Both of them were amazed at some of the things other people threw away at the landfill, and by the “free piles” left behind at the Midway Swap Meet at the end of a weekend. “Chad and him would look at the free piles,” Judith said fondly, “and maybe find something that needs to be fixed. We’d take things home and fix ’em, and so…like a bicycle. We got all kinds of bikes. He’d fix a bike after getting it for free, and sell it to a little kid who’d be happy for getting a bike for five or ten dollars. And a toy. He’d pick up a toy and maybe the grandkids would like to play with it.”

They found that they could make more profit by having frequent garage and yard sales at their house than they could by renting a space at the swap meet. Their neighbors grew used to seeing the “Yard Sale” sign out when the weather was good.

Pat Lindsay, who worked for the U.S. Postal Service, had sold him his house in 1981 and still lived close by. Although something about him always gave Pat a weird feeling, she liked Judith and often chatted with her as she presided over a yard sale. “They always had sales going, and baby kittens. Judith loved her cats and kittens,” Pat recalled. “I think the funny thing about him was that he didn’t seem to remember me at all. I’d sold him his house, but he didn’t recognize my face or connect me to that when I stopped by during a yard sale. I could have been a complete stranger as far as he was concerned.”

Once, before Judith moved in, Pat recalled that he had approached a couple of men in the neighborhood and asked them for help ripping out a carpet in one of his bedrooms. “He said he’d kicked over a can of red paint or spilled it somehow, and he needed to get it out of there and replace it. They helped him get it into his truck, but he never explained how he could have spilled so much paint.”

Once he had the carpet in his pickup, he wouldn’t have trouble getting it out at the county’s Midway landfill off Orilla Road. The men noted that he had a kind of hoist with cables and a “come-along hitch” bolted to his truck.

Despite all the things they found “Dumpster diving” or scanning other people’s sales for free “stuff,” he never bought Judith any presents. She didn’t mind. She had her rings from her first marriage melted down and redesigned. As far as any jewelry purchases, that wasn’t something he would buy to surprise her.

“We did all of that together,” she said, explaining that he never brought gifts home for her. He just wasn’t like that. “We went shopping together.”

There were so many things she did with him for the first time in her life. She went on her first plane trip when he took her to Reno. She loved the camping, either at Leisure Time Resorts campgrounds, where they split a membership with his parents, or roughing it. “At the very beginning of our relationship,” she recalled, “we went camping up on the Okanogan ’cause he had a week off. That was just so [much] fun and delightful. He was so nice and gentle—I hadn’t known him for very long.”

They came back from the largest county in Washington and the Pasayten Wilderness that led into Canada via the North Cascades Highway, and she was thrilled by the grandeur of the view and the Ross Dam, with its clear blue water. “I never got to go camping before,” Judith explained.

They visited several Leisure Time locations, mostly the site up past Ken’s Truck Stop off I-90, but also those at Ocean Shores on Washington’s Pacific Coast; Crescent Bar in Concrete, Washington; and Grandy Creek. At Leisure Time, they could pull their camper in and have electricity and water hookups, and cooking grills.

They finally got married in their neighbors’ front yard on June 12, 1988. Judith was the one who gave him an ultimatum about making a permanent commitment. “I told him after three years, he’s not getting rid of me. ‘We’re getting married!’ He said okay.”

The Bob Havens hosted the event, and most of the people who lived along their street attended. Everyone liked Judith. She was a sweet woman, and he was a good enough neighbor.

They soon bought a bigger house down in Des Moines, and Judith went to work to help pay the mortgage. She sewed on a commercial machine for a SCUBA equipment company there, and later worked at the Kindercare day care, both Des Moines businesses. He kept his job as a painter. He took great pride in his work, but he was always careful about cleaning up before he came home. He didn’t have a spot of paint on him when he left the plant and he even combed his mustache to be sure all the paint flecks were gone.

They were definitely moving up in the world. Judith was happy in her marriage, and she enjoyed being with her husband’s parents and brothers. She worried a lot about her daughters, especially her oldest, who had gone off to the East Coast, but she knew she could count on her husband.

37

THE FIRST HALF OF 1985 continued to be a fallow period in Seattle as far as new disappearances in the Green River case were concerned and that was one positive sign. The headlines slowed to a crawl, and they were mostly rehashes of earlier stories now. Almost everyone believed that the dread killer had moved on, and some people hoped he was dead. The task force investigators didn’t, however. If he was dead, so many questions would go unanswered forever. There was a good chance, however, that he had changed his base of operations—to at least one neighboring state, Oregon.

It looked as if the Green River Killer had thrown the task force a curve. At twelve seventeen PM, on June 13, 1985, a worker was operating a bulldozer on Bull Mountain Road near the Tigard/Tualatin area in Oregon, clearing the land so that a tree farm could be planted there. Tigard is about eight miles south of Portland, a quick exit off the I-5 Freeway. As the dozer operator looked idly at the dirt he had just turned over, he drew in his breath sharply, seeing what could only be human bones. He had uncovered skeletal remains.

Washington County sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene and found a skull, what appeared to be two pelvises, and some rib bones. The skull had an obvious defect, a hole left either by a bullet or a surgical procedure. The Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office said that the hole was from surgery performed many years earlier.

The remains of one of the bodies belonged to a black female who would have been five feet one to five feet four inches tall and had been in her early twenties. Forensic anthropologists estimated that the bones had been buried there for at least a year. A day later, she was identified as Denise Darcel Bush by the Portland-based M.E., in cooperation with the Oregon Health Services Dental School, Division of Forensic Science, and Dr. Don Reay’s M.E.’s office in Seattle. Only her upper jaw was available, however. Although her upper teeth were enough to make the identification, it seemed odd that none of the searchers could locate her lower mandible.

There was only the calvarium (the upper rounded part) of her skull. But this was the skull of the only victim who had once had brain surgery. Denise Darcel had been missing since October 1982, almost three years earlier. Where had she been for two years?

(Bizarrely, her lower mandible had been left near Seattle, although that would not be discovered for five more years. In 1990, her lower jaw and the shunt that had carried excess fluid from her brain were found near Tukwila, not far from the Strip. Why had her killer separated her skull into two parts and placed them two hundred miles apart? To confuse the detectives who hunted him?)

The killer was playing macabre games with the task force. There could be no doubt of that. More bones were located a week later. Four detectives from the Green River Task Force drove to the Tigard field as the search for remains continued: Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Frank Atchley, and Ed Streidinger.