Blood Lust: Portrait of a Serial Sex Killer (14 page)

Chapter 7

By the fourth week of August, reports about
twenty-three-year-old Lisa Maria Mock were making the rounds
through the Portland Police Bureau's Missing Persons Unit. Lisa, a
known prostitute and heroin addict, had been missing for more than
a month, and Portland detectives were having little success
developing any leads to her whereabouts.

According to Lisa's father, James Holden, a
California resident, Lisa was born in Berkeley and first became
involved with drugs at age sixteen. She began living a transient
lifestyle and eventually ended up in Oregon. She had been living in
the Portland suburb of Gresham with her husband, William, also a
heroin addict, whom she married on August 9, 1986.

"She had a boyfriend when she met William,"
said Holden. "But when he came into the picture, he just swept her
right off her feet."

Lisa prostituted herself to support her and
William's habits, sometimes hooking in Gresham, sometimes in
Portland. When prostituting in Portland, Lisa often worked out of
the eighty-room Continental Motel on East Burnside Street near
downtown. Sandwiched between a restaurant on one side and a topless
tavern on the other, rooms at the Continental typically went for
$19.95 a night or $99 a week. The Continental was an unsavory place
well known to the police, located in one of the sleaziest areas of
town and sometimes referred to by those in law enforcement as the
"Homicide Inn" and "Motel Hell" because of its unsurpassed
reputation for turning up murder victims.

For example, two months earlier, on June
twenty-first, Portland detectives had been summoned there to
investigate the grisly murder of Candace Marie Straub, twenty-six,
whose badly burned body was found inside Room 214. Straub had been
bound and gagged by two men who subsequently tortured and strangled
her in the bathtub following an attempted rape. Before leaving, the
attackers doused Straub's body with lighter fluid and set it and
the room on fire.

A year earlier, on May 17, 1986, a motel maid
found the partially clad body of thirty-four-year-old Barbara Ann
Maher in the bathtub of Room 116. Maher had been stabbed in the
chest. Additionally, a man and a woman were found shot to death at
the motel in the early 1980s, and there have been numerous other
shootings and knife attacks in and around the establishment over
the years. One of the latest incidents there involved the murders
of yet another man and woman, and when police arrived they found a
nine-month-old baby boy crawling on the floor in his mother's
blood. It was little wonder that investigators were now concerned
over the mysterious disappearance of Lisa Mock, who was last seen
leaving the Continental on July 23 with three men. Lisa's father
told police that he became concerned when she failed to show up in
court on August 20 for an inheritance hearing that involved $25,000
left to Lisa by a relative who had passed away.

Based on a description provided by Lisa's
father, Portland missing persons detectives issued an all-points
bulletin that described her as five feet six inches tall, 120 to
130 pounds, sandy blond hair, and good straight teeth due to having
been fitted with braces when she was younger. There were several
tattoos on her body, including a black Harley Davidson emblem
across her lower back with the word BITCH under it, a colorful
unicorn on one of her shoulder blades, and some homemade initials
done in black on her biceps.

"She was a very pretty girl, except for those
tattoos," said Holden. "I could never stand to look at them."

When she was last seen, Lisa was wearing blue
jeans, a multicolored belt with two ring-type buckles, a black
slingshot-type blouse, and black Reebok tennis shoes. She also had
a pink bandanna in her hair and was wearing a silver ring with a
pearl.

Holden explained to police that he
"kidnapped" Lisa on one occasion in an attempt to get her off
drugs, and brought her back to California. After three days she
left, however, but enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program in San
Francisco, where she obtained a job as a secretary for a company
that makes burglar alarms.

"She was straight," said Holden. "She had a
job as a temporary secretary. Eventually she got her own apartment
and a car. Everything sounded okay. She was back to being our
little girl."

But then Lisa and a girlfriend began moving
around, and they eventually went to Portland. William followed her
there, and within a month after he joined her she was back on
heroin.

"She never told me, because she knew how I
felt," said Holden. "But she told her grandmother. She also told
her grandmother that she was working as a prostitute. That's when
the trouble started. She called me and said she was trying to get
her life together again. She said she was going to call me back.
That was on July 21. Two days later she walked out of the
Continental at two A.M. to get a pack of cigarettes. She never came
back, and no one has heard a thing from her since."

While trying to find out what happened to
Lisa Mock, Portland investigators also began looking into the
mysterious disappearance of Maureen Ann Hodges, known as "Mo" on
the street, during that same time frame. Although the priority of
both cases were considered equal in the eyes of the police, there
was no reason at this point for detectives to suspect that they
might be linked. Neither woman had turned up dead yet, and there
was little at this point to suggest that foul play was somehow
involved. They had simply mysteriously disappeared, and there's no
crime in that. People vanish all the time for one reason for
another, often of their own doing.

As they probed into Mo's background,
Portland's missing persons investigators learned that she had met a
man named Tim Wilson,* twenty-seven, in a Portland bar the previous
May. This was some two months after her last contact with Tracie
Baxter. Although the police didn't know about Tracie's encounter
with the man in the blue pickup yet, and wouldn't for another two
months, Tracie had by that time become pregnant and was off the
streets, taking steps to turn her life around. As best as the
police could determine, Mo was still turning tricks to support her
habit when she met Tim. Tim, at that time, had no idea that Mo was
working as a whore, and the two of them really seemed to hit it
off. After only a couple of dates, Mo moved into Tim's downtown
Portland hotel room and became known to Tim's friends and
acquaintances as his woman.

The Fairfield Hotel, located on Southwest
Stark Street near 11th Avenue, was a dive by most people's
standards. It served as a temporary resting place for a variety of
derelicts, drug addicts, hookers, and the like, but it also had a
few permanent residents like Tim and Mo who were down on their
luck, people who would stay there for a few weeks to a few months
because of the cheap rent. Although Mo would have liked something
nicer, the Fairfield did provide shelter and it soon became home to
her, even if for only a couple of months. It also didn't churn out
dead bodies at the rate that the Continental did. Mo, even at
twenty-six and despite the rough and tough outer shell that her
lifestyle had created, was still an attractive woman. Her nose had
been broken earlier in life and, although it had been left slightly
crooked, it hadn't severely marred her looks. At five feet eight
inches and 125 pounds, her figure was trim. Her flowing brown hair
and hazel eyes rounded out her appearance. The tattoos on both arms
and her chest were a turnoff, but fortunately, they weren't
normally visible unless she had her clothes off.

Mo didn't dress like most other hookers,
which is perhaps why Tim didn't catch on to or otherwise question
her activities at first. Instead of wearing garish or tawdry
outfits, she usually wore plain clothes, like blouses with fabric
designs and Levi's 501 jeans or slacks. Sometimes she wore a white
sweater with birds and trees on it, but she never wore dresses on
her dates. Likewise she did not wear pantyhose, but normally wore
socks with white tennis shoes or black boots. She was almost always
home by 4:30 in the afternoon, which Tim liked. It also helped to
conceal her true self from him. But one day he came home
unexpectedly and discovered her secret. Unnoticed, he quietly stood
by the bathroom door which Mo had left ajar and watched her inject
a syringe full of heroin into her stomach. When she was finished,
he learned that what he had seen was only one of three or four
daily fixes, each consisting of a $20 "paper" or "bag" of smack. It
explained all the boils he had seen on her stomach, for which Mo
had not given him an explanation.

When he asked how she obtained the money to
support her habit, Mo had tearfully confessed that she worked as a
prostitute and that she often shoplifted valuable items from
several of the more classy department stores in Portland, such as
I. Magnin, Nordstrom and Meier & Frank. Tim took the startling
revelation hard at first, and considered leaving her. But when he
had time to consider his feelings for Maureen, he realized that he
truly cared for her and decided that he would try to help her. In
an effort to get her off the streets and put an end to her
shoplifting sprees, Tim soon began supporting Mo's habit with his
own money. At one point it had looked as if she might even beat her
addiction, and those who knew and cared for her held on hope that
she was finally well on her way to conquering her dependency. She
managed to gradually work her habit down to $40 a day, half of what
it had been for years, and she felt that she could cut it in half
again, given a few more weeks. Then came the silly argument on July
8, a Wednesday, and that changed everything.

Mo came home with a package of new clothes
that she had picked out specially for Tim. It was her way of
showing him that she appreciated all the concern he had shown her
and all the help, emotional and financial, he had provided. But Tim
didn't see things that way. He did not want her buying him things,
particularly with money that he knew came from her prostitution
activities. To him it was
her
money, it was
dirty
,
and he didn't want anything to do with it.

Angry, Mo walked out about noon that day and
took a bus from downtown out to 82nd Avenue, never to return or to
see Tim again. But, although she didn't know it, Tim saw her one
more time, later that afternoon, from the window of a passing
Tri-Met bus he was on, one he had taken from downtown to go out
looking for her. She was working 82nd Avenue and Holgate Boulevard
as the bus passed by, the last time he ever saw her. Although Mo
was a very tough, street-smart woman, Tim knew that she was at her
most vulnerable when she was strung out and in need of a fix, as
she was then. He got off at the next corner to try to talk her into
coming home, but he was too late. She had already climbed into the
light-blue Nissan pickup and was gone. Forever.

Also during that fourth week in August, while
investigators in Portland were looking into the unexplained
disappearances of Lisa and Mo, detectives at the Clackamas County
Sheriff's Office in Oregon City were busy mulling over reports
about a sixteen-year-old girl, Reatha Marie Gyles, who had been
missing from her Estacada, Oregon home since July 21 and hadn't
been heard from since.

Deputy John Johannessen had been dispatched
to the Gyles residence at 440 S.W. Maple in Estacada on Wednesday,
July twenty-ninth, and arrived there at 4:22 P.M. Reatha's mother,
Wanda Marie Gyles, a deaf-mute, motioned for him to come inside, at
which time Reatha's boyfriend, Leonard Todd Thornton, seventeen,
known as "Moose" on the streets, and Reatha's sister, Wanda "Lovey"
Gyles, fourteen, interpreted.

Using sign language, Wanda Gyles explained
that she wanted to report Reatha missing because she had not seen
her for a week. Leonard said he last saw Reatha, who was also known
as "Leslie" on the streets, on foot near 82nd Avenue and Division
Street in Portland, and that she was supposedly on her way to see a
friend who lived near that location.

"She never showed up, but Reatha was always
going off somewhere," interjected Reatha's mother with sign
language. "We didn't worry for a while."

Wanda Gyles explained that Reatha dropped out
of Marshall High School in April, just prior to the end of her
sophomore year, and began hanging out along 82nd Avenue. Lovey told
Johannessen that Reatha knew many of the prostitutes and street
people who hung out on 82nd Avenue.

"82nd Avenue was her life," said Lovey. "She
never used drugs. She just liked the money and the clothes. I was
shocked when I found out what she was doing, but she is my sister
and I love her."

Reatha, Johannessen was told, had been
arrested for prostitution twice in 1987, the most recent arrest on
July 10, less than two weeks before she disappeared.

"She was a good child until she got around
her friends," said Reatha's mother. "She was so sweet. Then she hit
the streets, and it all changed. Her friends pressured her to make
quick money. No one wanted to wait two weeks for a paycheck. She
started turning some tricks for fast cash. I wanted her off the
streets. I told her to get a job. She wouldn't listen. She wanted
to party."

Leonard said he met Reatha two years earlier,
when Reatha was fourteen, after helping her mother carry her
groceries from a supermarket in Southeast Portland.

"I met Reatha and liked her right off," said
Leonard. "I had her over for dinner and then we started going out.
She was sort of naive, but good and honest."

After they dated for a while, Reatha began
alternating living with her mother and with Leonard, who lived on
Portland's southeast side. Eventually she began attending Marshall
High School in Portland because she was spending most of her time
at Leonard's. Although she was not known to experiment with drugs,
Reatha began having problems at school and received straight Fs for
much of the 1986-87 school year.