The press and local television investigative reporters were anxious to link the victims by concluding that they had all worked the highway stroll. It made natural headlines. Prostitutes being murdered suggested a titillating story. Moreover, citizens, living in nice safe houses, whose wives and daughters were never alone on the streets could be reassured. Their female family members weren’t offering sex for money, and they had no tattoos or drug habits, so they could conclude that a roving killer was no danger to them.

DICK KRASKE had wasted no time. On Monday, August 16, he organized the initial Green River Task Force with twenty-five investigators from King County, the Seattle Police Department, the Tacoma Police Department, and the Kent Police Department. It was a prescient decision. No one could have even imagined what lay ahead.

They didn’t know at that point how many killers they were looking for. It was possible there was more than one. Killing partners were not unknown. In the early eighties, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole were boasting of over three hundred victims in their deadly travels around America, and Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Buono had racked up a tragic toll of young female victims in Los Angeles before Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, and committed more murders on his own. Two men working together and obsessed with killing wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. One man, bringing a single body, day after day, to this river hiding place was a more likely scenario. Perhaps he even had a vehicle large enough to hold more than one of his victims, all of whom needed to be hidden as soon as possible.

With the discovery of the last three bodies in a secluded site along the river, the consensus was that probably all five of the victims had gone into the Green River at that point. But Wendy Coffield’s and Debra Bonner’s bodies had drifted downstream until they were caught on something.

The investigators had no doubt that the killer had watched the nightly news, realized his mistake at not weighting the dead girls down, and rectified that with the rocks and boulders. He was crafty, obviously unafraid to take five victims in one month, but smart enough to hone his technique to evade the detectives who were now stalking him. But his “dump site” had been discovered and he couldn’t go back there now.

4

PEOPLE who lived in King County, Washington, weren’t afraid. Yes, there were five unsolved murders in the county, and it might even be true that the deaths were in all likelihood connected to a common killer or killers. But the backgrounds of the victims, soon manipulated and smoothed and shaped into a single image by the media, showed them to be young female prostitutes who hitchhiked. Every one of them had died within a month, as if some deadly tornado had swept through the Kent Valley, a faceless killer who had destroyed them and then moved on. The lay public wanted to believe their murderer was a drifter who had already left the area.

The girls who were still out on the streets were working because most of them had no other way to survive. They were a little anxious, and a lot of them tried to get a gun, or they carried a knife in their shoes. Outreach workers advised them to “Stay in groups. Don’t go out on ‘dates’ unless you’ve known them before. If you get a negative feeling, don’t get in the car. Follow your intuition.”

But they weren’t dealing with Girl Scouts or students on a school trip. How often would young prostitutes know the men who stopped to pick them up? They had to take chances.

“We even tell them to get off the streets,” one of the more naive social workers said. “But that’s a joke to them. They think they can handle anything.”

And some of the working girls believed they could, while others worried about what to do. Many relocated to Portland, finding Seattle too scary. One teenage prostitute shook her head and said, “Even Portland isn’t safe. They think a ‘trick’ maybe killed all those girls. Well, just like we travel, tricks do, too. You never know whether he is here today or will be here tomorrow.”

Needing rent or food or drug money, most of the girls returned to their regular haunts. The weather was warm in late August and it was light out until nine or so. They knew other people whose world was the Strip and they began to feel safe again.

The rest of August 1982 passed without incident. The bad times were probably over. At least everyone wanted to believe it was over, something frightening that had touched them briefly but hadn’t really interfered with their lives.

Still, what had happened was not nearly as isolated as it first seemed to be. Looking at those hellish weeks in July and August was like walking into a movie in the middle. Maybe the summer of 1982 was not the first chapter of horror after all.

There were some similar cases in the Greater Seattle area from early in 1982 that troubled those who remembered them—cops and reporters and families who had lived through them. Adding to a faint sense of dread was the phenomenon that occurs in slow news periods. Columnists and TV news producers look for crime statistics or murders that might be connectable to scare up a story. Way back on Valentine’s Day, popular columnist Rick Anderson filled an entire page of the Sunday Seattle Times with the details of the deaths of three young women.

Leann Wilcox was sixteen in October 1981, and she was a lovely-looking girl, but from the moment she entered puberty, she changed from an agreeable child to an incorrigible thirteen-year-old who was placed in a group home in Spokane when her mother could not control her. By the time she was sixteen, she was familiar with the street life and had four arrests for prostitution. She came home occasionally and vowed to change her life. But nothing lasted. Leann left for good on October 17, 1981.

Her mother’s final phone conversation with her was typical of the acrimony that marked their struggles with each other. Leann said she wasn’t going back to school and she wouldn’t be home for Christmas either.

Exhausted and frustrated, her mother said something she would always regret: “Leann, my door has always been open to you; you know that. But as long as you live like you are, then I don’t want you home anymore.”

Leann hung up on her. A month later, on January 21, 1982, two men found her body facedown in a weed patch at S. 380th and Military Road South. Friends had seen her only two days before. With her wine-colored jacket thrown over her, she seemed almost to be sleeping, but she was dead, beaten and strangled.

On January 29, 1982, Virginia Taylor, eighteen, headed for a bus in southwest Seattle. It would take her to her job as a dancer in a peep show on the seediest section of First Avenue. Virginia had visualized her life as so much happier than it was. She was a bride, but her groom slept alone on a prison bunk, serving five years for theft. Virginia’s job, where men sat in booths and dropped quarters into a slot to raise the curtains so they could watch half-nude girls gyrate and strip behind a glass wall, didn’t pay that well. But it sure paid more than taking orders in a drive-through burger joint. Virginia hated her shifts in the booth. She was more modest than most of the girls at the peep show, so she wasn’t a favorite of the patrons. And the piles of quarters weren’t worth stripping all the way or accommodating requests from kinky customers.

Despite her job, Virginia was generally cautious, yet she occasionally hitchhiked. Nobody saw her get on the number 20 bus that January day, and nobody remembered seeing her beyond two blocks from her sister’s house.