Robert Lee Yates junior was born in Oak Harbor, Washington, on May 27, 1952. He served nineteen years in the Army and National Guard, flew helicopters, was decorated, and deployed to Germany and to Somalia with the United Nations mission. He married, had five children, ran a prison bus route after leaving the service, and lived in a suburban house in Spokane. Neighbours described a quiet family man. That description is doing a lot of work in this case, because he was killing throughout.
He began in 1975 with Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage, a young couple shot in Walla Walla County. He killed Stacy Hawn in 1988 and Melody Murfin in 1996. From 1996 to 1998 he killed at least thirteen women in the Spokane area, almost all of them working the East Sprague corridor, shooting them in the head with a .25 calibre pistol, often after sex in his car, and leaving the bodies in fields, on golf course edges and in ditches. He buried Melody Murfin beside his own bedroom window. He also killed two women in Tacoma, Melinda Mercer in 1997 and Connie LaFontaine Ellis in 1998. Washington reporting called him the Spokane serial killer.
A Spokane task force worked the East Sprague killings from 1997. Yates had been stopped and spoken to more than once, and a white Corvette he had owned matched a witness description; he had sold it in a hurry. In 2000 DNA tied him to the series, and he was arrested in April.
In October 2000 he pleaded guilty in Spokane County to thirteen murders and one attempted murder, plus the 1975 Walla Walla double, in exchange for the state not seeking death. He agreed to show investigators where Melody Murfin was, which is how her family got her back. He was sentenced to 408 years. Pierce County prosecutors had not been party to the deal, and in 2002 they tried him for the Mercer and Ellis murders, convicted him, and obtained a death sentence in October of that year.
He sat under that sentence for sixteen years. In October 2018 the Washington Supreme Court struck down the state's death penalty as arbitrary and racially disproportionate in its application, and every capital sentence in the state was converted to life without release. He is held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.