The rapist waited at the top of the bank, smoking a cigarette and watching her. Then he clambered down to where she lay still, “dead.” Once more, he checked her pulse under her arm and in her neck. He must have felt her heart because he pushed her again until she landed at the bottom of the embankment in a fetal position, still not moving. She saw that he was smoking another cigarette, deciding. And he came back again.

“He stabbed me in the chest—straight in. I took both my hands and pulled the knife out, but then I went completely limp. This time when he checked for a pulse, I held my breath and I guess he didn’t feel anything.”

He climbed the hill to smoke. And then, for the last time, he crawled down to where she lay, sending rocks and dirt ahead of him. She was getting good at not breathing, and she wondered if she was dying. He evidently felt no sign of life, and he pulled a big oil drum in front of her body as if he was trying to hide her from the road above. Then he changed his mind and moved it away, but he pulled up handfuls of tall grass and threw them on top of her.

She never heard his car engine start or the crunch of gravel. She figured he was up there, waiting to kill her. As the sky turned to pink and then blue, she heard three train whistles, the last one heading west. She realized now that she was in the Columbia Gorge, somewhere near Horsetail Falls.

When it was full daylight, Moira painfully inched her way up to the road. There was a car in the turnout, but she thanked God that it wasn’t the blue taxi. She staggered toward it and gasped, “I’ve been stabbed and raped and the taxi driver did it!”

After several days recovering in a Portland hospital, Moira Bell worked with police artists and the F.B.I. to create a sketch of the man who had been so determined to kill her. The sketch that resulted looked very much like one of the Green River composite drawings done in King County.

The problem was that the four most widely circulated drawings were nothing like one another. One showed a phantomlike face with a long chin and “hippie-length” hair, another had a broad face with very curly short hair, one had short hair combed forward around his face and acne, and the last had a disproportionately long neck and hooded eyes that squinted.

Moira estimated that her rapist was probably between twenty-five and thirty, five feet nine to six feet tall, thinly built, with sandy shoulder-length hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy or acne-scarred complexion. He had had a thin mustache.

Were any of the drawings really like the GRK?

Maybe he was a master of disguise, or at least using wigs to change the way he looked.

Moira’s ordeal struck a chord in my memory. One of the many women who had called me, her voice trembling even though it had been decades since her own encounter with a man she would never forget, had told me a very similar story, only it had happened ten years before Moira hid at the bottom of a ravine, six years before the Green River cases surfaced in Seattle.

“I was only nineteen,” Cheryl told me, “and it was 1975. I felt I had no other way to make a living after my divorce. I was working in downtown Seattle for a place called Artists and Models. I was ‘outlawing’—that means working without a pimp. I didn’t know the city very well then, but I was living near 23rd and Cherry Street. I was probably working on Pike Street.

“This man, who seemed about my age, called me over to his car and he asked, ‘Can I pay you for sex?’ I said, ‘Yes.’

“Before I got into his car, I checked the door handle to be sure it flipped up from the inside—I always did that. It seemed okay, so I got in. We drove for about twenty minutes, and he was strange. He didn’t say a word to me, and he didn’t even turn on the radio. My radar was working at about 150 percent, but there was nothing to pick up on. I thought to myself how ‘spiritless’ he was, and I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.

“We were on a two-lane road, not on the freeway, and we were in the country before I knew it. I don’t know if we were north or south of Seattle. I’m still not sure. He turned off onto a sort of path, not really a road, but it looked as though a few cars had driven down there. The minute he stopped, I was out of the car and running, and I leapt over this embankment. It was steep, but I slowed myself a little by grabbing onto grass and weeds. There was nothing below my feet, so I know I didn’t fall all the way to the bottom—I was probably only about ten feet down.

“I could see him up there, trying to spot me. He was backlit by the moon. His foot was on the car fender, and he was smoking a cigarette—not nervously, just standing there, smoking, trying to spot me.”

She was still terribly afraid of him, but she was also frightened of slipping farther down the bank and dropping she didn’t know how far. She could see part of his car and him.

“After a long time, he said, ‘Come on up here. I won’t hurt you.’

“I was so scared, but I climbed back up and I got in his car. He didn’t ask for sex again. He didn’t talk at all on the way back either, but he drove me to a corner close to where my apartment was, and he let me go.”

Twenty-five years later, she would see the photograph of a much older man, and recognize him immediately. He had the same build, medium to thin, just an average-size man, and the eyes were the same, the lids so heavy that his eyelashes didn’t show. When a photograph showed him in profile, her heart really convulsed. This was the view she’d had of him as they drove silently through the night.

One question keeps running through Cheryl’s mind: “Why didn’t he kill me?”

She had survived, and she began to straighten out her life the way many people who believe absolutely that they have had a near-death experience often do. She returned to Portland, where she had lived most of her life, finished college, and found a profession in which she worked for twenty years. Even so, the memory of the man outlined against the moon never really went away.

Cheryl’s recollections of her terror would be reflected many times over the years ahead as women called or wrote me. I became absolutely convinced that there were probably twenty to forty women who had come close to death at the hands of the Green River Killer, but their will to survive or perhaps pure luck had saved them.

One more girl who didn’t get away was found four days after Moira Bell escaped her rapist. A teacher accompanying a class on a visit to Seattle’s Seward Park on September 8 found something that had to be shielded from the students’ gaze. This is a huge wooded park that extends like a thumb into Lake Washington a few miles east of the Rainier District. A human skull, long denuded of flesh, was hidden there. It was a much more urban site than most of the places where remains had been found. The search crews, long since expert at outdoor scenes moved over the park, and they discovered an entire skeleton in the shadows at the base of a fir tree. There were no clothes at all in the vicinity.

It was Mary Exzetta West, who had been pregnant at seventeen and scared about what she was going to do. She hadn’t come home to her aunt’s house on February 6, 1984, and had probably been in this lovely park for all of the eighteen months she had been missing.

38

THE GREEN RIVER TASK FORCE continued to be alternately hammered and ignored by the media. It received a million-dollar federal grant in November 1985, and everyone had expected an arrest would surely follow soon after. When it didn’t, taxpayers and politicians began to grumble. The King County executive who had backed the task force, Randy Revelle, was out of office and it didn’t look as though the new man, Tim Hill, would be nearly as supportive of a very expensive investigation that had yet to net any rewards.