Grim Serial Killer War Room Shut

S P O K A N E, Wash., Aug. 9 -- The 20-by-20-foot room where detectives spent three years tracking serial killer Robert Yates Jr. is a tidy place.

Thousands of tips are catalogued in three-ring binders. Adetailed account of Yates' many travels covers three walls.Gruesome pictures of his decomposed victims are stored in photoalbums. Even though Yates pleaded guilty to killing 13 people and facestrial for the killings of two more in the Tacoma area on the otherside of the state, the office in the Spokane County Public SafetyBuilding is still in use. A handful of sheriff's officers are trying to get a completepicture of Yates' movements from January 1968 until his arrest inApril 2000. They share data with outside law enforcement agenciesinvestigating whether the 49-year-old married father of five isinvolved in unsolved murders in other areas. They are also helping Pierce County officials prepare for Yates'murder trial next year. "No one else has this information," said Sheriff's Sgt. CalWalker, a leader of the task force that caught Yates. "We arebecoming a clearinghouse for Yates' movements."

Fighting Killers, and Mark Fuhrman

The task force has also been conducting a public relationsbattle with celebrity crime author Mark Fuhrman, whose latest bookfaults the task force for not catching Yates two years sooner. Fuhrman, the Los Angeles police officer who found the bloodyglove in the O.J. Simpson case, says the task force spent too muchtime building computer databases and chasing DNA samples, and toolittle time doing old-fashioned police work among the prostituteswho were Yates' victims. "Whether it was laziness, incompetence or just plain humanerror, the task force could have caught Yates back in September1997," sparing the lives of perhaps nine of his victims, wroteFuhrman, who lives nearby and has a Spokane talk radio show thatfocuses on crime. The Spokane County Sheriff's Office has been outraged byFuhrman's comments. Walker said the overwhelming physical evidenceagainst Yates, primarily DNA, was what prompted him to pleadguilty.