Historically, taking advice from the F.B.I. has often been difficult for local and state detectives, but communication got a lot better with the demise of J. Edgar Hoover. Special agents were no longer encouraged to appear above the crowd, and the exchange of information—once one-sided, with little being offered by “The Bureau”—was flowing more freely.
Even so, there remained a certain enmity. Sharp, old-fashioned cops with long experience at hitting the bricks and canvassing for information still came up with their own profiles, honed by their seat-of-the-
pants instincts. But the F.B.I. and the Green River Task Force were engaged in a war with an unknown killing machine. Anything that would help stop him and trap him was more important than personal egos.
With the wisdom that comes with hindsight, Douglas’s first profile would prove to be very accurate in some areas and totally off the mark in others.
THERE WERE, indeed, more working girls missing in King County than anyone yet realized. Although their names hadn’t yet appeared on an official “missing” list, something truly frightening was occurring.
DEBRA LORRAINE ESTES disappeared on September 20, 1982. She had just passed her fifteenth birthday. The last time her family saw her, she had dark hair permed in a Jheri curl close to her head, and wore little makeup. Debra had run away from home many times, and her mother, Carol, worried herself sick over her while her father went out looking for her. She was a wild child who was impossible to rein in. One of her relatives, who sometimes let Debra stay a few days when she was upset with her parents, tried to explain. “Life was a game to Debra.”
Although her parents didn’t know it, Debra had gotten a prescription for birth control pills at Planned Parenthood when she was only ten. She routinely added four years to her age, and there was no law requiring that parents be notified when teenagers asked for birth control advice.
The last time Debra’s parents had reported her as a runaway was in July 1982. They were never really sure where she was or whom she was with, although that wasn’t for lack of trying on their part. That July, she had come home with a friend who was a few years older than she was, Rebecca “Becky” Marrero. Debra asked if Becky could move in with the Estes for a while, but Carol Estes had to say no, that wasn’t possible. That angered Debra and the two girls left.
Becky found an apartment in the Rainier Vista housing project, and Debra moved in with her. Through Becky, Debra met a number of men in their twenties. Some were even older, including her boyfriend in the summer and fall of 1982. Actually, “boyfriend” was a euphemism. Sammy White* was a pimp. He and Debra stayed at most of the familiar motels along Pac HiWay: the Moon-rise, Ben Carol, Western Six, and the Lin Villa in the south end of Seattle. Whether Sammy knew she was only fifteen isn’t known.
The Esteses had had three children, but they’d lost their son, Luther, in an automobile accident. And now Debra was missing. Their other daughter, Virginia, worried with them.
As young as Debra was, she had nevertheless been booked at least twice into the King County Jail, and her mug shots looked like two different people. The most recent one showed a girl with golden blond hair, wearing very heavy eye makeup and bright red lipstick. Even her own mother would have had trouble recognizing her. Blond or brunette, Debra was extremely pretty and very petite, but her young life was troubled.
She went to a King County deputy some time in September 1982, telling him that she had been hitchhiking on the highway when a man in a white pickup truck opened his door and agreed to take her to the SeaTac Mall on S. 320th Street. Instead, he had driven to a lonely road and forced her to perform oral sex and then he raped her. He had stolen what money she had. But when Debra Estes reported the sexual assault, she used her street name: Betty Lorraine Jones. She told detectives Spence Nelson and Larry Gross that the rapist was about forty-five, five feet eight inches tall, and had thinning brown hair and a small mustache.
When the two detectives located witnesses who had seen the truck going in and out of the wooded area Debra described near 32nd Avenue South and S. 349th Street, she agreed to file charges. It was about September 20 when Larry Gross picked her up at the Stevenson Motel in Federal Way and took her to the sheriff’s office to view “lay-downs” of mug shots of suspects. Spence Nelson drove her back to the motel. Neither detective knew Debra by her real name. She was “Betty Jones” in the pending case, a witness who had suddenly bailed on them.
Sammy White was in the motel when she got back. They were a couple now, but it was the usual setup where Debra made the money and he “protected” her. She dressed that night to go to work. White would recall that she wore dark slacks, a dark gray or black V-necked sweater shot with glittering gold or silver threads, and a dark pink thong. She told him she hoped to make enough to pay for a larger unit with a kitchenette so she could cook supper for them.
Debra’s hair was newly dyed jet black, and she wore earrings but he couldn’t describe them. When Debra didn’t come back, Sammy waited around the Stevenson Motel for two or three days and then moved out. The owner cleaned the room, put Debra’s clothes into a plastic garbage bag, and moved them to a storeroom until she could come to pick them up.
As the months passed with no word at all from Debra, her father prowled the seamy streets near the airport. Tom Estes even tried to infiltrate the world that had snatched his daughter away, desperate to find someone who might have seen her. He was alternately angry with the police and despairing, afraid he would never see her again.
Fae Brooks and Dave Reichert would eventually contact more than a hundred people who knew Debra Lorraine Estes/Betty Lorraine Jones. They learned she had been in way over her head, spending her days and nights in some of Seattle’s highest crime areas, appearing to be eighteen or twenty when, in reality, she was only fifteen. They managed to list some possible witness names, but more often the two detectives were given the runaround by people who wanted nothing to do with the police.
Sammy White was the shiftiest. He was living here, there, and everywhere. They finally caught up with him while he was living with his sister. Like most of the pimps they had questioned, Sammy put on a sanctimonious face as he bragged that he’d managed to get Debra off Ritalin (speed). “I warned her that being out on the streets was dangerous,” he said.
The big question was: Was Debra Estes really missing? Or had she simply decided to move on to California or some other place? She was young and capricious; if, as her aunt said, she saw life as a big game, then new adventures might have seemed exciting. Still, Debra had Sammy White’s initials tattooed where they would always show. She must have cared about him to get that permanent mark. Would she have left him without saying good-bye?
Fae Brooks sometimes felt that Debra was still in the area, especially when new information came in on sightings. Someone registered at the Western Six Motel in her name as late as December 2, 1982. She was apparently with her friend Rebecca Marrero at that time.
LINDA RULE turned up missing six days after Debra Estes. But she had been living in the far north end of Seattle, near the Northgate Shopping Mall, more than thirty miles from where Debra was last seen.
LINDA JANE was sixteen years old when her family virtually disintegrated. Her father, Robert, and her mother, also named Linda, divorced and Linda turned to life on the streets. Her younger sister, Colleen, who idolized Linda, stayed with their mother. The girls looked nothing alike; Colleen was tall and hearty-looking with pink cheeks—like their father. Linda was a petite, fragile girl who resembled their mother, except that she was a little taller and she bleached her hair a very light blond.