Robert Lee Yates Jr. (born May 27, 1952), also known as the Spokane Serial Killer and the Grocery Bag Killer, is an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, necrophile, and former U.S. Army aircraft pilot who murdered at least sixteen people, mostly female prostitutes, in eastern Washington between 1975 and 1998.
Yates was enlisted in the United States Army from 1977 to 1996, during which time he flew helicopters. He is believed to have begun killing in 1975 when a couple was shot to death in Walla Walla. Between 1988 and 1998, Yates committed eleven murders in Spokane County, two in Pierce County, and one in Skagit County. He was sentenced to death in 2002 but it was commuted to life without parole after the Washington Supreme Court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional in 2018. He is currently serving life in prison at the Washington State Penitentiary.
Background[]
Yates was born on May 27, 1952 in Oak Harbor, Washington, where he was also raised. in a middle-class family. They attended a local Seventh-day Adventist church. Yates had a family history of violence; in 1945, his grandmother murdered his grandfather with an axe.
Yates graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970. In 1975, he was hired by the Washington State Department of Corrections to work as a correction officer at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
In October 1977, Yates enlisted in the United States Army, where he became certified to fly civilian transport airplanes and helicopters. Yates was stationed in various countries outside the continental United States, including Germany, and later Somalia and Haiti during the United Nations peacekeeping missions of the 1990s. Yates also served three years in the Army National Guard as a helicopter pilot from April 1997 through April 2000. He earned several commendation and service medals during his military career, including the US Army Master Aviator Badge.
Yates left the active duty Army in April 1996, apparently a year and a half short of being eligible for his full retirement benefits and pension. At this time, the military was reducing its numbers, so he received full retirement despite being short of the customary 20 years served. He then joined the Army National Guard in April 1997, and served three years until his arrest in April 2000. He served a total of 21.5 years in the military.
He has five children, (four daughters and one son), with his second wife Linda, whom he married in 1976. The children's birth years range from 1974 to 1989.
Victims[]
Yates committed his first murders in 1975, when he shot and killed two college students who were on a picnic together. Many of his subsequent victims were sex workers working along East Sprague Avenue who had substance abuse issues, and Yates would often do drugs with them and other sex workers. Yates initially solicited the victims; after having sex with them, often in his Ford van, he would kill them and dump their bodies in rural locations. All of his victims died of gunshot wounds to the head or heart. Eight of the murders were committed with a Raven .25-caliber handgun, and one attempted murder was linked to the same model of handgun. Several of his victims were found with grocery bags over their heads. One particularly bizarre detail of Yates' murders involved the case of Melody Murfin, whose body was buried just outside of the bedroom window of Yates' family home.
Modus Operandi[]
Yates targeted high-risk female victims, specifically sex workers and victims with drug addictions, originally from late teens to early 20s he previously met, progressing to victims as old ad their 40s as the murders continued. The only exceptions are Melinda Mercer, who is reported to have worked as a waitress, and Tarayon Corbitts, the only transgender victim of the total spree tied to Yates. Yates solicited the victims for sex to abduct them in his Ford van or Corvette, and once Yates had sex with them, he shot them in their heads and hearts, most often with a .25 Raven handgun. Yates' signature was covering the heads of the victims with plastic grocery bags postmortem, except for Melinda Mercer, who was still alive when bags were put over her head after she was shot. Sherry Palmer's clothes were also pulled up to cover her head. They were all left in rural locations across Washington State in outdoor locations, specifically fields, gullies, and ditches, to misdirect authorities, the locations more often being in Spokane and closer to where Yates abducted the victims as the killings progressed. Darla Scott was one exception, being buried in a shallow grave near a golf course. In the case of Melody Merfin, Yates buried her in a plot of land under his bedroom window after she was murdered. The women were most often naked, but sometimes wearing some clothes and/or covering them with items such as towels, plant foliage, and hot tub covers. Yates would take personal belongings from the women and girls as trophies. When Yates killed Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage, he shot them multiple times while they were picnicking, then covered them with brush after they were dead. His physical abuse in his house was never specified, except for his daughter saying he "hit [her] all the time".
Arrest and Aftermath[]
Yates was arrested on 18 April 1999, for the murder of Jennifer Joseph. After Yates' arrest, a search warrant was served on a 1977 white Corvette that he had previously owned. A white Corvette had been identified as the vehicle that one of the victims had last been seen in. Ironically, Yates had been pulled over in this vehicle while the Task Force was searching for it, but the field interview report was misread as saying "Camaro" not "Corvette", thus the incident was not realized until after Yates had been arrested. After searching the Corvette, police discovered blood that they linked to Jennifer Joseph and DNA from Yates that they then tied to 12 other victims.
After he was sentenced to death, he attempted to appeal the death sentence several times, but his most outrageous excuse came in 2013. Yates tried to claim he was not at fault for the crimes by reason of insanity. His defense? He claimed he was a necrophiliac. Yates's lawyer filed a motion stating that Yates is mentally ill. The motion said he suffers from severe paraphilic and necrophiliac disorders (he feels compelled to have sex with dead bodies) which caused him to kill against his will. It claimed that his normal-seeming lifestyle, his kind acts, and his family-man persona show that he acted outside of his right mind.
After the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the death penalty violated the state constitution, Yates's death sentence, as well as that of Washington's other death row inmates, was commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.