Tikkenborg matched both John Douglas’s and John Kelly’s profiles more closely than any other suspect. The circumstantial evidence was piling up, and for the first time in many months, Frank Adamson felt excited that the long hunt might be over. That excitement increased when one of the F.B.I. agents assigned to the case, who had come from a family familiar with trapping in his home state of Florida, explained about “drowning rocks.”

He said it wasn’t unusual for hunters or trappers to submerge their game in cold water to preserve it. To keep the carcasses below the surface of the water, logs and large rocks were placed on top of them. “Sometimes they place smaller rocks inside body cavities to be sure they don’t get carried downstream,” the agent said.

TIME was growing short. A reporter for a Seattle all-news radio station had been watching the Green River Task Force for months and had picked up the focus on Barney Tikkenborg. By following police units, he saw who they were following, and it was Tikkenborg, who was himself visiting the areas of some known body sites. When the reporter approached Adamson and asked why Tikkenborg was under such heavy surveillance, Adamson beseeched him not to break a story about the trapper. Yes, they were looking closely at him, but if it hit the media, the suspect would have an opportunity to get rid of evidence before the task force could obtain a search warrant.

The reporter said he would sit on the story, but only if Adamson let him have the first interview if they arrested Tikkenborg. Caught between a rock and a hard place and having, once more, to dodge the swarm of the hovering media, Adamson promised the reporter he would get the first word that an arrest had been made.

“I said arrest,” Adamson recalled, “and he took it that I would alert him before we served a search warrant. I never promised him that—I couldn’t. I wasn’t even sure when we’d get a search warrant. He called me and told me he was going out of town and asked if that was a good idea. I couldn’t tell him. As we got closer, the media was buzzing.”

The newscaster, sensing that something was about to come down, decided to stay in Seattle, just in case.

On February 6, F.B.I. special agents Duke Dietrich and Paul Lindsay, and task force detectives Matt Haney and Kevin O’Keefe set out early in the day to talk to Barney Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Back at Green River headquarters, Frank Adamson was writing an affidavit to obtain search warrants for Tikkenborg’s house, his mother’s house, his two pickup trucks, and another truck located at his mother-in-law’s house, which had been cut in two with an acetylene torch and then burned.

The specific items the task force searchers were looking for were women’s clothing, shoes, jewelry and purses, notebooks and other documentation of Tikkenborg’s trapping activities, weapons such as ice picks, knives, garrotes, scalpels and guns, newspaper clippings or photographs of the Green River victims, trace evidence like hair, fibers, blood or “particles,” latent fingerprints of the dead and missing women, and implements and solutions that would commonly be used to clean up the evidence of the crime of homicide. Adamson also listed control samples of carpeting, fabrics, and paint chips from various surfaces, floors, furniture, drapes, and clothing—all to be compared to fibers and particles found with the victims’ remains.

As it turned out, there was no need for a search warrant at the home of Tikkenborg’s mother and stepfather. Mick and Ruthie Legassi* readily agreed to sign a Consent to Search form. They had no objection to detectives looking around their house. And they were quite willing to be interviewed. Paul Lindsay and Kevin O’Keefe interviewed Tikkenborg’s mother, while Dietrich and Haney talked to his stepfather.

Mick was Ruthie’s fourth husband, and he admitted that her son had resented his marrying Ruthie at first. Young Barney Tikkenborg had lived with his father until he was about fifteen. Subsequently, he lived with the Legassis and other relatives. He wasn’t the kind of person to show his feelings, except when he was talking about hunting and fishing, so his stepfather never knew if moving from one relative to another had bothered him.

Early on, Barney had gotten in trouble for stealing things, and he’d had a brush or two with the law over thefts and burglaries that he had told Legassi he committed for “the thrill of it.” He was tossed out of the service after he was convicted of theft from a footlocker in his barracks.

Initially, Barney Tikkenborg hadn’t had much luck with women. His first marriage lasted only a year, and he was “shook up” when his bride left him for another man. He’d gone off to Alaska to hunt and fish for a year, but when he came back, he married again—a Canadian girl. She was the daughter of his father’s current wife—not a half sister but a stepsister. When he got arrested for burglary again, she left him, too.

Tikkenborg made a third try at marriage. He had a daughter by that wife, and the three of them lived in the Seattle area where he worked as a cement finisher. But periodically, he would be arrested for burglary and have to serve time. His third wife left him while he was in prison.

Duke Dietrich worked hard to keep up with this very complicated family tree, convoluted because so many of them had had multiple marriages. In the late seventies, Tikkenborg’s stepfather said that Barney had dated a checker at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket located near the Jovita Canyon. She had grown up on a farm in Enumclaw, and while they did not marry, she did introduce Barney to his fourth, and current, wife. They had lived first inside the city limits of Kent, off 192nd Street. And they seemed to have had a good marriage. If Barney teased his wife by talking about other women, she came right back at him.

“They’re pretty much equals,” Legassi said. “She doesn’t take any shit off him.”

Tikkenborg’s stepfather didn’t recall that Barney had ever commented on prostitutes one way or the other. Yes, he’d mentioned the Green River murders once or twice, but only in passing. “One time he said that there was a screwball on the loose. We talked about it a little.”

The closest Tikkenborg had ever come to showing his feelings about loose women was when he had put a sticker on his truck that read “Good Girls Go to Heaven; Bad Girls Go Everywhere.” But that was only a joke.

Legassi said that Barney hadn’t seen anything wrong with his trapping activities, and he’d made good money at it—running three hundred traps at one time. “He said that we’d be overrun with them critters if nobody trapped them.” He recalled that Barney trapped muskrats, beavers, and bobcats in the deep woods, raccoons in the airport area, and coyotes near Enumclaw.

“How does he kill them?” Dietrich asked quietly.

“By sticking ice picks into the back of their brain or stepping on their chests,” Legassi said. He added that Barney had once used a small pistol, but had stopped that because it made too much noise. Yes, he knew that sometimes his stepson had shot dogs in the woods so they wouldn’t get into his traps and tear up his animals. But he’d always had pets at home, both dogs and cats. “He told me that shooting dogs in the woods is ‘purely business.’ ”

Mick Legassi confirmed that Ruthie had once put a dress on her son because he’d disobeyed and gone down to a creek, and she was afraid he was going to drown. But it was only that one time. He couldn’t remember that Barney had ever had mood swings or acted crazy.

All in all, Legassi thought his stepson was a good guy. “If he’s the Green River Killer—and I don’t think he is,” he said firmly, “well, he would say so!”