Even though bloodhounds and searchers had combed the area where Andrea’s remains were found years later, they had missed her. “When someone’s buried,” Captain Bobby Evans said, “unless you know a grave is there, you can walk right over the site and never even know it.” Evans believed that there were many more victims yet to be found than anyone realized. “There are at least eight, and I’m convinced there are more.”
Andrea had grown up in southern California, but she moved to Seattle when she was sixteen to live with her father and stepmother. She’d been very close to her eighty-five-year-old grandmother who cried as she remembered the last time she saw Andrea. “She wanted to be a dancer. She gave lessons and she was very good, and she taught dance exercise,” Helen Koehler remembered. “She came for a late birthday celebration [in 1983]—her birthday was March 29. She was wearing a beautiful dress and a long gray coat. I baked her a chocolate cake. She kissed me, like always, and then she left.”
OTHER MEDICAL EXAMINERS’ personnel might have thrown out old dental records that seemed no longer to have any relevance, but not Bill Haglund and Dr. Don Reay. “This whole case is so freaky,” Haglund said, “that I am almost paranoid about getting rid of anything.”
None of the Green River Task Force regimes—from Dick Kraske’s to Frank Adamson’s through Jim Pompey’s and Greg Boyle’s to Bob Evans’s—had gotten rid of anything either. The first computers had been about as modern as a treadle-powered sewing machine, but the newest computer system was a marvel, and it contained photos and text and even images of scribbled notes on matchbooks and torn pieces of paper. Nine thousand pieces of evidence remained in the Green River archives.
Try to imagine your own life, as if you had pressed every corsage, saved every letter, taken photos of each piece of jewelry you ever owned, every garment, dirt samples from the yard of every residence, all your lost baby teeth, locks of your hair, all the artifacts of your days on earth. That may give you some idea of the depth and breadth of the Green River files. Each victim’s section was at least two thousand pages long; some were ten times that count. And as anyone familiar with police files knows, so many promising interviews end in disappointment, but the text of each was preserved.
Tom Jensen had joined the Green River Task Force in 1984, and there had once been fifty detectives working on it with him. Now for a long while Jensen was the only “keeper of the flame.” Jensen is a friendly, Scandinavian-looking man with dark blond red hair and mustache. There must have been many times when he wished for another assignment, because it was such a tortuous case. But he stayed because he worried about what would happen to the cases if he left. Later Jim Doyon joined him, but the rows and rows of files had to be intimidating. How could two detectives ever hope to follow up on all those tips?
Just because the task force had disbanded didn’t mean that new reports weren’t coming in. Wives, ex-wives, and girlfriends continued to call me throughout the 1990s, each of them convinced that the men they had once loved were, in truth, serial killers—and probably the Green River Killer. I passed the most credible information on to Tom Jensen, knowing that probably all he could do was feed the facts into the computer on the chance there might be a hit with information someone else had reported.
Despite the intrusiveness of local reporters who had no compunction about publishing information the task force wanted kept secret, the Green River investigators did manage to play some of their cards close to their vests. “We were excited by these microscopic pinkish glass beads the crime lab detected on some of the victims,” Frank Adamson recalled. “They looked as if they were very rare. We were feeling pretty good at first, but the F.B.I. lab told us what they were, and that they were really quite common. Almost anyone who drives on highways has some of those on their cars. The beads were from reflector stuff on road signs, or in paint used to paint the center lines.”
In February 1988, the F.B.I. had listed the commonalities among the Green River victims in the case they called “Greenmurs: MAJOR CASE #771.” Maybe all the dead girls weren’t known in very many places in America, but the Bureau recognized their deaths as some of the most important the Behavioral Science Unit had ever helped investigate.
The B.S.U. noted that all the victims were found outdoors, and that there was precious little physical evidence left behind. A few of the dead girls had their clothing scattered near their bodies; most were nude. The public did not know that Opal Mills was the only victim whose body held evidence of a blood group other than her own. Semen in her vagina was from a man with Type O blood; Opal had Type A blood.
Moira Bell, who survived her attack at Horsetail Falls in Oregon, had described the two-inch-wide, beige masking tape that was used to bind her wrists and arms. She also remembered that the knife used to stab her was a French butcher-block type of kitchen knife with a straight wooden handle and a straight edge, approximately eight inches long in a triangular shape, wider at the handle.
Many of the victims had had tiny fibers on their bodies. With a tool called a spinarette, crime lab technicians (like the Western Washington State Police lab’s resident fiber expert Chesterine Cwiklik) can find all manner of matches with minuscule fibers. Indeed, some of the strongest evidence against Ted Bundy were five distinctive fibers that could be linked to him found in the van he used in 1979 to kidnap twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach, the murder that he paid for in Florida’s electric chair. Rug fibers had also helped convict Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer.
In the Green River evidence room, there were: blue acrylic fibers, green acrylic fibers, red acrylic fibers, black polyester fibers, and green carpetlike fibers, all found with the victims’ remains. Missy Plager and Alma Smith both had “blue” dog hairs on their remains.
Interestingly, there were also paint particles found on eight of the victims: red enamel, medium brown enamel, medium blue metallic “nitrocellulose lacquer with fragmentary light gray primer,” and medium blue metallic paint. “None of the above-described paint particles is typical of—or consistent with—any type of original motor vehicle finish system,” Skip Palenik had reported. “A particular source or origin of these particles cannot be determined.” And eighteen of the victims had foreign hairs on them, hair that had not come from their own heads or bodies.
There had been at least eight vehicle sightings—five different pickup trucks, a green station wagon, and two blue station wagons: among them a full-size American-made light-colored truck, 1960–64; a 1970–77 (possible Ford) perhaps white over blue; an older 1960s GMC or Chevrolet pickup, turquoise green; a burgundy pickup; a two-toned brown pickup—and on and on. Some witnesses had reported numerous “sanded” spots painted with primer, as if the pickups were in the process of being repainted. There was a definite preference for pickup trucks, and all the vehicles were American made. None of them had been brand-new, and many had campers or canopies on the back.
When it came to describing the man (or men) last seen with the victims, there was even more variation. Witnesses tend to be less observant when they are upset or frightened, of course. They are most often wrong about height. And it would be learned in retrospect that many of the women the GRK encountered, the women who got away, never reported it. They were either too frightened or in a business where their view of the police was not favorable.
All the Seattle-area witnesses had said the suspect was Caucasian with blond to light-brown hair, and between five feet eight inches to five feet eleven inches tall. He was almost always described as being in his early to midthirties. And he usually wore a plaid shirt and sometimes a baseball cap. Most of the witnesses who had seen the dead and missing girls for the last time thought the man they left with had a mustache, a scrubby little mustache. In essence, he was “Mr. Average,” driving down a busy highway in a nondescript pickup truck.