Free Lust Killer by Ann Rule Page A

there were not enough similarities between the two cases to allow law officers to connect them. The girls were both young and slender, and attractive-—but one apparently had vanished from the streets of Portland, and the other from the freeway south of Salem. At any given time, there are always a handful of women who have disappeared in a metropolitan area. Most have chosen to leave for their own reasons, and eventually return or at least contact their families.
    Some do not. Stephanie Vilcko, sixteen, had left her Portland-area home to go swimming in July 1968—and never returned. Stephanie's disappearance came to a tragic denouement on March 18, 1969. A Forest Grove high-school teacher discovered her skeletonized body along the banks of Gales Creek five miles northwest of Forest Grove. By the time she was found, the ravages of time and weather had obliterated tissue that might have told forensic pathologists how she had died. Wind, ice, and water had also carried away any shred of physical evidence left by a killer—if, indeed, there was a killer.
    Stephanie, Linda, and Jan were only three among a dozen or more such cases. There had been headlines when the women first vanished, and then column-long articles on back pages of area papers, and finally, small items from time to time. In police departments, the files on the missing and dead women were growing thicker. Cases which detectives wryly refer to as "losers" are always thicker and more complex than the "winners"; they may slip from the public's mind-—but they are never, never forgotten by the men who work through one frustrating false lead after another.
    Thursday, March 27, 1969, was a typical example of spring in Salem, Oregon; the daffodils around the courthouse were in bloom, along with the earliest rhododendrons and azaleas, but they were alternately buffeted by rainy winds and warmed by a pale sun washing down through the cool air.
    Karen Sprinker, nineteen years old and a freshman at Oregon State University in Corvallis, was enjoying a short vacation between terms and had come home to Salem to visit her parents. Her father was a prominent veterinarian in Salem, and Karen had elected to follow him into the field of medicine, although she planned to treat human patients. She was carrying a heavy premed schedule at Oregon State, and earning top grades.
    Karen was beautiful, but not in a sultry way; she embodied the sweetness and warmth of an innocent young woman. In an age when chastity was becoming old-fashioned, Karen Sprinker was a virgin, confident in her own principles. She had thick, almost black hair that fell below her shoulders and tumbled across her high forehead in waving bangs. Her eyes were dark brown, and her smile was wide and trusting.
    She had never had a reason not to trust.
    Karen had graduated from Sacred Heart Academy in Salem in the class of 1968. She was class salutatorian, a member of the National Honor Society, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, winner of the Salem Elks' Leadership Award, and a member of the Marion County Youth Council. With her intelligence and concern for people, she was a natural as a future doctor. All things being equal, she would be practicing by 1979, a full-fledged M.D. before she was thirty.
    Shortly before noon on March 27, Karen Sprinker headed for the Meier and Frank Department Store in Salem. She was to meet her mother for lunch in the store's restaurant, and then the two of them were going to shop for spring clothes that Karen could take back to school.
    Meier and Frank's is the biggest department store in Salem, located in the downtown area. It is a block and a half east of what were the Salem Police Department's offices in 1969; it is a block and a half north of the Marion County sheriff's offices in the basement of the courthouse. The store complex contains its own many-tiered inside parking garage, a nicety for shoppers, who can avoid walking through the rain that is a definite possibility from