That did it. Caruso grabbed her stuff and left, but not before Stevens insisted she take a dozen pornographic videotapes as a good-bye gift.

Sarina Caruso recalled Stevens’s high-pitched voice and that he perspired heavily. “There were things I wasn’t comfortable with,” she told reporters later, “but I just thought he was bizarre and antisocial. I feel dumb now. I certainly didn’t think he might be a killer.”

Perhaps he wasn’t, but William Stevens II was a man with many secrets. Fellow students at Gonzaga were shocked by his arrest for escape and burglary. A lawyer who had graduated a few years earlier and once worked with him on the Student Bar Association recalled Stevens as “very dedicated” to duties for the group, but said he seemed lacking in commitment to his law studies. He often missed class. Even with his law school peers, Stevens was mysterious. They realized later that none of them had a phone number where they could contact him directly.

They had no inkling that most of Stevens’s life was a very elaborately constructed lie. To give himself official status, he used a crossroad of a town seventeen miles south of Spokane—Spangle—where he had license plates registered to the Spangle Emergency Services and Rescue Unit. Sometimes he purported to be the director of the EMS in Spangle, and sometimes he said he was the police chief. The town wasn’t big enough to support either a rescue service or a police department.

One fellow law student knew Stevens was intrigued at the thought of being somehow involved in law enforcement. “He told me that after he finished law school, he was going to be a motorcycle officer for the Washington State Patrol,” the man said. “That seemed bizarre. Why would he bother to go all the way through law school if that’s what he wanted to do?”

Other law students had found Stevens gregarious and likable, and always busy. But no one ever thought of him as a threat; he was just different.

All through the spring and half the summer of 1989, Green River Task Force investigators and Spokane County detectives were checking out Stevens’s life over the prior eight years. Satisfied that they had more than enough to go on by July 12, they obtained search warrants for two residences in Spokane. One was the home where Billy Stevens had grown up, and where he still had a room in the basement, and the other was a rental home his parents owned. The search warrants were very long and complicated, listing dates and times of the disappearances of the victims, followed by Stevens’s whereabouts during those periods. It did appear that his constant sweeps around Northwest highways placed him close by when many abductions took place. The warrants also specified all kinds of police paraphernalia, records, credit card slips, suspicious books and photos, videotapes, and other items they hoped to find among Stevens’s possessions.

There were, however, more reasons than just his proximity to the crime scenes. Stevens had made his feelings about prostitutes known to some of his acquaintances. One—perhaps his closest friend and a former classmate at Gonzaga—was a lawyer and a Spokane County deputy public defender named Dale Wells, who was also thirty-eight and single. Wells had acknowledged to Spokane County detectives that he and Stevens were close friends and had often discussed criminal cases, especially the crimes of Ted Bundy. Another topic that interested Bill Stevens was prostitution. He had denounced prostitutes to Wells and said they spread AIDS.

“He talked about them a lot,” Dale Wells said, emphasizing that Stevens had demonstrated “extreme hatred” for anyone who resisted him and often said of his perceived enemies: “They need to be killed.”

While Stevens appeared to have no romantic relationships with women, Dale Wells was involved with a woman he cared deeply for—and she for him. He appeared to be a sensitive and honorable man, and he was very troubled when Stevens became the top suspect in the Green River murder cases. Wells, whose career was dedicated to representing indigents, many of whom he thought were falsely accused, agonized over betraying his friend.

On the other hand, he was an attorney, sworn to uphold the law, and he felt he had to tell investigators what he knew. He also regretted that he had given Stevens two handguns, one of which was a .45-caliber pistol. That had resulted in federal charges against Stevens for being a fugitive felon in possession of a firearm.

If Stevens berated Dale Wells for turning against him, there was no proof. He may not have even known about Wells’s defection from his camp. And he was still possessed of the braggadocio that marked his personality. He had to be placed in an isolation section in the King County Jail after he told a judge that he had two hundred pages of notes from his interviews with another prisoner who was a convicted murderer. Stevens said he planned to use that information in a thesis to help him earn his Ph.D. in psychology. That put him in the “snitch” category, more than enough to make him a pariah in jail.

When asked how he supported himself during his eight years of freedom after his 1981 jail escape, Stevens said he made a good living buying and reselling cars, and that he was currently applying for an auto dealer’s license.

Deputies and detectives served the search warrants in Spokane and came away with more than forty boxes and bags, many containing pornographic material, dozens of photos of nude women in sexually explicit poses, some with Stevens, and eighteen hundred videocassettes. Detectives would have to view all of that material, looking for a familiar face. Perhaps some of the Green River victims’ images might have been caught in Stevens’s massive collection.

No one envied the detectives who drew the assignment of wading through the stultifying XXX-rated material that the seemingly affable law student had managed to hide in his parents’ home and rental property. If any of the victims’ photos were in the boxes and bags, what were the chances they would be recognizable? So many of the dead teenagers had dyed their hair, worn wigs, and changed their makeup, that it had been nearly impossible to spot them in mug shots. Stevens’s collection of grainy, amateurish porn videos made it difficult to recognize familiar faces.

Stevens himself, still in the King County Jail on his earlier charges, issued a statement that came exactly seven years after the day Wendy Coffield’s body was believed to have been discarded in the Green River. If he knew that date was a grim anniversary, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he was outraged and stunned. “I am not the Green River Killer,” he said through his attorney. “The Green River Task Force has not treated me or my family fairly. They have made me out to be a very bad person and I am not. People should know the fact that I have never hurt anyone in my life.

“If I knew anything about any of this, I would have told the task force long ago, but now I fear I have become the excuse for the time and money they have spent.

“I will discuss the matter in an orderly and honorable fashion in a court of law.

“The task force has put my family and me through a living nightmare that I would wish on no one. I want to serve out my remaining few months and get on with my life.

“Thank you.”

HIS FAMILY was going through a “living nightmare,” although the task force investigators hadn’t caused it. They were only doing their jobs. Bill Stevens’s brother had been taking care of their elderly parents. Their mother, Adele Stevens, had died earlier in July, and William Stevens Sr. was suffering from advanced brain cancer. No one could estimate what emotional pain Billy Stevens had caused them over the years.

Everyone who followed the seven-year plague of the Green River Killer had settled on a favorite suspect. And so had I. I was convinced in July of 1989 that William Jay Stevens II was the serial killer the task force had hunted for so long. Everything seemed to match my preconceived ideas of who the killer was: a middle-aged male Caucasian, very intelligent, a sociopath with charisma and cunning, perhaps someone pretending to be a police officer, someone who traveled continually, and who liked playing games with real cops.