SPOKANE, Wash. — A task force spent nearly three years trying to track a serial killer who preyed on the city's most vulnerable women, its costs ballooning to $2.2 million as the deaths continued to mount.
Time and money threatened to sidetrack the investigation. In January, budget cuts forced city police to pull all five of their detectives from the task force.
Detectives had samples of the killer's DNA from many of the crime scenes, but no description of a suspect.
Spokane County Sheriff Mark Sterk held an extraordinary public meeting two months ago and asked the public for fresh tips. He even wrote to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, asking him to donate software to help analyze 10 years of homicide files; according to a sheriff's spokesman, Microsoft said no.
Now, thanks to advances in DNA technology and carpet fibers from a white Corvette, authorities believe they finally have their man. Robert Lee Yates Jr., a 47-year-old father of five, was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder.
"We feel like we've arrested the person responsible for up to 18 homicides in our community," a beaming Sterk announced the day after the arrest.
Yates, a factory worker and National Guard helicopter pilot, is charged in one death, that of 16-year-old prostitute Jennifer Joseph, whose body was found Aug. 26, 1997.
However, investigators on Friday released the names of nine women whose slayings they say are definitively linked to Yates by DNA and other physical evidence, though they're not disclosing what that evidence is.
Further tests could tie Yates to the slayings of three other women, Sterk said, and investigators also are looking for possible links to six other killings in Washington, dating to 1990.
Yates' lawyer, Richard Fasy, said Friday he would not comment on the allegations for at least several days. He had spoken to Yates just once in jail, and only briefly. Yates is being held in lieu of $1.5 million cash-only bond at the Spokane County Jail.
Investigators encountered Yates as early as Sept. 24, 1997, when officers stopped him in his white 1977 Chevrolet Corvette for a traffic violation, according to court documents filed in support of the Joseph murder charge.
An officer also contacted Yates more than a year later after seeing him pick up a prostitute, court documents say. Yates told the officer he had picked the woman up to give her a ride home; the woman told police she agreed to perform a sex act on Yates for $20.
"He was just one of many, many names that had apparent potential," sheriff's Capt. John Simmons said.
Detectives interviewed Yates again last September, and said he sweated profusely as they questioned him.
In January, they tracked down a woman who had bought Yates' Corvette. She allowed detectives to remove carpet fiber samples, and on April 5, lab tests showed those fibers closely matched fibers investigators had found on Joseph's shoes and on a towel near her body.
Detectives obtained a warrant to search the car and found a button matching one missing from Joseph's clothing.
An analysis of blood smears found in the Corvette produced a match with a DNA profile generated through samples from Joseph's parents.