“We used to go down to McDonald’s on the highway,” Judith would recall later to Detectives Sue Peters and Matt Haney. “I’d be coming home [from work] and he’d be going to work. We’d sit and hold hands, have a hamburger. Then I’d either go home to my apartment or to his house. That was after. I didn’t go to his house till after a couple of months. Not right away.”
Judith wasn’t the kind of woman to jump into bed with a man until she really got to know him, so she didn’t spend the night at his house for the first two or three months they dated. Beyond that, she was still hurt and unsure of herself from the times her ex-husband brought men home.
“He treated me just so gentle and perfect. I’m remembering now one time when we were out camping on one of the mountains or in the parks or trees or someplace. Greenwater, I guess that’s what it was, out where you can just see the stars and everything. We were sitting in the back of the truck and talking and, you know, I let him know that I wasn’t used to a man wanting me. And, you know, personal things. And he was gentle. He didn’t rush or push. He wasn’t forward or anything. Any sexual relations we had [were], you know, slow and comfortable.”
Greenwater was a beautiful forested area, up Highway 410 east of Enumclaw, along the White River.
As time went by, Judith began to trust him and was relieved that his attention was focused only on her, and that he certainly wasn’t the least bit gay. He didn’t drink more than a beer or two, and she never saw him drunk. Once in a while, he would buy wine—Franzia, the kind that came in a box with a little spigot on the side.
They had similar interests—country-western music, of course—and they often went to garage and rummage sales. They both liked to go to the weekend swap meets at the Midway Drive-In Theater at Pac HiWay and S. 240th Street. She knew he liked the outdoors and going camping, and Judith looked forward to that.
Chad, his little boy, had his own room in his father’s house for when he stayed there on his weekend visitations. Unlike Darla, Judith didn’t shy away from the possibility that if she was with him, his son would be a big part of his life, even though his ex-wife had primary custody. He, on the other hand, didn’t object to her fondness for cats. His mother had always had cats. Judith felt as though the two of them just seemed to fit together.
He was “the best man” she’d known for a long time. “Nice, sweet, gentle,” Judith said. He took her to meet his parents, and they were nice to her and so were his brothers. “They were the ‘best’ family.”
He didn’t have any particular hobbies or any interest in sports, although he occasionally went fishing and there was always camping out. But he did that with her. He had neither close male nor female friends. She was his best friend, and that made her feel very secure. They did everything together. The only other people he talked about were people he knew at work. He was very proud of his job.
One thing he did not tell her about were the unexpected encounters he had had with King County sheriff’s detectives a few years before they met. That was another part of his life that had nothing to do with her, and he meant to keep it that way. Most of them happened before he even knew her, so it wasn’t really as though he was lying to her.
Judith had no idea that her lover had been stopped on the highway two or three times. Port of Seattle police officers had talked to him on August 29, 1982. Parked on a dead-end road, he had been only a hundred feet from sites where bodies were found a long time later, and he hadn’t been alone. Randy Mullinax had talked to him on February 23, 1983, and Jim Doyon had questioned him in April 1984 in front of the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Pac HiWay, when he appeared to be soliciting favors from a prostitute. He felt comfortable because he had been so agreeable with both detectives, and candid. Yes, he’d admitted, he did sometimes hire prostitutes, and he said he knew Kim Nelson aka Tina Tomson. But a lot of guys paid hookers on the Strip for sex.
The cops had all let him go, so he was serene in his belief that they didn’t suspect anything. He knew there wasn’t enough evidence to hold him. He’d been single then, a guy with a good steady job. What he did was his own business. Judith wouldn’t understand, so why even bother telling her now?
But then Ralf McAllister from the Green River Task Force had gone out and picked him up again in February 1985, the same month he and Judith met. That was after Penny Bristow got brave enough to file a complaint against him three years after the fact. That was a little dicier, but he’d explained it all away when Matt Haney questioned him about the 1982 attack on Penny. He readily admitted that he had tried to choke her, but it had only been a reflex action when she bit him during oral sex. Most men would have reacted the same way. It hurt like hell, but he had quickly come to his senses.
And the girl named Penny didn’t want to charge him formally. Without a complaining witness, they had no choice but to let him go. Actually, he was right in assuming they didn’t have anything concrete on him. But he didn’t know the third incident had elevated him to the level of an “A” candidate.
“He was certainly one of the primary people we had,” Frank Adamson said. “We followed him, and surveilled him, watching him stop and talk to prostitutes. We watched him staring at them. We talked to them, and we found no one he was hurting at that time. But he was certainly interested. Later, we were able to connect him to a number of prostitutes by talking to their girlfriends. We knew he had quite an involvement with prostitutes, but we didn’t think he was killing them.”
In the 1985 incident, Judith’s new boyfriend had even agreed to take a lie detector test and Norm Matzke gave him a polygraph. Matzke, who had long been the sheriff’s department’s polygrapher, following in the footsteps of his father, didn’t think this man was responsible for the Green River deaths. His pulse stayed even, he didn’t sweat a drop, and his blood pressure didn’t waver.
He himself was pretty sure he could always fool their fancy polygraph, but he decided that the next time they talked to him, he would refuse to take a lie detector test. There was no sense being foolhardy.
SOMETIME in either May or June of 1985, Judith agreed to move in with him. He was still living in the small house that backed up to the bank above the I-5 Freeway. Built on a good-size lot with room for their camping rig, it was a nice little house. Judith was thrilled to be living in her own home again. She was with a man who had perfect attendance at his job and who always came straight home to her. If he had to work overtime, he called her, and she appreciated that. He would go almost three decades without being late for work more than a handful of times, and that was only a matter of two or three minutes.
He was so considerate that he didn’t even ask Judith to get up and cook breakfast for him when he worked the early shift. He told her he’d stop at Denny’s or some other twenty-four-hour restaurant on his way to work. He handed his paychecks over to her and she would take care of the bills, but she always made sure he had enough money with him when he left for work to buy breakfast and lunch and fill up his gas tank.
When Judith’s younger daughter and her boyfriend and their babies needed someplace to live until they got back on their feet, he agreed that they could stay with him and Judith. She realized that not many men would have done that. He was someone she could count on even though he didn’t seem anxious to get married again. She figured that would happen some day.
In the meantime, theirs was a very comfortable relationship. They went camping, watched television together, and indulged a mutual passion: collecting, restoring, and selling things that other people had either thrown away or sold cheap. “We’re pack rats,” Judith said. “We like to save stuff. We don’t like to see stuff go in the landfill. We’d always go to the swap meet. We’d have yard sales. Oh, it was great because my ex-husband never let me have yard sales. We have so much fun doing that together.”