Yates, who received a 407-year sentence for his confessed commission of twelve murders in Spokane, faced trial in Pierce County, Washington, in April 2002 for the murder of two Tacoma women. Melinda L. Mercer and Connie LaFontaine Ellis were both killed in the Tacoma area, their bodies dumped in remote locations. In both cases, they were killed during periods when Yates, coincidentally, was serving with the Washington Army National Guard at Camp Murray and Fort Lewis, near Tacoma.
“Even if Mr. Yates is convicted in Tacoma,” said, Jerry Costello, Pierce County’s chief criminal prosecutor, “interstate compacts are in place to allow him to be transferred to Alabama to face a jury if charges are ever filed against him there.”
In 1996, leaving the armed forces behind, and possibly avoiding any connection with the deceased Corbitt, Yates moved his family to Spokane, Washington. With a population of 195,629 in the Spokane city limits, and another 417,939 in greater Spokane County, Spokane is located on the eastern side of Washington State, only eighteen miles west of the Idaho state line, and 110 miles south of the Canadian border. The Spokane area serves as the hub of the Inland Northwest, a thirty-six-county region encompassing eastern Washington, northern Idaho, western Montana, northeastern Oregon, and parts of Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. It is also only 140 miles from Robert Lee Yates’s in-laws in Walla Walla.
“I had hoped that coming back home to Washington would help the marriage,” Linda Yates said, “but it really didn’t. The romance was gone, but I felt guilty about splitting up the family. The kids loved their dad, and I just kind of suffered through it. I didn’t love him like a wife should. He killed that.”
Unable to secure a pilot position, he worked for Tony Givens, owner of Pantrol Inc. “Pantrol puts together electronic instruments for heavy machinery,” explained Givens. “Yates worked for me assembling components until 1997. He was a good worker who mostly kept to himself. Nothing really stuck out about him,” Givens said. “He was just an average Joe—pretty quiet. I didn’t talk to him much. But he seemed friendly enough.”
When orders dried up at Pantrol, Yates crossed the picket line at Kaiser Aluminum’s Processing Plant in Mead, Washington, where his coworkers considered him “a very family guy” who took the leader, or “father figure,” role in the group. “He got along with all of us,” said Tim Buchanan, the man with whom Yates took his coffee breaks. Dan Russell, president of the striking Local 329, said, “Yates initially worked as a carbon setter, and that’s intensive work that requires respirator-equipped laborers to toil around pots of molten ore that reach up to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Sometime later,” Russell said, “Yates’s job changed to overhead crane operator in the pot room.”
According to Susan Ashe, spokeswoman for Kaiser, “By all accounts, he was a good worker. He had a very good work record.”
Robert Lee Yates Jr. joined the National Guard in April 1997. “He came to us very, very qualified. In the three years he was assigned to us, he was a good performer. He did an excellent job,” said Lieutenant Colonel Rick Patterson, a National Guard spokesman. But pending medical evaluations, Robert Lee Yates Jr. was not allowed to fly. The dates of his grounding were from spring 1997 to spring 1998. The body count began.
During that one-year period, Robert Lee Yates Jr. killed Spokane women whose lost lives, one at a time, would not elicit outrage. “He learned as he went along,” commented Sergeant Walker. “He learned that killing women with high-risk lifestyles did not garner the same community outrage as killing someone such as Susan Savage.”
Yates’s next self-acknowledged kill was the 1988 murder of Stacy Hawn, twenty-five, last seen alive in Seattle on July 7, 1988. Her skeletal remains were found five months later in Skagit County, Washington.
“Oh, he learned all right,” said Cathy A., a former Spokane prostitute now living a respectable life in Renton, Washington. “He learned plenty just sitting with us in the Coach House coffee shop. All us hookers would sit around talking about who and what we did, and he would just be real quiet, pleasant, passive, and if one of us needed a ride somewhere, he would give us a lift. We didn’t know him as Robert Lee Yates Jr., of course. Sometimes he was Dan; sometimes he was Bob. You never notice names; they change all the time.”
“They said it was somebody we all knew and dated,” said Leda, another Sprague Avenue prostitute. “Sure enough, it was.” Yates was known as a reliable, safe regular.
“He paid me twenty dollars for an easy no-touch date,” said Jennifer T. “I don’t remember much about him other than he had big hands and a thick neck.”
“Every time I dated him, which I did about nine or ten times,” said Julie, “he had me get some crack cocaine for him and heroin for myself. He liked smoking it so much, I called him ‘my little crack patient.’ I shot him up with crank one time, too. I thought he was harmless.” Today, looking over the list of murdered women, many whom she knew, she wishes she had killed him.
Yates first picked her up near Trudeau’s Marina on East Sprague. “We went to Al’s Spa Tub Motel, and twice we went to my apartment,” she recalled. “He didn’t seem to give a shit who saw him. Most married men are nervous.
“He only scared me once,” she admitted, “and that’s when I asked for more money. He looked angry as hell, and I mean real angry, but he drove to the cash machine and got the rest of the money.
“Our dates ended when I quit heroin for a while. Because I didn’t need to support the habit, I stopped working as a prostitute,” she said. “Bob was emotionless most of the time. Underneath that mild-mannered mask, there was nobody home. You looked in his eyes and they were dead.
“I hate to admit it,” said Julie, “but I actually felt sorry for him when I saw on television that he had been arrested. If you’d have given me one hundred guys and said which is the least likely to do this, I thought he was a minus one. I wonder why he didn’t kill me, too. Maybe it was because I didn’t steal from him; maybe it was because I gave good head. I don’t know. The fact that I’m alive is a God thing to me.”
Julie wasn’t the only woman stunned by the revelation of the serial killer’s identity. “When I saw his face on TV after he was arrested, I about fell off my bar stool,” said Aloha Ingram. “I thought, it couldn’t be Bob. He was generous, soft-spoken, and I had halfway fallen in love with him. He wasn’t kinky. He wasn’t abusive. He wasn’t real aggressive. He was just normal. Very passionate and very concerned about my satisfaction. He’d kiss me from head to toe. He was real intimate that way,” she said. “He always had his arm around me. It was like a relationship, not a paying customer.
“I began to fall in love,” admitted Aloha. “I even told my family about him. He told me that he cared about me. That’s why I felt there was more there than just a business contact.” Of all the customers in her years as a sexual professional, she had never felt safer than when cuddled up to Robert Lee Yates Jr., the compassionate romantic who murdered her friends.
“I just thank God I never dated him,” said Cathy A. “I mean, either he liked you and let you live or he blew your brains out. I got out of Spokane because of the serial killer, and I got clean of drugs, too. My God,” she said with a perceptible shudder, “I could have wound up decomposing in an empty lot somewhere or rotting away in an alfalfa field.”
CHAPTER TWO
August 26, 1997
It was a beautiful day for finding dead bodies. The warm summer sun shimmered down through high overcast clouds, and a soft breeze cooled 80-degree August heat. At 11:00 A.M., Vietnam veteran Larry Jones foraged for empty pop cans in an overgrown empty lot off Spokane’s East Springfield Street. Searching for recyclable aluminum, he discovered a rotting corpse.
Concealed under a tree, and hidden in high grass behind some large metal tins, the half-naked body showed every indication of extensive exposure to the elements. Systematic analysis of the crime scene by Spokane