Finding my birth family was supposed to complete me, but it destroyed me instead.
The Alliance and the Hidden Hunt
The next morning, I made coffee and opened my laptop. I started searching everything I could find about the Westside Strangler case online. Most articles focused on my father alone. They called him a lone predator, a monster who acted alone.
But I wasn’t looking for information about him. I was looking for any mention of other people, associates, friends, anyone police questioned during the investigation. The first dozen articles gave me nothing useful, just details about the murders and the trial and his life before the arrest.
Then I found a forum where true crime fans discussed old cases. Someone had posted a question about whether my father really worked alone. Another person replied that early news coverage mentioned police interviewed several people in his social circle, but nobody was ever charged.
I spent two hours going through newspaper archives from the 1990s. The library database had digital copies of old papers. Most of the coverage focused on the victims and the investigation, but buried in one article from 1996.
I found a paragraph that mentioned police interviewed multiple people who knew the suspect. None were charged. Their names were kept out of the coverage to protect the investigation. The article said police were confident they had the right man and he acted alone.
But my birthmother’s photo proved that was wrong. Those three other men existed. They just never got caught.
I called my birth mother around noon. She answered on the first ring like she’d been waiting. I asked her everything she could remember about the men in the photo.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she started talking.
“They all hung out at a bar called Murphy’s on the west side,” she said. “It closed down maybe 15 years ago.”
“They worked together at a warehouse near the industrial district,” she continued. “She thought it was a shipping company, but she couldn’t remember the name.”
She only met them a few times when she was dating my father. They made her uncomfortable, the way they looked at her, the way they talked about women. She stopped going to Murphy’s with my father after a few months.
He said she was being too sensitive, that they were just joking around. She told me she wished she’d trusted her instincts and left him right then. Maybe if she had, some of those women would still be alive.
I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about whether to go to the police. Part of me wanted to hide. Going to the police meant more exposure, more questions, more reporters.
But these men were dangerous. If I kept this photo to myself and they killed me, nobody would know they existed. The photo would disappear with me.
By evening, I made my decision. Law enforcement needed to know about the accompllices, even if it meant putting myself at more risk. At least then someone else would be looking for them. I wouldn’t be fighting this alone.
The next morning, I put on sunglasses and a baseball cap. I pulled my hair back in a ponytail and wore a plain black jacket. Anything to avoid being recognized.
The police station was downtown in an old brick building. I parked two blocks away and walked with my head down. Inside, the officer at the front desk looked at me strangely when I approached.
I kept the sunglasses on and told him I needed to talk to someone about the Westside Strangler case. He picked up his phone and made a call.
5 minutes later, a woman in a gray suit came down the hallway. She introduced herself as Ellaner Harrington from the cold case unit. She took me upstairs to a small office with a desk and two chairs.
I pulled out the photo and slid it across the desk. Ellaner picked it up and studied it with intense focus. She asked where I got it. I explained about my birth mother and the coffee shop meeting.
Ellaner looked at the photo for a long time without saying anything. Then she told me this was the first concrete evidence anyone had ever presented suggesting my father had accompllices.
She said she’d worked cold cases for 8 years and always wondered if the Westside Strangler investigation missed something. The murders stopped so suddenly after his arrest. No similar crimes in the area since then. That suggested either he really did work alone or his partners were smart enough to stop.
She wanted to reopen certain parts of the investigation based on this photo. Ellaner asked if I was willing to work with her unofficially.
She explained I wasn’t a suspect, but I was potentially a victim. The department would want to keep this quiet. No media, no public announcements.
If the accompllices knew we were looking for them, they might run or destroy evidence or come after me more aggressively. She said she needed my help because I had access to my birthother and information the police didn’t have.
She also said she understood if I wanted to walk away. This wasn’t my fight. I didn’t owe anyone anything, but if I helped, we might actually find these men before they found me.
I agreed to help her. For the first time since the DNA results destroyed my life, I felt something other than fear and shame. I felt like I had a purpose, like I was doing something instead of just hiding and waiting for my life to get worse.
Ellaner shook my hand and told me to be careful. She gave me her cell phone number and told me to call immediately if anything seemed wrong, if I saw anyone following me, if I got strange messages, anything at all. She said we were going to find these men together.
I left the police station feeling like maybe I wasn’t completely alone anymore.
Ellaner called me the next morning and asked if I could meet her at a coffee shop downtown. She said she wanted me to meet someone who could help with the investigation.
I showed up wearing the same sunglasses and baseball cap I’d worn to the police station. Ellaner was already there sitting at a corner table with another woman who looked a lot like her. They had the same dark hair and sharp eyes.
Ellaner introduced her as Victoria, her younger sister. Victoria worked as a private investigator and had access to databases and software that the police couldn’t officially use.
She shook my hand and told me she’d already looked at the photograph. She said facial recognition technology had gotten really good in the past few years, and she thought she could identify at least one or two of the men if we enhanced the image quality.
We spent an hour at that coffee shop while Victoria explained how she could search old employment records, driver’s license photos, and social media accounts from the 1990s that might have been archived. She said the hardest part would be getting clear enough images from the blurry photo to run through her software.
Ellaner told me Victoria had helped solve three cold cases in the past 2 years by finding information the police couldn’t access through normal channels. I felt a small spark of hope for the first time in weeks. Maybe we could actually find these men.
2 days later, I was walking back to my apartment to grab some clothes. I’d been staying at Ellaner’s place because I was too scared to sleep in my own bed.
The sun was setting and the street was mostly empty. That’s when I noticed the car, a dark blue sedan parked half a block down from my building. I’d seen the same car in that exact spot yesterday morning when I left.
My heart started beating faster. I walked past my apartment building without slowing down. The car’s engine wasn’t running, but I could see someone sitting in the driver’s seat. I couldn’t make out their face through the tinted windows.
I kept walking until I reached a busy coffee shop three blocks away. My hands were shaking when I pulled out my phone and called Ellaner. I described the car and told her the license plate number I’d managed to memorize.
As I walked past, she told me to stay exactly where I was and keep myself surrounded by people. She said she’d send patrol cars to check out the vehicle.
I sat in that coffee shop for over an hour drinking tea I didn’t want and watching the door. Every time someone walked in, I jumped.
Ellaner called back and her voice sounded serious. She said the license plate came back to a rental car company. Someone was definitely following me and they were smart enough not to use their own vehicle.
She told me the patrol cars had checked the area, but the sedan was gone by the time they arrived. Whoever was watching me knew to leave before the police showed up. I felt sick to my stomach.
These men knew where I lived. They knew my routine. They’d been watching me and I hadn’t even noticed until today. Ellaner told me to come back to her place immediately and not to go anywhere alone.
When I got there, Victoria was already waiting. She said I needed to disappear for a while.
She suggested I move to a motel outside the city where nobody would recognize me, somewhere I could pay cash and wouldn’t need to show ID or use credit cards that could be traced. I packed a bag with just the basics, some clothes, my laptop, the photograph, and my phone charger.
Victoria called an Uber for me instead of letting me use my own car in case someone had put a tracker on it. She gave me the address of a cheap motel near the highway about 30 m away.
The driver dropped me off at a place called the Crossroads Inn. It had peeling paint and a flickering neon sign. I paid cash for a week and the clerk didn’t ask any questions.
The room smelled like old cigarettes and the carpet had stains I didn’t want to think about, but it had a lock on the door and nobody knew I was there. That’s all that mattered.
I set up my laptop on the small desk and called Victoria. She’d already started working on enhancing the photograph. She walked me through how to upload it to a secure server so she could work on it with better software.
We spent the next several hours on video calls while she adjusted the contrast and sharpness. Slowly, the faces in the photo became clearer.
We could see more details in their features, the shapes of their noses and jaws. Victoria pulled up employment records from the warehouse where my father had worked in the 1990s.
She’d gotten them through a contact who worked in county records. The files showed my father worked with 12 other men during the time period when the murders happened.
We started comparing their old driver’s license photos to the faces in the photograph. It was slow work. Some of the men had moved away or died. Others looked so different after 25 years that it was hard to tell if they matched.
Victoria cross- referenced each name with current addresses and criminal records. Most of them came back clean.
3 days went by like this. I barely left the motel room except to get food from the gas station next door. I kept the curtains closed and jumped every time I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. Victoria and I worked for hours each day going through records and comparing faces.
Then on the third day, she called me with news. She’d found a match. One of the men in the photograph was named Gregory Wilkinson. He still lived in the area under his real name.
He ran a construction business and had a website with his photo on it. Victoria sent me the link and I stared at the screen. The man looking back at me was in his 50s with gray hair and smile lines around his eyes. He looked like someone’s dad, like a normal person.
But when I compared his current photo to the enhanced image from the 1990s, there was no doubt. Same nose, same jaw, same eyes. This was one of the men who’d helped my father kill 11 women.
Ellaner ran a background check on him that afternoon. She called me with the results, and her voice sounded frustrated. Gregory Wilkinson had no criminal record, not even a parking ticket in the past 10 years.
He was married, had an adult son, owned his home, paid his taxes on time. On paper, he looked like a model citizen. He’d been hiding in plain sight for 25 years, building a normal life while my father sat on death row.
I pulled up Gregory’s construction company website again and looked at his photo. He was standing in front of a house his company had built, wearing a hard hat and giving a thumbs up to the camera. The caption said, “Gregory Wilkinson, owner and founder, building dreams since 1998.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. This man had helped strangle women and dump their bodies, and now he was building houses and smiling for website photos. He had a wife who probably loved him, a son who probably looked up to him, customers who trusted him to work on their homes.
Nobody knew what he really was. Nobody except me and Ellanar and Victoria. And now we had to figure out how to prove it.
Ellaner closed her laptop and looked at me with serious eyes. She told me not to go near Gregory under any circumstances. If he figured out we had identified him, he might run or destroy evidence or come straight after me.
I nodded, but my hands were shaking. The idea that this man was just living his normal life while knowing what he’d done made me feel sick.
Ellaner said she needed to build a case carefully and slowly. Physical evidence from 25 years ago would be hard to find, but she had connections who could help. She left around 8 that night and I locked the door behind her.
I checked the lock three times before I could walk away from it. That night, I lay in the motel bed staring at the ceiling. I kept thinking about Gregory’s wife and son.
They had no idea they were living with someone who helped strangle women and dump their bodies. They probably thought he was a good husband and father. they probably loved him.
It was exactly like my situation except reversed. My adoptive parents had no idea they were raising the daughter of a serial killer. They’d given me a normal childhood and never suspected the truth.
Now, Gregory’s family was living the same lie I had lived my whole life. I wondered if his wife would leave him when she found out. I wondered if his son would look at him the same way my ex- fiance had looked at me, like I was something dangerous and wrong. I didn’t sleep much that night.
The next morning, Victoria called to tell me she was still working on identifying the other two men from the photo. The image quality made everything harder.
Some of the warehouse employees from that time period had died. Others had moved away and she couldn’t track them down. She said it might take weeks to identify everyone. I told her to keep trying.
2 days later, Ellaner showed up at the motel with coffee and bagels. She sat on the edge of the bed and told me the police were quietly investigating Gregory’s background. They were looking for any physical evidence that might still exist from the crimes in the ’90s.
Old storage units, property records, financial transactions from that time period. But after 25 years, most of that stuff was gone or destroyed.
Ellaner said they were also checking if Gregory had kept any souvenirs from the murders. Some killers did that. The thought made me want to throw up.
I asked Eleanor about protective custody. Maybe the police could put me somewhere safe until they arrested Gregory and whoever else was involved. She shook her head and explained that I wasn’t technically a witness to any crime.
I was just a potential target. The department couldn’t provide official protection based on a decades old photograph and my birthmother’s claims. There wasn’t enough concrete evidence yet to justify using resources that way.
I felt panic rising in my chest, but I tried to stay calm. Ellaner promised she was doing everything she could.
A week went by like that. I stayed in the motel room most of the time. I only left to get food from the gas station next door or to walk around the parking lot when I felt too trapped inside.
My money was running low. The motel cost $40 a night and I was buying all my meals from convenience stores. I couldn’t access my old apartment safely because reporters still showed up there sometimes.
I couldn’t get a job because my face still appeared in true crime social media posts. People recognized me and some of them weren’t friendly about it.
I checked my bank account one morning and saw I had less than $300 left. That would last maybe another week if I was careful. Then what? I sat on the bed feeling helpless and scared.
My phone rang and I saw it was my birthother. I almost didn’t answer, but something made me pick up. She asked how I was doing and I told her the truth. I was broke and hiding and terrified.
She offered to send me money right away. At first, I felt angry. This was all her fault for telling me about the accompllices in the first place. If she’d just kept her mouth shut, I could have gone on not knowing.
But then I realized she was trying to help the only way she could. She’d given me information that might save my life, even though it put me in danger.
I told her I would take the money, and she said she’d wire it that afternoon. Before we hung up, she said something that made me freeze. She admitted she’d suspected my father had help even back when the murders were happening.
She’d been too scared to tell the police because she thought they would accuse her of being involved. She was 17 and pregnant and terrified.
By the time she was older and braver, she’d convinced herself it was too late to matter. The cases were closed. My father was on death row.
“What good would it do to bring up old suspicions?”
I felt like she’d punched me in the stomach. She’d known for almost 30 years that there were other killers out there. She’d kept quiet while those men built normal lives and families. She’d let them get away with murder because she was scared.
I told her I had to go and ended the call. I sat there feeling betrayed and angry and confused all at once. She’d been 17. She’d been alone and pregnant with a serial killer’s baby. What was she supposed to do?
But still, 30 years. She could have said something at any point in 30 years.
Ellaner called me that afternoon and her voice sounded tense. She told me someone had accessed the police database records about my father’s case 2 days ago. The credentials used didn’t match any current investigation.
Someone inside the system was looking into this and they shouldn’t have been. Either it was a dirty cop or someone had stolen login information.
Either way, it meant the accompllices knew the police were investigating. They knew we were getting close to identifying them.
Ellaner said I needed to be extra careful now. She was going to have patrol cars drive by the motel a few times each night. I thanked her and hung up.
Then I went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. Any one of those cars could belong to someone watching me. Any person walking by could be coming to finish what my father had started.
Victoria called the next morning while I was eating gas station donuts on the bed. She said she’d been digging into Gregory’s background all night and found something important.
His construction company had contracts with the city for the past 15 years. He’d worked on the police station renovation in 2015 and the courthouse expansion in 2018.
She explained that someone with those kinds of connections could easily know people inside the system. Maybe a corrupt cop or a city employee who owed him favors. That’s probably how someone accessed the database to look up my father’s case files.
I felt sick thinking about how deep this went. These weren’t just random criminals hiding from their past.
They’d spent 25 years building real lives with jobs and families and connections that protected them. Gregory had a whole business and contracts and probably knew half the people in local government.
The third guy was probably just as established with his own network of people who could help him stay hidden. They’d had decades to create safety nets while I had nothing. No job, no friends, no money, just a motel room and two people trying to help me stay alive.
Ellaner called an hour later and told me they were bringing Gregory in for questioning the next day. She wanted me to stay at the motel and not contact anyone until after the interview happened.
She said it was important that Gregory didn’t know I was involved in identifying him. If he thought I was working with police, he might panic and do something stupid, or he might come after me directly before they could build a case against him.
I promised to stay hidden and keep my phone on in case she needed to reach me. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about Gregory sitting in some interrogation room, denying everything while I hid in a cheap motel.
I watched TV with the sound low and checked my phone every few minutes. Around 2:00 in the morning, I heard something at the door. The door knob rattled like someone was trying to turn it. My whole body went cold.
I grabbed my phone and ran into the bathroom, locking that door, too. My hands shook so bad I could barely dial Elellanar’s number.
She answered on the second ring and I whispered that someone was trying to get into my room. She told me to stay quiet and stay in the bathroom. She was sending patrol cars right away.
I sat on the bathroom floor with my back against the tub and listened. The rattling stopped, but I heard footsteps outside moving along the walkway. Then nothing.
I stayed there for what felt like forever, but was probably only eight or nine minutes. Then I heard sirens and saw red and blue lights flashing through the small bathroom window.
I waited until I heard Ellaner’s voice calling my name before I came out. She was standing in my room with two uniformed cops. They’d checked the whole area, but whoever tried to break in was gone.
Ellaner crouched down and looked at the lock on my door. She showed me the scratches around the keyhole where someone had tried to pick it.
This wasn’t some random person. This was someone who knew which room I was in and came prepared with tools.
Ellaner said we needed to move me right away to a different motel across town. I threw my stuff in my bag while the cops waited outside. Ellaner drove me herself instead of letting me take an Uber.
On the way, she admitted the situation was worse than she’d thought at first. The accompllices weren’t just hiding anymore. They were actively hunting me.
They were willing to take risks and come after me, even though they knew police were investigating. That meant they saw me as a bigger threat to their freedom than the police were.
We pulled into a different motel parking lot on the other side of the city. This one looked even cheaper than the last place.
Ellaner paid for three nights in cash and walked me to the room. She told me to keep the door locked and call her immediately if anything felt wrong.
After she left, I pushed the dresser in front of the door and sat on the bed feeling scared and exhausted. I must have fallen asleep because I woke up to my phone ringing.
It was Victoria calling to tell me she’d identified the second accomplice from the photograph. His name was Brunwin Reyes, but then she said he died in a car accident back in 2003. That meant only two accompllices were still alive and threatening me.
I should have felt relieved, but I didn’t. If anything, it made things worse. Gregory and the third unidentified man probably knew each other well after 25 years.
They’d had all that time to plan for the possibility of getting caught. They’d probably talked about what they’d do if someone ever connected them to the murders. And now that someone was me.
