On July 13th, 1975, two college students drove out to a swimming hole along Mil Creek about 12 miles southeast of Walaw Wala, Washington.
Patrick Oliver was 21. Susan Savage was 22. They spread out a picnic beneath a stand of popppler trees on a warm Sunday afternoon, and they never came home.
Their bodies were found the next day, dragged across the creek and hidden under a tire and brush.
Both had been shot in the head. Both had gunshot wounds on their arms, meaning they saw it coming.
They tried to stop it. For 25 years, their families visited Mountain View Cemetery together.
25 birthdays that stopped counting. 25 Christmases with empty chairs. And 25 years of asking the same question over and over again.
Who did this? The answer, when it finally came, wasn’t delivered by a detective knocking on their door with a breakthrough.
It was offered up inside a courtroom in Spokane, 250 mi away, by a serial killer trying to avoid the death penalty.
Patrick and Susan’s murders weren’t solved because someone cracked the case. They were solved because a man named Robert Lee Yates Jr.
Needed something to trade. This is the story of the longest cold case Robert Lee Yates ever carried.
And this is the story of the two people who deserved so much more than to become the first line of a serial killer’s confession.
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A Sunday in July to understand what was lost on that creek bank in 1975.
You have to understand who Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage actually were. Not as names in a case file.
Not as victim one and victim two. As people. Patrick Allen Oliver was born on March 27th, 1954 into an established Walaw Wallala family.
He was the kind of student who made everything look easy. Honor roll, premed track.
The kind of young man whose teachers remember him years later because he stood out not for being loud or showy, but for being consistently, quietly excellent at the things he put his mind to.
And when Patrick got the chance to study abroad, he didn’t play it safe. He didn’t sign up for a semester in London or an exchange program somewhere comfortable.
He went to the Sorbone in Paris, one of the most prestigious universities on the planet.
He studied there, absorbed a different culture, lived in a different language, and came back to Washington with the kind of perspective that only comes from stepping outside of everything, you know.
By the summer of 1975, Patrick had only recently returned to the States from France.
He was 21 years old, back home in Eastern Washington, carrying everything he’d learned overseas and all the plans he had for what came next.
Medical school was in the picture, a career in medicine. The kind of future that parents dream about for their children and that Patrick seemed [music] fully capable of reaching.
Susan Patricia Savage was born on December 26th, 1953, and she was a Walaw Wala native through and through.
She knew the town and the town knew her. She’d grown up in the community, put down roots there, and when it came time for college, she headed to Washington State University in Pullman, about 130 mi north.
She just graduated that spring, freshly armed with a degree and the sense of possibility that comes with being 22 and stepping into the rest of your life.
Patrick and Susan were childhood friends. The [snorts] investigation would later confirm that there was no indication they were anything other than friends.
They’d known each other for years, growing up in the same community, orbiting the same circles, sharing the kind of bond that forms between people who understand where the other came from because they came from the same place.
Both of them were roughly two months out of college that July, both standing at the very beginning of adult life.
Both doing exactly what 21 and 22 year olds are supposed to do during a Washington summer.
Spending time outdoors with a good friend while the weather lets you. On July 13th, a Sunday, they drove out to a well-known swimming hole along Mil Creek.
The spot sat about 12 mi southeast of Walaw Wala, and it was popular with locals.
The kind of place where families would go to cool off, where teenagers would spend long afternoons in the water, where you could spread a blanket under the trees and forget about everything for a while.
Patrick and Susan settled in beneath a stand of popppler trees. The air was warm.
The creek was running. It was the kind of afternoon that doesn’t feel like it means anything while you’re living it.
Just sunlight coming through the leaves, the sound of moving water, and the easy comfort of two people who have known each other long enough that they don’t need to fill every pause with conversation.
And then somebody came. What happened next has never been fully explained. No witnesses ever came forward.
No one heard the shots, or if they did, they didn’t report them. The investigation would later determine that both Patrick and Susan were shot with a handgun.
Both of them had defensive gunshot wounds on their arms. And that detail is one you carry with you once you hear it.
They saw the weapon. They raised their hands. They tried to shield themselves. They tried to survive.
[music] And it wasn’t enough. Both were shot fatally in the head. The scene, when investigators later described it, carried a deliberateness that went beyond a panicked attack.
One law enforcement official who worked the case would later recall thinking that it almost seemed like an execution.
After the shooting, the killer dragged the bodies as far as 30 yards across the creek itself and concealed them beneath an old tire and brush.
This wasn’t someone who panicked and ran. Whoever did this took the time to hide what they’d done.
To move two bodies across a creek, to pile debris on top of them, to walk away knowing the scene wouldn’t be immediately visible to the next person who came to swim.
The bodies were discovered on July 14th, 1975, the day after the shooting. Word traveled fast in a town the size of Walaw Wala.
Two young people from good families, two of the town’s own, shot to death at a place where half the community had spent their summers.
The shock was immediate and deep. Patrick and Susan had no enemies. They weren’t involved in anything dangerous.
They weren’t in debt to anyone. They didn’t deal drugs, didn’t run with a rough crowd, didn’t have the kind of complicated personal lives that might have invited violence.
They were college students eating sandwiches by a creek on a Sunday afternoon. The deputy prosecuting attorney who would work this case, a man named Larry Seagull, would later put it as bluntly as anyone could.
They frankly ran out of ideas as to why anybody would want to kill them.
For a community like Walaw Wala, a small city surrounded by wheat fields and onion farms in the southeast corner of Washington State, the murders of Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage landed with a particular kind of force.
Violent crime happened in Walaw Wala, certainly, but but it happened in contexts that people could understand.
Bar fights that escalated, domestic disputes that turned deadly, [music] crimes with clear motives, and identifiable suspects.
This was different. This was two kids with no enemies and no involvement in anything dangerous, killed for no discernable reason in a place where families took their children swimming.
[music] It shook the fundamental sense of safety that small towns depend on. That absence of motive would haunt the investigation for 25 years.
Because in homicide work, motive is the map. It tells you where to look, who to talk to, which threads [music] to pull.
When there is no motive, there is no map. You’re searching in the dark, and every direction looks the same.
Patrick and Susan were buried at Mountain View Cemetery [music] in Walaw Wala. Their families laid them to rest in the same town where they’d grown up together.
Side by side, the way childhood friends should be, except childhood friends should grow old.
They should have careers and families and grandchildren. They should have stories that last [music] decades, not headstones.
And then the waiting began. If this [music] case already has you hooked, a like goes a long way in helping more people find these stories.
Every lead, every dead [music] end. The Wala Wala County Sheriff’s Office threw everything they had at this case [music] from the very beginning.
Two college kids shot to death at a swimming hole with no witnesses, no motive, and no obvious suspects.
It was the kind of case that keeps investigators awake at night because there is nothing to grab onto, no handhold to start climbing from.
Over the months and years that followed, the detectives cycled through every theory they could construct.
The first and most obvious was robbery gone wrong. Maybe someone had come upon Patrick and Susan at the creek, tried to rob them, and things escalated into violence.
It was plausible on the surface. Isolated location out in the countryside. No witnesses around for miles.
Two young people alone in a spot that was secluded enough to make them easy targets.
A textbook crime of opportunity in a rural setting where the nearest help was a long drive away.
But the evidence at the scene didn’t support it. Nothing of significant value was taken.
And the nature of the shooting, the deliberateness of it, the execution style head wounds, the fact that the bodies were carefully concealed afterward.
None of that matched the profile of a panicked robbery that spiraled out of control.
Robbers who accidentally kill someone don’t typically drag the bodies 30 yards and hide them under a tire.
They run. Then came the more extreme theories. At one point, investigators seriously considered whether the murders could have been a professional hit.
That sounds outlandish for two college students in rural Washington, [music] and it was outlandish.
But when you’ve exhausted the obvious, you start testing every possibility, no matter how far-fetched.
The investigators looked for anyone who might have had a grudge serious enough to warrant contract killing.
They found nothing. They also explored whether there was some kind of gang connection. Though nothing in either victim’s background suggested any involvement with organized crime or criminal networks of any kind, Patrick studied premed and French literature.
Susan had just finished her degree at Washington State. [music] These were not people who moved in circles where gang violence was a plausible explanation.
The most creative lead came from Patrick’s recent international history. He just returned from France from studying at the Sorbone in Paris.
That detail opened a door that most small county sheriff’s offices never walk through. The Walawwala investigators actually contacted Interpol, the International Police Cooperation Agency.
They explored whether something from Patrick’s time in Europe might have followed him home. Whether he’d crossed paths with someone dangerous overseas, whether there was an international dimension to this seemingly local crime that could explain the inexplicable.
There wasn’t. The Interpole lead produced nothing actionable. Just like everything else, Larry Seagull would later recall that they had two or three good suspects over the course of the investigation.
People who fit certain criteria, people who were in the area at the right time, people who couldn’t be definitively ruled out based on the evidence they had.
Every single one of those suspects eventually fell apart under scrutiny. Alibis checked out or the circumstantial connections proved too thin or new information eliminated them.
Dead ends, all of them. The frustration of working this case was compounded by the nature of the crime itself.
There was no obvious connection between the victims and their killer. No prior relationship, no financial dispute, no jealousy, no revenge.
When the motive is invisible, the suspect pool is essentially infinite. It could be anyone.
And that’s the hardest kind of case for a detective to carry. And yet, the case never officially closed.
This is the detail that would turn out to matter more than anything else in the eventual resolution.
The Walaw Wala County Sheriff’s Office made a decision early on that would prove critical a quarter of a century later.
They preserved everything from the crime scene. Every piece of physical evidence was cataloged, bagged, and stored.
The slugs recovered from the victim’s bodies. An old sleeping bag from the scene. Picnic items, shell casings.
All of it went into the evidence room and stayed there year after year, decade after decade.
This wasn’t a given. Plenty of departments in the 1970s disposed of cold case evidence after a certain number of years, especially when the case had produced no active leads.
Storage costs money. Space is limited. And when a case has been cold for 10 years, then 15, then 20.
The institutional pressure to clear the shelves grows. Walaw Wala didn’t clear them. They kept the Oliver and Savage evidence intact.
Every time a new investigator rotated through the department, they would pull the file. They’d sit down with it, read through the old reports, study the crime scene photographs, review the evidence logs, and try to find something that someone before them might have missed.
It became something of a tradition within the department. A case that refused to die even though it had nothing new to offer.
A puzzle that sat on the shelf waiting for a piece that hadn’t been manufactured yet.
Sheriff Mike Humphre, who would be in charge of the department when the case finally broke in 2000, described how the file kept circulating through the years.
New eyes, same evidence, same frustrating result. The bullets sat in their evidence bags. The sleeping bags sat in storage.
Everything waited for a context that didn’t exist yet. Meanwhile, the Oliver and Savage families kept doing the only thing they could do.
They visited the cemetery. They kept Patrick and Susan’s memory alive in their own private way through conversations and anniversaries and the quiet rituals of grief that the outside world never sees.
And they waited for a phone call that year after year, decade after decade never came.
The 1970s turned into the 1980s. The 1980s turned into the 1990s. Gerald Ford gave way to Jimmy Carter, then Reagan, then Bush, then Clinton.
The world changed, technology advanced, forensic science evolved, and the case file from July 1975 sat in a drawer in the Wallawala County Sheriff’s Office, untouched by progress, while somewhere out in the world, the person who killed Patrick and Susan was living a life that nobody would ever suspect.
The All-American Family Man. 250 miles northwest of Walaw Wala in a split level house on Spokane’s South Hill, a man named Robert Lee Yates Jr.
Was building exactly the kind of life that would make him invisible to suspicion. Yates was born on May 27th, 1952 and raised on Whidby Island in the town of Oak Harbor, Washington.
His family was middle class, church-going, 7th Day Adventist. From the outside, it looked like a normal upbringing in a quiet Pacific Northwest community.
He graduated from Oak Harbor High School in 1970 and eventually made his way to Walaw Wala College where he studied premed.
In 1975, the same year Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage were murdered. Yates was 23 years old and working as a corrections officer at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walaw Wala.
He’d been hired by the Washington State Department of Corrections that year to guard the inmates at one of the state’s most imposing institutions.
He didn’t last long in the job, only about 4 months. The reasons for his departure are not fully documented.
What is documented is that during that brief stint, Yates bought a box of 357 caliber ammunition from a local sporting goods store.
He was known to frequent the Mill Creek area southeast of town for target practice and hunting.
And on a day in July while in that area, he encountered two college students having a picnic beneath the popppler trees.
He killed them both. Then he left. He sold the handgun in Oak Harbor in 1976, and by October of 1977, he’d enlisted in the United States Army.
What followed was roughly two decades of military service that would have made any parents chest swell with pride.
Yates trained as a helicopter pilot and became a decorated aviator and flight instructor. He served tours of duty in Germany, in Somalia during the humanitarian mission, and in Haiti.
He earned commenations and medals. He rose through the ranks to become a senior warrant officer by every measurable standard the military uses to evaluate its personnel.
Robert Lee Yates Jr. Was an exemplary soldier and an asset to the armed forces.
[music] He married a woman named Linda in the mid 1970s around the time he left the corrections job and before he enlisted.
Together they built what looked like an ideal military family. They had five children over the years, raised them through the constant relocations and disruptions that military life demands, and somehow managed to keep the household stable and connected through all of it.
They went camping together on weekends. Yates coached [music] his kids sports teams, showed up to school events, and was present in the ways that count when you’re a parent.
The children grew up in a home that from every observable angle was stable, loving, and completely ordinary.
When Yates left active duty in April of 1996 after roughly two decades of service, the family settled into the Spokane home on South Hill.
The neighborhood was one of the more desirable areas of the city, the kind of place where families put down roots and stayed.
Yates took a civilian job as an overhead crane operator at a Kaiser aluminum plant.
He continued attending church. He continued being the kind of neighbor people appreciate. Quiet, friendly, always willing to lend a hand.
The descriptions from people who knew him during this period [music] paint a portrait of almost aggressive normaly, polite, religious, devoted to his wife and children.
His former boss at Kaiser Aluminum said he’d never even heard Robert Yates use profanity, not once, [music] in a factory where profanity is practically a second language.
His defense attorney, Richard Facy, would later struggle openly [music] with the contradiction between the man he’d met and the crimes his client had committed.
Facy said that what had always been difficult about this case was understanding how someone who was so [music] affable and normal and intelligent and bright and articulate could be guilty of these things.
And that is the central horror of Robert Lee Yates’s story. For more than 20 years after he killed Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage, he lived a life that looked from every single angle like a model of decency.
He flew helicopters for his country. He protected American interests in conflict zones. He came home and coached little league.
He carved turkey at Thanksgiving. He was, by all outward measurements, a good man. Meanwhile, in a quiet evidence room in the Walaw Wallala County Sheriff’s Office, the slugs recovered from Patrick and Susan’s bodies sat in a bag with no name attached to them.
[music] Nobody had any idea that the person responsible for putting them there was coaching youth basketball and earning military commenations just a few hours up the highway.
There was a question lurking beneath the surface of Yates’s biography that investigators would later find deeply unsettling.
Between 1975 when he killed Patrick and Susan [music] and 1988 when he committed another murder in Scadget County, there are 13 years of apparent silence.
No known victims, no confessed crimes, [music] just a vast unaccounted gap. And between 1988 and 1996, when the Spokane killings began, another 8 years of nothing.
Were those years truly quiet? Were there other victims in other cities, near other army bases, in other countries who nobody ever thought to connect to the polite helicopter pilot with the clean service record and the loving family?
That question has never been fully answered. And for some investigators, that silence is louder than anything in the case file.
What is known is that when Robert Lee Yates settled into his Spokane home in 1996, something changed.
Or maybe something that had been dormant simply found a new outlet. Because within months of his retirement from the military, women in Spokane started diying.
East Sprag, Spokane’s East Sprag Avenue in the late 1990s was exactly the kind of place where terrible things could happen to vulnerable people and the world could look the other way.
The corridor was known for street level prostitution, drug addiction, and the kind of grinding poverty that traps people in cycles they can’t escape.
The women who worked East Sprag were, in the eyes of much of the public, society’s discards, invisible people living invisible lives.
The kind of women whose disappearances don’t lead the evening news, don’t generate reward funds, and don’t inspire task forces.
At least not at first. Robert Lee Yates knew exactly how invisible these women were, and he used that invisibility as cover.
Beginning in 1996, shortly after his arrival in Spokane and his retirement from the army, Yates began a concentrated killing spree targeting women along East Sprag and its surrounding areas.
His method was horrifyingly consistent. He would drive the corridor in his personal vehicle, approach a woman, solicit her services, take her to a secluded spot, and shoot her.
In many cases, after killing his victim, he placed a plastic grocery bag over her head.
That grim detail repeated across multiple crime scenes would eventually earn him a nickname in the press.
They called him the grocery bag killer. He dumped his victim’s bodies in remote locations around Spokane County, along rural roads, in wooded areas outside the city limits, in ditches and clearings and patches of scrub land where discovery might take days, weeks, or months.
Some victims were found relatively quickly, within days of their disappearance. Others lay undiscovered for far longer, their absence barely registering in a community that had already written them off.
And because the women Yates targeted were living high-risk lives on the margins of society, the initial response from both the public and the media was muted in ways that would later cause deep institutional reckoning.
That changed on August 26th, 1997. On that single day, investigators discovered the remains of two young women.
Jennifer Joseph was 16 years old. Heather Hernandez was 20. Finding two victims on the same day forced a pattern recognition that could no longer be dismissed or minimized.
Someone was systematically hunting women in Spokane. This wasn’t a series of unrelated incidents. This was a predator operating with regularity and purpose.
By late December of 1997, the Spokane Police Department and the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office formed a joint task force dedicated to the serial murder investigation.
They started with four detectives. As the scope of the investigation grew and more potential victims were identified, the team expanded to eight.
Tips flooded in by the thousands, every one of which had to be documented, evaluated, and run down.
It was exhausting, painstaking work. The task force also operated under a cloud that Sergeant Cal Walker, who led the investigation, would later describe with visible frustration.
Early on, Walker heard the criticism openly. People were asking why the department was spending time and money investigating the deaths of women who were prostitutes and drug addicts.
The implication was clear. These victims didn’t matter enough to justify the expense. Walker pushed back against that attitude, but he understood the reality it created.
If the victims had been teachers, he said, the dollars would have flowed. That disparity in public sympathy didn’t change the fact that a killer was operating freely and the investigators kept working because the bodies kept appearing and because they believed every victim deserved the same effort regardless of how she lived.
And then came the lead that should have ended everything years earlier. A witness came forward with a crucial detail about Jennifer Joseph.
The 16-year-old whose death had helped trigger the task force’s creation. The witness reported that Joseph had last been seen getting into a white Corvette on East Sprag Avenue.
A white Corvette is not a subtle car. It’s distinctive, memorable, the kind of vehicle that turns heads.
It should have been easy to track down. And in fact, the task force nearly found it.
During the active investigation, while detectives were canvasing the area and stopping vehicles that matched the description, Robert Lee Yates was actually pulled over by police while driving his white 1977 Corvette.
An officer conducted a field interview and wrote up a report on the stop. And then the report was filed away because someone reading the officer’s handwriting interpreted the make of the car as Camaro instead of Corvette.
One word, one misread letter on a handwritten field report. And Robert Lee Yates Jr.
Drove away from the closest brush with capture he would have for the next two years.
The task force kept looking for the white Corvette described by the witness. They didn’t know they’d already had it and let it go.
More months passed, more women died. The pressure on the investigators was immense, compounded by the knowledge that the killer was still active and that every week without an arrest was a week another victim might disappear.
Then they caught the break that mattered. Investigators managed to track down the white Corvette, which Yates had sold to another owner after the heat intensified.
When forensic technicians examined the car in January of 2000, [music] they found a chain of physical evidence that linked it directly to Jennifer Joseph.
Carpet fibers from the vehicle matched fibers recovered from Joseph’s shoes and from a towel discovered near her body.
A pearl button lodged in the car’s interior matched a button from her blouse. [music] And blood stains found in the vehicle produced a DNA match to Joseph.
The evidence was conclusive. On April 18th, 2000, Robert Lee Yates Jr. Was arrested without incident as he drove to his shift at the Kaiser aluminum plant.
The decorated Army helicopter pilot, the devoted father of five, the churchgoing man who had never been heard to swear, was taken into custody and charged with serial murder.
The Spokane community was stunned. The South Hill neighbors were stunned. His co-workers were stunned.
Nobody who knew Robert Yates socially could reconcile the man they’d barbecued with and borrowed tools from with the person described in the charges.
And that’s when the investigation turned a corner that nobody had anticipated. Because the Spokane killings were only the most recent chapter.
The story reached back much further than anyone had imagined, all the way to a swimming hole near Walaw Wala to a summer afternoon in 1975 that had gone unanswered for a quarter of a century.
We’re about to get into the plea deal that cracked the 1975 case wide open.
If you’re still here, subscribe so you don’t miss our next deep dive. The deal.
With Robert Lee Yates sitting in a Spokane County jail cell, [music] prosecutors faced a decision whose consequences would ripple backward through [music] decades and across the entire state of Washington.
Spokane County prosecutor Steve Tucker had Yates on eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder. In Washington State at the time, aggravated first-degree murder was the only charge that carried the death penalty.
On paper, it looked like a straightforward [music] case. A serial killer caught red-handed with DNA evidence, carpet [music] fibers, and a trail of bodies stretching across the region.
The kind of case that juries don’t hesitate on. But Tucker had a problem that wasn’t visible from the outside.
He consulted with judicial experts who told him the aggravating factors he [music] planned to present to the jury, specifically robbery and common scheme or plan, might not be strong enough to guarantee a death verdict under Washington’s legal standards.
The threshold for death penalty aggravators was precise [music] and demanding. There was a genuine possibility that a jury could convict Yates of murder without finding the aggravating factors sufficient to impose death, which would mean Tucker had spent months and millions of dollars on a capital trial that ended [music] with the same life sentence a plea deal could secure in a week.
Tucker made a calculation that would generate enormous controversy. Instead of rolling the dice on a death sentence he wasn’t certain he could obtain, he offered Yates a deal.
The terms were stark. [music] Plead guilty to everything. Confess to every killing, not just the ones prosecutors could already prove, but any others Yates had committed.
Cooperate fully with investigators. Help recover any remains that hadn’t been found. Lead police to victims they didn’t know about.
In exchange for all of that, the death penalty comes off the table. Yates, staring down the possibility of lethal injection, took the deal.
And then he started talking. What came out of those conversations shook investigators across Washington state.
Yates didn’t just confirm the Spokane murders they already had evidence for. He confessed to a total of 10 killings in Spokane County.
And then he went [music] further. He revealed three additional murders that no law enforcement agency had ever connected to him.
One was the 1988 killing of 23-year-old Stacy Elizabeth Han in Scadget County. Han’s skeletal remains had been found months after her death, and the case had gone cold without a suspect ever being identified.
The other two were Patrick Allen Oliver and Susan Patricia Savage. Wala Wala, Washington, Mil Creek.
July 13th, 1975, 25 years earlier. [music] His very first killings. The reaction among law enforcement was immediate and visceral.
The Wallawala County Sheriff’s Office had spent 25 years trying to solve those murders. Investigators had contacted Interpol.
They’d considered professional hits and gang connections. [music] They tested and discarded suspect after suspect.
And the entire time, the answer had been a 23-year-old corrections officer who’d worked at their own state penitentiary, [music] bought ammunition from a local store, and gone target shooting at the same creek where the victims died.
When Sheriff Mike Humphre in Walaw Wala learned that Yates had been living and working in his jurisdiction in 1975, the pieces fell into place with devastating clarity.
Humphre laid out what his investigation had uncovered after Yates’s arrest. Yates had purchased a box of three 57 caliber ammunition from a local sporting goods store 10 days before the killings.
The caliber and brand of that ammunition matched the bullets that had been sitting in the evidence room since 1975.
The same slugs that generations of investigators had examined and re-examined and never been able to trace.
The sheriff’s office confirmed that Yates regularly frequented the Mill Creek area for target practice.
And the handgun itself, the weapon Yates had sold in Oak Harbor in 1976, had been tracked through four subsequent owners across the states, across the state.
Investigators recovered it and placed it in evidence. 25 years. The answer had been waiting for a context that finally arrived.
The slugs matched. The caliber matched, the location matched. All of it had been sitting in an evidence room in Walaw Wala, perfectly preserved, while Robert Lee Yates flew Blackhawk helicopters and attended parent teacher conferences.
On October 19th and 20th, 2000, Robert Lee Yates Jr. Stood [music] in a Spokane County courtroom and pleaded guilty to 13 counts of firstdegree murder and one count of attempted murder.
As the presiding judge read the names of each victim aloud, Yates broke down and wept.
As part of the agreement, he led investigators to the body of Melody Murphin, one of his Spokane victims.
Murfin had been buried in a flower bed directly beneath the bedroom window of the Yates family home on South Hill.
She had been there for years, decomposing in the soil of a suburban garden while Yates’s children played in the yard above her and his wife tended the flower beds.
On October 26th, 2000, Judge Richard Schroeder imposed the maximum sentence the plea deal allowed.
48 years and 4 months in state prison, plus a fine of $620,000. Every case was closed.
Every count was resolved, including the one from a summer afternoon in 1975 that nobody had been able to explain for a quarter of a century.
But for the families of Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage, the closure that arrived in that Spokane courtroom didn’t feel the way they had imagined it would.
Not after 25 years, not delivered like this. 25 years of cemetery reunions. The sentencing hearing for Robert Lee Yates Jr.
Was one of the most emotionally raw courtroom proceedings in Washington state history. 17 family members representing 11 of Yates’s victims stood before the court and spoke [music] directly to the man who had destroyed their lives.
For the Oliver and Savage families, this moment had been 25 years in the making.
They had waited longer than any of the other families in that courtroom. Their grief was the oldest, the most weathered, the most calcified by time and unanswered questions.
And yet the resolution they received was arguably the most bitter. They weren’t here because a detective [music] had cracked the case.
They weren’t here because forensic science had produced a breakthrough after years of careful analysis.
They were here because a serial killer had offered up their loved ones names as currency in a deal to save his own life.
Patrick and Susan hadn’t been solved. [music] They’d been traded. Chris Oliver, Patrick’s brother, stood in that courtroom and looked directly at Yates.
[music] And he asked the question that carried two and a half decades of accumulated grief behind every word.
Do you have any idea what it’s like to go to a cemetery for a family reunion for 25 years?
[music] Think about what that sentence contains. 25 years of Thanksgiving dinners where Patrick’s chair was empty.
25 years of watching his brothers grow older, get married, have children, while Patrick [music] stayed forever 21.
25 years of explaining to nieces and nephews why they have an uncle they’ll never meet.
25 years of the specific grinding weight of unresolved grief. The kind that never fully settles because you don’t know who to be angry at.
You don’t know why it happened. And you can’t even construct a narrative that makes sense of the loss.
Chris Oliver also told the court that he never thought he’d actually meet the person who killed his brother.
[music] For 25 years, the killer had been an abstraction, a shadowy figure in a mystery with no resolution, a phantom who existed only in the negative space of what the family didn’t [music] know.
And now here he was, a middle-aged man in an orange jumpsuit crying in a courtroom.
Patrick’s other brother, Don Oliver, aimed his fury not at Yates, but at the system that had made this outcome possible.
“Life must be cheap in Eastern Washington,” [music] he told the court. Don believed Robert Lee Yates deserved to die for what he had done.
The plea bargain that removed that possibility felt to the Oliver family like a second act of violence.
First, their brother was murdered. Then his murderer was allowed to barter a confession for his own continued existence.
The deal reduced Patrick and Susan’s deaths to leverage in a negotiation. A line item in a serial killer’s costbenefit analysis.
David Savage, Susan’s brother, took a different approach. He didn’t rage at the system or make broad statements about justice.
He made a [music] specific demand. He told the court that Robert Lee Yates owed his family a precise explanation of the events that surrounded the shooting of Susan and Patrick.
Not a generic apology, not courtroom tears. An explanation. After 25 years of not knowing anything, the Savage family didn’t just want to know who had killed Susan.
They wanted to know why. What happened at that creek? Why did he approach them?
Why those two people? Why that particular afternoon? Was it planned or was it random?
Did he say anything to them before he shot them? They never received that answer.
Yates never explained the 1975 killings. He never provided a motive. He never described what happened at Mil Creek in any detail that reached the public record.
Investigators later suggested that the encounter may have been random, that Yates stumbled upon Patrick and Susan while in the area for target practice, and that some kind of confrontation occurred.
Sheriff Humphre said he didn’t believe the killings were planned, but the specifics of what transpired beneath those popular trees on July 13th, 1975 died with Yates’s silence on the subject.
What Yates did offer, as required by the terms of his plea agreement, was an apology.
Standing before the court, he named each of his victims individually and expressed remorse. He began with the oldest names on his list.
Most of all, to the families and friends of Susan Savage, I am sorry. To the family and friends of Patrick Oliver, I am sorry.
Words spoken 25 years after the fact, delivered by a man who was uttering them as a contractual obligation within a legal transaction designed to spare his own life.
The families had to sit there and receive them. And then came the moment that silence the entire courtroom.
After Yates entered his guilty plea, Susan Savage’s mother, a woman who had spent 25 years not knowing who killed her daughter, who had visited Mountain View Cemetery more times than she could count, who had lived through the specific agony of a grief that could never find its target, stood up.
She walked across the courtroom. She didn’t approach Robert Lee Yates Jr. She walked past the defense table, past the serial killer who had murdered her child, and she stopped in front of his father, Robert Yates, Senior, an elderly man sitting in the gallery watching his own son plead guilty to 13 murders.
Susan Savage’s mother told Robert Yates Senior that she was sorry, the mother of the victim, offering comfort to the father of the killer.
After a quarter century of carrying a weight that would have broken anyone, her instinct in that courtroom was compassion for another parents pain.
Yates’s own family was shattered by the proceedings. His daughter Sasha, who was 25 years old at the time, addressed the court as well.
She said that no one deserves to be killed like that. She said she needed to understand why, just like the victim’s families did.
And she told her father in front of the judge and the families and the press that she still loved him even after everything.
Robert Yates senior, the killer’s father, spoke as well. He addressed the families of the victims directly.
He told them he was sorry they all had broken hearts. The hearing concluded, the sentence was imposed 48 years.
The families went home and the question that had defined the Oliver and Savage family’s lives for 25 years was finally officially answered.
But answered is not the same as resolved. The anger didn’t dissipate with the verdict.
The grief [music] didn’t shrink to a manageable size. The lost years didn’t return. And the knowledge that this answer had arrived not through justice, but through commerce.
A killer’s confession bartered for a killer’s survival left a residue that no prison sentence, not even one measured in centuries, could fully scrub clean.
The plea deal that resolved the Oliver and Savage murders, did not sit well with senior officials across Washington state.
State Attorney General Christine Gregoire stated her position plainly. Her office did not plea bargain death penalty cases.
Full stop. She believed a serial killing clearly constituted a common scheme or plan which should have been more than sufficient as an aggravating factor to pursue execution under Washington law.
In Gregoire’s assessment, prosecutor Tucker had surrendered more leverage than the case required. Even within the law enforcement community that had worked to catch Yates, the bargain generated open disscent.
Spokane County Sheriff Mark Sturk, whose own officers had participated in the task force, admitted publicly that part of him wished Tucker [music] had gone to trial seeking death.
“If there was anybody who deserved the death penalty,” Sturk said it was Robert Lee Yates.
The sheriff added that he’d seen the crime scene photographs from the 1975 Walaw Wala murders for the first time during the sentencing proceedings, and the youth of the two victims had visibly shaken him.
They were so young, he said. On the other side of the argument, Walaw Wala County Prosecutor Jim Nagel pointed out a practical reality.
Washington State did not have the death penalty in 1975 when Patrick and Susan were killed.
Even if the plea deal had never happened and Yates had been tried separately in Walaw Wala County for the Oliver Savage murders, the maximum penalty available would have been life in prison, not execution.
For Nagel, the Spokane deal produced the same result his own office could have achieved with the added benefit of resolving the case without the cost and uncertainty of a trial.
The confession also had national and international ramifications that went far beyond one courtroom in Eastern Washington.
When investigators mapped Yates’s [music] confessed timeline, a disturbing picture emerged. His first known murders were in 1975, his last in 1998.
That was a 23-year span of killing. But within that span, there were enormous [music] gaps.
13 years between 1975 and 1988, 8 years between 1988 and 1996. Those silences were suspicious to everyone who studied them.
Investigators from roughly 20 different law enforcement agencies across Washington state contacted the task force with unsolved cases they wanted cross referenced against Yates’s known movements and locations.
35 agencies from other states did the same. And in a development that took the investigation international, German federal police reached out to American investigators to explore unsolved killings near the US Army bases where Yates had been stationed during his military tours in Europe.
If Yates had killed in Washington and in Scadget County and in Spokane, the reasoning went, “What had he done during his years in Germany or Somalia or Haiti?”
Gregoire gave voice to the question that haunted the investigation most deeply. Authorities, she said, remained not convinced that they had all the victims.
The gaps in Yates’s timeline were too large. The silence was too prolonged. The behavioral profile didn’t fit a man who kills at 23, stops for 13 years, kills once more at 36, stops again for 8 years, and then begins a concentrated spree in his mid-4s.
Serial violence rarely works that way. The pattern suggested not inactivity but concealment. Crimes committed in other jurisdictions in other states, possibly in other countries where nobody had ever thought to look for a connection to a decorated army aviator with a spotless service record.
As part of his plea deal, Yates had passed a polygraph examination in which he denied involvement in any additional killings beyond those he had confessed to.
Whether that polygraph settles the matter is a question each person has to answer for themselves.
This was a test administered to a man who had spent more than two decades hiding a secret life of murder behind a mask of decency.
So convincing that his own wife and children never suspected a thing. Former Walawwala County Prosecutor Arthur Edgars offered one of the more unsettling interpretations of the 1975 [music] murders in the broader arc of Yates’s criminal life.
He characterized them as the point where Yates was cutting his teeth. The starting line, the place where a 23-year-old corrections officer from Whidby Island discovered what he was capable of.
Under that reading, Patrick Oliver and Susan Savage [music] weren’t just victims of a random act of violence.
They were, in a terrible sense, a beginning. The place where a serial killer first learned the mechanics of murder and the exhilarating discovery that he could get away with it.
The last irony. Pierce County on the western side of Washington State refused to be bound by the Spokane plea bargain.
Prosecutors in Pierce County charged Yates with the aggravated first-degree murders of two additional victims, Melinda Mercer in 1997 and Connie Laontaine Ellis in 1998.
These were killings that fell within their jurisdiction but outside the scope of Tucker’s deal.
In September of 2002, a Pierce County jury heard the evidence, deliberated, and convicted Robert Lee Yates Jr.
On both counts. On October 3rd, 2002, he was sentenced to death. For the Oliver and Savage families, and for all the families who felt the Spokane plea deal had denied them the full weight of justice, the Pierce County death sentence [music] offered something the plea bargain had not.
Finality. True accountability. The state of Washington was going to execute the man who had taken their loved ones.
Yates [music] spent 16 years on death row, filing appeals and exhausting [music] legal remedies.
In 2007, the Washington Supreme Court upheld his death verdict. [music] For over a decade, it appeared that the ultimate punishment the families had wanted would eventually be carried out, just through a different county’s prosecution.
For the families of every victim, [music] the Pierce County sentence carried a weight the Spokane deal never could.
Somewhere on death row, the man who had killed their loved ones was facing the same kind of ending he had inflicted on others.
It wasn’t peace exactly, but it was something closer to proportional justice than a plea bargain could ever deliver.
Then on October 11th, 2018, the Washington Supreme Court issued a ruling that had nothing specifically to do with Robert Lee Yates, but that changed his fate entirely.
The court declared Washington’s death penalty unconstitutional as applied, citing statistical evidence of racial bias in its administration.
Every death sentence in the state was vacated. Every condemned prisoner’s sentence was commuted, including Yates.
Robert Lee Yates Jr.’s death sentence became life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He will spend every remaining day of his life behind bars.
[music] He will die in a prison cell, but he will die on his own biological clock, not the states.
And here is where the geography of this case delivers [music] its final bitter symmetry.
Robert Lee Yates Jr. Is incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walaw Wallala, Washington, the same stonewalled institution where he worked as a 23-year-old corrections officer in 1975.
The same prison where he was employed when he walked into a local store and bought a box of.357 caliber ammunition, drove out to Mil Creek on a Sunday afternoon, and ended the lives of two young people who had done nothing to deserve what happened to them.
He serves his sentence just miles from the creek where Patrick and Susan died on that July afternoon.
Just miles from the popular trees where [music] they spread out their picnic. Just miles from Mountain View Cemetery where their families gathered every year for a quarter of a century [music] where Chris Oliver kept going back for family reunions that took place over headstones instead of dinner tables.
Where Susan Savage’s mother carried a grief she never let harden into bitterness, even when she had every right to let it consume her.
The families waited 25 years for an answer. When it finally arrived, it came not as a triumph of detective work or forensic science, but as a transaction between lawyers.
A serial killer’s confession bartered for a serial killer survival delivered to families who had earned something far better than what they received.
The case of Patrick Allen Oliver and Susan Patricia Savage was officially solved on October 19th, 2000 when Robert Lee Yates Jr.
Included their names in a list of confessions [music] designed to keep himself alive. After 25 years of silence, the wh was answered.
The how was reconstructed. The why never was and almost certainly never will be. Patrick Allen Oliver was 21 [music] years old.
He had studied at the sorebone. He had an honor role record. He was going to be a doctor.
Susan Patricia Savage was 22 years old. She had just graduated from Washington State University.
[music] She was home for the summer in the town that raised her. They were childhood friends who drove out to a creek on a warm July afternoon.
[music] And they were taken from everyone who loved them by a man who spent the next two decades pretending to be everything he wasn’t.
Cold case redemption doesn’t exist to tell the stories of killers. We tell killer stories only because we have to.
Because understanding how a case was finally solved means understanding the person who committed the [music] crime and the circumstances that eventually brought them to account.
But the story itself, the one that matters, the one that deserves to endure, belongs [music] to the people who were lost and to the families who refused to forget them even when the world had moved on and the newspapers had stopped writing about it.
And the case file gathered dust on a shelf and the cemetery was the only place left where anyone still acknowledged what had happened.
Patrick Oliver, Susan Savage. Now you know their names. [music] If you believe these stories deserve to be told, subscribe to Cold Case Redemption.
We’ll see you in the next one.
