Robert Stevens called a press conference to say he was furious with the task force for searching his parents’ home, and for the ordeal his family had undergone because of the publicity surrounding that.

Evans countered, “It is not my fault he [Bill Stevens] was a fugitive, that he told his friends he wanted to do things to prostitutes and that he collected police badges and equipment. If I would have walked away from that without checking it out, I should have been fired.”

On December 6, 1989, Stevens pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush to one count of being a felon and fugitive in possession of a firearm. In a plea bargain, two similar firearms counts were dismissed, and U.S. Attorney Ron Skibbie recommended a standard range of two to eight months in prison. The judge accepted the plea but said he would determine the sentence. The maximum penalty was ten years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release.

In the end, Steven’s sentence didn’t really matter. He was diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer while still in prison and subsequently paroled. Once overweight, he weighed under ninety pounds when he died in September of 1991 at the age of forty-one. He was unrecognizable as the man whose picture appeared on front pages from British Columbia to California, Washington, and Oregon to Idaho. Even so, he had been arrested for theft in the last year of his troubled life. He was a consummate con man who never used his superior intelligence for anything but the next scam.

Was Bill Stevens responsible for any of the sexual assaults or deaths of young women in Washington and Oregon? I don’t know. Was he the Green River Killer?

No. He liked to frighten women as he had scared his tenant in Oregon. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had planned to scare the woman who left the Beaverton bar with a stranger. The “body” in the “open grave” she saw might well have only been one of Stevens’s mannequins.

46

BY 1990, THE GREEN RIVER Task Force’s days were numbered, its manpower and assets siphoned off into the county’s Major Crimes Unit, and then the detectives were quietly reassigned. Where Frank Adamson’s task force had once had seventy people, including clerical support staff, Bobby Evans had only seventeen, and they were much easier to disassemble without fanfare.

Fifteen million dollars and a tremendous amount of work and dedication hadn’t brought the real killer to his knees. Some of the best detectives in America had stepped up to the plate, full of energy and confidence, and struck out. One of the F.B.I. special agents—Paul Lindsay—had been so sure that he would find the man who had murdered at least four dozen women. In the end, Lindsay said to Frank Adamson, “Captain, I am humbled.”

The others who had hung in for so long probably felt the same way.

Dave Reichert, the youthful detective of 1982, had some lines in his face now and his hair was shot with gray. He was promoted to sergeant and moved out of the task force. When Mertie Winston, Tracy’s mother, met with him and pleaded with him not to give up the search for the man who had killed her daughter and so many others, Reichert tried to explain to her that he wasn’t quitting—he never would—but he was in a command position and he couldn’t command the people he had worked beside.

Some of the task force investigators had retired, some were dead, and many of them had lost heart. In the prior eighteen months, two of their most likely suspects had been cleared. It was difficult to believe they would ever again execute a search warrant that wouldn’t turn out to be a bitter disappointment.

Every so often, another skull turned up in some godforsaken spot, but the public seemed jaded about it now. Even as the possibility that William Stevens might be the GRK still existed in October 1989, the remains of a woman who had been missing since 1983 were found just south of the SeaTac Airport. The skeleton was within fifty yards of the remains of three other victims—Mary Bridget Meehan, Connie Naon, and Kelly Ware. An Alaska Airlines employee found it as he was clearing brush, and Dr. Reay’s office tried to establish who the vacant-eyed skull had once been.

Through the long Green River siege, Bill Haglund had become expert at comparing the jaws and teeth of the lost girls to the hundreds of dental records he had gathered. Forensic odontology is a technique that has emerged as a significant tool of forensic science. A human’s teeth are unique—not as individual as DNA or the whorls and ridges of fingerprints, but unique nonetheless. Size, shape, placement in the mouth, and chipped, broken, and missing teeth hold a kind of silent history of who that person is, or was. Furthermore, victims of murder and sex crimes often have bite marks that can be used to identify their attackers.

In his job as the chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner’s Office since 1983, Haglund had been called upon again and again to find a name and a life to fit the pathetic bones ravaged first by a killer and then by animals and the elements. Despite his somber job, he was a pleasure to know, a gentle man with a great sense of humor.

One evening each Christmas season, I got together with my neighbor Cherisse Luxa, the longtime task force member who oversaw the records for still-missing Green River victims and did her share of digging and sifting in the wilderness. We looked forward to an invitation to dinner at Bill and Claudia Haglund’s north-end home. Bill’s pets and avocation usually stayed in his basement, and in their cages. He raised boa constrictors.

While I am afraid of rats and certain big hairy spiders, I’ve never been afraid of snakes, so one of my oddest holiday rituals was to get my picture taken with Bill Haglund’s twenty-plus-foot boa constrictor. Since few of the Haglunds’ dinner guests, including Cherie, cared to spend up-close time with his pets, Bill was happy to drape one of the snakes around my neck. It was my third or fourth Christmas when I discovered that while boa constrictors aren’t poisonous, they do have teeth. Fortunately, the young snake I was holding bit Bill and not me. He laughed, but I quickly handed his newest pet back to him.

Whenever I look at photographs of a grim-looking Haglund at a body site, I remember how much he cares for the families of victims and what a warm heart he has. Long after the worst of the Green River saga was over, he spent months working for the United Nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, helping to identify unknown victims of terrorism who had been buried in mass graves. Cheri Luxa also went to Bosnia and even rescued some Croatian kittens and brought them home with her.

 

HAGLUND had gathered more than two hundred sets of dental charts, mostly from Seattle area women, but some included missing persons from Florida, Oklahoma, and Montana. He had identified Debra Estes because he’d memorized her unique dental characteristic—a stainless-steel crown. Now he reconstructed the jaw of the latest possible victim. A missing nineteen-year-old named Andrea Childers was initially added to the Green River list in April 1983, but she’d been taken off when records at the Canadian border noted that someone with the same name had crossed into British Columbia a year later.

Like Missy Draper’s, dark-eyed Andrea’s dental records showed a distinct gap between her upper middle teeth. Haglund looked at the teeth in the skull and realized that Andrea hadn’t gone to Canada; she had been hidden just off the Strip for six years. She was victim number forty-one.