Body Count

By Burl Barer

He Seemed So Normal . . .

By day, Robert Lee Yates, Jr., was a respected father of five, a skilled helicopter pilot who served in Desert Storm and the National Guard, and a man no one suspected of a deadly hidden life. By night he prowled the streets where prostitutes gathered, gaining their trust before betraying them with a bullet to the head.

On August 26, 1997, the decomposed bodies of two young women were discovered in Spokane, Washington. Within months four more women were added to the mounting death toll.

In 2000, Yates pleaded guilty to thirteen murders to avoid the death penalty. But in 2001 he was convicted of two more murders and is now on death row in Washington State, waiting for the day when he will die by lethal injection.

Updated with the latest disturbing developments, awardwinning author Burl Barer's reallife thriller is a shocking portrait of one man's depravity.

"Brilliant investigative journalism. . .a nonstop chilling thrill ride into the mind of an evil and savage killer." Dan Zupansky, author of Trophy Kill

Includes 16 pages of photos

"A must read." True Crime Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Release date: Oct 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9780786030255

Book preview

Women

PROLOGUE

Patrick Oliver, twenty-one, and Susan Savage, twenty-two, grew up together in Walla Walla, Washington. Friends since childhood, the pair reunited in the summer of 1975 for a Sunday-afternoon picnic.

Patrick washed and polished his Mercury Cougar, then picked up Susan at her residence. On July 13, at exactly 2:15

P.M.

, the couple drove off to their undisclosed, and perhaps undecided, destination. We’ll be home in time for dinner were the last words Patrick said as Susan and he got into the car.

The dinner hour came and went. At first, their parents were only mildly concerned—car trouble could explain the delay. The mood darkened as the sun set, and comforting optimism turned gradually to cold fear—fear of a serious or fatal car accident.

This possibility stirred tragic memories for the Olivers. Patrick’s brother James was killed on the Fourth of July, 1967, at the age of eighteen, when his car went out of control and hit a tree about eight miles west of Elgin, Oregon. James was killed, and younger brother Dan was hospitalized for some time at St. Joseph Hospital in La Grande.

Phone calls to area hospitals and the Washington State Patrol confirmed that there were no serious injury accidents that day. The distressed and desperate families contacted local law enforcement.

We were asked to search for the missing couple, but the families had no idea exactly where to look, recounted Detective Mike Skeeters. Oliver and Savage didn’t say where they were going, only that they planned a picnic. All that could be done was to put out an alert for Oliver’s car.

The following morning, the two families gathered at the Oliver home to brainstorm on Susan and Patrick’s whereabouts. Oliver’s aunt Nadine Gerkey offered an insightful hunch: if the picnic’s purpose was to renew their fond childhood friendship, they would most likely go to a location filled with treasured memories.

A recreational area ten miles east of Walla Walla on Mill Creek, near the Wickersham Bridge, was a favorite outing spot for the Olivers, recalled Gerkey. Oliver and Savage enjoyed many fun-filled weekends relaxing on the grassy banks, shaded by large trees, and swimming in the softly flowing stream.

Dan Oliver and his uncle Frank Munns followed Gerkey’s hunch. Driving the ten miles up Kooskooskie Road to Mill Creek, they soon discovered Patrick’s Mercury Cougar parked on the roadside. Continuing their search along the creek bank, they spotted something unusual about a half mile west of Wickersham Bridge.

I saw this sort of funny arrangement of debris down near the edge of the creek, recalled Frank Munns. There was a lot of stuff piled up, and an old tarp thrown over it with a tire on top. Taking a closer look, the apprehensive searchers lifted the corner of what was actually an old army sleeping bag covering brush and debris. They saw a foot with a shoe on it sticking out from under the brush. I am the one who discovered Pat and Susan on July 14, 1975, said Dan Oliver years later. I saw their dead bodies on the west side of Mill Creek beneath a sleeping bag and a tire.

Exactly twenty-four hours after Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage pulled out of the driveway, Frank Munns and Dan Oliver walked into the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office. Notified of the shocking discovery, Sheriff Art Klundt and Chief Criminal Deputy Scotty Ray immediately drove to the scene.

Beneath the implement tire, sleeping bag, and debris were the bodies exactly as Dan Oliver and Frank Munns reported: Savage, placed on top of Oliver, was naked from the waist down, and her green halter top was pulled up exposing her breasts. Oliver, clothed in his matching lightweight blue shirt and shorts, had a bullet wound directly through the heart; Savage’s wound was directly behind her left ear.

An autopsy conducted on both victims by Dr. Abbas Sameh revealed that Oliver was actually shot three times—the first bullet went through his left forearm; the second passed through the right shoulder. This indicated that the killer was a marksman aiming for the heart and that Oliver put up his arms in a defensive reflex. The first two shots were only slightly off target; the third shot went directly through young Oliver’s heart.

Dr. Sameh reported that Susan Savage also was shot more than once. Prior to the fatal shot behind her left ear, there was one to her left shoulder. Doctor Sameh found no evidence of sexual assault, commented Sheriff Mike Humphries years later, but there was a substance noticed on Ms. Savage that was never identified for the simple reason that her body was completely cleansed by the funeral home before the autopsy. Today, of course, we would recover every hair, fiber, or whatever and identify it. But this is the twenty-first century, and the murder was in the mid-1970s.

The sheriff’s office requested, and received, assistance from the Spokane police in processing potential evidence retrieved from the debris piled upon the bodies. There were a small number of latent fingerprints, but they were insufficient for purposes of comparison to prints on file. About as good as we can do, reported the lab technicians, is to either say they were or were not left by any particular person in the event you locate a suspect.

Ray sent all the physical evidence, including bullets recovered from the bodies, to the FBI lab in Washington, DC. There was one thing, said Ray, which could crack the case. The FBI reported that the bullets came from a .357-caliber handgun. If there was a viable suspect who owned a .357, a ballistics test could determine with a high degree of probability whether or not the suspect’s gun was the murder weapon.

Desperate for additional clues, Ray invoked help from the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, the local newspaper where Oliver’s aunt Nadine Gerkey was a respected reporter. Radio stations KTEL and KUJ joined in the media effort encouraging any and all individuals with information, ideas, or evidence to immediately contact Scotty Ray at the sheriff’s office.

Public response to our efforts to track down the killer has been very good, noted Ray, who acknowledged that the sheriff’s office received an enormous number of calls from individuals offering information. Several people reported hearing gunshots at Mill Creek that Sunday afternoon, but the area was also a popular spot for target practice. Hearing gunfire wasn’t unusual.

Diane Lackey, a teenager picnicking at Mill Creek with her boyfriend the same day as Oliver and Savage, was among those who contacted Investigator Ray. She had heard more than gunfire, and had seen more than the area’s rural serenity. Lackey had heard a woman scream, and shortly thereafter, she had come upon a man crouching in the bushes.

To elicit more details, she agreed to being interviewed under the influence of sodium amytol by psychiatrist Frederick Montgomery. The interview’s results were then shared with Walla Walla deputy prosecuting attorney Jerry Votendahl.

Diane was, I think, extremely cooperative, reported Dr. Montgomery. "Following an altercation with her boyfriend, she walked to a small ravine and, while standing there, she noticed a young man between the ages of nineteen to twenty-four crouching in the brush with no shirt on. When they noticed each other, he stood up and they stared at each other for some time. She describes him as being weird-looking, with brown medium-length hair. He was of medium height, of a slender build, and wore jeans. They looked at each other for a period of time; then both became frightened and they both took off and ran. The boy running away from her, and the girl running back toward where her boyfriend was.

Diane seems to recognize this individual, noted Montgomery, and she states that she has seen him before some place in Walla Walla, but could not recollect when. I think she would recognize him again if she saw him.

Lackey added one more important piece of information—the man may have been driving a red compact car, similar to a Mustang. She noticed the car parked alongside the road when she arrived at Mill Creek. Several other people, including residents of the area, also mentioned a small red car parked near Oliver’s vehicle.

The unidentified red compact car was among over two dozen vehicles that were either parked or cruising in the Mill Creek area at the time of the homicides. The sheriff’s office is doing what we can, said Ray, to get these cars identified that people have seen up there. Deputies have interviewed about one hundred persons in the case, including individuals acquainted with the victims, and others who were in the area at the time of the shooting.

The entire town was emotionally invested in capturing the couple’s killer. A citizens’ group raised a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the guilty party. Walla Walla attorney Madison Jones, cochairman with fellow attorney Al Golden of the nine-member Concerned Citizens Reward Committee, was optimistic.

The bigger the reward, the more likely someone is going to come forward with information, Jones said. People in this town are upset about this thing. Susan Savage baby-sat for everybody in this town, including me. The day she died, Susan Savage had been wearing a cloisonné bracelet received as a thank-you gift from the parents of three neighborhood children for whom she baby-sat.

Pat Oliver was from a well-known family in this town, stated Madison Jones. I think that with a reward, we can continue to maintain the public interest. With a tragedy like this, it shouldn’t go unnoticed after a few days. Look at the Lindbergh kidnapping. They didn’t solve that for two or three years. They didn’t find Patty Hearst for nineteen months.

Within two weeks of the murders, the sheriff’s office confirmed that two officers working full-time devoted one thousand man-hours to the investigation. Hundreds of persons were contacted, and forty-three individuals provided taped interviews. Transcriptions ran to over two hundred pages, and the case files reached a thickness of more than two feet. Supplemental reports totaled over 150, and seventy-five items were collected as evidence. Despite the impressive numbers, authorities were no closer to catching the killer than they were on the day Savage’s and Oliver’s bodies were uncovered.

Walla Walla was then and is now a very small community with very limited resources, commented Christopher Oliver, Patrick’s younger brother, in retrospect. The investigation started with several suspects. All these leads were a dead end. No real suspects, no true motives.

Murders have three essential elements, explained Detective Skeeters. They are as follows: motive, means, and opportunity. The ‘means’ in this crime was a handgun, the ’opportunity’ was the seclusion of the couple’s picnic site, but the motive was something that couldn’t be ascertained.

We are not prepared to offer any motive that we can back up, acknowledged Ray to the press at the month’s end. Sheriff Klundt and he held strongly divergent opinions regarding motive: Klundt seriously considered the possibility that it was just some kook who killed them for no reason. Ray disagreed, insisting that the killings were too deliberate to be the sudden act of some kook.

My hunch is that somebody followed them out there with the intention of killing them, said Ray. He also firmly suspected that the motive was jealousy. It’s got to be the motive. The girl was not raped, and there was no struggle, commented Ray, who also noted that the bodies were easily discovered. There was no effort to hide the crime. Leaving Pat’s car at the scene was like setting up a sign.

Ray and the other deputies then pursued a process of elimination by investigating everyone with whom the couple associated. Perhaps something in their recent past, lifestyles, or behavior contained the singular clue that would reveal the killer’s motive and identity. It was time to take a deep look into the private lives of Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage.

So who was Pat Oliver? He was born in Walla Walla. He was raised in Walla Walla. Unfortunately, murdered in Walla Walla, said his brother Christopher. He was always adventurous. Pat was the third son of four boys. The Oliver boys were a unit. If anyone had a problem, we all got involved. If there was something new to experience, we all had to try it. Pat loved sports. He played baseball up to colt league. He played football; he was a halfback and linebacker. He played track. He was a very good skier. He liked the mountains and he hunted pheasants. Pat was a leader.

Patrick Oliver was a 1972 graduate of Walla Walla’s DeSales High School. He was class president in his sophomore and senior years, team captain of his football squad, president of the letterman’s club, and homecoming king during his senior year.

After high school, Pat went to Washington State University, continued Christopher. While some of his contemporaries partied, he studied inorganic chemistry, microbiology, and other premed courses. He was an honor student and had an opportunity to study in Paris his junior year. When Oliver returned from a year’s study at the University of Paris and the Sorbonne in the summer of 1975, he decided to attend Walla Walla’s Whitman College to study premed. He had only recently returned when Susan Savage and he went to Mill Creek.

Susan was at a point in life that had the most promise, said David Savage, Susan’s brother. She achieved an associate degree from Walla Walla Community College, received a bachelor of arts degree as an interior decorator from Washington State University, studied at the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and was, at the time of her death, a respected employee at Viewbird Graphics and Corporate Design.

I don’t know why this happened, said her mother, Marybelle Savage, in 2001. Why would anybody shoot your child? When you lose a child, you sometimes think you see her face in crowds, she said. She would have owned her own business. She would have been married with a family.

Looking back, Christopher Oliver commented that it would make sense to investigate who in the Walla Walla area had a license to both a small red car and a .357 handgun, but that wasn’t the tack taken.

Assuming jealousy as the motive, investigators probed deeply into the couple’s history and private lives. What they discovered was that Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage shared a relationship similar to that of a loving brother and sister—they were each other’s most ardent supporter, but they never dated. The couple was not, and had never been, romantically involved.

It was like that ever since they were kids, and all the way through school, said one longtime friend. Susan was Pat’s greatest booster. She thought he was tops; he thought she was the greatest. I guess they just knew each other too well to be anything more than good friends.

With the jealously motive abandoned, an alternate scenario was created. The new theory was international in scope and exceptionally expensive. I can’t really fault Ray or the sheriff, said Christopher Oliver years later, but I think they wasted an enormous amount of time and resources with Interpol.

Because Patrick had only recently returned from Europe and Susan had spent some time in Mexico, Ray considered that perhaps something happened outside the USA that accounted for the killings. We’ve drawn an absolute blank on any kind of motive from here, said Ray, and I think we can eliminate Susan as being the target for the killer because she has been home from Mexico for quite some time. But Pat was only back for two weeks when he was killed.

Ray asked a resident FBI agent concerning the proper procedure for requesting assistance from Interpol. Complete information on Patrick Oliver’s travels and activities were then sent to Interpol headquarters. It was learned that after Oliver left Paris, he went to Amsterdam for a short visit. The hotel in which he stayed was a suspected drug-distribution center and the scene of a large narcotics bust prior to his return to Walla Walla. The question evolved: was Patrick Oliver the informant who blew the whistle on the hotel’s drug traffic? If so, perhaps an international drug syndicate hired a hit man to travel all the way to Walla Walla to kill Oliver in retribution or to silence him.

The investigation’s focus for almost a year and a half was Ray’s theory that a professional assassin, sent from Europe, killed the couple. In my opinion, said Sheriff Humpries in 2001, they were off on a wrong track. A hit man usually targets one person, and they don’t do placement of bodies. Former sheriff Klundt’s theory that perhaps it was ‘some kook’ was more on target and was supported by psychologist John Berberich of the Seattle Police Department who, as the case remained unsolved, contacted Scotty Ray.

Berberich wrote that he had been thinking a lot about the murders in Wall Walla. In his opinion, the most likely explanation was that one or two men had stumbled on the couple, observed them for a while, and decided they wanted to have sex with the woman. Her companion probably resisted and was shot, and the female victim was shot to cover up the crime.

Because the bodies were not mutilated, these murders did not give Berberich the picture of having been done by a psychotic. He did, however, note a clear sexual component, in the female victim’s state of partial undress.

Berberich was three months into his employment with the Seattle Police Department at the time he advised Ray. I had written one profile prior to that which was of Bundy, and I did that in 1974 or ’75, he stated in 2001. The picture I tried to present to Scotty Ray was that of a psychopath, a personality type that tends to have the kind of descriptors I included here.

Berberich made some very interesting observations back then, commented Sheriff Mike Humphrey. As he mentioned, you can tell by the placement of the bodies that this was a sexually motivated homicide and not a murder for hire.

The Oliver and Savage families, emotionally devastated by the brutal murders, were further dismayed by the extended investigation’s continual detours down dead-end roads. In time, the reward committee’s optimism also faded as fanciful theories proved fruitless. The murders remained unsolved. We were left with no resolution, said Chris Oliver. But we never let go.

In 1975, while Scotty Ray pursued the nonexistent international hit man, a quiet and courteous corrections officer at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla resigned his job after only six months’ employment. He moved away, taking with him his red Dodge Dart and his Ruger .357 handgun. His name was Robert Lee Yates Jr., and his primary passion was shooting.

He shot all the time, said Linda Yates, his wife. According to her, his favorite place to shoot was about ten miles up Kooskooskie Road to Mill Creek, not too far from the Wickersham Bridge.

CHAPTER ONE

In his hometown of Oak Harbor, Washington, they don’t call him Robert Lee Yates Jr. They call him Bobby, differentiating him from his respected father, Robert Yates Sr.

In 1945, Bobby Yates’s grandmother, wielding a double-edged ax, violently ended her husband’s life. I was there, recalled Yates Sr. I heard the murder in the night. He found his father near death and his mother seated in a straight-backed chair in another room. She had given birth to eleven children, been under the stress of having a husband working away from home, and she simply broke. She spent seven years in a state mental hospital, confirmed Yates Sr.

When speaking of Robert Yates Jr., family friend George Cantrell said, This is a kid who was never in trouble. He was always practicing his upbringing—and it was a good one. Yates’s upbringing was idyllic, healthy, moral, and exemplary.

Oak Harbor, situated on Whidbey Island, offers stunning views of the majestic Olympic Mountains and the cerulean blue Pacific Ocean. Backpacking, hunting, dirt-bike riding, fishing, and other wholesome activities are the rule, not the exception, for life on Whidbey.

Robert Lee Yates Sr. was an elder in Oak Harbor’s Seventh-day Adventist Church—a tiny congregation of less than one hundred people sharing common bonds of beliefs and values. Health, family, and the sacredness of Sabbath are well-known pillars of American Adventist culture. The elder and younger Yates were always close.

The boy and his loving father shared everything together. The only childhood secret kept by the younger Yates was sexual molestation by a neighbor boy five years his senior when he was only six years old. Father and son, however, shared all of life’s joys. They did a lot of activities together, said family friend Dorothy Cantrell. Sports was their big thing.

His father coached Little League, and it was there that Robert Lee Yates Jr. learned the pitching skills later utilized while playing for the Oak Harbor Wildcats. He could throw a fastball with precision, recalled former teammate Harry Ferrier. Yates had a seven-one record his junior year in high school. According to former classmates, Yates was neither too outgoing nor exceptionally shy, neither a hedonistic animal nor a hermetic ascetic. He wasn’t a wild ladies’ man, but he dated with pleasant consistency. He was kind of quiet, said Harry Ferrier, who now lives in Anacortes. He was kind of like Joe Average.

For money, Yates mowed lawns, worked at gas stations, and harvested peas with Gary Berner in the summer, making $1.80 an hour. The worst thing I know about Bob is he wouldn’t play football his senior year, says Berner.

His steady moved away from Oak Harbor during their senior year. With no date for the homecoming dance, Robert Lee Yates Jr. spent the evening playing canasta with his buddy Al Gatti at the Yates family home on East 300th Street.

He was very much loved, said Gatti of his old pal Bobby Yates. There was a lot of respect in that family. They were the type of people that you‘d want as your neighbor. Mr. Yates—he’d give you the shirt off his back.

Yates and Gatti, two youths contemplating their futures, considered careers as biologists or game wardens. Gatti joined the army; Yates went to Skagit Valley College from 1970 through the spring of 1972, earning an associate art degree in general studies.

Respectful and courteous, Bobby Yates didn’t yield to pop-culture trends or in-crowd behavior. When other youths grew their hair long, Yates kept his closely clipped.

He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. Nothing or anything like that, said Yates’s closest friend, Al Gatti. We didn’t give into peer pressure; that wasn’t our thing. Our thing was hunting and fishing and hiking.

One popular hiking excursion for Yates and Gatti was a sixteen-hour round-trip backpacking outing in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. The purpose: fishing an isolated lake famed for its twenty-inch trout. Yates remained an avid outdoorsman, boasting to Gatti that his third daughter and he stalked deer together—a cause for celebration because none of his other daughters were attracted to the sport. According to Gatti, Yates told him, We had a terrific time.

Yates was the twice-married father of five. At the age of twenty, he married Shirley Nylander. The newlyweds moved to College Place, where they enrolled in Walla Walla College, a Seventh-day Adventist school.

I didn’t get to know him that much, said Mary Nylander, Shirley’s mother. About eighteen months after the marriage, Shirley moved out, went home, and asked for a divorce. Yates didn’t give her an argument; he gave himself to Linda Brewer, a pleasant young student at Walla Walla Community College.

Yates’s 1974 marriage to Linda was illegal, and therefore annulled, commented Sheriff Humphries, because his divorce from his first wife was not final. Six months after the invalid ceremony, Linda Brewer Yates, former high school classmate of Susan Savage’s sister, Nancy, gave birth to their first child.

Robert Lee Yates Jr. always had a passion for flight. Leaving Walla Walla, he enlisted in the armed forces, becoming an accomplished pilot. His wife, however, was more concerned about her husband’s other passions. Shortly after their marriage, Linda left him for thirty days when she learned that he had drilled a hole in the attic wall so he could watch the couple in the next apartment have sex.

I left him again in the mid-1980s, said Linda Yates, and moved back to Walla Walla with the children while he was on duty in Alabama. I loved the separation, she admitted, but the girls were pleading to be with their dad. They didn’t want to be poor and not have anything anymore.

While in the armed forces, Robert Lee Yates Jr. became a highly trained helicopter pilot. In his eighteen years of exemplary service, Yates received three meritorious service medals, three army commendation medals, three army achievement medals, and two armed forces expeditionary medals. He served in Germany and in Operation Desert Storm. Following the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, Yates participated in vital relief efforts, and he flew in a UN peacekeeping mission to Somalia. His fellow aviators praised his bravery and recalled him as an excellent pilot, knowledgeable and very safety conscious.

In Somalia, Yates violated regulations by shooting a wild pig while flying a helicopter. Yates and his airborne buddies, after more than a month of army food, wanted a barbecue. "They tried to court-martial him because he