"Green River
was so difficult because it had no timely suspect data that the
police could go on. They'd find out that some prostitute was identified
from the bones, and go back and interview the people who last
saw her, 6 or 8 months later." -- Bob Keppel,
retired WA State Investigator who worked on the case and author
of "Riverman."
Looking back, the lack
of scientific tools was a hindrance, Kraske said.
"Perhaps at that time,
we were looking at (psychological) profiles as being as good an
investigative source as DNA today,"
he said. There was so much information, and detectives didn't
have a computer to analyze it. By
1983, Kraske transferred to another precinct. "The thing was totally
disorganized when I left."
An FBI
psychological profile of the Green River killer, written by John
Douglas, then an FBI special agent with the Behavioral Science
Unit, Quantico, VA in the summer of 1982, revised in 1984 was
so vague it could have been 1/2 the men in King County.
In March 1984, a revised
profile gave more details based on additional evidence
from crime scenes, additional victims
and additional experience with psychopathic serial offenders.
Psychological profiling may be useful in eliminating suspects,
but it's far from an exact science. It's an art.
Many victims had no
ties, therefore nobody knew they were missing for awhile. When
the skeletal remains washed up there wasn't much evidence they
could be used with the limited tools and technology of the time.
Only 6 bodies were found before all that was left of them were
bones. 4 sets of remains are unidentified to this day.
Vern Thomas became
sheriff and brought in tools for a multi-agency task force. Thomas
formed a task force with more than 50 investigators from various
agencies and acquired a computer system with the help of $200,000
in state money and a $1 million grant. Over 50 local police detectives
and FBI investigators considered 20,000 possible suspects, they
searched several homes, followed thousands of leads, interviewed
victims' friends, witnesses and possible suspects.
Budget pressures and
the lack of success caused the original Green River Task Force
operations to dwindle by the early 1990s. The only investigator
left on the case for nearly a decade was Detective Tom Jensen,
who works out of the Regional Justice Center in Kent, WA. Detective
Doyon has worked on the investigation over the past 16 years.