Dateline NBC - A Killer Among Us

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

It haunted the city of Spokane, Washington for years, as one after another women turned up dead with few clues and few answers for grieving families. The search for the killer would lead investigators to a most unlikely suspect. Keith Morrison reports in this Dateline classic that originally aired on NBC on November 10, 2000.

It's such a beautiful picture. Sean had beautiful eyes. Above the fireplace in a modest house on a quiet street in Spokane, Washington, was the picture of a little girl named Sean. Not little anymore, of course. But her sister Kathy looked at that picture every day. I knew most of Sean's secrets. She knew most of mine. We were much more than sisters. We were definitely best friends. It's complicated what happens to people. Sean seemed to pick the wrong men to marry. And then, alone again, poor, a working single mother,

there was a misdiagnosis of a tendon injury and two surgeries and painkillers, to which she was soon addicted. And then, for whatever reason, she got heavier into drugs and eventually lost the house, started living with friends, relatives. And the only thing that seemed to make her feel better was the heroin, such a hard thing to stop and so expensive.

She was totally desperate. She would do anything, anything to get the money to buy the heroin. And that's when Shawn began, tentative at first, horrified with herself, to walk up and down East Sprague Street in Spokane to get the money to buy heroin Shawn sold herself. She felt truly, truly disgusted. But the drugs had such a hold on her. She felt like she was forced,

forced into doing it. People cared about Shawn. She had a son, a whole family worried constantly. One night, Kathy went looking for Sean and found her down on East Sprague. I just wanted to reach out and hug her and protect her. You know, to save her from everything. It was the time of year when night came on faster and colder. If less troubled families were frantic, it was to get the presents bought in time.

But Kathy was frantic about Sean, servicing strangers and passing cars, shooting up in some back alley. And then she got a letter from Sean herself with the best news she'd had in years. God, I am so happy, Kathy. This nightmare is almost over. Sean had been accepted for methadone treatment.

She'd be off the street in days, off the street for Christmas. Life is hard out here, but I feel I'm making the right decisions. I really think my life is almost together. God bless you all. I love you, sis. Shawn. She didn't quite make Christmas. It was December 26, 1997. A jogger found her. The killer had dumped her body by the side of a country road just outside of the city.

The autopsy showed she'd been shot twice in the head, which was then covered with three plastic grocery bags. Sean McClanahan was dead at 39 years old. Oh, and one more thing. She wasn't alone. Lying beside Sean on that roadside, also shot, her head also wrapped in grocery bags, also dumped like so much garbage,

was a young woman named Lori Wasson, for whom another family grieved. But the worst of it was this. There had been more, many more. It's a pattern that's becoming frighteningly familiar. His authorities found the most recent victims in a rash of homicides. And now in Spokane, the news was impossible to ignore. The woman's head had been covered with a plastic bag. Victim number five of a serial killer. Someone was killing the women of East Sprague.

Could the body found Sunday be number six? Investigators say this latest victim could be the seventh. In 1997, East Sprague Avenue, Spokane, was like a thousand other slightly downscaled commercial strips around America. By day, car dealerships and secondhand stores did an ordinary income. But when the sun went down, the commodity was sex. A dangerous business to begin with. But there was something new on the street. The cold fear of knowing there was a killer out at night and any one of them could be next. Being involved in prostitution isn't really a choice, rather it's a lack of choices. Lynn Everson, Mother Rubber they called her, worked for the Spokane Regional Health District. She cruised the streets and offered condoms and clean needles, advice when she was asked for it. And she kept a

list, updated it daily. A list with something like 140 men on it, or at least the cars they drove, sometimes a vague physical description. They called it the bad tricks list, the list of men who seemed to hate sex workers. Very often it seems that the men who pick women up hate women. They rob them, rape them, stab them, choke them, drag them outside their vehicles. Any one of the men on the list, anyone lurking on East Sprague could have been the killer. And now street life had become unimaginably worse. Between 1990 and the time Sean was dumped by the road, 13 women had been killed, every one of them shot, most through the head.

It had to be one man. But who? Not a night went by that women didn't talk about it. When they came to the office downtown, it was a topic of conversation. Theories about who it might be. Theories about who it was, why he would kill women, why he killed some women and not others, that they'd know him when they

saw him. It won't be me. You check immediately when you open the door to make sure it has a door handle. We agreed to call this woman Elizabeth for her own personal safety and privacy. We altered her voice, too. No matter how bad you need the money, I always follow my gut. But from August to December of 1997, the killer struck again and again. Seven victims in just five months. As more and more happened, I left. Just got out of here?

Yeah. Too scary? It was, because we didn't know if they were literally, the killer was grabbing them off the street, and by force, by a gun, we didn't know what. And around Spokane, public attitudes diverged. After all, these women were sex workers. Weren't they just asking for it by selling sex on the street?

Every news article, every newscast was another prostitute has been found. Not a person, but the labeling. That label comes before everything else. And it desensitizes people at that point. Well, they don't have to worry about it. It's not it was another daughter that was murdered, sister, aunt, granddaughter. It was just a prostitute. But behind the salacious headlines

were the stories of the victims, like 16-year-old Jennifer, who had been in the school choir and a budding pianist before she lost her way. 20-year-old Heather, who had just moved to Spokane, was found the same day. Shawn Johnson, who was about to tell her family she'd been offered a real job at a grocery store and was leaving the street. And Melody Murphin, a mother, a grandmother, who was assumed murdered by the serial killer but whose body was not found. So many victims, but who was the killer? We have never experienced this type of case. Cal Walker, then a sheriff's detective, was put at the head of a task force. The city police joined in too, but these men

considered themselves small-town policemen. They'd never tracked down a serial killer. As the death toll grew, they were struggling to get a handle. We dug into every book that we could find. Detectives were reading constantly, trying to understand what the possibilities were. And then at the same time, we started to experience homicide after homicide after homicide with victim after victim after victim. By the spring of 1998,

18 killings at least had been linked to the serial killer. And then, after years of all too regular deaths, suddenly, the murders stopped. Had the killer moved away or died? Did he know that a task force was trying to track him down? And without new clues, how could they possibly find him? And if they did, what kind of a monster would he be? The answer would be as shocking as anything these policemen had ever seen. And so the little girl who looked down from the mantelpiece,

now with the others, stared down eastward from a billboard. Lifeless, smiling faces, sad and angry eyes. Help find our killer, they pleaded. And each time a corpse was discovered, Cal Walker and his task force scoured the crime scene for any tiny piece of evidence that might tell them who did this. Though, of course, they had no way to know what bits were important. You get one chance to go in and take what you need. And a lot of times you take a lot more than you need because you don't know the value of

those items. And pretty soon you inundate the lab with thousands of pieces of evidence and every one is important. You end up having to just be patient and it's hard to be patient when people are dying. And so they tried everything, even this. When I went to Spokane, it's important to see things that you can't see in a photograph. They called Mark Safarik to Spokane. Safarik is a profiler.

Worked for the FBI, trying to penetrate the mind and motivation of killers. I wanted to go to all of the locations, but not just to go to the crime scene sites. I wanted to go there at night. I wanted to go there when the offender is there. I want to see what he is seeing. I want to see how dark it is. How does he know where to take these victims?

In essence, what we're trying to do is to really stand in the offender's shoes and feel and think the way he's thinking. Safaric's job is not to catch the murderer, but to help the task force determine the kind of person they were looking for, his personality and even appearance. He told people in Spokane they might not recognize the man they were looking for as a killer. They want to be able to recognize evil. It's easy to see that Richard Ramirez or Charlie Manson are serial killers. It's easy for people to look at individuals like that and go, that guy's dangerous.

It's much more difficult to look at the Ted Bundys and say, my God, this guy is a serial killer. Spokane's killer, thought Z Safaric, would not look evil. He would look so ordinary that even worried sex workers would get into his car. He's not going to have the appearance of being really scary. He's not going to be really big. He's just going to look very unassuming to the prostitutes. And because he's most likely dealt with them before,

they're not going to be afraid of him. And so, Safaric told the task force, they were looking for a slightly older man, probably single, maybe a loner, who had learned how to conduct his grisly business with a cold calculation. This is someone who is not panicking after the crime, someone who is able to compose themselves emotionally after having just killed somebody. Compose themselves well enough to be able to then decide, OK, I'm going to take the body here, I'm going to do this with it, I'm going to clean up this evidence. And Safaric told the task force one more thing, that they were close to catching the killer. We felt that they had already contacted their offender, that he was somewhere in their database of individuals, but that he didn't stand out. This was not a guy who would stand out, but they had probably already spoken to him.

Then by the end of 1998, the killing spree seemed to stop. A month went by, and then two months, and six, and then a year, without a single murder on East Sprague. The question was, why? Had the killer moved away? Had he died? Was he in jail? Or was he afraid Cal Walker and the task force was getting too close? By now, the task force had generated 6,000 tips, each of which generated work and often more leads. So much information, the computer system had to be upgraded twice. What did they have? A list of names, persons of interest. For instance, known sex offenders or men who had frequented sex workers. There were thousands of names on the list, including, the task force was convinced, the killer's name. It was a huge elimination process, is basically what it was.

And they had one very important advantage. The killer had made a crucial error. His DNA in the form of semen had been left on the remains of many of his victims. If they could just find a match of that DNA, they had their killer. And so they launched an enormous project. They took that list of names and began to visit everyone on it. DNA was a tool for us that would positively eliminate a person from suspicion. We could knock on your door and eliminate you through a DNA analysis. Just, can we have a little bit of your blood? See you later. We're never going to look at you again in reference to that. But it was taking time,

too much time. There was pressure from the community. Find the man or quit looking. For fear of tipping off the killer, detectives couldn't reveal that after two years, the investigation seemed, finally, to be getting somewhere. At first, it was just bits of things that somehow began to connect. One of the victims, the 16-year-old Jennifer Joseph, had last been seen riding with a man in a vintage white Corvette. A month later, a local cop pulled over a man driving just such a car. A routine stop blocks from where Joseph was last seen. Then a year later, the same man was pulled over again

with a woman passenger, not his wife. I recognized the female in the car to be one of the local prostitutes who I'd seen several times. No one, certainly not rookie officer Jason Reynolds, had any idea how important that stop was. There was no proof of illegal prostitution, so there was no ticket, no arrest. But just because it was standard department policy, both cops did record the driver's name, which was added to that big list of names. And one day, late in 1999, the name came up. Robert Yates Jr. was called in for an interview. It was just his turn. How did he behave?

Mr. Yates appeared nervous and was sweating profusely at the time of that contact. And any investigator is going to key in on those types of things, add it to the total picture. Part of the total picture was that Mr. Yates was asked for DNA. That's correct. And said? No. Which, of course, meant maybe nothing. Others on the list had refused DNA tests, too.

Still, just to be sure, they tracked down the 1977 Corvette Yates had since sold. Inside, nothing looked suspicious, but they collected some carpet fibers from the car anyway. The fibers were sent to the crime lab, where they sat for seven months, backlogged along with thousands of other microscopic pieces of potential evidence. And then... April 5th. What happened? The boom happened, you know, in the microscope of one of the forensic scientists in the basement of our building. The quote, and I don't think I can ever really forget it,

is, in the world of fibers, there aren't any two that get closer together. For us, that was a pretty darn big day. The carpet fiber from the Corvette was a perfect match for the fibers plucked off the shoe of teenage victim Jennifer Joseph. There has to be a reason, a correlation between the two. What is that reason? Is it a justifiable reason? It was, you know, that's something we were going to have to find out. Now they knew they were onto something.

But what more could they find in an old car now owned by someone else? Still, they had to look. And of course there was something. Secrets, alive in car seats, in leather creases, in cotton stitching. Molecules of proof. Dormant. Waiting. And so it finally came down to this, an old car.

Spokane's task force had been spinning its wheels before it ran across the vintage Corvette. Microscopic fibers taken from the carpet of a car once owned by a man named Robert Yates Jr. matched fibers found on the body of murder victim Jennifer Joseph. Remember, Yates had refused a DNA test. So the task force had to use a different tactic. They needed to find out everything they could

about Robert Yates. And what they discovered was a shocker. Yates was not just an ordinary man. He presented the outward appearance of an American ideal. He was 48 years old, had served 18 years in the military, had been a highly decorated helicopter pilot

who flew missions in Haiti and Somalia. He served in the National Guard, a master aviator so experienced he taught others to fly. But he couldn't find work flying, so he took a job as a crane operator at the local aluminum plant. He worked hard to earn a middle-class living. He'd bought a house in a quiet, respectable neighborhood called South Hill. And most remarkable of all, their suspect was married for 26 years, apparently happily, and the father of five children. He loved his wife. He loved his family. Al Gaddy had known Bobby Yates since they were 12 years old. They grew up in Oak Harbor, a picturesque town located on a small island in the Puget Sound.

Instantly, it seemed like it was overnight we were best friends. Gaddy said his friend had a very normal childhood. He wasn't a real extrovert, and he wasn't an introvert. He was just your calming guy. Gatti remembered a boy who had a dog named Lassie, a boy who was a great athlete and threw a mean fastball. A young man who came from a religious family, Seventh-day Adventist, very strict, with clear rules about the proper way to live. Young Robert was not wild. He didn't drink or smoke. He didn't even swear. And he was always around to lend a helping hand. Often Yates and Gaddy went hunting and camping together. This is Gaddy's home video of an apparently well-adjusted family back in 1991,

after Yates returned from a three-year tour overseas. The last time Gaddy saw Yates was in early 2000. We went out to dinner, and he had told me in the course of the night how him and his wife have grown to be the closest of friends. But Yates was still one of the prime suspects. So police went back to the old Corvette. They seized the car as their best chance of finding enough evidence to break the case. We dug a little deeper because it was a focus.

It was something that tended to make us say, you know, this is a piece that we've really got to take a look at. But remember, Detective Walker had one big problem. For years, that car had been owned by someone else. Somebody else had been driving it and washing it, taking it in for service, erasing its past. How could they hope to find evidence now? Still, investigators scoured the car, understanding this, that no matter how well you wash, some things don't come out. And there it was, on the seatbelt buckle, and soaked through the leather seats, they found blood. Almost certainly, tests revealed, Jennifer's blood. And one more thing, under the seat on the passenger side, stuck in a place where nobody had seen it for years, was an oddly shaped mother-of-pearl button.

Jennifer's blouse had been missing a button exactly like it. It was apparent to us that we had the missing button that had at one time been on Jennifer Joseph's clothes. Now there was enough to make an arrest, so detectives learned Yates' schedule. They waited through his days off. They watched him play catch with his son, but they held back. They knew that the family were victims too, and so to lessen the awful impact on them, they decided not to raid the house. On April 18, 2000, as Robert Yates Jr. was driving to work, police came alongside, pulled

him over, and arrested him. With them, a court ordered to extract a sample of his blood. Remember, when those women were murdered, the killer left behind his own DNA. If Yates' DNA did not match, they'd have to start all over again. You took the DNA per the court order and you sent it to the lab? Yes. And then waited? Yes.

How long? Too long. Seemed like days. Seemed like days. It was actually what, hours? A matter of, yeah. And the result? It matched.

And there was more. Yates' fingerprint was found on one of the grocery bags that was tied over a victim's head. I'm delighted to say today in Spokane County Sheriff's Office... And then, finally, the sheriff went public. We feel like we have arrested the person that's responsible for up to 18 of the prostitute homicides in our community. I was very shocked. I was amazed. Kathy Lloyd, whose sister Sean was murdered,

was stunned to hear the news of the arrest, but she was even more shocked to see the man she thought would look like a monster standing there before her in the courtroom. Would you please state your name, sir? Robert Lee Yates, Jr. What was it like to see him there? At first, it was really difficult. I was very, very shaky, almost lightheaded.

And then the more I looked at him, I was thinking, he looks like such an ordinary person. He just looked like a neighbor, anybody's neighbor. People want to believe that incarnate evil doesn't look like them, act like them, have a job like them. But there were more surprises to come. A young woman named Christine Smith saw a picture of Robert Yates in the newspaper, and suddenly her own picture became clear.

Smith told police Yates had picked her up and asked for oral sex in the back of his van, but when he couldn't perform, she was struck on the head. She stumbled out of the van bleeding, her wounds stitched up at the local hospital. But it wasn't until a year later that an X-ray revealed there was bullet shrapnel in her skull. That night, she'd been shot. Then, when police scoured the van Yates once owned for evidence, in the back, human blood, and lodged into the roof above the windshield, a spent bullet. A secret revealed, but there were more. We all have a secret life,

and that really is known only to us or maybe one other person. You're about to hear from the one person who could tell us, Mrs. Robert Yates. As to count eight premeditated murder in the first degree with aggravating circumstances, what is your plea, guilty or not guilty? Not guilty, Your Honor. When Robert Yates, Jr. was brought to court to answer to murder charges, he claimed innocence. Even victims' families wondered how could it have been a married father of five.

But they didn't know there were even more horror stories to come. I expected to see someone real scruffy, real scruffy looking. Even sex workers came forward to say they knew him all right, but they told Lynn Everson, their unofficial confessor, he didn't seem like a bad man at all. How can a woman trust her gut instinct when they find out that someone they actually thought of as a good date, as someone safe and trustworthy, had killed their friends and co-workers. If they were confused, imagine his friends. Al Gatti tried to stand by Bob Yates, even though the evidence looked bad. If Bob did these crimes, he would fess up to him. And whatever punishment that would be forthcoming,

he would believe that this is what I deserve. But imagine what she was thinking. How could he go out and do all that stuff and come home and be normal? This is Linda Yates, Robert's wife. After the arrest, she and her children were taken to a secret place hidden from public view to be helped and questioned by detectives. It was a family devastated. All we had was what we had.

No extra clothes? Nope. Not even a toothbrush? Nope. As Linda Yates talked to investigators, they began to see a less than idyllic family, and she learned that almost everything about her husband was a lie. He had two sides to him. When he's out in public, he had to be one thing, but at his home, he could be whoever he wanted to be. So when he came in that door, he changed?

Yeah. Mrs. Yates had been silent since her husband's arrest, but agreed to an interview with Dateline. She said she was rethinking all of her husband's behavior. How could you not see the signs? But see, when you're close to somebody, you don't see it. I don't know who took these pictures here. Looking through a family photo album in 2000, Linda and her oldest daughter Sasha remembered the good times when the family would travel and go camping together. But Sasha noticed a change in her father in the few years prior. It was more like he was like a single

person now and we were just, you know, people that were just there in the background. Sasha told detectives and us that her dad was a strict disciplinarian with a quick temper who often crossed the line and was verbally and physically abusive. See, my dad has this temperament where he's kind of moody. And he'll fly off the handle sometimes. And Linda told police she certainly had suspicions, but she was afraid he was having an affair, not that he was killing people. Did you get at all suspicious about his behavior? Yes, especially when he said he was going hunting and he was dressed up nice and had cologne on. You

don't go out hunting with cologne on. Though when she confronted him with clear evidence that he was having affairs. He always had answers to everything already prepared in his mind I think. Like the night her husband was out all night. When he returned in the morning the back of his van had blood in it. Yates told her he hit a dog. And they think that's when he did one of his first ones. He kept so many secrets, she now discovered, and some were very dark indeed, like the secret he'd carried around all his life. It is buried under the century trees of a country graveyard in Van Buren County, Tennessee. Has been there all but forgotten, a moldering secret since 1945.

There's a man buried there, a simple farmer, the father of ten, married to the same woman for 30 years. His name is John Tyler Yates, Robert Yates' grandfather. There is no public story that adequately explains what happened to Robert Yates' grandfather in the early dark hours of October 13, 1945. We know from court records he was asleep in his own bed. Robert Yates' grandmother, Novella Johnson Yates, got out of bed early that morning and went out to the woodshed and returned with an axe.

The record says she struck her husband four times in the head, that he died days later, that she was sent to a home for the criminally insane. Linda Yates says her husband never told her that story. She found out from someone else. Did the family trauma infect Robert somehow? Yates was saying nothing about any of this. His lawyers prepared for trial. But it was a strong case against him, and slowly but surely a decision was formed.

The hidden horrors of Yates' secret world had still not been revealed, but very soon now, they would be. Robert Yates sat in his cell at the county jail for six months, silent. And then he talked. He told his family he'd renewed his religious faith and so expected to avoid damnation. He told the law to avoid the death penalty. He'd make a deal. He confessed to killing 14 people, and in his cell on a yellow legal pad, he drew a map, a map that revealed how audacious this serial killer was.

Do you make those pleas of guilty freely and voluntarily? Yes, I do, Your Honor. Part of the plea agreement was that Mr. Yates would divulge the location of a body that was reported to be one of our suspected victims. But when police finally got that handwritten map and defense lawyers led them to the place it described, even Cal Walker, who thought he knew Robert Yates well by now, felt almost ill. Buried two feet underground in a flower bed just outside Robert Yates' bedroom window, when he slept at night he would have been inches from her body, were the remains of Melody Murfin. We had no indications that Mr. Yates had ever left a body at his residence, a place where his wife and four of his children resided. No reason to believe that.

In hindsight, yeah, she was there the whole time. That body was there, and that's just something we have to live with. The news hit as Linda Yates was struggling to put her life back together. They called me at work and said that they found a body in your yard. And I said, oh my God, I turned ice cold. The charge of murder in the first degree is set forth in count 10. But there were more stunning revelations. How do you plead guilty, Your Honor? But there were more stunning revelations. Yates confessed to three unsolved murders that reached far beyond East Sprague Street.

A sex worker in 1988, a double murder in 1975. It was a Sunday afternoon in Walla Walla, Washington, when Susan Savage and her friend Patrick Oliver disappeared after enjoying a picnic by a creek. A relative found their bodies. They'd been shot, their bodies hidden under debris, their killer never found. Robert Yates was a 23-year-old prison guard then. He often came to the creek with his baby daughter, or for target shooting. After Yates' arrest in Spokane, the Walla Walla Sheriff's Office plowed through the dusty case files, and among their old list of possible suspects, they found Yates' name. He had bought ammunition days before the murders,

but police never brought him in for questioning. Had he been arrested, would all those others have died? Mr. Yates, you deserve to die now. Families gathered in court to vent their grief and fury, not just at Yates, but at the attorneys who helped him avoid the death penalty. You need to be turned over to the families of your victims. To you and the people who bargained for your life, may you rot in hell. You deserve to die the slowest, most painful death possible.

You deserve to feel what Sonny and all the other women felt. How can you take my mother and bury her in your yard, in your family, walk around my mother for two and a half years? You stole her soul. And then it was Sasha Yates who bravely faced her father in that courtroom. It feels like a dream. I'm still in shock. I am... It just makes me mad that this happened to so many people.

They didn't deserve this. No one deserves to be killed like that. No one. And yet, somehow, still, could say this. And I still love you, Dad. Even though you did this. Then Yates himself addressed the court. Nothing I can say will erase the sorrow, the pain,

and the anguish that you feel and that I've caused in your lives. He apologized to each family. And to the friends and family of Sean McClanahan, I am sorry. But still, to the one question everyone wanted answered, Robert Yates had no answer. Sir, why did you do it then? It's all I have, Your Honor. Okay, ma'am, please be seated. It's a question everyone has asked and asked again. I said, do you know why you killed these women? I want to know why, like anybody else, and how you could have done this and still be married to me.

He had no answer. Mm-mm. Robert Lee Yates Jr. was sentenced to 408 years in prison. And that little girl, Shawn, who sparkled in that picture above the fireplace in Spokane?

At least Kathy Lloyd knows what happened to her sister, knows who did it, as do the other 14 families around Washington State. Actually, make that 16 other families. In 2002, Yates was convicted of two more murders, this time in the Tacoma, Washington area. He was sentenced to death,

a sentence that was commuted to life without parole in 2018 after Washington's Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional. Of course, knowing what happened to a loved one doesn't make it easier for anyone. It's been a nightmare that goes on and on, and there's not one day that I don't think about Sean.