Suddenly, the stranger leapt from the bed, and grabbed a rifle from behind a door, aiming it at her. “My life flashed before me,” Marisa recalled. She assumed he was upset with her because he couldn’t achieve an erection, so she started talking loud and fast, telling him she would give back the check and she ran into the bathroom, locking the door. She was naked, a fourth rule she had broken. Frantic, she dressed hurriedly, all the time shouting through the door that she was searching for his check.

Dressed now, she opened the bathroom door, only to find him standing there with the rifle pointed at her head. She threw the check at him, saying “Here! Here it is. Now let me go!”

She was trying to snap him back into reality, but it wasn’t working, and he had no intention of letting her go. She darted past him to the front door, only to find it had three locks. Why, she wondered, would a man who lived on a quiet cul-de-sac need three locks? As she struggled to turn the bolt, he began to beat her on the head with the rifle’s butt.

Marisa turned as he started laughing maniacally. “He looked like a kid on a ride at Disneyland, his eyes all lit up and happy. With every swing of the rifle into my head, he got happier. This guy was psycho,” she wrote. “He was getting off on it! This is how he gets off! I remember his big glasses, the same style he wears today…and his hair-do the same…and his stature…not that big a man…not that small either…that same dumb sneaky look he has today. With that sly sparkle in his eyes.”

It was evident to Marisa that he had brought her to this house to kill her, but he was taking his time. “He wasn’t slamming the rifle with all his might, just cat and mouse style.”

She remembered she had Mace in her front pocket, and she squirted it in his face, but his glasses blocked most of it. “He hit me left, then right, then left, then right, and beat up my forearms pretty bad. He finally pried the Mace from my hands and began spraying it in my face. Then I began to pray. My eyes burned with excruciating pain, but I would blink often to see what he was doing.”

Now, she turned her attention to the front door, getting a mental picture of where the locks were. She lunged at the door to try to open another lock—the dead bolt. He continued to spray her with the Mace. “I grabbed a pillow on the couch near the door to protect my face. I kept him thinking he was winning so he wouldn’t get even more forceful. That would buy me time for the third lock.”

Even so, she was losing strength and felt she was going to die. “I was hurting bad and my eyes were on fire.”

Her attacker was clearly enjoying himself. “That part is very scary; seeing him be thrilled over hurting someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly—me.”

She knew she had to get out because the Mace and her injuries were wearing her down. And then, for a moment, he seemed to tire, too. With her eyes almost entirely swollen shut, she twisted the dead bolt one more time.

“To my surprise, it unbolted and the door swung open. ‘GRK’ was surprised too.” Marisa ran blindly across the street and down four houses where she knocked and called out, “Please help me!” It was about twelve thirty AM, but a woman opened the door for her and led her to the bathroom where she washed her eyes.

The police arrived, and Marisa told them that a killer had a friend of hers hostage in a house nearby. Afraid they wouldn’t believe her if they knew she was a prostitute, she lied and said he’d picked them both up at a bus stop in downtown Portland. She tried to show them the house but she could hardly see, and the homes all looked alike. There were no trucks parked outside. As she stood on the porch of the woman who had helped her, Marisa saw a big sign right at the Tigard/Tualatin Exit from the freeway. It blinked on and off: Jiggles. She’d heard of it; it was a topless lap dance place.

The police gave up their search after she admitted that she didn’t have a friend in any of the houses in the cul-de-sac.

“Please understand,” she wrote to me, “living as a sex worker, I felt I had relinquished my rights as a citizen and that I wasn’t worthy of protection. I was doing an unlawful thing even though it was in the name of survival.”

The cops drove Marisa back to downtown Portland to her car. Her car keys were missing, and it cost her everything she’d earned earlier that night to pay a locksmith in the wee hours of the morning, but all she wanted to do was go home. Her friend, Tatiana,* who also worked the premier hotels in Portland, took care of her for a few days until her bruises began to heal and she could move without pain again.

Years later, when she watched the news bulletins from Seattle, and recognized the man in handcuffs, she felt sick to her stomach. An artist who remembers details, Marisa has always believed that she escaped from the Green River Killer. “We knew many of the girls who got killed,” she wrote. “We never thought they had any family. Most of them were on drugs—methamphetamine and marijuana. Sad to say that those girls didn’t have a chance in the world, even at their young age. Many were so hooked on drugs, they would have died of an overdose. I do wonder about the ones who came up missing and are not on the GRK list. Most of them were very sweet girls. They were still children in a way.”

Marisa herself went to New Beginnings in 1985, got off the street, and changed her life completely.

45

ONE WOMAN who definitely met Bill Stevens was Sarina Caruso, forty-four at the time, who rented the basement of the house on Crestline Drive from September 1984 to January 1985. She knew Stevens as “John L. Trumbull,” and although she found him somewhat odd, she didn’t suspect he might be dangerous. Caruso, who had just gone through a divorce, worked as a nursing assistant and considered herself lucky to find an apartment that cost her only $200 a month.

In the time she knew him, she never saw Stevens/Trumbull with a date, although she sometimes heard women’s voices in his upstairs quarters in the middle of the night. He was a night owl, though, and would often be barbecuing in the backyard at two or three AM. He had no friends, and she thought he might be an undercover cop or a C.I.A. agent. He wore several different uniforms that made it look as if he worked for the gas or electric company or as a repairman. But he had a gun collection and appeared to be fascinated with crime—to the point that he hung “Wanted” posters all over his house. He wore shoes with crepe soles, which allowed him to move so quietly that he would suddenly be behind her when she hadn’t heard him approach. He also owned a lot of telephone equipment, a photocopier, and other equipment that he told her he used to analyze fingerprints. One of his many idiosyncrasies was that he would never allow anyone to take a picture of him.

Caruso wasn’t too concerned about his eccentric ways, even when Stevens stole her chain saw and her marriage certificate. She worried a lot more when she saw that he had dressed mannequins in clothes she had thrown away. And even more when he cut the female dummies into pieces.

When she found bullet holes in Stevens’s bedroom wall, Sarina Caruso gave notice that she planned to move. Stevens/Trumbull had always told her that he was adept at placing secret “bugs,” and he’d offered to bug her ex-husband. Now she wondered if he had secreted listening devices in her apartment.

On the last day she saw him, Caruso had returned to pick up the remainder of her possessions and he said to her, “How are your nerves today?” He then began locking all the doors. Nervously, she let him lead her to the basement where he showed her the secret room he had there, a room hidden behind a bookcase that would slide open when he flicked a switch. Although she had occupied most of the basement, he demonstrated how he had been able to open a secret door into her area that couldn’t be opened from her side.