Body Count. Burl Barer
Robert Lee Yates Sr. was an elder in Oak Harbor’s Seventh-day Adventist Church—a tiny congregation of less than one hundred people sharing common bonds of beliefs and values. Health, family, and the sacredness of Sabbath are well-known pillars of American Adventist culture. The elder and younger Yates were always close.
The boy and his loving father shared everything together. The only childhood secret kept by the younger Yates was sexual molestation by a neighbor boy five years his senior when he was only six years old. Father and son, however, shared all of life’s joys. “They did a lot of activities together,” said family friend Dorothy Cantrell. “Sports was their big thing.”
His father coached Little League, and it was there that Robert Lee Yates Jr. learned the pitching skills later utilized while playing for the Oak Harbor Wildcats. “He could throw a fastball with precision,” recalled former teammate Harry Ferrier. “Yates had a seven-one record his junior year in high school.” According to former classmates, Yates was neither too outgoing nor exceptionally shy, neither a hedonistic animal nor a hermetic ascetic. He wasn’t a wild ladies’ man, but he dated with pleasant consistency. “He was kind of quiet,” said Harry Ferrier, who now lives in Anacortes. “He was kind of like Joe Average.”
For money, Yates mowed lawns, worked at gas stations, and harvested peas with Gary Berner in the summer, making $1.80 an hour. “The worst thing I know about Bob is he wouldn’t play football his senior year,” says Berner.
His “steady” moved away from Oak Harbor during their senior year. With no date for the homecoming dance, Robert Lee Yates Jr. spent the evening playing canasta with his buddy Al Gatti at the Yates family home on East 300th Street.
“He was very much loved,” said Gatti of his old pal Bobby Yates. “There was a lot of respect in that family. They were the type of people that you‘d want as your neighbor. Mr. Yates—he’d give you the shirt off his back.”
Yates and Gatti, two youths contemplating their futures, considered careers as biologists or game wardens. Gatti joined the army; Yates went to Skagit Valley College from 1970 through the spring of 1972, earning an associate art degree in general studies.
Respectful and courteous, Bobby Yates didn’t yield to pop-culture trends or in-crowd behavior. When other youths grew their hair long, Yates kept his closely clipped.
“He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. Nothing or anything like that,” said Yates’s closest friend, Al Gatti. “We didn’t give into peer pressure; that wasn’t our thing. Our thing was hunting and fishing and hiking.”
One popular hiking excursion for Yates and Gatti was a sixteen-hour round-trip backpacking outing in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. The purpose: fishing an isolated lake famed for its twenty-inch trout. Yates remained an avid outdoorsman, boasting to Gatti that his third daughter and he stalked deer together—a cause for celebration because none of his other daughters were attracted to the sport. According to Gatti, Yates told him, “We had a terrific time.”
Yates was the twice-married father of five. At the age of twenty, he married Shirley Nylander. The newlyweds moved to College Place, where they enrolled in Walla Walla College, a Seventh-day Adventist school.
“I didn’t get to know him that much,” said Mary Nylander, Shirley’s mother. About eighteen months after the marriage, Shirley moved out, went home, and asked for a divorce. Yates didn’t give her an argument; he gave himself to Linda Brewer, a pleasant young student at Walla Walla Community College.
“Yates’s 1974 marriage to Linda was illegal, and therefore annulled,” commented Sheriff Humphries, “because his divorce from his first wife was not final.” Six months after the invalid ceremony, Linda Brewer Yates, former high school classmate of Susan Savage’s sister, Nancy, gave birth to their first child.
Robert Lee Yates Jr. always had a passion for flight. Leaving Walla Walla, he enlisted in the armed forces, becoming an accomplished pilot. His wife, however, was more concerned about her husband’s other passions. Shortly after their marriage, Linda left him for thirty days when she learned that he had drilled a hole in the attic wall so he could watch the couple in the next apartment have sex.
“I left him again in the mid-1980s,” said Linda Yates, “and moved back to Walla Walla with the children while he was on duty in Alabama. I loved the separation,” she admitted, “but the girls were pleading to be with their dad. They didn’t want to be poor and not have anything anymore.”
While in the armed forces, Robert Lee Yates Jr. became a highly trained helicopter pilot. In his eighteen years of exemplary service, Yates received three meritorious service medals, three army commendation medals, three army achievement medals, and two armed forces expeditionary medals. He served in Germany and in Operation Desert Storm. Following the devastation of Hurricane Andrew, Yates participated in vital relief efforts, and he flew in a UN peacekeeping mission to Somalia. His fellow aviators praised his bravery and recalled him as “an excellent pilot, knowledgeable and very safety conscious.”
In Somalia, Yates violated regulations by shooting a wild pig while flying a helicopter. Yates and his airborne buddies, after more than a month of army food, wanted a barbecue. “They tried to court-martial him because he didn’t go through the proper channels,” said a former military associate. “It all turned into a big joke after a while. It didn’t hurt a damn thing. They were just trying to get some fresh meat.”
In 1995, Yates was transferred from New York to Fort Rucker, Alabama—the “Home of U.S. Army Aviation.” It was at Fort Rucker that Yates instructed helicopter pilots in the fine art of teaching other soldiers to fly OH-58 helicopters. He drilled seven hours a day and was one of only ten instructor pilots at that level. “We were in a pinch for instructors, and Bob filled the position nicely,” said Rick Ponder, his boss.
“My husband’s military colleagues always seemed surprised that he had a wife,” recalled Linda Yates. “When we would go to parties together, he would drink heavily, moon other women, and tell them his name was James Bond, 007.” Perhaps Robert Yates Jr. came to believe that he also had a license to kill.
With less than eighteen months left to finish a twenty-year career in the army, Chief Warrant Officer Robert Lee Yates Jr. abruptly requested voluntary separation from the army. This was undertaken with the same inexplicable suddenness as his resignation from Washington State Penitentiary.
Four months later, he received an incentive bonus for leaving early, and he moved from Fort Rucker to Spokane. “It was the tail end of another reduction in army forces,” commented a former associate, “and I was under the impression that he accepted a special incentive that allowed him to keep getting about forty-five percent of his normal pay, probably about twenty thousand a year. Maybe he just got tired of the army. The helicopter he knew best was also becoming obsolete and being replaced by the Kiowa Warrior.”
Maybe there was another, more imperative reason Yates retired from the armed services. On August 9, 1995, while Yates was stationed at Fort Rucker, prostitute Tarayon Corbitt was found murdered. Corbitt, a male fetchingly outfitted in female attire, was shot twice in the face with a . 45-caliber handgun. Corbitt’s corpse was dumped along the roadside between Ozark, the county seat, and Midland City, bordering Fort Rucker. It was only a matter of time before Dale County detectives turned their investigative gaze toward the Home of U.S. Army Aviation.
“Mr. Yates was very familiar with the area,” said Dale County detectives. “He traveled to Fort Rucker several times during his career for flight school, warrant officer school, and advanced training.”
Yates graduated from an instructor pilot course on August 18, 1995, just nine days after Corbitt was murdered. Nine days after that, Yates was awarded the Master Army Aviator Badge, a symbol of Yates’s fifteen years of service as an army chopper pilot.
“It’s just a theory at this point,” explained investigators from Dale County, “but the theory is that as our search for Corbitt’s killer closed in on Fort Rucker, Mr. Yates possibly panicked, resigned his commission, left Fort Rucker and his army career to avoid investigation.”