Robert Lee Yates Jr.
(born May 27, 1952) is an American
serial killer from Spokane, Washington.
From 1975 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 two 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 and sentenced to death
but it was commuted to life without parole after Washington State outlawed the death penalty in 2018. He is
currently serving life in prison at the Washington
State Penitentiary.
Early life
Yates grew up in Oak
Harbor, Washington in a middle-class family that attended a local Seventh-day Adventist church. He
graduated from Oak Harbor High School
in 1970. 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. He earned several military
awards and medals during his eighteen and a half year military career,
including three Army Achievement Medals,
three Army Commendation Medals, two Armed Forces Expeditionary Medals, and
three Meritorious Service Medals.
Yates left the Army
in April 1996, apparently a year and a half short of being eligible for his
full retirement benefits and pension. At this time the military was reducing
its numbers so he got his full retirement despite being short of the customary
20 years served.
Murders
The murders Yates committed between 1988 and 1998 in Spokane all involved sex workers who
worked along Spokane's East Sprague
Avenue. The victims were initially solicited for sex work 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. Eight 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, while his wife was
sleeping in the room.
On August 1, 1998, Yates picked up sex worker 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".
Convictions and
appeals
Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000, for the murder of Jennifer Joseph. After his arrest a search warrant was executed
on a 1977 white Corvette that he had
previously owned. A white Corvette had been identified as the vehicle that one
of the victims had last been seen in. Coincidentally, Yates had been pulled
over in this vehicle while the Task Force
was searching for it, but the field interview report was misread as saying "Camaro" not "Corvette", thus the incident was
not realized until after Yates had been arrested.
After searching the Corvette,
police discovered blood that they linked to Jennifer Joseph and DNA from Yates that they then tied to 12 other
victims. In 2000 he was charged with 13
counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder in
Spokane County Superior Court. 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 in
federal district court, 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. The still-pending motion is regarded as a "long shot" by most observers. "I don't think Mr. Yates helps his cause by relying on the fact
that he's a necrophiliac," said Pierce
County Prosecutor Mark Lindquist.
Yates remains incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary.
His case was further complicated by Washington
Governor Jay Inslee's 2013 declaration that he would not sign death
warrants for anyone on death row while he is in office. Inslee cited the high
cost of the appeals process, the randomness with which death sentences are
sought, and a lack of evidence that the penalty serves as a deterrent to other
criminals.
In July 2015, the Washington
Supreme Court once again rejected an effort by Yates to overturn his conviction
and death sentence. After the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in
2018 that the death penalty violated the state constitution, Yates's death
sentence, as well as that of Washington's other death row inmates, was commuted
to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Victims
Name Date of discovery
Patrick Allen Oliver
July 13, 1975
Susan Patricia Savage
July 13, 1975
Stacy Elizabeth Hawn
December 28, 1988
Shannon Rene
Zielinski June 14, 1996
Patricia J. Barnes
August 25, 1996
Heather Marie
Hernandez August 26, 1997
Jennifer Ann Joseph
August 26, 1997
Darla S. Scott November 5, 1997
Melinda Lee Mercer
December 7, 1997
Shawn Johnson December 18, 1997
Shawn Ann McClenahan
December 26, 1997
Laurie Page Wason
December 26, 1997
Sunny Gail Oster February 8, 1998
Linda Gayle Daveys
April 1, 1998
Linda Marie Maybin
April 1, 1998[20]
Melody Ann Murfin
May 12, 1998
Michelyn Joann
Derning-Hoyt July 7, 1998
Connie LaFontaine
Ellis October 13, 1998
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