Without A Trace

[The Tracker]

WITHOUT A TRACE

People Go Missing, Killers Go Free

Because of ignorance, indifference or poor training, police here and around the nation fumble missing-person reports.

Bodies remain unidentified, families get no answers and killers get away.

Over two weeks, the P-I revealed the startling results of a year spent investigating the problem

[The Tracker]

Part 1: People go missing, killers go free

'I still worry. I guess I always will'

By LEWIS KAMB

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

QUINCY WILDLIFE AREA, Grant County -- This is where Michelle Vick became Jane Doe.

Fourteen-year-old, full-figured Michelle; not too popular; not especially pretty. A middle child whose life veered suddenly in its final year -- from tomboy slugging softballs to runaway charmed by a child rapist.

She was dumped in a thick stand of cattails, two bullet holes in her head; robbed of her identity long enough for her killer to escape justice.

That her remains were found just 37 miles from the police station where her mother reported her missing offers a lesson in how Washington's system for tracking missing people fails those who need it most.

Because of a lack of knowledge, indifference or poor training, police officers in Washington state -- and around the nation -- routinely fail to take even the most obvious steps, conduct routine follow-ups or comply with the law when handling missing-persons cases, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found in a yearlong investigation.

As a result, bodies remain unidentified, families are left without answers and, as in the case of Michelle, killers get away with murder.

For Michelle, the system failed because police ignored a law that requires them to follow up on such cases -- a routine procedure that would have identified her remains nearly 17 months sooner. The delay allowed the prime suspect to disappear.

"I'm sure police would've caught him, or at least found some clues or evidence, if they would've linked this up sooner," said Michelle's mother, Tish Curry. "They didn't really seem to care that much. My daughter was just another runaway to them."

The small-town police chief can't see what all the fuss is all about -- or how it relates to him.

"What's there to talk about?" asked Mattawa police Chief Randy Blackburn. "She ran away, she wound up dead. End of story."

On a warm and clear October day in 1998, three hunters were stalking through the scrub brush around a string of old seep lakes in the rugged Columbia River Gorge not far from Quincy.

Just after noon, while flushing pheasants from a marsh near a fishing hole known as H Lake, the men encountered a grisly scene. Someone had taken great care to conceal a body deep in tall reeds, but coyotes had scattered the remains.

A meticulous search turned up patches of hair here, a pair of socks there. Investigators collected a baseball shirt, a pair of pants, a car's seat cover, a single fingernail painted blue.

And in a bullet-pierced skull they found teeth: a complete set, intact and the object of extensive dental work.

By all accounts, those teeth held the key to unlocking the mystery of a murdered girl's identity -- and potentially much more.

Dental records often are the best way to identify a body, especially if it has decomposed. And knowing the identity of the victim is the first step in catching the killer. With a name, police can retrace the victim's final days and question those who last saw her.

"If you can ID a victim in a week versus a year, you're way ahead of the game," said Spokane County homicide Detective Fred Ruetsch, who worked the case. "It's a matter of getting to people before memories fade and to evidence that maybe won't be there any longer."

Three days after the body was found, a forensic dentist in Spokane documented the girl's dental work and sent the chart to Olympia, where the state Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit used a computer to compare her teeth with dental records of about 600 people reported missing around the state.

Nothing matched.

Critical failure

Four months earlier, Tish Curry had returned from a shopping trip to find Michelle missing from the family's home in Mattawa -- a six-square-block village of gravel roads and low-slung homes perched above the Columbia in lower Grant County.

In Michelle's bedroom Curry found a note that spelled out the girl's plan to run away. Curry went to the town police, who immediately entered a report in state and national computers -- as is required by law when any child goes missing.

But Mattawa police didn't take the critical step that would have resulted in a near-instant match after the body was found.

State law requires authorities to obtain, where possible, dental and medical records for any person missing longer than 30 days, and to send them to a state agency that might one day use them to identify a body.

That didn't happen for Michelle.

Records from a dentist's office wouldn't have saved Michelle Vick's life, but they would have spared her family more than a year of anguish.

Instead, Curry spent hundreds of hours searching for her daughter, not knowing that Michelle's remains already were in a cooler at the Grant County Coroner's Office. Driving mile after mile across barren desert, she chased rumors and distributed fliers. She stayed up nights, too worried to sleep, and her family life spiraled out of control.

"The whole thing tore our family apart," said Brian Barrera, Michelle's older brother. (Editor's Note: Barrera's last name has been corrected since original publication.)

Why police in a county with fewer than 75,000 residents failed to connect a rare unidentified body to the report of a girl missing just 37 miles away is hard to fathom.

"Somebody knew this girl, somebody knew she was missing," said Jim Hansen, a state Homicide Investigation and Tracking System investigator familiar with the case. "It became a case of, 'Goddamn it, why is this going on? How does something like this happen?' "

Experts would like to say the Michelle Vick case is an anomaly -- one that slipped through the cracks of Washington's nationally renowned system for tracking the missing and identifying the dead. But they can't.

"If people knew how little was done with missing-persons cases, they'd scream," said Gary Bell, forensic dentist for the Washington State Patrol's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit.

There are about 2,100 active missing-persons cases on file with the state at any given time. About 1,400 of them involve people missing 30 days or longer

[The Tracker]

When the P-I reviewed those 1,400 state records, it found that in nearly two-thirds of the cases police had not done the required follow up. Those cases had no medical and dental records.

The reason? Police consider missing-person cases a low priority, and there's no real penalty if they let them slide.

Although unknown to the general public, the holes in the system are common knowledge among law enforcement officials, forensics investigators and criminal justice experts.

Those same experts say failure to adequately investigate these cases has helped killers escape detection, even though Northwest police departments should know better.


Trial and error

Call their expertise the bitter fruit of a morbid harvest.

Some of the most notorious serial killings have occurred in the Pacific Northwest. And with them came some of the most valuable firsthand experience in investigative and forensic techniques for law enforcement worldwide.

With little precedent to guide them, local investigators who tracked Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer in the '70s and '80s honed their skills by trial and error. Day by day and body by body, they learned what police were doing right and what they were doing wrong.

"We just started working missing-persons cases like they were dead," said Detective Tom Jensen, a longtime Green River Task Force member. "The only thing we didn't have was the body. If you wait until a body turns up, you're six, eight months behind in your investigation."

By working missing cases aggressively from the start, detectives gained critical information about victims and their last days while the trail and memories were still fresh.

They learned that police agencies were declining to take reports, failing to investigate them and neglecting to remove closed files from computer databases, costing investigators valuable time looking for people no longer "lost."

They also saw that detectives often were overly eager to close cases on rumor or hearsay without confirming whether a missing person was really alive and well.

Four women believed to be victims of the Green River Killer -- Gail Mathews, Andrea Childers, Mary Bello and Tammy Liles -- had been reported missing to various police departments. Yet their cases had been closed on the basis of unconfirmed sightings or rumors that they were alive. Investigators later learned the reports could not have been true -- the women had long been dead.

The report for Liles, a 16-year-old runaway, was cleared in May 1984 after a Marysville police officer said "a family member indicated she talked to her." In fact, she was already dead, though her body was not found for nearly a year.

Reports for four other Green River victims also were purged by mistake. In most cases, the problems complicated the identification of their bodies and the subsequent murder investigations.

The task force also discovered that family and friends of victims weren't doing their part. Often, they failed to report loved ones missing at all. One serial killer victim was reported missing almost five years after she disappeared; two victims had never been reported.

Investigators noticed little uniformity in the way cases were handled. Some departments would accept only those reports filed by a family member; others would take them from friends or associates. Some departments had waiting periods -- three days in some cases -- before they'd take a report. Some refused to take a report if the person lived or disappeared outside their jurisdiction.

"Police departments hate missing-persons reports because they tend to be a pain in the butt," Jensen explained. "Detectives will look for ways to dump cases so they don't have to do the follow-up work."

When nearby jurisdictions were slow to investigate missing-persons cases, King County became quick to jump in, often "bypassing the hometown police to . . . get the information we needed" -- such as dental records and medical X-rays valuable in making identifications, Jensen said.

The King County Sheriff established a standing policy to accept any missing persons report, no matter what. The aggressive approach led the Green River Task Force to track down more than 1,300 living girls and women reported missing between 1984 and 1990.

At the same time, investigators learned of limitations in state and national missing-person systems and recognized communications problems between police departments.

The King County Medical Examiner's Office created a makeshift central repository for records, something lacking at the state level. They also recognized that the only nationwide database for missing persons and unidentified dead, the FBI's National Crime Information Center, wasn't being used properly.

"One of the reasons Green River was important was that it brought attention to the problems," says Bill Haglund, a former King County Medical Examiner's investigator.

By 1987, former King County Detective Bob Keppel had helped start HITS, a state program that tracks homicides and other violent crimes. Keppel hatched the program while chasing notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

HITS -- one of the first and most detailed violent-crime databases in the world -- was meant to eliminate "linkage blindness" that initially plagued the Green River investigation. Authorities saw that various agencies had been investigating several homicides individually because they knew too little about each other's cases to recognize pattern killings. HITS aims to find links.

Bell, the forensic dental adviser, led the nation in recognizing that the NCIC computer search used to match dental records of the unidentified dead to the missing was unreliable. In turn, he helped set up a state-level program that worked.

Those and other breakthroughs made Washington a leader in investigating serial killers, tracking missing people and identifying bodies.

But now, years after many systemic problems were widely acknowledged, they continue to surface -- even in Washington.

"If it's easy to find these things still happening in a state that pays attention to these issues, you know that it's happening everywhere," Haglund said.


'Non-family abductions'

Of all the missing-person cases nationwide, abductions of children by strangers draw the most attention. But such "non-family abductions" are rare, with only about 200 reported each year, said Wayne Lord of the FBI's Child Abduction Serial Murder Investigative Resource Center.

When a child goes missing, whole towns drop everything. Amber Alerts flash on freeway signs and TV screens. Police make it a top priority.

"We'd like to see every missing-child case -- or adult case, for that matter -- be handled like an abduction and taken seriously up front," Lord said. "But in reality, that's not going to happen."

That's because police know that small children don't disappear on their own. Adults are a different story. They can go and do what they please, and it's no crime if someone isn't where someone else thought they should be.

They also know, from past experience, that few missing people are victims of foul play.

In each of the past five years, the FBI reported that for every new missing-person case on the books, more than one was resolved. In 2001, for example, 841,266 cases were reported to the FBI, but 861,918 were cleared, reflecting closure of old cases.

Experts agree the number of missing adults reported each year -- almost 200,000 in 2001 -- is low because local police routinely take a wait-and-see approach. It's a matter of cost-effectiveness, they say.

"When you look at your midsize and smaller departments, probably none of them have a missing-persons unit," said Bremerton Police Capt. Craig Rogers. "With our resources, we have to make decisions on priorities and, obviously, crimes of violence are going to take top priority.

"So, when you get a missing-persons report with no obvious sign of foul play, it's probably not going to get the attention. You'd like to investigate every case, but you have to strike a balance."

Even larger departments with more resources generally don't focus on these cases.

The people who are put in missing-persons bureaus are not the most experienced detectives," said Ben Ermini, a former cop now with the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children. "Usually, it's the guy on sick leave, reprimanded for something or near retirement. The missing-persons bureau is not looked at as the choice job."

Rapid turnover in personnel assigned to missing-person cases leads to a lack of experience with and oversight of such cases.

"This is where they get in trouble," says Dick Steiner, another HITS investigator. "You can't bring civilians or untrained officers in and expect them to make the determination of whether a case needs to be worked or not. But that's what you have at a lot of these agencies. Eventually, that's going to bite you in the butt."

In the case of runaway juveniles, that can be especially true.

Runaways account for about three-quarters of the approximately 850,000 missing-persons cases reported nationwide each year. About 75 percent are resolved within 24 hours when the youngsters return home or are otherwise located, said Lord, the FBI agent. As a result, police give little attention to runaways, even though federal and state laws require immediate reporting, as with any other missing-child case.

"If a child is 13, 14, 15 years of age, law enforcement pretty much assumes that they've run away and they'll come back in a day or two. And usually, they do," Ermini said. "But the danger is, very often that child is at risk. I think every missing-persons report of a child under 18 should be investigated thoroughly for that very reason."

That didn't happen for Michelle.

In her note, Michelle named several friends, including "Thomas" -- who police now believe was a reference to Tomas Mendez, her boyfriend of several months.

Mendez, then 18, was on parole for a child rape conviction.

That raised no red flags in Mattawa.

"It's just one of those things," said Grant County Sheriff's Deputy John Dazell, the primary detective on Michelle's murder case. "You don't do a real in-depth investigation for a runaway case. Nobody does. You just don't have the time."

Tish Curry says that's garbage.

"I know in my mind that I shouldn't have given (the police) the note she left," Curry said. "After that, they just considered her a runaway and no one looked for her.

"If she'd been 10 years old, they would have been frantically searching for her. Her face would've been all over TV."


Insatiable crush

In the months before she ran away, Michelle became enthralled with Mendez, who had come from Mexico four years earlier to live with relatives.

Curry had bad feelings about Mendez, who seemed too old for her daughter. She forbade Michelle from seeing him.

But the crush was insatiable. Michelle loved the attention Mendez paid her, and the freedom she felt when she was with him. She wrote his name on everything -- school papers, notebooks, her backpack -- always proceeded by "te amo," Spanish for "I love you . . ." Soon, she was sneaking out to meet him.

When a high school teacher told Curry that Mendez was a sex offender, Curry searched her daughter's room and found an unmailed letter written to Mendez's probation officer. In it, Michelle acknowledged that she and Mendez had a sexual relationship, but argued that he shouldn't get into trouble even though she was only 14.

The town rumor mill soon had Michelle pregnant, police records show. She told friends that she and Mendez were going to Mexico to avoid her family and the trouble Mendez could face because she was underage.

On June 24, 1998, Curry and her youngest daughter went shopping. Michelle was still in bed. She was gone when they returned home.


Wanted poster

The door to Chief Randy Blackburn's small office in Mattawa Town Hall features a wanted poster. On it, a stocky young man in a white T-shirt and close-cropped black hair stares out at visitors. He is described as Tomas Mendez, a registered sex offender and "a person of interest . . . sought for questioning in the murder of Michelle Vick."

Mendez likely left Grant County in late 1999 or early 2000. He may be in Mexico.

Standing at his office door with arms crossed, Blackburn rejected the idea that inaction by his department gave Mendez time to flee.

Blackburn said his officers did attempt to retrieve information about Michelle's dental records when she remained missing for more than 30 days. But he quickly added that the law requires police to do so only if the records are "available."

"We had a hell of a time trying to get information from her parents," he said. "It took an act of God to find out from them that maybe she had dental records. We had no luck at it and we just couldn't get them. Nobody could remember who the dentist was."

Nothing could be further from the truth, Curry maintains, adding she would have given authorities the records herself, had she known they were needed.

Michelle saw her dentist only two days before she left home, Curry said. Records show dental X-rays were taken June 22, 1998. Michelle had another appointment the week she disappeared, Curry added.

"The day after she was gone, I even called the dentist's office and asked them to call me just in case Michelle showed up for her appointment," Curry said. "So of course I knew who her dentist was."

Mattawa police first asked about dental records about eight months after her daughter went missing, Curry said. That was well after the body was found.

"It was kind of out of the blue," Curry said. An officer "came to the house and asked us if there were dental records. I said, 'yeah, of course' and gave him the name and number of Michelle's dentist. I don't know if they followed up on it or not."

The officer apparently didn't.

"Mattawa never did forward the dental records to the state," said Dazell, the Grant County deputy. "I'm not going to say Mattawa did this right or this wrong. But yeah, if we would've been able to ID her sooner, if everything worked out right, it would've helped. It would've helped quite a bit."

Someone else did follow through. Eventually.

[The Tracker]

"I just called the family," said Spokane County homicide Detective Fred Ruetsch, whose legwork in a serial murder investigation led to the identification of Michelle. "They gave me the dentist's name pretty quick."

Ruetsch was on the case because detectives noticed similarities between the Grant County homicide and the murders of eight prostitutes in Spokane. The victims were female, shot in the head and dumped in remote places. The wildlife area where Michelle's body was found is also midway between Spokane and Tacoma, another city where the same serial killer had claimed two lives.

The Spokane task force converged on the Grant County crime scene, where they used computers to map the site and collected every bit of fabric and scrap of paper. They picked up insects to try to determine when things happened. Under a pile of rocks they found girl's clothing wrapped in a car seat cover.

A King County pathologist later performed an autopsy and a Spokane dentist carefully examined and recorded the dead girl's teeth, noting the location of 12 fillings.

When a dental record search in the state's missing persons files yielded no results, the investigation slowed to a crawl.


No match found

Dazell had done everything he could think of, but failed to identify the girl based on her physical characteristics.

He had searched county, state and national missing-person databases for potential matches, entering the victim's probable time of death, and "descriptors" such as likely age and probable height. There were hundreds of potential matches, some of them for girls reported missing in states hundreds of miles away. None panned out.

What tripped him up? The pathologist estimated the dead girl's age at 16-25. To play it safe, Dazell included missing 15-year-olds. Michelle was physically mature for her age, but was still two months short of 15.

"Our agency wasn't aware of her being reported a runaway," he said. "She was in our computer, but we weren't looking for 14-year-olds."

A forensic artist's sketch of the victim based on skull characteristics was done. It looked a lot like Tish Curry.

"Everybody in Central Washington got a bulletin, along with (the sketch)," Dazell said. "Mattawa got a bulletin, too, but obviously it didn't click."

Blackburn, the Mattawa chief, said, "We had no reason to think the sketch was her. We were still getting reports of (Michelle) being sighted alive."

In fact, she had been dead for months.

By then, Ruetsch, the Spokane County detective, was mining the state's database of missing people. He assumed a broader range in age and used information about decomposition to narrow the likely time of death. Then, he compiled a list of girls and women who disappeared before that period.

On March 3, 2000, Ruetsch started calling police about the 29 candidates on his list. He was surprised to discover that 17 of the cases were from just one Western Washington police agency, yet none of those cases was still active. The agency hadn't bothered to clear the reports after the person was found.

"They told me that they just didn't have the time to do it," Ruetsch said, declining to name the agency.

Four days later, Ruetsch was looking at just two possibilities.

"It wasn't rocket science," Ruetsch said. "I had a girl missing from a town only 30 miles away from where the body was found. Wouldn't you start there?"

Michelle's dentist compared his files to the chart made from the body and reported that they were similar. Confirmation came from a forensic dentist on March 8, 2000. The detectives could finally start the murder investigation -- one year, four months and 13 days after the body was found.


Focus on the note

Dazell focused on the note Michelle had left, which was in the Mattawa police file. Running down the names of the people in the note, he learned that Michelle had called a girlfriend a week after she left home.

The friend told the Grant County deputy she didn't know Michelle was missing at the time of the call. Before the conversation ended, Michelle had said she would call her back later that day. She never did.

Dazell already knew another person on the list. Years earlier he had arrested Mendez for raping an 8-year-old girl. But by then the trail was cold; Mendez was a "person of interest" but beyond reach.

Blackburn, the Mattawa chief, won't concede that a different response by his department would have led police to Mendez before he left town.

"The only thing they're going on is that (Tomas) was Michelle Vick's boyfriend," said Blackburn. "That's all they got. I think if they even were able to arrest him, there's not enough evidence to convict him."

Mendez had left for Mexico right after Michelle ran away, Blackburn added. Even if her body had been identified earlier, there would have been no way to interview Mendez because "he had done skipped town" long before, he added.

Police reports and witnesses say that's not true.

"He was around for the two years we had the body but didn't know who Michelle was," Dazell said.

According to a report Dazell submitted to HITS, police contacted Mendez at Mattawa's high school in November 1998 after it was reported that he had brought a gun to school.

That's a month after the body was found.

A year later, police in Quincy, where Mendez was living, arrested him for cocaine possession after a traffic stop. He was in the county jail from Nov. 25 until his release on bond Dec. 3, 1999. An arrest warrant was issued when he failed to show for a hearing on the drug charges in February 2000.

John Ball, a Mattawa high school art teacher who was close to Mendez, recalled speaking with him weeks after the unidentified body was discovered near Quincy.

"He left me a desperate phone message, saying 'It's really, really bad, Mr. Ball. It's really a big problem,' " Ball said.

"I didn't hear from him again after that. I think he knows a lot more about Michelle's death, but he's not around to tell anyone now."

Dazell also discovered Mendez no longer had the van he had owned when Michelle disappeared. Witnesses described the van's seat covers as similar to the one found with Michelle's clothing at the dumpsite, he said. The van is still missing.

About a month after Michelle's body was identified, a police chief in Mexico told Dazell that Mendez was living there with his mother.

Meanwhile, forensics tests of evidence taken from Robert Lee Yates Jr. -- the man who ultimately confessed to the Spokane serial killings -- failed to match samples recovered from the Grant County crime scene.

"I'm now 99.9 percent sure that Tomas is our guy" based on the investigation, Dazell said. "I don't have anyone else I'm looking at, I can tell you that."

Under Mexican law it would be difficult to extradite Mendez to the United States. Although Dazell could ask for a trial in a Mexican court, he acknowledges that he lacks enough evidence to persuade a judge there to order it.

Dazell is also unsure whether Mendez is still in Mexico.

A friend of Michelle's said she saw him last summer at a grocery store near Yakima.

"If I can talk to him, I think I'll be able to prove it," Dazell said. "He's actually somewhat of a likeable kid. He's not stupid, and he's surprisingly truthful."

Had Michelle been identified sooner, Dazell said, "I'd have had a lot better chance of getting him. I could've had a shot at getting the evidence we needed."


Remembering

Sometimes, late at night, Tish Curry will pull up a basket with bits of fabric -- pieces of cloth with colors, patterns and animals that remind her of Michelle. She'll then begin quilting, a hobby she started when Michelle was still missing. It helps her avoid the nightmares.

She and her children have left Mattawa behind. She has a new love interest, new job and new home near Vancouver, Wash., where "the heat isn't so bad."

But every now and then, usually late at night, her thoughts drift to a grave over the mountains and in the desert. And to a brown-eyed girl on the cusp of adulthood, the one who never made it.

It's then that Curry reaches for the quilting basket, as if the bits of cloth can be pieced together to answer the questions that haunt her.

Did she know she was going to get shot? Did she know she was going to die?

"These are the kinds of things that come into my head, sometimes, late at night, when I can't sleep or when I have bad dreams," she said. "It's getting better, but I still worry. I guess I always will until I know.

"I need to know."


THE PRIME SUSPECT

Fourteen-year-old Michelle Vick was enamored with Tomas Mendez, then 18 and on parole for a child rape conviction. She wrote his name on everything, preceded by "te amo," Spanish for "I love you." Michelle's mother forbade her from seeing him, but she told friends she and Mendez were going to Mexico. Michelle disappeared in June 1998. Hunters found skeletal remains in October 1998. In March 2000, the remains were identified as Michelle's, and the homicide investigation began. Mendez likely left Grant County in late 1999 or early 2000. Police say he's their only suspect.
KEY SERIES FINDINGS

Botched police work: Police routinely botch missing person investigations and have lost reports in more than 100 cases. Even cases with obvious signs of foul play are often ignored.

Hidden murderers: Killers in Washington, including as many as 30 serial murderers, have exploited flaws in the system to avoid detection.

Nameless corpses: Nearly 100 corpses have been left without names, in part because of defects in the system. Coroners and medical examiners charged with identifying "Does" have lost records -- as well as some remains.

Faulty programs: Computer systems designed to track the missing and identify the dead are fraught with problems, often producing false matches -- or no leads at all.

[The Tracker]

Part 2: Missing-person cases are routinely ignored

By LISE OLSEN AND LEWIS KAMB

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

The locals knew something was wrong when the Hindmans' red Ford convertible was parked all night long at the Big Y Cafe in Dryden.

Police later found blood on the walls and floor of the travel trailer in which they lived. Everything they owned was where they'd left it.

But of Gene and Sherry Hindman, newcomers to the Wenatchee Valley who packed apples and dreamed of better days, there was no sign at all.

Seventeen years later, the Chelan County sheriff still calls it an unsolved double homicide, but the case long ago went cold. Deputies figured there wasn't much they could do until bodies turned up.

Late last year, after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked about the Hindmans, Chelan County for the first time added the 1985 case to a nationwide database that helps police track missing people and identify bodies found. It has yet to provide the state dental records and police reports -- key information if the Hindmans ever turn up -- that are required by state law. "We made mistakes and we're trying to do better," said newly elected Sheriff Mike Harum.

It's unclear whether county authorities ever examined two unidentified men whose remains were recovered there to determine whether one might be Gene Hindman. The county has lost all records for the bodies, which do show up on a state list.

For 17 years now, someone has gotten away with murder in Chelan County -- partly because of flaws in the system for tracking missing people.

Through hundreds of interviews and analysis of hundreds of police reports and information in three state computer databases, the P-I found that police statewide routinely botch or ignore missing-person cases, even when there are ample indications of foul play. As a result, families have been left with unanswered questions, countless dead have been buried without a name and killers have been allowed to roam free.

In the Hindman case, proper investigation might have prevented more bloodshed. The sheriff's chief detective and the county prosecutor have long suspected they were killed by their landlord, Jim Lowry, after an argument about money. But without bodies, they had no case.

In 1994, Lowry crept into a trailer on his land and shot a different tenant in the head after they argued about money. That man survived.

Lowry, a retired Merchant Marine from Cashmere, was convicted of attempted murder and is now confined to a state assisted-living center in Yakima. Squinting and sometimes laughing, Lowry doesn't deny he had a dispute with the couple but says he never shot or killed anyone. He blames his troubles on a conspiracy run by "the Masons and the IRS."

The state's oldest inmate at age 88, he likely will die in custody.

[The Tracker]

Victims of foul play

In its yearlong investigation, the P-I asked more than 270 Washington police agencies for reports on all people who had been missing for more than a year, as well as all unsolved homicides, since 1980. Ninety-one agencies sent reports.

The P-I also obtained the State Patrol's master list of more than 2,000 missing persons, which includes more than 600 people missing longer than a year.

The P-I analysis revealed that as many as 130 missing people may have been victims of foul play, with police listing at least 20 as victims of serial killers. Police said they found signs of a struggle, identified a history of domestic violence or discovered small children unattended or prized possessions abandoned. In some cases police learned of death threats or were told of hidden graves.

Some of the reports led to homicide investigations. Others fell through the cracks.

The P-I also found that police:


Routinely mishandle and lose cases: Police departments could not account for more than 100 missing-person cases still shown to be active by the State Patrol. Seattle police overhauled their system for tracking missing-person cases after they received a P-I request for information and were unable to account for 37 reports that were on the state's roll -- about half of the city's long-term cases. Now they can account for all cases. Other departments admit their records remain in disarray, mistakenly purged or destroyed.


Ignore the law: Washington police are required by law to obtain, where available, dental records for all people gone longer than a month. But state records show they failed to do so in more than 60 percent of all cases. Moreover, 45 departments have filed no follow-up reports on any long-term cases.


Fail to use tracking systems: Dozens of cases were never entered into missing-person databases maintained by the State Patrol and the FBI -- including several that involved missing children or adults who likely were murdered. For example, Chelan County not only failed to report the disappearance of the Hindmans, it also did not pass on data about the probable homicide of Steven Smith, who vanished from his home in 1982. A man later confessed to Smith's murder but the case was not pursued because no body was found where the man said he left it, said retired Undersheriff Daryl Methena.


Close cases with little investigation: Because of the P-I's inquiry, departments across the state "solved" more than 150 open cases.

But officers in several departments who closed cases, including Bremerton, Bellingham, Tacoma and the Pierce and Douglas county sheriff's offices, admit they didn't actually talk to the subject of the report. Bremerton detectives, for example, cleared half the department's 30 open cases last spring mostly by checking credit reports and public records -- but without making a single face-to-face confirmation.

Experts say missing-person cases should not be cleared that way.

"I'm more than anal about that," said Seattle Police Department Missing Persons Detective Tina Drain, who was assigned to handle these cases three weeks after the P-I began its investigation of the missing-person report system. Drain, a veteran domestic violence detective, has since flagged one case as a homicide, helped nail down a tricky John Doe case and called out search-and-rescue teams in another.

She's also taken classes from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on child abductions and helped produce a video used to train patrol officers on how to pick up on signs of trouble.

Her diligence appears to be rare among police in Washington state.

"I don't think any law enforcement agency is going to dedicate those kind of resources to track down each and every missing person" without signs of a crime, said Bremerton Police Capt. Craig Rogers.

When asked about open cases, Rogers said: "Is it possible that some of these cases might end up with foul play involved? Anything's possible."

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File and forget

Few know the system better than Bob Keppel, a former King County detective who investigated Ted Bundy and the Green River murders.

Keppel recalls the primitive method one major Western Washington police agency used in the 1970s: A new missing-person report went to the top of the stack and the one on the bottom went in the trash.

"These were viable cases with people who were probably murder victims," Keppel said. "No goddam work was done. Nothing. Zero."

Even now, some departments do little more than file and forget.

"There's an overriding hesitancy to investigate missing persons," Keppel said. "If they turn out to be a murder victim -- or even if they wind up dead for some other reason -- this causes the investigation to stagnate."

Despite the problems, some investigators pull off impressive coups -- such as a Seattle investigation that was solved based on a cop's gut instinct.

When Donald "Rob" Wood, then 27, disappeared in July 1998, Seattle police Detective Ray Holm played a hunch and found him. Wood had vanished after a night drinking at a Pioneer Square tavern -- his friends had lost track of him when the party moved to a loft in the same building. He later failed to show up at work or pick up his mother at the airport.

Five days after Wood disappeared, Holm returned to the building that housed the tavern and checked a seldom-used freight elevator -- and found Wood, critically hurt but alive after falling 80 feet down an elevator shaft.

Yet many other troubled people don't get the help they need, often because police discourage missing-person reports by imposing waiting periods or other dodges.

In July 1995, Ramona Fey, a 39-year-old schizophrenic, cut her own throat and drove away from her sister's Spanaway home. Family members tried to get two different agencies to take a report that day, but neither did. A report was finally taken only after they called the King County Sheriff's Office that evening.

But in the time it took to get a report filed, police already had missed a chance to help Fey. That afternoon, she drove her car into a ditch in Mount Rainier National Park. A park ranger helped her pull it out.

"He checked (the computer) to see if there were any records for her," said her mother, Shirley Angel. "No one had taken a report yet, so he had to let her go."

Later that evening, Fey's car, the motor still running, was found swathed in blood farther up the mountain. She remains missing.

Police also can be reluctant to take reports about runaways, prostitutes and drug addicts, even though they often are crime victims.

"Prostitutes and people with transient lifestyles are easy to prey on. Serial killers know that, and they know that these kinds of victims are a lot harder to track," said Wayne Lord of the FBI's Child Abduction-Serial Killer Investigative Resource Center.

A few of the state's large departments assign a detective with specialized training to handle missing persons. Some, such as the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office, have homicide detectives read reports. When a case looks suspicious, that department has two detectives check it out.

But in most places, reports may never be reviewed at all.

And because police know that most people turn up on their own, some officers indiscriminately close cases in less than a month to avoid the chore of checking to see whether the person is still missing, filing supplemental reports, and tracking down dental records to send to the proper authorities, said Kirk Mellecker, an investigator with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP.

Lax police work isn't "done with sinister intentions," said Marvin Skeen, a former Bellevue detective now with the state's Homicide Information Tracking System, or HITS.

"It's more like naiveté," Skeen said. "With a lot of agencies, officers aren't trained and probably not even aware of the laws."

Lackluster follow-up doesn't matter in most cases, which routinely solve themselves when people return home or are otherwise located.

But such investigative failures can also help a killer.

Verification of missing-person reports can be especially important. Often, killers file the reports themselves to throw off suspicion, Keppel found in a 1987 study.

The Yakima Police Department assigns a trained detective to scrutinize all missing-person reports. Yet important cases -- including probable homicides -- still are overlooked, said Detective Tim Bardwell, who noted that patrol officers without training often fill out the reports.

Patricia Rodriguez was 33 when she went missing from Yakima in February 1983. She was having financial troubles and her husband was in jail -- problems that suggested to officers that she had taken off on her own.

But her family believes she never would have abandoned her four children, ages 2 to 11.

Employees of the family business called police. Officers checked her home and noted the children had been home alone for two days. Yet it wasn't until her mother and sister arrived from another state that authorities filed a formal missing-person report -- 10 days after she vanished.

Six months passed before her family could talk a detective into looking into the case, Bardwell said. The investigator quickly uncovered evidence of a dispute between Rodriguez and her husband's co-workers -- the very people who called the police, and who remain suspects in her still-unsolved disappearance.

"Nothing was really checked into," said Rodriguez's sister, Bev Evanson. "It was just assumed she'd left on her own, which we knew she never did. As long as there's no body -- you can't get help."

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Mostly teenagers

The vast majority of missing person reports concern teenagers -- hundreds of thousands of whom disappear nationwide, only to reappear a few days later. Because of that, police seldom act. If a teen is a chronic runaway or has a history of misbehavior, they take even less interest.

But the system is supposed to be better for missing juveniles than it is for adults, thanks to federal legislation passed after a national furor about child abductions in the early 1980s. By law, local police cannot require a waiting period before taking a missing-juvenile report, and must immediately enter all such reports in state and national databases.

In recent years, a few high-profile abductions have prompted several areas, including Washington state, to also adopt "Amber Alert" systems to quickly spread the word. But few other missing-person cases generate that level of rapid response or attention.

Generally, the quickest response comes in the rare cases in which a small child can't be found. Washington's database of missing persons lists only about 10 unsolved abductions by strangers of children younger than 12.

Older children often are presumed to be willing and able to disappear on their own, and police generally do little to check them out.

Two cases "solved" after the P-I asked about them show that older youths get little attention -- even in suspicious circumstances.

Cecelia Garibay, a Douglas County teen, was last seen in the company of a known sex offender before she was reported missing in October 2000. Yet investigators considered her a runaway and did no follow-up for nearly two years. Only after the P-I asked about the case did authorities check and discover that she had returned home long ago.

Similarly, Ronald Porkalob, a 17-year-old model student from Bremerton, vanished in 1988. He remained "missing" for 15 years -- until the P-I asked about him and police determined he was alive and well in Seattle.

Not all cases harmlessly fall through the cracks.

When 14-year-old Misty Thompson ran away from a Cowlitz County foster home in 1993, the Sheriff's Office initially assumed that there was no need for any special action: Foster kids run away all the time.

But there was more to the Thompson case. State regulators were already aware of problems at the home, which eventually lost its foster care license. Girls placed at the home had complained of inappropriate relationships, including time Misty had spent with the adult son-in-law of the home's owner. Social workers had asked the man, a Mexican facing deportation, to move.

Police learned three months later that Misty and the man had left at about the same time. By then, they were investigating allegations that the man had impregnated another teen, according to a Department of Social and Health Services report and Cowlitz County sheriff's records.

Misty's foster mother, Arlotte Noble, told authorities that Misty had called to say she was fine, but wouldn't say where she was. Much later, she told the P-I that she believes Misty went willingly with the man.

Still, eight years passed before a detective asked about Misty. Noble told him that in 1997 she was called by U.S. government officials in Mexico who said Misty had died, though she received no written notification. She said she passed word on to the state -- which DSHS said it cannot confirm.

Police have never been able to determine what happened to Misty.

The P-I also found at least three homicides in which parents say police initially refused to search for their daughters, insisting the girls were runaways. Two remain unsolved.

On July 18, 1994, Tanya Frazier, 14, disappeared after leaving Seattle's Washington Middle School. Her mother, Theresa Frazier, has remained troubled by the idea that her daughter might have been alive even as she was trying to convince police and the media to publicize the case and make a more active search. But Frazier long said her daughter was dismissed as a runaway -- until a man walking on Capitol Hill found her body five days later.

The same appears true for 14-year-old Misty Copsey, who vanished in 1992 after attending the Puyallup Fair. Copsey has never been found, though volunteer searchers recovered some of her clothing. Copsey's mother repeatedly has complained that police treated the case as a runaway and refused to search, though Copsey disappeared after missing a bus and attempting to walk home alone late at night. Her family never believed she left on her own.

Volunteers also had to take the lead in the September 1986 search for Tracy Parker, 16, in Kitsap County. Sixteen years later, Barbara Parker-Waaga still gets angry when she thinks about the deputies who wouldn't lift a finger until volunteers found Tracy's clothing in the woods -- three days after she tried to file a missing-person report.

"The deputies were rude," she said. "They insisted she was a runaway and would turn up in a few days. But there were so many clues that something wasn't right."

Detectives focused on Brian Keith Lord, a 25-year-old who had been convicted of murder in California and who was doing carpentry work at the home where Tracy was riding horses the day she vanished.

Deputies arrested Lord on Sept. 30, 1986 -- about the time a horseback rider found Tracy's nude body in the woods. Trace and blood evidence were said to link Lord to her murder.

Former Kitsap County Sheriff Pat Jones said he knows his department failed to act appropriately in the Parker case, and in doing so lost one of the most valuable assets of any missing-person investigation.

"When you get a case like this," he said, "you need a good relationship with the family. They are one of your best sources of information."

Lord's July 1987 conviction and death sentence were overturned on appeal. He will be retried this year.

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Not a crime

A missing-person report is not a crime report. Nor does filing a report mean that anyone will go looking for the subject -- there's no law that says adults have to be where someone thinks they should be.

The report is a tripwire to alert police of a possible crime, and in many cases it is a way to reach across time and distance to identify any human remains that might turn up years later, hundreds of miles away.

After a hiker found a partial skull in the Olympic National Park in June 2000, a pathologist examined the remains and sent dental X-rays to the state's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit in Olympia. When those records were put into a state computer, it spit out the name of Douglas Gibbs.

Gibbs, a 33-year-old man with a history of mental problems, had been reported missing to Seattle police in October 1998. Detectives had followed through by tracking down his dental records and sending them to the state.

The case "demonstrates how well the system can work when each party does what they are supposed to do," said King County forensic pathologist Kathy Taylor, who worked the case. "The information was there to compare to when we found his remains. Ironically, we had very little of him but got a positive ID. The system works if agencies use it."

The case also shows why police are required by law to seek dental or medical records for people who remain missing longer than 30 days, and to send the records to the state -- which doesn't always happen.

The reason? Reading the paperwork, tracking down doctors and dentists and retrieving medical files is time-consuming and tedious. Police say they're spread thin and have better things to do.

"Police view missing persons as a low priority case," said John Turner, chief investigator of the state's HITS program. "In reality, Part 1 crime -- your murders, rapes and robberies -- that's what's driving police departments and budgets. Missing persons are not a Part 1 crime."

At the same time, the law is toothless -- no penalties for officers or agencies that ignore it.

State records show that some of the agencies with the worst compliance records are some of the largest -- Tacoma and the Pierce County Sheriff's Department.

Tacoma police failed to report whether it even tried to get dental records in more than 90 percent of its cases. Pierce County failed to report in 84 percent, the P-I found in an analysis of cases that were 30 days old or older. When asked about the lapse, supervisors from both the Tacoma police and sheriff's departments said they weren't aware of the law.

Dozens of cases have been neglected, including that of Alexander Welcher, 72, who vanished from his Tacoma gun shop in February 1986. Tacoma police say they routinely send form letters to families of missing people to ask for dental records. But Welcher's son, John, said his family was never contacted and any dental records are now long gone.

"There are . . . bodies that have been found, that could be him," Welcher said. "But how would they know without these records?"

Tacoma police Lt. Tom Strickland said he doesn't know whether officers ever tried to get Welcher's records. The detective who handled the case is long retired, he said. The case languishes, even though police and family members assume Welcher was murdered.

"You call down there and it's like, 'That book has been closed,' " Welcher said.

Although Seattle has an excellent record for providing records for older missing-person cases, the department still fails to meet the 30-day requirement to report about the availability of dental records in 77 percent of its cases, records show.

Department officials said the high volume of reports makes it almost impossible for them to meet the deadline, though they try to report back within two or three months on all cases.

Unfortunately, for many runaways -- especially foster children -- there are no dental reports to find, they said.

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'Waste of time'

An integral part of a missing-person investigation is sharing the data, because victims often turn up in another county or state -- some as corpses. Dental records, physical descriptions and other facts fed into computers are supposed to help police put together the puzzle.

The system is run by the Justice Department's National Crime Information Center, or NCIC.

The missing persons part of the NCIC system, launched in 1975, is outdated and flawed. Some data entry categories are useless or misleading and its automatic search engine is unreliable.

"It's just a big waste of time," said Skeen, a former Bellevue homicide detective who now works for the state HITS program. "You're basing everything on descriptors, and you can generate hundreds and hundreds of names of potential matches that never pan out."

Federal officials have improved other parts of NCIC but the missing-person section remains largely unchanged, despite widespread knowledge of its failures and limitations.

Although many improvements are now scheduled, advocates have argued that the national computer should be replaced or upgraded with modern, Web-based tools featuring standard reports, photos, dental information and availability of DNA.

"There are easier ways to do this," said Bill Haglund, a former King County Medical Examiner's investigator. "Once you have a system you've paid millions of dollars for in place, there's a lot of resistance to change it."

Regardless of the technical flaws, human factors can also defeat justice. Every month the State Patrol sends a form asking departments to verify active cases. All cases are supposed to be reviewed over the course of a year.

Yet the P-I found many departments had trouble finding records, some of which are deleted in error.

For a case to remain active, an agency must respond to the State Patrol's letters. If it doesn't, reports can be removed.

But experts say police routinely ignore the letters.

Conversely, agencies often fail to notify the state when a case is legitimately closed, allowing invalid reports to clog databases with information that doesn't belong there. After the P-I inquired, Pierce County checked the 116 missing person cases the state has listed as active for the department. Detective Ed Troyer, the sheriff's spokesman, said many of the cases have indeed been cleared and blamed the state for not updating its records.

However, system guidelines clearly show that the burden of clearing reports is on the originating agency -- in this case the sheriff's office.

To try to keep its data manageable, the FBI and state also notify local police when a reported runaway has been "emancipated" at the age of 18. In theory, departments are supposed to review the case and get a signature from the family and re-enter it into the system if the teen is still missing.

The local police are also supposed to retain records for teens who may have been abducted or who were otherwise endangered, regardless of the date of their emancipation.

But those labels are subjective and the follow-up takes time.

So many of the cases are simply purged, regardless of the circumstances.

Gerald Nance, an investigator for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said land mines in missing-person cases are plentiful -- but many problems relate to lack of knowledge or indifference.

"It comes down to you as an officer, as a person really, making the wrong decisions that become the reason why a case is not going to be solved," Nance said.

And timing is everything, said Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent and expert on serial killers.

"When somebody's missing, you have to make a concerted effort to determine why," Ressler said.

"The same mistake is made over and over again. But if (police) don't get their s--- together within the first 24 hours, it's usually a lost cause."

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Part 3: County solves case after Kent dodges it

By LEWIS KAMB

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

KENT -- It's like a game of "dodge ball," King County Detective Tom Jensen says.

Try to evade missing-person reports being thrown at you, if you can.

Like any game, there are rules. They can vary from police department to police department, but most generally base their dodge on where a person lives or where he or she disappears. As long as one or the other puts the person outside your police jurisdiction, you win.

"There are double standards," Jensen says. "Where someone lives or where they disappear, police will use that to their advantage in dodging a report."

In this game, odds generally favor police who do nothing. Most missing persons simply reappear, unharmed, on their own. It happens every day.

But when a missing person is a crime victim, everyone loses -- the family, friends and especially the victim.

Fortunately for the family and friends of Elizabeth Lamphere, the King County Sheriff's Office stepped in when Kent police took a pass on a missing-person report.

In doing so, county deputies caught a killer.

The "dodge" technique is just one of several ways that law enforcement fails to adequately investigate or accept missing-person reports, a yearlong investigation by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has found. Through lack of knowledge, indifference, poor training and unreliable computer systems, law enforcement can allow the dead to remain unnamed and killers to get away with murder.

In Lamphere's case, it began around 11 p.m. on Sept. 23, 1996, when the 27-year-old mother left Sappho's bar in downtown Kent. She was a regular at the nightspot managed by her friend, Mary Benton.

Lamphere had been forlorn that night: Her mother was hospitalized, near death. Elizabeth had decided to unplug the machines rather than watch her slowly die.

She arrived at the bar in the afternoon and left hours later with a truck driver who said his name was Paul. She was immediately missed.

Lamphere's sister, Charlene Schonberger, got a worried call from her 11-year-old nephew, Charles, sometime after 11:30 p.m. Schonberger was worried, too. This wasn't like Lamphere, who would call even if she was just running late.

The next day, with still no word from Lamphere, Benton and Schonberger called Kent police.

"They gave us every excuse," Benton said. "'Well, she probably just took a break, she's an adult and can take care of herself.' But to disappear -- that wasn't Elizabeth's nature."

The Kent department has a policy: Unless there are clear signs of foul play, no report will be taken until the adult is gone longer than 24 hours.

Benton and Schonberger were left on their own, calling hospitals, jails, and morgues, learning nothing.

That night, employees at Sappho's again called Kent police. An officer came to the bar and took down some information, but she didn't take a report. Sheriff's records show that Kent classified the call as a "citizen assist."

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Kent police spokesman Paul Petersen recently researched the case at the request of the P-I. He said the officer who went to the bar "got no indication of abduction, so wrote no report."

And, Petersen added, Lamphere lived in Covington, just outside the city. Her disappearance "was not within the Kent Police Department's jurisdiction" even though she was last seen there.

Deciding which agency should take a report when a person lives in one place and disappears from another "is a conversation I've heard debated between police agencies quite frequently over the years," Petersen said. "There is a reluctance to put a report into the system for another agency."

County deputies "took it far more seriously," Benton said.

Serious enough to launch a murder investigation before Lamphere's body was found.

"For any investigation, the faster you get into it, the better off you are," Jensen said.

As the most senior member of King County's Green River serial killer task force, Jensen is all too familiar with the "dodge" technique involving police jurisdictional disputes over missing-persons cases.

The same thing happened several times during the height of the Green River killings 20 years ago, such as with the disappearance of 19-year-old Shirley Sherill, one of 49 presumed victims of the Green River Killer.

Sherill's mother repeatedly tried to report her daughter missing to Seattle police in 1982, but was told that "since her daughter was an adult, she could not do so," according to a later sheriff's report.

More than a year after Sherill went missing, a Seattle officer finally took a report -- which was quickly purged when city police learned Sherill may have gone missing from the South City Motel in unincorporated King County.

"Detectives will look for ways to dump a missing-persons case," Jensen said. "That's still pretty typical."

A similar dodge occurred when John Cronk, 66, fell overboard and presumably drowned while rafting on the Nisqually River in July 2000.

Though he was last seen in Thurston County, he had lived in Pierce County. And that sparked a debate between two sheriff's departments over who had to do the paperwork, said Doug Patterson of the state Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit.

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Fortunately, Cronk's case generated enough attention that the Pierce County Medical Examiner obtained his dental records for the state, which may need them to someday identify a body.

No police agency has ever filed a missing person report for John Cronk, Patterson said.

"In this particular case, we got the information just because we got lucky," he said.

In Lamphere's case, King County saw the need for a thorough investigation from the start. Days after Lamphere disappeared, Jensen interviewed bar employees and patrons and discovered that "Paul" had started coming to the bar about a month before. He had an East Coast accent, a white semi-truck and a penchant for bragging that he often drove moving vans for famous athletes.

The Sheriff's Office had an artist make a composite sketch of Paul, which was released to the media. In early October, a woman reported meeting the man in another Kent bar three nights before Lamphere disappeared.

She said the man had bragged that he once played for the Boston Red Sox, and he gave her a business card from the team equipment manager as proof. Jensen soon learned that a mover who hauled team equipment had stolen some business cards, and the moving company confirmed that driver Paul Goyette had been in the Seattle area.

Detectives later interviewed the Massachusetts resident, who acknowledged hanging out at Sappho's, but denied leaving with Lamphere. Then he changed his story, saying he showed Lamphere his new truck but she returned to the bar and he left alone.

A search of Goyette's truck in Waltham, Mass., turned up few clues. But Goyette failed one lie detector test; a second was inconclusive.

Still, Elizabeth Lamphere had not been found.

Then, on Nov. 29, two employees smoking behind Chipman's Moving and Storage in Kent -- a local agent of Goyette's company -- found the remains of a partially clothed woman. She had been shot in the head and dumped in a ditch.

Goyette later confessed, claiming he shot Lamphere when she tried to rob him. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and is serving 15 years in prison.

"If we hadn't pursued the missing-persons case from the beginning, I don't think we'd ever have gotten the arrest," Jensen said.

For Benton, who raised Charles Lamphere, the case inspired her to become a paralegal. Jensen, she said, is "a hero to me."

"The difference in the way King County police saw this case from the way Kent did is like night and day," she said.

"They believed us. They saw all the red flags."

Petersen, the Kent spokesman, says she's right.

"Had we investigated this more thoroughly . . . we probably would've found suspicious circumstances," Petersen said.

"Perhaps raising these issues will help us get a policy in place so that we will at least be willing to take a missing-persons report and transfer it to another agency. That's something I think the department's policymakers need to look at."

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Part 4: Serial killers prey on 'the less dead'

By MIKE BARBER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Leonard Hicks and Deborah McDaniel thought they were doing what responsible parents ought to do, that day in 1990 when they told police their daughter, Tia, was missing.

Hicks signed the missing-person report at 2:20 p.m. Dec. 13 and the couple gave a picture to the Seattle police community service officer, who said she would pass it on to a detective.

Hicks hadn't heard from Tia since Nov. 19, when he had dropped her off near the Elbow Room Cafe in Columbia City. She had been visiting him and her grandfather and needed a ride home. So Hicks dropped her off, planning to go cash a check to give her some money later.

But Tia vanished.

At first, Hicks didn't think much about it. Tia, 20, sometimes dropped out of sight for days at a time. But as days stretched into weeks, he called police.

Hicks was frank with the Seattle detective who responded the day after the missing-person report was filed, saying that Tia had a drug problem and sometimes was out of touch. He wanted to tell everything he knew, to help them find Tia.

The detective heard it a different way. In his report, he wrote that Hicks "explained . . . this is not the first time that Tia had not come home in several days."

The report was filed away as "unfounded" and purged from state and national crime computers.

"The police concluded Tia was not a minor, was of age and there was not much they could do," said her mother, who lives in Federal Way.

Six months would pass before police learned that Tia had been murdered.

It's impossible to say whether a better response would have saved Tia or led police to her killer. Seattle police now say they've fixed their system -- with sweeping changes coming last year after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked about problems such as the Hicks case.

But even before police knew Tia was dead the only suspect in her murder had killed two women in Oregon -- entering the ranks of known Northwest serial killers.

"Officers take a chance with such cases by sloughing them off as 'just doing drugs or prostitution,' and they can get away with it -- until that one case like Tia's comes along where they should have taken it more seriously," said Tom Jensen, a veteran King County detective who took up Tia's case when no one else would.

Robert Ressler, a former FBI agent who has interviewed dozens of serial killers and helped start the bureau's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program -- ViCAP -- said that's a lesson more departments need to learn.

"That's just common sense, but it's something that police continue to fall down on," Ressler said. "If they really hit it hard, they can probably prevent a killer from getting his next victim."

Ressler and other experts in the field know that serial killers, the sexual psychopaths and sociopaths whose crimes generally appear random and motiveless, are adept at using the system against itself. They prey on people like Tia Hicks -- a drug user police suspected of prostitution, though she had no record -- because they are more vulnerable than most.

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Criminologist Steven Egger calls the victims of serial killers "the less dead" because they are usually people who have been marginalized -- prostitutes, drug users, homosexuals, farm workers, hospital patients and the elderly.

"We don't spend a lot of time dealing with missing people who aren't particularly important; who don't have a lot of prestige," said Egger, a University of Houston-Clear Lake professor and former police officer. It's a public failing as well as a police failing, a common belief being that such people take big risks and get what they deserve.

Leonard Hicks wasn't willing to let his daughter go out that way.


The father cared

A month after the first report was snubbed in 1991, Hicks walked into the King County Sheriff's Office, approached a clerk and asked for help. This time he got it. He was sent to Jensen, who was then single-handedly keeping the Green River serial murder investigation alive.

"This was just one case where a dad cared enough to come in to report his daughter missing," said Jensen, who is now retired but remains a consultant to the revived Green River Task Force.

"It's significant when a parent walks in. You have to take it seriously," Jensen said. "I had seen enough of this crap with these agencies that wouldn't take reports, or dump them. It was always my policy to take a report."

The fact that the case was in Seattle's jurisdiction didn't matter. After years of experience with the likes of Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer, King County knew missing-person reports can be a clue that something is amiss -- sometimes the first indication of a murder. Taking them seriously can yield fresh evidence, statements from witnesses with fresh memories, names of people last seen with the missing person. If nothing else, Jensen said, investigators may quickly obtain dental records, DNA and other forensic samples for later use.

Michael Nault, a retired King County police detective commander who led two serial murder investigations during his career and now is a U.S. Department of Justice and State Department contractor working with Indonesian police, said Jensen's instincts are right.

"There is no more important nexus to find serial killers than missing persons," Nault said. "The major things done wrong in the Ted Bundy and Green River cases were failures to track and identify missing persons."

Knowing this, Jensen immediately began his own investigation. He ran computer checks, looked for prostitutes who might have known Tia and contacted the father of her two sons, who was then in jail. He came away with a long list of names and locations to check.

Jensen was working the case on April 22, 1991, when something on his computer screen caught his attention. Seattle police had reopened its "unfounded" case, entering it in state and national crime databases and superseding the case Jensen had posted there.

The reason: A man checking out an old boat stored in the parking lot of the Silver Dollar Casino in Mountlake Terrace had found the nude body of a woman in the bilge. Tia was identified through her fingerprints and dental work, but after six months there was precious little evidence for investigators to go on.