The Pacific Northwest has produced a disproportionate number of serial killers in recent years, and several have managed to escape detection, remaining at large despite the best efforts of state and local law enforcement. One such predator was active in the area of Salem, Oregon, from February 1981 through March 1983, claiming at least six lives in a two-year period.

The first to die was 21-year-old Terry Monroe, reported missing on February 13, 1981, after she left a Salem tavern "to get some air" and never returned. Her body was discarded in the nearby Willamette River, recovered by searchers more than a month later.

Sherry Eyerly, 18, was delivering pizzas in Salem on July 4, 1982, when she vanished en route to a caller's fictitious address. Her delivery van was found abandoned, but her body has not been recovered. A suspect in the case committed suicide after preliminary interrogation, but police are now uncertain of his guilt.

Four weeks later, on July 31, nine-year-old Danielle Good disappeared from her bedroom, at home, without signs of a struggle. Her skeleton was found, along with some of her clothes, by a farmer near Scio, Oregon, on February 14, 1983.

On November 22, 1982, 27-year-old Patricia Loganbill was shot and killed at the Salem veterinary clinic where she worked. An autopsy revealed that Loganbill was pregnant when she died. Some fifteen weeks elapsed before the final outrage, on March 8, 1983, when 32-year-old Laurel Wilson and her nine-year-old daughter, Erika, were shot to death in their beds, at home, by an unknown intruder.

Without a suspect, the authorities refuse to speculate on positive connections in the series, but investigators from Seattle have ruled out involvement by the elusive "Green River Killer," since none of the Salem victims were prostitutes. Likewise, Salem's "open" cases are supposed to have no link to William Smith, convicted of other local murders during the same period.