Wash. Police Retrace Yates' Steps
S P O K A N E, Wash., Oct. 18, 2000 -- Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage were justtwo months out of college in 1975 when they set out for a Sundayafternoon swim and a picnic.
At some point, the childhood friends crossed paths with anotheryoung man on a hunting trip — 23-year-old Robert L. Yates Jr.
For Oliver, fresh from studies in France, and Savage, a recentgraduate of Washington State University, the chance encountermarked a tragic end.
For Yates, it apparently was a beginning of a murderous streakthat lasted until the 1990s.
Yates, now 48, will plead guilty to 13 murders, including thoseof Oliver and Savage, and one attempted murder on Thursday, SpokaneCounty Prosecutor Steve Tucker announced today. Except for theyoung couple, all the victims were women involved in prostitutionor drugs.
Death Penalty Still Possible
The 18-year Army veteran and helicopter pilot will be sentencedOct. 26 to 447 years in prison, but the plea bargain will allow himto escape the death penalty in those cases, Tucker said.
However, the agreement doesn’t cover two slayings in PierceCounty and one other slaying in Spokane, and he could face death inthose cases.
“This plea agreement doesn’t keep him from being prosecutedanywhere else,” Tucker said.
Yates sealed his plea offer by directing investigators to a bodyburied in his own side yard, evidence investigators missed in morethan a month of searching his home.
Helping With The InvestigationThe plea agreement was contingent on the body being that ofMelody Murfin, 43, a suspected victim missing for two years.
An autopsy Tuesday failed to positively identify the body andinvestigators said DNA samples would be required. However, Tuckersaid jewelry found with the corpse matched jewelry that Murfin’sfamily members described.
“Last night by telephone, family members verified the rings shehad on and the necklace,” Tucker said. “Everything matches, he(Yates) hasn’t told us anything that is not true yet.”
No one knows why Yates, then a prison guard at the WashingtonState Penitentiary in Walla Walla, might have decided to killOliver and Savage, whose bodies were dragged to a wooded area andconcealed beneath underbrush and debris.
“I think he went up there to target shoot like he usuallydid,” Walla Walla County Sheriff Mike Humphreys told the WallaWalla Union-Bulletin. “He came across these people, and ithappened.”
Mountain of EvidenceYates enrolled at Walla Walla College in 1970, then dropped outtwo years later. In 1975, he worked for six months as a guard atthe state prison. He married in 1976, and enlisted in the Armyshortly after.
At some point, police say, he began approaching and killingprostitutes.
The first, according to what Yates told investigators, was StacyElizabeth Hawn, 23, who was last seen alive on July 7, 1988. Herskeletal remains were found five months later in Skagit County.
Yates will plead guilty to the deaths of 10 prostitutes in a14-month period in Spokane, where he and his family moved in 1996after his discharge from the Army.
Spokane police stopped Yates on Nov. 10, 1998, after he pickedup a prostitute. Officers let him go when he said the woman’sfather had asked him to drive her home.
However, police were drawn back to Yates in their investigationbecause he drove the same Corvette that was seen around the areaswhere the women were killed.
A mass of physical and circumstantial evidence built up againsthim, and he was arrested in April on his way to work. His familywas removed from their home the same day and has been in hidingsince.
Faced with a huge volume of physical evidence and thepossibility of being executed, Yates began exploring a pleabargain. On Monday, as part of the deal, investigators say Yatesdrew a map of where he had buried a body in his own yard.
“I just can’t say what I think the motive is,” Robert L. YatesSr., Yates’ father, told Spokane TV station KHQ in his first mediainterview since the arrest. “I thought about this an awful lot …I can’t think of one single thing that might have contributed tothis.”