Strategies Are Revealed In Serial-Murder Trial

A boyfriend did it . . . or a mystery man who left nothing behind but a semen stain - and Carol Marie Beethe's broken body.

Whoever killed Beethe - and Mary Pohlreich and Andrea Levine - it was not George Waterfield Russell, said Miriam Schwartz, one of Russell's public defenders.

But King County prosecutors yesterday told a jury that Russell killed the Eastside women, in three of the most "heinous and depraved crimes in the history of our state."

In opening statements yesterday at Russell's trial - the first ever in King County of someone accused of being a serial killer - Schwartz said the 33-year-old Mercer Island dentist's son and high-school dropout is wrongly accused.

Russell was arrested last fall and subsequently charged with first-degree murder in the three killings. He has pleaded not guilty.

Pohlreich, 27, was found June 23, 1990, next to a trash bin outside the Black Angus restaurant in Bellevue's Crossroads area. Beethe, 35, of Bellevue, was found in her bed Aug. 9, and Levine, 24, was found in her Kingsgate apartment, also in bed, Sept. 3.

All three had been beaten and died of head injuries, and each killing was successively more brutal. Each was found nude. All had been sexually assaulted with objects, and posed after death.

Those factors, say King County prosecutors Rebecca Roe and Jeffrey Baird, led local police and national experts to conclude the women were killed by the same person.

Prosecutors say that person is Russell.

"These women had several things in common; their ages, their love of life," Roe said. "And one very bad thing: They all knew George Russell."

Roe was the first to address the jury of six men and six women, one of whom is black. Jury selection, which took several days, was thought to be especially important in this case because Russell is black, the three victims white.

But Roe made no mention of race except when discussing the Negroid hair and hair fragments found on or around the bodies.

As Roe detailed the evidence against Russell, she referred to a poster board set up in front of the jury holding large photographs of the faces of the three women.

Under Pohlreich's picture, Roe placed a picture of a pickup belonging to one of Russell's friends. In that truck, investigators found blood, which prosecutors say matched Pohlreich's and only 6 percent of the population.

The other DNA evidence Roe will present, she told the jury, is semen found in Pohlreich's vagina, which she says matched that of Russell and only 8 percent of the population.

Under Beethe's photo, Roe placed a picture of a bag in which a brand of whiskey is packaged.

Roe said some bags like that one, in which Beethe kept coins, were missing after her murder, and friends of Russell said he had the same bags.

Additionally, a diamond ring, still unrecovered, was taken from Beethe. Prosecutors said a witness will testify Russell tried to sell a ring like that.

An amethyst ring taken from Levine is a key piece of evidence in the case. Roe said the ring, traced by police to a Florida pawn shop, made its way south after Russell gave it to a woman friend.

But Schwartz said the ring recovered from Florida is not Levine's ring, and that her killer is the man who left an unidentified fingerprint at the scene of her murder.

Prosecutors say they will introduce testimony that Levine had told friends shortly before her death that Russell was bothering her.

Schwartz also offered an alternate theory on the Beethe killing. Beethe's on-again, off-again boyfriend, the original suspect in the case, is the guilty one, she said - and, interestingly enough, she added, he also hung around Papagayo's, the last place Pohlreich was seen alive.

Or, she said, the killer was a man, still unidentified, who left a semen stain on Beethe's bedspread.