By the River's Edge

Chapter 1: Prologue

Overview

The prologue opens on a Boeing jet heading from Seattle to Bangkok in the winter of 2000. In a window seat, a quiet passenger folds into himself—unassuming, awkward, and accustomed to being dismissed. At forty-eight, he’s small-framed, with long dark hair and oversized glasses, and he’s been dressing as a woman off and on for a while. But this trip is different. This trip is meant to end everything: the confusion, the shame, the life he was forced into at birth.

A Childhood of Violence and Labels

Growing up in rural Omak and Spokane, Washington, he learned early that being seen as different came with a cost. His mother beat him when she caught him wearing her clothes. His father and older brother inflicted wounds he could only speak about in therapy. The world called him weirdo, faggot, freak of nature—words that left deeper bruises than any fist.

But the biological reality was even more complicated. Born with both male and female reproductive organs, he was labeled a “morphodite,” then “hermaphrodite,” then “intersex” as the language shifted. None of it made him feel less like a joke—God’s cruel joke, as he saw it. At birth, the family physician made a coin-flip decision: suture the vagina, assign male. From that moment, he was his parents’ second son. A boy who would become a man, no matter what it took. Even if it had to be beaten into him.

The Surgery and the Reckoning

Mental health counselors required a full year of preparation before they’d approve surgery. He’d been good. Very good. And now, on that flight, he had an appointment with one of the world’s best surgeons in Bangkok. The operation would undo what he saw as God’s mistake—gender-reassignment surgery, a procedure made famous by Christine Jorgensen and Renée Richards, but still deeply controversial in a country that offered no legal protections for transgender people.

What happened on the operating table was brutal: a grueling ten hours, near-fatal bleeding. He later told listeners that dying wouldn’t have been the worst outcome—not compared to the life he’d lived.

The Passenger Who Returned

When the soft-spoken woman with the same oversized glasses flew back home to her growing herd of cats and guns, she left behind a bucket of blood and slivers of discarded anatomy in a Bangkok medical waste container. Right where, she’d insist, the SOB belonged. She’d slayed the monster. The operation was the proof she’d offer to anyone who caught up with what Douglas had done.

Donna was not to blame. The reinvention was calculated, permanent, and risky—not just to align her body with her identity, but to keep her safe from everything lurking in her past.

Key Takeaways

• The chapter introduces a protagonist born intersex, assigned male at birth, who endures decades of family violence, medical confusion, and social ostracization.
• The decision to undergo gender-reassignment surgery in Bangkok at age 48 is framed as both a personal liberation and a strategic reinvention.
• The surgery nearly kills the patient, but the story reframes it as a successful slaying of the “monster” that haunted the former self.
• The shift from “he” to “she” in the final paragraphs marks the transition from Douglas to Donna—a deliberate, permanent break from the past.

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Chapter 2: Chapter One

Overview

The opening shows survival sex work along East Sprague Avenue in Spokane, 1990. No woman enters this life through ambition or childhood dreams. Yet there they were, night after night, working a gritty stretch of blacktop that cut through the city's ragged edge. The Spokane Street Motel served as their landing pad, a faded mid-century relic with rust streaks and peeling paint, its neon arrow still pointing hopefully toward an entrance that now welcomed the broken and lost rather than weary travelers.

The women who lived there formed what they called the Circle, a bond built on shared danger. They knew the threats intimately: disease, pregnancy, addiction, violence from johns and boyfriends alike. They wrote down license plate numbers. They memorized details about the men who picked them up. They watched each other's backs because cops offered no help, and their men—whether pimps or boyfriends—seemed more concerned about the money than their safety.

A Discovery on the River

Catherine Crisler, sixty-seven, kept a simple promise to herself: take a walk, breathe fresh air, keep moving. On February 22, 1990, that routine led her to something horrifying along the Spokane River Centennial Trail. What first appeared as a floral-patterned blanket wadded off the shoulder revealed itself to be the body of an African American woman, wearing only a gold necklace, dumped near the riverbank. Catherine stayed calm enough to call her husband and then the police.

Detective Jim Lundgren, a thirty-nine-year-old lifer who lived and breathed law enforcement, arrived at the scene and later returned to the station to find a message from Linda Rose, manager of the Spokane Street Motel. A guest named Yolanda Sapp was missing. The connection came quickly. Lundgren pulled Yolanda's file: twenty-six years old, eleven arrests for prostitution over four years, the most recent just three weeks earlier.

The Brutal Details

The autopsy revealed Yolanda died from three small-caliber gunshots to the back, fired while she lay face down. The bullets damaged her heart and lungs before exiting through her upper chest. Needle tracks marked both legs, evidence of a serious drug habit. Her body had been moved some four miles from where she typically worked, an impossible distance for a woman without a car.

Detectives Nick Stanley and Bruce Nelson interviewed Yolanda's boyfriend, Darrel Thomas, known as "Doc." He'd been searching for her since she didn't return home at 2:00 a.m. on February 21. He'd called jails, hospitals, and friends. He'd alerted Linda Rose that something was terribly wrong. When Stanley broke the news of her murder, Doc collapsed onto the bed, cycling through tears and rage for fifteen minutes before he could be interviewed.

He told them Yolanda was smart and careful. She insisted on condoms, carried scissors for protection, and knew the dangers of the street better than most. She'd come to Spokane from Seattle after the man she ran with there was murdered. She'd left two children, ages six and nine, with her mother. Doc signed a consent form for a room search without hesitation, and the detectives noted blood spatter on the headboard and wall—likely from drug use, they thought, not violence.

The Circle Grows Tighter

News of murder spread fast among the women who worked the streets. Linda Rose felt it in her bones when Yolanda didn't return. Doc's anguished face confirmed it. The cries of another working girl sealed it.

Nickie Lowe, thirty-four, had lived a few doors down from Yolanda at the motel. They'd been in the Circle together. Now fear consumed her. She knew the score. She knew about the freaks out there, about the Green River killer who'd left clusters of murdered women south of Seattle. "I'm going to be next," she told her boyfriend, Gorden Lucas. He pushed back, but she couldn't shake the feeling. She repeated it: "I'm next."

Months later, another prostitute, thirty-eight-year-old Kathy Brisbois, would stumble into a sheriff's department van outside a mental health center, reeking of alcohol but sincere in her desire to get clean and get back to her three daughters. Before anyone could help her, she was gone.

Key Takeaways

• The chapter establishes the harsh reality of survival sex work in Spokane, centered on the Spokane Street Motel and the women of the Circle who looked out for each other
• Yolanda Sapp's murder on February 20-21, 1990, is the central crime: shot three times in the back while face down, her body dumped four miles from where she worked
• The investigation begins with Doc, Yolanda's boyfriend, who appears genuinely grief-stricken and cooperative, though the detectives note suspicious blood spatter in their room
• The murder triggers profound fear among other sex workers, who see it as part of a pattern of violence against women like them, connecting it to unsolved cases in Seattle, Southern California, and Vancouver
• The chapter hints at further violence with Kathy Brisbois's introduction, setting up a broader, darker story to come

Chapter 3: Chapter Two

Overview

Detectives Nick Stanley and Bruce Nelson understood a fundamental truth as they sifted through Yolanda Sapp’s police file: a criminal rap sheet tells you nothing about the person behind it. Yet they had to dig into that side of her life anyway, because somewhere in those harsh records might lie the clue to how she ended up naked and shot dead on the banks of the Spokane River. They knew that reducing a woman to her worst moments was no true portrait, and that the way her body had been dumped—like so much refuse—said everything about the killer, not the victim.

The files they inherited revealed a young woman who refused to back down in a world that had been brutal to her. Arrests for shoplifting, sometimes after scuffles with security or police. Charges for fighting in the street with men and other sex workers. One citation described how she flashed a breast at a john while lifting his wallet from his back pocket. Her relationship with Doc Thomas was volatile and drug-fueled—she told police he’d struck her in the face multiple times; a motel manager found syringes in their room after kicking them out. Doc’s probation officer even alluded to reports that Yolanda had stabbed both Doc and a client. Tough. Terrifying at times.

But here’s the thing that the detectives kept front of mind, especially Detective Lundgren: no one was victim-blaming. Being a sex worker was illegal, sure, but it wasn’t an excuse to dismiss her murder as “cost of doing business.” Yolanda sometimes stole from clients to feed her addiction. One john reported that she and another woman tried to rob him and, when he fled, they ran him over with their car. She herself had reported being raped at knifepoint by a Gonzaga student after they argued over a fee. So yes, she was complicated, and the investigation had to hold all of that without judgment.

The Stories Behind the Rap Sheet

What the public saw in The Spokesman-Review on February 23, 1990, was grim: “Detectives today will attempt to reconstruct the final hours of the life of a Spokane prostitute whose nude, bullet-riddled body was found … on an embankment above the Spokane River.” The article listed eleven arrests over four years. The only humanizing voice came from Linda Rose, the motel owner who described Yolanda and Doc as a couple trying to straighten out their lives. They’d been cutting back on drugs, keeping court commitments, and only occasionally turning tricks “to get money for food.” Linda told the paper that the couple talked about a brighter future once Doc received a financial settlement for a neck injury. “They always talked about how they were going to get a house and get off the streets. They would get so happy talking about it.”

That image—two people dreaming of a way out—sat in stark contrast to the photo that ran alongside the article: Yolanda’s sheet-covered body being carried on a stretcher up the north bank of the river. For the detectives investigating, every new lead felt like a short, pulled thread.

A Life of Struggle and Love

Few people outside East Sprague Avenue knew the other side of Yolanda Sapp. She was the mother of two little girls, whom she loved deeply. Their father had been murdered in Seattle. Her mother, who lived near Seattle, told detectives that Yolanda had tried repeatedly to get clean and stable enough to make a home for them. Most of the women on the streets were doing their best—and that was that.

But there was a darker thread from that same conversation. Yolanda had called her mother six months earlier, desperate and terrified. She owed money to a drug dealer named Chico and his partner, Mary. During that call, Chico held a gun to Yolanda’s head, forcing her to explain where the money went. She lied, saying she’d sent it to her mother for the kids. Her mother, like so many parents of children who’d used up a million chances, went along with the story. Yolanda told her: “If anything ever happens to me, check out these two people.”

That lead—a possible drug debt—joined a pile of others. The relationship between prostitution and drug dealing was symbiotic and tense. Dealers didn’t offer credit for long.

Following the Threads

A maintenance worker named Robert White gave detectives their most promising lead. He’d stopped at Trudeau’s Marina around 11:15 p.m. on Tuesday night, February 20, to admire the boats. Yolanda waved at him from her corner. They exchanged a few words—he smelled alcohol on her breath—and then a dark-colored, late-model station wagon pulled up. Yolanda climbed in next to a man in his mid-thirties with dark hair and a dark jacket. The car drove south and disappeared. Stanley noted wryly in his report: “He did not see the vehicle turn in any direction and no longer paid any attention to what was going on.”

Other leads fizzled just as quickly. A Spokane Valley man harassed prostitutes from a white Chevy sedan, flashing a badge and posing as a cop—but his tires didn’t match the treads near Yolanda’s body. A rental car returned with a suspicious bloodstain in the trunk turned out to have been returned the day before she went missing. A wood-molding plant employee reported hearing gunshots near where Yolanda was last seen, but when he and a coworker drove to check it out, they found nothing.

And then there was Doc.

The Unraveling of Doc Thomas

Doc insisted he’d last seen Yolanda at 11:00 p.m. Tuesday night. But witness after witness contradicted him. A bail bondsman named John Graves said he saw both Yolanda and Doc together the following afternoon, asking for forty dollars for rent and food. That placed Doc with her after he claimed she was already gone. Another tip put them outside a bar earlier Tuesday evening, with Yolanda wearing different clothes than the ones Doc had described her in that night. Most damning: a witness placed Doc at a drug house with three other men at 2:00 a.m. Wednesday—just hours after he claimed to be frantically searching for Yolanda. The witness noted he had a pistol tucked into his waistband, contradicting Doc’s earlier claim that he didn’t own a gun.

So the police brought Doc in for a polygraph. The examiner ran through the questions, eyes on the unfurling graph paper. The result was conclusive: Doc passed. When he returned to the motel, he told Linda Rose the news. “Passed it.”

And just like that, as far as persons of interest in Yolanda Sapp’s murder, there were none.

Key Takeaways

• The detectives approached Yolanda’s case with empathy, refusing to let her criminal history or sex work define her worth or dismiss her murder.
• Yolanda’s life was a tangle of struggle and love: a mother fighting addiction and poverty, caught between violent relationships and the dream of a better future.
• The investigation produced multiple leads—a station wagon driver, a drug dealer named Chico, a suspicious rental car—but every thread frayed into nothing.
• Doc Thomas was the prime suspect despite his public grief, but a polygraph cleared him, leaving the case at a dead end.

Chapter 4: Chapter Three

Overview

A Sunday morning jogger’s routine run under Spokane’s Greene Street Bridge turned into a grim discovery on March 25, 1990. Ron Copeland, still adjusting to life after a move from Tulsa, spotted what he first took for a mannequin slumped against a guardrail. It was the partially nude body of a woman, a single wound to her chest, blood still wet on her skin. For detectives already haunted by the recent murder of Yolanda Sapp, the scene carried an unmistakable echo of violence and humiliation—another young woman dumped in a public but secluded spot, stripped nearly bare, left like a message.

A Familiar Pattern Emerges

Detective Nick Stanley felt the weight of déjà vu as he examined the body. The victim was Nickie Inez Lowe, thirty-four, reported missing by her mother just hours earlier. The parallels with Yolanda’s case were chilling: both women were shot, their bodies stripped or half-dressed, and left in locations where anyone might find them. Stanley knew better than to officially link the cases yet, but the signature of a killer who viewed these women as disposable was already written in the scene.

Piecing Together Nickie’s Final Night

Stanley and Detective Ron Graves drove to the home of Nickie’s mother, Diane Matney, where Nickie lived with her boyfriend of eleven years, Gorden Lucas. The identification process was brutal. Diane hesitated, searching for any mistake in the coroner’s Polaroid. Gorden, coming up from the basement, took one look and confirmed: “That’s Nickie.”

Diane’s portrait of her daughter was raw and painful. Nickie had struggled with dyslexia and low self-esteem, dropped out of high school, and turned to prostitution to fuel a drug habit. A near-deadly strangulation by a client hadn’t stopped her. In the days before her death, Nickie had voiced fear to both Gorden and Diane—fear that something might happen to her out on the streets. But the fear wasn’t enough to keep her away.

Gorden explained that Nickie had asked him to drop her off near the Covered Wagon Tavern the night before, planning to meet a client named “Al.” She promised to be back within a couple of hours. When she didn’t show, Gorden waited at the tavern until 2 a.m., then stayed in the parking lot until dawn. By 5 a.m., he went home and called police.

The Mystery of Al

The mention of Al immediately sharpened the detectives’ focus. Gorden described a married man in a white pickup who had a crush on Nickie, producing a stack of love letters and heart-shaped balloons as evidence. Diane added that Al was short and stocky, dark-haired, possibly Hispanic, and had “something odd about his voice.”

Using return addresses from the letters, detectives tracked Al to Deer Park, about nineteen miles away. He readily agreed to talk. He admitted knowing Nickie for two months and claimed they’d last met on Friday night—the night before she disappeared. They ate a quick meal, then had sex in a shed at the lumberyard where he worked. He even directed police to a used condom as proof. But the clothes he described Nickie wearing didn’t match what she had on when her body was found. Gorden had given a different account. Someone was lying—or mistaken.

Al’s wife corroborated his alibi: he’d been home all Saturday with a bad back and asleep by 8 p.m. A search of his house, truck, and locker turned up nothing incriminating—just a note reading “I love pussy” taped under his visor. A polygraph that same day showed no deception. The lead was still alive, but it was fraying.

Autopsy and a Break in a Dumpster

The pathologist’s findings were stark: a single .22-caliber bullet had entered Nickie’s chest, severing her aorta and lodging in her spine. Death was instantaneous. Abrasions on her back matched being dragged over the guardrail. Cocaine was present in her system, ingested about an hour before she died.

That same day, a man scavenging for aluminum cans behind Royal Upholstery found Nickie’s red wallet in a dumpster. Police rushed to the scene and recovered twenty-one items: the wallet, her blue-and-white athletic shoes, a syringe, a tube of lubricant, welfare forms—and fibers that appeared to match samples from Yolanda Sapp’s case. The dumpster sat not far from Trudeau’s Marina and the Covered Wagon Tavern, places Nickie had worked. Everything was bagged and sent to the state crime lab. The detectives couldn’t yet see how the pieces would fit, but the dumpster had given them a glimmer of something solid.

Key Takeaways

• Nickie Lowe’s murder closely mirrored Yolanda Sapp’s: single gunshot, partial nudity, body dumped in a public but secluded spot, reinforcing fears of a serial predator.
• The prime suspect, “Al,” passed a polygraph and had an alibi, leaving the investigation without a clear direction.
• The discovery of Nickie’s wallet in a dumpster with fibers possibly linking to Yolanda’s case offered a potential forensic breakthrough.
• The chapter underscores the vulnerability of women working the streets and the difficulty of protecting them even when they sense danger.