Robert Yates

Frank enjoying fish and chips at the Old Brickhouse in St. Cloud A case of 2 serial killers killing prostitutes in the same city-- solved
 
In Spokane, Washington, three women living at a motel were murdered weeks apart.  On February 22, 1990, Yolanda Sapp was murdered.  Yolanda was a 26-year-old mother of two daughters, was engaged to be married, and a prostitute.  Her daughters described her as a loving mother, and they didn’t know she was a prostitute until they read about her murder in the paper.  Yolanda was shot 3 times with a .22 caliber gun and dumped naked along the Spokane River.  Yolanda Sapp Two months later, Vicki Lowe, 34, was the 2nd victim shot 3 times by a .22 caliber bullet.  She had also lived in the Spokane Street Motel (the same motel as Yolanda) and was also a prostitute.  Vicki’s naked body was dumped under the Green Street Bridge along the Spokane River.
 
Kathy Brisbois, 38, was the 3rd victim.  Kathy was described as a vibrant young woman who, as a result of drug addiction, ended up on the streets.  She was prostitute who had a case worker who was trying to get her into a drug rehabilitation program.  Cathy also lived at the Spokane Street Motel.  She was shot by a low caliber handgun also.  All three of the bodies were dropped along the Spokane River. Kathy Brisbois The twist in this case would simply not be believable if it wasn’t true.  Shannon Zalinski, a prostitute, called the police from jail to report she knew the killer.  But when they interviewed Shannon, she only provided vague information.  Shannon knew the previous 3 victims and had lived at the same motel.  Shannon was then found murdered and was believed to be the 4th victim.  There was a slight difference.  Shannon had been shot with a .25 and she was the first victim to have a bag over her head.  It was later discovered, believe it or not, Shannon was killed by a different Spokane serial killer than the first 3 victims.
 
On August 26, 1997, Heather Hernandez, 20, a drifter, and Jennifer Joseph, 16, a runaway, were found dead.  By December, 5 more victims were discovered.  All were shot in the head with handguns and found dumped by roadsides with plastic grocery bags over their heads.  None had purses or wallets.  The break came when a witness came forth later and said she saw Jennifer Joseph get into a white corvette on East Sprague Avenue.  The police began pulling over and searching white corvettes.  The killer was stopped, but that particular officer had misread the memo and was looking for a white Camaro instead.  He released Robert Yates.  The corvette was eventually tracked down and a button from Jennifer Joseph’s shirt and her blood was found in Robert Yates’ car.  Yates committed 11 additional murders after Jennifer Joseph.  Yates confessed to 13 murders, but denied the first three identified in this blog.  It was discovered Yates was in Germany when the first 3 murders were committed, indicating to investigators that another killer had been killing prostitutes in Spokane at the same time. Jennifer Joseph So who killed them?  Re-examination of the DNA evidence of the first 3 victims found that Kathy Brisboe had scratched the killer in a fight for her life, so they had the killer’s DNA.  Three more years go by, until a match is made in 2010.  Douglas Perry had a 2nd Degree Assault in the 1970’s, and arrested for making a pipe bomb in the 1980’s.  He was arrested in 1989 for soliciting a prostitute.  Perry was arrested in 1988 for being a felon in possession of a firearm, with 49 firearms and 22,000 rounds of ammunition in his possession at the time.   Douglas Perry was living with his adult female partner, a prostitute, at the time of the murders.  His partner had children but they had been removed from her care by child protection.  Douglas Perry killed the three women in part because he was jealous of their ability to have children.  Their bodies were left either naked or with their breasts and genitals exposed.  Another twist is that at the time of the arrest, Perry was no longer a man.  In 1999, Perry flew to Bangkok, Thailand, underwent gender reassignment surgery, and changed his name from Donald Perry to Donna Perry. “Donna” argued that she was not a killer, and the murders had to be blamed on Doug (her former identity).  Donna Perry was sentenced to 3 life sentences in prison without parole. Douglas Perry Robert Lee Yates Jr. (born May 27, 1952) is an American serial killer from Spokane, Washington. From 1996 to 1998, Yates is known to have murdered at least 13 women, all of whom were sex workers working on East Sprague Avenue, in Spokane. Yates also confessed to 2 murders committed in Walla Walla in 1975 and a 1988 murder committed in Skagit County. In 2002, Yates was convicted of killing two women in Pierce County. He currently is on death row at the Washington State Penitentiary.

Early Life
Yates grew up in Oak Harbor, Washington in a middle-class family. He graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970, and in 1975, he was hired by the Washington State Department of Corrections to work as a correction officer at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. In October, 1977, Yates enlisted in the United States Army, in which he became certified to fly civilian transport airplanes and helicopters. Yates was stationed in various countries outside the continental United States, including Germany and later Somalia and Haiti during the United Nations peacekeeping missions of the 1990s. Yates left the Army in April, 1996.
Robert Yates Murders
The murders Robert Yates committed between 1996 and 1998 in Spokane all involved prostitutes working along Spokane's East Sprague Avenue. The victims were initially solicited for prostitution by Yates, who would have sex with them (often in his 1979 Ford van), sometimes do drugs with them, then kill them and dump their bodies in rural locations. All of his victims died of gunshot wounds to the head; 8 of the murders were committed with a Raven .25-caliber handgun, and one attempted murder was linked to the same model of handgun. Autopsies of two of the victims indicated that the killer was a marksman aiming for the heart. One particularly bizarre detail of Yates' murders involved the case of Melody Murfin, whose body was buried just outside the bedroom window of Yates' family home.
 
On August 1, 1998, Yates picked up prostitute Christine Smith, who managed to escape after being shot, assaulted and robbed. On September 19, 1998, Yates was asked to give a DNA sample to Spokane police after being stopped; he refused, stating that it was too extreme of a request for a "family man."
 
Oddly enough, without his confession, Yates’ first 2 murders would have never been solved.  This was an execution.  Here is their story:
Susan Savage Patrick Oliver On a summer afternoon, on July 13, 1975, Patrick Oliver, 21, an honor-roll pre-med student who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Susan Savage, 22, a recent graduate of Washington State University, were at a popular swimming hole on Mill Creek, a dozen miles southeast of Walla Walla. Walla Walla authorities had exhausted their investigation into the slayings according to Larry Siegel, the deputy prosecuting attorney who had the lead in the case.  "We had two or three good suspects, but they ended up going nowhere," he said.  Speculation about what happened had run from the mundane - a robbery gone bad, perhaps - to the extreme.  "At one point, we considered it might have been a professional hit . . . or maybe, somehow, was gang related," Siegel said.  Even Interpol was called because Oliver had recently returned from Europe, but to no avail.  "We frankly ran out of ideas as to why anybody would want to kill them."
 
Robert Lee Yates, age 23, came upon a pair of local college students picnicking beneath a stand of poplar trees and he shot them both dead.  Patrick Oliver is the only man Yates is believed to have killed.  According to sheriff's investigators and prosecutors, even now, nobody is quite sure why.  The bodies were dragged, perhaps as far as 30 yards, across the river and secreted beneath a tire and some brush. The woman was partially clothed. There was no indication, however, that Patrick and Susan had been anything but friends.  "But I don't think it was planned," the sheriff said. "I think he ran into them up there and there was some sort of confrontation, and he shot them.”  Both victims had gunshot wounds in their arms, indicating they had tried to deflect the shots. Both died from being shot in the head.  "I remember thinking that it almost seemed like an execution," Siegel recalled.
 
When Robert Yates was arrested for killing a dozen prostitutes in Spokane, the sheriff opened an investigation and found that Yates had bought a box of .357 caliber shells from a local store 10 days before the killings.  "They matched the caliber and brand of bullets from our crime," the sheriff said. His detectives learned from friends and family that Yates regularly went to the Mill Creek area for target practice.  Yates left the Walla Walla area, where his wife's family lived, shortly after the killings and sold the handgun in Oak Harbor in 1976. Investigators were able to track that handgun after his confession and use it as evidence.

Convictions and Appeals
Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000, for the murder of Jennifer Joseph. In 2000, he was charged with 13 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder. As part of a plea bargain in which Yates confessed to the murders to avoid the death penalty, he was sentenced to 408 years in prison.
 
In 2001 Yates was charged in Pierce County with the murders of two additional women. The prosecution sought the death penalty for the deaths of Melinda L. Mercer in 1997 and Connie Ellis in 1998, which were thought to be linked to the killings in Spokane County. On September 19, 2002, Yates was convicted of those murders and subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection on October 3, 2002.
 
The 2002 death sentence was appealed on grounds that Yates believed his 2000 plea bargain to be "all-encompassing," and that a life sentence for 13 murders and a death sentence for two constituted "disproportionate, freakish, wanton and random" application of the death penalty. The arguments were rejected in 2007 by the Washington Supreme Court. A September 19, 2008 execution date was stayed by Chief Justice Gerry L. Alexander pending additional appeals.
 
In 2013, Yates's attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition, stating that Yates is mentally ill and "through no fault of his own ... suffers from a severe paraphilic disorder" that predisposed him to commit murder. "I don't think Mr. Yates helps his cause by relying on the fact that he's a necrophiliac (someone who has sex with dead bodies)” said Pierce County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist. In July 2015, the Washington Supreme Court once again rejected an effort by Yates to overturn his conviction and death sentence. Yates remains on death row at the Washington State Penitentiary. 

Victims
Name / Date of discovery

Patrick Oliver / July 13, 1975
Susan Savage / July 13, 1975
Stacy E. Hawn / December 28, 1988
Shannon Zielinski / June 14, 1996
Patricia Barnes / August 25, 1996
Heather Hernandez / August 26, 1997
Jennifer Joseph / August 26, 1997
Darla Scott / November 5, 1997
Melinda Mercer / December 7, 1997
Shawn Johnson / December 18, 1997
Linda M. Maybin / December 26, 1997
Shawn A. McClenahan / December 26, 1997
Laurie Wason / December 26, 1997
Sunny Oster / February 8, 1998
Linda Daveys / April 1, 1998
Melody Murfin / May 12, 1998
Michelyn Derning / July 7, 1998
Connie LaFontaine Ellis / October 13, 1998

Every one of the above people had people who cared about them.  Shawn Ann McClenahan’s sister wrote:  Shawn was born May 30, 1958. My sister attended schools in Spokane, Washington. She attended Spokane Community College and worked very hard to get her degree. She then went on to work in area hospitals. She did well until she was diagnosed with carpal tunnel and could no longer work.  Eventually drugs took over her life and she fell into prostitution, to get the money for heroin. The month she died she had sent me a birthday card expressing her love for myself and my family. She said to tell the family she had just been accepted into a methadone program. Shawn had been living at a relative's house and was babysitting their children. She was last seen driving away from their home with two other women, in, I believe a van (not hers). She called the next morning, Dec. 18, 1997 to say that she would be late, but that she would be there. That was the last anyone heard from her until she was found Dec. 26, 1997. 
 
And there is at least 1 more uncharged victim:  In August 1998, Christine Smith remembers a man about 50, 5 ft. 10 in. tall, blue-eyed, picking her up on East Sprague at about 1 a.m. "You're not the psycho killer, are you?" she asked as she climbed in. As they drove to a secluded spot, he told her he was a helicopter pilot for the National Guard. He was not a murderer, he told her, because he had five kids and "wouldn't do that." He was calm and--unlike many of her customers--sober. He paid Smith $40 for oral sex. Then suddenly she felt a blow to her head. At first she did not know what hit her. As blood gushed from the wound, she almost lost consciousness. The man asked for her money, but Smith managed to scramble out of the vehicle. At the hospital, the wound, mistakenly deemed a knife cut, was sewn up with three stitches. It was not until early in 2000, when Smith was in a car accident that required a head X ray, that she discovered shrapnel: the 1998 attack had in fact been a shooting, and she had been too shaken at the time to realize it. Smith's police report of the incident would remain buried in a police file until 2000.  
This song reminds me of the wonderful sounds of Motown from the past.  On a nice summer night, Brenda and I were walking in Pierz, and numerous families were sitting in their yards roasting marshmallows over a fire.  A young girl was holding a stick with flaming marshmallow singing the Alicia Keys tune, “This girl is on fire…”
​Quotes:  (More Mitch Hedburg—but getting to the end)
 
I saw on HBO they were advertising this boxing match, it said "It's a fight to the finish"... that's as good a place as any to end.
 
I think Big Foot is blurry, that's the problem.
 
 This one commercial said "Forget everything you know about slip covers," so I did. And what a load that was off my mind. Then they tried to sell me slip covers, but I didn't know what they were talking about. 
 
I opened up a yogurt, it said "Please try again" because they were having a contest I was unaware of. At first, I thought I might have opened the yogurt wrong.  And then I considered maybe it’s a moment of inspiration from our friends at Yoplait.  “Don’t give up Mitch.  Please try again.”


Thanks for listening,

​Frank
A meal at Travail Andrea and Kaycee Deal The Bash Brothers, Austin and Brandon Dickman, were part of the attack that lead Pierz to a come from behind extra inning victory, 5-4, in playoffs over Royalton. Isaac Otte had a 10 pitch at bat with 2 out in the last inning, before driving in 2 runs to tie the game in this hard fought battle between two excellent teams. Pierz has since beat Albany 2-0 and Foley 2-0 in playoffs.