Exactly a month later, on August 7, 1987, a Portland woman who also worked Union Street screamed desperately for help, shouting, “Rape! Help…Rape!” Nearby residents rushed to their windows. In the Denny’s parking lot far below, they saw a man bent over a naked woman, raising his arm again and again. By the time they reached her, however, she was dying from stab wounds to the chest.

As horrible as her murder was, it was far from the worst of it. Oregon detectives traced the license-plate number one witness was able to memorize and linked it to thirty-three-year-old Dayton Leroy Rogers. Rogers, a well-known auto repairman in the hamlets of Woodburn and Canby (about twenty-four miles south of Portland), was married with a toddler son. But he also had a record for sexual assaults going back many years. He had been in prison and then diagnosed as mentally ill, but he had slipped through Oregon’s parole system. He was familiar to prostitutes as a foot fetishist, a bondage fan, and as a client who was stimulated by inflicting pain.

When a decomposed female body was found in the Molalla Forest on August 31, Clackamas County, Oregon, detectives recalled Rogers’s sexual penchants. He was a known sadist, and he lived less than fifteen miles away. As deputies and dogs conducted a sickening search of the ninety-thousand-acre timber farm, they found six more female bodies. Four of them were within fifty yards of one another on an almost vertical slope. They had been covered with brush and then “self-buried” as weeds and brush grew over and around them.

Dr. Larry Lewman, the Oregon State Medical Examiner, went through the two hundred dental records the King County M.E. had gathered after the Green River murders, searching for matches to the seven victims found between August 31 and September 5, 1987, in the remote forested area ten miles southeast of Molalla, Oregon. He was able to identify most of them by their dental work, even though some of their charts were more than ten years old. But none of them were missing young women in the Green River files. All but one of these known victims had ties to prostitution. One would never be identified. The worst part, however, was the fact that the killer had cut his victims’ feet off, probably with a hacksaw.

The Green River Task Force sent detectives to the Molalla Forest to help in working the outdoor body site, a cluster site like those where the Washington State victims had been found. And of course they wondered if they might find evidence that would link these murders to the Green River cases. Since the man they sought had apparently stopped taking victims in King County, he might well have moved south to begin with a clean slate.

Rogers scarcely looked like a killer. He wasn’t very tall, and had a slight build and a baby face. He would certainly appear innocuous to women who stared through a car window at him. He was also an alcoholic who never went anywhere without a supply of tiny vodka bottles—the kind used on airplane flights. Several of the bottles were found close to the bodies in the Molalla Forest.

But could Dayton Leroy Rogers be the Green River Killer? Not likely. Some elements were the same, but some were very different. As far as the task force investigators could tell, Rogers hadn’t traveled to Washington. Although most of the King County victims weren’t found until they were skeletonized, none of the bones showed signs of nicking or breaking from bullets or a knife. None of the first victims found had been stabbed, they were younger than the Molalla victims, and there was no indication that their feet had been cut off. No, the Portland area had its own serial killer.

After the first flurry of interest on the part of King County detectives, they realized that Rogers was not their man. He was a serial killer certainly, but not the one they’d been hunting for so long.

Dayton Lee Rogers went to trial and was sentenced to life in prison.

43

IT WAS 1988 and the centennial anniversary of the most infamous serial killer of them all. Jack-the-Ripper had stalked unfortunate ladies of the night in London exactly a hundred years before. Oddly, no one interested in the Green River murders appeared to note that. At least, there were no “anniversary” articles or television comments about it. Old Jack was a piker compared to the GRK’s toll; he had claimed less than a half-dozen victims, but his fame had magnified exponentially over the years because he was never caught.

The Green River Task Force detectives devoutly hoped that was not going to happen with the man they were tracking.

ANYONE who investigates homicides or who writes about them soon learns that there are things that happen that seem far more than coincidence, events and discoveries that have to be almost unexplainable. It is something more than a victim’s hand reaching out from the grave, or, more likely, reaching back from the other side. Certainly murder “will out” is not always true. People get away with murder all the time. But sometimes evidence and victims are discovered through such unlikely means that it seems almost miraculous, and I do not question it.

By May 30, 1988, Debra Lorraine Estes, fifteen, had been gone for almost six years. There had been moments of hope. One of her aunts, who lived in Virginia, was known as a psychic, but the messages she got were far more grounded than something ethereal. She had received two phone calls—one in 1985 and another in 1986. The young woman who called said that she was her niece and she needed help. Debra’s aunt could hear background noise and the sound of coins being dropped into a pay phone.

“I need help,” the girl said. “I’ll come to where you are.”

The caller said she was Debra, and she even knew her Virginia cousins’ first names, although she had seen them only once and didn’t know them very well. She got the names right. But she hung up abruptly during both calls. The second time, she screamed before the line went dead.

Was it Debra? Maybe she was being held captive and had managed to get to a phone twice. But why hadn’t she called her parents instead of an aunt she barely knew? Or was it Debra from some place just beyond life, making contact with the one relative she had who was sensitive to ghostly communications?

More likely, it was a cruel practical joker, one of the ghouls who thrive on making the pain of victims’ relatives even more acute.

Carol Estes clung to her hope that her daughter was out there someplace. She told Linda Barker that if she couldn’t have her daughter back safe and sound, she hoped that Debra could somehow be the one girl who would bring the killer down and lead to his arrest. “I want her to be the one to break the case.”

On January 20, 1988, Tom and Carol Estes appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show, asking for information from someone—anyone—in the viewing audience who might have seen Debra. Although the show has a tremendous following, only four tips came in. All but one were vague. One caller had seen a girl dancing on a dock in the Southeast, a girl who resembled Debra. Another had seen a girl in passing but could give no specific information. The most likely information came from a rehabilitation facility in New England where troubled youths were helped. Debra might be one of their charges.

But it wasn’t Debra.

LIKE ANY CITY with a burgeoning population, Seattle and surrounding King County attracted developers with plans to build houses and apartment complexes in the suburbs where there had been nothing but forests and mountain foothills. Federal Way, more than halfway between Seattle and Tacoma, was deemed a perfect site for putting up apartment buildings, and it could be accomplished with creative financing that leveraged a relatively small amount of cash up front.