And how long had Debra Estes lain beneath the tot lot’s soil? That was important because it would let the detectives know if she had been buried by her murderer, or accidentally by trucks bringing in load after load of fill dirt. One of the top names in another scientific area that aids criminal investigation was available to help. Professor Fio Ugolini, a soil scientist from Florence, Italy, was currently teaching at the University of Washington, and he agreed to come to the body site with Detective Cecil Ray to take samples from the dirt there. Ugolini was able to assure investigators that no soil had been added after Debra’s body was placed in the ground. “She’s been there since 1982,” he said.

That was a terribly important piece of information. Debra had undoubtedly walked out of the Stevenson Motel on September 20, 1982, met her killer that night, and been taken to the tot-lot location in the unfinished apartment complex. Why her name was added to the registration book at the Western Six Motel, along with Rebecca Marrero’s who really was there on December 1 and 2 a little over two months later, might have been a sick joke. Or it could have been a cover-up on the part of the Green River Killer.

44

IN THE MID- TO LATE EIGHTIES, there were several areas in the United States and Canada where serial killers were at work. Honolulu police were investigating the murders of four women in their late teens and early twenties, all Caucasian, who had been killed between spring of 1985 and April of 1986. None of them was connected to prostitution. It was a stretch to connect them to the Green River murders.

More likely, the San Diego serial killer or, more probably, killers, were deemed to have begun a murderous marathon in the third week of July 1985. San Diego’s “strip” was a long stretch of El Cajun Boulevard. Norm Stamper, second-in-command of that city’s police department, who would become Seattle’s police chief three years later, recalled being asked by the San Diego District Attorney to review the multiagency investigation into a string of perhaps forty-four murders of women of the street in both the city and the county. There were rumors of a rogue cop, and the DA was particularly concerned about the possibility of police involvement in the deaths and/or disappearances of a handful of the victims.

This speculation was fueled by the front-page statements of Donna Gentile, a warm, likable, and truthful prostitute with a passion for justice. She knew cops on both sides of the law and spoke openly about that. Her sense of self-preservation was flawed, however. Finally realizing she had gone too far, she expressed concern for her safety because she was a rabble-rouser who made people nervous.

It was too late. Shortly after Donna Gentile was interviewed on the evening television news, she disappeared. Her strangled body was found in the hills east of San Diego. She had been sexually assaulted, and her lungs were full of aspirated pea gravel, indicating that her killer had purposely jammed them down her throat. Was this a message to other prostitutes?

Stamper read every case file and interviewed every detective working on the San Diego cases. It was clear that the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, comprised as the Green River Task Force was of city, county, and district attorney investigators, was woefully understaffed. Working in secrecy in an undisclosed Mission Valley office building, the San Diego detectives weren’t sure if they were working homicides or internal investigation. Most were talented but inexperienced. It had taken them a long time, for example, to realize that a diagram drawn by a patrol deputy of a key homicide scene was a bit off kilter. In fact, it was completely reversed. It turned out that the county deputy who drew it was dyslexic and had sketched the whole scene backward.

Since Seattle detectives had more than their share of experience tracking serial killers, San Diego investigators flew to Washington to ask questions about the efficacy of forming a task force and how different police agencies could work well together to solve serial murders.

King County detectives had a lot of hard-to-come-

by wisdom to share with San Diego’s. Certainly, the “Ted” Task Force had proved that the more agencies involved, the better. But the Green River Task Force could not yet validate that having the King County Sheriff’s Office, the Seattle Police Department, the Washington State Patrol, the Port of Seattle Police, and the F.B.I. all working to solve more than forty homicides was the best way. They had never caught their man, but they had learned a lot as they hit one brick wall after another.

Perhaps both jurisdictions were looking for the same man with a killer who lived primarily in either Seattle or San Diego choosing to take victims in the West Coast’s most northern and most southern major cities. A comparison of the timing between the Green River murders in Washington State and the San Diego serial murders was interesting. The peak time period in Seattle seemed to have been between 1982 and 1984, and the California murders of similar victims began in 1985. By August 1988, San Diego County authorities had discovered bodies and skeletal remains of twenty-six women, most of whom fit the same profile as the King County victims. Eight other female bodies had been left in the city of San Diego.

Faced with more than thirty unsolved murders of prostitutes in less than three years, San Diego investigators were happy to share information with King County, and vice versa. In September 1988, a few weeks after they returned to California, authorities in San Diego arrested a man who had taken a young prostitute working on El Cajun Boulevard to a deserted spot in Mission Valley, and then demanded his $40 back after they had sex. He had threatened her with a shotgun. As she tried to talk reason to him, he reportedly said, “Aren’t you going to cry and beg like that little Mexican girl did?”

The only Hispanic victim who seemed to match his reference was Melissa Sandoval, whose body had been found in Rancho Bernardo the previous May. Task force members would say only that she had perished “as a result of criminal means,” but had not been shot.

The man was held on $100,000 bail.

After analyzing the San Diego Task Force, Norm Stamper called for two major changes. First, any and all allegations of police misconduct—from fraternizing with prostitutes to criminal behavior—would be investigated by the California State Attorney General’s office. Second, since most of the prostitute murders had originated in the city of San Diego, the police department would provide additional resources and manpower to the task force. After exhaustive interviews, Stamper selected six additional detectives to complete the murder investigations.

In the end, Gary Schons, a brilliant attorney from the attorney general’s office, was appointed to oversee the investigation into alleged police misconduct. He cleared the San Diego force of any involvement with the prostitute murders.

Dave Reichert was interested in the apparent similarities between the Green River victims and those in San Diego. He made one of the many flying trips he’d taken over the years to other jurisdictions and talked to the detectives in San Diego. If there were only some way to link a King County suspect to San Diego, it might be possible to compare times and dates. But nothing came of the California connection, although Norm Stamper isn’t sure that is a closed door.

The man eventually convicted of the murder of Donna Gentile was a former marine and mechanic, a traveler who liked to drive up and down the West Coast. Citing fiber and other trace evidence, San Diego detectives were able to implicate him in almost two dozen of their cases. He is currently serving twenty-seven years to life in a California prison.