Although he had spent some summers working in the family drugstore, Stevens never really wanted to be a pharmacist. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to join the Seattle Police Department, but he had a lousy driving record.

Stevens was one of the most interesting suspects yet to rise to the forefront in this marathon investigation. His photo first appeared in the media at the end of January 1989, when the handcuffed fugitive was arraigned in a King County Superior Court. His attorneys asked Judge Donald Haley to release Stevens on bail because his elderly parents were ill and needed his help. “Our position,” Craig Beles said, citing Stevens’s success in law school, “is that Bill is a remarkable example of what rehabilitation can do.”

The judge asked somewhat wryly why Stevens hadn’t responded to two warrants for his arrest in 1981. Stevens explained that he had given police information on his fellow prisoners and he’d been afraid that, as a “snitch,” his life was in danger, so he had walked away from work release and was afraid to go back.

In reality, he had never been a police informant.

Where had he been between 1981 and 1985 when he enrolled in law school in Spokane? Stevens proved to have had a lifestyle so peripatetic that it wasn’t easy to trace the many places he had lived. For the moment, however, he was safely behind bars again in the King County Jail, finishing the sentence he had walked away from ten years before.

The Green River Task Force found that Stevens had crossed the Canadian border into British Columbia shortly after his 1981 escape. There he lived as a “house guest” of a Vancouver couple for about four months. They had acquiesced to his staying there at the request of a mutual friend. They knew him as “Ernie,” and thereafter, he changed his name to “John Trumbull.” He explained that he was setting up an import business. He never seemed to have much money, but he explained that, too, saying he was waiting for funds to be released. He didn’t pay rent, but he bought some groceries, and helped with the dishes and the housework. They found him an amiable and polite guest.

“He was very organized, tidy, and a good talker,” the husband of the couple recalled. “He dressed well and gave the impression of being an army man. He slept on a couch in the den and spent his time watching TV and reading.”

Toward the end of Ernie/John’s time with the Canadian couple, he made several overnight trips. He said he was going to Seattle. Then, in late summer 1981, their visitor left. They weren’t sure where he was going.

William Stevens’s/John Trumbull’s trail picked up again in a southwest suburb of Portland. He bought a house on Southwest Crestline Drive for $108,000, a Roman brick with a double garage and a daylight basement. To help with the mortgage, he occasionally took in tenants in an apartment in that basement.

The task force looked at an Oregon map and saw that the house was within five miles of the Tigard/Tualatin site where the remains of four young women had been found, and within a mile of the location of Shirley Sherrill’s skull and the partial skull of Denise Darcel Bush.

How Stevens supported himself was a question. Whether he was a danger to women was also a mystery. When I sorted through the hundreds of emails and notes I took during phone calls about the Green River Killer, sometimes I found circumstances and tips that seemed to match. I remember finding one that struck me as eerily connected to the time William Stevens lived near Tualatin.

A few years after the Portland area phase of body discoveries and attacks on women by would-be stranglers, I received a phone call from a woman who lived in Washington County, Oregon. She was embarrassed and made me promise I would not reveal her name. I promised.

“I’m married now,” she explained, “and I don’t live the same kind of life at all. But then I did pick up men at bars and taverns, and I was drinking too much.

“I met this one guy at a tavern near Beaverton [a few miles from Tigard and Tualatin]. It seemed to me that he was taller than average, and I do remember that he had one of those great big country-western-style belt buckles. We drove out to a field that was quite a ways from the place where I picked him up. And…well, we had sex outside in a field someplace. Afterward, I started walking back to his truck and he suddenly reached out his arm and grabbed me by the elbow. I looked down and saw that I had almost fallen into what looked like an open grave. The worst thing was that there was a woman down in there, and I think she was dead.

“When I got back to my car, I was so grateful to be alive that I just tried to put it all out of my mind. But I know there was a grave, and I know there was someone in it.”

The “field” that the woman remembered was close to Bull Mountain Road and she believed that was where the man had taken her.

I turned the information over to the Green River Task Force, just one of more than the thousands of possibles it would document, but I kept her name out of it. If they thought it was worth following up, I could get back to her and see if she would talk to them on the condition that she remain anonymous. I don’t know if she ever called them, although I urged her to do so.

When William Stevens’s name came up, I remembered another woman who had written to me from Oregon. She told me her name was Marisa, and that she had once been a prostitute in Portland. She had described a shorter, thinner man than Bill Stevens appeared to be, but terror and shock can warp such perceptions.

Marisa’s recall of her meeting with a stranger was, however, precise. I don’t know her real name, but everything she told me about life in The Camp during the early to mideighties was validated by official police files.

Marisa has lived an entirely straight life for many years, and people who knew her after the eighties as a successful career woman would never guess what her former life was like. She was working the streets twenty years ago because she had been badly burned in an accident in a business she’d started and she was tired of being hungry and behind in her rent.

In 1983, she was thirty but looked about nineteen. “I remember being on Third Ave and Taylor Street about eleven PM in downtown Portland when he motioned to me to get in,” she recalled. “I had been out there trying to get up rent money.” Marisa usually worked in expensive hotels, but rainy Sundays were always slow, and she broke her first safety rule by going out on the street. Halloween decorations hadn’t been taken down, so it could have been early November. She got into a shiny red Ford pickup truck, which was clean and new. “The word on the street was that the GRK was driving an old beat-up van so I figured I was safe. And besides, I told myself the GRK was in Seattle.”

She broke her second rule, one shared by most working girls: never leave the downtown area. But Marisa was having a lucky night and had made almost all of her rent money. There were no other girls out that night and she decided to turn one more trick. “I asked him what he was interested in. He didn’t answer. He stayed quiet and drove with purpose as he headed to I-5. I thought he was just shy. I told him I didn’t want to leave downtown. He said he didn’t feel comfortable because of the cops and he wanted to go to his house.”

She was about to break the third rule of the street: never go to anyone’s house. “I thought what the heck. I can break a rule because I am on a lucky streak.”

The man didn’t even glance at her as he raced along the I-5 Freeway, heading south, and then took an off ramp near Tigard. “He pulled into his garage and the automatic door closed behind us.” They went into his small two-bedroom house.

She assumed he would ask for oral sex; most men did. He signed a cashier’s check for $80.00 and gave it to her. She saw the name “Robert Thomas” on it. She thought he was probably a truck driver because they often had cashier’s checks, but she was puzzled that he remained distant and seemingly disinterested in sex. “In fact he was unable to get it up. I thought well what the hell—you bring me all this way for nothing.”