A carefree evening of fun at a local carnival turned into a nightmare for two Spokane, Washington, families in the spring of 1983. On Friday, May 20, 15-year-old friends Rhonda Rima and Elizabeth Marks attended the Lilac Festival carnival at the Spokane Coliseum. It was a picture of a typical American teenage pastime, a night of lighthearted fun and festivities. But the two girls never returned home, sparking a desperate search and leaving a community on edge.
Their lives, just beginning to unfold, were stolen in an act of unimaginable violence that would haunt the city for years.
Rhonda Rae Rima, a female teenager just a few weeks past her 14th birthday, was born on May 9, 1969, to Vaughn and Sandra Rima. She and her friend Elizabeth were looking forward to a weekend of fun at the annual festival. They were last seen by friends enjoying the Fun Center Carnival, but as the night ended, they vanished without a trace. For three agonizing weeks, their families and law enforcement searched for them, holding onto hope that they would be found safe. That hope was tragically extinguished when their bodies were discovered in the Spokane River.
The discovery shifted the focus from a missing persons case to a double homicide investigation. The community was gripped by fear, and for seven long years, the families of Rhonda and Elizabeth endured a grueling wait for answers. The case remained cold, a painful open wound for a city that had lost two of its young daughters. Hundreds of mourners, at least 300, gathered at the Garry Junior High School Gymnasium for a joint funeral on June 24, 1983, to grieve the profound loss of the two beautiful girls.
The break in the case came from an unlikely source hundreds of miles away. In 1989, an inmate in a Montana prison told authorities that his cellmate had confessed to the murders of two teenage girls in Spokane. The cellmate, a truck driver named Martin Lee Sanders, revealed details about the killings that only the perpetrator could have known. Sanders was already serving a 20-year sentence for kidnapping two hitchhikers in Missoula, Montana, in 1986, a crime for which he was arrested in Wyoming in 1987.
Sanders was a serial killer who had murdered before. In 1980, he had kidnapped and killed two other young women, 18-year-old Marsha Weatter and 19-year-old Kathy Allen, near Ephrata, Washington. Their bodies were found along Interstate 90 in October 1981, covered in ash from the eruption of Mount St. Helens. With the inmate's testimony, authorities in Washington finally had their suspect in the murders of Rhonda Rima and Elizabeth Marks.
Extradited to Washington in 1990 to face trial, Martin Lee Sanders pleaded guilty to the kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder of Rhonda and Elizabeth to avoid the death penalty. As part of his plea deal, he also admitted his involvement in the murders of Marsha Weatter and Kathy Allen, though he was not prosecuted for those crimes. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Sanders died of a heart attack in prison on April 4, 2022, while serving his sentence at the Coyote Ridge Correctional Center in Connell, Washington. His death brought a final, quiet end to a story of terror that had spanned several years and multiple states.
