Speaking to her on the phone, Ruetsch asked her if she remembered that night and, more specifically, the car antenna. “Sure I remember. The reason he had the antenna,” she explained, “was because he was gonna make it into a crack pipe.” After gaining new insights into the multitudinous uses of automotive accessories, Ruetsch inquired if she had any idea who killed Joseph and/or Hernandez. “No. I’m clueless,” she said. “I can’t imagine anyone doing shit like that. Pardon my language.”
Off-color remarks and street-level obscenities were the detectives’ least concerns. Prostitution and drug possession—often termed “victimless crimes”—are insignificant compared to homicide. Interviewing several prostitutes in rapid succession gave Grabenstein and Ruetsch additional insights into Joseph’s and Hernandez’s lifestyles.
“I knew both Jennifer and Heather ’cause I worked the same corners as them,” said one Sprague Avenue regular. “I came to Spokane from Tacoma in February 1996 because over here the cops aren’t so rough on you as over there. In Tacoma, they throw you into jail every chance they get. Here, they give you a citation and a talking-to.”
The most important talking-to in recent memory was not from Spokane law enforcement, but from Heather Hernandez. “She got hold of me and asked if she could, you know, ‘associate’ with me and my man because she had a falling-out with hers,” the woman explained. Her man was the same man whom the apartment manager knew as Roberts, and it was he who represented Jennifer Joseph as an escort. “Heather’s man was doin’ some other lady, and Heather was hurt over it. Anyway, Heather and I both left the Bel-Air Motel at six o’clock to work East Sprague. We walked to the area of the Honey Baked Ham Restaurant, and I was almost immediately picked up by a date. I got back about twenty minutes later, and Heather was not around. I wasn’t too concerned. I just figured that she was with a customer. All this occurred on a Friday night. It was the day before Jennifer disappeared, and that was a Saturday.”
Detective Miller suspected Hernandez’s man, commenting, “These girls had been playing games with their pimps, and they can get disciplined for that.” Sergeant Walker confirmed this initial suspicion. “The idea of pimp wars did occur to investigators. You have to take all things into consideration, and that was a possibility.”
The woman acknowledged that Hernandez’s former man might be angry at Heather for working “under different auspices,” but she thoroughly discounted any possibility that the women’s deaths were due to any kind of “pimp war.”
“They don’t do that sort of stuff around here,” she told detectives. “Maybe in the movies they do, but not on East Sprague. We try to watch each other’s backs most of the time. Sure, there are some psycho nutcases working out here, but you gotta worry more about the customers than the other girls or their so-called pimps.
“I saw Jennifer the next night,” she continued. “She was wearing black pants, a long-sleeved silver button-front shirt, and some type of dress shoes. Oh, and she had the same purse that she always had, which was a small plastic zip-lock pouch about four inches long, two inches wide, and one inch thick. It was clear except for all the glitter. Inside the pouch was change, condoms, and a canister of mace. I told her to take the mace out of the pouch and put it in her right pocket where she could get to it, and would keep it away from the guy in the driver’s seat if she were a passenger.” A thoughtful pause postponed her recollections’ final punctuation. “I guess it didn’t do her much good, did it?”
Jennifer Joseph took a taxi from the motel to East Sprague, sharing the cab with Tiesha, another prostitute whom she first met in Portland, Oregon, earlier that summer.
“The cab would come and pick us both up at the motel,” said Tiesha, “and take us wherever we wanted to go. Most times, we would call for this same cab to pick us up when we were finished.”
This one particular cabdriver was often requested by a number of the prostitutes, explained Tiesha, “because he was respectful toward women and wasn’t judgmental even though he knew we were prostitutes. He didn’t even trade sex for taxi fares. He wasn’t like some other cabdrivers,” she said, naming one or two whom she found particularly repellent.
According to Tiesha, it was “against policy” for Jennifer and her to engage in chitchat, walk together on the street, or spend too much time with customers. “We did get to talk once in a while,” said Tiesha. “Jennifer talked a lot about her father. She said that he was mad at her because she left home, and she told me that she didn’t think her dad would even let her come home if she wanted to. She even said that her dad had rented out her room, but I didn’t believe that, and I don’t think she really did, either. I think it was just something she was saying, you know, just to say it.”
Asked if she knew why an essentially drug-free sixteen-year-old girl would choose prostitution as her summer employment, Tiesha gave detectives a simple, direct, and inarguable answer: “She liked the lifestyle.”
Not all other prostitutes, however, liked Jennifer. “When I first met her, I didn’t like her because she was Korean,” admitted one streetwalker questioned by Detective Grabenstein. “Korean girls make a lot of money ’cause for some reason, all the guys want ’em. So Jennifer was always very busy, being picked up by customers one right after another. I mean it was ‘wham-bam-door slam’ and on to the next one. She would get in the car, drive away, come back, get out, and get in another one. Meanwhile, I’m still pacing back and forth on the corner waiting for my next date.”
The graveyard-shift employees at the Chevron station close to Jennifer Joseph’s favorite corner remembered her well. “She used to come in here quite a bit,” recalled one counter person. “She was always pleasant, friendly, and courteous. I knew she was a prostitute by, well, some of the things she said and by the fact that she bought quite a few condoms—mostly LifeStyle brand, the ribbed kind. The other girls told me that she made up to seven hundred dollars a night.”
A security guard working in the parking lots on 3900–4000 East Sprague frequently observed prostitutes doing business and made entries in her journal regarding activities that affected her clients. “I recognized the media photographs of Jennifer Joseph,” she told detectives. “I had contact with her a few times and observed her on other occasions without contacting her. She would be picked up at least four times in twenty minutes,” recalled the security guard. “I told the young woman to make her contacts somewhere else other than the Pepsi parking lot. She agreed and was very nice about it. The other thing I noticed was how often she was picked up, driven around the block, and then dropped back off. I think maybe her price was higher than some men were willing to pay.”
Joseph was also seen fending off one man’s unwanted physical advances. “At first, I thought they were embracing, but then I realized that she was trying to push him away. I recall that he drove a white car, a two-door, but I don’t know the make, model, or license number. I did write it down on a scrap of paper, but I can’t find it.”
Grabenstein and Ruetsch compiled an extensive list of suspect vehicles. They also inquired regarding known violent and dangerous tricks; they didn’t rule out regular customers with benign reputations.
“We didn’t have the individuals’ names, but we had physical descriptions of both the men and their vehicles.” Familiar cars and trucks cruising the high-prostitution-activity area included a white 1990 Chrysler New Yorker, a dark Chevrolet Camaro, a white Chevrolet Camaro, a maroon Buick, a Ford Thunderbird, an older Ford LTD, a dark Oldsmobile Cutlass, a light-blue Chevy Blazer, a large white Chevy Suburban with a company logo on it, an older dark-blue or black van, a brown 1970s-era van, a pickup truck with a camper on the back, a four-door Nissan, a white Porsche, and numerous pickup trucks with big wheels.
September 2, 1997
Yolanda Cary, the prostitute who interacted with Jennifer Joseph’s boyfriend when she failed to return home for dinner, recounted to detectives about the last time she saw Jennifer Joseph and the vehicle in which she was riding.
“We were all staying at the same motel, but Jennifer and I weren’t in the same room,” said Cary. “I last