On October 13, 1998, the body of a 35-year-old Caucasian woman, Connie LaFontaine Ellis, was discovered discarded in a ditch in Tacoma, Washington. An investigation revealed she had been shot once in the head, and her head was covered with three plastic bags. Connie, who had grown up on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation, had trained as a hairdresser.
However, she had moved to Spokane and, following the tragic death of her 11-year-old son who was awaiting a heart transplant, she struggled with drug addiction and became involved in sex work. The loss of her son, along with the earlier death of another child to SIDS and the death of her mother, had a devastating impact on her life.
For a time, Connie's death remained an unsolved crime, one of a string of similar murders in the area that instilled fear in the community. The investigation into her homicide, along with others, eventually led police to Robert Lee Yates Jr., a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot. In 2000, Yates was arrested after his DNA was linked to 12 victims, and blood from another victim was found in his Corvette. He confessed to a total of 13 murders in Spokane County as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, resulting in a 408-year prison sentence.
However, Pierce County prosecutors, where Connie and another victim, Melinda L. Mercer, were murdered, refused to agree to the plea bargain. In 2001, Yates was charged with their murders. During his trial in Pierce County, it was revealed that Ellis's blood had been found inside one of Yates's vans. In September 2002, a jury convicted Yates of the aggravated first-degree murders of both Connie Ellis and Melinda Mercer. The following month, the same jury sentenced him to death by lethal injection for these crimes. Yates is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after Washington state's Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional in 2018.
