Over a few months in the latter half of 1985, at least four people were killed in a bizarre series of crimes known either as the Mineral, Washington Murders, or the Tube Sock Killings. Despite a thorough investigation and a great deal of public attention, including being featured on Unsolved Mysteries in 1989, the homicides remain unsolved as of 2023.
It was Saturday, August 10th, 1985, and twenty-seven-year-old Steven Harkins was planning a weekend camping trip with his forty-two-year-old girlfriend and mother of five Ruth Cooper. The pair had been together for about three years and lived in Tacoma, Washington with their dog, who was also accompanying them on the trip.
The couple headed out for the somewhat remote Tule Lake in Pierce County and set up their campsite. What happened after that is not clear; the only thing known with any certainty is that neither Steven nor Ruth turned up for their teaching jobs on Monday, at which point their concerned families reported them missing.
On Wednesday, August 14th, hikers stumbled across Steven’s body, still lying in a sleeping bag at their campsite. He had been shot in the head, presumably while he slept. The body of the couple’s dog was also found not far away; the animal had likewise been shot.
Months later, on October 26th, the skull of Ruth Cooper was discovered near Harts Lake, about a mile and a half from where Steven’s remains had been found back in August. A tube sock had been tied around her neck. Two days later, the rest of her body and her purse were found about fifty feet away from the skull. Though the sock found around the neck would seem to suggest strangulation, the cause of death was actually determined to be a gunshot wound to the abdomen.
Initially, authorities attempted to connect the Harkins/Cooper murder with a similar double homicide that had occurred earlier that year: in March of 1985, Edward Smith and his fiancée Kimberly La Vine went for a weekend getaway in Grant County.
Some time later, the body of Edward Smith was found in a gravel pit near the Wanapum Dam; his hands were tied behind his back and his throat had been slit. Two weeks later, the couple’s car was recovered ten miles away from where Edward’s remains were found, but Kimberly La Vine’s body wasn’t discovered until August, lying in some sagebrush two miles away from Edward. A fingerprint was salvaged from the pair’s vehicle, and in 1989, this would lead to the capture of a truck driver named Billy Ray Ballard, Jr., who had later been arrested for kidnapping, raping, and torturing two women in Wyoming. Ballard eventually confessed to killing Edward Smith and Kimberly La Vine, and though the crime was similar to the other Mineral, Washington Murders, there were enough differences for authorities to consider it unlikely that Ballard was responsible for the other double murders in the series.
In late 1985, investigators were still struggling to solve the gruesome Harkins/Cooper slaying when another similar crime took place in the same area. On December 12th, thirty-six-year-old Mike Riemer, his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend Diana Robertson, and their two-year-old daughter Crystal, who were also from Tacoma, headed out for a camping trip along the Nisqually River, where Mike had also set up some animal traps he wanted to check.
Hours later, after evening had fallen, customers at a Kmart store in Spanaway, thirty miles from the campsite, found Crystal standing alone outside the store’s entrance. When asked where her parents were, the child could only say that, “Mommy was in the trees.” Police questioned the child about what had happened to her family, but she was too young to convey any useful information. She was placed in temporary foster care, but after her picture was shown on the news, her maternal grandmother came to pick her up.
A massive land and air search was undertaken for Crystal’s missing parents, but for months, nothing was found. Finally, on February 18th, 1986, a dog walker found Diana Robertson’s body, partially buried in the snow off a logging road near Elbe, Washington. She had been stabbed seventeen times, and like previous victim Ruth Cooper, had a tube sock tied around her neck. Mike Riemer’s red Plymouth pickup truck was also discovered nearby.
Eerily, there was a manila envelope on the dashboard of the truck bearing the message, “I love you, Diana,” written in what was believed to be Mike’s handwriting. There were also bloodstains found on the seats of the truck, and bullet casings discovered scattered around outside it.
Due to these strange clues and the fact that Mike’s body was not found, authorities began to suspect that Mike himself might have killed his girlfriend, abandoned his daughter at the Kmart store, and fled the area. And because of the tube sock detail, it was also theorized that perhaps Mike had also been responsible for killing Steven Harkins and Ruth Cooper back in August of 1985. Fueling speculation about his involvement was the fact that Mike Riemer had been charged with domestic assault against his girlfriend in October of 1985, and was known to routinely carry a .22-caliber handgun when out checking his traps. Both Steven Harkins and Ruth Cooper had been shot with a .22.
There the case stood for more than two decades. But then, in late March of 2011, hikers happened on a partial skull in the same area where Diana Robertson’s body had been found in February of 1986. Forensic examination determined that the skull belonged to Mike Riemer. While investigators were finally satisfied that Mike had also been a victim of a homicide at the same time as his girlfriend, his exact cause of death could not be determined, since the remainder of his body has yet to be found. All investigators could say with any confidence was that Mike had not been shot in the head.
Interestingly, there was another similar double murder in November of 1987, though this particular crime took place about a hundred miles away from the others. Twenty-year-old Jay Cook and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend Tanya Van Cuylenborg had traveled down from Canada on an errand for Tanya’s father’s business. Days later, Tanya’s bound body was found in a ditch near Alger; she had been raped and shot in the head. Jay was eventually found beaten with rocks and strangled about sixty miles from where Tanya’s remains were discovered.
In 2018, a truck driver named William Earl Talbott II was found guilty of the murders after a genealogical DNA match. He is currently serving two life sentences at Washington State Penitentiary, and it is not known whether he had any connection to the Tube Sock Killings.
There have been no further developments in the case since 2011, and authorities are still no closer to discovering who murdered two couples in cold blood in the remote woods of Washington State in 1985, and whether there are more victims who have never been discovered.
Crime Immemorial 