Robert Lee Yates Jr. pleaded guilty in October 2000 to 13 murders committed over more than two decades. Ten of the victims were women killed in and around Spokane, Washington, between 1996 and 1998. Two were college students shot at a swimming spot near Walla Walla in 1975, and one was a 23-year-old woman from Seattle whose remains were found in Skagit County in 1988. He also admitted shooting a woman in his van in 1998 who lived. In 2002 a Pierce County jury convicted him of two more murders, of women found near Tacoma, and sentenced him to death.
Yates did not fit the picture people had of the man police were hunting. He was a retired Army chief warrant officer, a National Guard helicopter pilot with service in Somalia and Haiti, married for more than 25 years and the father of five. He had once worked as a guard at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla. The Spokane prosecutor spared him the death penalty in exchange for his pleas and for directions to a body buried beside his house. The Pierce County prosecutor refused to be bound by that deal, and the fight over it shaped the case for the next 18 years.
Yates was born on May 27, 1952, in Anacortes, Washington, according to a 2000 Seattle Times profile, the son of Anna Mae and Robert Lee Yates Sr. He grew up in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, where his father worked at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station and his mother's family had held land since 1916. His mother had two daughters from an earlier marriage.
The family belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist church. His parents were baptized into it in 1965, and the Whidbey News-Times later reported that father and son helped build the local Adventist church. The boy did not eat pork, sang in the choir, hunted deer and pitched for the baseball team. An uncle, Ernest Youderian, told the Seattle Times that he never heard him swear. "You'd think you were talking to a professor," he said. A friend, Gary Berner, said the worst thing he knew about him was that he would not play football in his senior year. Classmates remembered him as quiet and unremarkable and a good pitcher; Jim Waller, a former teammate, said in 2008 that he had seemed perfectly normal. Yates graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970.
He enrolled at Walla Walla College, a Seventh-day Adventist school, in October 1972 as a pre-medical student and left in 1974 without a degree. He earned an associate degree from Skagit Valley Community College in May 1975. He married Shirley Nylander in August 1972; they divorced in August 1974. He married Linda Brewer in July 1974, before the first divorce was final, and the couple held a second ceremony in Oak Harbor in July 1976. Their first child, a daughter, was born in December 1974. His mother died of cancer in October 1976.
In 1975 Yates was living in Walla Walla, where his wife's family lived. He worked for about four months as a guard at the Washington State Penitentiary, where his father-in-law had worked for 18 years, and later as a hospital janitor and a movie theater usher.
Patrick Oliver was 21, an honor-roll pre-medical student who had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. Susan Savage was 22 and had recently graduated from Washington State University. Investigators later said there was no sign they were anything but friends. On July 13, 1975, they were picnicking under poplar trees at a popular swimming hole on Mill Creek, about a dozen miles southeast of Walla Walla, when both were shot in the head. Their bodies were hidden nearby.
The case went unsolved for 25 years. Detectives looked at robbery, a professional killing and gang involvement, and contacted Interpol because Oliver had just come back from Europe. "We frankly ran out of ideas as to why anybody would want to kill them," the deputy prosecutor Larry Siegel told the Seattle Times in 2000. The county kept the evidence and detectives returned to the file over the years.
After Yates's arrest, investigators found that ten days before the killings he had bought a box of .357-caliber shells of the caliber and brand used. Friends and family told them he often went to the Mill Creek area for target practice. He sold the handgun in Oak Harbor in 1976, and detectives traced it through four owners into evidence. Walla Walla County Sheriff Mike Humphries said he did not think the killings were planned and suggested there had been a confrontation. Arthur Eggers, the former prosecutor, described them as Yates "cutting his teeth." Patrick Oliver is the only man Yates is known to have killed.
Yates enlisted in the Army in 1977, at 25. He finished warrant officer flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 1980 and served in Germany from 1981 to 1984 and again from 1988 to 1991, including at Goeppingen. He was then posted to Fort Rucker and to Fort Drum, New York, from 1991 to 1995. He deployed to Somalia in late 1992 and early 1993 during Operation Restore Hope, and to Haiti in 1994. Over 18 years he received 12 medals, two ribbons and a badge, among them meritorious service and humanitarian service medals. In Somalia, the Seattle Times reported, he shot a wild pig from a helicopter, an incident that nearly led to a court-martial. He retired in March 1996 as a chief warrant officer 4. The couple had five children in all.
Stacy Elizabeth Hawn was 23 when she disappeared from Seattle in July 1988. Her skeletal remains were found south of Big Lake in Skagit County on December 28, 1988. Her death was not linked to anyone until Yates told investigators in 2000 that he had killed her while he was on military leave. Her case was one of three killings that had never been connected to him before he admitted them.
After he left the Army, Yates moved his family from Alabama to Spokane and rented a house on the South Hill. He had no job at first. He was hired at Pantrol, a company that made circuit boards, and worked there until he was laid off in September 1998. He joined the Washington Army National Guard in April 1997 and flew helicopters, training once a month at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma. In 1998 the family bought a house about a mile from the rental. In December 1998 he went to work at Kaiser Aluminum, where a co-worker described him as meticulous. Neighbors noticed mostly that he washed his cars in front of the house.
Search warrants unsealed in May 2000 recorded a story Linda Yates told detectives about the fall of 1996. Her husband had left the house around 11 p.m. to drive their oldest daughter to work and came home at 6:30 a.m. in coveralls with blood in his black van. He told her a dog had run into the van and that he had taken the dog and its owner to a veterinarian. He cleaned the van and took out a foam cushion from its fold-down bed. "Police apparently are not so sure," the Spokesman-Review wrote. No victim tied to him was found that fall.
East Sprague Avenue, east of downtown Spokane, was the city's main area for street prostitution. Between 1996 and 1998 women who worked there began to disappear and were later found shot, most of them in rural places outside the city. The Washington Supreme Court later summarized what the Spokane cases had in common: all the women were last seen on the East Sprague corridor, had drug histories and were shot in the head with small-caliber handguns, and five were found with plastic bags tied over their heads.
The families wanted the women known for more than that. "How they died was not how they lived," Patrick McClenahan, a brother of one of them, told the Seattle Times in 2000. What follows is drawn from the profiles the Seattle Times and the Spokesman-Review published after the arrest.
Shannon Zielinski was 38 or 39; the papers differ. She was born in Ione, Washington, had worked as a waitress in Los Angeles and had lived in Tacoma before moving to Spokane. A drug counselor, Lynn Everson, remembered her as strong and determined, a woman with a great sense of humor who disliked wearing shoes and who had once talked a pregnant woman into getting treatment. She had been missing since late May 1996 when her body was found that June, the first in the series. She left a daughter, her parents, three brothers and two sisters.
Jennifer Joseph was 16. She was born in Hampton, Virginia, the daughter of an Army sergeant, and grew up in Denmark, South Korea, Massachusetts and the Tacoma area. She was allergic to pets, so she collected stuffed animals, a roomful of them. She played classical piano and sang in the school choir and did well in school until her parents divorced, when her grades slipped and she left. On August 16, 1997, a friend saw her get into a white Corvette near Sprague and Thor. Her body was found on August 26 near Forker Road, in rural Spokane County.
Heather Hernandez was 20. She had come to Spokane from the Southwest in July 1997. Little else was known about her, but Everson, who met her, found her smart, funny and level-headed. She was found in an overgrown lot on August 26, 1997, the same day as Jennifer Joseph, about 15 miles away.
Darla Sue Scott was 29. She loved her family, especially her young daughter, who lived with Scott's mother in Wenatchee, and she volunteered twice a week at a homeless shelter. Around 1995, while pregnant, she sought methadone treatment through the Spokane County Health District, and her life steadied for a time. "She had a really good heart," a friend said at a memorial service. Her body was found buried near the Hangman Valley Golf Course on November 5, 1997.
Shawn Johnson was 36. She was working as a grocery clerk, was proud of the job and was fighting her addiction. Her mother, Margaret Dettman, wrote to the Spokesman-Review that her daughter "was trying to get help when the serial killer took her choices away." She was last seen in October 1997, around the time of her son's wedding in Deer Park, and was found on December 18, 1997.
Laurie Ann Wason was 31, married, with a 12-year-old son. She had run a state-licensed adult family home and bred and trained Rottweilers; her picture appeared in Rottweiler Quarterly with her dog, Lucky. "She was a nice person and she really liked the dogs," said her friend Eckart Salquist. Her sister, Darcy Acevedo, last saw her on October 30, 1997, walking along East Sprague in a black trench coat; Laurie promised to call that evening and never did. She was found on December 26, 1997.
Shawn McClenahan was 39. She was born in Walla Walla and graduated from high school there. She earned a phlebotomist's certificate at Spokane Community College and worked in hospital laboratories at Deaconess and Sacred Heart medical centers until an arm injury led to painkillers and then heroin. She loved Winnie the Pooh, auctions and yard sales and was known for helping neighbors, and she had a son. In December 1997 she wrote to her sister, Kathy Lloyd, a Spokane teacher, asking forgiveness and saying she was entering a methadone program. "Tell them all I love them, and I'm still alive," she wrote. She was found the day after Christmas, near Laurie Wason, in a field in east Spokane.
Sunny Gale Oster was 41, the mother of two sons, and grew up in Auburn. Her mother remembered a girl who held a garter snake and dove into water before she knew how to swim. She had cared for her stepmother through cancer. She came to Spokane for drug treatment and, by the families' accounts, was killed while she was waiting to begin it. Her son, then 19, had a tattoo made with her name. "The pain is almost unbearable," said her sister Audrey. Her body was found in February 1998.
Linda Marie Maybin was 34, the mother of two, and was known on Sprague as "Barefoot Linda" because she went without shoes in summer. She was afraid of the killer. A friend, Brian Brown, last saw her after they had talked about the murders; she told him not to go anywhere because she was coming back. Her corrections officer had written that she seemed sincere about changing her life. Her remains were found on April 1, 1998, in the same field as those of Shawn McClenahan and Laurie Wason. Her mother thanked the Spokane authorities for their care but said, "Closure is not a concept I find attainable."
Melody Murfin was 43 and the mother of daughters. The Spokesman-Review reported in 2000 that she had been missing since May 1998. She was not found until Yates showed detectives where she was.
Michelyn Derning was 47 and was called Mike. The daughter of a Marine Corps colonel, she grew up in Southern California, loved snorkeling, surfing and scuba diving, and camped on long trips to Baja California in her 20s and 30s. She worked as an executive secretary in San Diego, married in 1985 and had a son, and lost the marriage and custody of the boy as drugs took hold. She came to Spokane in 1997 to be near an old friend and worked as a ranch hand and an in-home nursing assistant; she wanted to become a nurse. "If I don't go up there, I'm going to die," her parents recalled her saying. Her body was found in northeast Spokane on July 7, 1998, near the Pantrol plant where Yates worked. She is buried in Oceanside, California.
Two more women were found on the west side of the state. Melinda Mercer was 24 and had lived in Seattle for four years, working at restaurants in the Wallingford neighborhood. Friends remembered her red hair and green eyes and her love of tacos and movies. "She was the most loving girl, the most innocent victim ever," her mother said. According to the Washington Supreme Court, she had no criminal record and turned to prostitution in November 1997 to pay for a heroin addiction. She was last seen on the night of December 6, 1997, leaving a Seattle tavern. The next morning she was found in a vacant lot in South Tacoma used as a dump site. She had been shot three times in the head, and four plastic grocery bags were over her head. National Guard records placed Yates at Fort Lewis at the time.
Connie Lynn LaFontaine Ellis was 35. She grew up in North Dakota, on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, and moved to Spokane as a teenager to be near her mother and stepfather. She studied cosmetology and was known for being beautifully groomed. She lost one son to sudden infant death syndrome and another, in 1996, to a heart condition. Her addiction took her from Spokane to Tacoma. She tried treatment, which, her father, Emil LaFontaine, said, "just didn't work." She re-entered a methadone program on September 8, 1998, and was last seen at the clinic on September 17. Shortly before she died she had planned to move to the Spokane Indian Reservation and enroll in a training program. "Connie was a loving person. I miss my girl," her father said. On October 13, 1998, a search and rescue dog found her body in a greenbelt in Pierce County used for dumping trash. Three plastic bags were over her head.
When the news reached Spokane that day, a sheriff's detective there telephoned a Tacoma detective. The court later quoted his question: "Will you just tell me one thing? Does she have plastic bags on her head?" She did, and the two departments began working together.
Early on August 1, 1998, a little after 1 a.m., a 32-year-old woman who worked on the street got into a van near Division and Short in Spokane. The driver paid her 40 dollars for a sex act, the Spokesman-Review reported from court papers. She asked him whether he was "the psycho killer," and he said he was not; he told her he was a National Guard helicopter pilot with five children. During the encounter he struck her on the head. She escaped, leaving her purse behind, and ran to a nearby rehabilitation center. Sacred Heart Medical Center treated what looked like a cut behind her left ear.
No one realized she had been shot. More than a year later she was in a car accident in Seattle, and in March 2000 doctors at the University of Washington found bullet fragments in her head. After Yates's arrest she saw his picture in the newspaper and went to the police. She could not positively identify him in a photo lineup but said he looked a lot like the man in the van. Her jacket was later found in his closet, and the court found that the same .25-caliber pistol used on her had killed Connie Ellis and Melody Murfin. She was the only known person to survive an attack by him, and his guilty plea to attempted first-degree murder covered what was done to her.
After Jennifer Joseph and Heather Hernandez were found on the same day in August 1997, sheriff's deputies were told to watch for white Corvettes near East Sprague. On September 24, 1997, an officer stopped Yates in his white 1977 Corvette near Sprague and Ralph, a few blocks from where Joseph was last seen. He was not cited. On November 28, 1997, a state trooper stopped him for speeding on Highway 195 in the same car.
The Spokane police and the sheriff's office joined forces late in 1997 and asked the FBI for help. The Spokesman-Review dated the formal start of the task force to December 22, 1997; the Seattle Times put it in November 1997, and an Associated Press report in 2001 said December 1998. The task force built a database of Corvette stops, a list of every Corvette registered in Washington and Idaho and lists of Corvette club members. Over the life of the case it received more than 6,000 tips.
Yates sold the Corvette in May 1998 to a woman he knew. Later that year the police had two more contacts with him. In July 1998, after Michelyn Derning was found near the Pantrol plant, an officer took down his name, birth date and address, according to the Washington Supreme Court. In November 1998 an officer saw him pick up a young woman on East Sprague in a Honda Civic; the Supreme Court gives the date as November 9 and the Spokesman-Review's police timeline as November 10. Yates told her to say he was a friend of her father's, and she did. She testified later that he seemed very nervous and dropped her off a few blocks away. Two days after that, he was charged with misdemeanor assault after a confrontation with his adult daughter; the charge was to be dismissed if he committed no further crimes.
On March 7, 1999, a man reported seeing a white man pick up a woman on the street and gave a license plate number that belonged to Yates. On September 15, 1999, detectives interviewed him about the 1997 Corvette stop. He was not a suspect. According to the statement of facts filed after his arrest, he "started sweating profusely." He said he did not pick up women on Sprague, did not own handguns and had sold the Corvette to a friend.
In January 2000 detectives found the Corvette, which its new owner kept stored with her sister, and with permission removed carpet fibers for the state crime lab. On February 28, 2000, the task force held a public meeting, said it had DNA that would link the killer to 10 victims and asked for help. On April 5 the lab reported that the Corvette's carpet fibers closely matched fibers from Jennifer Joseph's case, including a towel found with her body. On April 10 investigators seized the car. Under the front passenger seat was a white mother-of-pearl button that matched the one missing from her blouse, and bloodstains in the car matched her DNA. Detectives put Yates under round-the-clock surveillance when he came back from two weeks of National Guard training at Fort Lewis.
On April 18, 2000, Yates was stopped and arrested on his way to work at the Kaiser Aluminum plant in Mead, and his house was searched. The next day he was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder in Jennifer Joseph's death, with bail set at 1.5 million dollars. He declined to speak to detectives. By April 20, according to the Seattle Times, initial tests had matched his DNA to DNA found on or near eight of the women, and the sheriff was calling him the leading suspect in at least 12 and as many as 18 deaths.
The evidence grew over the next weeks. A May 2000 search of a black Ford van he owned found blood on the carpet, padding and wooden bed platform that was later identified as that of Connie Ellis and Melody Murfin, along with three bullet holes and a spent bullet. Records showed he had owned at least three handguns, a .22 and two .25s. The Washington Supreme Court later summarized the ballistics: one .25-caliber pistol killed Melinda Mercer and four Spokane women, and a second killed Connie Ellis and Melody Murfin and wounded the woman who survived. DNA evidence recovered from Mercer and from six Spokane victims was matched to him, hairs found on Mercer and Linda Maybin were tied to him, and a canvas coat in his laundry room carried Mercer's blood.
On May 18, 2000, Spokane prosecutors charged him with seven more counts of first-degree murder and with attempted first-degree murder and first-degree robbery for the attack in the van, the robbery charge arising from the purse she left behind. Shannon Zielinski's and Heather Hernandez's deaths were not charged then; the sheriff's spokesman said the best evidence was in other cases. The charges included the two Pierce County deaths, which Spokane wanted to try. Yates's public defender, Richard Fasy, said he would oppose that.
After the arrest his wife and children left their Spokane home. The task force later helped Linda Yates and the children move to the Walla Walla area, and in December 2001 she sent the officers a Christmas card thanking them for their support of her family.
Fasy pressed the Spokane County prosecutor, Steven Tucker, for what he called a global resolution that would settle every case at once. At a mid-June 2000 meeting of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, Tucker came away believing he had some consent to handle the Pierce County murders. The Pierce County prosecutor, John Ladenburg, testified that he never gave it. Around June 28 Ladenburg told Tucker by phone that he could not handle the Pierce cases if he planned to bargain away the death penalty. On July 13 Tucker faxed him a draft agreement that included the Pierce murders anyway, and on July 16 asked for written permission to file them in Spokane. On July 17, 2000, Ladenburg told Tucker that Pierce County would try its own cases, and that day his office charged Yates with the aggravated first-degree murders of Melinda Mercer and Connie Ellis.
The Spokane agreement went ahead without them. Tucker said he had agonized for months over whether to seek death, because the evidence of aggravating circumstances in the Spokane cases was weak. The deal had a condition. Yates drew a map showing where he had buried a woman on the east side of his house on the South Hill. "None of the rest takes place if it's not Murfin," Tucker said. Deputies, who had searched the property for more than a month without finding her, dug where the map showed and found remains six to eight inches below the surface, beneath his bedroom window, the Supreme Court later wrote. An autopsy could not confirm the identity, but jewelry found with the body matched what Melody Murfin's family had described. "Everything matches, he hasn't told us anything that is not true yet," Tucker said. Yates never helped find the .25-caliber handgun.
On October 19, 2000, in Spokane County Superior Court, Yates pleaded guilty to 13 murders and one attempted murder. The hearing lasted about 30 minutes in a courtroom packed with families. He answered "guilty, your honor" to each count, removed his glasses and wiped his eyes. Asked whether the confession read in court was accurate, he said, "That's my statement, your honor." The counts covered 10 Spokane-area killings, the two Walla Walla killings of 1975 and the Skagit County killing of 1988, and the attempted murder in the van. In return the State did not seek death. Under the deal, the Associated Press reported, he pleaded to premeditated first-degree murder rather than aggravated murder, the only crime then punishable by death in Washington; the Washington Supreme Court's later opinions describe the counts as aggravated first-degree murder.
One case was held back. The murder charge for Shawn McClenahan, which prosecutors called their strongest, was dismissed without prejudice. If Yates ever tried to withdraw his pleas or attack the convictions, the State could refile it and seek any lawful sentence, including death. Tucker said he did not expect charges in other states, because Yates had said he killed only in Washington, and added that the agreement did not keep him from being prosecuted elsewhere. Fasy said his client was remorseful and wanted to put the matter to rest. Since his arrest, Yates had maintained his innocence in letters to friends.
On October 26, 2000, Spokane County Superior Court Judge Richard Schroeder sentenced Yates to 408 years and four months in prison, the 4,900 months the Supreme Court later described as "just over 408 years," and ordered him turned over to Pierce County. The two 1975 murders, committed before the state's 1981 Sentencing Reform Act, were sentenced at 20 years each.
Many relatives denounced the deal. "Life must be cheap in Eastern Washington," said Don Oliver, Patrick Oliver's brother. Another brother, Chris Oliver, asked Yates whether he had any idea what it was like to go to a cemetery for a family reunion for 25 years. Jennifer Joseph's father, John Joseph, asked how many murders it took to get the death penalty and said Yates had disgraced and dishonored every uniform he ever wore. Melody Murfin's daughter Wendi Engeldinger asked how he could bury her mother in his yard and let his family walk around her for two and a half years. Kathy Lloyd, Shawn McClenahan's sister, stood and asked him why he did it. He did not answer.
Yates read the names of his victims and apologized to each family. "Nothing I can say will erase the sorrow, the pain and the anguish that you feel and that I've caused in your lives," he said, his voice breaking. He said he had turned to God and prayed "that God will right the wrongs that I have committed and that justice will bring closure." Some in the courtroom called his remorse a lie. His eldest daughter told him she wanted to know why, and that she still loved him. His father told the families he was sorry they all had broken hearts.
The case prompted legislators to propose adding serial killing to the aggravating circumstances that make a murder punishable by death.
Yates was arraigned in Pierce County on October 31, 2000, and pleaded not guilty. On January 12, 2001, the State filed notice that it would seek death. In May 2001 the former Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman published a book arguing that the task force could have caught Yates about two years earlier by following up on the Corvette. Sheriff Mark Sterk called the claim a fabrication, and the task force leader, Sergeant Cal Walker, said the facts throughout the book did not support its speculation.
Opening statements began in Tacoma on August 12, 2002. Yates's lawyers, Roger Hunko and Mary Kay High, conceded at the start that he had killed both women. "He did," Hunko told the jury. The question was whether the killings were aggravated murder, which could carry death, or first-degree murder. The State called 90 witnesses over five weeks, among them task force detectives, an FBI profiler and friends of the victims, and argued that the Pierce County killings fit the same scheme as the Spokane killings. Evidence from the Spokane cases was shown to the jury on a large summary chart, to which details about each victim were added as the evidence came in. The medical evidence suggested Melinda Mercer was alive when the bags were placed over her head. The defense called 10 witnesses in under two days, including four women who said Yates had been a client who paid up front and caused them no harm. Yates did not testify.
On September 19, 2002, after less than two days of deliberation, the jury convicted him of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder and found all three aggravating factors the State had alleged: that the killings were part of a common scheme or plan involving more than one victim, that they were committed in the course of robbery, and that they were committed to conceal another crime. "We want to get the full measure of justice for these victims," said Chief Deputy Prosecutor Jerry Costello. Mercer's mother asked, "If he doesn't get the death penalty, who should get it?"
In the penalty phase the defense asked the jury to spare him because of his military service and his potential to guide other prisoners. Yates addressed the jury for 14 minutes. He described a month of denial after his arrest, until he came to believe God had seen what he had done. "Few men have ever felt the guilt I have, from all the horror I've brought into your lives," he said, and told the families he prayed they would turn to God. The prosecution called it a self-pitying statement that did not accept responsibility.
On October 3, 2002, the jury returned a death sentence after less than five hours. Its first vote was unanimous. "We tried and scraped to find some reason to give him mercy, but we came up empty," said juror Launi Hocker, who added that she felt for his five children. "You don't put a man to death every day," said juror Bill Warren. Yates showed no reaction. His father and a sister cried together. Melinda Mercer's sister kissed a photograph of her when the verdict was read, and her mother said she wanted him to take responsibility for killing her daughter and Connie Ellis. The trial court ruled that the death sentence would run concurrently with the Spokane sentence rather than after it.
On September 27, 2007, the Washington Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the death sentence in State v. Yates. It struck one aggravating factor. Prosecutors had argued that Yates killed the two women to hide the misdemeanor of patronizing prostitutes, but the court found the evidence insufficient, because he had paid other women for sex without killing them. It upheld the robbery factor: women in street prostitution were usually paid in advance and kept money in their clothing; Mercer's bra, tank top, shoes and purse were missing and no cash was found; Ellis's undergarments, a shoe and her purse were missing; and Yates and his wife had been having money trouble and calling about his National Guard pay. It also upheld the common scheme factor, found no reversible error in the guilt or penalty phase and approved the use of the summary chart. The United States Supreme Court declined to review the case in June 2008.
On September 5, 2008, a judge in Tacoma signed a death warrant setting his execution for September 19, 2008. Margaret Dettman, Shawn Johnson's mother, and her daughter attended; they lived in Oak Harbor, the town where Yates grew up. Dettman said justice had been served but doubted an execution would bring her family closure. On September 11, 2008, the Washington Supreme Court stayed the execution so his lawyers could bring a personal restraint petition.
The court dismissed that petition on March 14, 2013, rejecting all 25 of its claims. The most pointed compared Yates with Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, who had pleaded guilty to dozens of murders and avoided death in exchange for leading detectives to remains. Yates's lawyers argued that "a confession coupled with a willingness to plead guilty constitutes mitigation of the most persuasive kind." Justice Susan Owens, writing for the court, answered that the court had repeatedly rejected the idea that proportionality requires mathematical precision; cases cannot be matched up "like so many points on a graph," and the review exists to make sure death is not imposed "wantonly and freakishly." The court also found that his Pierce County lawyer, Roger Hunko, was not shown to have harmed him by advising him to plead guilty in Spokane first. Pleading first let Pierce County use the Spokane killings against him, but it also took death off the table for 13 of the 15 murders, and nothing showed that Hunko would have advised otherwise or that Spokane would have agreed to wait. The court found that his lawyers had been deficient in not investigating victims' relatives who might have opposed a death sentence, but that the failure had not changed the outcome. It also rejected claims about the jury pool, closed proceedings and a juror who planned to write a book.
After the court denied reconsideration on May 6, 2013, Yates turned to federal court. His habeas petition argued that his trial lawyers had not adequately investigated a mental disorder, possible brain damage, a sexual deviancy disorder and his low risk of future violence in prison, and had not shown the jury his cooperation with Spokane authorities. He said he had pleaded guilty there to give a victim's family comfort and relief. For an evidentiary hearing on some of his 15 federal claims he was moved from the penitentiary in Walla Walla to Seattle. No final federal ruling has been reported.
By then Governor Jay Inslee had said he would not sign a death warrant for anyone while he was in office. On March 20, 2014, the state Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to the Spokane judgment. Yates was right that the two 1975 sentences were wrong: under the law in force in 1975 the judge should have imposed indeterminate terms with a minimum, not flat 20-year terms. But the court found no practical harm. "Given the reality of the human life-span, there is no difference between those two sentences," Justice Owens wrote. Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud, in dissent, would have sent the case back for a hearing on whether the error affected his decision to plead. The court also held that the challenge allowed the State to refile the McClenahan charge, and Tucker said he would discuss it with his staff. "I can't see bringing him over here and giving him another 10 or 15 years of appeals," he said.
On July 9, 2015, a unanimous court dismissed a third petition, which argued that his trial lawyers should have challenged venue, as filed too late. In 2017 the Court of Appeals ordered technical corrections to the two 1975 counts of the Spokane judgment without a full resentencing; the State asked the Supreme Court to review that decision, and its outcome was not reported.
On October 11, 2018, in State v. Gregory, the Washington Supreme Court held that the state's death penalty, as administered, violated the state constitution because it was imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner. "All death sentences are hereby converted to life imprisonment," the court wrote. Yates was one of eight men then on death row at the Washington State Penitentiary; the Associated Press listed him as condemned for the murders of two women in 1997 and 1998 in Pierce County and noted that he was also serving 408 years for the killings of 13 others. His death sentence became a life sentence, which later reports describe as life without the possibility of release.
On April 20, 2023, Governor Inslee signed Senate Bill 5087, which removed the death penalty from Washington law altogether.
In November 2025 KXLY in Spokane devoted an episode of a local true-crime documentary series to the case.
In the months after his arrest, investigators across Washington compared their unsolved cases with Yates's record. Spokane County reviewed a dozen unsolved deaths of women going back to 1984, including shootings in 1990 and 1992. Police in Kitsap County looked at a 1995 shooting, the Island County sheriff at a 1977 killing on Whidbey Island, Snohomish County detectives at a 1987 double killing, and Yakima County investigators at a 1988 death near the Yakima Training Center, after a GPS receiver seized from his house showed a stored location nearby. Investigators from Washington, Oregon and British Columbia met to discuss the gaps in his known killings, from 1975 to 1988 and from 1988 to 1996. Authorities in Vancouver and Germany were also reported to be looking at him. The Skagit County prosecutor said there was no reason to connect him to any other killing there. The sheriff had believed Yates was responsible for four other Spokane deaths, but Yates denied them in a polygraph given by his defense and reportedly passed. None of these cases has been charged to him.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Patrick Oliver, Susan Savage, Stacy Hawn and the 10 Spokane-area women named above, and the attempted murder of the woman shot in the van in 1998 (guilty pleas, Spokane County, 2000); the aggravated murders of Melinda Mercer and Connie Ellis (jury verdict, Pierce County, 2002, affirmed 2007). The Spokane counts are called first-degree murder in the 2000 wire reports and in the State's 2017 filing, and aggravated first-degree murder in the Supreme Court's 2013 and 2014 opinions.
Admitted but never convicted: the death of Shawn McClenahan. Yates confessed to it, prosecutors called it their strongest case, and the charge was dismissed without prejudice as a safeguard for the plea deal. It is a killing attributed to him, not a conviction.
Suspected, never charged: the other killings that investigators examined after his arrest. No court has found him responsible for any of them.
The missed chances: Mark Fuhrman's 2001 book argued that better use of the Corvette leads would have caught Yates about two years sooner, and the task force rejected that. The police contacts are documented: the 1997 Corvette stop, the 1998 stops, the 1999 license plate report and interview. Whether any of them should have led to an arrest sooner remains a matter of opinion.
Details that vary between sources: the date of the Spokane plea (October 13, 2000, in the 2007 Supreme Court opinion; October 19 in the Associated Press and Seattle Times reports of the hearing); the fine (60,000 dollars in AP and CBS reports, 620,000 dollars in the Seattle Times); the start of the task force (November or December 1997, or December 1998); the date of the November 1998 stop (November 9 or 10); when Melody Murfin went missing (May 1998 in the Spokesman-Review; two years before October 2000 in AP reports; July 1997 in one Seattle Times account); and Shannon Zielinski's age (38 or 39). Some news accounts expected a 447-year sentence before the hearing; the sentence imposed was 408 years.
May 27, 1952: Robert Lee Yates Jr. is born in Anacortes, Washington; he grows up in Oak Harbor.
1970: graduates from Oak Harbor High School.
1972 to 1974: attends Walla Walla College; marries in 1972, divorces in 1974, and marries Linda Brewer in July 1974.
1975: works for about four months as a guard at the Washington State Penitentiary; associate degree from Skagit Valley Community College.
July 13, 1975: Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage are shot at Mill Creek, near Walla Walla.
1977: enlists in the Army.
1980: completes flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama.
1981 to 1984 and 1988 to 1991: serves in Germany.
July 1988: Stacy Hawn, 23, disappears from Seattle; her remains are found in Skagit County on December 28, 1988.
1992 to 1994: deploys to Somalia and Haiti.
March 1996: retires as a chief warrant officer 4 and moves his family to Spokane.
June 1996: Shannon Zielinski's body is found near Spokane.
April 1997: joins the Washington Army National Guard.
August 26, 1997: Jennifer Joseph and Heather Hernandez are found.
September 24, 1997: an officer stops Yates in his white Corvette near East Sprague.
November 5, 1997: Darla Sue Scott is found.
Late 1997: the Spokane task force is formed.
December 7, 1997: Melinda Mercer is found in Tacoma.
December 18, 1997: Shawn Johnson is found.
December 26, 1997: Laurie Wason and Shawn McClenahan are found.
February 1998: Sunny Oster is found.
April 1, 1998: Linda Maybin is found.
May 1998: Melody Murfin is reported missing; Yates sells the Corvette.
July 7, 1998: Michelyn Derning is found.
August 1, 1998: a woman is shot in his van and survives.
October 13, 1998: Connie LaFontaine Ellis is found in Pierce County.
November 1998: an officer sees him pick up a young woman on East Sprague; he is charged with misdemeanor assault after a confrontation with his daughter.
September 15, 1999: detectives interview him about the Corvette.
January 2000: detectives find the Corvette.
April 10, 2000: the Corvette is seized; the button and blood evidence are found.
April 18, 2000: Yates is arrested on his way to work.
May 18, 2000: seven more murder counts and attempted murder and robbery counts are filed in Spokane.
July 17, 2000: Pierce County charges him with two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
October 2000: Melody Murfin's remains are recovered beside his house, using his map.
October 19, 2000: he pleads guilty in Spokane to 13 murders and one attempted murder.
October 26, 2000: Judge Richard Schroeder sentences him to 408 years.
October 31, 2000: pleads not guilty in Pierce County.
January 12, 2001: Pierce County files notice to seek death.
August 12, 2002: the Pierce County trial opens in Tacoma.
September 19, 2002: the jury convicts him of two counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
October 3, 2002: the jury sentences him to death.
September 27, 2007: the Washington Supreme Court affirms.
June 2008: the United States Supreme Court declines review.
September 5, 2008: execution set for September 19; stayed September 11.
March 14, 2013: the state Supreme Court dismisses his personal restraint petition.
March 20, 2014: the court dismisses his challenge to the Spokane judgment; Governor Inslee has said he will sign no death warrants.
July 9, 2015: the court dismisses a further petition as untimely.
July 11, 2017: the Court of Appeals orders technical corrections to the 1975 counts.
October 11, 2018: State v. Gregory converts all Washington death sentences to life imprisonment.
April 20, 2023: Washington repeals the death penalty by statute.
November 2025: KXLY broadcasts a documentary episode on the case.