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CHAPTER THREE

September 5, 1997

At 8:40 A.M., Detective Rick Grabenstein received a telephone call relaying a message from a local prostitute. “The information was concerning a full-sized Chevrolet van, believed to be a late-1970s model which was dark brown in color with a center panel on the side that was beige in color with a dark brown flame pattern in the lighter center section. The vehicle also had an eagle painted on the back door or spare-tire carrier. It was driven by a white male, middle-aged, and probably with brown hair.”

“My parents don’t know I’m a prostitute,” the woman told Grabenstein when he interviewed her in person, “so if you ever have any reason to contact them, please don’t tell them.” Asked why she suspected the van’s driver, she offered an intuitive explanation. “I saw the van earlier this summer, and it didn’t have tinted windows, but now it does. Anyway, the guy in the van drove by where I was working about eight times. He finally pulled over to the curb,” she said, “and I guess he was expecting me to come over, but I didn’t because I just had this bad feeling about him. He drove away, and that was that. I just followed my intuition—I got bad vibes, you know. I did talk to another girl who said that she dated him and that he was harmless, but I don’t know. I go with my gut, and my gut said, ‘Don’t get in the van.’ I guess Heather Hernandez either didn’t have the same gut reaction, or if she did, she ignored it.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Detective Grabenstein.

“Well,” she replied, “because I saw her get into that van a couple days before they found her dead body.”

“That’s not the only uncleared homicide possibly linked to Yates’s van,” commented Detective Grabenstein several years later. “In the summer of 1996, I investigated the murder of Shannon Zelinski. Her body was found near a school bus stop. She died as a result of a gunshot wound to the head.”

It was at the same time of the year, according to Linda Yates, that Robert Yates Jr. took his daughter Sasha to work at Certified Security Systems at 11:00 P.M. At 2:30 A.M., Robert Yates still hadn’t returned home, so she locked up their Fifty-ninth Avenue residence. At 6:30 A.M., she heard her husband banging on the front door. “When I opened the door for him,” recalled Linda Yates, “he came in and immediately gathered up all sorts of cleaning supplies. There was lots of blood in the back of the van, and the cushions of the fold-down bed were soaked with blood, too. He told me that a man on Ray Street was walking his dog on a leash and that the dog jumped in front of the van, and he hit the dog. He said that he couldn’t avoid hitting it and that he put the poor thing in the back of the van and took the dog and owner to a veterinarian. He claimed the dog bled all over the cushion in the back of the van. He removed the foam rubber in the cushion and destroyed it, and then bought new foam rubber to replace it,” explained Linda Yates.

Grabenstein, of course, knew nothing of Robert Lee Yates Jr. or his ownership of a 1988 Chevrolet van. The detective made note of the prostitute’s uneasy feelings about the van’s driver, but there were also similar hunches about the drivers of big rigs, compact two-seaters, luxury cars, and grungy trailers. If you’re a detective, you make note of them all and track down as many as you can. First on the detectives’ agenda was a trip to Tacoma to track down Jennifer Joseph’s boyfriend, Marlin, who, according to Yolanda Cary, searched Spokane’s streets before returning brokenhearted to Tacoma.

“I’m not her pimp, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Marlin told detectives when they contacted him in Tacoma, Washington. “I met her at a party in Tacoma about two to four months ago. I’ve been to her house, and I’ve met her dad and her brother. Her father told me that she needed to get someone to take care of her, and he jokingly told me that she would drive him crazy.

“Once we got to Spokane from Tacoma,” he said, “we checked into the Red Top Motel, where we paid one hundred ninety per week. Anyway, she would leave the motel at about three in the afternoon to work for some escort service. I don’t know exactly where she went, or what she did, and I never took her there. I don’t really know my way around Spokane at all.”

Joseph’s boyfriend last saw her on Saturday afternoon, August 16, 1997, at about 3:00 P.M. “As usual, she left the motel in a cab,” he said. “She was wearing long black pants, a gray silk blouse with long sleeves and a zipper or buttons in front, and black velvet dress shoes. No, I don’t know what kind of underwear she had on. Her hair was curled and just below the shoulder in length. I think her hair was worn down and not pulled back.”

“The only jewelry he recalled that she would have been wearing,” reported Grabenstein, “was a cross necklace. He didn’t recall her wearing any rings. Later that night, the victim called him at the motel.”

“It was about nine P.M.,” recalled her boyfriend. “She called me and told me that she would be home at about midnight. Other than asking me what I was going to cook for dinner, there was nothing else discussed.”

Marlin did discuss loaning money to a fellow named Swan, but that discussion didn’t involve Jennifer. Mr. Swan needed a loan and requested money from Jennifer’s boyfriend. Marlin didn’t have the cash on him, but he assured Swan that once Jennifer got home around midnight, there would be money available. When Jennifer failed to come home, the loan became irrelevant; Marlin became increasingly concerned.

“I started asking other girls if anyone had seen her,” he told detectives. “One girl said she saw Jennifer getting into what she thought was a white Porsche, and that was about ten-thirty P.M. She said that the guy driving was white and in his midthirties or early forties. I guess he’d been driving around the area for a while—you know, kinda cruisin’, waving at the girls, and that sort of thing. I don’t know her name, but I can describe her—a white female, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, with blond hair, and she’s a little heavyset. I think she was staying at the same motel and she seemed to go down the steps in the northwest corner of the complex to an area in back of the west side of the motel. Whatever her name is, she was the only one who seemed to know anything at all.

“I remained in Spokane for seventy-two hours after she disappeared and made several attempts to locate her. I called her father’s house twice in the following days to find out if she had gone home.”

Disconsolately he returned to Tacoma, assuming that she may have taken up with someone else or would possibly return home at a later time. “It had crossed my mind,” he admitted, “that she might be dead. The reason I didn’t make a missing persons report was because this wasn’t the first time that she had disappeared for up to two days at a time since I’d known her.”

Joseph was neither a drug addict nor a recreational user, but the only time she had ever vanished for two days at a time was when she had experimented with crack. “I know she hadn’t had any drugs for at least thirty days because I was with her during that time and she was drug free.

“I brought her belongings home with me,” he tearfully told detectives, “hoping that Jennifer would show up and everything would be fine. When I heard that she had been found dead, I could not even look at them, so I gave them to a friend of mine to keep safe. I knew someone would come looking for them sooner or later.”

His first indication that Joseph was dead came via telephone from Spokane on August 27, the day following her body’s discovery in the alfalfa field. “I heard that a dead girl had been found in a place with a lot of rubbers and that the cops were asking if anyone knew any features that might help them identify the victim.” He had the caller relay to authorities the description of Jennifer’s distinctive tattoo of two roses. His fears were confirmed when he read the subsequent article in the Sunday Tacoma News Tribune that identified the victim, along with funeral arrangements.

“He turned over four containers of personal belongings that belonged to the victim,” reported Grabenstein. “These articles were noted to contain at least two purses, several pairs of shoes, a CD folder, and numerous clothes. The articles were transported back to Spokane for further examination.”

Marlin directed the detectives to his car, and he had no objection to his vehicle being thoroughly searched for evidence. He also willingly provided blood samples. “He was most cooperative,” recalled Detective Grabenstein, “and was honestly devastated by the victim’s death.”

“He was initially reluctant to take a polygraph test,” recalled Detective Fred Ruetsch, “because his parents told him it wasn’t a good idea due to his nervous personality. After a short discussion with both Detective Grabenstein and me concerning the workings of a polygraph, he agreed to accompany us to the Tacoma Police Station, where we turned him over to Detective Larry Miller.” Miller administered a polygraph examination and concluded that the young man was being truthful when he said he was not involved in the death of Jennifer Joseph.

“What never made sense to us,” later commented Sergeant Walker, “was that Joseph’s ‘escort representative’ and her boyfriend didn’t seem to know each other. Here was Joseph living with one fellow, yet obviously associated with D.D.’s escort enterprise, and the two men claimed to not have any interaction at all.”

That conundrum was the least of law enforcement’s worries. It was almost sixty days since the discovery of Joseph and Hernandez. Police prayed for a breakthrough, and on September 15, they had their first ray of hope.

September 15, 1997

A potential breakthrough offered instant encouragement—Spokane police temporarily detained a man held for an unrelated violation and impounded his car. Not only did his vehicle match one of those on “the list,” but in his possession were two handguns: a Raven Arms .25 and a Jennings. 22 automatic. “The calibers of these weapons,” said Detective Ruetsch, “were perfectly consistent with those used in the homicides of Jennifer Joseph and Heather Hernandez.”

Ruetsch, accompanied by Detective John Miller, drove to Garland Towing, where the suspect’s car was impounded. “It was an older Chevrolet Camaro that had been recently spray-painted black,” recalled Ruetsch. “The chrome had not been taped over very carefully, and the rust and the vinyl top were also spray-painted to include lots of overspray on the taillights and brake lights.” Most important, there was no antenna visible on the car. “There was also what appeared to be a bloodstained bedspread wadded up on the backseat.”

Later that afternoon, Ruetsch and Grabenstein interviewed the passenger riding in the car at the time of the driver’s arrest. “She stated that both firearms belonged to her, and she willingly gave permission to have the weapons test fired to assist our homicide investigation.”

Fred Ruetsch sent the weapons and the ammunition to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory System. He requested a comparison of the Raven Arms .25 semiautomatic ballistics to the bullet recovered from the Heather Hernandez homicide. He also requested a comparison of the .25-50 grain ammunition. Awaiting results, Detectives Ruetsch and Grabenstein returned to Spokane’s streets.

Lynn Everson, a counselor at the public HIV clinic in downtown Spokane, knows the status of AIDS in Spokane County, and she also knows the names and faces of almost every prostitute on East Sprague. “The AIDS rate in Spokane County is very low,” said Everson. “Part of the reason for that certainly is that we try to work with the women to keep them as safe as possible and because condoms are free and available to them at two different locations, and that helps women to be safer.”

As for Heather Hernandez and Jennifer Joseph, she remembers them both. “I had only one encounter with Joseph. She asked for the list of ‘bad tricks.’ ”

The “Bad Tricks List” is a compilation of one hundred descriptions of customers known to be violent, deviant, and/or dangerous. “Women are advised to not get into these cars,” Everson explained, and offered some examples from the Tricks list.

“Red cab semi truck, white male tried to drag worker outside the truck. White van, older, looks spray-painted, white male, rapist tried to gut worker. Ninety-five percent of the people on the list,” Everson said, “are white males with trucks.” The hot August night Jennifer Joseph chatted briefly with Everson, she helped herself to several free LifeStyle condoms.

“As for Heather Hernandez,” continued Everson, “she struck me as very levelheaded, with a good sense of humor. I never saw her drink or use drugs, and she never appeared to be under the influence of either.”

“I don’t think she ever used any kind of drugs,” said “Young B.,” the man—her man—who knew her best of all. “If she did, I wasn’t aware of it.” Immediately following his initial interview concerning the Hernandez homicide, and before follow-up questioning could take place, he disappeared from Spokane. This sudden departure did not elevate him to “prime suspect” status. Such mobility is not uncommon for gentlemen of his lifestyle. It was, however, indicative of the reluctance for police interaction that plagued the investigation from day one.

September 22, 1997

At approximately 11:00 A.M., Detective Ruetsch observed the previously mentioned white Chevy Suburban parked partially in a garage entryway door on Augusta Street. “On October 1, 1997, Detective Grabenstein and I drove to the company headquarters of the firm to whom the Suburban was registered, and [we] contacted the secretary, asking to speak with the president of the company.”

The company’s president, warmly cooperative, asked how he could be of assistance. “We told him that we were investigating the death of a prostitute here in Spokane,” said Detective Fred Ruetsch, “and that during our investigation, a witness told us that they had observed the Chevy Suburban owned by his company possibly attempting to contact prostitutes on East Sprague.”

The company’s president told Ruetsch and Grabenstein that this particular Suburban was driven by one of any number of employees and that “he would look into it for us and get back to us as soon as possible.”

That same afternoon, Ruetsch received the call—the president was unable to determine which of his many employees might have been driving the vehicle on East Sprague. He offered to provide detectives with a list of his employees’ names, if that would be of any value. Detectives accepted his offer, but the names, for the most part, were as common as John Smith, and none of the names were flagged by Spokane police as having drug-related lifestyles, nor were any of the employees known for blatant and repetitive frequenting of Sprague Avenue prostitutes. The president, going the extra mile, provided investigators with a series of photographs taken at the company’s Christmas party. Hopefully, the individual whom they sought could be spotted in the pictures. “We had no such luck with that. We also heard back about the ballistics tests on the guns from the Camaro.”

“The Raven pistol, item thirteen, was submitted with a broken firing pin,” reported Edward L. Robinson, firearms examiner for the Washington State Patrol. “The pin was replaced with an exemplar, and test firing was completed without malfunctions. This pistol has a trigger pull weight of six pounds, which is within average parameters. Test-fired bullets from the Raven pistol were compared to an open-file bullet. . . . These items all share similar general characteristics; however, the microscopic comparison of individual characteristics was inconclusive.”

The Jennings pistol was also test-fired by Robinson, and it, too, functioned normally. “This pistol has a trigger pull weight of eight pounds, which is within average parameters. Test-fired bullets and cartridge cases from the Jennings pistol were compared with open file bullets and cartridge cases. . . . both with negative results.”

September 24, 1997

Robert Lee Yates, Jr. saw the flashing lights of Officer Corey Turman’s patrol car in his rearview mirror. Yates dutifully pulled his white Corvette over to the curb just blocks away from where Jennifer Joseph was last seen. Officer Turman, who regularly patrolled the “prostitution zone” on East Sprague, was asked by homicide detectives to keep on the lookout for a white Corvette. “I hoped the driver would make a mistake so I would have an excuse to stop him,” Turman later recalled.

There were two mistakes that night involving Turman and Yates. First, Yates neglected to signal a lane change when swerving around a city bus. The second mistake was more serious. Turman’s report accurately recorded the time, date, and the driver’s name and description. He even wrote that the 1977 sports car was in excellent condition. Under “model,” however, he wrote “Cam” instead of “Corvette”—he misidentified the vehicle as a Chevrolet Camaro rather than a Chevrolet Corvette.

“Slip of the hand,” remarked Turman years later. “You’re thinking apple and you write orange.” At the end of his shift, he delivered his report to crime analyst Jack Pearson. From there, it would be brought to the attention of the Spokane police major crimes unit. “It should have,” said Pearson in retrospect, but it wasn’t. A field report noting that the driver of a white Camaro failed to signal a lane change did not attract the immediate attention of homicide detectives.

“We decided against asking the public to help find the Corvette,” said Detective Fred Ruetsch. “We worried that the killer, if he indeed drove a Corvette, would quickly ditch it. He might destroy other evidence, too.”

“We suspected that the same person killed Hernandez and Joseph,” Detective John Miller acknowledged later, “but we weren’t completely convinced that a Corvette was involved. We had suspects who drove other cars . . . In addition, I could just imagine the complaints from innocent Corvette owners if we went public. If I owned a Corvette, it would irritate me.”

The first ray of hope was an illusory flicker, and the first solid connection to Yates and his white Corvette lay dormant due to a simple penmanship error. This was not going to be a quick solve; not quick at all. Three more women, regular prostitutes on East Sprague, Lynn Everson told detectives, had not been seen in some time: Their names were Laurie Wason, Shawn Johnson, and Darla Scott.

A check with the missing persons crew revealed that Darla Scott’s conspicuous absence had already prompted her distraught twin sister, Marla, to file a report. Shawn Johnson’s counselor had also contacted missing persons agents, explaining that Johnson was awaiting admittance into a local methadone program but never returned. “She was dressed,” said the counselor, “as though she were going to work on East Sprague as a prostitute.”

Shawn Johnson’s mother, describing her daughter as “a known drug user who had been living with her ex-husband’s brother in the Deer Park area,” also contacted police when the usual contacts between mother and daughter suddenly ceased. Johnson, of Native American descent, had received land claims payments, and had used Indian Health Care for her medical and dental. Her previous employment included the Wan-dermere Chevron Station, Taco John’s, Maid-o-Clover, and John Doempier Oil Company in Spokane. She had children, an occasional boyfriend, and the requisite number of angry associates outraged at unpaid debts, shoplifting incidents, and vanishing drug money. Her lifestyle and behavior were not dissimilar to that of Darla Sue Scott’s.

“I never date guys who’ve been smoking crack,” said Darla Scott on April 12, 1996. Interviewed over a fast-food lunch of fish and chips from Zip’s in downtown Spokane, Scott enthusiastically discussed the perils and possible pitfalls of her chosen career as “sex service professional.”

“If men smoke too much crack, they can’t get an erection,” Scott insisted. “If they get mad about it, they might take it out on me. I don’t want to get beat up because some guy can’t get it up. I refuse to put myself at risk like that.” Seventeen months after granting this previously unpublished interview, Darla Sue Scott was murdered by a man who couldn’t get it up, at least not while she was alive. When she was dead, however, he had no trouble at all.

“The last glimpse I had of Darla was from my front porch,” said her former boyfriend, Arthur. “I’d been doggin’ her a bit, and I sat up there and watched her walk back and forth waiting for this date to pick her up. She told me that this guy had been violent with her on a previous date. She not only dated him again, she got drugs for him—you know, that’s what they do.”

“They” refers to prostitutes who introduce dates to drugs. “First of all,” explained one well versed in the art of deception, “you now have the trick more or less dependent on you because, as a new user, he doesn’t know how else to get the drugs. And because he doesn’t know the real players, prices, and amounts—he wouldn’t know a ’teener from an eighth—you can cheat him blind. Plus, you can always just outright rip him off by telling him you were robbed or cheated when you really just used the drugs yourself. Of course, sooner or later he wises up. By then, he’s in the game and has become a player. I don’t mean he lies, cheats, and robs people, too; I just mean he’s ‘smart to the business.’ He never trusts you like he did at the beginning, unless you wise up and stop thinking about ripping him off. If you see him as an associate, you can do deals together, and both of you either pretend that you never did rip him off in the ’old days,’ or you both know that you both know, but he just lets it go. After all, you both may need each other someday. Until he gets wise, however, you got yourself an easy score.”

The other, or reverse, aspect of the scenario is the male view of this hustle. “These women think we’re all stupid as shit,” remarked one street-savvy trick. “What many of them don’t know, or maybe they do know, is that we allow them to cheat us, or rob us, or lie to us, just to see if they will—it’s both a test and entertainment.”

“Hell, yes,” agreed another man with a hearty laugh. “I’ll allocate forty dollars for theft or reward, and this is how it goes: I’ll tell the girl I want to buy forty dollars’ worth of stuff and that I’ll share it with her, plus if it is good, I’ll buy us a lot more. What they don’t know is that I’m telling them the truth. If they come back with some sob story of how they were robbed, I know they are liars and thieves, but I pretend that I believe them. If they come back with good stuff and we share it, then I keep my word, plus I give them a forty-dollar bonus. Most of these girls steal the first forty dollars and are too damn short-sighted to go for the free stuff and the bonus. But I’ve already figured that into my budget under ‘entertainment.’ ”

Of course, some men simply have no patience for lies and thievery. The fastest way for a prostitute to get killed is to disrespect her client, attempt to defraud him, or rip him off. The second fastest way is for the client, whom she has now made an addict, to find out that she’s an “informant”—a crack snitch. For a “respectable man” acting out perverse, violent, psychopathic behavior one or two nights a month, killing a prostitute-snitch could be easily justified as prudence personified. How he would know that the prostitute was a snitch to the cops is simple: another coke snitch would tell him.

“The number one topic of conversation with these women is each other—gossip and backbiting,” explained one formerly amongst them. “They’ll use together, steal together, and talk about each other behind each other’s backs constantly. A coke snitch-whore will be the first to snitch on a snitch.”

Bob Dylan’s famous words “To live outside the law, you must be honest” find their tragic fulfillment in the murder of those whose back stabbing possibly contributed to their own demise. “Darla came over to the house, was really high, and very upset,” recalled a female friend. “She said she was going to go meet this guy who had beaten her up before, and she was afraid that he was going to do it again.”

“You can see why I couldn’t stand that scene, and Darla’s immersion in it,” said Arthur. “And you might wonder why Darla would see a man that had been violent with her in the past, or why she violated her rule against dating guys who were dick-numb from dope. Simple—she wanted the money. Once Darla decided to do something, you couldn’t stop her. When I last saw her, she was wearing my Mickey Mouse shirt. You know, the one they found covered in blood out on Hangman Valley Road.”