On October 13, 1998, a search and rescue dog working an unrelated search in Pierce County found a woman's body ten feet down an embankment in a greenbelt that people used to dump trash. She was Connie LaFontaine Ellis, thirty-five, and she had been dead about a month. Her head was wrapped in three plastic grocery bags. When word of the case reached Spokane that same day, a sheriff's detective there telephoned one of the Tacoma detectives and asked, as the call was later recited in court: "Will you just tell me one thing? Does she have plastic bags on her head?"
She did. Spokane had ten unsolved killings of women from the previous two years. All of them had been last seen along the East Sprague Street corridor, where women worked the street, all had been shot in the head with a small-caliber handgun, and five had two or three plastic bags tied over their heads. Tacoma had another. Melinda Mercer, twenty-four, had been found the previous December in a vacant lot used for dumping garbage, shot three times in the back of the head, with four grocery bags over her head. The two departments began trading files. The man who connected them had already spoken to Spokane police, and it would take another eighteen months to arrest him.
He had grown up far from either city. Yates was born on May 27, 1952, in Oak Harbor, on Whidbey Island, and raised in a middle-class family that attended the local Seventh-day Adventist church. There was violence in the family history: in 1945 his grandmother had killed his grandfather with an axe. He graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970. In 1975 the state Department of Corrections hired him as an officer at the penitentiary in Walla Walla, and in October 1977 he enlisted in the Army, which trained him to fly transport airplanes and helicopters. He married his second wife, Linda, in 1976; their five children, four daughters and a son, were born between 1974 and 1989. He left active duty in April 1996, when the Army was cutting its numbers, and was allowed full retirement although he was about eighteen months short of the customary twenty years; in April 1997 he joined the National Guard.
By 1998 he was forty-six, a helicopter pilot in the Washington Army National Guard with nearly two decades of Army flying behind him, in Germany and on United Nations missions in Somalia and Haiti. He held the Master Aviator badge, two Meritorious Service Medals, three Army Commendation Medals and a long list of other decorations. He had a house in Spokane and a job at Pantrol, a manufacturing company he had joined when the family moved to the city. In July 1998, after the body of Michelyn Derning was found a block north of the Pantrol plant, an officer took down his name, date of birth and address. On November 9, 1998, an officer watched him pick up a young woman named Jennifer Robinson on East Sprague. Yates told her to say he was a friend of her father's, and she did. The officer let them go. Yates dropped her off a few blocks away, so frightened, she testified later, that he no longer wanted what he had asked her for.
There were other chances. According to Bill Morlin and Jeanette White, the Spokesman-Review reporters who wrote the first book on the case, police who stopped Yates in September 1998 asked him for a DNA sample, and he refused, saying it was too much to ask of a family man. Earlier, while the task force was looking for a white Corvette that witnesses had connected to the disappearances of two of the first victims, an officer had pulled Yates over in his. The field report was read as saying Camaro, and no one tied that stop to the search until after the arrest.
The Corvette is what finally caught him. When police learned he had once owned one, a detective interviewed him late in 1999. Yates said he never picked up women on Sprague, owned no handguns, and had sold the car to a friend. In January 2000 police found it. Under the front passenger seat was a white mother-of-pearl button, the one missing from Jennifer Joseph's blouse, and bloodstains in the car matched her DNA. On April 18, 2000, Spokane police arrested Yates for her murder.
Jennifer Joseph was sixteen. After her parents divorced she dropped out of high school and moved to Tacoma, where she started using methamphetamine and was drawn into prostitution. She had been in Spokane about a month. Her body was found in a field on August 26, 1997, the same day Heather Hernandez, twenty, was found in an overgrown lot across town. Hernandez had come to the area only weeks before and had been arrested twice in that time. The first body in the series had been found more than a year earlier: Shannon Zielinski, thirty-eight, shot in the head and left in the woods near a school bus stop outside Mead in June 1996.
On the day after the arrest, a woman named Christine Smith called the police. In August 1998 she had reported being hit on the head during a sex act in the back of a black van with a raised bed inside it, by a man who told her he was a National Guard helicopter pilot with five children. Officers had found bullet fragments in her hair. She had not known she was shot. She recognized Yates from the newspaper. She is the only person known to have survived him, and her jacket, which she left behind in the van, was hanging in his closet.
The evidence came quickly after that. In the back of Yates's black Ford van, beneath carpet on a homemade wooden platform bed, investigators found blood that proved to be Connie Ellis's and Melody Murfin's, along with three bullet holes and a spent bullet carrying Smith's DNA. Records in the house showed he had owned at least three handguns, a .22 and two .25s. Ballistics tied one .25 to Mercer and to four Spokane victims, Shawn Johnson, Sunny Oster, Laurie Wason and Linda Maybin, and the other to Ellis, Murfin and Smith. A canvas coat in his laundry room carried a stain of Mercer's blood. His National Guard records put him at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, when both Mercer and Ellis were last seen. Semen recovered from Mercer and from six Spokane victims, Darla Scott, Johnson, Wason, Oster, Maybin and Derning, was matched to him.
The women had names before they were a series. Darla Scott, twenty-nine, was found on November 5, 1997, in a shallow grave near a golf course. Shawn Johnson, thirty-six, had told her roommate on October 17 that she was going out to make some money; her car turned up on East Sprague, and she was found on December 18, about a mile from Scott. Eight days later two more were found together in a gully. Laurie Wason, thirty-one, had been sober for six years, raising a twelve-year-old son, breeding and training Rottweilers and running an adult family home licensed by the state, when she relapsed into heroin. Shawn McClenahan, thirty-nine, had worked in a hospital laboratory until an arm injury, and the painkillers she took for it led her to heroin. She loved Winnie the Pooh, auctions and yard sales. In early December she had sent her sister, a Spokane teacher named Kathy Lloyd, a birthday card that said how hard life on the street was, and that she had been accepted into a methadone program. "She wasn't working on Sprague because she wanted to," Lloyd said.
Sunny Oster, forty-one, the mother of two, disappeared the day after she completed a drug treatment program; she was found in February 1998. Linda Maybin, thirty-four, whom people on Sprague called Barefoot Linda, was found on April 1, about a hundred yards from where Wason and McClenahan had been. Melody Murfin, forty-three, went missing on May 20, 1998, and was not found at all until Yates showed where she was. Michelyn Derning, forty-seven, was the daughter of a Marine Corps colonel and grew up moving from base to base. She finished high school in Virginia, studied at Palomar College in California and worked as an executive secretary in San Diego, married and had a son, and lost the marriage and custody of the boy to drugs. She came to Spokane in 1997 and worked as a ranch hand and a nursing assistant. She was found on July 7, 1998, nude and partly hidden under a hot tub cover, the .25-caliber casing still caught in her hair.
Connie Ellis was Chippewa, the eldest of five children, raised on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota. At seventeen she was a secretary for a tribal organization. She studied cosmetology and did hair in Spokane. Her first son died as a baby of sudden infant death syndrome; her second died in 1996 at eleven, of a heart condition, while waiting for a transplant. Her mother had died the year before. "She was devastated by that," her father, Emil LaFontaine, said, and when she tried treatment, he said, "it just didn't work." Of her three children, her daughter Angel survived her. Melinda Mercer had no criminal record and had worked as a waitress. According to the court, she turned to prostitution in November 1997 to pay for heroin, and she was last seen on December 6, leaving a Seattle tavern for Aurora Avenue.
Yates's own account, once he began giving one, reached back twenty-five years. On July 13, 1975, Patrick Oliver, twenty-one, and Susan Savage, twenty-two, college students, set off for an afternoon swim and a picnic near Walla Walla. They were found shot in the head the next day. That same year Yates had gone to work as a corrections officer at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. The killings went unsolved until he admitted them. So did the death of Stacy Hawn, twenty-three, last seen in Seattle on July 7, 1988, whose partial skeleton was found that December near Big Lake in Skagit County. Yates said he had picked her up in his van.
The deal that settled most of it was made in Spokane, and it was made over the objection of the one prosecutor who could not be bound by it. Yates's public defender, Richard Fasy, pressed Spokane County Prosecuting Attorney Steven Tucker for what he called a global resolution. Tucker came away from a June 2000 meeting of county prosecutors believing he had room to fold in the two Pierce County murders. Pierce County's prosecutor, John Ladenburg, testified that he never gave that permission, and a court later found that in a late-June phone call he had withdrawn any authority Tucker thought he had. On July 13 Tucker faxed Ladenburg a draft agreement that included the Pierce County cases anyway. On July 17 Ladenburg filed his own charges of aggravated murder, the kind that could carry death.
The Spokane agreement went ahead without them. On October 13, 2000, in exchange for the state not seeking death, Yates pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of first-degree murder, ten in Spokane County, two in Walla Walla County and one in Skagit County, and to the attempted murder of Christine Smith. His written plea did little more than acknowledge premeditated murders listed by name and date. The draft had required him to lead police to Melody Murfin and to help find one of the .25s. Using a map he drew, officers dug on the east side of his house, beneath his bedroom window, and on October 18 they recovered her body. He never helped find the gun. At the sentencing hearing, relatives of the dead spoke, and Yates apologized to the families. He was sentenced to 408 years.
One name was missing from the plea. The charge for Shawn McClenahan's murder was dismissed without prejudice, so that if Yates ever managed to undo his guilty pleas, Spokane could still try him for her and seek his death.
The Pierce County trial opened on August 12, 2002, and his own lawyer ended any question of who had done it. "Mr. Yates has waited patiently for almost two years for me to say to you that he killed Melinda Mercer and Connie LaFontaine Ellis," he told the jury. "He did." The trial was about whether the murders were aggravated. Mercer's autopsy supplied the hardest evidence of what that meant. Of the four bags over her head, the two inner ones held pooled blood and were torn in small places over her nostrils and upper lip, and they had been drawn partly into her mouth. The holes suggested she had been alive when the bags were tied and had bitten through them. The jury convicted him on September 19, 2002, and on October 3 he was sentenced to death.
The Washington Supreme Court affirmed in 2007, and in doing so threw out one of the three aggravating factors. Prosecutors had argued that he killed Mercer and Ellis to hide the misdemeanor of patronizing prostitutes, pointing to his fear of losing a full-time National Guard post. The court found the theory failed on the evidence, because the defense had shown that Yates paid other women for sex without killing them. It upheld the robbery factor. The women were stripped of the clothing where money was usually kept, no cash was found, and Yates and his wife had been having money trouble, calling in periodically about his Guard paychecks.
An execution date of September 19, 2008, was stayed. In 2013 his lawyers told a federal court that he suffered from a severe paraphilic disorder, a disorder "through no fault of his own," that predisposed him to kill. "I don't think Mr. Yates helps his cause by relying on the fact that he's a necrophiliac," said Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist. In 2014 Governor Jay Inslee announced he would sign no death warrants while in office, and the state supreme court upheld the Spokane sentence even though the judge had made an error at sentencing, reasoning that it had no practical effect on a man who had agreed to 408 years. In October 2018 the court struck down Washington's death penalty altogether, and Yates's sentence became life without release.
He is held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the prison where he first went to work in 1975, and in November 2025 a Spokane television station was still revisiting the case in a documentary series. After his arrest, Spokane detectives said they had not tied him to six other killings of women in Spokane and Kitsap counties between 1990 and 1996, and investigators went through his military records to trace where he had been stationed. None of those cases has been charged to him.
Of the sixteen people he is known to have killed, Robert Yates stands convicted of fifteen. Shawn McClenahan, found in a gully beside Laurie Wason the day after Christmas in 1997, eight days after she was last seen, is the one he was never convicted of killing.