Worth More Dead

matter of pure greed over intelligence.
    And Pitre chose greed.

“It’s Really Weird Looking
at My Own Grave”

Almost everyone has felt a sudden, unexplainable shiver, that feeling that someone or some ghostly presence is running cold fingers up and down your spine.
    I can remember my grandmother saying, “A rabbit just ran over my grave.” I couldn’t understand what that meant. How could she know where her grave would be?
    She explained to me that was just an expression, something people said when they got that shivery feeling. In this case, it was much more than a strange, scary feeling.
    Very few victims of violent sexual assaults want to return to the place where they were attacked. Some of them can’t return because they didn’t survive the attacks. One of the teenage girls in this case, whose quick thinking saved her life, went back to the frightening and lonely place, so far from anyone who could have rescued her from a madman. She knew just how close she had come to dying, and she breathed the words more to herself than to the detective who accompanied her: “It’s really weird looking at my own grave.”
    Knowing that she was dead was extremely important to the murderer whose story follows. He didn’t kill for money or insurance or revenge or out of jealousy. He didn’t even know most of his victims until shortly before he attacked them. They were worth more dead to him because alive they could take away his precious freedom, perhaps even send him to the execution chamber.
    And he had every intention of shutting them up.
    Forever.

It was close to five on the afternoon of September 25, 1979, when a resident of the Timberlane area east of Kent, Washington, drove slowly down a familiar rutted logging road near his home. It was seldom traveled by anyone other than loggers or residents of the neighborhood. He glanced idly over the vegetation that crept up to the road, much of it just beginning to take on the tinge of fall color. The underbrush was thick as it grew over deadfall logs with tangles of blackberry vines, Oregon grape, salal, and sword ferns. Suddenly, he spotted something light-colored that seemed out of place, and he backed his four-wheel-drive vehicle up and got out to get a better look. The only sounds in the lonely area were his boots crunching through the brush and the cries of crows and hawks. Then he sharply drew in his breath, shocked by what he found.
    A skull that was almost certainly that of a human being lay about twelve feet from the road. He paused long enough to see that there were some tattered fragments of clothing, a few swatches of blondish-brown hair, and then he ran back to his rig and drove rapidly to his house, where he could use his phone.
    When he reached the King County Police radio dispatcher, he blurted, “I just found a skull and some bones! They’re located approximately one mile northeast of SE 259th and 199th SE. I think that’s just outside the Kent city line. I’ll wait here at my house until you can send a car out.”
    Patrol Officer Phillip Orwig was the first deputy to respond to the radio call to investigate “possible human remains.” Although it wasn’t unusual for citizens to call in reports of human skeletons, most turned out to be only the remains of animals. A few were Native American graves, where tribe members had been buried a hundred years earlier, unearthed now by bulldozers, as the cities of the Northwest were more and more enlarged by suburbs.
    Orvig’s perusal of the scene told him that this was no coyote or elk. The skull was clearly of human origin. He was joined at the scene by Sergeant Sam Hicks and Detectives Bob La Moria, Frank Tennison, and Dave Reichert and King County Deputy Medical Examiner, Gordon Anderson.
    The young investigators, most of them not long out of the Patrol Division, surveyed the scene, where someone had either wandered into the brush and died or, more likely, where a killer had attempted to hide a body. They could see fragments of bone and torn weathered clothing, but the time wasn’t right for an intensive crime scene search. Already the chill of the early fall evening made them shiver, and the setting sun made the woods murky. If they attempted to work the body site now, they might overlook something vital. The body had lain here for at least three months; twelve more hours wouldn’t matter. The detectives left patrol deputies to guard the area until they could return in the morning light to