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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast.
The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 163. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Roseland Weyborg II. At the time of this episode's publishing, we have just entered the new year of 2022 AD. Kind of feels like we are living in a science fiction film, doesn't it? Saying 2022 as our current year is strange.
Anyway, a sincere Happy New Year from me, your humble host, to you, my very dear listeners. As I mentioned in the last episode, I have been working on a brand new series for the Serial Killer podcast. It is a series I have had on hold for a few years, as these kind of cases are exceedingly rare and do not, as they say, grow on trees.
I am talking of one of our serial killer superstars. On this show, I have covered most of the darkest stars out there. Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader, a.k.a. BTK.
The Zodiac, Robert Hansen, Dennis Nilsen, David Berkovitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, Eileen Vournos, Pedro Lopez, John Wayne Gacy, Peter Sutcliffe, a.k.a. The Yorkshire Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, and of course, Jack the Ripper himself.
However, several more of the most infamous killers remain, and one of those black holes of depravity stands out in particular, Gary Ridgeway.
more commonly known as the Green River Killer. For a long time, he held the North American record as its most prolific serial killer. Only recently has he been eclipsed by Samuel Little, the Choke and Stroke Killer.
Mr. Little and Ridgeway's stories are quite different, however, and while I intend to, of course, cover Little's crimes in a separate series, I do find the story of the River Man to be more fascinating, especially considering Ted Bundy himself helped to solve his identity.
Tonight, we begin our sojourn into the abyss. We travel along a river Styx of sorts, although our river is real and has a name, the Green River. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Marilyn, Meow, Nick, Operation Brownie Pockets, Reed, Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Shauna, Sputnik the Radio, Tim, Tony, Trent, Vanessa, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. I can hear the fool calling me.
Imagine, if you will, D'Alizade, the American Northwest, flowing from the slopes of the Cascade Range south of Interstate 90, runs the Green River for 105 kilometers before meeting the Duwamish River just before the city of Seattle.
The Upper Green River Valley forms the western approach to Stampede Pass and was once home to many small railroad and logging towns such as Weston, Leicester, Green River Hot Springs, Nagram and Cannascat. Today, much of the upper valley has become a gated water supply watershed for Tacoma and access is heavily restricted.
Between 1880 and 1888, the Northern Pacific Railway explored and surveyed the Green River. The railway constructed the first direct link across Washington's Cascade Range with the opening of their Stampede Tunnel in 1888. Until 1906, the Green River flowed into the White River in downtown Auburn.
In 1906, however, the White River changed course above Auburn following a major flood and emptied into the Pouvalin River as it does today. Then, with the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1916, the lake's level dropped nearly 9 feet and the Black River dried up.
From that time forward, the point of the name change from the Green to Duwavish is no longer a confluence of rivers. Thus, the Green River now becomes the Duwamish River, flowing into the industrialized estuary known as the Duwamish Waterway, and thence Elliott Bay in Seattle.
Most of the river, and including Eagle Gorge Reservoir, are part of the Green River Watershed, which is closed to public access, creating controversy among recreation proponents for some time.
West of the Green River watershed, at Cannescat, the river passes through the Green River Gorge, with cliffs rising sharply as much as 300 feet from the riverbed. Downstream from the Green River Gorge is the half-mile-wide Green River Valley, where farmland has been protected from development.
But it is not the picturesque Green River Valley or the picturesque Cascade Range we are visiting. No, we are standing below a bridge crossing the Green River. The road we are standing on is West Meeker Street. Below us, the Green River looks more brown than green. There is a yellowish light in the air from the street lamps.
Close by there is a small parking lot, and just to the west of the Green River lies a pond called Old Fishing Hole. The roar of aircraft is also periodically deafening as the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is close by. It is the 12th of August, 1982. We stand next to a man smoking a cigar. He has just climbed onto a truck parked behind the slaughterhouse.
He loves smoking cigars, both because he enjoys the taste and the nicotine, but also because it shields him from the smell of the slaughterhouse he is working at. The slaughterhouse is P.D. & J. Meat Company, near Kent. The man's name is Frank Leonard. The sound of the truck's diesel engine, combined with the aircraft roar, is indeed deafening, almost a cacophony.
In addition, there is a constant clang of chains from inside the slaughterhouse as they carried off the steaming fresh-killed animals. The sound of working men laughing, joking, hollering also rises through the noise. Frank was a proper worker, what we in Norway would call a guy on the floor. In the US, a more commonly used phrase is probably a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy.
A part of Frank's job was to clean up the mess after the slaughter. Wearing galoshes and his leather apron, Frank hosed the blood and small bits of flesh off the slaughterhouse floor and into the underground septic tank. Only twenty years earlier, the septic tank would have been emptied, unfiltered, straight into the Green River, running right next to it.
As Frank was enjoying his cigar, he casually gazed down into the green river below, running behind the building. Right where the slow-moving current swept past the slaughterhouse, Frank saw a gravel hump poking up from the water. A few logs stuck out of the mud and weeds. What appeared to be a large mass of foam clung to one of the logs. Frank looked closer. That was indeed a lot of foam.
too much foam to actually be foam he thought to himself it was probably a dead animal of some kind looked to be decent size too a good quality pelt would net him a nice sum of money and all he had to do was go down to the river and pick it up easy money he had some time before the tank of the truck was filled up and he had to resume work
Quickly he made his way down a trail, usually used by local sports fishermen. He made his way down to the bank. There were tall bushes all around, and when he emerged, right at the edge of the river, he saw something he would never forget. The animal he hoped to skin and sell the pelts of was no animal. Its skin was not covered in fur, but shining white against the weak light from the sky.
It was no It, but a She, a dead woman, a dead, naked woman. Her buttocks were raised above the water. Her arms dangled below her, swaying gently in the slow-moving current. A purplish heart tattoo marked one arm. Her hair floated on the water, It too swaying with the flow of the river.
Frank could see the woman's face staring down at the shallow riverbed under the water. Her eyes appeared to have no pupils. He knew she was very dead. Frank wasted no time lingering. He rushed out of the water, straight back to the slaughterhouse, and got to a phone where he immediately called the police.
As he waited for an answer, he told anyone who was nearby what he had seen. In short order, the whole floor of men emptied and went outside to gawk at the gruesome discovery. Around an hour after Frank's discovery, a plain sedan driven by a young man with jet-black hair, a moustache, and a network of scars across his neck drove up to the slaughterhouse and parked in front.
King County Police Department Major Crimes Detective David Reichert had arrived to begin an investigation of the death. He too went down to the bank of the river and looked at the dead woman, slowly dancing in the moving water. When he came back, he instructed the uniformed police at the scene to search the riverbanks thoroughly for anything that might explain how the woman had come to be there.
A nondescript grey van from the medical examiner's office arrived. A folded blue plastic bag was produced, and soon police officers and medical examiners returned from the river with the bag sagging heavily between them. They placed the bag behind the van, out of sight from the television crews already setting up nearby on the road. Frank put down his hose and went over to watch them work.
To Frank, the way the examiners worked seemed to be casual, just like the body was a piece of meat, not a woman. He watched as the pathologist rolled the body around, viewing it, looking for an indication, the cause of death. There was no blood, no obvious wound, just water-bloated white flesh. Frank saw how the body actually had numerous tattoos in addition to the heart he had seen.
The whites of her eyes bugged out, and he saw again how the pupils were missing. It was clear to the pathologist that she had been dead for at least several weeks, maybe even longer. The skin of her fingers were already beginning to fall off from long immersion in the water. Fingerprints would be difficult, maybe impossible.
The corpse was putrefied, and the skin was crawling with a number of small insects and larvae. The pathologist put the body back in the body bag, and then the bulging sack was put onto the gurney for the trip to the grey van. This latest move was in plain view of the television cameras, who dutifully recorded it. Overhead, the roar of a media helicopter added to the general noise in the area.
Police were by then busy searching up and down the banks of the Green River, looking for the woman's clothes or anything that might suggest how she had met her fate. They found nothing, and reported so to Detective Reichert. The detective thought this was to be a routine case. He went back to the office at King County Courthouse in Seattle. There he told his sergeant the details of the discovery.
The sergeant, in turn, told his supervisors. After a journey through several links in the chain of command, the case ended up with King County Sheriff Bernard Winkowski. In the meantime, Reichert had sat down at his desk. Around him, other plainclothes detective made phone calls, typed reports, laughed, joked, argued, drank coffee, ate donuts, and got ready to go home.
The dead woman in the river caused little comment. It was thought, not just by Reichert, but by everyone there, to be just another routine tragedy in a job where someone's misfortune was a daily event. Reichert was no veteran detective, nor was most of his colleagues. The older guard had almost all quit, and the roster of men was mostly that of young men in the prime of their life.
Reichert's six-cop homicide robbery unit included Bob Lamoria, a veteran police officer with little homicide experience, Frank Atchley, who was waiting for a promotion to sergeant, Ben Caldwell, another veteran detective light on homicide experience, Earl Tripp, a productive narcotics investigator getting his first crack at major crimes,
and Larry Peterson, a quiet detective who had a reputation for solid, unimaginative work. Not far away from Reichert's bullpen was the county's two-person sex crimes unit. Here, too, the accumulated experience did not amount to much.
The team included Fabienne Brooks, a woman who sometimes doubled as a police artist, and Spencer Nelson, who had just arrived from the warrants section. Brooks was one of the very few black people employed in the department.
Despite his lack of experience, 31-year-old Detective Reichert was considered a rising young star in the police department. He was handsome, six feet tall with an athletic build and weighing 190 pounds, around 87 kilos, of mostly lean muscle mass. He had been a quarterback in college and still moved with an athlete's coiled graces. He had hazel eyes and a charming boyish smile.
Men wanted to be his friend, and women wanted him. The scars on his neck were a visible reminder of his initiative and courage. He got them from climbing through the rare window of a house in which a woman was being held hostage by a man who had gone berserk. After getting the woman out through the window, Reichert had moved through the dark house looking for the berserker.
The man saw his reflection in a window and attacked. He slashed Reichert repeatedly in the neck with a knife, one or two centimeters the wrong way, and Reichert's artery would have been cut and he would have been killed. Reichert had not turned away or given up, but fought hard. He managed to hold on to the crazed man until backup broke through the front door.
The officers that came through the door quickly disarmed and disabled the crazed man, and Reichert came away from the incident with scars on his neck and stars on his employment record. Another aspect about all-American Detective Reichert was his personal religious views. He was deeply religious and not afraid to tell anyone and everyone about Jesus Christ.
At one point, he had gone to a small college in Minnesota, pursuing a divinity degree, but he had had to give that up when his young wife got pregnant and money ran short. Even though he didn't achieve becoming a minister, as his grandfather had been, he viewed being a cop as a very valuable second choice, as really helping to make a difference in people's lives was important to him.
Even though this latest case on his desk was viewed by many as a routine case from Washington's seedy underbelly, he intended to give it his full attention and solve it. The woman had been found naked. It was therefore more than likely a homicide, and Reichert was not about to let some pimp or john get away with murder.
A month prior to the discovery of the naked woman in the river, another woman had been found in the Green River. Less than a kilometer from the latest discovery site, 16-year-old Wendy Caulfield had been strangled to death with her own pants. Like this latest woman, Wendy had tattoos. Because Wendy had been found within Kent City limits, the suburban police department was investigating it.
Reichert wondered, rightly so, if the two cases might be connected. Reichert had talked to a local Kent police officer at the crime scene of the unidentified woman who happened to be assigned to the Wendy murder case. The officer, named R.D. Kellams, was sure the cases were connected. Reichert was unsure.
The Green River, especially in the suburban and industrial areas surrounding Seattle, was known for being a place where one could dump things. Illegal firearms, stolen goods, junk, hazardous materials, and yes, victims of a violent crime. Just because two women with tattoos had been found dead in the river did not automatically mean the two cases were connected.
But Reichert was a thorough man, and if the Wendy case was not enough, he had a third case on his mind. Six months prior to this latest discovery, someone who had been a friend of Wendy had also been found murdered. Reichert had investigated that crime. The name of the young woman had been Leanne Wilcox. She, too, had been strangled to death.
Her body had been found several kilometers away from the Green River, but both Leanne and Wendy had been prostitutes. And now Reichardt had a third dead young woman on his hand. If she too would turn out to be a streetwalker, a prostitute, Reichardt actually could find himself in the midst of a bona fide serial killer case.
The autopsy of the naked woman in the river, nicknamed as all unidentified female bodies as Jane Doe, began around 9 a.m. on the 13th of August 1982. Photographs were taken of the dead woman's tattoos. They were crude and poorly done. One arm had a faded tattoo that appeared to be a heart around the word Doobie.
They then managed to take blurry finger and palm prints from the dead woman's hands. X-rays were next. Then the autopsy proper could begin. The autopsy procedure itself has changed very little during the 20th century. The first step is a gross examination of the exterior for any abnormality or trauma and a careful description of the interior of the body and its organs.
This is usually followed by further studies, including microscopic examination of cells and tissues. The main incisions in the body remain the same. For the torso, a Y-shaped incision is made. Each upper limb of the Y extends from either the armpit or the outer shoulder and is carried beneath the breast to the bottom of the sternum or breastbone in the midline.
From this point of juncture, at the bottom of the sternum, the incision is continued down to the lower abdomen where the groins meet in the genital area. Each organ is removed separately for incision and study. The great vessels to the neck, head and arms are ligated, tied off, and the organs removed as a unit for dissection.
The neck organs are explored in situ only, or removed from below. Dissection then proceeds usually from the back, except where findings dictate a variation in the procedure. Usually groups of organs are removed together so that disturbances in their functional relationships may be determined.
After study of the brain in position, it is freed from its attachments and removed. The spinal cord can also be removed. The dissector proceeds to examine the external and cut surface of each organ, its vascular structures, including arteries, lymphatics, facial or fibrous tissue, and nerves.
Specimens are taken for culture, chemical analysis, and other studies. Immediately upon completion of the procedure, all of the organs are returned to the body and all incisions carefully sewn. After the body's proper restoration, no unseemly evidence of the autopsy need remain. Teeth were x-rayed, fingernails carefully preserved, and hair samples were collected.
The body had been in the water for too long to determine with absolute certainty the cause of death, but it was determined that she had died from suffocation, either from drowning or strangulation. Reichert were at the conclusion of the autopsy given a set of photos and prints taken from the corpse.
these he returned to the court-house and gave them to a technician in the department's criminal identification section within several hours the prints and tattoos were tentatively matched to a name doe was no longer the naked woman in the river's surname
She had been Deborah Lynn Bonner, 23 years old, a convicted prostitute and occasional striptease dancer who sometimes went by the alias of Pam Peake. Deborah, or Pam as she was sometimes known as on the street, had been arrested for prostitution as late as the 18th of July, 1982.
Reichert took it upon himself to inform Deborah's next of kin of her passing. On the 14th of August, 1982, he drove up to Tacoma to Walter and Shirley Bonner. He informed them of the likelihood of the murder victim being their Deborah, and they were naturally devastated. They informed Reichert that their beloved daughter's nickname was Dub growing up.
That explained the doobie tattoo. The parents informed the Reichert that their daughter had been reported missing for almost three weeks. This happened to be the same amount of time her body had been in the water, according to the medical examiners. Walter and Shirley told him they knew very well their daughter had been in trouble.
Recently, they had put their house up for bond to bail out Dub and her boyfriend, Carl Martin, from jail. The mention of a boyfriend immediately piqued Detective Reichert's interest. In most violent crime against women, it is either the husband or boyfriend who is the perpetrator.
To make it even more interesting, Carl Martin was no proper boyfriend, according to Dub's parents. He was a drug dealer and a pimp. After the pair had been bailed out of jail, Dub had disappeared. A couple of weeks later, Carl Martin had appeared at their door, asking if they knew where she was. They did not, but they told Detective Reichert they had a pretty good idea what had happened.
Dubb had left a note with a Tacoma bartender who knew Walter and Shirley. It said that Carl Martin owed another man several thousand dollars, and this man threatened to murder Dubb if Carl Martin did not pay up. This mysterious second man was named Larry Darnell Matthews. He too lived in Tacoma and was affiliated with Carl Martin. Reichardt smelled an easy wind.
Here he had several good leads and a possible suspect with an apparent motive. He genuinely hoped Dub's case was not connected with the other two dead women. His hopes would be short-lived. A nightmare was about to unfold. Terror and depravity beyond anything Reichert had seen or heard of in his life. And he was to play protagonist.
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For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. And with that, dear listener, we come to the end of part one in the Riverman series. I honestly do not know how long this series will go on for.
I wish to take care to get all the details right and not leave anything out. I write the script for these episodes as the series goes on, so please enjoy the ride. And remember, the journey is the goal, not the destination. Next episode will continue the Riverman saga, and I will introduce you to a landscape taken straight from hell.
Naked corpses floating to the surface seemingly without end. Death. Terror. Despair. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
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