It wasn’t an easy approach for a devout churchgoer, a family man who was used to setting positive goals and meeting them. Every detective had his or her own personality.
Bob Keppel was analytical, able to step back and see how the investigation should be organized. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel the pain of the dead girls and their families; it was more that he was able to set it aside for the moment and tap into his own experience in dealing with serial killers. If he was sometimes blunt with his critiques, it was more important to him to solve obvious problems with communication, record-keeping, and matching up information that might be vital than it was to hold anyone’s hand.
Frank Adamson was very smart, very kind, and adept at handling his detectives. He didn’t have a trace of the ego that mars many command officers’ ability to accept help or advice. Whatever might work, Adamson welcomed it.
Randy Mullinax appeared to be the best at comforting families, a quality that he sometimes must have wished he didn’t possess, and he was an indefatigable investigator.
They all worked hard, side by side with the young people from Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR). The spring and summer searches were the easiest because it seldom rained. Even so, fir trees, alders, and a few big-leafed maples shut out the sun as they moved into the shaded woods, but the days were longer and there was no fog. The sound of their footsteps was muffled by the thick carpet of decaying leaves and needles beneath their feet.
In the fall of 1984, Frank Adamson had asked those citizens who were heading into the wilderness to keep a sharp eye out for some sign of the at least fifteen young women who were still missing. Long-abandoned bodies, left in the woods or other isolated places, are often discovered by hikers, mushroom seekers, or hunters. Leaves fall and their branches are bare and stark against a leaden sky, making visibility easier. Snowfalls collapse blackberry vines. Men in heavy boots break through underbrush and saplings as they look for pheasant, deer, and elk.
What had been hidden would eventually be found. If there was any emotion that still seeped from the quiet forests, it was the loneliness of someone shut away from home, family, love, and sunshine forever. The girls left near the SeaTac Airport lay in a prettier location beneath maple trees turned golden in October. That was, of course, small comfort to their families.
ONE NAME had been removed from the list—that of Mary Bello—and her mother, Sue Villamin, lived with the renewed hope that Mary was alive and well and had simply walked away from her life in Seattle. Maybe she hadn’t been able to fight her heroin habit after all. It was better to think that Mary was still hooked than to know for sure that she was dead.
Mary’s little lobster tattoo was unusual, and a policeman in Odessa, Texas, was sure that he had seen Mary dancing at a club in Odessa a few months or so after she was reported missing. She sometimes used the alias Roxanne Dunlap, and that was the name the Odessa officer recognized.
Still, Mary hadn’t called home for a year, and a second Christmas without her was only two months away. Sue Villamin knew in her heart that, no matter what, Mary would have found some way to check on her and on her grandparents, even if she didn’t want to be found.
On Friday, October 12, 1984, a man hunting for chanterelle and morel mushrooms off Highway 410 eight miles east of Enumclaw, an area already known as one of the Green River Killer’s body sites, came across a skull and widely scattered bones. Some were animal bones, but many were human. The task force and the “brush monkeys,” the young people of the Explorer Search and Rescue team who worked so many volunteer hours at every body location, moved in to gather evidence and find even the smallest bone. Sadly, they had all become adept at it, as they walked shoulder to shoulder across a very wide search area. When anything was found, it would be bagged and taped with the initials of the evidence officer, the date, time, and place. Dirt was shaken through screens to find minuscule bits and pieces of something the killer might have left behind, something belonging to the victim or to himself. They had learned to check the holes and tunnels of big and little animals, and found hair, small bones, shiny objects. By now, there wasn’t a search team in the country that could work an outdoor body site any better than the Green River Task Force, thankless though the job was so far.
In his coveralls and boots, Bill Haglund, the chief investigator for the Medical Examiner’s Office, was recognizable instantly to anyone who watched the news. So were Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Jackson Beard, Randy Mullinax, Dan Nolan, Rupe Lettich, Cheri Luxa, Matt Haney, Sue Peters, Mike Hatch, Jon Mattsen, Matt Haney, and Fae Brooks.
It was usually Haglund, however, who was able to give the final word on who the newest set of remains belonged to. After consulting the dental charts on file, he realized that Mary Bello should never have been removed from the list of possible victims. The Odessa, Texas, sighting must have been of someone else. She had been found almost a year to the day after she vanished. Gone October 11, 1983—found October 12, 1984.
Two police officers, a man and a woman, knocked on the door of Sue Villamin’s trailer and told her that her daughter was dead. She was too distraught to remember their names.
“I sort of went to hell in a handbasket for a year,” Sue says. “My mother didn’t live a month after she found out. I know I wasn’t the kind of mother I wanted to be with Mary. And so I thought she would settle down some day and have children, and I would do better with them as their grandmother. But I never had a chance to do that.
“I took some of Mary’s ashes home with me. And I liked having them there, but they made me sad, too. One of my friends told me that it was too hard on me. I went to the Green River and I said a prayer and gently put her ashes in there.
“She didn’t have a funeral service. My parents were afraid their friends would know what she’d been doing. Her street name wasn’t ‘Draper,’ though, so nobody ever figured it out.”
Widowed, with her adoptive parents and her daughter gone, without ever finding her birth family, Sue was living alone, by 2004, except for her dog Chico, in an apartment in downtown Seattle. She had become close to her father’s widow, who was in her nineties.
It wouldn’t be long before another body was found. Martina Authorlee probably never returned to Oregon in May 1983. She was up there off Highway 410, along with Mary Bello and Debbie Abernathy, close to the White River. A hunter found Martina’s body on November 14, 1984.
On the shoulder of the highway, detectives found the sodden pages of a collection of pornography—magazines catering to sadomasochists and a paperback novel penned by a writer with little talent but a grotesque grasp of his readers’ tastes. Was it a coincidence that the scurrilous material was there close to the remains? Or had the Green River Killer tossed it there to tease those who were a year behind him on a cold trail?
Dave Reichert and Bob Keppel weren’t in King County in mid-November 1984 when Martina Authorlee’s remains were identified. They were far away in Starke, Florida, on a mission that sounded like something out of Silence of the Lambs.
Ted Bundy would never deign to talk with Bob Keppel back in the years when Keppel was a young King County detective working on the murders of women in the Northwest, those murders that came to be known as “The Ted Murders.” Ted was smart enough to know that the less he said to Keppel and his partner, Roger Dunn, the better, and he took some delight in avoiding them when he was out on bail during the holiday season in 1975.
By 1984, however, Ted was on Death Row in Raiford Prison, the Florida state penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. He was, in essence, silenced—no longer able to joust with detectives or to take advantage of photo ops with reporters. He considered himself the expert on serial murder, and he would tell me patronizingly in letters that I “didn’t really understand serial killers,” and I was “all wrong” in my conclusions about their motivation and psychological profiles. He liked to hint at things he could tell me, and then draw back, enjoying the tease.