On October 13, 1998, the body of 35-year-old Connie LaFontaine Ellis was found discarded in a ditch in Tacoma, Washington. She had been shot once in the head and her head was covered with three plastic bags. Ellis grew up on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and trained as a hairdresser. After the death of her 11-year-old son, who had been awaiting a heart transplant, she struggled with drug addiction and became involved in sex work; the earlier deaths of another child to SIDS and her mother had a devastating impact on her life.

Connie’s homicide remained unsolved for a time and was one of a string of similar murders that alarmed the community. Investigators later linked the killings to Robert Lee Yates Jr.; Ellis’s blood was reported found inside one of Yates’s vans. In September 2002 a jury convicted Yates of the aggravated first-degree murders of Connie Ellis and Melinda L. Mercer, and the following month the jury sentenced him to death by lethal injection for those crimes.

Did anyone who knew Connie in Tacoma or Spokane notice changes in her life or see her around October 1998?