Keli wrote a poem a little while later, a poem her mother didn’t find until she had run away from home for good. Elizabeth Rhodes quoted it in her article:

“Looking back through the pages of yesterday,

All the childhood dreams that drifted away

Even the box of crayons on the shelf

Reflect bits and pieces of myself…

She was only fourteen when she wrote that, regretting that she “had to grow up.” Her life as she knew it was over, and there were hints that growing up hadn’t been the usual maturation that the years bring. She ended her poem:

“But I know now in my heart and mind

I had to leave it all behind

And as a tear comes slowly to my eye,

I stop and ask myself,

Why?”

—Keli K. McGinness

And then Keli McGinness was on the streets, as if somehow the pain would lessen there. She bleached her hair and wore clothes that played up her D-cup bust. If you can call it that, she was a success, working the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, The Camp in Portland, and coming home to Seattle’s Strip. She fell in love with an African American boy two years older than she, and she was pregnant at fifteen.

Keli Kay carried two babies to term before she was eighteen. Unlike Mary Bridget’s, both of Keli Kay’s babies survived.

Did Keli herself survive? Probably not; her status is still in limbo. Her first baby, a boy, was born in California. She brought him home to Seattle to show to his two grandmothers. His paternal grandmother offered to look after him, but Keli decided that he should be adopted, and he was.

But both teenage parents regretted that, and within six months, Keli was pregnant again. They had planned this baby as much as they were capable of planning in a lifestyle that involved constantly moving and living in cheap motels. Somehow they thought that keeping this second baby would make their love stronger and impress their families that they were mature.

It was a little girl, a lovely baby girl who combined the most attractive features of both her young parents. Again, the father’s mother was willing to help raise her, but Keli’s mother had never been able to accept her daughter’s boyfriend. She blamed him for Keli’s lifestyle, and she was opposed to a biracial union. Keli told her she was prejudiced, which she was, but only because of what she felt Keli’s lover had done to her.

She had pleaded in vain with Keli to leave the streets. She didn’t have to have a pimp/boyfriend. Her mother would help her. They were still friends as well as mother and daughter, although Keli was the worldly-wise one as her mother struggled to cope with what Keli had become. Still, they stayed in touch with each other, talking in the way people do whose experiences with life barely touched. They loved each other, but they couldn’t help each other.

Keli tried to explain, “I’m a prostitute, Mom. How could I ever make the kind of money I am making now doing anything else?”

As her acquaintances from The Camp recalled, Keli did make top dollar. When it wasn’t raining and cold out, the girls in Portland and Seattle could bring in more than $3,000 a week, although most of it was turned over to their pimps. Ironically, Keli’s childhood, when she had moved easily among the wealthier members of Seattle society, gave her a polished image that attracted the richest johns.

But she couldn’t do that and take care of her four-month-old baby girl, too. She was doing fine so far, and between Keli and her boyfriend, someone was always with her. But Keli knew she wasn’t in a position to be a full-time mother. She took her baby to a religion-based child-care agency. No, she did not want to put her up for adoption. Keli asked that she be placed in a foster home, but just long enough for her to serve some jail time for an earlier prostitution arrest that was hanging over her head. She couldn’t say exactly when she would be back to pick up the baby, but she insisted she was coming back. There was no longer someone in either her family or her boyfriend’s family who was able to care for the infant, although they all said they loved her.

Keli McGinness showed up at the jail on May 25 and served her seven days, secure in her knowledge that her baby was already safe in a foster home.

Although both their parents disapproved—his mother was unable to even say the word prostitution—Keli’s boyfriend picked her up from jail in his six-year-old Cadillac convertible and they drove to Portland, a regular pattern along “the circuit” for them. He waited in a restaurant lounge, as he always did, for Keli to come back with the money she had earned. As all the “boyfriends” of the missing women have said, he “really loved her” and worried about her, afraid she might meet some weirdo.

Keli herself felt fairly safe, even though she knew about the Green River Killer. She would not get into cars; she took tricks to motel rooms that she rented. She told people who loved her and cops who arrested her that “It won’t happen to me.”

Keli considered arrests part of the cost of doing business, and she was philosophical about fines and the jail time she occasionally had to serve. By adroitly changing her names, birth dates, and identification, she managed to skate free many times because the arresting officers couldn’t find her current name in their records. But sometimes she got caught, and she would shrug her shoulders and accept the law’s edicts, laughing as she said, “You got me!” She knew most of the vice detectives and she was polite with them, accepting the fact that sometimes it was their turn to win.

The vice cops did win in Portland on June 21, 1983, and Keli spent three days in jail in Oregon. Her legal schedule was crushing, though, and she had to be back in Seattle for a court appearance on June 28. She told her attorney that she would be back in time for that, but she didn’t show up, and the judge ordered a bench warrant for her arrest. According to her boyfriend, they had come back to Seattle, but for some reason Keli didn’t want to go to court. Instead, they spent that day together.

And then Keli checked into the Three Bears Motel. The desk clerk verified that. Her room cost about $22. A little after nine, she was on Pac HiWay, strolling down toward the Blockhouse Restaurant where the clientele, mostly Des Moines residents attracted by the prime rib, fried chicken, and the senior citizen discount, were having dessert, or sitting in the crowded bar as the live entertainment began. She wouldn’t have found any johns there, but cars coming off the I-5 Freeway at the Kent–Des Moines exit would slow down at the sight of her.

Keli McGinness never returned to pick up her baby girl from the church agency. The baby’s father said he didn’t get any of the messages that the agency left for him. Their fourteen-month-old daughter was too young to know that her mother was gone, and there was no one else in the family who could take care of her. Keli’s baby girl was adopted when no one came for her.

Keli’s mother hadn’t seen her since Mother’s Day, 1981, when Keli drove to eastern Washington to see her. She hoped against hope that her daughter had decided to get lost somewhere far away. At least that would mean she was alive.

17

DURING the summer of 1983, the newspapers around Seattle ran a lot of stories about women who might or might not be missing, but they were seldom on the front page. And no two articles tabulated the same names. Some said a dozen were missing; other coverage wondered if it might be as many as nineteen. And they all vastly underrated the inherent danger of a deadly hunter who roved unchecked throughout King County. Somehow, he was still blending into the background, never drawing attention to himself.