George Waterfield Russell Jr. killed three women in the Seattle suburbs in the summer of 1990 and arranged each body deliberately, which is what tied the cases together. The Seattle press called him the Charmer and the East Side Killer.
He was born in 1958 and was known locally as a charming petty thief who moved easily around Bellevue. Mary Ann Pohlreich, thirty-six, was killed on June 22, 1990; Carol Marie Bleethe, twenty-four, on August 9; Andrea "Randi" Levine, twenty-seven, on August 31. They were strangled, beaten or stabbed. After death he pushed objects into the throat or the vagina and posed the bodies in elaborate sexual positions, and it was that signature rather than any physical trace that established a single killer.
He was arrested on September 12, 1990 and in 1991 was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus twenty-eight years. The Washington Supreme Court reviewed the case in State v. Russell.