The F.B.I. wrote a summary of the cases to isolate patterns that might have escaped detection. Amina Agisheff was still deemed to be the first victim, taken on July 7, 1982; Cindy Ann Smith, the final young woman abducted, was seen for the last time on March 21, 1984. There were twenty-six Caucasian victims known dead, ten African American, and one American Indian. Of those still missing, five were Caucasian, three African American, one Hispanic, and one Asian.

“All victims are believed to have suffered from either manual or ligature strangulation, the ligature being that of the killer or the clothing of the victim,” the F.B.I. summary read. “One possible victim who survived her attack, Moira Bell, from Oregon, was stabbed with a knife in combination with being strangled.”

The cluster the Green River Task Force was focusing on during the holiday season of 1985 was not new; the Mountain View Cemetery site appeared to have held almost as many victims as the Star Lake cluster. Another partial skull had been found on December 15, unidentified bones on December 30, and more on January 3 and January 4, 1986. Not only was the GRK still free, it appeared that there would be no end to the rising death toll. Dr. Don Reay and Bill Haglund believed two of the sets of remains belonged to a twenty- to thirty-year-old black female, who had been five feet one to five feet four, and a fourteen- to seventeen-year-old white female who’d been five feet four to five feet eight.

Only a fluke had led searchers back to the Auburn graveyard. A cemetery worker had discovered a battered Lincoln Continental in a woods below the actual grave sites. It proved to be a stolen car and it had been pushed into a ravine where it was almost invisible beneath a blanket of fallen leaves. In investigating the auto theft, the bones were found, too.

It would be poetic justice if the owner of the Lincoln turned out to be the killer. But he wasn’t. The luxury car had been stolen from the street in front of a Tacoma tavern owned by the car’s registered owner, and the Green River investigators found no evidence at all to connect him to the dead girls in the cemetery. The car thief himself was never found.

Some of the smartest detectives in the Northwest had worked on this thankless case for three and a half years. Almost $8 million had been spent, and still there was nothing to show for it. Now, the task force swelled even further. Ten additional F.B.I. agents were assigned to the Green River cases. This could mean that something big was about to happen, or it could mean that the task force was about to make one last massive effort to bring their quarry in.

Frank Adamson, who wasn’t given to making statements that might come back to bite him, seemed almost optimistic that 1986 was going to be the year when the Green River Killer would be brought to ground.

I myself believed that the “fox”—actually “the wolf”—would be penned up and punished. Because of the increased manpower on the task force, I was a lot more likely to wax positive, and I can remember telling a large audience at a seminar in the early months of 1986, “I’m sure he’ll be caught before Thanksgiving—maybe even by Easter.” And just as I had to do several times before, I would have to eat my words.

I wasn’t that sure, and I had no inside information, but the law of averages convinced me that no one could escape the eye of this hurricane of top cops. Moreover, forensic science seemed to have “gone about as far as it could go”—in my mind, at least. The $200,000 computer was humming along, and criminalists were routinely matching hair and fiber profiles and solving other cases. Forensic anthropologists could establish race and sex from bare skulls, and odontologists could match bite marks to attackers and teeth to dental charts. Blood enzymes could already be isolated to show racial probability.

Even though it had been less than a year since DNA blood comparisons had solved the first homicide case in the world, DNA testing for all police jurisdictions was on the horizon. The Green River Task Force had a contingency fund of around $5,000 for DNA testing if it seemed feasible.

Ed Hanson, a task force member on loan from the Washington State Patrol, had an idea that made the job of triangulating measurements at a body site much easier. Given the steep hills and deep ravines and the hundreds of yards the detectives had to traverse over and over in order to mark a body location, Hanson thought it would be far more cost-effective and productive to employ professional surveyors to do that part of the job. And, of course, he was right.

It had to be only a matter of months now.

Having fully recovered from the meningitis that had almost killed him a few years earlier, John Douglas updated his profile of the Green River Killer and was one of the F.B.I. agents on hand in Seattle in January and February 1986. At this point, Douglas claimed a 77 percent success rate in the 192 criminal cases he had personally evaluated “after all leads had been exhausted.”

His second look at the Green River Killer was very close to the first profile he had drawn up. Douglas was quite sure that the GRK was in good physical shape, an outdoorsman, although probably both a drinker and a smoker. “He is not very neat,” Douglas said. He would be a nocturnal cruiser who drove conservative vehicles. Souvenirs and trophies would be important to him, along with newspaper clippings about his crimes. With those things, he could relive the emotional thrills of his murders.

How old was he? Douglas said “mid-20s to early 30s. There is no burnout for this type of murderer though.” He added, “These homicides reflect rage and anger…. He will not stop killing until he is caught.”

Every detective on the task force still had a favorite suspect—or two or three. Frank Adamson continued to watch three men who seemed to him to be the most likely candidates for being the Green River Killer. Whenever Adamson had “command duty,” he made it a point to drive by the houses where these men lived. All three lived close by the Green River or the Pac HiWay Strip. One was the wealthy and eccentric farmer who had held the young prostitute captive and collected photos of young women, albeit pictures the task force had never been able to find in his huge barn. Another was a man who was a familiar visitor to the Strip and had been stopped and questioned at least three times, and who had grown up near the highway. The third was a fur trapper, an outdoorsman, who also lived close to the highway.

Adamson never saw anything suspicious when he drove slowly by their homes, but he thought about them a lot. He wanted to be sure they were still around. “The Green River Killer was extremely active during 1982 and 1983,” he commented. “Out of control, really, with two or three victims a month. And then he appeared to stop—at least around here. I wondered why.”

In early 1986, Adamson had reread Douglas’s profile as well as profiles done by John Kelly, a New Jersey counselor who was also known to be on-target with his evaluations of suspects. Adamson needed to know which of his three main suspects fit most neatly within the parameters of the profiles.

John Kelly quickly dismissed Ingmar Rasmussen, the older man with a barn allegedly full of women’s photos. “I believe him to have been a lonely, elderly man who wanted a woman to live with him and take care of him,” he wrote. “He [once] even advertised for such a woman. His house was important to him; he felt secure behind the heavy wooden door. I believe his house was much more important to him than the river or woods…. He was too conservative and concerned about his wealth and success and would not endanger that by being in the river or woods with corpses or transporting them long distances. If [he] was the [Green] River Killer, that girl would never have escaped from his house.”