The Long Road Back

There is a moment investigators remember, even years later, with a particular kind of stillness. It was the spring of 2000, and detectives were standing in the backyard of a modest home in the Spokane Valley, shovels in hand, working carefully near a bedroom window. The man who lived there was a decorated military pilot, a father of five, someone neighbors described as quiet, dependable, the kind of man who waved from the driveway and kept his lawn tidy. And then the ground gave way to something that would rewrite everything anyone thought they knew about him — and about the years of death that had quietly accumulated on the streets of Spokane while the world looked elsewhere.

What they found beneath that window would confirm what the evidence had been whispering for months. A body. A young woman. One more name for a list that had been growing since the early 1990s, largely unnoticed by anyone who didn't live close to the margins.

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To understand what happened in Spokane, you have to understand who was dying there, and why it took so long for the world to pay attention.

Yolanda Sapp was twenty-six years old. She loved her children. She struggled, as many people do, with circumstances that had narrowed her options, and she worked the streets of east Spokane to survive. She was found in February of 1990 near the Spokane River, and the manner of her death — a single gunshot wound — bore a clinical precision that would become, in time, a recognizable signature. Nickie Lowe was twenty-two. Kathy Brisbois was thirty-five. Over the following decade, the names accumulated — Shannon Wilfong, Shawn Johnson, Laurel Wason, Melody Murfin, Sherry Palmer, Linda Maybin, Connie LaFontaine Ellis, Michelyn Derning, Jennifer Joseph, and others. Most were women who worked the streets. Most were poor. Most were, in the language of law enforcement at the time, considered high-risk — a classification that, then as now, sometimes functions as a quiet rationale for slower urgency.

It is worth pausing on that, because the women who died deserve more than a moment. They were daughters. Some were mothers. They had histories and habits and people who noticed when they didn't come home. Sherry Palmer had a sense of humor people remembered. Jennifer Joseph was eighteen years old — barely more than a girl — when she disappeared in 1997. Each of them had arrived at a particular corner of their lives where vulnerability had outpaced protection, and each of them encountered a man who understood exactly how to exploit that fact.

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Robert Lee Yates Jr. was born in 1952 and raised in a stable, churchgoing family in the Pacific Northwest. He joined the Army and became a helicopter pilot — a skill he honed across two decades of service that included assignments in Somalia and Haiti. He flew Black Hawks. He earned commendations. He returned home to a house in Spokane Valley with his wife, Linda, and their five children, and he worked as a National Guard pilot when he wasn't working other jobs to support the family. By every visible measure, he was a man of discipline and structure, someone who had built a life requiring trust — from the Army, from his community, from the passengers in his aircraft.

Prosecutors would later argue that the same discipline that made him a competent soldier made him, in another part of his life, extraordinarily careful. He allegedly selected victims who were unlikely to be quickly missed, he disposed of evidence methodically, and he allegedly continued killing for the better part of a decade without generating a single reliable witness account that pointed toward him specifically. That careful invisibility was, investigators would come to understand, very much by design.

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The bodies began appearing with enough regularity through the 1990s that Spokane law enforcement eventually recognized they were dealing with a serial offender. The victimology was consistent: women involved in street prostitution, deaths caused by gunshot wounds, bodies left in semi-rural areas along corridors that connected residential Spokane to the agricultural outskirts of the valley. A task force was assembled. Tips came in and were worked through. Names were generated and ruled out.

What investigators were working with, for much of the decade, was a puzzle with a frustrating number of missing pieces. The crime scenes were outdoors, which made trace evidence difficult to recover and preserve. The victims, by the nature of their lives, had contact with many men and could not themselves provide testimony. And the man investigators would eventually identify as responsible was not someone who appeared on the margins of society or who drew attention through erratic behavior. He lived in a house. He drove ordinary vehicles. He had a military ID and a family and a reason to be almost anywhere in the county at almost any time.

The task force continued working through the late 1990s. They cataloged every piece of physical evidence. They mapped the dump sites against local geography, looking for patterns in where bodies were left relative to roads, rail lines, population centers. And in the late 1990s, advances in DNA analysis began to change the calculus of the investigation in ways that older forensic methods simply could not.

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The turning point, documented in court records and subsequent reporting, arrived through a combination of DNA evidence and what investigators described as a painstaking geographic analysis. Biological material recovered from victims was submitted for DNA profiling, and a single male DNA profile appeared with a consistency that told investigators they were looking at one person responsible for multiple deaths. That profile, however, meant nothing without a comparison sample — without a name attached to a body attached to a life.

Investigators cast a wide net. They requested DNA from men who had been identified as persons of interest over the years of the investigation. Some cooperated voluntarily. Others were compelled through court orders. And in 1999, through a sequence of events that combined good detective work with the kind of fortunate circumstance that serious investigations sometimes require, Robert Yates came into sharper focus.

A woman who had survived an encounter with a man in Spokane — an encounter that had, she later told investigators, felt very wrong — was able to provide a description and details that helped narrow the field. At roughly the same time, investigators working the geographic analysis were noting that the distribution of body recovery sites aligned with areas that Yates, given his home address and his known routes, would have had natural reason to travel. These were not the smoking gun, not yet. But they were enough to move him to the center of the inquiry.

When investigators obtained a DNA sample from Yates and submitted it for comparison, the result was unambiguous. The biological material recovered from multiple victims matched Robert Lee Yates Jr.

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In April of 2000, Spokane law enforcement executed a search warrant at the Yates family home. What they were looking for, in part, was any physical evidence connecting Yates to the killings. What they found exceeded what many of them were prepared for.

Buried in the yard outside his bedroom window — an almost unfathomably brazen location, a few feet from the house where his children slept — were the remains of a young woman later identified as Melody Murfin, who had been missing since 1995. She had been there for five years. The family had gone about their lives. Yates had mowed the lawn. And beneath a thin layer of earth, Melody Murfin waited for someone to find her.

Robert Yates was taken into custody. He was fifty years old. He did not match whatever image the public might have assembled in their minds of a man who had killed more than a dozen women over the span of a decade. He was calm. He was measured. He looked, as one observer noted at the time, like someone's father — because he was.

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The legal proceedings that followed were lengthy and, in their own way, as methodical as the investigation that preceded them. Yates was charged in Washington State with multiple counts of first-degree aggravated murder. Prosecutors presented the DNA evidence, the recovery of Melody Murfin's remains from his property, and a constellation of additional forensic and circumstantial evidence linking him to the other victims.

In October of 2000, facing the weight of that evidence and the prospect of a jury trial, Robert Yates pleaded guilty to thirteen counts of aggravated first-degree murder in Spokane County. The plea agreement was structured to spare his family a prolonged trial and to provide at least some measure of closure — that complicated, partial word — to the families of the women he had killed. In exchange for his cooperation in identifying victim locations and providing investigators with additional information, the plea carried a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole on the Washington charges, along with a recommendation regarding a pending case in another state.

That other case involved murders that predated the Spokane killings. In 1975, a couple — Patrick and Susan Skelly — had been killed in Walla Walla County. Investigators examining Yates's background after his arrest developed evidence suggesting his involvement in those deaths as well. Additionally, prosecutors in Skagit County, Washington, examined additional cases. And separately, California authorities had been investigating the 1975 murders of a young woman named Stacy Hawn and a man named Patrick Oliver in San Diego County.

The California case proceeded to trial. Unlike the Spokane guilty pleas, the San Diego prosecution required a jury to hear the evidence — forensic evidence, testimony, records placing Yates in the area at the relevant time. In 2002, a California jury convicted Robert Yates of two counts of first-degree murder in those deaths. He was sentenced to death by the State of California.

That death sentence, and its subsequent legal journey, became one of the longer postscripts to the case. Yates pursued appeals through the California courts over the following years. In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted Yates's death sentence to life without the possibility of parole, a decision consistent with Governor Brown's broader policy approach to capital punishment cases in the state. The commutation did not alter Yates's confinement — he remained, and remains, incarcerated — but it changed the terminal legal status of the California sentence.

As of the time of this reporting, Robert Lee Yates Jr. is serving multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. All appeals related to the Washington guilty pleas have been exhausted. The California conviction has been affirmed. He will not leave prison.

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There are details in this case that investigators and journalists have returned to over the years, trying to understand how something of this scale could unfold across nearly a decade in a mid-sized American city without resolution. Part of the answer lies in resources — the Spokane task force operated with the tools and budgets available to it, and DNA technology in the early 1990s was not what it became by the end of the decade. Part of the answer lies in the fragmented information-sharing systems of the era, which made it difficult to connect cases across jurisdictions or years.

But part of the answer, and this is the part that law enforcement professionals and victim advocates have spoken about most directly in the years since, lies in the way society assigns urgency to missing and murdered women based on who they are and where they live. The women who died on Spokane's streets were not invisible to the people who loved them. They were invisible to the systems that might have moved faster, looked harder, asked louder questions about who was responsible.

Jennifer Joseph was eighteen when she was killed. Her mother, Verlena Stockard, became one of the most prominent voices calling on Spokane law enforcement to treat these cases with the same intensity applied to any other homicide investigation. Stockard's advocacy, and the advocacy of other family members, helped keep public pressure on the investigation during years when it might otherwise have receded from attention. That pressure mattered. The willingness of survivors and witnesses to speak to investigators, despite the risks that came with doing so, mattered. The eventual breakthroughs in DNA analysis mattered enormously. But so did the refusal of the families of victims to allow their daughters and sisters and mothers to become simply a number in a file.

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What lingers about the Yates case, beyond its scale and its duration, is the quality of the concealment. Not the concealment of bodies — though that was real enough, and grim enough — but the concealment of a self. The man who flew helicopters for the National Guard, who coached youth activities and attended church and raised children and maintained a home, was operating a parallel existence so completely severed from the visible one that the people closest to him had, by all accounts, no knowledge of it. His wife expressed shock. His children were devastated. His military colleagues described a man who functioned, in every professional interaction, within the norms expected of him.

Criminologists have noted, in the years since Yates's conviction, that this kind of compartmentalization is not unique to him — that the history of serial violence includes many individuals who maintained seemingly ordinary lives alongside extraordinary destruction. But knowing that does not make it less disorienting. We extend a particular kind of trust to the people in our communities who wear uniforms, who serve in the military, who appear to be doing the work of keeping things together. That trust is not wrong. But it is, as the Yates case reminds us, not infallible.

The women who died deserve to be remembered by name — Yolanda Sapp, Nickie Lowe, Kathy Brisbois, Shannon Wilfong, Shawn Johnson, Laurel Wason, Melody Murfin, Sherry Palmer, Linda Maybin, Connie LaFontaine Ellis, Michelyn Derning, Jennifer Joseph, and the others whose names are part of this record. They were not abstractions. They were not cautionary figures. They were people who existed fully before they encountered Robert Yates, and their lives had weight and meaning that no crime, and no criminal, can retroactively diminish.

Robert Yates is sixty-two years into a life that will end behind prison walls. The investigation that caught him is studied in law enforcement circles as an example of how forensic science, geographic analysis, and persistent detective work can overcome years of evasion. The families of his victims, many of whom have spoken publicly over the years, carry what families in these circumstances always carry — something complicated and permanent, something that does not resolve the way the legal case eventually did.

The ground outside that bedroom window in Spokane Valley holds its memory quietly now. The house is long since changed hands. But the story of what was found there, and why it took so long to find it, remains.