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FOR DECADES, Tukwila, Kent, Auburn, Des Moines, and Federal Way depended on the Pac HiWay for their commercial sustenance, entertainment, and transportation to either Seattle or Tacoma. The road, like the river, has changed continually over sixty years. It began as Highway 99, and then it was "Old 99" when the I-5 Freeway opened. Some spots are called Pacific Highway South, except where it passes the Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, where it has become International Parkway. Despite the newly sophisticated name, fancy street signs, and the median planted with shrubs and bulbs, this part of Pac HiWay remains the "SeaTac Strip" to many King County residents.

Heading south from Seattle for the twenty-six miles to Tacoma, the highway was two lane in the 1930s and 1940s, a pleasant drive out of the city on Saturday nights to dance at the Spanish Castle, gamble at a permanently anchored ship on the Duwamish River, or eat fried chicken at Rose's on the Highway.

There were little motels, which were referred to as "cabin camps," decades before the Hiltons, Sheratons, and Doubletrees, before the Super-Eights and Motel 6's, and even before the Ben Carol, the Three Bears, and the Legend motels. And, of course, 99 was the only highway to take to Portland and on to California, passing through the center of towns along the way.

Roads age and change the way people do, so subtly that nobody notices the first faint wrinkles and loss of rosy innocence. Often, the good things are just gone one day and few remember when they disappeared. The Spanish Castle and Rose's burned down in unexplained fires. Manca's In-and-Out hamburger drive-through went out of business. The Midway Drive-in, said to be the first outdoor theater in America, stopped showing movies at some point and became a thriving weekend swap meet.

The marginal hotels and motels became seedier, a club called Dandy's that featured topless dancers and male strippers took over Pepo's Gourmet Hungarian Restaurant at the corner of Pac HiWay and 144th, and then Pepo himself died while still in his forties.

"Pepo's corner" became the center point for something else entirely.

In the old days, sections of Seattle where love for sale was commonplace were far from the SeaTac Strip because it was much too remote from downtown. The airport was hardly a draw because it wasn't all that large. Instead, undercover cops watched for prostitutes and pimps along downtown's Pike Street and out on Aurora Avenue in the north end of the city.

Over time, the Pac HiWay became a tunnel of contrasts. In 1954, the airport was a single structure with no jetways and no underground trains, but it morphed into a huge spiderweb of gates, jetways, and ramps with two runways. Indeed, today's SeaTac Airport is one of the nation's hubs, and the King County Port Authority Commission foresaw the need for more and longer runways. Through its power of eminent domain, the commission bought up whole neighborhoods of little postwar houses with perfect lawns, whose occupants had long since grown used to the roar of jets directly over their roofs. The Port paid fair-market prices and scores of homes were loaded onto trucks, leaving behind many miles of wasteland both north and south of the airport. The grass grew tall around the houseless foundations and the neglected trees and shrubs left behind. The trees still blossomed and bore fruit, although no one was left to appreciate them.

By the early 1980s, the whole ambience of Highway 99/Pac HiWay/International Parkway had been transformed. Serious motorists raced along the I-5 Freeway a mile to the east, and the strip became a local roadway, full of businesses that catered to those who flew in or lived and worked nearby, some of them long-standing, some new: fast food, overnight lodging to fit any budget, lock-smiths, bicycle repair shops, hot-tub sales, one stupendous gourmet supermarket—Larry's—and any number of 7-Elevens. The Little Church by the Side of the Road was still there and so was The Pancake Chef and the Lewis and Clark Theater, but its once magnificent single auditorium was sliced into a utilitarian multiplex. Don the Barber, who shares his shop with his twin brother, Dick, has cut hair at Pac HiWay and S. 142nd for decades, and they still have hundreds of "regulars" who stop by to joke with Don or have serious conversations with his more taciturn twin.

Drug deals became commonplace as pimps and their girls moved to the area. Certainly, there were homicides and lesser crimes along the Pacific Highway. One Chinese restaurant has had two fatal shoot-outs in as many years, but next door, families still flock to Angle Lake State Park to picnic and swim in the summer, and no one could have foreseen that the deadliest killer of all would choose a ten-mile stretch of this roadway as his personal hunting ground.

He was like a wolf watching his quarry from the woods, almost invisible as he crouched where the leaves have turned to faint brown and gray, virtually hidden by protective coloration. No one really saw him, and if anyone did, they wouldn't remember him. More than any other serial killer in the annals of crime, he could quite literally hide in plain sight.

Disasters often begin silently with an almost imperceptible shift in the way things are expected to be. Rockslides start with a pebble or two plinking down a mountain, and avalanches with the first tiny jar beneath pristine snowbanks. A small hole in a dike. A crack snaking along the hull of a ship. Rocky plates far beneath the ground shift and a gigantic earthquake topples tall buildings above. By the time human beings find themselves in the path of destruction, it is all too often too late to save them.

Except for the people who had known and loved her, and the Kent Police Department, Wendy Coffield's murder didn't make much of a blip on the awareness of people who lived in King County, Washington. Locals in the south end were afraid that summer of 1982, but not because of Wendy Coffield's murder; they were frightened because two people in Auburn had died suddenly and agonizingly the month before of cyanide poisoning after taking Extra-Strength Excedrin capsules purchased in Kent and Auburn stores. Investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration were sweeping thousands of pill bottles off store shelves for testing. A lead investigator warned against taking any capsules until all the seized painkillers had been tested.

It was a scary time, but, sadly, not because of one teenager whose defiant nature and habit of hitchhiking had probably ended her life. Various police departments in the greater Puget Sound area had unsolved murders and missing persons cases involving young women, but there didn't seem to be any pattern among them.

In the next few weeks, the Green River rolled on, and fishermen sometimes talked about the body found in the river, but teenagers didn't swim in the Green River, anyway, and few of them had even known Wendy Coffield. The river's current was too swift for swimmers, and Lake Fenwick was close by. It was dangerous, too, because there were no lifeguards on duty, but it was still a popular spot for keggers.

AND THEN THE EARTH SHIFTED and more stones bounced quietly down a mountain of catastrophe. It was another Thursday, August 12, 1982, four weeks after Wendy's body was found, when what had appeared to be an isolated tragedy began to take on a horrific pattern. Another woman's body floated in the Green River about a quarter of a mile south of where Wendy had been discovered. The second body was found by a worker from the nearby PD & J Meat Company. It was difficult to determine where she had gone into the river, but her corpse, unclothed, had been trapped in a net of tree branches and logs. Where her killer had met up with her, no one knew. It was unlikely that she had drowned accidentally.

There was no question that the body had been found inside the boundaries of King County, so the case was assigned to Detective Dave Reichert, who was next up to be lead detective on a homicide. Reichert, a detective for only a few years, was about thirty, although he looked much younger and the investigators he worked with usually called him "Davy." He was a handsome man with bright blue eyes and an abundance of wavy brown hair. Reichert was a family man with three small children and a strong Christian ethic. Like a lot of King County deputies and detectives, he had grown up in the south end of the county. He was totally familiar with the area, where he and several brothers had roamed as kids.

That summer of 1982 had been devastating for the King County Sheriff's Major Crime Unit, particularly for Dave Reichert. They had lost one of their own in a senseless shooting. Sergeant Sam Hicks would surely have been working alongside Reichert. They were very close friends, not really "hot dogs," but imbued with the enthusiasm of youth and the belief that they could track down almost any bad guy they were looking for.

Hicks was a tall, broad-shouldered man, slightly balding, always smiling, whose desk sat in the middle of the Major Crimes office. But on June 17, Hicks and Officer Leo Hursh approached an isolated farmhouse near Black Diamond to question Robert Wayne Hughes, thirty-one, about the murder of a south Seattle rock musician. Bullets zinged at them from somewhere inside a barn as they crouched, unprotected, in the open—they had had no forewarning that Hughes might be dangerous. As Hughes fired at them from his secure position, Sam Hicks was killed and Leo Hursh injured.

Hicks's funeral procession was many miles long and south-end residents, many of them with their hands over their hearts, lined the route in tribute, tears running down their cheeks. Captain Frank Adamson, Reichert's commander, saw how Hicks's death had crushed him and he'd considered reassigning him until the enormity of his grief had passed. But he thought better of it. Reichert was sensitive, but strong, and he was managing to cope. He wasn't likely to take things into his own hands if he encountered Hicks's killer.

Only three weeks after Sam Hicks's funeral, Wendy Coffield's body was discovered. And now another dead woman. Hicks was gone. One of the best homicide detectives the department had ever had wouldn't be there to help solve her case. But Reichert, if anything, would work as hard as two men now.

The woman floating in the Green River wasn't just a case to him—he cared about all human life. He was a high-energy optimist who waded into the water, expecting that he would find out what had happened to her, and that he would quickly ferret out who had done it. Years later, Reichert would recall that the slender hand of the woman in the river seemed to be reaching out to him for help. The only way he could do that was to help convict whoever had killed her.

It was easier to identify this "floater" than it had been in Wendy Coffield's case; her fingerprints were in police files. Debra Lynn Bonner was twenty-two years old, and she had lately made a precarious living on Pacific Highway South, working as a prostitute. In the thirty days before Debra's body was found, she had been arrested twice for offering sex for money.

Copyright © 2004 by Ann Rule