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- [00:01]
A
Dc 911. What is your emergency?
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Ten years ago, one of Washington DC's most notorious and violent crimes.
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Darren Wint is charged with 20 counts.
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Including those for the murder of Amy.
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Savas, Philip Savopoulos and Vera Figueroa.
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Now in 22 hours, a second look, the fourth season of our award winning podcast, American Nightmares. I'm returning to revisit that unforgettable case experience, new interviews, unseen perspectives, and one of the Tsavopoulos surviving daughters, Abigail, speaking for the first time since the tragedy.
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C
You try and come up with. Oh, it could be anything else. Not the worst case scenario.
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B
Search American Nightmares wherever you get your podcasts. It was the spring of 1988, northwestern Alabama. A preacher commits a sin, a deeply personal transgression, and from there everything spirals out of control. The amount of damage this man did is incalculable. It's still damaging all of us. It still hurts us to think about it. From revisionist history, this is the Alabama Murders. Listen to revisionist history, the Alabama Any way you get podcasts Lemonada hi, I'm Carolyn Osorio, host of Stolen Voices of Dole Valley. If you liked stolen voices, I want to share another series I host called the Shadow Girls. It is a deep dive into the 1980s, where another serial killer was preying on vulnerable young women because he knew they were less likely to be believed. The Shadow Girls chronicles the Green River Killer investigation, but is centered around the victims and one survivor, Rebecca tried to warn police, but she was dismissed. This series highlights the danger when society devalues a group of people over judgments about their profession. Each week we'll drop an episode of the Shadow Girls right here in the feed. This series contains adult language and descriptions of graphic violence throughout. Listener discretion is advised. July 15, 1982 was a scorcher in the Pacific Northwest. Two 15 year old boys were riding their BMX bikes across the Peck Bridge at the western edge of the city of Kent, a suburb of Seattle. Traffic that day was just beginning to stack up on the bridge deck. Top 40 hits blared from open car windows. Olivia Newton John's Let's Get Physical was a number one that year. Or the edgier Joan Jett and the Black Hearts. I Love Rock and Roll was at number three. Like the music, the 80s were a decade full of contradictions. Conservativism juxtaposed to an era of excess. That summer, former movie star, then President of the United States was Ronald Reagan was enjoying the second year of his landslide victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980, while first lady Nancy Reagan coined three words meant to galvanize a generation of children to be good and just say no to drugs during a cocaine epidemic. And locally, the fledgling Seattle Mariners were knocking it out of the park, experiencing their best year since the franchise inception six years earlier. But that Wednesday on Peck Bridge, it was around 4 in the afternoon when those two boys were cruising without a care in the world. It was near the end of the workday, but for kids then there was still time on the clock. It was the era of the latch key kids, when the universal signal to get on home was the street lights coming on. An age before computers and 24 hour television, when a kid's bike was their ticket to freedom. Hanging out at a friend's house playing Atari or meeting in packs at convenience stores for candy. Lining up their quarters on the Pac man machine as they watched, anticipating their turn. Or maybe these boys were just heading back home as they made their way across the bridge after an adventure in one of the many green spaces in the county mid span, the boy in front, his name was Galen, slammed on his brakes. Hey, I think there's something in the river. Both boys walked over to the ledge, peering over the metal railing. They looked at the green river below. Was it white shoes attached to a grayish green sack? Whatever it was, it was hung up on a wood stump. Go check it out. They dumped their bikes at the end of the bridge, then beat a path in the high river grass toward the bank. Whatever it was, it was in the middle of the river. But the hot summer had mellowed the current to the point where it was only about two and a half feet at the center. So the boys kicked off their shoes and began wading into the water, arms swinging. Of course, it became a game. Who could get to it first? It's a mannequin. Galen shouted. But just one step closer and he stopped abruptly. He was near the mannequin's head, but he was looking at its legs, which should have been stiff. Instead, they were moving with the river's current. As he was trying to process what that could mean, it all came crashing down. It's a dead body. Galen cried. He shifted his gaze from the woman's legs to the blue jeans that had been tied around her neck, a detail that would never leave him her brownish blonde hair streaming out of the jeans, floating on the river's current. That image seared into his brain. Over the next 20 years, Galen and his friend would be the first of scores of locals to have their dreams invaded by nightmares over Finding a victim of the Green River Killer. From Pie in the Sky Media. I'm Carolyn Osorio and this is the Shadow Girls. An in depth investigation into the victims of the Green River Killer. You're listening to episode one, Peck Bridge. It was around 4:20. The boys were shaky. They were relieved though as they heard sirens approaching, anxious for adults to lift the burden of what they found that day. A murder in Kent in 1982 was a rare occurrence. There were only three homicide cases from 1979 to 1982 and the body that the boys found in the Green river was one of them. A photographer would capture the mood at the river that day as first responders trudged the body up the bank on a metal Stokes carrier, loading the corpse into a gray morgue van. The slam of the door as the looky loos on the bridge were just hoping to catch a glimpse. But as the body was driven out of view, it wouldn't be the end, but just the beginning. The medical examiner determined that the victim's hyoid bone had been broken. The cause of death was strangulation. When she had been pulled from the river, she had been naked except beat up. White leather Nike knockoffs with a red swoosh and yellow striped tube socks. Her sneakers were on the wrong feet. The ME Would theorize that the jeans that had been tied around her neck were a means to drag her body. The strangulation ligature was thought to be the shirt that they found inside the seat of the jeans. The woman's left forearm had been broken. Had she fought her killer? And would he bear the marks of a struggle? The algae growth on her body indicated that she'd been in the river for several days. There were no missing persons reports that matched her description. So the Kent police released a description to the media for help in identifying her. She was described as around 25 years of age. 5ft 4 inches tall, 140 pounds. They also included descriptions of her unique tattoos. A vine wrapping itself around a heart on her left arm. Two tiny butterflies floating above her breasts. A cross with a vine on her shoulder. A Harley Davidson motorcycle insignia on her back. And a work in progress above her lower abdomen. The outline of a unicorn. A mysterious magical creature that would never be completed. A tattoo artist recognized his work in the paper and called police. Yeah, her name is Wendy Cofield. I think she lives in Puyallup with her mother. She's only 16. In fact, Wendy was just 15 years and 3 months old. Wendy Cofield would be the first found victim there would be 48 others. Young women and girls whose murders would rock a community for nearly 20 years. In what would become the longest unsolved serial murder case in the history of the United States. The attributes of the so called Green river victims would become too familiar. Female, mostly teens, with a supposed history of prostitution. Retired King county sergeant Steve Davis.
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D
You need to remember at that time and even now today, you know, if you really talk to people and they'll get really honest with you, the business owner that the girl is working in front of, I have to be careful how I couch this, doesn't really care about her history or that she's a victim or anything. He or she just wants them out from in front of their business. They want them gone. Right? And that's where the people just disappear. And when they're out there working the street, you know, they're constantly moving. They don't stay in the same area all the time. They go on what's called the circuit. And, you know, they can be anywhere at any time. They lose track with their families and they become ghosts, you know, in a lot of ways.
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C
Well, you know what the podcast series is going to be called?
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B
Shadow Girls.
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D
There you go. That's, that's a good one. And that's exactly what they were. And that's exactly what these women that you're going to see tonight I think are, you know, because they fall into this system now nowadays, of course, they, they try and give them more help and things like that. They try and treat them as victims when they can.
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E
Right.
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D
There's, there's a lot of social services that come in and things like that. But the bottom line is there's still shadow girls.
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B
Shadow girls, vulnerable people who desperately needed help. And as it would turn out, help they would never have the opportunity to find. Begging the question time and time again over those devastating years, would the Green River Killer ever be caught? And what of the deeper work festering beneath the surface like an untreated wound? How many shadow girls would have to die in order for us to care about keeping vulnerable children and young women safe? And today the realization that Even though the GRK was caught in 2001, we still don't have an answer to that question. Cultural anthropologist Dr. Deborah Boyer.
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C
I feel like part of the project that I'm working on is, you know, the six degrees of separation, where in the 80s you mentioned the Green River Killer, the girls and how they were. I mean, I will say my impression as a young person was they were bad girls, they were doing bad things. You didn't want to do that or that could happen to you. You know, that was kind of the message.
- [12:44]
E
That is. Right. That's how society excuses this. They're bad, they're spoiled. It comes out of a lot of cultural references and religious references that are 10,000 years old. But they become throwaway women, so. So you can do whatever you want. They become objectified, which is a term that we've learned through feminism, what that means for women in all walks of life to be objectified. This is the most extreme example. You can do whatever you want to an object. You can rape them, you can kill them. Nobody is really going to pay very much attention to that.
- [13:16]
C
What does that do when that message gets across? Because I heard it loud and clear. And this has become more of a personal project in the sense of I had all this information during COVID with the Green river killer and all the documents from the victim's profiles, and it just became so overwhelming. And this isn't about me, but just I'm kind of trying to share where I'm coming from. So overwhelmed with so much of true crime. The victims are women. And I feel like it's such a popular genre because women don't get to talk about this stuff, like stuff happens to them. And wherever you are on the spectrum, you know, whether you're, you know, on the street or you're affluent, it's a secret thing where you can't talk about it.
- [14:02]
E
That's a good way to put it that it is on a continuum, because the issue of prostitution affects all women. Even though we believe now we have advanced and progressed in our thinking because of the women's movement and the feminist movement, we have to understand this is a very short time period. And the good woman has really stood on the shoulders and on the backs of the women who have been, who were raped and murdered and violated and prostituted, that somehow we had to be separated. We had to create this pool of bad women to service normal men. And that is still reflected in the laws.
- [14:38]
B
I grew up in Washington State by the Green river, near a valley of some of the most fertile farmland in the country. That sounds pretty idyllic, right? Well, if you're familiar with the Pacific Northwest landscape, you might be envisioning moody forests shrouded in mist and drizzly rain alongside a river whose current rushes over well worn river rocks. And where I grew up, all of these things are true, but not at the Green River. The first thing I want to share with you about the Green river, where I grew up, which is as true today as it was back in the summer of 1982, that it's not actually green. By the time she flows from the Cascade Mountains to my neighborhood, she was considered an urban river that meandered through the blue collar bedroom communities of Auburn and Kent. And here her water was more of a dingy brown, and it was girded into a channel with high sloping banks that were full of scrubby vegetation, grass and and thorny BlackBerry bushes. In the summertime, that reedy grass could grow over 5ft tall on either side of the riverbank. As we would come to find out, it was the perfect rural place to hide an onslaught of unspeakable evil. If you Google Green river, the third entry down has a picture of the killer and it says Green River Killer, American serial killer. But for a long time, I had come to associate the Green river of my childhood with what was then the longest unsolved serial murder case in history. I moved away when I was 17 and I sort of tried to avoid the area for a variety of reasons. Nearly 40 years after the murders began, A pandemic and a true crime podcast would call me back to the very bridge where that first victim was found by those teen boys so long ago in the summer of 1982 when I was just 10 years old. Honestly, it's so weird for me to be back in Kent where I grew.
- [16:57]
C
Up, where I, you know, basically spent my whole life trying to get rid of this area out of my head.
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B
And it's really just like 20 minutes.
- [17:05]
C
Away, you know, and yet just having.
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B
That 20 minutes distance between where I grew up and my life now has been everything to me. So coming back now and talking about all these things and everything has changed, you know, I mean, it's, it's changed and yet, you know, there's all this urban sprawl that wasn't there before. It was super rural when I lived here.
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C
Yeah, I have mixed feelings.
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B
It's just weird how a place can have such power over you and then you drive through it and it just is like any other place. November 2021 marked 20 years since the capture of the so called Green River Killer, a serial murderer who stole the lives of 49 women and young girls, terrorized a community and tainted a river, which for many like me, became synonymous with the spawning ground for these horrendous crimes. I'm a local and I'm also a journalist and the co host of the Scene of the Crime podcast, a show that features investigations that are specific to the Pacific Northwest. Many true crime fans know the story behind the so called Green River Killer. But if you're not familiar, the GRK was a serial killer who trolled the Pacific highway south and Seattle's Aurora Avenue, hunting vulnerable teens and young women beginning in 1982 and continuing until his capture in 2001. These victims more often than not were referred to in the media as prostituted people. Their murderers strangled them, stripped their bodies of their possessions, and left them in the Green river and other hidden green spaces across King county for decades.
- [19:10]
F
What he was, was he was kind of a, I don't know. One of the prosecutors described him as a serial killer savant. He was able to. He just stumbled on a method of picking up these girls, getting them in a position of vulnerability and then strangling them. And he had his doggy style thing going on and they were just totally helpless when he got a hold of their neck, that was it.
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B
My co host and I started the podcast Scene of the crime in January 2020. And one of our very first episodes was on the Green river investigation and it featured my interview with retired King County Sheriff Dave Reichert. Reichert was the first detective on the scene at the green river in 1982.
- [19:55]
A
I was happy walking by the sergeant's desk and he had picked up the phone from the communications center and they had told him that they found a body in the Green river near Kent. And as I was walking by, he hung up the phone. He says, reichard, there's a found body and you know, the Green river go out and handle that case. So that's. I just happened to be walking by. So that was my fortune or misfortune if, however you want to look at it.
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B
And Reichert says from the beginning, the case was personal.
- [20:27]
A
I went to that scene thinking I was going to be investigating the murder of one person three days later. Now have four young girls who have been strangled and left the Green River. We knew on that Monday, so first body was found on Friday, the other three on Saturday. On Monday we knew. Well, that day, Sunday evening, we knew we had a serial killer. And no, there's no way I was going to walk away. I mean, you're on a mission. You're going to find the person who is responsible for this.
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B
Little did he know it would take almost 20 years to do just that. The Shadow Girls will continue after a word from our sponsors.
- [21:09]
G
Well, hi everybody, it's Julia Louis Dreyfus from the Wiser Than Me podcast. And I'm not going to talk about food waste this time I'm going to talk about food resources. All that uneaten food rotting in the landfill. It could be enriching our soil or feeding our chickens being because it's still food. And the easiest and frankly way coolest way to put all its nutrients to work is with the mill food recycler. It looks like an art house garbage can. You can just toss your scraps in it like a garbage can. But it is definitely not a garbage can. I mean, it's true. I'm pretty obsessed with this thing. I even invested in this thing. But I'm not alone. I any mill owner just might corner you at a party and rhapsodize about how it's completely odorless and it's fully automated and how you can keep filling it for weeks. But the clincher is that you can depend on it for years. Mill is a serious machine. Think about a dishwasher, not a toaster. It's built by hand in North America and it's engineered by the guy who did your iPhone. But you have to kind of live with mill to understand all the love. That's why they offer a risk free trial. Go to mill.com wiser for an exclusive offer.
- [22:37]
B
In the 1980s, fear gripped the Connecticut River Valley as a serial killer stalked and murdered women in New Hampshire and Vermont. But this isn't a story about him. It's about the eight women whose lives were cut too short and one woman who survived to take tell us the tale. I'm Jennifer Amell and this is Dark Valley, an audio docu series of my personal investigation into a series of unsolved murders that have haunted this region for decades. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. And now back to the Shadow Girls. When I was researching the Episode four scene of the crime, I wasn't intending on doing anything more with the case than just the one episode, which we dropped in 2-22-20. But something Sheriff Reichert said stuck with me.
- [23:27]
A
The victims were people, young girls who were in the human trafficking world. Back then it was called prostitution, and they were with pimps on Pacific highway south in downtown Seattle. And the average citizen driving to and from work or to the shopping center, to the store and back home again, didn't see those little girls. Although there were hundreds of them out there. They weren't visible to the community because, you know, part of it was they lived in an underworld, didn't want to be seen. But the other part is when they were seen, really the community didn't want to see them. They were there, but they wanted to pretend like they weren't there.
- [24:04]
B
Those two words, little girls. It was a description of the victims that I'd never heard before, which surprised me, considering I grew up near the epicenter of the case. It was then that I became aware that 33 of the GRK's 49 confessed murders were teenagers when their lives were stolen. As I was researching the case, something else kept surfacing. Memories of when I was a kid and later as an adult. I had gotten the message early on that they had somehow deserved it, that they were bad girls. And that's what would happen to you if you were a bad girl.
- [24:48]
A
And the victims themselves may be helping their murderer avoid capture. Their lifestyle, their personalities, the people they associate with, are into illegal activities or on the fringe of illegal activities. That is frustrated to some extent, our attempt, if you will, to get information. If these victims were a middle class housewife, the suburban neighbor, if you will, there would be a wholly different type of case.
- [25:15]
B
This was something Sheriff Reichert and I discussed too.
- [25:18]
A
The underground. He picked the perfect victims. These were young girls who were vulnerable. Obviously they were young girls who were abused at home, ran away, lived on the street, abused on the street. And just as a side note, they were also abused by the justice system because they were treated as criminals rather than young girls who were, you know, that needed a lot of help because of where they came from. But imagine you're this young girl who has no self esteem and you're on the street and you're selling your body. All that has to happen is a guy come up with his car, make a deal, you jump in, you drive off. There may or may not be someone standing there with you. There may or may not be a pimp that's watching over you. You disappear into the night. He rapes and kills the victim. The body is then put in a wooded area or in a river, areas that aren't frequently traveled. In some cases, the bodies of these young girls weren't found until six years later. But most of the bodies that were connected with the Green river were all skeletons or severely decomposed to the point where trying to get any sort of forensic evidence, especially biological evidence, would have been impossible. So if you, if you think of it this way, you know, the technology back then was worked in his favor.
- [26:48]
B
And Reichert tapped into something that I had been thinking about after we dropped the episode on the Green River Killer for Scene of the Crime. Something I couldn't get out of my head. The impact the case had on the community and me Personally, I still meet.
- [27:06]
A
People today who said, I know exactly where I was. When you were on tv and you said, we caught the Green River Killer, which I didn't really say, but everybody knew because we only had him on four. And then a couple, three or four weeks later, we ended up with three more charges on paint evidence. But that shows to me that, you know, the impact was sort of like, now there'll be some people not old enough to remember this, but in 1980, I think. Right. Mount St. Helens erupted.
- [27:36]
B
Yes, yes.
- [27:38]
A
Right.
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C
I know where I was.
- [27:40]
A
There you go. And it's that same. It had that same sort of an impact on people when we made the announcement that he had been arrested, that that killer had been taken off the street. People who watched that, who heard that, who were here, remember exactly where they were when that announcement was made. And that just shows you the power of, you know, that that case held over the community for so long, I didn't know why.
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B
Then it became an itch that I had to scratch. So I continued talking to people about the case, which, where I come from in Seattle is like Kevin Bacon's Six Degrees of Separation. I'll give you an example. My husband works at the headquarters of a popular coffee company near downtown Seattle, and I went to go grab lunch with him there. But first I had to check in at the front desk, show them my id, and then they would give me a temporary badge. The woman behind the desk recognized my voice from my previous work as a reporter at a popular news and talk radio station in Seattle. This was right around February 2020, just before the pandemic. I shared with her that I had left the newsroom to start a new Pacific Northwest true crime podcast. And her reaction was swift. I love true crime. She cried. And then the two women alongside her at the front desk started gushing over the news. And it was a great moment of camaraderie and friendship. And it wasn't necessarily surprising to me when there at the front desk at my husband's work, we all instantly bonded. It's common knowledge that around 80% of the true crime audience is women, something Saturday Night Live keyed into on a recent skit.
- [29:33]
E
All right, I'm gonna head out.
- [29:35]
B
Okay, have fun. Finally, he's gone. On the surface, women gushing over true crime has always felt a little strange to me. I had read a slew of magazine articles that tried to kind of explain why women love true crime. And the common theme was that women binge true crime because we are so often the victims. And we listen to true crime because we want to know how they not to become a victim while we're being entertained, which always felt a little flimsy to me. As a true crime podcast host, I was doing tons of research, interviewing victims, families, survivors, detectives who worked those cases, and psychologists. And then, along with my own life experience, I couldn't help but see a pattern coming into focus. I started to hypothesize that maybe some women binge true crime like me, because they come from traumatic childhoods and were looking for camaraderie at a distance. And the feeling of it's not just me. This feeling was confirmed anecdotally when the woman at the front desk at my husband's work, who I just spent 10 minutes gushing over true crime cases, handed me a temporary badge and I was like, hey, you should check out our latest episode we just dropped on the Green River Killer investigation. I felt like I had said something wrong as her smile wilted, and then she signaled for me to get closer with her pointer finger, so close that I could smell her perfume and shampoo. And as I leaned toward her, our eyes locked and in a hushed tone, she confided, my best friend was murdered by the Green River Killer. Instantly, our voices became conspiratorial, as if we'd known each other for a long time as she recounted the loss of her beloved friend to the grk. Not just what had happened to her friend, even more how scared she'd been during that time, worried that something similar might happen to her. And as she shared her story, something unexpected bubbled to the surface for me. When I was around 12 years old in 1984, that year alone, they found over a dozen GRK victims. Sometimes when I was home alone at night, I was terrified, and I would keep a butcher knife close by, checking and rechecking the doors and windows. The slider. I had never told anyone that before, and up until that moment, I had buried it so deep I had forgotten that it had ever even happened. That day, as if on autopilot, I said, hey, would you ever consider being interviewed for a project I'm working on related to the Green River Killer case? That too, came out of left field. I wasn't working on a project. I had already completed the episode, and I'm not the type to get all woo woo. But it was like a larger force had taken the wheel that I just couldn't quite explain, and I began collecting stories from strangers and friends who, like me, had feelings about what it was like growing up in the Shadow of the Green river killer for 30 years. And in March 2020, when the pandemic put the world on lockdown, something long dormant was activated within myself. Between my growing obsession with the GRK case and also my weekly podcast that required researching different investigations week in and week out, I really felt like I was swimming in a stew of depravity. And I realized for the first time that many of these cases had roots in my own childhood. Toxic and manipulative domestic violence and gaslighting to the point of blaming myself for everything. When I was growing up and because of the pandemic, I was sort of stuck with myself and all these emotions. And like so many other people, as we were washing our cereal boxes with disinfectant and singing Happy Birthday long enough to wash, wash our hands until they were chafed, I felt fear and anxiety and something deeper was coming to the surface that I just didn't understand. The fear of not being in control of my life or the health and safety of my family. It was insecurity that I hadn't felt since childhood. So while some people were baking banana bread or picking up a new hobby during the long months of isolation, I started sending off a flurry of public disclosure request to the King County Sheriff's and Prosecutor's office about the GRK investigation. What I was looking for at the time, I didn't know. I will say reporting is like fishing and I like to have a lot of lines in the water to maximize my catch. In my work as a reporter, I love uncovering wrongdoing, particularly when people in power try to get away with messing with people without power. I will admit I'm suspicious of pencil pushers and I love outmaneuvering bureaucrats and clandestine meetings with a source like Deep Throat is, for someone like me, better than money. An opportunity to get information on the GRK case presented itself. A source in the sheriff's office offered to let me borrow a box. Apparently, members of the Green River Task Force were given a box filled with a massive collection of DVDs that captured videotaped footage of the GRK's five month confession from 2003. Now, I had seen snippets in the past, but never the whole confession. I wanted that box to help me understand what Detective Reichert had schooled me on from the very beginning. Walk us through. Basically kind of like a timeline of the intensity of finding those first or five bodies in the Green river. And then, you know, how many years until the case kind of went cold. And just however you want to, you know, chip away at this 30 year saga.
- [36:10]
A
You know, everybody wants to know about the case, but they. So I'll give presentations and they'll give me, you know, 20 minutes. So I have 20 minutes to tell you a story that took 19 years, right, to solve.
- [36:23]
B
That source offered to meet up with me during the pandemic to let me borrow their box. We met at a strip mall parking lot, open trunk to open trunk, masked up and trying to stay distant, but also trying not to be weird about it. And I'll admit the circumstances of our meeting space gave the whole affair a little Deep Throat vibe. When I first started this investigation, which technically wasn't an investigation because the murders had been solved, I'll admit I was most interested in finding something that had never been heard before. But as I was going through the discs, I was gobsmacked by the harsh truth. Out of a box full of DVDs capturing five months of a killer's confession, which translated into over 9,000 pages of transcript copy. There were just two DVDs titled Victims. The two DVDs represented the investigation details related to the Green river killer's 49 victims. And during the long months of quarantine, I began looking through the victim investigation files. They were organized into PDFs. Each victim had two to three PDFs, each with roughly three to 400 pages of documents per file. The first batch of PDFs that I went through were the murder investigation of Wendy Cofield. I scrolled through lab reports, transcribed interviews, detective logs. But there, sandwiched between hundreds and hundreds of investigation documents, I saw a photo of Wendy's jeans, the ones that had been tied around her neck. In the background of the photo, you can tell it was taken in the sterile environment of a morgue. The close up of the jeans took me back to the river. They were caked with mud and algae. And I kept thinking of Galen, the boy who had found her body. Galen and his friend were the same age as Wendy was at the time of her death. And his words kept repeating over and over in my mind how he'd been haunted by the image of her blondish brown hair streaming through the jeans when he discovered her body in the river. Seeing those jeans for the first time, I recognized the brand. They were James jeans. I had a pair of James jeans just like that when I was a kid. And the image transported me back to the summer of 1982, when I was 10 and we lived near the Peck Bridge. My favorite outfit at the time, the one I wore to skate king on Friday nights with a sparkly woven headband, a pink unicorn T shirt, white leather Nikes with a blue swoosh, and my designer James jeans. I couldn't explain at the time why seeing the jeans that Wendy had been wearing the night she was murdered affected me so deeply. And I couldn't explain why I was spending so much time researching a case for no apparent reason during a pandemic when was having an effect on me. White tears were in my eyes when I looked closely at the photo and saw in faded blue ink the initials WC on the tag, putting 2 and 2 together. Before Wendy was murdered, her file documented the fact that she'd been recently released from a juvenile detention center called Raymond Hall. Wendy must have inked her initials into the tag to make sure that no one stole them. They were just as precious to her as mine were to me. Wendy had been sent to Raymond hall for petty theft, and I was reminded growing up the lore of Raymond hall that preceded was a place where local parents threatened to take their unruly kids if they misbehaved, if they weren't good. As I continued to scroll through Wendy's file, I stopped at the photo of a little girl. It was obviously Wendy. She was about two, with a button nose and a precocious smile. She wore a white Toosie T shirt and Oshkosh B' gosh overalls. Wendy's mischievous grin was centered around that plush black hat with a leather band around was obviously her aunties or mommy's. And in my mind I hear her giggling and I wonder what happened to that little girl. We'll be right back with the Shadow Girls after a word from our sponsors. And now we continue with the Shadow Girls. When police notified Wendy's mother, Virginia that her daughter had been murdered and that her body had been found in the Green River, Virginia would tell authorities that her daughter had been living in a temporary foster home because she was incorrigible. Virginia would also tell detectives that she had struggled as a single parent to support her two daughters and as a result, they moved from one low rent apartment to another in South King County. The situation was something I could relate to, especially when I found out that Wendy and her sister and her mother had experienced homelessness during the pandemic. I had confided in my mom the anxiety I was feeling and we started talking about how tough it had been for her as a single parent trying to raise two daughters on her own. Like Wendy's mom, I became after a.
- [41:55]
D
While I was totally depressed Because I.
- [42:00]
B
Put myself and my daughters in this.
- [42:02]
D
Position of going to McDonald's and brushing our teeth.
- [42:06]
B
And I thought, I can't do this anymore.
- [42:11]
D
I think we'd been doing it for a couple months, right?
- [42:13]
C
It felt like years.
- [42:16]
B
I read in Wendy's file that at the low income apartment complex where she lived with her mom, she had started to date a 21 year old man when she was just 14. At some point, Wendy's mom, who was 36, began dating Wendy's boyfriend and he would move in with them. As a result, Wendy moved out and began couch surfing at other apartments in the complex, drinking, doing drugs and was sexually exploited. It was at this time that Wendy got into trouble at school, which led to suspensions. And inside Wendy's file, a friend claimed that before her murder, Wendy had confided in her that she'd been molested by a family member for years and that the sexual abuse began when she was just a little girl. Sexual abuse was a thread that ran through many of the victims files that I would go on to read. Something I spoke with the Green River Task Force Detective Tom Jensen about.
- [43:17]
C
It's a friend alleging it and so it's not a first person account and there's nothing in the documentation to prove that that actually happened. But I have to wonder how many times you guys ran across that where these girls were molested by their own family or friends of the family. And how did you guys handle that?
- [43:36]
F
Well, I think it was probably the fact that a lot of these girls were molested either in the home or by somebody else during the course of their childhood. Their early adulthood is probably going to be consistent factor in most of these cases that particularly the younger ones left home that ran away for some reason. It wasn't, wasn't always the case but, or it wasn't always documented. That's, that's the thing. I mean you don't, you don't know about some of these girls because the background was that they were runaways and nobody ever asked, had the chance to ask them why we didn't. Anyway, all we had to do was rely on people that may have known them. They were running away from something in a lot of cases. And what they ran away from or what they ran away to was probably more volatile than what they ran away from.
- [44:33]
B
Cultural anthropologist Dr. Deborah Boyer, who has spent the last 40 years learning about sexually exploited adults and children in and around Seattle.
- [44:44]
E
We're both anthropologists trying to understand the culture, the subculture, the meaning of this in society and the Meaning to individuals. And we did do that and we did document the subculture, the rules, the beliefs and so forth. But we also saw something else and that was oppression. And you really can't just study people and publish without doing something about the kind of oppression and exploitation that we were seeing. And that just led me on a long march of doing work to develop services and policy advocacy on behalf of sexually exploited women and adolescents.
- [45:24]
B
We talked about how unfairly the GRK's victims were treated, not just in life, but in death.
- [45:32]
C
One of the particularly evil things that I've heard people say is that teens and young women engaged in what in the 80s would be referred to as prostitution. Prostitution or engaging in a street lifestyle, which is sort of code for, you know, drugs, prostitution, illegal activity. You know, your work sheds a light into this really unfair, unjust characterization. And I want to get to the root of that because in that website that you worked with, on with King county, you talked about the link between childhood victimization and poverty. How, how would you describe that link? And, and in all of your work, you know, it's not that these young girls wanted sex and wanted to party. This is a whole huge deeper, deeper thing.
- [46:20]
E
Everyone needs to understand first of all that prostitution is violence. And you approached me about the Green river murders and of course it took 40 murders really before anybody started to pay attention. And people need to understand that prostitution is violence and it is sexual violence. And promoters and buyers target the most vulnerable. Poverty is the biggest pimp that we have.
- [46:49]
B
Reading through Wendy's file, I could understand why she would be acting out and why she would be so angry at adults who had let her down time and time again. In early 1982, Wendy was arrested for theft and the county's Department of Youth Services referred her to a psychologist in Seattle. The psychologist who tested Wendy would later write. Because of Wendy's anger, chronic dissatisfaction, pessimism and general discouragement, together with her meager coping skills, I suspect that she could well have self destructive tendencies which could emerge when she feels highly upset. In Wendy's file, there was the transcript of the taped interview between her mother and Detective Dave Reichert. After she's found out that her daughter has been murdered, he asks her if there's anything that she'd like to add. To which she replies, the only thing I can add to that is that these last three and a half years have been pretty rough on me because I, I've never been on my own. And all of a sudden to be out there with a 13 and a half year old that's already got her own ideas in life. I wasn't as much help as I probably could have been, but I did at least ask the courts and the state and counselors for help for her. And she turned it. Most of it down. The notes written in Wendy's file triggered memories of the many hours of therapy that I'd been through with my family when I was a kid. And, like Wendy, how let down I had felt by adults. But the larger impression then and now was that sometimes there are good reasons why people turn down help, and it's not because they don't want it. This was something my mom and I discussed recently. Done a lot of counseling, Carolyn.
- [48:39]
C
I know. I think that's why I've always been, like, against it. Well, not against it. It's just that I remember Bill, our counselor.
- [48:47]
D
Well, that didn't turn out so good.
- [48:48]
C
I know, but let's talk about that, because that was really traumatic for me.
- [48:52]
B
Well, it was traumatic for all of us because Bill became really close to our family and he couldn't handle it.
- [48:59]
C
I know. It was another rejection.
- [49:01]
B
Another rejection.
- [49:02]
D
Exactly.
- [49:03]
B
By a man. By a man.
- [49:05]
C
And I felt like I had revealed what had happened to me because I felt safe to. To finally talk about it. And then he, like, booted us as his clients. I mean, I just. Who the hell knows? It was very unprofessional and very, like, you know. You do sometimes I think that.
- [49:28]
B
Well, he gave us another counselor. I think.
- [49:32]
C
I know, but.
- [49:34]
B
And then we quit.
- [49:35]
C
Well, yeah, I mean, I think that therapy is amazing if you get a really great therapist. But I've read a lot of stuff, and we went to therapy a lot when I was a kid. I know you always tried getting us into therapy, and we did do a lot of therapy, but I. Oh, that's right.
- [49:52]
B
We did it when we moved to Kent, didn't we?
- [49:54]
C
I've done therapy with my sister. I've done therapy with you. And I've read. I've done a lot of reading on this since that. There's a study. They bring kids in and they're like, okay, here's two marshmallows. You can have one now, but if you save the other one for later, you will get, like, 10 more marshmallows. Or you can just eat them both now. And so what they did was they had. They found that the. The affluent kids were more likely to save. To save. And then the poor kids were more likely to take the two marshmallows. And so, of course, they're like, yeah, of course. Course, you know, the, the affluent people can. This is why they're successful, because they can, you know, hold off instant gratification for, you know, for the long term. And the poor kids just take what they can get.
- [50:40]
E
Right.
- [50:41]
C
So that was kind of the, you know, low brow description of that study. Right. Well, what they, what they realized is that it wasn't a fair study in terms of, like, the poor kids, they knew that they'd had problems, promises broken to them so many times in their lives that it was the smart move for them to take what this. To take the two marshmallows and at least have that than to hold out hope that they're gonna get these other marshmallows because so often in the past they've been disappointed.
- [51:14]
B
Yeah.
- [51:16]
C
So I feel like that is such a great example for me where you gotta know the layers and sometimes therapists depending on, you know, you got to.
- [51:28]
B
Get a good match. Yeah, oh, definitely.
- [51:30]
C
And the childhood trauma that we're just now learning so much more about childhood trauma and how it affects your overall health for the rest of your life. Like just because went through this childhood trauma and you have this great life, like, you can still have anxiety and health issues because you're always constantly in that fight, fight or flight situation.
- [51:50]
B
Yeah. Actually, I feel like now I'm not in that fight or flight. I feel like I always was.
- [51:58]
E
Yeah.
- [51:59]
B
And now I'm not. Wendy was a child and she was desperate. And desperate people make desperate choices, which makes them vulnerable. Something the Green river killer knew only too well.
- [52:15]
A
Imagine you're this young girl who has no self esteem, and you're on the street and you're selling your body. All that has to happen is a guy come up with his car, make a deal, you jump in, you drive off. There may or may not be someone standing there with you. There may or may not be a pimp that's watching over you. You disappear into the night.
- [52:38]
B
But Wendy was smart, she was savvy. She tried to suss out people she could trust, mostly girls like herself. Girls like this one on Pacific highway, who police would later interview after her murder. Wendy walked up to me and she asks, you look like somebody I can depend on. I go, yeah, why? She goes, well, I've got this trick and she hands me this, you know, this piece of paper with the make of the car and the license plate number that it was a trick, and told me if she wasn't back in a half an hour to let everybody know. She said she would have given it to a pimp, but a pimp wasn't around and. And if I did, she gave me 10 bucks and then she came back and she gave me the 10 bucks. But this girl wasn't around. The night Wendy crossed paths with the grk, she was tragically alone. And her murder was just the beginning. Next time on the Shadow Girls. Less than a month after Wendy's murder, police would be called to the Green river again when on an entirely unassuming day in an unassuming suburb, the hunt for a serial killer and what prosecutors would later describe as the tragic enigma in the history of our county would commence. The Shadow Girls is a Pie in the sky production in association with KSL Podcasts and Lemonada Media. Our executive producer is Brandon Morgan. Post production supervisor is Casey Wheland. Supervising sound editor is Victoria Chang. And edited by Joey Jordan. For Pie in the Sky Media, I'm Carolyn Osorio.