On the morning of June 23, 1990, an employee taking out the trash behind a restaurant in Bellevue found a woman's body in the dumpster enclosure. She had not been dumped there. She had been arranged: laid on her back, ankles crossed, hands folded across her stomach, a fir cone placed in them. The effect, as more than one person who saw it said, was of a body laid out for a funeral.
She was Mary Ann Pohlreich, thirty-six. She had spent the previous evening at Papagayo's, a Bellevue nightclub, with two friends. The autopsy found she had been beaten, choked and struck with such force that her liver had split against her spine.
Bellevue in 1990 was an affluent suburb across Lake Washington from Seattle, and this was not the kind of thing that happened there.
Seven weeks later, on August 9, Carol Beethe was killed in her own home. She was twenty-four and tended bar in Bellevue, and contemporary reporting recorded that it was her young daughter who found her. Her body had been posed as well. The killer had taken the knives from the kitchen and wiped down the bat he had beaten her with, which police read as an effort to stop investigators identifying which blade had been used on her after death. Two wedding ring sets from her jewelry box were gone.
On August 31 he killed Andrea Levine, twenty-seven, known as Randi. She too was posed. Her amethyst ring was missing.
Three women in ten weeks, and the connection was not forensic. It was the arrangement.
Investigators brought in an expert in sexualized homicide, who told them the three were the work of one man. That opinion carried the whole case. Nothing about the three scenes was identical and each death had a different immediate cause. What was consistent was the deliberateness with which each woman had been left to be found.
What caught him was smaller. Eight days after Levine's death, Bellevue police arrested Russell on outstanding misdemeanor warrants. It was not a murder arrest, and that is the point: it put him in custody and gave detectives lawful access to his belongings and his car. A ring surfaced. Police took it to a jeweler who recognized his own work on it and said he had repaired it for Andrea Levine in February 1990. The shop's owner testified that Levine had brought it in herself.
He was born in Florida in April 1958 to Joyce and George Waterfield Russell Sr., who separated when he was a baby; his mother took him to Mercer Island, Washington, and at sixteen he was sent to live with his stepfather, who threw him out after he was caught spying on his new wife, and he went to live with aunts. He had a long record of theft and burglary. After a truancy case in 1971 he was given work at the Mercer Island police station instead of a punishment, and he used that later to put women at ease. He trawled Seattle's cocktail lounges and did not take rejection well; one club banned him for impersonating a police officer. In 1987 he was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. The press called him the Charmer.
Russell had been a familiar figure around the same bars and restaurants as his victims. A witness testified that he and Beethe both used the same Denny's. A waitress described discussing a situation between herself and Russell with Beethe, and looking up to find him staring at them. He had been banned from one of the restaurants. After the killings he told friends he had known the second victim, and that she tended bar at a particular Bellevue place.
He denied everything. He refused to give a DNA sample voluntarily and presented himself to detectives as a helpful man who understood how police work. He made partial admissions about where he had been and who he had known, and those statements sent investigators to witnesses and searches that did him no good at all.
The trial ran from September 13 to October 18, 1991 before Judge Patricia Aitken in King County. Rebecca Roe and Jeffrey Baird prosecuted. Miriam Schwartz and Brad Hampton defended.
It was the first serial murder case Washington had ever tried, and the state's case rested on the signature argument: that the posing of the three bodies was distinctive enough to establish one killer. If the jury rejected that, the three counts fell apart into three separate and much weaker cases.
The jury did not reject it. On October 18, 1991 it convicted him of the first degree murder of Mary Ann Pohlreich and the aggravated first degree murder of Carol Beethe and Andrea Levine. The distinction matters: aggravated first degree murder in Washington carries life without the possibility of parole, and he received two such terms, plus a term of years for the Pohlreich count.
He appealed, and the Court of Appeals sent the case straight up. The Washington Supreme Court heard it en banc and decided it on October 13, 1994. Justice Madsen wrote for the court. Rita Griffith and Eric Broman appeared for Russell; the King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng's office for the state.
The first thing Russell argued was that the trial court should never have let the jury hear the DNA evidence, because PCR testing had not gained sufficient acceptance in the scientific community. The court disagreed and held that it had. That holding, in a case that was already the state's first serial murder prosecution, is why lawyers still cite State v. Russell.
The conviction and the sentence were affirmed. He is held at the Clallam Bay Corrections Center.
One thing about the three women is not settled. The ages given here come from accounts working from cemetery records. At least one widely circulated account assigns a different age to each of them, and it is a machine-generated reference site of the kind that should not be relied on for anything. The disagreement is real and is stated rather than resolved.