Homicide in Spokane

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Speaker 5 I'm Dan Rather. A serial killer terrorizes Spokane, Washington.
Did mistakes by the police cost lives 48 hours right now.

Speaker 6 A baffling murder spree.

Speaker 8 I can remember the summer that they started turning up dead.

Speaker 9 Very typically two gunshot wounds to the head.

Speaker 5 At least a dozen women murdered in three three years, like Debbie's sister Sean.

Speaker 12 She loved her children so much.

Speaker 13 There were more questions than answers.

Speaker 14 This was our first serial killer case.

Speaker 5 Were the police overlooking clues in plain sight? Controversial ex-cop Mark Fuhrman started turning up the heat.

Speaker 17 We're going, what are they doing?

Speaker 5 He is investigating the investigators.

Speaker 18 Looks like a body stacking up like cordwood.

Speaker 5 Then finally, police get their man, a former Army pilot and father of five.

Speaker 21 Murder in the first degree of you plea.

Speaker 23 Mr. Yates deserves to die.

Speaker 24 We took him off the street before he could create any new victims.

Speaker 20 But Fuhrman charges the delay was deadly.

Speaker 26 9-10 women would still be alive.

Speaker 27 Did police mistakes cost lives?

Speaker 28 Isn't it easy?

Speaker 29 The Monday morning quarterback.

Speaker 16 A 48 hours mystery.

Speaker 5 Murder in Spokane.

Speaker 5 Who knows more about pressure than a cop working homicide, always under the gun?

Speaker 5 A string of murders that stymied authorities for years, the body count steadily rising, along with the heat on one city's police force. Women were dying.

Speaker 5 Were the police slow off the mark, too inexperienced to catch the killer?

Speaker 12 Or worst of all, did they simply bungle the case?

Speaker 5 All charges they vigorously deny. Their chief accuser, in many ways, is one of their own, a former detective with a lot of miles on the homicide beat and a lot of baggage, too.

Speaker 5 A key figure in another notorious case. Harold Dow goes inside the highly charged investigation of murder in Spokane.

Speaker 33 It's like Russian roulette. Every time you get into a car, you don't know what's going to happen.

Speaker 8 You know, it can happen to anybody.

Speaker 34 We're scared.

Speaker 35 We don't want to die.

Speaker 33 1986 is when I started working the street.

Speaker 36 Michelle, not her real name, worked this dangerous stretch of East Sprague known as the track.

Speaker 33 There was always somebody disappearing. When a prostitute disappears, that's it.

Speaker 12 It's scary.

Speaker 36 But in 1997, the track suddenly got a lot scarier.

Speaker 44 I was the fourth prostitute found dead in the Spokane area in less than three months.

Speaker 45 Two more women have apparently been murdered in Spokane County.

Speaker 13 Within a two-year period,

Speaker 3 16 women, most believed to be prostitutes, were murdered, their bodies dumped in out-of-the-way places.

Speaker 43 County detectives say that a serial killer is at work here.

Speaker 48 A serial killer on the loose. Did the community care?

Speaker 49 No. To this day, the community doesn't care.

Speaker 32 Because they were prostitutes.

Speaker 2 They didn't give a damn. They're indifferent.

Speaker 51 Mike Fitzsimmons, who earned a law degree before beginning a 30-year career as a journalist, is well known in Spokane.

Speaker 15 It's all about crime.

Speaker 19 His call-in radio show, All About Crime, has been on the air since early 1997.

Speaker 47 And the consensus was it wouldn't fly.

Speaker 36 Fitzsimmons soon began doing some of his shows with a former Los Angeles homicide detective.

Speaker 16 Here we go.

Speaker 3 Mark Furman.

Speaker 57 I don't call myself an expert, an expert in detective work, homicide, or anything else, but I've been exposed to a lot of things in a lot of areas. Remember the O.J.
Simpson case?

Speaker 31 I remember that case.

Speaker 38 After his infamous testimony at the O.J.

Speaker 59 trial.

Speaker 43 Detective Furman, would you resume the witness stand, please?

Speaker 54 Furman pled no contest to perjury for lying about making racist comments and left the L.A.

Speaker 38 Police Department in disgrace.

Speaker 13 He resurfaced two years later.

Speaker 60 The ex-homicide detective had reinvented himself as a journalist.

Speaker 57 I just reported what the evidence showed.

Speaker 60 Furman investigated the 23-year-old murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Speaker 16 I saw the solution to this crime.

Speaker 36 His book about the case, Murder in Greenwich, named Kennedy relative Michael Skakel as the killer.

Speaker 28 Michael, Michael, Michael.

Speaker 15 Scakel was subsequently indicted.

Speaker 55 And Mark Furman fingered Michael Skakel.

Speaker 58 That is a fabulous piece of police work.

Speaker 61 A special.

Speaker 60 Today, Furman lives in Northwest Idaho.

Speaker 62 90 miles from Spokane.

Speaker 42 And now, Mark Furman.

Speaker 19 He's been co-hosting All About Crime since early 1998.

Speaker 57 We are back.

Speaker 15 Soon after prostitutes started to die.

Speaker 8 I can remember the summer that they started turning up dead.

Speaker 34 August 26th, 1997.

Speaker 26 Jennifer Joseph and Heather Hernandez are found the same day, one in the county, one in the city. Now, Mike, he had this gut feeling that they're connected.

Speaker 25 And then along came Darla Sue Scott.

Speaker 60 29-year-old Darla Sue Scott was discovered on November 5th, 1997, partially buried with white plastic bags over her head.

Speaker 38 Cause of death, two gunshot wounds to the head.

Speaker 16 Now we've got three prostitutes that are murdered.

Speaker 57 So we start asking questions on the radio.

Speaker 63 Just one little piece of information could make the difference. Do you know anything about Darla Sue Scott?

Speaker 28 Telephone number 326920.

Speaker 19 Early on, Fuhrman profiled the serial killer on the air.

Speaker 63 I would say he's a male white, maybe early to late 30s, a resident in this county.

Speaker 63 He's very comfortable with the area. He's a predator.
He's going out looking for a victim. I mean, he's killing people right now.

Speaker 48 And then Sean Johnson was found.

Speaker 65 Two days before Christmas, we got a knock at the door.

Speaker 39 Debbie Fine is Sean Johnson's older sister.

Speaker 12 She loved...

Speaker 28 She loved her children so much.

Speaker 38 A mother of two young boys, Sean was struggling to overcome a drug problem when she was murdered.

Speaker 66 A lot of people might think that because someone might have been a part of that street life, that they're not loved, they don't have a family, no one cares about them.

Speaker 67 But that's not true in Sean's case.

Speaker 65 Not in this case at all. We never expected this.

Speaker 68 Never.

Speaker 48 It's your baby sister, huh?

Speaker 69 Always will be.

Speaker 57 A killer among us.

Speaker 23 The investigation continues.

Speaker 60 The murders and what police were doing to catch the killer became the number one topic on Furman and Fitzsimmons radio show.

Speaker 63 Well, you can't fault the police, or they probably have so many different leads to investigate. I would be real comfortable if some of these clues have been followed up on.

Speaker 63 That is not good police work.

Speaker 66 You and Mark Furman investigated these murders yourselves.

Speaker 55 We didn't really investigate the murders. We investigated the investigation.
We started looking into how they were doing things.

Speaker 57 You know, Mike would say, what are are the police doing? What are they thinking?

Speaker 59 The first task we have is to find out if indeed this is the work of a serial killer.

Speaker 26 Four bodies, all women, all prostitutes, and all shot with a small caliber weapon.

Speaker 25 I can't believe they're not connected.

Speaker 34 Looking for evidence to link the four murders, police formed a task force in late 1997. This was too little,

Speaker 32 too late.

Speaker 57 You have four detectives that are handling all the evidence booking, the autopsies, the families, the interviews, and things started coming in. And yes, they became very quickly overwhelmed.

Speaker 45 The day after Christmas, 1997, 50 officers combed the crime scene.

Speaker 19 The serial killer left a macabre gift for the new task force.

Speaker 45 The coroner removed the bodies for an autopsy.

Speaker 52 Two more murdered prostitutes, their bodies buried head-to-head within inches of each other.

Speaker 73 Lorianne Wasson and Sean McClenahan were found here at 14th and Carnahan in this field that's now a housing development. Why was this important? You You had two bodies here.
What does that mean?

Speaker 12 He came here twice.

Speaker 61 This guy's, he's probably out of control.

Speaker 34 In the year to come, prostitutes would keep turning up dead.

Speaker 18 They got bodies stacking up like cordwood.

Speaker 17 We're going, what are they doing?

Speaker 34 Did the task force mishandle the investigation?

Speaker 16 Errors were made, and people died because errors were made.

Speaker 73 It's on-the-job training.

Speaker 73 It's not detective work, but it's ridiculous.

Speaker 30 That's next.

Speaker 41 By the end of 1997, the women who worked Spokane's Sex for Pay district were under siege, held hostage by a serial killer who was murdering them one after another,

Speaker 17 then disposing of their bodies like bags of trash.

Speaker 8 I went out there and worked anyway.

Speaker 60 Rina is a former prostitute.

Speaker 8 I just didn't think it was going to happen to me.

Speaker 55 Inside police headquarters, Detective Fred Reutsch was determined to put an end to the bloodshed.

Speaker 29 They were human beings.

Speaker 49 Every one of them was a daughter, a sister.

Speaker 66 A lot of them were mothers.

Speaker 29 They were loved by somebody.

Speaker 60 Reutsch was part of the task force established in late 1997 to investigate the serial killings.

Speaker 34 Task Force Captain Doug Silver.

Speaker 68 The only common thread we had at that point was the fact that they were prostitutes.

Speaker 36 Former forensic pathologist George Lindholm soon discovered something else that tied the killings together.

Speaker 9 The common activity here was gunshot wounds, very typically two gunshot wounds to the head. This is reminiscent of what is called double tapping, that is bang, bang.

Speaker 37 By the end of 1997, seven women had been murdered.

Speaker 34 No one on the task force had had ever dealt with anything like this.

Speaker 14 A great deal of time educating ourselves.

Speaker 15 Ben Estes is a city police detective.

Speaker 14 It was a whole learning experience for all of us and many of us have been involved in homicide cases but this was our first serial killer case.

Speaker 19 Early on a crucial decision was made.

Speaker 74 Keep details and possible clues to the crimes a secret from the public.

Speaker 63 We've got to figure out who's killing these prostitutes and why.

Speaker 19 That decision immediately came under fire from Mark Fuhrman and Mike Fitzsimmons.

Speaker 58 They find a body and they wouldn't tell you if it was male or female.

Speaker 69 That's crazy.

Speaker 68 We didn't want to take the risk of having any evidence destroyed. We didn't have that much evidence to deal with in this serial killing situation.

Speaker 44 Since the beginning of crime, it's been a cat and mouse game.

Speaker 22 We educate criminals.

Speaker 44 When we give them something, they learn how to fight what we do. When we come up with fingerprints, they learn to wear gloves.
When we come up with DNA, they learn to wear condom.

Speaker 19 In fact, investigators were keeping the lid on exactly that kind of evidence.

Speaker 15 DNA.

Speaker 9 One case of condom was recovered from the body of one of the women, and it contained seminal fluid.

Speaker 51 And fingerprints found on a plastic bag used to cover one victim's head.

Speaker 9 The plastic bags were taped with duct tape. Duct tape is just excellent for picking up fingerprints when you're wrapping it.

Speaker 76 Detectives soon had another lead.

Speaker 75 16-year-old Jennifer Joseph, the killer's second victim, was last seen climbing into a white Corvette on East Brague Avenue.

Speaker 76 Now, the police couldn't know this at the time, but that white Corvette would prove to be the key to solving the case.

Speaker 36 Again, police made no mention of it to the public.

Speaker 16 They had a witness who gave them a great clue, which put out in the proper way, could have elicited the suspect in days, weeks, a few months.

Speaker 38 The killings and police response gave Furman the subject for a new book.

Speaker 57 Greenwich book was done. What are you going to do next?

Speaker 16 Serial killers killers in my backyard.

Speaker 57 So I became engaged, not only in the radio show, but then I became engaged to write the book.

Speaker 47 Furman and Fitzsimmons began to investigate the crime scenes.

Speaker 73 We were very well-meaning, trying to really get information that they needed out to the public from an avenue that could elicit some kind of clues.

Speaker 47 They visited the site at 14th and Crawhan, where the sixth and seventh victims had been discovered, buried head to head.

Speaker 31 We started patrolling through here, have a look.

Speaker 47 The two men discovered unexamined debris not far from the crime scene.

Speaker 41 It turned out to be unrelated to the murders, but the failure to examine it, they claim, was sloppy police work.

Speaker 22 Why wouldn't they at least check this out?

Speaker 37 And then on February 8th, 1998.

Speaker 55 Was in plain sight.

Speaker 78 They were up on the road and could see the body in plain sight.

Speaker 44 And this is the victim, Sonny Oster, the son of the Oster.

Speaker 13 Sonny Oster, victim number eight, a woman known to work East Sprague, was found dead from gunshot wounds to her head.

Speaker 37 Once again, Furman and Fitzsimmons decided to investigate.

Speaker 55 And we canvassed all the homes and we asked,

Speaker 29 you know, if the police had been here and asked questions.

Speaker 79 And the answer was no.

Speaker 50 One man living nearby saw a maroon car near where Oster's body was dumped.

Speaker 42 He said, This is where the car was parked.

Speaker 66 The car was parked right here, right across from where the body was found.

Speaker 56 Furman and Fitzsimmons sent the information to the task force.

Speaker 80 They talked to him in July 17 months later.

Speaker 48 17 months later.

Speaker 68 The information that it was, it was just that a vehicle was in the area. Okay, that information is just as strong as what about

Speaker 68 25 other vehicles that we had.

Speaker 47 Although the car turned out not to be involved in the crime, Furman's frustration with the task force continued to grow.

Speaker 57 We would fax every clue we got from the radio. We would tell them everything that we had,

Speaker 58 not hoping they'd tell us something.

Speaker 57 We're trying to have them tell us, don't do this, don't give this out, this is important, don't. And finally, I just said, screw it.

Speaker 57 Let's put the information out to the public because they have a right to know where this occurred because they might have seen something because we canvassed the neighborhood and nobody talked to anybody.

Speaker 14 Mark Furman implied that we should be for some reason consulting him.

Speaker 38 Task force officials say they had a good reason not to talk to Fuhrman about the case.

Speaker 79 What we're not going to do is bring a person of questionable truthfulness into this investigation.

Speaker 12 That would be ludicrous.

Speaker 14 All fairness to Mark Fuhrman, I have all the respect for him that I do any other convicted felon in this community.

Speaker 42 Do you think the task force was unhappy with you and Mike Fitzsimmons?

Speaker 57 I think they were extremely unhappy.

Speaker 16 I think the biggest reasons we wouldn't go away.

Speaker 47 A car passing by here on the side of the road is only Furman and Fitzsimmons began to openly question the thoroughness of the task force investigation.

Speaker 16 The representatives of the Sheriff's Department and the police department made some overture that we were interfering with an investigation and that they should reel us back. Of course, the

Speaker 57 TV and radio stations said they're journalists. They're working on the case.
If they're interfering, you know,

Speaker 12 deal with them. Yeah, arrest them.

Speaker 20 In late February of 1998, the police commissioned a National Guard helicopter equipped with an infrared camera to fly over the crime scene where the two bodies were found, looking for heat emanated by decomposing bodies.

Speaker 73 They find nothing here with that technology, and they do a press conference and make a statement there's no more bodies at Florentin and Carnahan.

Speaker 66 And of course, the next day, April 1st.

Speaker 71 Another body was found at the site.

Speaker 57 That's when the task force got knocked on their heels.

Speaker 70 Nine women had been murdered in 21 months time and the police seemed nowhere in their investigation.

Speaker 11 That is a slow, long, slow process.

Speaker 68 Obviously on a situation like this, we pick up everything that's in the area.

Speaker 36 Meanwhile, the serial killer was not about to stop.

Speaker 30 That's next.

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Speaker 8 When it happened, when it started happening, everybody was scared.

Speaker 70 Nine women murdered in 21 months.

Speaker 10 None of these cases is solved.

Speaker 43 You'd think they'd have some kind of an inkling.

Speaker 41 That was the body count in Spokane after Linda Mabin's body was discovered on April Fool's Day, 1998.

Speaker 48 Just after police had declared there were no more bodies at the 14th and Carnahan location.

Speaker 16 The task force, they were very demoralized by this.

Speaker 53 Morale was affected.

Speaker 44 Every day we walked in and looked at those pictures and affected every one of us differently every single day.

Speaker 49 I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat.

Speaker 34 Two detectives transferred out of the task force and in a political shake-up.

Speaker 10 These people have everything to be proud of.

Speaker 54 Cal Walker was named as a new supervisor.

Speaker 42 And so this is the task force room.

Speaker 29 This is where the work was done.

Speaker 37 Nine months later Mark Sterck joined the team as newly elected sheriff.

Speaker 84 Hours and hours and hours of good old-fashioned detective work.

Speaker 36 The investigation intensified.

Speaker 10 We had a number of surveillance sites. 24 hours a day.

Speaker 60 The task force began electronic surveillance of the track on East Sprague Avenue, shooting hundreds of hours of videotapes.

Speaker 29 And then we reviewed those tapes, looked at all of the license plate numbers, ran all those plates so that we knew who was out there on East Spring.

Speaker 69 We'd come out, initially we were out here two or three nights a week.

Speaker 60 The police were also taking a more hands-on approach toward protecting the killer's potential victims.

Speaker 19 Even though the women were breaking the law.

Speaker 69 One of our jobs was in fact to get to know the women that worked the street and hopefully gain their trust.

Speaker 6 We actually became pretty good friends with some of these people.

Speaker 85 Terry Hammer and his partner Dave Bentley.

Speaker 6 We knew that there was a killer out here, and at any time, they could pick up one of these people and kill him.

Speaker 21 And then we'd have to deal with that.

Speaker 49 Those women, regardless of their stature in life, deserve the same quality of investigation as anybody on the face of this earth.

Speaker 55 And that's what we attempted to do.

Speaker 17 Despite a re-energized investigation,

Speaker 48 it wasn't long before the serial killer struck again.

Speaker 69 This is basically the area that she was recovered. She had a hot tub cover placed over her.

Speaker 60 47-year-old Michael Lynn Derning had been missing for several days by July 7th, 1998.

Speaker 78 The first thing they said was, we found her body. And of course...

Speaker 60 Gregory Landis was one of Derning's closest friends.

Speaker 78 She was an incredible person.

Speaker 78 Everywhere she went,

Speaker 24 people would fall in love with her.

Speaker 19 Landis says Michael Lynn was struggling to rebuild her life and didn't fit the profile of the killer's usual victims.

Speaker 78 She had been a drug addict, but she was definitely not a prostitute. Michael Lynn was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Speaker 48 You lost a dear friend. Will you ever get over this? Will you ever forget?

Speaker 69 When you get close to those families and you watch what they go through and you start going through that too,

Speaker 73 You don't give up.

Speaker 41 Frustrating as it already was, the Spokane serial killer case was about to get worse.

Speaker 45 Homicide detectives say the woman's head had been covered with a plastic bag.

Speaker 39 In January of 1999, the task force announced that two murders in Tacoma, Washington, 300 miles away, were both linked to the Spokane killer.

Speaker 60 And then, in the strangest strangest turn of all the killings suddenly stopped.

Speaker 3 Months passed

Speaker 24 and with no new bodies discovered we're committed to continuing this case.

Speaker 13 Sheriff Sturck faced a new problem.

Speaker 29 As the sheriff, I had to fight the policymakers in this community to make sure that our funding didn't get withdrawn for this investigation before it was done.

Speaker 2 We will solve this case when we run across the right person.

Speaker 48 In the first year and a half of the serial killer case, investigators had amassed a lot of physical evidence.

Speaker 77 They had DNA samples from several crime scenes, as well as ballistics. But what they really needed was a prime suspect.

Speaker 11 Well, they found one by re-examining one of their earlier leads.

Speaker 10 Jennifer Joseph had been seen by another prostitute driving away eastbound in a white Corvette.

Speaker 38 Jennifer Joseph was one of the first serial killer victims back in August 1997.

Speaker 10 We took every registered Corvette owner out of the state of Washington and Idaho, about 3,000 of them. Then we took that and whittled it down to about 1,200 really workable names.

Speaker 10 That was a data file. We started comparing those to people who had contact with prostitutes.

Speaker 15 Through computer databasing, detectives zeroed in on a smaller list of potential suspects.

Speaker 10 About 47 names.

Speaker 31 Now, you've got this list.

Speaker 66 You've got these 47 odd names here.

Speaker 31 What do you do with them?

Speaker 10 Investigate these people.

Speaker 62 One of the names given to Task Force Detective Rick Grabenstein was a man who had sold a 1977 white Corvette.

Speaker 10 Detective Grabenstein goes and takes a good quick look at the car. He had the wherewithal to take his fingers and grab some carpet fibers.

Speaker 38 Those fibers were sent to a lab and compared with fibers taken from the original Jennifer Joseph crime scene.

Speaker 48 And what were the results?

Speaker 10 In the world of fibers,

Speaker 10 no two fibers get any closer to a match than these two.

Speaker 38 on april 10th 2000 a search warrant was issued for the car police discovered blood on the passenger seat belt and a missing button from the blouse belonging to jennifer joseph at that point you knew you had your man we knew it we got our guy

Speaker 38 When we come back, Robert Lee Yates Jr., police arrest Jennifer Joseph's killer.

Speaker 24 We took him off the street before he could create any new victims.

Speaker 36 Can they link this married father of five

Speaker 3 to the murders of all these women?

Speaker 50 That's next.

Speaker 5 How tough is it to catch a serial killer? Very, say experts in the field. For one thing, the perpetrator rarely looks the part, and since he usually has no remorse, he doesn't act guilty either.

Speaker 5 Most serial offenders are considered to be fairly smart, smart enough to at least keep quiet about their evil deeds in the presence of strangers, even if some may openly taunt the authorities.

Speaker 5 In Spokane, Washington, ten women had been murdered in two years.

Speaker 5 After a painstaking investigation and sometimes painful scrutiny of the police, authorities finally got their man.

Speaker 20 Harold Dowell picks up the story.

Speaker 53 This is breaking news.

Speaker 45 Police in Spokane, Washington have arrested a serial killer,

Speaker 48 47-year-old Robert L.

Speaker 22 Yates. He was booked about a half hour ago.

Speaker 57 Here comes the kids.

Speaker 15 On April 18th, 2000, the Spokane Homicide Task Force arrested Robert Yates Jr.

Speaker 50 for the murder of 16-year-old Jennifer Joseph.

Speaker 43 Detectives have definitive evidence tying Robert Yates to the murder of nine victims.

Speaker 19 Through DNA analysis, police were able to link Yates to nine more murder victims, positively identifying him as the Spokane serial killer.

Speaker 29 He was exactly what the FBI said he would be.

Speaker 43 We wouldn't recognize him.

Speaker 10 He would fit in.

Speaker 50 Yates, a career military helicopter pilot and married father of five, had somehow kept his killing spree a secret.

Speaker 43 Investigators are waiting laboratory results in three more cases which and the more police investigated

Speaker 38 the more the number of Yates victims began to climb.

Speaker 26 We are talking about none other than Robert Yates.

Speaker 19 The outcome of the task force investigation seemed fine to Mark Fuhrman.

Speaker 73 Here we got Todd on welcome to show Todd.

Speaker 3 Until he took a closer look at the arrest affidavit.

Speaker 26 I think there's several things in this investigation that

Speaker 57 really went sideways.

Speaker 72 According to the affidavit, Robert Yates Jr.

Speaker 50 had been questioned by the police a total of three times over the course of the investigation.

Speaker 44 Jennifer Joseph died from gunshot wounds.

Speaker 38 The first encounter, a mere month after Jennifer Joseph was murdered.

Speaker 58 Back in 97, they had everything that they needed.

Speaker 57 They had a witness who gave them a great clue.

Speaker 75 Remember, back in August of 1997, an eyewitness told police she had last seen Jennifer Joseph in a white Corvette.

Speaker 75 Well, just five weeks later, Officer Corey Terman, acting on instructions from detectives, pulled over a white Corvette right here on the corner of Ralph and Sprague.

Speaker 48 The driver of that car was Robert Yates Jr.

Speaker 73 Corey Terman stops the white Corvette. He does not run the plate before he stops the car.
He talks to him, he puts down that he's cooperative, and he asks him a few questions.

Speaker 72 Satisfied because Yates had a reason for being in the area.

Speaker 10 Driver works at 2200 East Riverside.

Speaker 19 Officer Terman filed a standard police field interview, known as an FI and let Yates go.

Speaker 10 He writes down the license number of the car.

Speaker 60 However, he mistakenly identified the car as a Camaro, not a Corvette.

Speaker 10 These detectives are looking for white Corvettes.

Speaker 32 They see this.

Speaker 10 It's about a Camaro.

Speaker 72 The field interview was routed to the city's equivalent of a Vice Squad.

Speaker 60 Task Force members didn't see it until two years later.

Speaker 29 Officer Terman made a simple mistake.

Speaker 49 It was a fatal mistake.

Speaker 55 It was not an unimportant mistake.

Speaker 31 They asked him to pull over a Corvette because a Corvette was involved in a murder.

Speaker 39 And Furman says police never should have let Yates go.

Speaker 75 Corey Turman did pull over a Corvette.

Speaker 73 Two blocks from where Jennifer Joseph was last seen.

Speaker 22 I'm sorry.

Speaker 16 This guy's going to the station.

Speaker 61 Do I have probable cause? Absolutely.

Speaker 29 We didn't have probable cause to stop and search that car at that time. They might do that in Los Angeles.
But the people in this county elected me to protect their constitutional rights.

Speaker 19 Police also maintained that the Corvette tip was just one of many in their investigation.

Speaker 23 We didn't just sit around and do just this.

Speaker 10 These guys were out pounding the pavement working on 6,000 tips.

Speaker 71 In November of 1997, Yates was pulled over for speeding in a white Corvette.

Speaker 34 One year later, he was stopped for possible solicitation of a prostitute.

Speaker 15 Both stops were treated routinely.

Speaker 48 They didn't have a clue.

Speaker 31 They did have a clue.

Speaker 55 They just didn't know they had it.

Speaker 13 Finally, in August August of 1999, almost two years after police first stopped Yates, his name appeared on a list of 47 Corvette owners.

Speaker 60 He was brought in for questioning on September 24th.

Speaker 2 We didn't have great evidence to confront him with.

Speaker 10 Basically, we were looking for his cooperation.

Speaker 60 Detective Rick Grabenstein conducted the interview.

Speaker 2 Absolutely, and we wanted to get a sample of his blood.

Speaker 13 But Yates refused to cooperate.

Speaker 66 Which was within his right at that point.

Speaker 31 Absolutely.

Speaker 50 And once again, police let him go.

Speaker 66 Looking back on it, Mark, if you could pick out major mistakes that led to prolonging the arrest of the suspect.

Speaker 27 When they followed that Corvette clue as far as they could in a very short period of time, they should have released that to the public.

Speaker 29 They had nothing to lose. If we start putting information out about our case, who are we communicating with?

Speaker 29 We're communicating with our suspect.

Speaker 66 Had they stopped him right there, would a number of women still be alive?

Speaker 32 Yes.

Speaker 26 Nine, ten women would still be alive.

Speaker 29 Isn't it easy to Monday morning quarterback? We look back now at what we've done. We're not saying we didn't make mistakes.
Did we cause some women to die as a result of that?

Speaker 29 I don't think so, and I don't think that's a fair statement.

Speaker 43 I'm not the most popular character of a city government, so cat.

Speaker 58 This is a book about a frustrating investigation for a task force.

Speaker 55 This book is about one thing.

Speaker 29 It's about money.

Speaker 29 It's about monetary gain for Mr. Fuhrman.

Speaker 77 You read Mark Mark Fuhrman's book.

Speaker 66 What do these markers represent?

Speaker 10 They represent the pages that have errors on them.

Speaker 66 You got a lot of markers.

Speaker 68 There are a lot of errors.

Speaker 31 Mark Fuhrman is about Mark Furman.

Speaker 34 And some cops question Fuhrman's credibility in light of his behavior during the O.J.

Speaker 38 Simpson trial.

Speaker 59 All right, Detective Furman, you zoom in.

Speaker 84 I have to look at the last case that he investigated down in Los Angeles. In my opinion, is he embarrassed the city of Los Angeles, and he certainly embarrassed law enforcement.

Speaker 84 And I think when we look at him now, we have to look at him as an entertainer a talk show host and not a not a police officer or an investigator or anything else I guarantee this

Speaker 16 give me the white Corvette clue when I first asked I would have found Robert Yates

Speaker 27 they had a great clue which could have elicited the suspect in a few months despite charges of a problematic investigation

Speaker 43 We have but 11 felony charges involving homicide suspect Robert Yates.

Speaker 34 It was the Spokane Task Force that ultimately got its man.

Speaker 86 Coming up. Mr.

Speaker 32 Yates, any last words?

Speaker 50 Robert Yates Jr.

Speaker 65 God will not forgive you, Mr.

Speaker 41 Yates.

Speaker 38 Serial killer stands accused.

Speaker 86 You killed my mom.

Speaker 23 Mr.

Speaker 64 Yates deserves to die.

Speaker 3 His fate next on 48 Hours.

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Speaker 88 Hey there, we're Corinne Vienne and Sabrina Deanna Roga here to introduce our newest podcast, Crimes of: A Crime House Original.

Speaker 89 Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season, from Crimes of the Paranormal, Unsolved Murders, and more.

Speaker 89 Our first season is Crimes of Infamy: the true crime stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror villains.

Speaker 88 Listen to and follow Crimes of, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 33 We got a room and spent the night.

Speaker 33 I never would have thought in a million years that he was the serial killer. That's how normal he was.

Speaker 65 He looked like a neighbor, like the guy right down the street.

Speaker 28 He didn't look like a killer.

Speaker 74 What looks can be deceiving.

Speaker 5 A suspected serial killer is in custody tonight.

Speaker 53 47-year-old Robert Yates Jr.

Speaker 51 served as a helicopter pilot in the National Guard.

Speaker 85 On May 31st, 2000, this married father of five was arraigned on eight counts of first-degree murder.

Speaker 63 To count six, premeditated murder in the first-degree. What is your plea?

Speaker 30 Not guilty, you know.

Speaker 34 At first, the prosecution sought the death penalty.

Speaker 38 Was it a good case that the police gave you?

Speaker 12 It was a great case.

Speaker 50 But Spokane prosecutor Stephen Tucker cut a deal with the killer.

Speaker 74 In exchange for a full accounting of his crimes, the state will forego the pursuit of the death penalty.

Speaker 38 Yates would receive life in prison.

Speaker 86 Mr. Yates, any last words?

Speaker 21 To the charge of murder in the first degree.

Speaker 61 How do you plead?

Speaker 12 Guilty, Your Honor.

Speaker 15 In October, Robert Yates pled guilty to 13 counts of murder.

Speaker 12 Guilty, Your Honor.

Speaker 30 Guilty, Your Honor.

Speaker 12 Guilty, Your Honor.

Speaker 19 And disclosed the location of Melanie Murfin's body, another of his victims.

Speaker 8 The last girl's body they found buried in his yard.

Speaker 40 Right next to the house underneath the master bedroom.

Speaker 8 This guy is a monster.

Speaker 52 But there was another bombshell. Not all of Yates' victims were women or prostitutes.

Speaker 40 Those were just a couple kids on a picnic blanket, and he just killed them.

Speaker 60 Yates confessed to murdering a young couple, Susan Savage and Patrick Oliver, way back in 1975.

Speaker 22 The one thing that did bug me was that couple that was murdered. When did this all start? Was there something before that while we were going to college?

Speaker 3 Al Gotti has been Yates' close friend for nearly 40 years.

Speaker 22 He told me he doesn't know why he did that.

Speaker 13 Yates was only 24 years old when he committed the murders.

Speaker 31 Anything in his childhood that would indicate that he would be sitting where he's sitting right now in jail for murder?

Speaker 22 No, there was none whatsoever.

Speaker 60 Yates grew up in Washington state, Gotti says, with the support of a strong, nurturing family.

Speaker 22 He was very much loved. 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.

Speaker 90 We're just an ordinary family, and I want the victim's family also to know that I care about them, too.

Speaker 13 Robert Yates' father.

Speaker 66 What was Bob Yates Jr. like, your son like, growing up?

Speaker 90 I would say he was a wonderful son.

Speaker 86 He was a happy-go-lucky kid.

Speaker 90 Got into all kinds of sports, mainly baseball.

Speaker 22 He was a star pitcher, a starter on the football team.

Speaker 31 Did you go to any of his games?

Speaker 90 I went to every one of his games. I was very proud of him.

Speaker 37 Yates spent a few years in college and then joined the Army in 1977.

Speaker 20 He became a respected helicopter pilot, serving for 18 years.

Speaker 90 He went to Somalia when that uprising happened, flew some generals around.

Speaker 48 You know, as a father, you raised him in a decent home.

Speaker 67 You taught him right from wrong.

Speaker 48 What would make your son kill?

Speaker 90 You know, I just don't know. I don't have a clue.
I've been, my mind is just always thinking about that.

Speaker 22 I think anybody that you would ask that knew Bob Yates, they'd probably tell you he would be the last person that you would suspect to do such a thing.

Speaker 19 In 1974, 23-year-old Robert Yates married his current wife, Linda.

Speaker 52 They raised five children together.

Speaker 33 He loved his children dearly.

Speaker 35 I remember when we were young, he'd come home, him all being being happy, singing, and

Speaker 35 let's go fishing, let's go camping next weekend.

Speaker 46 25-year-old Sonia is Robert Yates' second oldest daughter.

Speaker 35 But he had his good days, and then he had his bad days, too.

Speaker 48 What's a bad day?

Speaker 35 He would just come home and be angry, and we wouldn't know why, and we'd just stay away from him.

Speaker 66 Looking back, you notice any strange behavior now?

Speaker 66 Your dad coming home late?

Speaker 35 Yeah, he's lied and said that he's gone to a National Guard thing, and actually he stayed in a hotel in Spokane with one of the prostitutes.

Speaker 33 He was a regular of mine for his two years. I dated him two weeks before they arrested him.

Speaker 34 Michelle, a Spokane prostitute, says she knew Yates well.

Speaker 33 He was always very quiet. He was just a middle-aged man who wasn't happy at home.

Speaker 8 It's the first time I dated him in this parking lot, but like it was a medical center parking lot.

Speaker 60 Rina is a former prostitute.

Speaker 8 And after the date was done, he said, Can you get me some crack?

Speaker 13 She says she used drugs with Yates.

Speaker 8 From there on out, he was a regular mine.

Speaker 74 Robert Yates, a good John for some.

Speaker 8 He tipped me good and always smoked crack.

Speaker 19 The last John for others.

Speaker 12 I guess I was one of the lucky ones.

Speaker 86 And I knew so many other girls that weren't.

Speaker 22 For him to kill these people was quite a shock to me.

Speaker 60 Al Gaddy corresponds with Yates regularly.

Speaker 62 Do you think Bob Yates realizes all the harm he's done?

Speaker 22 I don't think that he really comprehends the magnitude of what he's done.

Speaker 60 At his sentencing on October 26, 2000, this is the time for the sentencing.

Speaker 36 Yates faced not only justice.

Speaker 91 I am the daughter, a daughter of Melody Murphy, but the relatives of the people he killed.

Speaker 65 God will not forgive you, Mr. Yates.

Speaker 86 You killed my mom.

Speaker 91 John's death has quite simply damaged me in ways that can never be repaired.

Speaker 64 How can you take my mother and bury her in your yard?

Speaker 12 I feel the pain and the fear that she went through in the hands of you.

Speaker 23 Mr.

Speaker 61 Yates deserves to die.

Speaker 38 And finally, Robert Yates Jr. spoke.

Speaker 68 Nothing I can say.

Speaker 64 Little Rafe,

Speaker 64 the sorrow, the pain, and the anguish that you feel, and I apologize.

Speaker 63 I am sorry.

Speaker 64 I am sorry.

Speaker 29 No, Mr. Yates, I will impose the maximum sentence.

Speaker 50 Robert Yates was sentenced to 408 years in state prison.

Speaker 42 Was justice served?

Speaker 28 I don't know.

Speaker 65 How can anyone have justice when you lose a sister or a mother or anyone?

Speaker 41 For those close to Yates,

Speaker 54 there will always be one unanswered question.

Speaker 35 Yeah, I do want to know why.

Speaker 90 I do not have a clue to this day as to why he might have done this.

Speaker 22 He told me he has no idea why he did them.

Speaker 65 He gave up everything.

Speaker 14 Why?

Speaker 5 Trying to solve the puzzle of the serial killer.

Speaker 63 Serial killers are unique.

Speaker 61 They live with us. They work with us.

Speaker 11 In a moment.

Speaker 73 In Murder in Spokane, I tried to get into the mind of a serial killer. I read about Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez, Jeffrey Dahlmer, and a dozen others.

Speaker 25 Did I learn anything?

Speaker 73 Yes, about those individuals.

Speaker 32 Did I learn anything that could catch Robert Yates?

Speaker 57 Not really.

Speaker 57 Serial killers are unique.

Speaker 73 They're individuals. They're manipulative.
They're chameleons that walk among us and we never see them.

Speaker 29 They live with us.

Speaker 61 They work with us.

Speaker 16 We don't know who they are.

Speaker 73 Every case that we do, we create a profiler, another cop that knows a little more, another city, another agency.

Speaker 16 And then they all have to start start from ground zero at the next one because he's different, unique, smart.

Speaker 19 But the question always looms, do we know why?

Speaker 16 The answer is no.

Speaker 55 In fact, we don't even know how many.

Speaker 5 Those who profile serial killers offer this chilling assessment. that Yates has probably committed even more murders than he's been linked to thus far.

Speaker 5 There's some very long gaps in his self-confessed killing spree, and the experts say it's unlikely a serial killer would go that long, a decade or more, between murders.

Speaker 5 Investigators in Washington state have been making lists of every unsolved murder everywhere Yates is known to have been during the last 25 years.

Speaker 5 But so far, aside from those crimes that have already landed him in prison for life, Robert Yates isn't talking.

Speaker 92 In 2002, Robert Yates was found guilty of two other killings and was sentenced to death.

Speaker 92 In 2018, the Washington Supreme Court declared the state's death penalty as unconstitutional, and Yates' sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole.