No one on the Green River Task Force knew in the late eighties that one of the men they’d talked to a number of times on the highway near the Seattle airport had once been stationed in San Diego. Indeed, that was the first time he’d felt betrayed by his wife and begun patronizing prostitutes. However, that was long before the serial killings began in either state. And a check on the whereabouts of the man arrested in San Diego in September 1988 indicated that he had never been to King County.
CAPTAIN BOBBY EVANS, who had once convinced Ingmar Rasmussen that his Cadillac had broken down so he could get inside the wealthy farmer’s house to find some sign of the first missing Green River victims, was now the head of the Green River Task Force. But the torch, handed down so many times, was dimming, and all the detectives working the Green River case exclusively were in danger of being swallowed up by Major Crimes until the task force itself was no more.
ON DECEMBER 7, 1988, in what had all the signs of a last-ditch effort to bring forth vital information on possible Green River suspects from the American public, a television marathon called Manhunt…A Chance to End the Nightmare was broadcast. The show, in an America’s Most Wanted format, resulted from the efforts of Myrle Carner, a robbery detective in the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department.
It featured interviews with the families of the murdered girls and information on dozens of homicides in other police jurisdictions, all unsolved. Patrick Duffy, who rose to television fame through his role, as “Bobby” in Dallas, hosted the special, while scores of detective volunteers answered phones. Duffy’s sister was a Seattle police officer, and they shared a tragic connection to the victims’ families. Their parents, Terrence and Marie Duffy, were murdered on November 18, 1986, by two teenagers during the robbery of their bar, The Lounge, in Boulder, Montana. Kenneth Miller and Sean Wentz, who was believed to have fired the sawed-off shotgun that killed the Duffys, were sentenced to 180 years in prison in 1987.
Not surprisingly, Patrick Duffy had strong personal motivations for trying to find killers who roved free. The show aired all across America and Canada, attracting millions of viewers.
F.B.I. special agent John Douglas faced the cameras to give the profile of the man they sought, and a somewhat nervous Dave Reichert sat beside him. Reichert warned the Green River Killer that he would have to pay for his crimes and asked him to turn himself in to face his punishment.
A lack of tips and information had never been the Green River investigators’ problem. Rather, the mountains of calls, letters, and emails had almost buried them. Still, they had to hope the one vital lead that had eluded them for more than seven years might result from Manhunt. Sixteen thousand people called in that night and over the next weeks, offering almost two thousand new suspects. The majority of them were useless. However, the show did result in a possible new direction that left the task force with revived hope.
More than one viewer called in with information about William Stevens II, suggesting that he was “weird enough” to be the Green River Killer. “Billy” Stevens was thirty-eight years old, a student at Gonzaga University’s law school in Spokane, and he was about to feel the uncomfortably hot glow of the task force’s spotlight. Initially, Stevens seemed the least likely suspect of them all. He was in his last year of law school, and he had twice been elected to the prestigious office of president of the Student Bar Association. He had friends and admirers in that group and appeared to a be a winner, if somewhat eccentric. Even so, his name began to creep into Green River news coverage in January 1989.
On a viewer’s tip, Stevens was arrested in his parents’ Spokane home after the Manhunt program. Spokane County deputies seized twenty-six different license plates and twenty-nine guns from his bedroom. A number of the license plates had been issued to municipal departments and law enforcement agencies. He also had a Snohomish County undercover police vehicle, which he had bought at an auction and equipped as a standard police unit, handcuffs, and a motorcycle similar to those used by police.
Stevens was the eldest of three children, all adopted by a caring Spokane pharmacist and his wife. Billy Stevens was less than a week old when they brought him home, and he grew from a chubby child to a bearlike man, tall and lumbering with a big belly. He wore dark-rimmed glasses and had tightly curled brown hair. Indeed, he looked remarkably like one of the four widely disparate sketches of the Green River Killer as described by witnesses to possible abductions.
Just as Dick Kraske had remembered fingerprinting Melvyn Foster when Foster was first arrested in Seattle, Tom Jensen of the Green River Task Force recalled investigating Stevens in a King County burglary case nine years earlier. When Jensen heard his name, he had no trouble recalling the smooth-talking, overweight burglar he’d once interviewed. In 1981, Billy Stevens was being held in a work release unit in the King County Jail with five months left to serve. One day he was supposed to be carrying garbage out, but he’d just kept right on going.
It was what Stevens had stolen that made him most interesting as a Green River suspect, and where he had stolen it: He had taken a police uniform, Mace, surveillance devices, bulletproof vests, and other police equipment from a store out on Pac HiWay, a business located across the highway from the Blockhouse Restaurant, kitty-corner from the Midway Tavern, and just down the block from the Three Bears Motel. Stevens himself had lived in a nearby apartment at the time.
Now, he’d been arrested with guns, license plates issued to police vehicles, and a police car. Because of the constant rumor that the Green River victims had been killed by a policeman, Stevens’s collection of police gear and weapons put him quickly into the “A” category. He was not just a “person of interest”; Stevens looked good enough to be a “viable suspect,” although the task force was careful to keep that appellation to themselves for as long as they could. Stevens fit neatly into so many facets they sought in a suspect.
And with good reason. The face Billy Stevens presented to the world was only a facade. In truth, he was a con man on the level of “The Great Imposter.” Ferdinand Waldo William Demara Jr. defrauded scores of people who believed he really was who he seemed to be. A brilliant con man, “Fred” Demara managed to masquerade successfully as a monk, a Canadian navy surgeon (who actually performed complicated surgeries successfully), a cancer researcher, a deputy sheriff, and a professor. Demara, who never graduated from high school, much less college or medical school, had a thirty-year career, although he was sporadically arrested for fraud, theft, embezzlement, and forgery. Had he chosen to pursue any of his “careers” legitimately, he could have accomplished the necessary education easily. Instead, he was a fraud, a man who some considered to be a true multiple personality.
It was the same with William Stevens II. He had a solid legal education after his years at Gonzaga, but he could never have passed the bar in any state that checked his background. He had a felony police record. He had also studied psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and had allegedly graduated in 1979 with a degree in pharmacology. He claimed to have been a second lieutenant and a military policeman in the U.S. Army, and to have applied to the Seattle Police Department to become a patrolman. Instead, for all his years at Gonzaga, and even before that, he was supposed to be in jail.
Stevens’s early life seemed uneventful enough. He’d been born in Wallace, Idaho, on October 6, 1950, adopted by William and Adele Stevens, and raised in a quiet neighborhood north of the Spokane city limits, attending Jesuit schools and graduating from Gonzaga High School in 1969. His father owned the University Pharmacy, a block from their home, for thirty years, hoping that his son and namesake would take over the business one day. Young Billy was not particularly close to his siblings by adoption, consumed as he was with his own hobbies and interests. He was a police buff early on, fascinated with the lifestyle and paraphernalia of law enforcement. An inordinate number of serial killers are police groupies, eager to move in the same circles as real cops.