Robert Lee Yates Jr.

What the record shows

Robert Lee Yates Jr. is a Washington man convicted of 15 murders committed between 1975 and 1998 in Spokane, Tacoma, Walla Walla and Skagit counties. In October 2000 he pleaded guilty in Spokane County Superior Court to 13 counts of aggravated first-degree murder and one count of attempted first-degree murder and was sentenced to 408 years in prison. In 2002 a Pierce County jury convicted him of two further aggravated murders and returned a death verdict. According to the Washington Supreme Court's 2013 order on his personal restraint petition, Yates acknowledged committing 15 murders. His death sentence was converted to life without parole in October 2018, when the state's high court struck down Washington's death penalty.

The earliest killings to which he pleaded guilty were those of Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage, a young couple shot near Walla Walla in July 1975, and of Stacy Hawn, a 23-year-old Seattle woman killed in Skagit County in 1988, as reported by The Seattle Times at his sentencing. Most of the victims were women working as prostitutes in Spokane between 1996 and 1998. Bodies were found at roadsides, in vacant lots and in rural areas around the city: Shannon Zielinski in June 1996; Jennifer Joseph, 16, and Heather Hernandez in August 1997; Darla Sue Scott in November 1997; Shawn Johnson, Laurie Wason and Shawn McClenahan in December 1997; Sunny Oster in February 1998; Linda Maybin in April 1998; and Michelyn Derning in July 1998. The Spokesman-Review reported in December 1997 that Wason and McClenahan were found together in an overgrown gravel pit in southeast Spokane and identified by fingerprints, and that a four-detective task force was examining whether a series of murders of Spokane-area women was the work of one person.

Two victims were found near Tacoma, in Pierce County: Melinda Mercer, 24, in December 1997, and Connie LaFontaine Ellis, 35, in October 1998. According to the Washington Supreme Court's 2013 order, prosecutors argued that Yates was in Pierce County for National Guard duty when he killed them. The Associated Press reported that the Tacoma victims were shot and suffocated with plastic grocery bags placed over their heads. Yates also admitted attempting to kill a woman in Spokane in 1998, the single attempted-murder count in his plea.

The Seattle Times reported in May 2000 that Yates had been interviewed in September 1999 as one of hundreds of suspects and refused to give a blood sample. Investigators then traced a white 1977 Corvette he had owned from 1994 to 1998 and, in January 2000, took carpet fibers from it. In April 2000 the fibers were reported to match fibers found on Jennifer Joseph's shoes and on a towel near her body; a search of the car under a warrant produced a button matching one missing from her jacket and traces of blood. Yates was arrested on April 18, 2000, on his way to work at a Kaiser Aluminum plant, and charged the next day with Joseph's murder. The sheriff said DNA linked him to eight deaths and other evidence to more.

According to the Washington Supreme Court, negotiations in July 2000 produced a Spokane County plea agreement under which Yates would plead guilty and reveal the location of a further victim's body in exchange for life without parole; the body of Melody Murfin was recovered from his own yard. Pierce County declined to join the deal and filed two counts of aggravated murder. On October 26, 2000, Spokane County Superior Court Judge Richard Schroeder sentenced Yates to 408 years and four months and fined him $620,000; The Seattle Times reported that 17 relatives of 11 victims addressed the court and that Yates apologized by name to each victim. A charge in the McClenahan killing was dismissed without prejudice.

A Pierce County jury convicted Yates of the Mercer and Ellis murders on September 19, 2002, and on October 3, 2002, after fewer than five hours of deliberation, unanimously returned a death verdict. The Washington Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentence 8-1 in September 2007, rejecting his argument that the state's inconsistent use of capital punishment, including the life sentence given to Gary Ridgway for 48 murders, made his sentence unconstitutional. The court dismissed his 25-ground personal restraint petition in March 2013, and in 2014 declined to let him withdraw his guilty pleas to the 1975 murders, though it agreed that those consecutive 20-year sentences had been miscalculated under pre-1981 law. In October 2018, in State v. Gregory, the court held the death penalty unconstitutional as applied and ordered all death sentences converted to life in prison; the Associated Press listed Yates among the eight men then on death row.

Yates was born on May 27, 1952, and raised in Oak Harbor on Whidbey Island, graduating from Oak Harbor High School in 1970. He worked briefly as a guard at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in 1975, enlisted in the Army in 1977 and became a warrant officer and helicopter pilot, serving in Germany, Somalia and Haiti before retiring in 1996. He moved his family to Spokane that spring, joined the Washington National Guard in 1997 and worked at a circuit-board company and later at Kaiser Aluminum. He is married with five children. He is held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the prison where he once worked.