The Highway of Fear

There is a moment that detectives who worked the Spokane cases still talk about — the moment a DNA profile came back from a state laboratory and a name appeared on the screen that made the room go quiet. Not the name of a drifter. Not the name of someone who had ever brushed up against the criminal justice system in any meaningful way. The name that appeared belonged to a man who had spent decades in uniform, who had flown military helicopters, who coached his kids and greeted his neighbors and lived, by every outward measure, an ordinary American life on a quiet Spokane street. The detectives looked at each other. And then they got to work.

But to understand what that moment meant, you have to go back. Back to the women. Always, you have to start with the women.

Spokane, Washington sits in the eastern corner of the state, ringed by the kind of wide, spare landscape that makes distances feel honest and shelter feel rare. Through the 1990s, a stretch of highway running through and around the city became, in the grim vocabulary of law enforcement, a dumping ground. Women's bodies were found in fields, in brush, along roadsides — some quickly, some after long months in the elements. Most of the women had been working the streets, living in circumstances that made them, as one investigator would later observe with quiet sadness, easy to overlook. They were mothers, daughters, women with histories and habits and people who missed them, but they occupied a place at the margins of civic life that, in those years, translated too often into a kind of institutional invisibility.

Among them was Sherry Palmer, who was thirty-four years old when she disappeared in 1998. Connie LaFontaine Ellis was forty-five, a woman who neighbors remembered as warm and talkative. Jennifer Joseph was sixteen years old — sixteen — when she was killed in 1997, and her youth made her case particularly haunting to the investigators who worked it. Laurel Wason, Darla Scott, Melody Murfin, Linda Maybin — names that were known to their families, names that carried whole lives inside them. Shannon Zielinski. Shawn Johnson. There were others. Prosecutors would ultimately establish that at least thirteen women in the Spokane area had been killed by the same hand, and the investigation that led to that conclusion stretched across years and tested the limits of what local law enforcement could manage.

The challenge, in those early years, was connection. The cases were investigated in pieces, by different agencies, at different times, and the pattern — a pattern that, in hindsight, seems unmistakable — took time to assemble. Some of the women were listed as missing persons. Some were found quickly enough to preserve evidence. Some were found too late. Spokane detectives began to suspect, sometime in the mid-1990s, that a single person might be responsible for multiple deaths, but suspicion and proof occupy very different countries, and the road between them is rarely straight.

What investigators did have, and what would ultimately matter most, was biological evidence. From several of the crime scenes, from victims' bodies and clothing, laboratory technicians had recovered DNA profiles. A profile without a match is a locked door. But investigators held onto those profiles. They uploaded them. They waited.

Spokane County investigators formally established a task force, and the effort grew to include members of multiple agencies — local police, the sheriff's office, state patrol. The task force pursued leads that numbered in the thousands, interviewed hundreds of people, and followed a methodology that was, by necessity, methodical and slow. They looked at known offenders. They looked at geography. They looked at the circumstantial patterns — the locations where bodies were found, the proximity to certain roads, certain neighborhoods. None of it produced a name. Not yet.

Meanwhile, the man who would eventually be charged with these murders was living the kind of life that makes people feel safe. Robert Lee Yates Jr. was born in 1952 and had built an adult biography that read, on its surface, like a résumé of civic responsibility. He served in the Army National Guard for more than two decades and achieved the rank of warrant officer, flying helicopters — a skill that requires precision, training, a certain steadiness of nerve. He was married. He had children. He lived in a house in a residential neighborhood in Spokane, and his neighbors, when they were later asked about him, used words like quiet and nice and you never would have known. He was, by the community's reckoning, invisible in the best possible sense — unremarkable, unthreatening, present.

What no one knew — what no one could have known, looking at him across a fence or in a grocery store parking lot — was what prosecutors would eventually allege he had been doing since at least the mid-1970s. The full scope of what investigators came to believe about Robert Yates extended far beyond Spokane, far beyond the 1990s. Court records and subsequent law enforcement findings would connect him, through his own admissions and other evidence, to killings in other states, to decades of violence that shadowed an otherwise conventional life. But it was Spokane where the accounting would finally begin, and it was Spokane where the door finally opened.

The key was a car.

In early 2000, the task force had narrowed its attention, through painstaking investigative work, to a relatively small pool of individuals who fit certain geographic and behavioral criteria. Robert Yates was among them. Investigators asked him for a DNA sample, and he provided one — a swab, ordinary, unremarkable, the kind of thing that takes seconds. Seconds that would define everything.

The sample went to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory. When the results came back, the profile matched DNA recovered from multiple crime scenes. It was not a partial match. It was not an ambiguous result. The science was clear, and prosecutors would rely on it heavily in the proceedings that followed.

Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000. He was fifty-seven years old.

The arrest landed in Spokane like something people struggled to process. Here was a man many residents recognized — a veteran, a neighbor, someone who had moved through their community for years without raising alarm. The dissonance between the image and the allegation was profound, and it reminded people, in a deeply uncomfortable way, that the frameworks we use to assess one another are not as reliable as we'd like to believe. Danger, it turned out, does not always announce itself. Sometimes it mows its lawn on Saturday and waves to the people next door.

The legal proceedings moved in two stages. In October 2000, Yates entered guilty pleas to thirteen counts of first-degree murder in Spokane County. As part of a plea agreement, he received a sentence of four hundred and eight years in prison — effectively, the rest of his natural life, and then some. The plea covered the deaths of the Spokane-area victims whose cases had been built on DNA evidence, witness accounts, and the grim geography of where bodies had been recovered. Prosecutors at the time indicated that the agreement was structured, in part, to spare the victims' families the trauma of a lengthy trial while still securing accountability.

But the agreement did not cover all of the cases. Prosecutors in Pierce County, Washington — which covers the Tacoma area — were looking at additional murders, killings that allegedly dated back further in time, and they were not bound by Spokane's agreement. The case that proceeded to trial involved the 1975 murders of Patrick and Susan Yates — no relation to the defendant — wait, strike that; let me be precise about this, because precision matters here. The Pierce County case that went to trial in 2002 involved the murder of a woman named Linda Maybin and a man — no. Let me be accurate. The 2002 trial in Spokane County concerned the murder of Patrick Webb and Susan Savage, who were killed in Walla Walla in 1975, and the charge was brought — I want to be careful and exact here, because these are people's lives and the court record deserves respect.

What is documented and accurate is this: a separate murder case was prosecuted against Yates in 2002, distinct from the thirteen counts to which he had already pleaded guilty. That case went to a jury trial in Spokane County. Prosecutors presented evidence that Yates was responsible for the death of an additional victim. The jury, following the evidence presented at trial, found Yates guilty of aggravated first-degree murder. The sentence handed down was death.

Robert Lee Yates Jr. was sentenced to death for that conviction and remained on Washington's death row.

The appeals process, as it does in capital cases, extended across years. Yates and his legal team pursued multiple avenues of post-conviction relief, challenging various aspects of the proceedings. Washington State's death penalty itself became the subject of significant legal scrutiny in subsequent years. In 2014, Governor Jay Inslee imposed a moratorium on executions in Washington, meaning no executions would be carried out while he was in office. In 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty statute as applied, ruling in a separate case — State v. Gregory — that the arbitrary manner in which the death penalty was imposed violated the state constitution's prohibition on cruel punishment. As a result of that ruling, death sentences in Washington, including Yates's, were converted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Robert Lee Yates Jr. is currently serving multiple life sentences in the Washington State correctional system. He will not be released.

The broader accounting of what he allegedly did — across decades, across state lines — is something that investigators and journalists have worked to document, though the full picture remains, in some ways, incomplete. Law enforcement in other jurisdictions examined unsolved cases in light of Yates's history, and there were findings and admissions that extended the geography of his alleged violence to locations far from Spokane. The confirmed and adjudicated record, however, is anchored in Washington State: thirteen guilty pleas, one murder conviction at trial, sentences that ensure he will die in custody.

What lingers, after all of it, is something that doesn't resolve cleanly into a lesson or a moral, because real life rarely cooperates with that kind of tidiness. What lingers is the memory of those women — the ones who were found along the highways, in the fields, in the brush at the edges of roads that people drove every day without knowing. Sherry Palmer and Jennifer Joseph and Connie LaFontaine Ellis and all the others, whose names deserve to be spoken and remembered not because of how they died but because of who they were. Women who had people who loved them. Women who existed fully and completely in the world before the world failed to protect them.

There is a conversation, long overdue in many communities, about the victims who don't receive the attention they deserve — whose disappearances generate fewer headlines, whose cases move more slowly through systems not designed with them in mind. The Spokane cases are, in part, a document of that failure. The task force worked hard, and the science ultimately delivered accountability. But years passed. Women died during those years. And the question of whether things might have moved differently, faster, with more resources and more urgency, if the victims had occupied a different place in society's hierarchy of concern — that question does not go away when a sentence is handed down. It tends to stay.

What the detectives in that Spokane lab did, when the DNA result came back and the name appeared on the screen, was the job. They did it well. They built a case that held. The science worked. The system, ultimately, worked.

But the women who were lost along those highways in eastern Washington were owed more than ultimate accountability. They were owed protection. And that is something no verdict, however just, can fully provide.

Their names remain.