George Waterfield Russell Jr. was convicted in October 1991 of killing three women on the Eastside, the suburbs east of Seattle, during the summer of 1990. Mary Ann Pohlreich, 27, was found in Bellevue on June 23. Carol Marie Beethe, 35, was found in her Bellevue home on August 9. Andrea Levine, 24, known as Randy, was found in her apartment in Kingsgate on September 3. All three had been beaten to death.
Russell was 32 when he was charged. He had grown up on Mercer Island, the son of a woman who had married a local dentist, and he had a long record of theft, burglary and car prowling. Police knew him as a charming talker. He knew each of the women, witnesses said, from the bars and restaurants of Bellevue. A King County jury convicted him of the first degree murder of Mary Ann Pohlreich and the aggravated first degree murders of Carol Beethe and Andrea Levine, and Judge Patricia Aitken sentenced him to two terms of life without parole and a third term of nearly 29 years. The Seattle Times called the case the first trial in King County of someone accused of being a serial killer. It was also one of the first criminal trials in the state to use a new kind of DNA test, and in 1994 the Washington Supreme Court used his appeal to rule that the test was generally accepted by scientists.
Little is recorded about Russell's early years. According to the account of his trial in the reference work Great American Trials, written by B. J. Welborn, his mother left him with his grandmother in Florida when he was about six months old. She later married a dentist, and the family moved to Mercer Island, Washington, when he was in junior high school. The Seattle Times described him in 1991 as the stepson of a local Black dentist. Welborn writes that he felt isolated on the island.
He attended Mercer Island High School in the middle 1970s but did not graduate. He had poor attendance, failed many classes and dropped out in his senior year, the Seattle Times reported. Acquaintances described him as articulate, friendly, quick-minded and well read, a young man who often carried books.
His criminal record began in his teens. By January 1991 it included convictions for third degree theft, taking a motor vehicle without permission, simple assault, vehicle prowling, possession of marijuana and second degree burglary, going back to 1977, when he was 19. Welborn writes that he had been jailed 24 times, mostly for minor offenses, including burglaries of homes on Mercer Island. Once, while held in the city's temporary holding facility after an arrest for car prowling, he kicked out a window and escaped, the only prisoner ever to break out of it. Wayne Stuart, a prosecutor who handled his cases, said he had always sought the most jail time he could for Russell, but that apart from the escape Russell had been a model prisoner. Police often found a knife on him, though no one remembered him using one to hurt anyone; there was a single report that he had brandished one.
The Mercer Island police chief, Jan Deveney, called him a "sneak thief." "It's hard to believe he could be that dangerous," the chief said in January 1991. Stuart said murder would have been "an awfully big step for George to take." Sergeant Jim Myers described him as "a good talker" and "charming."
By his 20s, according to Welborn, Russell was spending his nights in Bellevue nightclubs, could not hold a steady job and had no fixed home. A drinking friend who testified at his trial said they had been drinking companions for seven years. When he was charged, the Seattle Times gave his home as Bellevue; at trial it gave it as Mercer Island. In the summer of 1990, witnesses later said, he was a regular at a Bellevue dance bar and knew many of the people who went there.
Mary Ann Pohlreich was 27 and lived in an apartment in Redmond with a roommate. She was the oldest of eight children; her parents lived in Ravensdale. She graduated from Tahoma Christian School in 1981 and earned associate degrees in business management from Green River and Bellevue community colleges. She had attended Seattle Pacific University and planned to study computer science.
For five years she made contact lenses for a Bellevue company, until it closed the previous December. She then did telemarketing for a short time and had recently quit to look for other work. Her roommate said she was friendly and would talk to anyone, and that she went dancing several times a week. A former teacher who spoke for the family said she had been shy as a girl but was opening up and enjoying life, and called her bright and giving. "Mary was not only a sister, she was a friend," her brother said.
On Friday, June 22, 1990, she went to a Bellevue nightclub and dance bar where she was a regular. She arrived about 8:30 p.m. with two friends, who left early; she stayed and talked with several people. She was dressed in white that night, a witness said. Russell arrived about 9 p.m. with his drinking friend and ate with a group at a table for eight. A young woman who sat with him testified that he and Pohlreich were both regulars who knew each other, and that he told her he had seen Pohlreich that night.
An off-duty Bellevue police officer working at the club saw Russell leave with a woman at around midnight. Russell told the officer he was taking the woman home to get something. Earlier that evening, according to the friend, Russell had asked for the keys to the friend's pickup truck, saying he needed to fetch a collared shirt so he could dance. He did not bring the truck back that night.
Her body was found early on June 23, 1990, in Bellevue, about a mile from the club. The medical examiner said the most likely cause of death was manual strangulation, and the Seattle Times reported that she had also been struck on the head. Five days later the paper reported that the case had stumped detectives, who did not know where she had been killed and were asking anyone who had seen or heard anything that night to come forward.
Carol Marie Beethe was 35. She had moved to Bellevue from Montana about ten years earlier. She was divorced and the mother of two daughters, aged 13 and 8. She worked the day shift as a bartender at an Italian restaurant in Bellevue, and before that had tended bar during the day at a downtown Bellevue lounge until the previous December. A bartender who knew her called her "very sweet," and said she was selfless but tough. "She made people respect her," he said.
In April 1990 a boyfriend she had lived with for about 18 months moved out, though the two were still in touch and were planning a trip together. A week before she died she received roses at work three days in a row, with no card; she told friends she did not know who had sent them. On the evening of August 8 she had a drink after work with a colleague and left at about 7 p.m. Her boyfriend later testified that he last spoke with her by telephone at about 11 that night.
She was killed in her home in East Bellevue on or about August 8, 1990. Her two daughters were at home. Her older daughter testified at the trial that shortly after 4 that morning she saw someone shine a flashlight through the bathroom and the girls' bedrooms, and that she did not know who held it. Later that morning, seeing her mother's car still outside, she went to check on her and found her, and she called her father. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as head injuries. Two wedding ring sets that Carol Beethe owned, and bags of coins she kept, were missing and were never found.
Two days after her death the Seattle Times reported that police had no suspects, had found no sign of a struggle or of forced entry, and thought the killer had probably come in through a sliding window. Neighbors heard nothing. Hers was the third homicide in Bellevue that year.
Detectives first suspected her boyfriend. He testified for the defense in September 1991 that they questioned him until about 3 a.m. on the day she was found, that they grew hostile and told him his car had been seen, and that after hours of being told he had been there he said, "If I was there, I don't remember it." Police stopped treating him as a suspect after results from the FBI laboratory linked hair and fiber evidence to Russell, the Seattle Times reported.
Andrea Levine, called Randy by her family, was 24. She rented a lower-floor apartment in the home of a family in Kingsgate. She had a truck and worked days. Her favorite piece of jewelry was a gold ring set with an oval amethyst, which had been a gift from her sister-in-law, who had inherited it from their mother. A jeweler had worked on the ring for her in February 1990. Her family said she would never have taken it off.
Shortly before her death, prosecutors told the jury, she told friends that Russell was bothering her. Police said he knew her and had dropped by her apartment unannounced several times.
On Thursday, August 30, 1990, she met her boyfriend at a Kirkland restaurant. That night Russell was staying with friends at a motel near her home, and he left the motel during the night wearing dark clothing, according to the evidence summarized by the Washington Supreme Court. At about 5 a.m. on August 31 the man who owned her house saw a figure running from his yard. On the following Monday, September 3, his wife went to check on Levine's cat and found her body. The cause of death was severe head wounds.
Bellevue police handled the three deaths as separate cases at first. In January 1991, after Russell was charged, police said they had deliberately played down any links between the killings to protect the chances of a conviction.
The links were there. The three women had been killed within 67 days in a small area, an FBI expert later testified. Each had been beaten to death, and each was found in a place where she would be discovered quickly. Rings had been taken from two of them. Robert Keppel, a criminal investigator for the Washington Attorney General's Office and a widely known analyst of serial crimes, later said the killer had taken rings as souvenirs and had left a pattern he called a signature. "I've never seen a signature quite so obvious," he said.
Eight days after Levine was killed, Bellevue police arrested him on outstanding misdemeanor warrants so that they could question him about the murders, the Washington Supreme Court found. In the interview he explained how he knew Mary Ann Pohlreich and Andrea Levine and what he had been doing when each was killed, and he said he had used his friend's truck on the night Pohlreich died. He ended the questioning by asking for a lawyer.
That statement led detectives to the friend who owned the truck, to the friend's sister, and to stains on the truck's seat. The sister later testified that she had seen Russell bring the truck back at about 6 a.m. on the morning Pohlreich was found, that she noticed a reddish orange stain on the passenger seat, and that he said he had been sick. The friend testified that Russell returned the truck the next day smelling of vomit and with red stains, including a large one on the driver's seat, and apologized, saying he had drunk too much. Russell had told him he spent the night with a blond woman he had long admired and had taken the truck so he would not be seen riding in her sports car. Another regular, a woman known at the club for her white Porsche, testified that he had a crush on her but that she had never left the club parking lot with him. The friend pulled out the carpets and took the truck to a detailer; a detective said it cost about $2,000 to restore.
With what Russell had said, police had enough to obtain warrants for samples of his blood, saliva and hair.
Detectives found the names and telephone numbers of Russell's acquaintances on scraps of paper in his apartment. They interviewed each one and asked about a ring. In November 1990 they found a woman who had been given an amethyst ring by Russell around Labor Day, as a peace offering after he broke a date with her. When she learned that he was a suspect in the Pohlreich case, she gave the ring to a male friend.
That friend had since hitchhiked across the country with his girlfriend and ended up in the Florida Keys. Detective Larry Petersen learned his whereabouts from his mother and found him in February 1991, about two weeks after he had sold the ring for $5 to a pawnshop in Key West. The ring had grown too tight, and the pawnshop clerk had cut it off his finger. Petersen traced the ring to the shop, and Levine's sister-in-law identified it there as the ring she had given her.
Another witness told police that Russell had tried to sell him a ring resembling one of Carol Beethe's missing rings, and described it to Bellevue police on March 5, 1991. That ring was never recovered. Russell later gave a friend a bag of silver dollars and change in the same kind of whiskey-brand bags in which Beethe had kept her coins.
In the fall of 1990 Russell was jailed on unrelated charges. In January 1991, on the day he was due for release, King County prosecutors charged him with the first degree murder of Mary Ann Pohlreich and asked for $500,000 bail. The charge rested on laboratory results from the Bellevue police: body fluid evidence matched Russell's blood type, and blood in the truck he had borrowed matched Pohlreich's. At that point the Seattle Times reported that he was also a suspect in Andrea Levine's death, while police called him only "a person of interest" in Carol Beethe's death and said there were other suspects in that case.
In early March 1991 prosecutors charged him with aggravated first degree murder in Levine's death and first degree murder in Beethe's death. The Levine charge was aggravated because the killing was committed during a burglary, with the theft of the amethyst ring as the aggravating circumstance. Under state law as the Seattle Times described it, first degree murder carried a minimum of 20 years in prison, and aggravated first degree murder carried a mandatory sentence of either life without parole or death.
In mid-March 1991 he pleaded not guilty before King County Superior Court Judge Anthony Wartnik to a further count of aggravated first degree murder, which the Seattle Times tied to a ring he was accused of taking from a victim and trying to sell. Russell smiled often and seemed relaxed at the hearing. The King County prosecutor, Norm Maleng, had to decide whether to seek the death penalty. In the end prosecutors did not seek it, citing what the Seattle Times called technical and political reasons. "Life without parole is fine," the senior deputy prosecutor Rebecca Roe said later.
Before the trial, Judge Patricia Aitken held a two-week hearing on whether the jury could hear the results of a new kind of DNA test. The test used the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which copies tiny amounts of DNA so that very small or old samples can be typed. The Seattle Times described it as working "like a molecular photocopy machine." The tests in the Russell case were done by Dr. Edward Blake of Forensic Science Associates, using a kit made by the Cetus Corporation that typed a single genetic marker known as HLA DQ alpha. They were run on a sample from Mary Ann Pohlreich's body and on upholstery from the borrowed truck.
The state called four scientists: Dr. Rebecca Reynolds, a Cetus employee; Dr. Daniel Geraghty of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle; Dr. Cecelia Von Beroldingen of the Oregon State Police crime laboratory; and Blake. The defense called three of its own: Dr. John Gerdes, Dr. Kristen Skogerboe and Dr. Glenn Evans. Defense lawyers argued that the test had not been proven, that labs could make mistakes, that samples could be contaminated and that the population figures used to estimate the odds of a chance match were unreliable. Judge Aitken admitted the results.
At trial, prosecutors said the DNA type found in the sample from Pohlreich's body matched Russell's and was shared by about 8 percent of the population, and that the months-old bloodstain on the truck seat matched Pohlreich's type, shared by about 6 percent. The Washington Supreme Court later put the share of people with Russell's type at about 5 to 10 percent. The Seattle Times reported in October 1991 that it was the first trial in King County, and only the second criminal trial in Washington, to use this type of DNA evidence. "PCR has revolutionized molecular biology. It was the discovery of the '80s," Geraghty said.
Opening statements were given in September 1991 in King County Superior Court in Seattle. Great American Trials dates the trial from September 13 to October 18, 1991; the Washington Supreme Court said it took 33 days, not counting pretrial motions. Rebecca Roe and Jeffrey Baird, senior deputy prosecutors, tried the case for the state. Miriam Schwartz, a public defender, and Brad Hampton represented Russell.
After several days of jury selection, six men and six women were seated. The Seattle Times noted that race had been treated as an important issue in choosing the jury, because Russell is Black and the three women were white; one juror was Black.
Russell had asked the judge to try the Pohlreich count separately from the other two, and he asked again at the close of the state's case. Judge Aitken refused both times. She found the evidence in the Pohlreich and Levine counts about equally strong and the evidence in the Beethe count weaker, but ruled that evidence of each killing could be heard on the others to prove the identity of the killer, and that separate trials would repeat a great deal of the same evidence.
Roe told the jury that the three women "all knew George Russell." The prosecution's case on Pohlreich rested on the DNA results, on the blood in the truck, on fibers matching the truck's carpet and upholstery, and on a hair consistent with Russell's. The witnesses from the dance bar placed Russell and Pohlreich there together on her last night, and Russell had been banned from the restaurant near where she was found.
On Carol Beethe, an FBI laboratory agent, Robert Fram, testified that hairs and hair fragments recovered at her home were consistent with Russell's, the Seattle Times reported. Witnesses described Russell's attempt to sell a ring like hers and the coin bags. Friends said he had told them he knew she tended bar at the restaurant where she worked. Her older daughter testified about the flashlight she saw before dawn, saying, "I got really scared then," when she described finding her mother.
On Andrea Levine, the state relied on the ring, on Russell's departure from the motel during the night in dark clothing like the figure seen running from her yard, and on disparaging remarks he made about her after her death. A single hair found where she died could not be matched to Russell, but he could not be excluded.
The defense said Russell was the wrong man. Schwartz told the jury that the ring found in Florida was not Levine's and that whoever killed Levine had left an unidentified fingerprint at the scene. For the Beethe killing, she offered the jury two other possibilities: the boyfriend, who had been the first suspect and who also went to the bar where Pohlreich was last seen, or an unidentified man linked by evidence found on her bedspread. She cross-examined the friend who owned the truck about inconsistent dates and times in his statements and suggested that he had shaped his account to please the police. The judge would not let the defense present evidence that two other named men had committed the murders, finding nothing that connected them to the killings, and she excluded evidence of two assaults in September 1990 that the defense said were similar.
Because the case rested on proving that one man killed all three women, both sides called experts on the behavior of serial offenders. Robert Keppel testified for the state that the three killings were the work of one person. He drew on HITS, a Washington database built from forms filled out by local police agencies, and the defense went over the same data with him for several hours before he testified.
John Douglas, the FBI behavioral expert, testified that the three killings shared the same signature and that they took place within 67 days in a small area. He acknowledged differences among the crimes but said they were small compared with the similarities. Russell Vorpagel, a retired FBI agent working as a private investigator, testified for the defense that the crimes were too different to be the work of one man, according to Great American Trials.
A second defense expert, Robert Gebo, had first thought the Pohlreich and Beethe killings were not connected. On cross-examination the prosecution brought out that he now believed one person had committed all three. In rebuttal the state showed that his change of view had come from his colleagues Keppel and Douglas, not from any information about Russell.
Earlier, investigators had consulted an expert in sexually motivated crime, who concluded that one man had committed the three murders and that he was probably a young white man, Welborn writes.
Russell did not testify.
After about 22 hours of deliberation, according to Great American Trials, the jury found Russell guilty on all three counts: first degree murder for Mary Ann Pohlreich and aggravated first degree murder for Carol Beethe and Andrea Levine. The Seattle Times gave the date of the verdict as October 25, 1991. In its year-end review, the paper described the trial as one that set a precedent for the region.
In late November 1991 Judge Aitken sentenced him to the mandatory terms: two sentences of life without the possibility of parole and one sentence of nearly 29 years. She called the killings cruel, denied a defense motion for a new trial and ordered him to pay $15,000 toward the women's burial costs. Russell declined to speak. The Seattle Times called him King County's first convicted serial killer.
Family members and friends of the three women spoke before the sentence was imposed. Mary Ann Pohlreich's family had wanted the death penalty. "In this case, justice would be the maximum punishment," her father said. A friend of hers said that Russell's going to prison was "absolutely no compensation" and that Russell was laughing at them. The mother of a former boyfriend of Andrea Levine said, "The three girls are gone, the families are destroyed."
Russell appealed, and the Washington Court of Appeals sent the case directly to the Washington Supreme Court. Russell was represented by Rita J. Griffith and Eric Broman of the Washington Appellate Defender Association, and the state by Jeffrey B. Baird and Rebecca J. Roe for the King County prosecutor, Norm Maleng. The court, sitting en banc, decided the case on October 13, 1994, in an opinion by Justice Madsen.
On the main issue, the court held that PCR testing at the HLA DQ alpha marker was generally accepted in the scientific community and that the Cetus kit results had been properly admitted. Worries about contamination or errors in a particular test, it said, went to how much weight the jury should give the results, and so did any self-interest of witnesses with ties to Cetus.
The court also held that the Washington Constitution gave no more protection than the federal Fifth Amendment against the use of physical evidence found as a result of a voluntary statement taken without Miranda warnings. The trial court had kept Russell's statement itself out of the state's case but admitted what it led to, and the Supreme Court agreed.
It found no abuse of discretion in the refusal to sever the Pohlreich count, pointing to the comparable strength of the evidence, the clear separation of the defenses and the signature evidence that made each killing admissible to prove identity in the others. It held that Keppel's HITS testimony did not involve novel science and needed no special hearing, that the experts' opinions that one man had committed all three murders were admissible, and that the defense had opened the door to the state's questions about whether the crimes were related. It upheld the denial of discovery of the police reports behind the HITS data, the exclusion of the other-suspect evidence, and the admission of other items found in Russell's possession, including a police scanner that the state offered to rebut a defense claim. It also found that a question one prosecutor asked a witness was "undeniably improper, inflammatory, and unprofessional," but held that the trial judge cured it by striking the question at once and telling the jury to disregard it.
The Seattle Times returned to the Russell case in December 2001, during the Green River investigation, in an article on signature analysis. James Neff, the paper's investigations editor, wrote that the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office had used signature evidence to win convictions, among them Russell's in 1991, and that Keppel had testified to Russell's signature, including that the women were left where they would quickly be found. A 1994 book about the case, Charmer, is listed in Great American Trials as further reading.
In December 1991 a University of Washington sociologist, George Bridges, told the Seattle Times that the killings would leave Eastside residents more fearful and more careful about security. "It troubles people, and it should trouble people," he said.
The Seattle Times reported in November 1991 that Russell planned to appeal. Under Washington law as the Seattle Times described it in 1991, aggravated first degree murder carried a mandatory sentence of life without parole or death.
The ages of the three women have been given differently. The Seattle Times consistently gave Mary Ann Pohlreich's age as 27 and Andrea Levine's as 24. Carol Beethe was 35 in the Seattle Times reports of 1990 and of the trial, and 36 in the paper's December 1991 year-end summary.
The verdict date differs. The Seattle Times gave October 25, 1991. Great American Trials dates the trial as ending on October 18, 1991, but does not give a verdict date.
The Beethe evidence was the weakest of the three, as the trial judge found. The Washington Supreme Court's summary says that hair fragments found at her home were not suitable for comparison and that no fingerprints were found there, while the Seattle Times reported that an FBI agent testified that hairs and fragments found there were consistent with Russell's. The defense pointed to evidence from an unidentified man found on her bedspread and to her former boyfriend.
Russell has never admitted the killings. He pleaded not guilty to all three counts and did not testify.
1977: Russell's record of convictions begins, at age 19, according to the Seattle Times. June 22, 1990: Mary Ann Pohlreich, 27, spends the evening at a Bellevue dance bar; Russell is there and borrows a friend's truck. June 23, 1990: Her body is found in Bellevue. August 8 to 9, 1990: Carol Marie Beethe, 35, is killed in her East Bellevue home and found the next morning. August 30 to 31, 1990: Andrea Levine, 24, is killed in her Kingsgate apartment. September 3, 1990: Levine's body is found. Eight days after Levine's death: Bellevue police arrest Russell on misdemeanor warrants and question him. November 1990: Detectives find the woman Russell gave Levine's ring to. January 1991: Russell is charged with the first degree murder of Mary Ann Pohlreich. February 1991: Detective Larry Petersen traces Levine's ring to a Key West pawnshop. March 1991: Russell is charged with the Beethe and Levine murders and pleads not guilty. September 1991: Trial opens in King County Superior Court before Judge Patricia Aitken. October 25, 1991: The jury finds him guilty on all three counts (Seattle Times). November 1991: He is sentenced to two terms of life without parole and a term of nearly 29 years. October 13, 1994: The Washington Supreme Court decides State v. Russell, holding PCR DNA evidence generally accepted. December 2001: The Seattle Times cites his conviction as an example of signature evidence in King County.