FRANK ADAMSON got his search warrant, and later that Thursday evening, February 6, 1986, detectives and F.B.I. agents swarmed over the Tikkenborg house, which was located on a short private street a block from Pac HiWay. Neighbors watched in shock as a hooded figure, whom they assumed to be Barney, was taken away in a police car, and detectives and agents carried out items to be tested.
The hooded figure was not Barney Tikkenborg. He had been detained on his way home from a cement finishing job near Snoqualmie Pass when the car he was riding in was sandwiched between unmarked police units that suddenly flashed blue “bubble lights” on their dashboards. With guns drawn, several task force members and F.B.I. agents ordered him out of his boss’s car.
His wife, Sara,* was being picked up at her job at the same time. Both were transported to F.B.I. headquarters in downtown Seattle.
Several of the Tikkenborgs’ neighbors were coaxed to comment on-camera by television crews. Their words sounded like every neighbor’s in every shocking murder, fire, natural disaster, or tragedy in any neighborhood in any city. “I can’t believe it. They’re such a nice couple. Such good neighbors…This just doesn’t happen in a neighborhood like ours.”
If ever a police operation was compromised by a determined army of reporters and photographers, this was it. Helicopters hovered overhead with floodlights illuminating the scene and reporters got in the way of the task force investigators. Over at task force headquarters, Fae Brooks did her best to placate the reporters who surrounded her. “We have made no arrests. We are talking to a person of interest.”
The public’s right to know, and to know immediately, was obviously tantamount in the media’s minds and conflicted with the task force’s urgent need to do what it had to do.
Given the information the Green River Task Force had gathered on Barney Tikkenborg, surely the probable cause for a search warrant had been met. But the Tikkenborg incident was to be a major public relations disaster. And there was no reason that had to happen. Without the glare of strobe lights and the intrusion of microphones, the search warrant could have been served quietly without undue attention on the family that lived there.
Tikkenborg was questioned for several hours by Jim Doyon of the task force and an F.B.I. agent. He denied having any knowledge whatsoever about the Green River murders, which wasn’t surprising. Of course, they had expected that. No suspect was likely to say, “I did it! I killed them all!” the first time he was questioned. Tikkenborg was angry and his wife was angry. He volunteered to take a lie detector test.
And he passed. Absolutely passed. It was a major blow to the task force and to Frank Adamson personally. He had been so sure, and his expert advisers had concurred. They had believed they had the right man. And now it seemed that all their deductive reasoning had been wrong. They had no choice but to release Tikkenborg.
Criminalists continued to evaluate possible evidence taken from his home: all the bloodstained items, which they had expected to find, of course, all the hairs and fibers. But, in the end, Barney Tikkenborg was eliminated as a suspect in the Green River murders three months later.
By reading the next day’s papers and tuning into television, it had certainly looked as if the long investigation was over. Headlines blazed; the entire front pages of both Seattle papers trumpeted the news, and smaller local papers echoed the story. Some printed Tikkenborg’s name and address, while others did not. Some featured a picture of his house with the address clearly visible on a shingle outside.
Frank Adamson faced the wrath of the reporter who had agreed to hold back his scoop. Adamson met with him and explained the truth—he had promised only to give the man first chance for an interview after an arrest was made. As it was, it had been completely out of his hands anyway as the feeding frenzy of the press and airways proliferated.
“I met him in a restaurant in Fremont and he was mighty upset,” Adamson said. “But as it turned out, we ended up arresting the suspect, took him to the F.B.I. office and he passed the polygraph. That became my downfall. We made the search, we got bad publicity, and it was an opportunity for the politicians to plan to get rid of me because it was a low point. We’d focused a lot of our energy and the press’s energy on the wrong guy. I felt like I was standing on a board when someone was sawing through the other end.”
Technically, Adamson would be on the task force from December 1983 to January of 1987, but he sensed which way the wind was blowing. He had begun with the belief that he and his detectives would surely solve the murders of the dead girls, but he was worn down, battered on every side. It was ironic. A public and press that had shouted that the task force must “do something” was now eager to condemn them because they had done something, and it proved to be wrong.
As the task force members had expected, Tim Hill, the new King County executive, held the opinion that it was always better to “spend less,” and the Green River investigation was draining the county’s coffers.
“There was publicity about the cases,” Adamson said, “but also publicity about the expense of the task force. People complained. After the search on Tikkenborg’s house, it got worse. I didn’t feel that just because we couldn’t prove that this particular person did it, it was the end. There were other suspects.”
That was true, but being on the Green River Task Force was hard going now.
Both the media and the detectives were being judged harshly. More than two months after the search of Barney Tikkenborg’s house and the abortive probe into his life, the Los Angeles Times printed a very long article on the front page of its Sunday edition, tsk-tsking about the “near hysteria” caused by Seattle’s television coverage of the detainment of an innocent suspect, and taking swipes at both TV newscasters and the task force. However, the Los Angeles Times article also listed the real names of the fur trapper and his wife, perpetuating, it would seem, the attention focused on them.
Proving that Tikkenborg had been in no trouble at all with the law since 1967, the outraged couple sued three media outlets and eventually collected $30,000.
And, all the time, he must have been watching the news coverage gleefully. He knew who the real Green River Killer was, and he enjoyed the fact that his persona as an unknown killer was getting so much attention from the media. He especially liked to see the task force members end up with egg on their faces. They had talked to him, but he was convinced they didn’t have a clue. He had completely snowed them, and they had gone off chasing somebody else.
39
COTTONWOOD PARK is just north of the Meeker Street Bridge on Frager Road, a shabby little stretch of stubbly grass between the road and the river in the eighties, with a few picnic tables gray and splintery from too much moisture and not enough maintenance. It is close to Des Moines, but I never heard of anyone actually going there on a picnic, or to swim for that matter. Beyond that, everyone who lived in the area remembered that Wendy Lee Coffield, Debra Lynn Bonner, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills, and Marcia Chapman had been found less than half a mile away in the river. That made Cottonwood seem like a ghost park, and it hadn’t been that appealing to begin with.
In March 1986, two Kent Park Department workers discovered what appeared to be human bones at the base of a large tree in the park. There were enough bones to know that it was a young female, but not enough to identify her with the forensic science available at the time. There was no skull, no mandibles, no teeth, just a human torso and spine. It would take thirteen more years to know that this was the only part of Tracy Winston ever found. Mitochondrial DNA, which compares the unknown subject with the DNA makeup of a possible mother, verified in 1999 that the young woman left in Cottonwood Park was the tall, dimpled daughter of Chuck and Mertie Winston, the girl who had vowed to change her life just hours before her death.