The paper wasn’t specific about the cause of death, but police in Kent suspected that she had been strangled. Although she had been in the river for several days, no one had come forward to identify her.

The woman was white, estimated to be about twenty-five years old, and at five feet four, she weighed about 140 pounds. She had no identification on her body, and she wore unhemmed jeans, a lace-trimmed blue-and-white-striped blouse, and white leather tennis shoes.

Her clothing wasn’t distinctive, but King County medical examiner Dr. Don Reay noted that she had five tattoos on her body: a vine around a heart on her left arm, two tiny butterflies above her breasts, a cross with a vine around it on her shoulder, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle insignia on her back, and the unfinished outline of a unicorn on her lower abdomen. The delicacy of four of the tattoos warred with the motorcycle-gang mark, but Kent detectives still thought that it might be the likeliest lead they had in finding out who she was—if any members of local motorcycle organizations would admit to knowing her.

I clipped out the coverage of the woman’s death, being careful to save the upper margin of the page with the date. It was published on July 18, 1982. She had actually been found on Thursday, July 15.

The victim hadn’t drowned; she had been dead when she was placed in the river. When a description of her tattoos was published in area papers, a tattoo artist recognized his work and came forward to identify the victim. She wasn’t a grown woman at all; she was much younger. He knew her as Wendy Lee Coffield. “I think she lives in Puyallup with her mother,” he added. “She’s only sixteen.”

Detectives located her mother, Virginia Coffield. Although she appeared to be in shock, the woman murmured, “I kind of expected it.” She explained that she suspected Wendy had been working as a prostitute and might have been attacked and killed by a “john.”

“I know that was the kind of life she chose for herself,” Virginia Coffield said with a sigh. “We taught her the best we could.”

Wendy Lee’s mother said her daughter had been a good little girl when they were living in the country, but that her “trouble” had started when they moved to Auburn and Kent, both of which were still very small towns compared to Seattle and Tacoma.

Wendy and her mother never had much money as Virginia struggled to support the two of them after Virginia and her husband, Herb, divorced; they lived in one low-rent apartment after another. There had even been times in the warm summer months when they had to live in a tent, picking blackberries to sell so they could buy food.

“Wendy dropped out of school—way back in junior high,” her mother said wearily.

She didn’t say, but Wendy had been caught in an all too familiar vicious circle. Virginia herself was only thirty-six, worn and discouraged beyond her years. Her own childhood had been a miserable time where many of the adults who were supposed to be caring for her were more interested in the fuzzy escape of alcohol. She had come from “a big family of drinkers.”

Virginia had become pregnant at sixteen and given that child up for adoption. Then she spent two teenage years at Maple Lane, Washington’s juvenile corrections facility for girls. “I felt like I was a misfit; nobody understood me. She [Wendy] was seeking help just like I did, but they put her out [of juvenile detention] when they should have given her supervision. She just needed a couple of years off the street to grow up.”

By mid-1982, Virginia and Wendy were living in another rundown apartment in downtown Puyallup. Photographs of Wendy showed a smiling girl with a wide, open face. She could have passed for eighteen or nineteen, but she was only a few years past childhood. After she stopped going to junior high, she had been enrolled in Kent Continuation School in the hope that she could catch up. But she was a chronic runaway, perhaps wanting to leave behind a home where she wasn’t happy, or simply looking for excitement out in the world—or both.

Her mother had lost control of her. “Wendy just started having trouble,” Virginia Coffield said, explaining that her daughter was known to police for minor offenses in both King and Pierce Counties. “The last thing she did was she took $140 in food stamps from one of our neighbors.”

One night, when Wendy was fourteen or fifteen, Virginia recalled, she had come home disheveled and upset. “She said some guy raped her while she was hitchhiking. That’s the way she got around. Hitchhiking. I told her that’s what happens.”

Wendy changed after that and her problems grew. Her theft of the food stamps landed her in Remann Hall, the Pierce County juvenile detention center in Tacoma, and then into a foster home. She became a runaway from there on July 8 when she didn’t return from a twenty-four-hour pass to visit her grandfather.

Wendy and her mother had lived a hardscrabble existence, and neither seemed to have met the other’s expectations. Fathers drift away and single mothers despair of ever making enough money to keep going. Rebellious teenage daughters make it more difficult as they act out of their own pain. And so it continues. Wendy Lee got caught in the centrifugal force of it. She wanted the things she didn’t have and she took terrible chances to get them. Somewhere along the way, she had met someone who was angry enough or perverted enough to consider her survival in the world insignificant.

Since Wendy’s body had been found within the Kent city limits, her murder would be investigated by the Kent Police Department. Chief Jay Skewes said that the last time anyone had seen Wendy alive was shortly after she had slipped out of Remann Hall, a week before her corpse was discovered in the Green River. She had been listed as a runaway, but no one had been actively looking for her. There were so many runaways that it was hard to know where to start.

And now Wendy’s sad little life was over before it really began. Her blurry photo appeared over and over in the media as the story of her murder was updated and details added. She was an attractive blond-haired girl, and I had written about hundreds of homicide cases in the dozen years before Wendy was killed, a number of them about pretty blondes who had been strangled.

But she was so young, and I learned she had been violently choked with her own panties. I had teenagers myself, and I remembered the girls I’d known when I was in college and worked summers as a student intern at Hillcrest, the juvenile girls’ training center in Salem, Oregon (a facility once known as a reform school). The Hillcrest residents ranged in age from thirteen to eighteen, and they tried to act tough, although I soon realized just how frightened and vulnerable most of them were.

Maybe that’s why I saved the clipping about the girl in the Green River. Or maybe it was because Wendy’s body had been found close to where I lived in the south end of King County, Washington. At least a thousand times over the forty years I’ve lived here, I’ve passed the very spot where someone threw her away.

To reach this stretch of the Green River from my house, I had to cross Highway 99 and head about four miles down the long curving hill that is the Kent–Des Moines Road. The Green River coursed south from Eliott Bay and the Duwamish Waterway, irrigating the floor of the Kent Valley. In the days before the Boeing Airplane Company expanded and the Southcenter Mall mushroomed, the valley was known for its rich loamy soil and was home to family farms, many of which supplied produce to Seattle’s Public Market, or who simply put up their own stands along the road. When my children were small, I took them every summer to one of the U-Pick strawberry patches that abounded in the valley. We often took Sunday drives through Kent, Auburn, and Puyallup.