Hotel with past has conversion
The working girls on East Sprague knew him as a “cheap date.”
He came by the motel a couple days a month. Each time, Robert Lee Yates Jr. paid the $28.95 room bill in cash – until the spring of 2000, when a serial killer task force busted him for the deaths of 18 prostitutes, bringing infamy to the little motel and an uneasy calm to East Sprague.
So much has changed since then.
Yates is working on a 408-year prison sentence. And the former Spokane Budget Saver Motel – notorious for drug and prostitution arrests – will reopen today as a Christian crisis shelter for women and children.
“We wanted something in an area of town where the need was,” said David Wall, development director for Union Gospel Mission, which purchased the motel for $350,000 in November. “This will be a hopeful place.”
The Bible-based nonprofit, which operates a shelter for homeless men and another for women with children, plans to offer 50 emergency beds at the new center to women in crisis. Wall said women will have the option of moving to Anna Ogden Hall, its long-term rehabilitation and living center.
Unlike many women’s shelters, the new center will be able to accept women with boys as old as 17 because each room has its own bathroom. Most women’s shelters struggle with how to care for both women and teenage boys in the same settings, said Pastor Rich Schaus, director of the crisis shelter.
“There’s been this group of older boys who haven’t had a place to go,” Schaus said.
After looking at several properties, Union Gospel decided on the motel – in part because it would be quickly available. Mission leaders knew the homeless problem was immediate and pressing: A 2006 survey found 759 women in Spokane had been homeless at some point during the year, including 536 living on the streets. The same survey found 594 homeless children.
Beginning Jan. 15, some of them will be able to go to 15 rooms at the motel at 1234 E. Sprague Ave., which will be renamed the Union Gospel Mission’s Crisis Shelter for Women and Children. Situated next to the Hells Angels headquarters – and beyond that, an empty lot – the motel is surrounded by a security gate that closes at 5 p.m. Infrared cameras track nighttime visitors.
“The neighborhood has been very supportive,” Schaus said. “This was such a crime-ridden motel that people felt anything would be better.”
Inside the gate, clean bunk beds and welcome baskets will greet visitors. A continental breakfast and sack lunch will be provided, as well as van rides to dinner at Union Gospel Mission. Numerous companies have donated everything from furniture to tile. Before the nonprofit could rehabilitate women, it first had to deal with the 1954 building and its messy legacy of drugs, prostitution and sketchy clientele. The rooms have been fumigated and painted, and carpets have been cleaned.
“We value the women we serve, whereas they might not have been valued before,” said Debi Pauletto, director of Anna Ogden Hall, which will work closely with the shelter. “They’ve been taken from again and again. We want to show them this is a new beginning.”
Behind the grime of the motel, Union Gospel saw potential.
“My heart just about jumped out of my chest when I thought about what could be done here,” Pauletto said.
In recent years, news from the Budget Saver was reliably troubling.
Three years ago, a SWAT team blew out the window to a room and busted down the door in search of Richard Lee Keenum, later convicted of the execution-style murders of a gay couple at their remote cabin in Stevens County.
Like many others at the motel, he paid cash for a single bed. The night clerk waived the $5 key deposit because Keenum was short on money.
“He acted a little nervous,” she told a news reporter later that day. “But a lot of these customers act nervous.”
Perhaps no one understands the motel’s transformation as intimately as Paula Fitzhugh, a 42-year-old recovering addict who frequently used drugs at the Budget Saver. Last month, Fitzhugh completed a one-year rehabilitation program at Anna Ogden Hall.
On Monday, when the doors open, Fitzhugh will work as a live-in house manager.
“I walked these streets clear on up to Altamont,” Fitzhugh said, during a tour last week. “Here I am working for God in a building where I was Satan’s spawn. It just brings chills to me.”