Her Final Confession

Chapter Forty-Six

Josie stared at him. “I’m sorry. The who?”

“The Soul Mate Strangler. He was a serial killer operating in Seattle in the early nineties.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t, I’m sorry. What’s this have to do with Gretchen?”

He held up a hand as if to tell her to wait. Lifting the mug to his lips, he gulped down the rest of the beer and signaled the waitress for another. “Well, I guess he wasn’t real famous outside of Seattle. He was never caught. In 1994, he broke into Gretchen and Billy’s house, killed Billy and raped Gretchen.”

“My God,” Josie said, unable to hide her shock. She hadn’t been sure what to expect from Starkey, whose strange paranoia had seemed particularly bizarre, but it wasn’t this.

“Yeah. She was the only one of his victims to survive.”

Now, Josie thought more seriously about the drink she had declined. “Please,” she said, using her straw to stir the ice cubes in the bottom of her glass, “tell me more.”

Starkey looked around as though someone might overhear them, but the other patrons were engaged in conversation or in the soccer game playing on the flat screen televisions that peppered the place. “Like I said, he was active in Seattle in the early nineties. Actually, from May to May—1993 to 1994. Had the whole city in an uproar. People were freaked out. With good reason.”

“Why was he called the Soul Mate Strangler?” Josie asked.

The waitress arrived with another beer, and Starkey slugged it down, nearly finishing it. He set the glass on the edge of the table and swiped a meaty hand over his beard. “Well the strangled part you can guess—he choked all his victims. But the press dubbed him the Soul Mate Strangler because he only ever attacked couples.”

A cold feeling crept up Josie’s spine. “How many?”

“Six couples.”

Josie felt punch drunk even though all she had had was soda. “Jesus. Gretchen and Billy were the last?”

“No. There was one more couple in 2004.”

“That’s a big gap,” Josie noted.

He nodded. “Ten years. It was a shock, ’cause honestly, everyone thought he was dead.”

“No chance it was a copycat?”

“Nah, see, he liked to take things from one scene and leave it at the next one. He took Billy’s knife when he left the scene at their house. Ten years later it turned up at the Neal crime scene—that was the name of the couple, Justin and Amy Neal—plus, everything else was the same. He disabled the power, got in through a window, tied up both victims with rope he brought with him, assaulted the female, and then strangled both.”

Josie couldn’t help but think of that damn Wawa cup making its way from Gretchen’s living room to the Wilkinses’ kitchen. And yet, Omar had been shot and Joel Wilkins had been bludgeoned—and during the walk-through with Robyn Wilkins, she hadn’t noticed anything missing.

Then there was the photo of the boy running through tall grass—with the date 2004 printed on the back.

“What did he take from the Neal scene?” Josie asked abruptly, leaning into the table. A waitress shimmied past with a tray full of drinks, and Josie longed for the burn of Wild Turkey sliding down her throat. But she kept her focus on Starkey.

“Nothing. That’s why we think he was done. Some people think he stopped. Gretchen said he was probably late thirties when he attacked her—although she never got a real good look at his face—so in 2004 he would have been in his late forties. A serial killer pushing fifty?”

“You think he aged out?” Josie said. “He knew he was getting older, less able to control a scene with two people, and so he somehow managed to stop himself?”

“That’s a theory that’s been kicked around, yeah. Some FBI shrinks say his testosterone levels would decrease as he got older, and his compulsion to assault and kill would lessen with time. Nobody knows. It’s all theories. Obviously, he was able to stop for ten years. Some people think he’s really dead this time. That, or he went to prison for something else. Although, if he had gone to prison, his DNA would be on file, right? He left DNA at every damn scene, and after twenty-five years, there’s still no match.”

Josie took out her phone and pulled up the photo from 2004 and showed it to Starkey. He took the phone out of her hands and held it at arm’s length, looking down his nose and squinting. Then he said, “Hold on.” A pair of reading glasses appeared from the inside of his jacket, and he perched them on the bridge of his nose so he could study the photo.

“That was found pinned to James Omar’s body after he was shot in Gretchen’s driveway.”

He handed the photo back to her. “Never saw the kid before.”

“Did the Neals have children?”

Starkey laughed so hard, his eyes watered. He put his glasses away and drank what was left of his beer. Seconds later, the waitress replaced the empty glass with a full one. He held it in one hand but didn’t drink it yet. “Are you telling me that you think the Seattle Soul Mate Strangler was in your city?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” Josie said. “I’m asking you if his last-known victims had children. There was something missing from Gretchen’s house. A couple of days later, we caught a double homicide. A couple. The husband was bludgeoned but the wife was strangled—and raped. A travel mug with Gretchen’s prints on it was found at the scene.”

Starkey sipped his beer this time, regarding her over its rim with skeptical eyes. “The Neals didn’t have children.”

Maybe Josie was crazy thinking a serial killer from twenty-five years ago who had killed people in a city 3,000 miles away was now killing people in Denton—using methods he hadn’t used before—but there were a lot of strange coincidences that she couldn’t otherwise account for.

“How did Gretchen get away?” she asked. “You said she was the only person to ever survive him.”

Starkey set his beer back down and nodded. His face sagged, and a bone-deep sadness shrouded him. “It was Billy. Initially, he told her to run, and she did. The killer shot Billy in the leg. Gretchen—she hesitated, and the killer caught up with her.”

Josie’s heart paused for two beats and then kicked back into overdrive, fluttering wildly. Her heart ached for her friend, who had been a young wife, a woman in love, trying to make a new life after her mother had spent years torturing her and her sister.

“The killer,” Starkey continued, “he would have the women tie up the men and then he’d make the men lie down on the floor, facedown, and he’d put plates and glasses on their backs.”

“Plates and glasses?” Josie asked.

“Yeah, like dinner plates, drinkware. Anything glass that would make a shitload of noise if you tried to roll over and knock it onto the floor. They actually didn’t know what the hell the stuff was for at the earlier scenes. It wasn’t until Gretchen survived and told them what went down that they figured out that’s what he’d done at the earlier scenes.”

“So he tells the husband if they move and try to get help and make noise—”

“That he’ll kill their wives.”

“Jesus.”

She thought of the plastic plates, cups, and bowls in Gretchen’s kitchen, and the soda burned her stomach. How horrific had the experience been that twenty-five years later, Gretchen couldn’t have glass dinnerware in her own home?

“We think Billy was going to bleed out, and that he knew it, because he didn’t stay put. Gretchen said eventually she heard the plates crash to the floor. The killer was done with her by then. As soon as she heard the racket, she knew he was going to kill her. She knew he was going to kill them both anyway. He hesitated for only a second, got off her long enough to go to the bedroom doorway, and she hit him over the head with a lamp. She kicked him into the hallway, closed and locked the door, and climbed out the window. By the time she got help, the killer was gone, and Billy was dead. From the condition of the living room, the police think they had some kind of confrontation, a struggle, and Billy lost. The killer shot him again in the chest at close range. It was the only time he ever used a gun. They thought he had one—that he was using it to control the scenes—but they didn’t know until he got Gretchen and Billy. Gretchen gave the police a lot of good information, but it never led anywhere.”

It wasn’t lost on Josie that Starkey kept saying “they” and “them” and “the police.” She said, “You’re ATF. How do you know so much about the case?”

“Well, we kept a close eye on it. It was personal, you know?”

“Of course.”

“But the main reason is I did a lot of my own digging. You see, Gretchen was always convinced that the killer was someone in law enforcement.”

“ATF or Seattle PD?”

“We didn’t know.”

“What made her think that?”

“I told you Billy was undercover. His undercover identity was Benji Stone. He was in deep with the Devil’s Blade for nearly two years when he was killed. Almost patched in. You know what that is?”

Josie nodded.

“Everyone called him Benji Stone. His driver’s license said Benjamin Stone. The lease to his house was in the name Benjamin Stone. Utilities, vehicle, everything. Even Gretchen had a driver’s license for Gretchen Stone. The only people who ever called him Billy were us guys.”

“In the ATF,” Josie clarified.

Starkey nodded. “Yeah, and in the Seattle PD. We coordinated with them on an illegal arms bust not long before Billy went undercover. Wasn’t related to any biker gang. Anyway, he got hurt, had to go to the hospital. Was there a few days. So some of the Seattle guys knew him from that bust.” He picked up his beer again. Josie wondered if she should have ordered an appetizer or something. Then again, this conversation was killing her appetite.

“So everyone called him Benji,” Josie said. “Go on.”

“When the killer heard Billy knock the plates off his back, Gretchen said he muttered under his breath. He said, ‘Goddammit, Billy.’”

“So the killer knew his real name,” Josie said. “Is there any chance he heard Gretchen call him that?”

“That’s what I thought. Truth is we’ll never know for sure, but then what happened afterward really convinced me.”