Detectives learned that she had told her friends that she was “freelancing,” working the “circuit” from Portland to Tacoma to Seattle to Yakima and Spokane on the east side of the Cascade Mountains and back again. But Debra had been trying to turn her life around, and she was meticulous about paying $25 a week on a $1,000 fine she owed to the Municipal Court in Tacoma, the seat of Pierce County. Fines were the cost of doing business for girls on the street, but Debra wanted no reminders of her old life. Week by week, she had whittled her debt down to $775 by the summer of 1982. Wherever she was, Debra was faithful about calling home, and her folks always accepted her collect calls. Her dad had an eye operation scheduled for July 20, and she called a few days later to see how he was and to tell him she loved him. That was the last time she phoned.

Debra had sounded cheerful in that call, but she was actually running scared. She had confided in a bartender that she was being stalked by her boyfriend/pimp. All the sweet-talking was over and she said that Tackley claimed she owed him several thousand dollars. “She was crying and upset,” the woman recalled. “She didn’t know how she was going to pay him.”

Debra probably had reason to be afraid. Twelve years earlier, her lover had been convicted of manslaughter (lowered from second-degree murder) in the shooting death of a man he’d known since childhood—and that was over a $25 debt. His sentence was only five years in prison. He’d also been charged with two counts of assault in different confrontations over drug deals gone wrong, and received a ten-year sentence, but one that ran concurrently with his first sentence. He was out in seven years. If Debra really owed him thousands of dollars, it was likely he would collect it one way or another.

During the seventies, when the approach to rehabilitation was extremely lenient, Tackley was one of the recipients of a scholarship to the University of Washington. A number of parolees benefited from the educational experience, but some of them didn’t change. Tackley’s rages continued unabated and he got into fights. Heretofore, however, he had never been known to hurt women.

King County sergeant Harlan Bollinger acknowledged that they were focusing on Max Tackley, at least for the moment. As far as anyone knew, Debra had no links to Wendy—nothing more than their final resting place. It was even possible that two murders four weeks apart could be grim coincidence.

None of the homicide investigators made the mistake of using tunnel vision. In a week, they talked to almost two hundred people, most of whom worked in the areas where Wendy and Debra spent their days and nights—in Tacoma and along the SeaTac Strip. They questioned motel and hotel workers, taxi drivers, bartenders and cocktail waitresses. They contacted police and sheriff’s detectives in both Portland and Spokane to see if they might have unsolved cases involving young women who worked the circuit. None of them had, making it less likely that a “pimp war” might be under way.

But something was happening. Three days later, there was no question at all that a bleak pattern was emerging. It was a warm Sunday, and a local man was in a rubber raft drifting along the Green River looking for antique bottles or anything else of value that someone might have thrown into the murky waters. Previously, he had found bottles so old that they had “applied lips”—their tops added after the rest came out of a mold, embossed by old-time companies, with the lavender patina created by a century of being left out in the elements. Bottles like that could bring hundreds of dollars apiece.

There were, of course, other things in the river not as desirable: garbage and junked cars and things people were too lazy or too cheap to take to the nearby county dump on Orilla Road. In the summer’s heat, the river was shallower than it would be in winter, but there were still deep holes. Looking for treasure, the rafter found horror instead.

He squinted, trying to see through the hazy water, and drew back suddenly. Two still figures floated beneath the surface, their unseeing eyes staring blindly at the sky. They looked, at first glance, like dolls or store dummies, but he knew they were too detailed and lifelike to be only facsimiles.

The treasure hunter paddled frantically for the bank. There were no cell phones in 1982, so he had to signal passersby and ask them to call the King County Sheriff’s Office.

The officer responding realized at once that the female forms were human, but oddly, something held them close to the river bottom.

Dave Reichert and Patrol Officer Sue Peters responded first to the scene when they were summoned by the sheriff’s dispatchers. Reichert had been at the river when Debra Bonner was found, but Sue Peters had had her own patrol car for only a week. Neither Reichert nor Peters could have imagined then that they were stepping into a nightmare that would grip them for more than two decades, and undoubtedly haunt them for the rest of their lives. Each would remember that warm Sunday with crystalline detail, the way all humans recall a moment that suddenly alters the direction of their lives.

Major Dick Kraske, commander of the Major Crimes Unit for the sheriff’s office, would remember, too. His pager sounded as he stood talking to a neighbor, balancing grocery bags. The Radio Room directed him to the river site. “In a way, I knew it was something big,” Kraske said. “I had the same feeling—some call it your illative sense, where you know something big is happening—when I was a lieutenant and my boss, Nick Mackie, called me out to Issaquah because they’d found Bundy’s victims. He told me to put on a tie and a sport coat and meet him out there. This time I put on my tie and my sport coat and went out to the Green River alone.”

Kraske always thought the Ted Bundy murders would be the worst he’d see in his career, but he was wrong. He got to the riverside a few minutes after Reichert and Peters. Search and Rescue (SAR) was on the way already, and Reichert was photographing the riverbank while Peters was recording what was happening.

Reichert half slid down the bank—it was very steep, at least a seventy-degree angle. The grass and reeds were as tall as the six-foot Reichert, and Peters disappeared completely in it when she followed him down. The grass closed like curtains behind them when they reached the river.

Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep the women’s bodies hidden, and he had chosen this spot well. From the road it was almost impossible to see the bodies down in the river. The thick vegetation assured that. Now Reichert and Peters could see that both victims were weighted down by large rocks placed on their breasts and abdomens. The near-boulders were clearly designed to keep them from surfacing, as all bodies eventually do when decomposition gases form and make them buoyant.

Fixated on that, Dave Reichert suddenly slid on the slippery grass, only to look down at something that lay on the edge of the river. He tumbled backward to avoid it. He had almost stepped on yet another female corpse. Either the killer had been too exhausted to carry the third victim all the way into the water, or he had been spooked by someone approaching and dropped his burden.

This girl looked quite young, in her midteens, apparently. She had a paler complexion, although she was severely sunburned, probably after death. She looked to be of mixed racial heritage, and it was obvious she had been strangled by ligature, with her own blue shorts or slacks.

Whoever the killer was, he was almost certainly a very strong man. It would have been no easy feat to carry the three bodies from a vehicle and down the steep bank and its slippery grasses. The river bottom was silt, slick as grease, and yet he had somehow maneuvered the huge rocks into place. It would be even more difficult for investigators to carry the dead women back up, but they would have more manpower.