Foster’s prison records indicated that he had tested above average in intelligence while he was incarcerated, but he certainly wasn’t a trained psychologist. Still, he claimed to have assisted other law enforcement agencies as an “unpaid intelligence operative.” He gave Dave Reichert and Bob LaMoria the names of two cabdrivers he considered likely suspects.

The young detectives looked at Foster with interest, although their faces didn’t betray what they were thinking. Any astute detective knows that killers often like to be part of the probe into the murders they have committed, just as arsonists are drawn to the crowds that gather at the fires they have started.

IN HIS CAREFULLY DRAWN OVERVIEW of similarities in the characteristics of serial killers, Pierce Brooks had already noted that many of them tend to be “police groupies,” and his supposition would be validated over the years: Wayne Williams, the Atlanta Child Murderer; the Hillside Stranglers in Los Angeles in 1978—Kenneth Bianchi and his adopted cousin Angelo Buono—who killed both prostitutes and schoolgirls to feed their own sadistic fantasies; Edmund Kemper in San Jose, who murdered his grandparents, his mother, her best friend, and coeds; and Ted Bundy all enjoyed their games with the police, perhaps as much as their killing games. Some had gone so far as to apply for jobs in law enforcement. Apparently jousting with detectives was a way of extending their pride over killing and evading detection.

Serial killers, once imprisoned, often correspond with one another, comparing tolls of human misery and competing for an awful kind of championship. Was Melvyn Foster aiming for a spot on the hierarchy of serial murder?

He had no hope of becoming a detective, except in his own mind. He had two convictions related to auto theft and he’d served almost nine years in prison. However, he seemed to harbor no animosity toward police, and glowed with pride as he said he had come forward to assist the task force with his knowledge. He told them he was quite sure he had known five of the victims.

“How is that?” they asked.

“I like to hang around with street kids,” he said. “They’re out there on their own with nobody much to help them.”

Foster painted himself as a kind of unofficial social worker who came to the aid of runaways and teenagers when they were in trouble. He laughed when he told reporters later that he had gotten acquainted with prostitutes because “I took my coffee breaks in the wrong restaurant.”

Melvyn Foster’s interest in the young women who had gravitated to the highway wasn’t entirely altruistic. He admitted that he had also received sexual favors from some of the girls “as a way of settling the books” when they couldn’t pay their cab fares, but he stressed that he was basically a benevolent influence in their lives.

Not surprisingly, Foster fit neatly within the parameters of the kind of killer the task force was seeking. Reichert, who was ten years younger than Foster, wasn’t nearly as streetwise as the experienced con man, and tended to see him as a prime suspect rather than as a man who craved notoriety.

Reichert and Bob LaMoria questioned Foster extensively, and he did, indeed, become more and more interesting. First, he’d mentioned knowing some of the victims, and then he denied it, saying they must have misunderstood. When he submitted to a polygraph test on September 20, 1982, he flunked. Now he waffled, saying that he might have known them, but that he sometimes had trouble putting names and faces together.

The two cabdrivers whose names Foster had given to the detectives also took lie detector tests. They passed. Foster backpedaled, trying to explain why his answers appeared deceptive: “I believe I have a nervous problem that causes me to flunk lie detector tests.”

After the disappointment when Debra Bonner’s and Giselle Lovvorn’s boyfriends were cleared, it seemed that the investigators might have found the right man. Foster looked good. He knew the SeaTac Strip, had known at least some of the victims, flunked his polygraph, and was a little too fascinated with the investigation—all indicators that kept the task force detectives’ eyes on him.

IN THE EARLY FALL, the task force had only one other viable suspect: John Norris Hanks, thirty-five, who had been convicted of murdering his first wife’s older sister, stabbing her sixteen times. But that was only the beginning. He had served his time in Soledad Prison and was presently in jail in California on assault charges. San Francisco detectives said he was the prime suspect in six of their unsolved murders from the midseventies—all women who had been strangled.

Hanks, a computer technician, had come to the forefront of the Green River investigation when he was arrested in East Palo Alto on a warrant charging him with assaulting his wife in Seattle. They had been married less than a month when, on September 9, she reported him to Seattle police officers after he had bound her ankles together and then choked her unconscious in their downtown Seattle apartment.

He was smart and he’d been a perfect prisoner, but something in Hanks hated women and he had attacked both relatives and strangers. “Wherever he is,” a San Francisco police inspector commented, “women seem to end up getting killed.”

And John Norris Hanks had been in Seattle in early July 1982—about the time the first Green River victims disappeared. On July 8, he’d rented a car at the SeaTac Airport, charging it to the company he worked for. He never returned it; the 1982 silver Camaro was found abandoned in the airport parking lot on September 23.

King County detectives could not ignore a suspect who seemed to have a fetish for strangling women and had been in the SeaTac Airport area in the time frame of the Green River body discoveries. They traveled to San Francisco to question him, but he appeared to have a sound alibi—at least for the Seattle-area murders. People had seen him in San Francisco during the vital time period. Gradually, Hanks faded as a workable suspect in Washington State. He was sentenced to four years in prison for the assault on his bride.

THAT LEFT MELVYN FOSTER in the top spot, although he apparently didn’t realize that could be dangerous to him. Still confident, Foster gave task force detectives his verbal permission to search the house in Lacey, Washington, where he lived with his father. The small, shake-sided house was fifty miles south of the SeaTac Strip. It had several sheds and outbuildings. All of the rooms were filled with furniture or tools or “stuff” of one kind or another, the possessions of an old man who had lived there for many years, along with all of Melvyn Foster’s belongings.

It made a very long day for the searchers looking for something that might link Foster to the murdered girls. It was probably an even longer day for the man who had drawn their attention to himself. Melvyn Foster became annoyed as the hours passed and he watched the detectives and deputies poking through his father’s house. He had apparently expected them to take a cursory look and go away.

Foster went public on October 5, 1982, announcing that he was a suspect. He invited reporters to watch the sheriff’s deputies and detectives who were watching him. “All they found were some swinging singles magazines I received unsolicited in the mail, and a bra one of my ex-wives left behind in a closet,” he told reporters afterward, with a tinge of outrage in his voice. That didn’t make him a killer.

Speaking almost daily with television reporters, Foster was a shoo-in for a spot on the nightly news. But now he offered reasons as to why he couldn’t possibly be the Green River Killer. He pointed out that his car wasn’t drivable in mid-July and he wasn’t currently strong enough to strangle a young girl who was struggling, much less pick her body up and throw her over a riverbank; he’d been limping since March because of torn cartilage in his knee.