The second suspect profile was of the meek man the Pro-Active Team detectives had encountered several times on the highway as he talked to prostitutes. He had admitted, of course, that he tried to choke the girl who “bit him.” But Kelly didn’t think he was viable as a suspect either, despite Sergeant Frank Atchley’s strong belief that he was, along with Adamson’s more tentative suspicions.

“He had a full-time position…with which he was satisfied,” Kelly wrote. “I believe that the [Green] River Killer could only have a job that consistently took him to or past [the] dump sites. The amount of energy and time involved in stalking and singling out, picking up and controlling, killing, transporting and staging these hookers could not have been done by someone who had to keep a scheduled full-time position.

“It also seems that he had an overbearing, perfectionistic mother. However, it seems that she showed him enough attention to prove that she cared about him and did not abandon him.”

And this man had passed a lie detector test.

John Kelly’s favorite pick of the trio of “A’s” was the fur trapper. He based this on the man’s early years when his mother allegedly cared more about alcohol than she did about him, alternately abandoning him to be raised by others and behaving in an inappropriate way by letting him sleep in her bed and be aware of her sexual relationships with a series of men.

The trapper, who was also a fisherman and hunter, was completely at home in the woods and water, and Kelly drew a comparison with the way he stuffed and mounted his animal prey and the way the body sites were staged. While Kelly had devoted a paragraph or two to the old man and the man with the steady job, he wrote quite convincingly for three single-spaced pages about the reasons he had selected the trapper as the prime candidate to be the Green River Killer.

Adamson had been led to the fur trapper by a ranking officer in the Bellingham, Washington, Police Department who thought he should be considered a likely suspect. His name was Barney Tikkenborg,* a middle-aged man and an avid trapper who was very familiar with the areas where the Green River victims had been found. Other trappers had commented that Tikkenborg was obsessed with killing dogs and took pleasure in using different methods to kill them: traps, rifles, garrotes, knives, and ice picks.

Task force records in the computer were checked, and Adamson had been surprised to find that two other people had called in their concerns about Tikkenborg. One informant had worked with him as a cement finisher, his other occupation. During the eight years the informant worked with him, Tikkenborg spent most of his time off in the woods, trapping animals for their fur. “He’s extremely strong and athletic—he can run as fast backward as he can forward—but it’s just that he loves to kill things,” the informant said. “Once he bought this doctor’s surgical kit with different scalpels. He told me he was going to try to cut the unborn babies out of the pregnant animals he’d caught.”

Tikkenborg had also shown off his macabre library, which had books and magazines about human anatomy and various methods of killing people. Moreover, other workers kidded him about the prostitutes he picked up, and he seemed to view all women as merely objects. Ten years earlier, he had been furious because a local college student had allegedly given him a venereal disease.

Tikkenborg cruised in his truck at night and kept a red police bubble light in it. He also had displayed a pair of handcuffs and a police badge shaped like a star. He said he’d stolen it and a gun from a police car in Auburn. He often came to work after being out all night “trapping,” and both he and his truck had “a foul odor.”

The most bizarre thing Tikkenborg’s co-worker recalled, however, was the time Tikkenborg showed up with a mannequin he said he’d found in the woods. He kept it in his truck after that, covered with a tarp, and often slashed at it with his scalpels.

In November 1985, task force investigators had interviewed a Washington State Wildlife Control Agent who worked for the Department of Game. He recalled Barney Tikkenborg very well.

His trapping activity peaked between 1976 and 1981, but after that it had dropped off. During his most active years, Tikkenborg had run as many as 125 registered traplines. Moreover, he’d been one of only four trappers who frequented the Green River area during that time.

The wildlife agent said that Tikkenborg’s other trapping areas were around Enumclaw, North Bend, and the Seattle-Tacoma area. He was required by law to keep records on every animal he killed, and he was “a fanatical record keeper. His tally sheet for the 1979–1980 trapping season showed he’d killed 103 cats and seventy dogs.”

In 1978, the trapper was arrested on Mercer Island where trapping was illegal. He had once put homemade decals on the doors of his green Ford pickup truck apparently to create the impression that he was a wildlife agent. That gave him the chance to trap out of season. When the real agent talked to the task force detectives, he said that he had advised Tikkenborg that his animal skins were obtained out of season and would be seized by authorities, to which Tikkenborg had a surprising reaction: “He broke down and wept.”

Ever since Barney Tikkenborg’s name had leapt into the “A” category for the task force, detectives had located and interviewed people who had known of his activities, and a sickening image grew more and more detailed. His cruelty to animals and his preoccupation with sadism and death had been noted by many people.

In early January 1986, Frank Adamson read yet another report of an interview with an acquaintance of the trapper. It said he killed animals with an ice pick shoved into the spinal column at the base of the skull. This acquaintance also said that the trapper was obsessed with sex and was drawn to danger.

The Green River investigators learned that Tikkenborg had been a hyperactive child who ran around the neighborhood and had once come close to drowning. His mother, who had been divorced four times, chose an odd way to keep him indoors. She made him wear a dress. That had embarrassed him so much that he never went outside. According to a police officer who knew Tikkenborg, he had heard from one of the trapper’s siblings that his mother had once tried to kill him when he was a child because she didn’t want him.

Silently and carefully, task force officers and F.B.I. agents spread out to talk to a half dozen or more witnesses who knew Barney Tikkenborg. They would try to conduct concurrent interviews so the word that they were homing in on the trapper wouldn’t reach him or the media.

Another fur trapper recalled that Tikkenborg had taken him into the woods to show him trapping methods. He had watched as Tikkenborg pulled his set lines. He agreed to go with detectives into the areas where Tikkenborg had placed his traps. He wasn’t sure if he could find the exact spots again, but he said he would try. Tikkenborg had always used natural landmarks and milepost numbers along the roadways to locate his traps and he kept a loose-leaf notebook listing each trap’s position.

For the entire day of January 23, 1986, detectives traversed roads that were all too familiar. They went first to the Enumclaw area, coming within several miles of where the bodies of Debbie Abernathy, Mary Bello, and Martina Authorlee had been found. Their potential witness also took them to the Green River, to within four hundred yards of the spot where Wendy Lee Coffield’s body had been found floating. Next, they went to the Mountain View Cemetery, and to Star Lake Road where the informant said Tikkenborg had set his traps at both the bottom and the top of the ravine.

Finally, they went to areas near Jovita Road and Soos Creek, and the novice trapper pointed out the exact spot where Colleen Brockman, the girl with braces on her teeth, had been discovered. Yvonne Antosh’s remains had been left directly across the road.