This serial killer has psychiatrists scratching their heads

Robert Lee Yates cried for his sins.

Standing in a Spokane courtroom the other week, he spoke the names of 15 of his murder victims: one man and 14 women, some of them students, some of them prostitutes, some of them drug addicts. All of them loved.

Yates followed each name with "I am sorry," wiped his eyes and then turned his back on the hunched, tearful families gathered to witness as he was sentenced to 408 years in prison.

Only when a woman near the front stood to address Yates did I feel true words were being spoken.

"Sir, why did you do it then?" asked Kathy Lloyd, sister of victim Shawn McClenahan. "Mr. Yates? Mr. Yates?"

We all want to understand what separates us from something so heartless and evil. The families want specific answers, of course. Why them? Why theirs? But searching, too, for some lethal logic are psychiatrists, detectives and authors--those who make their living following the trail of the dead to see how it came to be. In the catalog of serial killers, Robert Lee Yates is one of the guys. He doesn't fit a profile, but not all do, experts say.

In terms of how they dealt with their victims, the timing of their killings and the weapons they used, Ted Bundy was nothing like John Wayne Gacy, who was nothing like Wayne Williams.

The only thing that holds them all together, including Yates, is their love of killing and their inability to stop.

"I am as repelled by this guy as any serial killer that I have come in contact with or studied," said Ann Rule, the Seattle-based author of true-crime books, of Yates. Rule knew and wrote about Bundy in her best-selling book "The Stranger Beside Me."

"I see an ultimate coldness in this man."

Psychiatrists have been watching Yates, too, trying to decipher meaning and motivation from the maddening normalcy of his haircut, his eyeglasses, his wife, five kids and split-level home.

Without a psychiatric evaluation or some explanation from Yates, though, it is easier for mental-health experts to say what he isn't, than what kind of creature he may be.

"He's obviously not psychotic, or you would have picked that up on TV," said Thomas Hyde, a University of Washington psychologist.

Yates lived "a pretty normal life," Hyde said--or so it seemed. He was working, he had relationships with his wife and children.

"The way his lifestyle was... ," Hyde said. "If he had a psychotic mental disorder, he wouldn't be functional and carry on in society."

Fellow UW professor Eric Trupin agreed that Yates doesn't fit the serial-killer pattern of a young, male loner unable to maintain relationships or a career.

That he stayed married and employed "while engaging in these incredible acts of violence and cruelty is remarkable," Trupin said. "And it makes him more intriguing, from a mental-health standpoint.

"He is one weird mother."

But serial-killer expert Robert Keppel cautions everyone not to draw quick conclusions.

"You don't know what the functional relationship is in that family," said Keppel, the retired chief criminal investigator for the Washington state Attorney General's Office. Keppel, who investigated the eight killings Bundy committed here, included the former law student's confessions in his book, "The Riverman."

While psychologists will probe Yates' criminal mind, Keppel--whose Seattle business is to teach homicide detectives how to track murders--looks forward to sifting through what Yates left behind, searching for patterns that may show how to stem the tide of murder.

It is interesting, Keppel said, that Yates used a gun--it makes noise and its impact is relatively clean.

"But you know, (Yates) is doing his thing sexually," Keppel said. "He is still getting his hands-on experience that others get from stabbing and bludgeoning."

Yates often covered his victims' heads with plastic bags, and left semen on their bodies--a habit that eventually got him caught.

"We don't know for sure what that all means," Keppel said. "But it does put him in a different light."

Rule couldn't say whether she will write about Yates. It would mean spending a year with the man, she said, "and Yates is someone I want to walk away from, immediately."

What she saw of the sentencing hearing, and in the news, is enough.

"He is grieving, but for the loss of his freedom," Rule said. "If he felt any empathy, we would have seen the killings end a long time ago."

Said Keppel: "Serial killers don't really have that true remorse for their victims.

"If they liked to do it, how can they be sorry for it?"

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday and Thursday in The Times. Her phone number is 206-464-2334. Her e-mail address is nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She wonders who else is out there.