I hedged my bets a little when I was contacted by reporters, although I did say I believed that charges would soon be forthcoming in the Green River murders. I had a contract to write about the Green River Killer, and I was finally ready to start my book.

I had even more reason to believe I had chosen the real Green River Killer a few months later. On Friday, September 21, 1989, I drove the three hundred miles from Seattle to Spokane where I was to teach a number of seminars over the weekend for the Washington State Crime Prevention Association convention. Daryl Pearson of the Walla Walla Police Department was in charge of providing speakers for an audience consisting of police officers, attorneys, probation and parole officers, and the media. I had done a phone interview with the Spokane Spokesman Review-Chronicle that appeared in the paper just before the convention. Among other subjects, I answered questions about the likelihood that the Green River investigators were heading toward an arrest. I certainly didn’t know, but it was a subject readers always wondered about. This time, I felt as confident as some of the task force members did, and said so, although I didn’t mention the suspect’s name.

The convention was held in a Spokane hotel, and I was a little taken aback to find I was scheduled to give my two-hour slide presentation on serial killers—featuring the Ted Bundy case—four times on Saturday and twice on Sunday morning. Although I had expected to speak once on each day, there were so many attendees that every seat was full at each session, even when the folding doors between two meeting rooms were opened to double the size.

I recognized a lot of faces in the crowd, but it was impossible for me to note everyone in the six different audiences. As usual, I started with childhood slides of Bundy, Jerome Brudos (The Lust Killer), Randy Woodfield (The I-5 Killer), and a number of other serial murderers I’d written about, and moved on to their progression from exposing and/or voyeurism to rape to murder. At the end of each session, I answered questions from the audience. I wish that my memory was better, but I can’t say if Dale Wells attended any of my seminars. If he was there, there was nothing about him that caught my attention.

By the time I drove home on Sunday, I was exhausted.

On Tuesday morning, Dale Wells’s landlady unlocked the small apartment he rented. She hadn’t seen him coming or going for a few days, and the woman he dated steadily was very concerned about him because she hadn’t been able to get in touch with him.

He was there, lying on his sheetless water-bed mattress, but he was dead. Sometime over the previous weekend, he had killed himself with one blast of a shotgun to his head. No one who knew him had any warning whatsoever that he was depressed or troubled enough to commit suicide.

The next day, I got a phone call from Detective Jim Hansen of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. He asked me what I could tell him about Dale Wells. Baffled, I said I didn’t know anyone named Dale Wells. Hansen told me that Wells had probably committed suicide sometime on Saturday. He had left no suicide note, but I was shocked when Hansen said, “He left a letter addressed to you, though…”

I explained that I had been in Spokane that Saturday and asked Hansen what the letter said. He read it to me and said he would mail me a copy. For the first time, I learned who Dale Wells was, and that he had been subpoenaed to appear before an upcoming grand jury empaneled to decide whether William Stevens II would be tried as a fugitive in possession of a firearm. Hansen said that there was no indication at all that Wells himself had been involved in any criminal activity.

When I received a copy of Wells’s letter to me, it was undated, and it looked as if it was a rough draft of a letter he had worked over for some time, scratching out sections and adding inserts to make himself clear. It could have been written months before he shot himself on September 22 or 23, 1989.

“Re Your Green River Killer Project

Dear Ms Rule:

It is my understanding you are writing a book about the Green River Killer w/a scheduled publication date sometime this summer. It is further my understanding, based on accounts in the press, that you do not believe the GRK is in custody. I believe you are mistaken in this regard in that the man I believe to be the GRK is in custody on unrelated charges.

The basis of my suspicions regarding the ID of the GRK is somewhat analogous to your suspicions re: Ted Bundy where there was no direct confession, even to intimate friends, but a myriad of suspicious circumstances which would have considerable significance to a perspicacious observer.

As I have not followed the killings in the press as they have occurred, I would appreciate your sending me an advance copy of what you have written so far so that I can better understand the killer’s M.O. & the background of the victims.

Thank you

Sincerely, D.D.W.”

At that point, some fifteen years ago, I hadn’t written anything beyond notes because no one had been charged with the Green River murders. And I had no plans to publish a book in the summer of 1989 or 1990, if that was what Dale Wells meant.

Most of all, I felt sad that Wells hadn’t contacted me or someone about his anxiety and his depression. Because my only sibling had committed suicide, and after volunteering at the Crisis Clinic, I have always found suicide the saddest way to end a life. Maybe I could have eased Wells’s mind over some perceived guilt feelings about Bill Stevens’s situation. Maybe I could have listened to his suspicions. More likely, there was nothing I could have done. It was obvious he believed Stevens was a serial killer whom he had befriended unaware, just as I had befriended Ted Bundy unaware. He may have felt guilty because he hadn’t come forward sooner. He may even have felt guilty for telling detectives about Stevens’s hatred for prostitutes. None of that should have been enough for him to take his own life.

In the end, all I could do was try to comfort Dale Wells’s girlfriend and his landlady when they called me, but I could do so only in general terms because I never knew the man they mourned.

Green River Task Force commander Bob Evans, whom I have known since he was a road deputy, told reporters it was clear to him that Wells’s letter to me compared Stevens to Bundy, but that his detectives weren’t sure what significance to attach to the letter. “It’s just another bizarre twist,” he said, “in [what is] probably this country’s most bizarre case.”

The Spokane County Sheriff’s investigators and the Green River Task Force carried stacks of papers and files out of Wells’s apartment, but they never found anything that connected either Wells or Stevens to the Green River murders.

William Stevens II was transferred to Spokane County a few days after Dale Wells’s suicide. He had only another month to serve on his King County sentence. However, he and his attorney had steadfastly refused to discuss the Green River murders with the task force, blocking any progress on his case for months.

Robert Stevens, who was a seventeen-year navy veteran, came forward in defense of his brother with photographs of him vacationing on the East Coast with their parents. The dates on the photos and the credit card slips from several cities seemed to validate that Bill Stevens was not in Washington State for most of 1982, and particularly on vital days in July.

After an exhaustive examination of Stevens’s pornography collection, weapons, and police paraphernalia, nothing whatsoever was found linking him to the Green River cases. Reluctantly, the task force accepted that the prime suspect so far wasn’t their man either.