Mertie had known for years that her only daughter was gone, but the knowledge that she was absolutely, finally, dead was almost too painful to bear. It always would be. The long wait had probably contributed to Mertie’s stroke at a young age, but she fought to recover—and she did. When she finally learned the truth, it seemed ironic that Tracy had been so close to home all along, even though her many moves had taken her far north of Seattle.

“I’m not going to second-guess why this happened to Tracy, and to us,” Mertie said in 2004. “God had his purpose that we had her for such a short time: nineteen years, eleven months, and two weeks.”

The spring of 1986 continued to reveal what the Green River Killer believed he had hidden forever. On May 2, 1986, an employee of Echo Glen, who was looking for a runaway teenager near a pullout off Highway 18 just south of the juncture of 18 and Highway 90, looked down and saw some weathered bones. It was Maureen Feeney, who had disappeared on September 28, 1983. Her family had reported her missing two years and eight months earlier. Maureen had been so thrilled to be living on her own near Bellevue. But she had been enticed into a dangerous life in Seattle. Ironically, her body had been left not far from her first apartment.

In June 1986, Kim Nelson’s skull and a few bones were found not far away in a deeply forested area off I-90 at Exit 38. Kim, also known as Tina Tomson, had been only a couple of miles from where Delise Plager and Lisa Yates were found in early 1984. Now her relatives would know why she hadn’t come home to Ann Arbor for Christmas. Kim’s father had died a few months before she was finally identified, and one of her sisters suffered a nervous breakdown after dealing with too many tragedies. Until there is a formal identification of the remains of a murder victim, relatives cling to a tiny glow of hope amid overwhelming anxiety. Afterward, hope is gone, and there is another phase of grief to deal with.

OFFICIALLY, there were no longer any new disappearances in the Seattle area, and the public seemed to have grown bored with an investigation that apparently had no end and no answers. In November of 1986, I was still convinced that I would soon be writing a book about the Green River murders. Because I have saved every scribbled-up calendar since 1972, it’s easy to look back and see what I was doing as long as thirty years ago. And a few words bring back images of events as if they had happened only last week.

That November I accepted an invitation from a King County deputy I had not met before to be taken on a tour of the body sites near North Bend. I figured it was an opportunity to learn the topography and the vegetation of the areas where the Green River Killer had left his tragic victims. I’d eaten many times at Ken’s Truck Stop, and each of my children had spent a week in the spring at Camp Waskowitz, but I’d never been into the woods on roads so narrow that they looked like trails.

It was a bleak, sunless day and whatever light there was had disappeared well before four in the afternoon. I must admit that I began to feel nervous, spooked, as the deputy turned into one area that looked more like a moonscape than the forests of the foothills of Snoqualmie Pass. There, I had the sensation that I really didn’t know this man at all, and in the back of my mind was the knowledge that many people believed that the Green River Killer was a cop. Wondering if I had been really stupid to drive around with a deputy I didn’t know, I told him I didn’t want to see any more body sites.

But that was the climate of the times. Every woman in King County was somewhat nervous and all men were suspect.

THERE WAS GOOD REASON to be wary. Hope Redding* was neither a teenage hitchhiker nor a woman who frequented the streets. Her lifestyle was totally different from the victims of the Green River Killer. She was a professional woman, married, and extremely cautious because she had once been the victim of a sexual assault. After that, she vowed that no man would ever do that again, even if she had to die fighting him. She followed every safety guide there was, and under almost any circumstance, she would never get into a stranger’s car.

In 1986, Hope was driving home from work along a dark road in the Maple Valley area of King County. Her car sputtered and stopped and nothing she tried got it started again. A short time later, a pickup truck slowed and then pulled over to the side of the road. She watched the driver approach her car and she checked the locks on the doors. Good. All locked. He was saying something to her through the window on the driver’s side and she rolled it down only an inch.

“Pop your hood,” he shouted. “I’m pretty good at cars.”

That might be safe enough. Cell phones weren’t common in 1986 and she had no way to call for help. Her husband wouldn’t know where to look for her. She either had to trust this man to take a look under the hood, hike miles in the dark to find a phone, or spend a cold night locked in her car. She popped the hood.

The helpful stranger wasn’t a very big man; he probably wasn’t any taller than she was, and he didn’t look muscular. She could hear him tapping and banging on things as he tried to find what the problem was. Time passed and she realized he had spent twenty minutes or more trying to help her. Finally, he slammed the hood down and walked back to her window.

“I can’t fix it,” he said. “It needs parts I don’t have, but I can give you a ride to where you can call someone to come and get you.”

Hope felt guilty for having doubted him in the beginning. How many strangers would stand out in the cold rain for so long trying to help someone? She nodded, grabbed her purse, and followed him to his truck.

He didn’t say much as they headed toward a crossroads where she knew there was a 7-Eleven, and he didn’t even glance at her. He had been so nice that she decided she should give him something for the time he’d spent trying to help her. She opened her purse and began to fish around for her wallet. The driver glanced over at her in alarm.

“He freaked,” she recalled. “I think he thought I was reaching for a gun. Since he seemed so nervous, I shut my purse.”

Now she began to feel vaguely uneasy as they sped through the night. She figured it was probably because she’d just broken her own rule about getting into a stranger’s car. She saw the 7-Eleven up ahead and prepared to hop out of his truck. But he didn’t slow down at all, and soon the convenience store was behind them, and the road ahead was even darker and less familiar. She asked him where he was going and he only grunted.

“I started swearing at him,” Hope recalled. “And I never swear at anyone. But I was yelling at him, telling him to stop and let me out. I drove my elbow into his ribs as hard as I could.”

He glanced angrily at her and Hope realized that he had never intended to stop. He turned corners again and again until she was disoriented about where she was. The road they were on now dead-ended at a junkyard of some sort. “I hit him and fought him and we were struggling inside the cab of his truck,” she said. “We fell out the door and I was fighting him on the ground. I was probably in the best condition I’d ever been in in my life—I went to aerobics three times a week—and I was not going to let him overpower me. He kept calling me ‘Bitch’ and I could tell he was terribly angry.”

As they rolled and tumbled on the muddy ground, she saw him sweep his free hand along the ground, reaching for something, a rock maybe, to smash against her head. And he was angling to get his other arm around her throat so he could crush her windpipe.

“I did what I had to,” Hope said. “I sunk my teeth as deep as I could into his arm, and he let go.”

She ran into the darkness that surrounded them, and hid. She could hear him crashing around, looking for her and she held her breath. Finally, he gave up and drove away. She managed to follow lights and find a phone, but Hope Redding would have nightmares for a long time. And many years later, when she recognized a picture of the man who might have killed her, she called the Green River Task Force.