Unsolved Cases Studied With Yates In Mind Woman Who Vanished In 1996 One Of Many Cases Detectives Are Reviewing

Penney Cruser called home just before Christmas.

She was anxious that her toddler son was in state custody, her stepmother said. And she said she had stopped taking medication to ease her mental illness.

That was December 1996. Relatives haven’t heard from Cruser since.

Now Spokane County detectives are investigating whether Cruser’s disappearance may be related to serial killer Robert L. Yates Jr. The apparent vanishing happened right before Yates escalated his killings in 1997 and ‘98.

Cruser’s disappearance is one of many unsolved cases that detectives in Spokane and elsewhere are reviewing with an eye toward Yates. The admitted killer was sentenced to 408 years in prison two months ago for killing 13 people between 1975 and 1998. He still faces two murder charges in Pierce County, which could carry the death penalty.

Spokane County sheriff’s Capt. John Simmons said Cruser, who was 30 when she disappeared, used drugs and was the type of “person who would accept a ride very readily from people.”

She was often seen in the area of Sprague Avenue and Pittsburgh Street before she disappeared from Spokane, Simmons said.

Cruser was also known to frequent the Hoot Owl Club and other East Sprague gathering spots, said LaRae Cruser, Penney’s stepmother in Boise. She received disability payments from the government because she had borderline schizophrenia, which was often left untreated due to her dislike of medication, LaRae Cruser said.

Penney gave up her first child for adoption and then yielded parenting rights on her younger son just before her disappearance.

“I don’t think she was a prostitute, but I don’t know what she was doing for sure,” said LaRae Cruser, who’s married to Penney’s father, Stewart.

“It’s very possible she could have been mixed up with Mr. Yates,” she added.

The last time she saw Penney was about late October 1996. Initially, LaRae Cruser wasn’t alarmed when Penney’s weekly phone calls stopped.

“She was a mess,” LaRae Cruser said. “She was really thrown off kilter. She was calling us all the time. When she quit calling it was a relief.”

But worry grew to the point that she reported Penney missing in March 1997.

Detectives flashed a picture of her on East Sprague street corners about a month ago, said Lynn Everson, who runs the Spokane Regional Health District’s needle exchange clinic.

Some people recognized her, but none remembered seeing her for years, Everson said.

Investigators are asking anyone with information on Cruser’s whereabouts to call Crime Check at 456-2233.

Separately, homicide investigators said they have at least one other “person of interest” besides Yates in three killings that occurred in Spokane in 1990.

In a four-month stretch between February and May that year, the bodies of Yolanda Sapp, Nickie Lowe and Kathy Brisbois were found near the Spokane River. All had been shot to death. A ballistics review determined that Lowe and Brisbois had been killed with the same .22-caliber weapon, court documents say. Their deaths have long been grouped into the serial killing investigation.

Yates has been documented as using a .22-caliber gun in 1997 to kill Jennifer Joseph. But the recovered bullets from the Joseph crime scene “bore insufficient characteristics” to make a ballistics comparison, court records say.

Investigators have not formally eliminated Yates from being involved in the early ‘90s murders, but they have also not been able to prove he was in Spokane when the women were killed.

Detectives handling unsolved murders in Grant and Yakima counties are awaiting results of DNA tests.

In Grant County, detectives extracted DNA from the body of 14-year-old Michelle Vick to be compared with DNA samples found in Yates’ van.

Det. John Dazell expects to get results of the analysis between three weeks and three months from now.

“We won’t rule Yates out until the DNA comes back,” he said.

There is another “person of interest” in the case, a man who recently fled to Mexico, he said.

Analysis is also pending on matter scraped from the fingernails of Geni Harrop, who was found shot in the head near Yakima in October 1988.

Harrop apparently fought her attacker, and detectives hope DNA analysis of the fingernail scrapings matches Yates’ DNA.

Harrop was shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber handgun at a park-and-ride lot near the Yakima Firing Range, Yakima County sheriff’s Lt. Dan Garcia said. One coordinate entered into a GPS device Yates owned was close to where Harrop was found, which stoked investigators’ interest.

Detectives have had difficulty placing Yates - who was stationed in Germany with the Army at the time - in Yakima because military records are missing.

“We hear from the Army he made frequent trips back to the U.S. and had some trainings at the firing center,” Garcia said. “We haven’t been able to pin (the Army) down specifically when he would come and go.”

Yates is also considered the key suspect in the unsolved killings of two more women: Sherry Palmer in Spokane in 1992 and Patricia Barnes in Kitsap County in 1995.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Cal Walker said last week that three other unsolved murders that are not tied to the serial killings - but have been investigated by the task force - now have a good chance of being solved.

Walker said the cases will be followed up. He declined to say if all the suspects are already in jail. Walker also declined to specify when and where the unsolved killings took place. He said they happened within the past 10 years.

Last week, Sheriff Mark Sterk asked for $366,000 from the county budget to fund the task force through 2001.

With the recent departure of two city police detectives and one Washington State Patrol trooper, the task force is now staffed by a sheriff’s sergeant and three detectives.

Since Yates’ guilty plea, Walker said the task force doesn’t have the time-sensitive demands it once did. But he added that city police and the State Patrol will both reassign personnel to the task force if a need arises.