Prostitutes Become Human Prey Long List Of Predators One Of Their Few Safeguards
Pale yellow Chrysler. Driver is white male, violent, bites and uses a hand saw. - One of 42 cars and drivers on a warning list for Spokane prostitutes.
There is a growing list of nameless violent men who beat, rape and perhaps kill Spokane prostitutes.
One guy wields a crowbar. Another uses a gun. Still another says he wants to “butcher” a hooker.
The murder of a woman found on Mount Spokane this month was the fourth unsolved killing of a prostitute in the past six years.
The increasing danger isn’t confined to the city’s illicit sex market. It spills into Spokane’s mainstream too. Rape reports jumped by 40 percent last year.
Spokane now teems with so many predators that a county social worker started a list of the cars and drivers women should fear.
Red Ford Probe. Driver is young white male with very blue eyes, light brown hair, may have a beard. Uses handcuffs and talks about the end of your life.
Prostitutes working Sprague and Riverside avenues pass the 2-1/2-page list around, reciting it aloud to those who can’t read.
Red Toyota pickup. Driver is a tall white male with dark blond hair. Uses a gun and baseball bat. Says he is a cop and isn’t.
Rebecca “Misty” Hedman, the 13-year-old runaway clubbed to death with a baseball bat in 1993, remains the city’s best-known prostitute victim.
But there were many before, and several since.
Earlier this year, 18-year-old Toby Stackhouse was convicted of murdering a prostitute by kicking her nearly to death near Playfair Race Course, then slashing her throat.
Why did he do it? A prosecutor said the teenager turned hostile when the woman refused to perform oral sex for $9.
Spokane Police Sgt. Michael Yates said it’s hard to gauge how often prostitutes are raped or assaulted because the crimes often go unreported and the victims conceal their illegal occupations.
Yates said the prostitute predator list is a valuable street tool. “We give it to all our officers on patrol,” he said.
Police cited the list Friday afternoon at a meeting of 12 officers preparing to set up a prostitution sting along Sprague Avenue.
Officers posing as prostitutes were reminded that their backup would be armed with the predator list, and that they might intercede quickly if the situation appeared dangerous.
“We’re not going to leave you out there in the dark dealing with one of these knuckleheads.”
Big blue pickup with grid on back window. Driver is white male, talks about modeling. Robs and rapes.
A pregnant Spokane prostitute who works East Sprague says she was raped at knifepoint last month by two men in a moving truck.
“The guy pointed the knife at me and said we can do this the hard way or the easy way,” she said. She has since learned the two guys have “team raped” a lot of girls.
The dangerous duo became the 37th entry on the predator list:
Yellow moving truck. Driver is very light black male. May be with a white male. Rapists, use knives.
The keeper of the list is Lynn Everson, an outreach worker for the Spokane County Health District.
Everson counsels prostitutes about AIDS and other hazards while giving out condoms and updated copies of the predator list once a week from a motor home off Sprague.
A prostitute watched anxiously as Everson added another car and driver to the list on a recent evening. “Is this a new one?” the woman asked, trying to read Everson’s handwriting.
Yes.
White Ford station wagon, newer four-door. Driver is white male, light brown hair, mustache, glasses, rapist, violent.
The predators fit no stereotype.
They’re in their teens. They’re in their 50s. They wear T-shirts. They wear neckties. They coax prostitutes into old pickups, new Camrys, delivery trucks and Acuras. Some have baby seats in the back.
Maroon Ford Grenada. Driver is white male who tries to drag women into his car. Violent.
Beth, 25, has been a prostitute in many U.S. cities. “Spokane has a lot more violence than most,” she said, noting she’s felt safer in far bigger cities.
A Spokane man took her for an involuntary ride on Interstate 90 recently, she said.
He knocked her unconscious when she asked where they were going. She woke up on the ground with her face swollen and the man searching her clothes for cash.
“He’s a very large man who wears shorts down to his knees,” she said, her hands shaking. “He’s young, maybe 19. He drives all different kinds of cars.”
She said she later tried to stop a friend from climbing in a car with him. She failed. Her friend got “raped and beat up bad,” she said.
Beth said the first thing she does when she sees new young prostitutes on Sprague is warn them about the weirdos. “We run out and tell them to look out for him and him and him …”
That same night, two 15-year-olds burst into Everson’s motor home off Sprague. The girls were breathless from running.
One just shot a man with pepper spray after she said he tried to rape her. The two girls were excited, as if on a daring adventure.
They both left their Spokane homes within the past month and are living in a house with other prostitutes.
Everson reminds them they could get hurt. They shrug and chew gum, still excited.
White station wagon. Driver is white male, 40s, balding, very violent, likes to cut.
Everson said many of the city’s prostitutes are homeless kids who survive by selling drugs or sex. She offers to help them find counseling that could lead to healthier lives, but she can’t find them jobs that pay the $200 some say they can make in a few hours on the street.
Everson and other Spokane social workers also say many of the prostitutes were sexually abused or assaulted as children, and are subconsciously drawn toward abusers.
“There are some weird guys in Spokane,” said A.J., an 18-year-old Seattle prostitute recently working East Riverside. She said she tries to look out for the younger girls. “I know how dangerous it is out here,” she said.
Ford pickup, black, may have a white canopy. Driver is white, very attractive. Rapist.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MEMO: The names of prostitutes were changed in this report.