On March 28, 1987, 22-year-old Robin Smith left a Puyallup, Washington, tavern to attend a party with new acquaintance "Herb Johnson." She never came home, and police were alarmed when they found Johnson's car abandoned near Marysville, north of Seattle, on May 31. A search of the trunk turned up Robin's bloodstained jacket, plus several human teeth; a check on the vehicle's registration revealed it had been stolen two months earlier, in Nampa, Idaho.

The owner was a trucker, who recalled the thief in detail. Young and blond, with the word "JUNE" tattooed across the knuckles of his left hand, the drifter had been thumbing rides when the truckdriver picked him up and offered him a place to spend the night. Next morning, he was gone, along with his benefactor's car and a Ruger .357 magnum revolver, stolen from the trucker's home.

The "JUNE" tattoo rang bells with law enforcement, leading to identification of the drifter as Darren O'Neall, a fugitive from child support payments after abandoning his wife and child six years earlier. His whereabouts was presently unknown, but officers suspected he was hunting other female victims.

On April 29, 1987, Wendy Aughe, 29, disappeared after leaving her beauty school night class to keep a date with the bartender from a neighborhood restaurant in Bellingham, Washington. It was the bartender's first day of work, and he never returned to pick up his paycheck, but fingerprints lifted from his job application identified the man as Darren O'Neall. Wendy's car turned up days later, outside a tavern in Eugene, Oregon, and federal warrants were issued charging O'Neall with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for murder.

By that time, there were other warrants pending, including a federal charge of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution for sexual assault, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A female victim there identified O'Neall as her assailant, and the list of charges grew longer when skeletal remains of Robin Smith were discovered on May 25, near Greenwater, Washington, north of Mt. Rainier.

On June 9, 1987, Lisa Szubert disappeared from a truck stop at Mountain Home, Idaho. Last seen with a young man bearing the familiar knuckle tattoo, she was found dead on June 13, southeast of La Grande, Oregon. A week later, O'Neall was linked with the bungled abduction of a woman in Burly, Idaho; his name was added to the FBI's "Most Wanted" list on June 25.

In flight, O'Neall was drawing attention from law enforcement agencies across the nation. Three women had been shot to death in Salt Lake City over the past year, each killed with the same small caliber gun, and witnesses recalled seeing them last with a man bearing the "JUNE" tattoo on his knuckles. Speculative bodycounts were climbing into double digits by the time FBI agents captured O'Neall in Florida, on February 3, 1988. He was returned to Washington for trial on murder charges, and the disposition of his case is pending.