Robert Lee Yates Victims

Case background and investigation

Robert Lee Yates Jr. was born in 1952 and graduated from high school in Oak Harbor, Washington. He enlisted in the Army in 1977, became a helicopter pilot and served overseas before leaving active duty in 1996; he then flew for the Army National Guard until 2000, according to Wikipedia's summary of his service record.

Beginning in the 1990s, women who worked in prostitution along East Sprague Avenue in Spokane were found shot to death and left in rural areas, several with plastic bags over their heads. A task force investigated the killings for years. On April 18, 2000, Yates was arrested and charged with the murder of 16-year-old Jennifer Joseph. The Seattle Times reported the following month that the Spokane County sheriff said DNA evidence tied Yates to other deaths in Spokane and Tacoma.

In 2000 Yates pleaded guilty in Spokane County Superior Court to 13 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder under an agreement that spared him a death sentence in that county, and he was sentenced to 408 years in prison, the Spokesman-Review reported. The plea covered more than the Spokane killings. It included the deaths of Patrick Oliver, 21, and Susan Savage, 22, who were shot near Walla Walla in July 1975, and, according to Wikipedia, Stacy Hawn, whose remains were found in Skagit County in 1988. The remains of one victim, Melody Murfin, were found buried at Yates's home after his confession.

Pierce County prosecutors separately charged Yates with killing Melinda Mercer in 1997 and Connie Ellis in 1998. A jury convicted him in September 2002, and he was sentenced to death on October 3, 2002. The Washington Supreme Court upheld the sentence on appeal, and Courthouse News reported that the court rejected his argument that the sentence was disproportionate.

Yates also argued that his Spokane County sentence was calculated incorrectly for the 1975 murders, which predated the state's sentencing reforms. The Spokesman-Review reported in 2016 that the state Supreme Court had found no practical difference between the sentence he agreed to and the one he said he should have received.

In October 2018 the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the state's death penalty was applied in an arbitrary and racially biased way. The decision converted the sentences of everyone on death row, including Yates, to life without the possibility of parole. Sources reviewed for this entry describe him as still serving his sentences in a Washington prison.