Giselle’s family was actually relieved when she traveled to Seattle for what they believed would be the final time before she turned her life around. She assured them that she was only going to pick up some possessions that Jak-Bak was holding for her, and then she was coming home to settle down and go back to school.
But within a week she changed her mind and decided to stay in Seattle. Jak-Bak was a master at persuasion, and he had evidently sweet-talked her into staying with him.
Giselle was a small girl whose thick blond hair tumbled down her back. She had freckles and looked wholesome and young, but she was soon working the SeaTac Strip. Her appearance appealed to certain males cruising the Strip—the ones who liked the “schoolgirl look.”
Giselle was strolling along the highway in mid-1982, looking for tricks. Jak-Bak knew it and didn’t stop her even though he later told detectives and reporters that he cared deeply for her and had done his best to talk her out of prostitution. He insisted that their living arrangement was merely platonic.
More likely, theirs was a typical relationship between an opportunistic man and a girl who didn’t seem to question that if the man who was “protecting” her really loved her, he wouldn’t allow her to sell herself to complete strangers. By the time most girls figured that out, it wasn’t easy to break the ties.
But Giselle had some happy times in Seattle. On July 13, she got to see a Charlie Daniels concert. Four days later, Giselle left their apartment at one in the afternoon. It was a Saturday, and, according to Jak-Bak, she planned to turn three or four tricks. He said he’d asked her not to go but she’d been adamant about her plans.
If she had read local papers that week, she would have seen the coverage about the bodies in the Green River, and the murders were all over the news on television, too. But Giselle wasn’t familiar with Seattle, and she really knew only the area around the airport. She probably didn’t even know where the Green River was.
Afternoon became evening and Giselle didn’t come back to the apartment. Not that night. Not on Sunday. Everything she owned and the only person she really knew in Seattle, everything that mattered to her, was in the little apartment on First Avenue South and S. 180th.
Jak-Bak soon warmed to the glow of media attention and gave many interviews. He recalled that he had tried to report Giselle missing right away, but the police wouldn’t take him seriously. That wasn’t true. They had listened to him, and Giselle had officially gone on their missing persons list on July 17.
Jak-Bak said he’d met Giselle in a Los Angeles–area restaurant a year earlier and they had become best friends. “We weren’t intimate,” he said sadly, “but we were really, really close.” He and Giselle had shared their Seattle apartment with another man. He told reporters that he had continued to look for Giselle on the Strip, at truck stops, motels, and bars, but he never found her. She had left everything behind, even her treasured backpack; all she took with her was her California I.D. card, which falsely listed her age as nineteen, not seventeen.
Jak-Bak said Giselle’s plan was to establish a regular clientele so she could have a career as a call girl and not have to stroll the highway. He had urged her to get a job in a delicatessen or some other straight employment, but she was headstrong and believed that she could take care of herself.
Perhaps. Or perhaps she was following a plan he had outlined for her.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a “blind” story that quoted King County lieutenant Greg Boyle as saying the task force was investigating the possible disappearance of two more young women who fit the “profile” of the Green River victims. One was Giselle Lovvorn, although her name was not mentioned. The other was Mary Bridget Meehan, eighteen. Her boyfriend, Ray, reported that he had last seen her on September 15 as she left the Western Six Motel just off the Strip. He said she had planned to walk to the Lewis and Clark Theater that day. It was a two-mile walk, a long way for a girl who was eight months pregnant. Bridget and Ray hadn’t come to the Strip from very far away; they’d both lived in Bellevue, just across the floating bridge from Seattle, all their lives.
“Was she working?” detectives asked Ray.
He shook his head, seemingly confused. “I don’t know.”
KING COUNTY detectives had now talked to almost three hundred people as they looked for connections between the first five victims and witnesses who might have seen or heard anything unusual. They had made a request of the Behavioral Science Unit of the F.B.I., asking for as thorough a profile as they could come up with on the man, or men, they were looking for.
The task force knew now that Wendy Lee Coffield and Opal Mills had attended the same continuation school in Renton, but there was no indication that they had known each other or been seen together at the end of their lives. And Debra Bonner and Cynthia Hinds had patronized the same bar in Tacoma. It was probable that they had been at least acquainted, although no one at the bar could remember ever seeing them come in together. It was an intricate pattern that the investigators would find again and again; people whose lives revolved around the Strip often knew each other, if only tangentially.
As for the two missing girls, they might come home again. Or they might be dead.
The first Green River suspect to merit headlines was Debra Bonner’s lover/pimp, Max Tackley. By August 21, the thirty-one-year-old former University of Washington student was being held for questioning while three detectives searched his small house in Tacoma. Tackley had given his permission for the search, and Detective Bob LaMoria, Detective Dave Reichert’s partner, remarked, “We either have to prove him innocent or prove him guilty.”
It was not so much a case of Tackley’s being a truly likely suspect in the death of all five women, it was more that the detectives had so little to go on. “We have not been able to develop enough evidence to develop a suspect,” Major Dick Kraske said. “Consequently this [Tackley] is the focal point of our investigation.”
However, Kraske came up with the first short profile of whom they might be looking for. He figured that the killer probably lived in either the south part of King County or in the Pierce County area, and he was apparently quite familiar with the Green River. He had picked a convenient turnout off Frager Road to dump the last three bodies, a spot most people wouldn’t be aware of.
But so many possible victims in a month? They knew they weren’t looking for an ordinary killer—if, indeed, there is such a thing. Lieutenant Greg Boyle commented that “This guy is more than just a ‘john.’ ”
Would he go back to the Green River with more victims? If he did, it would be a pretty stupid choice. The whole area of Frager Road was being monitored by police, although they didn’t publicize that.
THE so-called Green River Killer would soon prove he wasn’t stupid. He apparently abandoned the river as the means to rid himself of his victims. On September 25, a trail biker was zipping around the empty streets of the ghost town left behind by the Port Authority’s buyout when he became aware of a cloying, sickening odor. Seeking the source, he honed in on some overgrown bushes. There, he discovered a female body, in an advanced state of decomposition, half-hidden in the brush of an abandoned yard. She was nude except for what appeared to be a pair of men’s socks that were tightly cinched around her neck.
The man backed away, sick to his stomach. It had been a warm September. No one would be able to identify the dead woman visually.
The acres of overgrown yards, trees, and cement front porches extended both north and south of the airport. Except for passengers in the planes coming in for a landing, few people were even aware it was there. The body’s location was more than three blocks from the nearest street and it was six miles from the Green River, but it wasn’t very far from where Giselle Lovvorn had last been seen—maybe two or three miles.