Between 1975 and 1998, Robert Lee Yates brutally killed at least 16 people, mostly female sex workers, near Spokane, Washington.
Spokane County Sheriff’s OfficeRobert Lee Yates was arrested for murder.
To most, Robert Lee Yates Jr. seemed perfectly ordinary, even admirable. He was a helicopter pilot with more than two decades of service in the U.S. Army, a church-going father of five, and a husband living near Spokane, a city in Washington state. But behind his polished image was a horrifying secret: Yates was a serial killer.
Between 1975 and 1998, Yates murdered at least 16 people. Most of his victims were sex workers, whom Yates solicited and then shot to death.
When he told his family he was heading out on hunting trips, he was actually stalking human prey. In one of his most chilling crimes, he buried a victim near the bedroom window where he and his wife slept.
For more than two decades, Yates managed to kill without attracting serious suspicion. By the time he was finally arrested in 2000, he’d become one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history.
The Outwardly Normal Life Of Robert Lee Yates
YouTubeRobert Lee Yates and his wife Linda were a churchgoing couple raising five children.
Robert Lee Yates was born in 1952 and raised in Oak Harbor, Washington, on Whidbey Island. He came from a religious family and attended services regularly at a local Seventh-day Adventist church. On the surface, he was the picture of middle-class stability: polite, clean-cut, and quiet.
But there was a history of violence in his family. In 1945, before Yates was born, his grandmother had killed his grandfather with an axe.
Despite this bloody family history, Yates seemed to be on the straight and narrow. He graduated high school in 1970, married, divorced, and then married again. By 1977, he had joined the U.S. Army, where he became certified to fly helicopters and transport planes. He served tours in Germany, Haiti, and Somalia, and racked up over 20 years of military service, earning awards and the rank of Master Aviator.
He was also a devoted husband to his wife Linda, and together they raised five children. But even as he attended school functions and church picnics, Robert Lee Yates had begun living a double life.
YouTubeRobert Lee Yates during his time as a decorated Army helicopter pilot.
In 1975, the year before he married Linda, Yates started to kill.
Becoming The ‘Spokane Serial Killer’
The first known victims of Robert Lee Yates were 21-year-old Patrick Oliver and 22-year-old Susan Savage, two friends found shot to death near Walla Walla in July 1975. They’d been out enjoying a picnic together when Yates attacked them. According to the Los Angeles Times, he later said that he’d come across the couple while on a hunting trip, and decided to kill them.
Find A GraveSusan Savage and Patrick Oliver.
The double murder shocked locals, but for Yates, it was just the beginning.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he began to focus on sex workers, especially those struggling with addiction or poverty. Yates would solicit the women for sex, often offering them drugs or cash. Then he would pull a .25-caliber handgun, shoot them in the head or heart, and dump their bodies in isolated locations. Sometimes, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Robert Lee Yates would also have sex with their dead bodies.
Yates also sometimes placed plastic bags on his victims’ heads after he shot them. According to the Washington Post, this was possibly to minimize blood evidence. It earned Yates the nickname “The Grocery Bag Killer.”
The Many Victims Of Robert Lee Yates
Between 1975 and 1998, Robert Lee Yates killed at least 16 people, mostly women who were working as sex workers or who had problems with drugs. Among the victims were Jennifer Joseph, a 16-year-old runaway; 20-year-old Heather Hernandez, who had only recently arrived in Spokane; and 24-year-old Melinda Mercer, who, even after being shot in the head and suffocated with plastic bags, tried to chew her way free before succumbing to her injuries. After he killed 43-year-old Melody Murfin, Yates even buried her body under his own bedroom window.
All the while, Yates’ family had no idea. His wife later recalled that though he’d come home one night in 1996 with blood all over the back of his van, she had believed him when he told her he had hit a dog and taken it to a veterinarian. She also believed him when he said he was going on “hunting trips” even though he left the house wearing cologne.
Investigation DiscoveryThough Linda Yates noticed suspicious behavior on her husband’s part, she never suspected that he was a serial killer.
But in August 1998, Robert Lee Yates made his first mistake when he tried to kill a sex worker named Christine Smith. According to the Washington Post, Smith was aware that there was a serial killer in the area targeting sex workers, and she even asked Yates if he were “the psycho killer.” Yates reassured her that “he was not the killer because he had five kids and would not do that” and that “he was a helicopter pilot with the National Guard.”
Smith agreed to give Yates oral sex. But during their encounter, she suddenly felt a blow to her head. As Yates demanded his money back, Smith, disoriented but conscious, was able to escape from his car.
Later, investigators would find that Yates had shot Smith — and missed. Smith would also later be able to describe Yates to the police.
But it took time for investigators to tie Christine Smith to Robert Lee Yates. When Smith went to the hospital after the attack, doctors misdiagnosed the blow to her head as a knife attack. (It wasn’t until she underwent an X-ray in March 2000 that anyone noticed the bullet fragments).
Meanwhile, Robert Lee Yates killed at least one more victim — 35-year-old Connie Ellis-LaFontaine — before investigators started to catch up to him.
How A Button And A Corvette Led To An Arrest
In 1997, police began to look for a man driving a white Corvette, as witnesses had seen Johnson with a man in such a car shortly before her murder. That summer, the Seattle Times reports that a policeman pulled Yates over in an area known to be frequented by sex workers. Two months later, Yates was pulled over again, near where he’d dumped some of the women’s’ bodies.
Though he sold his Corvette, Yates was also pulled over in November 1998 with a known sex worker in his car — Yates claimed she was the daughter of a friend that he was driving home.
Meanwhile, police had put together a database of all the Corvette owners in Washington state and Idaho, as well as a list of people with Corvettes who’d been stopped by the police. This led to them to a Corvette — Yates’ Corvette — which he had sold. In the car, they found fibers which matched fibers on Johnson’s shoes, bloodstains, and a pearl button that matched one on Johnson’s blouse.
Police then tracked down the Corvette’s original owner. And in April 2000, they arrested Robert Lee Yates. Investigators had found Yates’ fingerprints on one of the plastic bags tied around a victims’ head, and Yates’ DNA matched semen found on one of his victims’ bodies.
He was charged with 13 counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder. To avoid the death penalty, Yates gave investigators information about his other victims. He also told them about Murfin, who he had buried in his backyard.
KREMRobert Lee Yates appears emotional during a court hearing for the murders of multiple women in Washington state.
“[The police] called me at work and said that they found a body in your yard,” his wife Linda later said. “And I said, ‘Oh my God.’ I turned ice cold.”
Most of his victims were women who had few people advocating for them, women living on the margins of society. But the father of Jennifer Joseph stated at Yates’ sentencing — during which the killer was sentenced to 408 years in prison — that he was proud that evidence from his daughter’s murder was able to stop Yates’ killing spree.
“She marked him for all the world to see with her blood and a pearl button in a white Corvette,” John Joseph stated “Yes, your honor, Jennifer… reached from her grave to snare her murderer.”
After reading about Robert Lee Yates, discover the gruesome story of Ted Bundy, one of the nation’s most infamous serial killers. Or, learn about Richard Ramirez, the California serial killer known as the “Night Stalker.”
