In the spring of 1983, a 15-year-old Caucasian female named Carrie Ann Rois vanished from the Seattle, Washington area. A pretty and inquisitive girl who played the flute in her school's marching band and dreamed of a modeling career, Carrie came from a troubled background. Having endured abuse at home, she had spent time in various group homes and had a history of running away. Despite the difficulties in her life, she maintained friendships and had reconciled with her mother, with whom she spent her last Christmas in 1982. Her disappearance sometime between May and June of 1983 marked the beginning of a long and painful period of uncertainty for her family.
For four agonizing months, Carrie's father, Robert Rois, and her grandfather walked the seedy streets of Seattle and SeaTac every night, desperately searching for any sign of the missing teenager. They traversed areas known for their danger, driven by the hope of finding the girl who was the light of her grandfather's life. The nightly searches continued in vain, a heart-wrenching testament to their love and desperation as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, with no word of Carrie's whereabouts.
The family's desperate search came to a grim end on March 10, 1985, when Carrie's skeletal remains were discovered down a hill off Star Lake Road in South King County. The location was near where several other victims had been found over the previous years, linking her death to a string of unsolved murders that had terrorized the region. It would be many more years before her killer was officially identified and brought to justice.
The investigation into Carrie's murder, along with dozens of others, eventually led to Gary Leon Ridgway, the notorious Green River Killer. Ridgway, a truck painter from the area, was responsible for a reign of terror throughout the 1980s and 1990s, preying on young women in vulnerable circumstances. He was finally arrested on November 30, 2001, after advances in DNA technology definitively linked him to several of the victims. In a plea deal to escape the death penalty, Ridgway confessed to a staggering number of murders, including that of Carrie Ann Rois. He received a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, closing a long and horrifying chapter in the history of the Pacific Northwest.
