Yates link is studied in Alabama, N.Y. killings

The murder of a teenage transvestite in Alabama and the slaying of a young mother in New York are among the so-far unsolved cases that police say could be linked to Robert Lee Yates Jr. of Spokane.

The sheriff in Dale County, Ala., already knows that Yates, a former Army helicopter pilot, was stationed at Fort Rucker from July 5, 1995, to April 1, 1996, when a 19-year-old transvestite was shot in the face several times with a .45-caliber pistol on Aug. 10, 1995. The man, Tarayon Corbett, was from Dothan, Ala., about 20 miles south of the post.

"The killer was looking at him at the time," Dale County Sheriff Bryant Mixon said.

The body of Corbett, wearing long hair, a dress and women's shoes and underwear, was found the next morning in a remote area alongside the Choctawhatchee River.

Mixon said that Corbett, who had considered a sex-change operation, was good at portraying himself as a woman, and whoever shot him likely did not know he was a male.

The night before his death, Corbett was seen near a nightspot in Dothan. It is unknown how he got to the remote location 10 miles away where he was shot and killed, Mixon said.

Also unclear is Corbett's involvement with drugs or prostitution, Mixon said.

Dale County has only about 10 homicides a year. Of all the leads pursued in Corbett's death, none panned out, Mixon said.

A Dale County detective has contacted the Spokane County Sheriff's Office about Yates, but Mixon says that Dale County authorities would have to get more details before linking Yates to Corbett's death.

What they want most, police said, are details about the telltale marks a killer leaves behind. The caliber of the weapon used in the deaths would help, plus Yates' shoe size, Mixon said, adding that whoever killed Corbett left a shoe print behind.

Watertown, N.Y, a city of 30,000 in upstate New York, is three miles from the U.S. Army's Fort Drum. Police there say it has only one unsolved murder, that of Tina Hosmer Smith, a 20-year-old mother, who was shot and killed on Aug. 1, 1990.

Watertown police want the same kind of details Dale County wants, but they also want confirmation that Yates was in the area.

Preliminary information indicates Yates was not stationed at Fort Drum until 1991 - a year after Smith's murder - but police and military officials said that's not conclusive yet.

Such information is not always as straightforward as it appears to be because Army personnel may be permanently stationed at one post for a period, but at the same time temporarily assigned to another post for training or maneuvers, Army officials said. And while that information is available, it takes time to track down.

Smith was killed on her way home from a bar around 4 a.m., police said.

She was walking down Goodale Street when she was shot by someone who was seen driving away in a compact car.

It was unclear from witnesses whether the person who shot Smith got out of the car, or whether she got in, but she was shot several times and was left on the sidewalk to die.

Detective Sgt. Gary Comins of the Watertown Police Department said that while she had no known ties to prostitution or drugs, she may have appeared to be vulnerable to attack.

The case puzzled police because there did not seem to be an obvious motive.

There was no sexual assault. She was not mixed up in prostitution or drugs, and she was the mother of a small child, said Watertown police Lt. Joseph Goss.

"We exhausted hundreds of leads" but nothing matched up with the shell casings recovered on the sidewalk and slugs recovered from Smith's body, Goss said.

"This is a really good lead, and we're very interested to follow up on it," said Comins.