Colleen took a lot of things with her, enough so that her father filed charges against her in the hope that it might bring her to the attention of law enforcement more quickly, and that she might get some juvenile court–required counseling. All of her clothes were gone, all of her Christmas gifts, and also her family’s stereo and some money.

One of Colleen’s friends, Bunny, had run away a few years earlier, when she was only thirteen. “I was abused,” Bunny remembered a long time later. “I had to leave. I had no choice.”

Colleen’s father always felt that Bunny had somehow lured his daughter away. That wasn’t true. Bunny had nothing at all to do with Colleen Brockman’s leaving home. She hadn’t even been in contact with her. But Bunny considered herself lucky; she never had to walk the streets, and always found a place to stay. “God was good to me,” she said gratefully.

Bunny hadn’t seen Colleen Brockman for about three years when she ran into her old friend. Colleen had told other friends that she was miserable at home, but she hadn’t gone into specifics, or if she had, they were not forthcoming with detectives about her reasons for leaving. She didn’t tell Bunny either, but she seemed thrilled to be out on her own. Bunny realized that Colleen was prostituting herself.

“I was about seventeen the last time I saw her,” Bunny said. “She told me what she’d been doing and I was instantly terrified for her. She seemed very happy with her new life, though, and she said most of the guys were really nice to her—buying her presents and taking her to dinner. She was pretty naive. I think she thought that meant they loved her in some way. I told her she shouldn’t do that because she might get hurt. She admitted to me that one guy raped her. He told her that if she did everything he told her to do, he wouldn’t hurt her, so she did, and he let her go. She said it would never get worse than that.”

But just before the dawning of the new year—1983—it looked as if something much worse had happened to Colleen Brockman. Despite her father’s missing-person’s report and his criminal complaint, she was not found immediately and she didn’t come back home.

The other girls who were working the highway didn’t really miss Colleen because they didn’t know her very well. “She didn’t fit in,” one of the Strip regulars said. “The guy she was with wasn’t really…ahh, he didn’t know—They were just trying out the lifestyle, and it was a much bigger sacrifice than she was prepared for.”

Christmas of 1982 was such a sad and anxious time for so many families. Some knew their daughters were dead; others had no idea where they were. Were they being held captive somewhere? Were they being tortured? Maybe they’d been sold into white slavery. In a sense, it was easier for the families who had held funerals and knew where their daughters, sisters, and cousins were buried. The ones who waited agonized, but occasionally they could still feel a small glimmer of hope.

There wasn’t an extended “official list” yet because no one knew just how many names would be on it. And most of the girls who had escaped with their lives in late 1982 considered themselves just plain lucky, yet still nervous about making a police report.

Penny Bristow* had been working at a minimum-wage job near the SeaTac Airport in November. When she ended her shift, it was dark and looked like rain and she dreaded the walk to her apartment. She was in the early stages of pregnancy and didn’t feel very well, anyway. She could have hailed a cab, but that would take more than half of what she’d made that day. So she stuck out her thumb.

A man in a pickup truck stopped to pick her up near S. 208th Street, and she could tell he was looking at her speculatively, wondering if she was a working girl. She knew that world, and she was trying to avoid it. But when he offered her $20 for oral sex, she agreed. She needed the money. Artlessly, she asked him if he was the Green River Killer, and, of course, he said he wasn’t. He even showed her his wallet with money sticking out, and flashed various pieces of I.D., one from his job.

She agreed to go into a nearby woods with him.

Though it was November and chilly, he wore shorts instead of trousers. She knelt to perform oral sodomy, but he was apparently impotent and didn’t become erect. That angered him, and he suddenly reached down and knocked her into the dirt and leaves with his fist, trying to push her face into the ground. She felt suffocated and fought back with everything she had, at the same time pleading with him to let her go. She wished mightily that she had walked home in the rain because now she feared she was going to die.

He was shouting at her that she had bitten him on the penis, which wasn’t true. Somehow, he had gotten behind her and she felt his arm, surprisingly strong, around her neck in a choke hold. She kept struggling and begging him not to kill her.

For an instant, he loosened his grip to get an even stronger pressure against her neck arteries and Penny managed to duck and twist away from him. She ran faster than she had ever run before. He tried to follow her but his shorts, around his ankles, tripped him up. By the time he pulled them up, she had raced up to a mobile home and pounded on the door, screaming. She was hysterical and sobbing as the people let her inside.

When Penny finally did tell the Green River detectives about what happened to her, her memory was still very precise.

The man had been white, in his thirties, with brown hair and a mustache.

11

HE WAS A STRANGE LITTLE BOY who seemed half-formed, a newt in a world of stronger creatures. It wasn’t that he was missing any features or limbs, but his face was like a bland pale puppet’s with deep-set, painted-on eyes. His dark hair flopped lank across his forehead and there was already a faint vertical dent above his nose. He was a slow child who took a long time to commit most things to memory, his recall full of gaps.

He often felt that he didn’t fit into his family because there wasn’t anything special about him. His parents had other kids and they always had dogs and so many cats that he couldn’t remember all their names. School was very, very difficult for him. He could not understand how anyone was supposed to read when all the letters were jumbled around. Other kids in his class saw words, but he didn’t.

He was one of those students who sat either in the back of the class where he wouldn’t bother the other kids, or in the front where the teacher could keep an eye on him.

Although he couldn’t actually remember it himself, his father sometimes talked about the time he had almost drowned, or at least his parents thought he had drowned, and how scared and upset everyone was, and how grateful they were to find him alive and not drowned in the water at all. That made him feel somewhat better—that they must really care about him, although it didn’t seem like it. His mother was very efficient and busy, and his father came home from work and sat in his easy chair and watched television.

The boy was a bed wetter and that was humiliating. It wasn’t so bad when he was really little because other kids wet the bed, too. Probably even his brothers did. But he couldn’t seem to stop, even after he was out of grade school and into junior high.

After a while, his mother got annoyed with him and told him she couldn’t understand why he made so much work for her. She didn’t yell at him, but she set her mouth in a tight, annoyed grimace so he knew she was displeased. He helped her strip his bed, and then he had to go sit in a tub full of cold water while she washed his legs and bottom and his pee-pee.