Bad Trick: The Hunt for Spokane's Serial Killer

by Jeanette White, Bill Morlin

Spokane's East Sprague Avenue is a long, cluttered and car-choked strip of flickering signs and boxy commercial buildings planted in cracked pavement where you can buy anything, including sex. The nastiest three-mile stretch of Sprague is call the Track. In the late 1990s it was a bountiful hunting ground for one of the nation's most vicious and prolific serial killers, Robert Lee Yates, Jr.

He shot 13 people to death. Or maybe 17, or maybe many more. Like Jack the Ripper and the Green River Killer, he preyed upon prostitutes. He returned to the Track again and again, luring desperate heroin- or crack-addicted women into his car. Some of the women who survived these encounters remember him as a "good trick" -- gentle and generous. But other women he used sexually, shot in the head and tossed like trash, though not always in that order.

For many years the killer hid behind his mask of the ordinary: husband, father of five, accomplished helicopter pilot and military man, middle-aged, middle-class, balding, polite. A homeowner in Spokane. He seemed so normal.

Then the mask began to slip. And the cops moved in. "Bad Trick: The Hunt for Spokane's Serial Killer" is the inside story of the flawed, frustrating pursuit of a man who has earned a place alongside Gacy and Dahmer, Bundy and Gein in our nation's pantheon of monsters.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2001