The Spokane Murders

By Margot Hornblower/Spokane

Lynn Everson's "bad-trick list" has an inventory of 143 johns. "Red Toyota pickup--white male. gun, bat. Says he's cop, is not...Yellow Chrysler 4-door--white male, hand saw...Green Pickup with tinted windows--young white male, strangled woman till she passed out...Blue Honda, 2-door--white male, rapist, Eastern bloc accent..." The Spokane health worker, affectionately nicknamed "Mother Rubber," hands out condoms, cookies and clean needles from a Winnebago parked on East Sprague Street. Hookers too need someone to watch over them--especially when so many were winding up murdered.

Along East Sprague, where the clamor of freight trains punctuates the night and the Rainbow Tavern advertises "cold beer and hot women," a giant billboard remains standing. In large black letters it demands HELP US FIND OUR KILLER! above photographs--some smiling, some sullen--of Sherry, Shannon and Shawn, of Melody, Melinda and Michelyn, of Sunny, Heather, Laurie and Linda. The first three bodies turned up in 1990 along forested roadsides outside Spokane. Another was found two years later, then another in 1995.

In the summer of 1997, the fatal shootings began to fall too thick and fast to be coincidental. On Aug. 26 two bodies were found in different parts of town: Heather Hernandez, 20, a drifter, and Jennifer Joseph, 16, a runaway, last seen in the passenger seat of a white Corvette speeding down East Sprague. By December, five more victims were discovered. All were shot in the head with handguns and found dumped by roadsides with plastic grocery bags over their heads. None had purses or wallets. As many as 18 murders in Washington State from 1990 to 1998 may be linked to one killer. The inquiry has also widened to include unsolved murders of 26 prostitutes near U.S. Army bases in Germany.

The killer, it seems, was never on Everson's bad-trick list. He left no decipherable signature: the bags tied around his victims' heads were more likely an effort to contain the blood than a symbol of suburban anonymity. Even FBI psycho profilers were stymied, offering only that the perpetrator was probably a white male age 20 to 40. When a suspect was finally arrested, hookers recalled him as a regular, paying cash several times a month for a $28.95 room at the Spokane Budget Saver Motel. "He was a good trick," says Everson. "He was never weird. The women were happy to see him coming. Now they're asking, 'Why didn't he kill me?'"

Someone did try to kill Christine Smith in August 1998. She remembers a man about 50, 5 ft. 10 in. tall, blue-eyed, picking her up on East Sprague at about 1 a.m. "You're not the psycho killer, are you?" she asked as she climbed in. As they drove to a secluded spot, he told her he was a helicopter pilot for the National Guard. He was not a murderer, he told her, because he had five kids and "wouldn't do that." He was calm and--unlike many of her customers--sober. He paid Smith $40 for oral sex. Then suddenly she felt a blow to her head. At first she did not know what hit her. As blood gushed from the wound, she almost lost consciousness. The man asked for her money, but Smith managed to scramble out of the vehicle. At the hospital, the wound, mistakenly deemed a knife cut, was sewn up with three stitches. It was not until early this year, when Smith was in a car accident that required a head X ray, that she discovered shrapnel: the 1998 attack had in fact been a shooting, and she had been too shaken at the time to realize it. Smith's police report of the incident would remain buried in a police filing cabinet until this year.

It was the slick, shiny, vintage Corvette that ultimately led investigators to the suspect. A prostitute told police she had seen the killer's youngest victim, Jennifer Joseph, in the car nine days before her body was found. Joseph, a striking Asian-American teenager from Tacoma, had dropped out of high school only three months earlier. The hair of a Caucasian male was found on a towel near her decomposed corpse. Working through 6,000 tips associated with more than a dozen victims, police eventually compiled a database of all Corvette owners in Washington and Idaho and another of all Corvettes stopped by police checks. They tracked a car that had recently been sold and matched its carpet fibers to those on Joseph's shoes. Seizing the vehicle, they found bloodstains similar in genetic makeup to that of Joseph's parents. And they found a mother-of-pearl button identical to one on Joseph's blouse. They then tracked the car's previous owner.

On April 18, sheriff's deputies arrested Robert Lee Yates Jr., 47, on his way to work. His Honda Civic carried a bumper sticker saying WHY MUST I BE SURROUNDED BY FRICKIN' IDIOTS? Forensic experts found his fingerprint on one of the plastic bags tied around a victim's head, and Yates' genetic profile, from blood drawn after his arrest, matched semen found on the corpses. Says Sheriff Mark Sterk: "There's no doubt in my mind we're going to convict this guy." But at Yates' arraignment, the mother of one of the victims looked in disbelief at the accused killer, a balding father of five in a navy blue suit and wire-rimmed spectacles. "He looks like a little mouse," she said.

There's the wife of 23 years, the religious upbringing, the military career as a respected helicopter pilot, the new job as a $13.75-an-hour crane operator, the split-level home with forsythia bushes and a backyard barbecue. Yates sent out Christmas cards and won Army medals for meritorious service. "Bobby is a loving, caring, sensitive son; a fun-loving and giving brother; an understanding, generous and dedicated father who enjoys playing ball, fishing and camping with his kids," the Yates family said in their only statement to date. "Bobby is the type of person you would want to have as your best friend."

Yates grew up in Oak Harbor, Wash., a small town on picturesque Puget Sound, where his father was an inventory specialist at Whidbey Naval Air Station. His Seventh-Day Adventist family observed the Sabbath, avoided alcohol and pork and never used four-letter words. When their Oak Harbor church was destroyed in a fire, Yates Sr. and Jr. chipped in to reconstruct it. In high school Yates pitched for the baseball team, sang in the choir and picked vegetables in the summer. A "solid guy" and "Joe Average" is how classmates remember him.

After two years of premed at Walla Walla College, Yates married Linda Brewer, daughter of a prison guard, and at 25 enlisted in the Army. By the end of his 18-year career, Yates was a master aviator, instructing other pilots on how to teach flying. He was quiet, methodical and extraordinarily patient. Only one incident from his military record stands out: while on assignment in Somalia, Yates and his fellow soldiers spied a wild pig from their helicopter. Weary of Army rations, they shot it, swooped down and brought it back to cook in camp. The breach of discipline had no serious consequences.

Like many soldiers, Yates was a defender of the National Rifle Association, writing to a Watertown, N.Y., newspaper in 1994 and declaring, "If we seek answers to the crime problem, let's look to the criminal and focus on enforcement of existing laws, stiffer penalties, more prison space and deterrents to criminal activities." Home videotapes of his possessions, seized after his arrest, show five handguns, among them two of the type used to kill the victims.

Yates did not retire from the military and move back to Washington until 1996, but police believe they can link him to several of the murders through his frequent vacations before then. In June 1996, three months after the Yateses moved to South Hill, a tony section of Spokane, a prostitute turned up dead. That fall, Linda Yates would later tell investigators, her husband failed to return home one night and showed up the next morning with blood all over the back of his van. He claimed he had run over a dog and transported the animal and its owner to a veterinarian. She believed him. "Bells and lights would normally go off," says Sterk. "But this guy hid everything from his family. I'm convinced his wife and daughters didn't have a clue." But there were also signs of domestic trouble. He was charged with a misdemeanor when his daughter Amber, 19, filed a complaint that he had hit her. The case was still pending when he was arrested on more serious charges.

It was not until September 1999 when sheriff's deputies, working their way through Corvette owners, called in Yates. He had sold his Corvette in 1998, but before that he had been stopped twice in it for traffic violations, once near East Sprague, once near the burial site of a victim. Yates told investigators he had not patronized prostitutes in Spokane, but they noted in their report that he was "sweating profusely." He refused to provide DNA samples. Several weeks later, police pulled him over as he was driving a Honda Civic with a known prostitute in the passenger seat. He was not charged with a crime until, a few months later, a crime lab analyzed fibers from the Corvette he had owned.

On May 31 Yates was arraigned on charges of murdering eight women, all allegedly engaged in prostitution and drug use. He was also charged with robbing and attempting to kill Christine Smith. Hands folded before him, Yates looked more like a solemn insurance adjuster than a criminal. He pleaded not guilty on all counts. His lawyer, veteran public defender Richard Fasy, who is trying to persuade prosecutors not to seek the death penalty, describes Yates as "a relatively intelligent man who has some insights into his predicament."

Smith will be a star witness against Yates. Her 1998 police report, in which she describes her assailant in detail, will help the prosecution, as will the fact that she can attest to being robbed. Washington State law permits the death penalty only for aggravated murder--in other words, murder plus something else, and she will testify that he stole her money.

She will also be a voice for women whose lives many thought were not worth avenging. On Christmas Eve, 1998, citing mounting expenses, Spokane's police department pulled out of the investigative task force it had formed with the sheriff's department. That left half a dozen sheriff's deputies with double the work. Letters to the editor in the local paper suggested they give up. "You heard early on, 'Why waste time on prostitutes?'" recalled Sergeant Cal Walker, chief of Spokane's Serial Homicide Task Force. "If they had been teachers, the dollars would have flowed." As costs mounted, Sterk called a town meeting to drum up support for the inquiry. Relatives of victims spoke out, telling how their daughters or sisters, many of whom came from loving families, fell into drugs and thus onto the streets.

Among the most outspoken was Kathy Lloyd, a Head Start teacher, whose sister, Shawn McClenahan, 37, had been found by a jogger on a weedy hillside the day after Christmas, 1997.

A decade ago, Shawn McClenahan had gone back to college after a couple of bad marriages. A pretty woman with blond hair and green eyes, she got a job as a phlebotomist, drawing blood from patients at Sacred Heart Hospital. But a rib pressing on a nerve was misdiagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome. After two surgeries on her wrists, McClenahan was on painkillers and unable to work. She was evicted from her home, and her teenage son went to live with her sister. She fell into heroin and, to pay for it, prostitution. Days before her death, she sent a birthday card to her sister, saying that after 67 days on a waiting list, she had finally been accepted for methadone treatment. "God, I am so happy," she wrote. "This nightmare is almost over."

The nightmare ended with her murder.