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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:46:18 GMT -5
A learning curve
Dick Kraske, a former King County Sheriff's major who first headed the Green River serial murder investigation in 1982, saw the same thing happen with missing persons more than 15 years earlier. Kraske, who retired in 1990, was there at the beginning of the learning curve for police when serial killer Ted Bundy's murder spree was putting the Pacific Northwest on the map in the 1970s.
In the middle of the "Ted" investigation, before Bundy was unmasked, the failure to form a nexus between missing persons and serial murder blew up in the county's face.
"The missing-person issue stomped us bad back when Bundy was running around the country," Kraske recalls.
It happened over the disappearance of 19-year-old Vonnie Stuth of Burien on Nov. 28, 1974. Stuth was initially thought to be a Bundy victim. Stuth's husband, Todd, had tried to report her missing almost immediately after she disappeared, only to be rebuffed by a police dispatcher who cited a 48-hour waiting period then required by state law.
Six months later, Gary Addison Taylor, 40, an escaped Michigan mental patient suspected in the murders of four women and several sexual assaults in Michigan and Texas stretching back to 1957, as well as a string of freeway sniper attacks, was arrested in Houston. His long confession led authorities to her grave near the house in Enumclaw where he had moved a few days before killing Stuth.
Public outcry over Taylor and Bundy, especially loud because the victims were generally young college students or middle-class women, prompted reforms in the reporting system and helped bring back the death penalty to Washington state. Stuth's family helped found the non-profit Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims in Seattle, one of the first victim advocate groups in the nation.
Authorities said Stuth had been shot twice in the head during a desperate escape attempt.
What was frustrating, Kraske said, is that investigators on the Bundy case had been asking colleagues to give higher priority to missing-person cases.
"I thought, 'goddamn, some people just don't get the word,' " Kraske said.
"We didn't have too good a track record until 1974 when Bundy descended on us. Then we had a lot of discussion about the communications center people screening people to determine that a missing-person case was not just run of the mill. There was a consensus that it was being done wrong."
Northwest killers
The Pacific Northwest seems to have had more than its share of high-profile killers, including some of the most infamous -- Bundy, Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi and the Green River Killer among them.
But Kraske and other veteran investigators and criminologists don't believe the Pacific Northwest's reputation as a breeding ground for sociopaths. They caution that serial killers are at work everywhere -- police in the Northwest are just better than most at detecting them.
"In some states, 'serial' is what they have for breakfast," said John Turner, chief criminal investigator of the state's Homicide Investigation Tracking System -- or HITS -- a unit of six veteran homicide investigators who use a computer to track violent crime statewide.
In a yearlong investigation, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found major flaws in the way Washington law enforcement handles reports of missing persons and unidentified bodies, but it also found a startling fact: Washington's system is the best there is.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:47:38 GMT -5
The HITS system, created in 1987 with a federal Justice Department grant, and now run by the state Attorney General's Office, is widely known as a national model and functions even better than the federal government's vaunted ViCAP, formed in 1985 to improve communication between law enforcement agencies nationwide.
HITS operates in a similar fashion within the state and, to a lesser degree, with police in Oregon and Idaho. The unit was founded by Bob Keppel, the Attorney General's chief investigator and a former King County detective who pursued Bundy. He has since retired.
HITS in 1991 expanded to include reports of "missing persons with foul play" in its database of murdered and missing. At last count, it held 7,404 murders and disappearances from Washington, but included some from Oregon and Idaho. Of them, 1,827 are unsolved, and 178 are missing-person cases believed to have potential for foul play.
"We get every murder, or at least pretty close to every one," said HITS investigator Jim Hansen.
What sets HITS apart, however, is its team of veteran homicide investigators, all retirees from local departments. Each is responsible for a region of the state in which they collect data on violent crimes from each police agency and provide confidential consultation about tough cases.
Programs such as HITS are critical in overcoming "linkage blindness," a term coined by Egger, the University of Houston criminologist, to describe the failure to recognize related crimes.
Serial killers, for example, often can escape detection for some time by crossing jurisdictional lines. Detectives tend to focus intently on the crimes they're investigating while often being hyper-secretive for fear that media exposure could damage a prosecution, tip their hand to a suspect or bring public pressure to make an arrest.
Sometimes, departments in the same region end up chasing the same killer for months before they discover that their cases have anything in common -- or officers may not make a connection when a string of people drop out of sight and are dismissed as flakes or runaways.
"Linkage blindness is basically a communication problem," Egger said. It's an Achilles heel in the nation's strongly decentralized police departments, which range from one-man departments to thousands.
But Egger said police nationally "have gotten better because the press has done a better job of identifying patterns and putting pressure on police."
"Police have done a better job of sharing information, but there is a long way to go," he said.
Some states now require that departments fight linkage blindness by sending case information to ViCAP. New York legislators, for example, passed such a requirement in 2001. A new, easier-to-use online ViCAP system has allowed more states to join in, and the number of cases in the system has grown from 17,000 in 1998 to 80,000 today.
Kirk Mellecker, a major-case specialist with ViCAP, said it now can effectively pinpoint the unique aspects of crimes, linking them in ways local police may miss.
"If it's a prostitute dumped nude in an alley somewhere, we probably won't be able to give as much help as we'd like," Mellecker said. "That's what happens to prostitutes.
"But if you've got a string of prostitutes dumped across five states and each of them are wearing a red bow tie, that's where we can step in and help police recognize patterns. The main benefit here is that through ViCAP, we're bringing police agencies together."
While ViCAP's star is rising, HITS has been the victim of declining support. The state program's budget has fallen from $1.6 million in 1993 to $1.3 million in 1999, forcing the elimination of one investigator's position.
Last month Gov. Gary Locke proposed a budget that would have eliminated HITS, but since has backed away, instead allowing the agency to live on slightly less money.
Robin Campbell, of the state Office of Financial Management, blamed the initial cut on a lack of information, and said lawmakers will instead be asked to fund HITS.
That reversal has made local police breathe easier. Over the years, the program has linked scores of seemingly unrelated cases and generated information to keep other cases alive -- just as it connected an Oregon man's crimes to similar attacks in Washington state, making him the only suspect in the murder of Tia Hicks.
Investigator saw more
A month after Tia's body was found, HITS received a Seattle police report of a woman who had been raped, choked and left for dead in May 1991.
The case was not being pursued because the woman, a prostitute, was intoxicated -- all factors making it a long shot that police would ever make a case -- but a HITS investigator saw more.
The assailant clearly intended to kill the woman, and his method of operation indicated that this probably wasn't a first-time attack.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:48:07 GMT -5
Though the victim didn't know the man's name, he was thought to be a truck driver, a job that would make it easy to avoid detection for similar crimes elsewhere.
HITS helped activate the case and sent a bulletin to police agencies in the state and in Oregon, where investigators recognized similarities to the murder of two Portland prostitutes.
On Nov. 24, 1990 -- a week after Tia disappeared -- Rheena Ann Brunson, a suspected prostitute with no history of arrest, was found dead in front of a Portland Safeway store. She had been handcuffed and was stabbed in the heart. On Feb. 19, 1991, the partially clad body of Victoria Rhone, who had a prostitution record, was found in a railroad car in suburban Portland. She had been strangled.
Scott William Cox, a Portland man who has family in Tacoma, was linked by DNA evidence to the Brunson and Rhone murders. He pleaded no contest in September 1993 to two counts of intentional murder, and is serving a 25-year term in Oregon.
Cox, whose long-haul driving took him across the West from Canada to Mexico and as far east as Ohio, has drawn the interest of police nationwide who were examining at least 20 similar murders of known or suspected prostitutes.
He's also of interest to police in Mountlake Terrace.
Perusing the five binders compiled during an investigation now more than a decade cold, Mountlake Terrace Police Sgt. Craig McCaul said decomposition was so complete that there was nothing to indicate when or where Tia was killed.
"The evidence is very circumstantial," he said. "We don't know what caused her death."
Time had also eliminated any recoverable DNA that might have been used to match the victim to her killer.
Decomposition is just one factor. The lack of an initial investigation right after Tia was reported missing also means detectives had to try to piece together her movements right before her death long after memories had faded or witnesses had moved on.
Cox has not been charged in connection with the Hicks murder, but Mountlake Terrace police said they consider him their only suspect.
McCaul said investigators checking out Cox's long-hauling trips to Washington placed him in Mountlake Terrace between the time of Tia's disappearance and the discovery of her body. In fact, a delivery route to a car dealership would have taken him past the Silver Dollar Casino, McCaul said.
"We sent people to interview him twice. We had the (Snohomish County) Prosecutor's Office write a memo saying we want to close the case and would give him immunity, but he would never confess to Tia Hicks' case," McCaul said.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:48:40 GMT -5
No blame cast
Oct. 2 would have been Tia's 32nd birthday. Each year, her family gets together with Tia's two sons, now teenagers and doing well, for a celebration of her life.
Leonard Hicks died more than three years ago, frustrated that Tia's killer was not made to answer.
Her mother, Deborah McDaniel, keeps Tia's ashes in a box surrounded by angel dolls and family photos.
Detectives kept her informed long after Tia's body was found and had indulged her frequent phone calls.
Despite the crucial early foul-ups in investigating her daughter's case, McDaniel is reluctant to cast blame on police officers. The problem, she said, is more systemic.
"I wish they had more manpower or they had searched harder," she said.
Yet, after a dozen years, "I would like some resolution, some closure," McDaniel said.
"If this person (Cox) is not the one, it's someone else who could be out doing something to someone else's daughter or child."
MORE INFORMATION
Comprehensive background on convicted and suspected serial killers in Washington state
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:51:21 GMT -5
Part 5: Serial killers -- they're not always who we think By MIKE BARBER SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER For years, the issue of whether Charles T. Sinclair was a bona fide serial killer remained a question of his intentions. Like serial killers, he trolled -- from New Mexico to Canada. Like serial killers, he had a pattern, killing coin shop dealers, all strangers. But unlike the popular perception of serial killers, Sinclair appeared to have a motive -- money. Serial murderers are said to kill without conscience, for power, even for pleasure. People who kill for money are robbers. But when Pete Piccini, a Jefferson County cop who chased Sinclair for years, entered a ministorage shed near Sumas in 1990, he discovered a pile of evidence and a mountain of conflicting ideas about Sinclair and his crimes. In the bottom of a barrel in the shed were a yellow flowered bed sheet and pillows. They matched the linen used to strangle and wrap the body of 18-year-old Amanda Stavik. Stavik, a Central Washington University student, vanished Thanksgiving Eve 1989 while jogging. Her body was found Nov. 27 in the South Fork of the Nooksack River. There was evidence of rape. Another item to emerge from the shed was a school yearbook. Leafing through it, investigators saw Stavik's picture. She had been a classmate of Sinclair's son. Piccini, diligently running down a missing-person report from his own county, had discovered a sex crime that called into question the profile of a man then sought as "The Coin Shop Killer." "It was hard to define Sinclair; he was all over the map," said Piccini, who retired as Jefferson County sheriff in December. Unlike Hollywood's Hannibal Lecter or the real-life Ted Bundy, not all serial killers present an easy-to-spot profile ripe with rituals, methods and arcane messages. Many remain unnoticed for years because their crimes show little or no common link. Charles Sinclair defied the textbook definition of serial killer, even though he is thought to have killed more than a dozen people, including six in Western Washington. Even now, Piccini struggles to understand exactly what kind of monster he had found. A new way of thinking Those who study serial murder -- including some who wrote books about it -- say their definitions have changed as they have learned more about the little-understood phenomenon. Robert Ressler, a pioneering homicide investigator often credited with coining the term "serial murder," said he and others in the FBI's fabled Behavioral Science Unit created the definition in the 1970s "to get over the bureaucracy that was limiting the scope of what criminal offenses were." "It was mostly a way for us to communicate with ourselves and with law enforcement outside the FBI," Ressler said. "We had to come up with new definitions to change the FBI's way of thinking." At the time, the FBI's Uniform Crime Report allowed just five categories to describe murder. "That was totally inadequate," Ressler said. "So we put our heads together and came up with 43 different classifications." Among them, mass murder -- killing three or more people in one incident -- and spree killings, several murders one after another. Ressler's group defined serial murder as "three or more murders (with) a cooling-off period between the crimes. That's serial homicide. It's very much based on a fantasy that builds and builds during this cooling-off period that leads to premeditation and planning for the next murder." The FBI has since tinkered with that definition, reducing the number of homicides to two, said Larry Ankrom, Unit Chief of the bureau's Behavioral Science Unit-West Region. But even that definition isn't steadfast. "Even one murder can distinguish someone as a serial killer," said Robert Keppel, a former King County detective who worked the Bundy and Green River cases and is now one of the foremost experts on multiple murders. "The characteristics in a single-victim homicide can help you predict if the killer is going to do it again." And even crimes short of murder, including rape or assault, can lead authorities to conclude the attacker may also be a serial killer. Even while trying to define the phenomenon, criminologists warn that trying to be too precise can have deadly consequences. Steve Egger, an internationally known authority on serial homicide and pattern crimes, said too much is made of defining spree, mass and serial killers. He figures a serial can happen with two murders. "It's frustrating," said Egger, a former homicide detective who now teaches at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. "There are a whole range of theories, some good, but they don't match all the killers out there."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:52:22 GMT -5
Spree or serial?
Two former Tacomans, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, await trial in Virginia in relation to the monthlong string of Washington, D.C., sniper slayings last fall. They're also suspects in a Tacoma slaying that occurred months earlier, making a total of 13 deaths they have been linked to.
Yet, the D.C. sniper is widely classified as a spree killer -- a cousin of the serial killer whose actions are often triggered by some rage-inducing event stemming from a perceived failure or rejection, killing anyone they encounter over a shorter period.
Egger, however, considers the snipers to be serial killers.
"It is about domination and control," he said. "I think it was about power over life and death (because the snipers) appeared to be choosing victims and playing games with police."
Other strings of slayings more comfortably fit the general definition of serial killings.
Robert Pickton, a Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farmer, is accused of killing several prostitutes who disappeared from the streets of Vancouver in recent years -- a more familiar pattern, much like the Seattle-area Green River murders in the 1980s.
But not all killers follow such an obvious plan in selecting victims. And not all fit the Hollywood profile of loners, cannibals and misfits.
Some are like Charles Sinclair.
Sinclair, a New Mexico native, was a Navy veteran of the Vietnam War and a father of two teenagers. He had been an oil field worker, farmer and gun shop owner -- unknown to law enforcement until people he met began turning up dead in the 1980s.
"In Hobbs, he had been big in the neighborhood, a nice guy, opened a gun store and expanded it into sporting goods," Piccini said of Sinclair's life in New Mexico. "Then he needed money. That's when his routine began."
Sinclair's first crime was likely embezzlement. When a bank began looking for $30,000 in missing money, he and his family "went into the wind," Piccini said. They surfaced in Deming, Wash., living under assumed names, in 1985.
Piccini's long struggle to understand Sinclair began the following summer, when he was assigned to run down a missing-person report. Robert D. Linton, 64, and his wife, Dagmar, 62, retirees from Stockton, Calif., were on their way to Expo '86 in Vancouver, B.C., when they stopped at a Brinnon, Wash.-area campground. They unhooked their travel trailer and drove off in their truck on a day-trip to the Mount Baker area. They were never seen again.
"We went down to the campground thinking maybe they just took a trip," Piccini recalls. "But I got a little shaky about it because they had been gone a week. We got inside the trailer, and everything was set up like they were coming back."
Jefferson County investigators first checked out the couple's credit card and found it was used to pay for a movie and gasoline near Marblemount, 125 miles and a ferry ride east of Jefferson County, not long after they disappeared.
Over the next three weeks, the card was used up and down the Interstate 5 corridor, as far south as Cottage Grove, Ore. Investigators suspected the killer had taken the Linton's car as well.
Tracking the card, Piccini noted an attempt to buy two 50-peso Mexican gold pieces, $500 a copy, at an Oregon coin shop. Much later, he would know exactly how close the shop owners had come to death.
The Coin Shop Killer would show interest in a piece, but profess to be short of cash -- an excuse to ask the dealer to open the shop early or late so he could come back with money. Usually that meant the dealer would be alone -- an easy target.
The gold coin purchase in Oregon didn't go through and the "buyer" didn't come back later with cash as promised -- likely because the dealers never worked alone and always were armed. They later described the man with the credit card to Piccini. Their description fit Sinclair -- taller than 6 feet, 4 inches, big hair in a bandanna.
By then, Jefferson County investigators were just three days behind the credit card user, and were narrowing the gap. Piccini was getting ready to spring when someone tipped his hand.
"All of a sudden the story hits the paper, then the wire service, and then television is all over, looking at the Linton's trailer, Piccini said. "The credit card usage stopped. We lost him."
Worse, Piccini said, "He went on killing."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:53:10 GMT -5
A hunting buddy
Over the next four years, the Coin Shop Killer became a suspect in robbery-murders in Spokane; Vancouver, B.C.; Vacaville, Calif.; Kansas City, Mo.; Watertown, N.Y.; and Billings, Mont.
All the while, Piccini kept the Linton's file on his desk. Any time he saw any report of a crime anywhere with an unusually tall suspect he would call that police department for details. One summer day in 1990 he saw a Teletype about a coin shop robbery in Utah.
"He didn't follow his usual routine," Piccini said of the Utah robbery. "Usually he'd shoot someone and then shoot them again behind the ear. This one he shot, but didn't shoot them again."
The clerk was able describe an unusually tall robber who had given the name Weir. After several dead ends, police found a man named Jimmy Charles Weir -- and learned he was a victim of stolen identity.
The real Weir had a hunting buddy: Charles Sinclair.
From 1985 to 1989, Sinclair, calling himself Jimmy Charles Weir, had lived on a rented farm near Deming, about 50 miles northwest of Marblemount -- the town where the Linton's credit card had been used.
Local police from several states met in Montana to discuss the breakthrough and quickly discovered that federal agents who were supposed to look for pattern killers had let them down.
"A lot of police agencies filed information with . . . the FBI (which) never let the agencies know about all these reports of coin dealers being killed," Piccini said. "When the FBI came into the case . . . our question to them was, 'You had all these police reports from agencies around the U.S. and Canada and never put it together or let us know. How did that happen?' "
No one has been able to answer that question, he said.
Sinclair, still calling himself Weir, was tracked to Alaska, where he was arrested Aug. 13, 1990, near Kenney Lake, where he was trying to buy a farm. More than a dozen police departments made the trek to the jail in Cook Inlet, Alaska, to get what they could from him. Piccini was there in October 1990.
"He was as cold as a snake on a stone," Piccini said at the time. "I showed him pictures and his face didn't change but he was swallowing. He knew them."
Twelve years later, he recalled that Sinclair "was very surprised to see me. I told him we weren't interested in prosecuting -- we would just have to stand in line with bigger fish waiting to get at him. We just wanted to know where the missing were."
But Sinclair took his secrets with him. He died of a heart attack at 44 on Oct. 30, 1990.
In addition to the Lintons and Stavik, Sinclair is now thought to have killed three others in Washington state, starting with the 1980 slaying of David M. Sutton at the Bennington Auction Co. in Everett.
He is also thought to have killed a young Canadian couple, Jay Roland Cook, 20, and his girlfriend, Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18, who disappeared after getting off a Bremerton-to-Seattle ferry in 1987. The girl, sexually assaulted and shot, was found Thanksgiving Day, dumped in a ditch near Burlington. Cook was strangled and dumped near Monroe.
Piccini sought help from the FBI's relatively new Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, ViCAP, a computer capable of suggesting patterns to killings.
The computer's results were inconclusive, but Piccini notes some common points. Cook and Van Cuylenborg, like the Lintons, had driven through Brinnon and were en route to Bremerton to catch a ferry before they disappeared. The Lintons' truck later was found abandoned in public parking at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport; the Canadian couple's van at a parking lot in Bellingham.
After Sinclair's arrest in 1990, his common-law wife, Debby, was extradited to New Mexico to answer questions about the alleged embezzlement. Neither she nor their children, who could not be located for comment, were implicated or charged in the robberies and killings.
"She was more like an ostrich," Piccini said. "She just never asked. He would bring home coins, cash them in, and they'd party and then he'd go out again."
He kept everything
What police found in Sinclair's storage locker in Sumas comes closest to answering the question of whether he was an unusually violent robber or belongs on the list of more than 40 serial killers known to have operated in Washington state.
Many serial killers keep trophies, often-common items that remind them of the thrill of a murder. Sinclair kept everything.
Investigators in Sumas found a big Rolex watch taken from Lucky Williams, a coin dealer murdered in California, and Lucky's sale book. They found stacks of phony identification.
They found matchbooks Sinclair had saved from almost everywhere he went.
"Half were places where the murders were," Piccini said.
They even found everything charged on the Linton's credit card, including a clarinet, school supplies, household goods and even underwear from J.C. Penney's.
The inventory brought a chilling realization.
"Sinclair's daughter needed a clarinet," Piccini said. "His wife needed a crockpot and he needed some more coins.
"That's why the Lintons died -- he needed their credit card. He didn't give anybody mercy. He was a sociopath."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:55:01 GMT -5
Part 6 -- In their own words: The twisted art of murder By LEWIS KAMB SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER WALLA WALLA -- He tells his story casually, between yawns, revealing unspeakable horrors the way most people talk about the weather. Joe Kondro, shackled at the wrists, rests a chin on his big hands as he tells how he used them to rape and kill a little girl, and get away with it for a dozen years. Get away with it long enough to do it again. And if he had a second chance, he says, he wouldn't be in this small room being watched so intently by armed guards. If he could change just one thing, Kondro says, he would've been more careful in hiding his final victim's body. Then, he'd be free now to rape and kill again. Joe Kondro. Adopted son. Father of six. Serial killer. He was allowed to go free for so long, he says, because he learned to exploit the gaps and weaknesses of the law enforcement system. "When a police officer can't find a body, what can he do?" he asks, already knowing the answer. In another prison, behind walls just as drab, another student of murder explains his own twisted art of hiding the dead. Time and distance, Keith Hunter Jesperson says, is all it takes. Separate yourself from the body and don't be seen. Meet a victim one place, dump her someplace else -- in another town, another county, another state -- somewhere no one is looking for the missing. "The longer it takes to find a body, the better," Jesperson says. "But you don't have to take it 20 miles away to dump it. You can put a body in the Dumpster next door if you feel comfortable that no one can pin it on you." That's why it's best to take strangers, he says, victims who can't be linked to you. Keith Hunter Jesperson, the infamous Happy Face Killer, has boasted of murdering as many as 160 women. His confessions tie him to eight murders in five states, including one in Washington. He might still be on the road had he not failed to heed his own advice.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:55:53 GMT -5
The killers among us are always learning. Even with advances in police and forensic technology, experts say, killers learn new tricks that allow them to continue their morbid harvest. Both Kondro and Jesperson killed for years before anyone knew their victims shared a common killer, much less who that killer might be.
One lesson each learned early on is that police rarely can track down a killer if they can't find a body. Without a body, a murder can be forgotten as a routine missing-person case.
And even if a body is found, both killers know that paying attention to matters of time and distance can mean that police can't always determine who that body belongs to, or who did the victim in.
State and national law enforcement databases hold thousands of records of unidentified bodies and reports of missing people, but oversight, error and bureaucratic glitches often prevent anyone from linking a body found here to a person missing there. And sometimes the dead are never found.
For Kondro it was simple: He hid 8-year-old Rima Traxler so well that no one ever found her.
"I figured if I could take her and bury her in a place far enough away, there was no way they'd go find her or go looking for her there," he says. "I was right."
On the afternoon of May 15, 1985, Kondro, then a 25-year-old laborer, was driving to the store for beer and cigarettes when he saw Rima walking home from St. Helens Elementary School in Longview.
Rima's parents were his close friends; she trusted him like family. Just that morning, he had been at her home, drinking beer with her step-dad, an old high school pal.
"I pulled over and thought, 'If she gets into my car, I'm going to take her out to the woods . . . ' " Kondro says. "And she just jumped in."
Kondro drove to a remote swimming hole on Germany Creek west of town. He raped, bludgeoned and strangled the third-grader, then buried her behind a tree. When Rima didn't return home from school, her desperate mother went to Kondro for help.
"She asked me if her daughter was there," Kondro says flatly. "She started crying and she actually used my phone to call in the missing-persons report."
Police searched for Rima, but found nothing.
Kondro also went on a hunt -- for other victims. He gives little away, but acknowledges that 11 years later he found 12-year-old Kara Rudd.
Kondro also knew Kara's family, and lived for a time at their home. The girl and her sister called him "Uncle Joe."
One fall day in 1996 he took Kara and a friend to an abandoned house on the banks of the Columbia River.
"That was like a test run," Kondro says. "I was planning on raping and killing them both."
He had already picked the place where he would dump the bodies; a spot chosen on one of his many long drives through the dense forest around Longview. His cruising was part of the game, a chance to savor the anticipation.
On a cold November day in 1996, Kondro met Kara and her friend near their school while on his way to drop off a job application. He stopped and talked to the girls, and agreed to help Kara skip class. When he came by the school later, Kara hopped in his gold Firebird.
Kondro took her to the abandoned house, where he beat, raped and strangled her, then loaded her body into his car. Off a logging road on Mount Solo he wedged the body under a rusted shell of an abandoned Volkswagen he had found in a deep ravine.
"The search started right away," Kondro says. "The school called her mom and said, 'Hey, your daughter's absent.' "
Kara's friend, who had come close to sharing her fate, told authorities about Kondro.
By then, the killer had covered his tracks. He had washed his clothes, showered and thrown away his shoes. Police searched his home and questioned him, but came away empty-handed.
"I knew they didn't have any solid evidence," he says. "I knew they didn't have a body."
More than six weeks later, detectives searched the Mount Solo area on a hunch. They'd heard Kondro sometimes liked to hang out there. They found Kara's body, and DNA evidence that sealed the case against Kondro.
"I should've buried her in a different place," Kondro says. "Still, it took them 49 days to find her."
Facing the death penalty, Kondro bartered for his life with a secret he'd kept for 12 years.
"Police had given up on Rima's murder," he says. "They couldn't find her. They even admitted they couldn't do anything without a body."
He confessed to Rima's murder and explained how and where he hid her small body beneath debris, but investigators still haven't found her.
Kondro is now serving 55 years in the Washington State Penitentiary.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:56:34 GMT -5
Methodic killer
Like Kondro, Jesperson was a methodic killer. A long-haul trucker, Jesperson often chose women he met on the road -- truck-stop hookers and hitchhikers, women he derided as "lot lizards."
"I had a transient lifestyle," he says. "They were victimized because they were in my lifestyle."
In 1990, the Canadian-born Jesperson was a divorced, 35-year-old father of three leading a trucker's life out of the Northwest when he claimed his first known victim.
He met Taunja Bennett, 23 years old and mildly retarded, at a Portland bar. Later he beat, raped and strangled her, then drove east, up the Columbia River Gorge. On a dark, wooded stretch of highway he tossed his victim down an embankment.
He drove miles away to discard Bennett's purse and Walkman in bushes along a river, before getting coffee at a truck stop.
"When you're throwing away bodies, the real adversary out there is not the police, it's the public," Jesperson says. "You're trying to avoid being seen by them. You can't be placed at a dumpsite."
Jesperson never was. He not only avoided detection in the Bennett murder, he remained free to kill again as two innocent people were sent to prison.
After Bennett's body was found, a middle-age homemaker named Laverne Pavlinac told police that her boyfriend, John Sosnovske, forced her to help him kill Bennett and conceal the crime. Pavlinac learned details about the case from news accounts, and later produced a cut-out section of denim that seemed to match one missing from the fly of Bennett's jeans. Pavlinac also led investigators to the approximate area of the dumpsite.
The story was convincing enough to convict Pavlinac and Sosnovske of murder. Her recantation and explanation that she hoped to escape an abusive relationship by putting Sosnovske in prison came too late.
All the while Jesperson was picking up women along his truck route, dumping their bodies in ditches and along roads, sometimes miles away from where he met them. No one even knew a serial killer was at large -- until he decided to brag.
Two and a half years after Bennett's murder, anonymous letters were sent to an Oregon court and a newspaper, detailing slayings of women in California and Oregon. A "happy face" doodle was the only signature, and the unknown confessor was soon dubbed "The Happy Face Killer."
At the time, nothing linked the dead women to one another or Jesperson.
But after years of careful planning, Jesperson slipped up. Julie Ann Winningham's friends and family in Camas knew she was dating him. She even told them he was her fiancé.
When her body was found along a highway in Clark County in March 1995, friends told police about Jesperson. He was questioned and released -- there was no hard evidence to link him to the murder.
By then, Jesperson was ready to quit. A few days later, he wrote a letter to his brother admitting to eight killings over five years. He soon called a Clark County detective and confessed, but only to Winningham's murder.
"They didn't even know I was a serial killer until I told them," Jesperson says. "They had me down for one murder and that's it."
While awaiting trial, Jesperson began writing to the press about other murders, trying to trade information to avoid a death sentence. He confessed to killing Bennett, an admission authorities initially declined to accept. But Jesperson was able to prove his own guilt. For a reporter, he sketched a diagram of where he discarded Bennett's purse, and searchers later found it. He also passed a lie detector test and eventually, Pavlinac and Sosnovske were freed.
His admissions, along with handwriting analysis and DNA tests, were used to link Jesperson to killings described in the Happy Face letters.
At times, Jesperson has boasted of killing more than 160 women, but pleaded guilty to only four murders -- one each in Washington and Wyoming and two in Oregon. He's taken credit for three killings in California and one in Florida, but those cases haven't been prosecuted. Although he drew maps of where bodies were dumped and remains have been found, some victims haven't been identified or their causes of deaths not substantiated.
"Is there more? Yeah. But do I want to expose them? No. Why should I?" Jesperson says. "There's no benefit in it for me."
Kondro, who has been a suspect in more than 70 slayings, is equally coy when asked about potential victims.
Over the years, detectives have tried to persuade him that he could do right by the families of victims, to help recover bodies and end agonizing mysteries.
"I won't go there," he says with a smirk, the only sign of emotion during a three-hour interview.
Even behind bars for the rest of their lives, two killers remain loyal to their twisted rules of murder -- holding on to secrets or lies, keeping old skeletons hidden.
"People talk about closure, but in my opinion, it just doesn't exist," Jesperson says. "It's almost better for someone to believe their loved one is going to come home, rather than them knowing they're dead and dumped somewhere."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 0:59:04 GMT -5
Part 7: Records often are as hard to find as a body By LISE OLSEN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER No one called the police when Jeff Sheyphe disappeared. His landlord boxed up and sold his belongings when the rent came due. His boss assumed he had just taken off. Months would pass before his partially mummified body was discovered in the woods near Olympia. He lay in the Thurston County morgue for nearly a year before he was identified, all by chance. Across the state, some 97 other unidentified bodies still wait to be buried under their own name. At least 19 are murder victims -- cases in which investigators first must solve the mystery of their identity before finding their killer. Three are thought to be victims of the Green River Killer, who is blamed for the murders of dozens of women from the Seattle area in the early 1980s. Another Green River victim, whose remains were found in Oregon, also is unidentified. The King County Sheriff's Office now has 11 officers working the Green River case, and an Auburn man, Gary Ridgway, awaits trial on charges that he killed four of the women who have long been on the Green River list. Authorities say DNA and other evidence links him to the victims. As part of the continuing investigation of dozens of other murders, police are working hard to try to link Ridgway to other crimes and to finally identify all the victims. They have collected DNA samples from the families of known missing women to try to find a match. Not all unidentified dead bodies receive the same attention, even if it's a clear-cut case of homicide. Without a name, investigators are stymied. They cannot find family, friends -- or suspects. Gilbert W. Arias / P-I Robinette Struckel, autopsy technician with the King County Medical Examiner's Office, prepares an unidentified skull for X-rays before the skull is examined by Kathy Taylor, a forensic anthropologist. Forget the television shows where unusually attractive techs in space-age labs make a quick arrest on the basis of a bone shard or a smear of blood. Real-life investigators often are left with little to go on, and few resources to help. Coroners and medical examiners statewide said they cannot afford to autopsy all unidentified corpses. Other cities and counties may do more, but many are unwilling to pay the high cost of DNA tests or facial reconstruction and artist's sketches that could help people recognize a lost loved one. In fact, authorities have released photos or sketches for only about 19 of the 97 unidentified bodies in the state. Four were made only after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer asked about the cases.
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 1:00:25 GMT -5
Records lost or destroyed
All anonymous dead bodies are supposed to be entered into state and national databases that automatically compare them with descriptions of missing persons. Under Washington state law, information for most corpses should also be there.
But in a yearlong investigation, the P-I found that many bodies never make it into the system. Records for one in 10 cases have been lost or destroyed.
Taylor used the case as part of a presentation she gave to law enforcement officials and coroners in Washington on difficult unsolved cases. She chose it because the corpse had mummified, and because the victim had an unusual healed wound where he had once been shot in the chest.
Corpses are routinely X-rayed by medical examiners' offices to look for any identifying characteristics.
At a presentation sponsored by the FBI in Seattle in early 2000, Terry Harper, a new deputy coroner from Olympia was in the audience. The X-ray made him think of a neighbor's story of a friend who had been shot when a convenience store where he worked was robbed, and who later disappeared.
Harper retrieved Sheyphe's X-rays from a local hospital and Taylor confirmed that the wounds matched. That was in July 2000, nearly a year after Sheyphe's body had been found.
But those kinds of breaks are rare. Coroners and medical examiners are often too busy investigating recent deaths to go back over cold cases with unidentified remains.
And sometimes the coroners don't even know they have unidentified bodies on their books.
And even records that do make it into the system may not allow a match. The computer system relies on such things as age, height and weight -- all of which must be estimated for corpses, and which may or may not be accurately described on police reports.
Coroners and medical examiners investigate unidentified-victim cases and supposedly retain records, but only police officers can actually enter them into the national computer system. That's because the NCIC system, maintained by the FBI, is designed specifically for law enforcement.
That bureaucratic gulf may prevent matching names and bodies, particularly if the police don't follow through -- and sometimes they fail to do so in spectacular ways.
In King County, 24 out of 39 sets of unidentified remains have been entered in the state database, the P-I found.
Seattle Police Department alone had not entered six sets of remains found by its officers, though some involved only bones that might not have been easily compared through the NCIC system to missing persons. SPD officials agreed the bodies should have been entered and could not explain why they were not. They promised to follow up.
Even if all available information is entered, the system may not make a match.
Sometimes small differences between a description of the person in life and the person in death can stump the FBI computer, which relies on 20-year-old software.
And then there's the possibility that the computer is working fine, but the data is bad or incomplete. In a review of more than 600 reports, the P-I found that about 100 were missing important information or were partially or totally illegible.
Flaws in the computer system are so frustrating that increasingly coroners and medical examiners are turning to a network of volunteers for help on difficult old cases.
The volunteers, known as the Doe Network, run a Web site (www.doenetwork.org) that features a searchable database of unidentified John and Jane Does, along with artists' sketches and case summaries. They pass tips on to police and provide volunteer forensic artists to generate sketches where none exist.
Though the Doe Network's list is far from complete, the Web site fills a void and encourages public participation in cases that otherwise might be forgotten, said Kathy Taylor, a forensic pathologist with the King County Medical Examiner's Office.
In some cases, no one even reports the person missing. With no report, there's no possibility of a computer match.
Jeff Sheyphe's family in Oregon had no idea he was missing until several months after he hiked into the woods near Olympia in the summer of 1999 to kill himself. His parents were accustomed to infrequent contact and to discovering that he had moved without letting them know.
"When you have children or teenagers or young adults and they're off doing their own thing and you're giving them their space, you don't even know they're missing," said Carol Sheyphe, a retired counselor from Salem.
What led investigators to identify her son was a fluke in the form of an X-ray
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 1:01:15 GMT -5
Unidentified bodies
According to a master list maintained by the Washington State Patrol, there are 10 unidentified bodies that were found in King, Pierce, Benton, Spokane, Whatcom, Chelan and Cowlitz counties for which coroners and medical examiners can find no records at all.
The state says Chelan County has two "Does," yet Coroner Gina Fino can find no paperwork. Fino said she found records for her office "in a shambles" after her election in 2000 and didn't even know about the entries on the State Patrol list until the P-I asked about them.
The widow of a former Chelan County coroner told the P-I she destroyed the records after the death of her husband, thinking the county had copies.
In response to the P-I inquiry, medical examiners, coroners and other officials statewide found at least 21 dead-body cases that had never even been entered into the FBI's national computer system. Some cases, however, may be virtually unidentifiable because only a few bones were recovered. Two involved newborns.
There are probably far more lost Doe cases statewide, however, because only the medical examiners' offices in Seattle and Spokane have done a thorough search for historical records.
Authorities said that in some cases the information might not have been submitted to the FBI database because there was no possibility of making a match through dental records -- some were just partial skeletons, and two were infants who probably never saw a dentist.
Other cases fall through the cracks because of politics. In most Washington counties an elected coroner is responsible for identifying dead bodies -- only five of the largest counties have a medical examiner. In some rural counties, the prosecutor does double duty.
Coroners are responsible for running death investigations and keeping related records, though they hire medical experts to do autopsies.
Experts have long recognized that coroners often fail to collect and submit necessary information to help identify anonymous remains. In 1992, the state's Forensic Investigations Council created a standardized "Unidentified Person Packet" that was distributed statewide to help guide the local officials.
Although the packet helps coroners in collecting needed information for newly discovered remains, it doesn't always mean the records will end up where they belong. Often, outgoing coroners simply fail to pass on records to their replacements, the P-I found.
Spokane County had a fairly rapid turnover among coroners in the 1980s and 1990s, and even its first didn't last long -- he was forced to resign after he was charged with stealing prescription drugs from corpses. The case is still pending.
Last spring Sally Aiken, Spokane's second medical examiner, went in search of records and found them scattered in different offices, at cemeteries and with funeral homes. She was surprised to find that her office has so many unidentified-dead cases, and says that it's likely that it's a statewide problem as well.
She may be right, but no one has ever done an exhaustive statewide search, and even some of the state's largest medical examiners' offices cannot track old cases.
In one Pierce County case, the only information the chief investigator could find was a note that said "bones found."
Even if they still had all the records, getting the time and money to run down leads on long-cold cases can be a tough sell in tight times.
"People don't want to pay for the dead," Aiken said. "They don't vote and they don't complain."
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 1:04:03 GMT -5
Part 8: Whatever happened to Baby Jane Doe? By LISE OLSEN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER KELSO -- She remains a little girl lost. Fishermen in search of steelhead in the blue-gray Cowlitz River discovered the tiny body, caught in a snarl of driftwood. They first mistook it for a waterlogged, abandoned toy. How she came to be there on that fall day in 1987 is a mystery. The toddler, with short, dark hair and dusky skin, had been dressed in a bright pink T-shirt with a narrow white stripe. Someone had changed her very last cotton diaper, fastening it with pink safety pins. Then someone broke her skull, and threw her into the river just downstream from the spot where four noisy lanes of state Route 432 cross the water on two steel spans. The killer took her identity as well as her life. The blue Magic Marker scrawl on a clean-erase board in the detectives' room at the Kelso Police Department reads only "Baby Jane Doe 1987." Baby Jane is the only toddler among the state's approximately 100 victims of untimely death whose names are unknown. Some, like Baby Jane, still haunt investigators. Others are simply forgotten -- victims of a system unable to match the identities of missing people to the bodies found months or years later. Even in clear-cut murder cases, authorities in Washington often misplace or inadvertently destroy records that could help identify the dead, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer found in a yearlong investigation. Anonymity in death cuts across all boundaries, the P-I found. From the smallest police agencies in the state to the largest, authorities routinely fail to keep track of missing people and records of bodies found. Though Baby Jane is a rarity -- one of only 25 unidentified toddlers nationwide -- interest in her case has waned over the years. Cowlitz County Coroner Mike Nichols initially could find no record of the girl when the P-I asked about her. Later, he was able to dig her file out of a box left behind by a past coroner -- a veterinarian who died while in office. Kelso police had never tried to publicize how Baby Jane looked in life. After the P-I's inquiry, the department contacted "EDAN" -- Everyone Deserves a Name, volunteer forensic artists who used a morgue photo to create a likeness of the child. Baby Jane's description has appeared on the state's official roster of unidentified dead bodies for 15 years, but no state or national agency has ever found a missing-person report to match a child described as Hispanic or American Indian, 33 inches tall, 20 to 30 pounds, thought to be 18 to 24 months old, but possibly 15 months to 3 years of age. For 15 years, she has been a tragic illustration of the holes in the missing-person system. Someone has to be reported missing to be found again. Baby Jane might not ever have been reported missing. But if she was, the information was apparently never entered into the Justice Department's national database. All missing children are supposed to be listed there, but some cases -- particularly old ones -- are overlooked or purged by mistake, the P-I found. Nor do all reports cross borders. Indian reservation police, who consider themselves officials of sovereign nations, often fail to share their records. And Mexico lacks a central computer system. There are other holes in the system that could be keeping her identity a secret
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Post by The Tracker on Jan 13, 2006 1:05:35 GMT -5
The FBI computer system that is used to match missing persons with dead bodies is seriously flawed. Designed in the 1980s, it often does not produce all of the matches that it should -- or comes up with so many erroneous matches that it overwhelms investigators.
Even if leads were to emerge, confirming Baby Jane's identity could be difficult. It's unknown whether any forensic evidence taken from the baby before her death has been preserved. The respected Oregon pathologist who conducted her autopsy has no records and does not recall her case. Baby Jane may have to be exhumed if authorities one day need DNA to match her to a relative.
Detectives believe they do know who Baby Jane's mother was, but that's no help at all.
When Baby Jane was found on Sept. 24, 1987, in a bend of the Cowlitz River, Kelso police Sgt. Wayne Nelson and a firefighter in a flat-bottomed boat lowered a sheet into the water to make a cradle, carefully plucking her from the tangle of logs. Nelson, whose own children were small at the time, has since become chief of his department. Though he has investigated other deaths and child abuse cases, he said he has never experienced anything like that day.
No one can imagine doing violence to a child like that," he said.
Exactly 13 days earlier, on Sept. 11, a fisherman in the Lewis River, about 17 miles away, near Woodland, made the horrifying find of a woman's torso with only the arms attached.
Her legs were found a few days later in the Willamette River in downtown Portland.
Dressed for bed, the woman was wearing a nylon two-piece pink teddy and blue-green Hanes underwear. She had red fingernails, and wore two thin silver bangles on her wrist. She was about two months pregnant and had been pregnant at least once before.
Police believe she was Baby Jane's mother, but local officials have been unwilling to pay for exhumation and about $1,000 for the DNA tests that could confirm their theory.
Cowlitz County Undersheriff Duane Engler was a rookie cop when he begin investigating the torso case. What sticks in his mind, 15 years later, is that the woman had painted her toenails red to match her fingernails.
A rangy man who wears a buzz cut, Engler has arms so long that he has to buy his shirts at big-and-tall shops. He cracks self-deprecating jokes and chain-smokes when he escapes from his office. He speaks at length of the frustration of working a case for a decade and a half with only a laundry list of dead-ends to show.
He and other officers canvassed door to door in the area where the woman was found, a fertile river bottom where flowers, grapes and corn grow late in summer. No leads were found.
Fingerprints from the body were entered in the national crime information computer.
Local doctors were asked whether any pregnant patients had disappeared.
Catholic churches up and down the Interstate 5 corridor were contacted. Shelters for battered women were checked.
Fliers were distributed across the West, with particular care to reach all Indian reservations.
Press releases were sent to a migrant workers' newsletter, to Mexican consulates, to Mexican police, to the legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Nothing came of it.
"No one was ever able to find a missing person -- let alone a missing woman and child, which around here should have stood out pretty well," Engler says.
Engler also asked the FBI for a list of all missing women and children -- thousands of pages of printouts. None matched.
It would have been a miracle if it had.
The National Crime Information Center's database of missing people has a big limitation that is little known among local law enforcement. It is designed to search for precise matches -- something impossible to get when there's no way to accurately peg the height, weight and hair color when only part of a body is found. And there is no reliable way to search for relationships between missing people such as a mother and child.
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