Anatomy of a Serial Killer

One in a Million

Derek Bachmann was 14 in 1984 when he helped his 15-year-old sister, Marci, pack her bags and run away from their Vancouver, Washington, home. “She told me my stepfather was touching her, making her touch him,” he recalls. “I told her, ‘You’re right, you need to get the hell out of here.’ ” That was the last time he saw her. “The fact that I helped her pack has always haunted me,” says Bachmann, now a Web marketer living outside St. Louis. “I mean, there were five different serial killers in the Northwest at the time.” (In fact, there were at least eight.)

Investigation: Dixie Hybki and Dr. Rhonda Roby at the University of North Texas Health Science Center.  Courtesy University of North Texas Health Science Center

By 2000, Web sites such as the Doe Network offered Bachmann a new resource. Maintained by amateur detectives and families of the missing, these cyber-bulletin boards feature case histories and, when possible, photos or artist re-creations of the unnamed dead, typically gleaned from news and police reports. Bach-mann began spending all-nighters at his computer. His obsession put a strain on a short-lived marriage, he admits with a slow shake of his head. “The atrocities I’ve seen looking for my sister.”

Among them was a flower-adorned memorial page dedicated to a girl named Robin, with a photo of a dark-haired girl in glasses under the banner “Do you recognize this face?” Bachmann looked again. There was something familiar about the mouth and nose. “I showed it to my relatives,” he recalls. “They said, ‘No way. Marci never wore glasses.’ ” Besides, the hair color was wrong. Still, a few months later, he dialed the number provided for the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department and left a message for Captain Greg Hintz. No return call.