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resembling an old press camera from the 1950s, which I had never operated before. It was cumbersome and heavy and required a battery pack that was 12 inches high and 4 inches thick. A thick leather strap wrapped around my shoulder to help steady the camera while I focused the lens. Here was a machine definitely not made for dragging around a wooded hillside where I needed both hands for balance as I tried to step over ground cover that twisted around my ankles every time I moved. The whole point of a clumsy camera like this was its huge 110-mm negative that produced an image so fine that every minute detail of the evidence came out in perfect resolution. The camera produced prints so perfect that even when enlarged to almost poster size, they could be used in court before the most critical judge and jury.
    Before touching or moving the evidence, I took two rolls of film and had an officer run it over to the photo lab for immediate processing. I didn’t want to interfere with the evidence and later find the photos I had taken hadn’t developed well. It was fortunate that the first two rolls were tested. I had not locked the lens in the open position, and as a result, all the prints were blurred. Subsequently, Roger Dunn was sent to the scene to be my assistant photographer. He constantly reminded me of the proper camera settings prior to each photograph, and from then on, the prints turned out fine.
    So what began as a search for a few more bones belonging to a single skeleton had turned into a major bone find in which over 400 items of evidence and bones from the remains of three women were recovered. This was a first. The ESAR search techniques proved invaluable for us since we had never been faced with processing thistype of outdoor crime scene before. We learned the importance of thoroughness and of animal behavior, the latter of which helped us find remains along their travel paths. This search really was revolutionary and would be a model for crime scene processing forever.
    As I went up and down the hillside, photographing, measuring, and packaging evidence and bones, I was obsessed with what the killer had left behind. What signs of him were left for us to find? Was there anything here that could be linked to this murderer? Locard’s Exchange Principle—Edmund Locard’s theory—states that when a murderer comes in contact with things at the crime scene, a cross-transfer of evidence occurs. This meant that we should find something of the killer at the crime scene and, conversely, that when we found the killer, we should find something from the crime scene on him.
    The “fresh” physical and circumstantial evidence, such as eye-witnesses, lead bullets, bullet casings, and weapons, were noticeably absent from this scene. The area had been stripped of all these usual forensic clues. It was a scene of great mystery. In the history of King County homicide investigation, no murder case had a crime scene with so little evidence as this one.
    What would the evidence that we did find tell us about the psychology of the killer? What might be detected from this scene? At this stage, it was all guesswork, since no one had ever had to solve such a series of crimes. First of all, even though the crime scene was only one mile from a populated area, I was impressed by how secluded this location really was and how much advantage the location gave to anyone lying in wait. It was the perfect terrain for staging an ambush or scouting for enemies. If you parked a car just off the dirt road, you could see or hear anyone coming from any direction. I got the feeling that this was no accident—the killer chose this site so he could cover his tracks well before anyone’s arrival.
    The implication that the killer chose this location prior to committing the murders was also a frightening thought. We understood from this carefully selected multiple-body crime scene that each of his kills was premeditated and would share the same final