Nobody's Angel

In July 1982, when the body of Wendy Lee Coffield was fished from the waters that gave the Green River Killer his name, no one could have predicted the eventual gruesome toll. Over the next 20 months, 48 more young women would turn up dead or go missing in the Seattle/Tacoma area.

During this dreadful season, fear was the common currency among the women in the cities and towns all along the I-5 corridor. This was especially true for the little girls, the ones who'd have to make their way to school before dawn. Many would sneak steak knives—purloined from their parents' kitchens—into their pockets, some small talisman of protection against the evil that lived in the darkness.

It's hard to imagine what it must've felt like to walk the streets under such circumstances. No doubt, it was a pure and abiding fear, not the morning chill, that turned the blood of these innocents cold.

Neko Case remembers that fear well. She was one of those little girls.

When Case would tune into the news reports of the crimes on television, though, she'd feel something else—not fright but a quiet outrage. As she watched the well-coiffed talking heads grimly wring their hands and report another death, Case noted how they always referred to the victims: as prostitutes, hookers, runaways, drifters. There was something in the naming that suggested these poor souls—their bodies brutalized and dumped—had somehow brought these horrible fates upon themselves.

Even then, as a sheltered 13-year-old, Case could sense the cruel injustice in this: A mean world casting its prim, judgmental eye upon the dead, who were no longer able to respond. It's a memory that would stick with Case for a long, long time.

Some 17 years later, writing songs for an album she'd spent a lifetime growing fierce enough to create, Case would recall the victims of the Green River Killer, the slighted women who died so horribly—and worse, so anonymously—on "Deep Red Bells."

"Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag?/Past empty lots and early graves of those like you who've lost their way/Murdered on the interstate/While the red bells rang like thunder."

It's little wonder she was able to empathize so instinctively with those lacking a voice, an identity, or a chance. After all, Neko Case had felt that way for as long as she could remember. Since her earliest days, she'd known what it was to be poor, small, and insignificant in a world much too big and nasty to comprehend.

America, Nick Tosches once wrote, is alone among nations to conceive of her destiny as a dream. So, too, with Neko Case, a lost, hopeless child who knew neither destiny nor dream until she divined the twin forces of punk rock and country music—the former providing the initial burst of inspiration, the latter, her true direction.

Today, Case is a different person—a musician, a singer, an artist poised on the cusp of some sort of stardom. Exactly what form Case's changes will ultimately take is still uncertain. Her journey, far from complete, has brought her a long way from her Northwest roots, yet she's never really escaped the time, experiences, and realities that defined her years here.

But whatever her future may hold, one thing is certain. Neko Case's soul—once gadding and aimless—casts about no longer.

IT'S LATE OCTOBER in Chicago, and Neko Case is battling traffic on the city's West Side. Propped up behind the wheel of the Ultra Beaver—the droll sobriquet given her 1988 Dodge conversion van—Case looks wan and wasted. Just back from a European promotional jaunt, she's been in town only a few hours and is already shuttling between radio shows and band rehearsals, fighting jet lag and a cold as she readies herself for a monthlong tour that starts tomorrow.

"God," she sighs, absently cutting off a pickup truck. "I really do need some rest."

Humboldt Park's silent streets and dowdy architecture create the impression of a peaceful, idyllic borough. But a passing glance at a street corner tells a different story: A large green mailbox sits riddled with bullet holes, shafts of light poring through the torn metal openings. Case's house is, quite literally, located on the dividing line between two rival gangs. Gunshots, sirens, and body bags are as much a fixture of the neighborhood as the tall, loping sycamore trees.

Rangy and red-haired, Case climbs a creaking staircase up to a musty apartment decorated—overflowing, rather—with all manner of cornpone bric-a-brac and country music ephemera. Spending an average 10 months a year on the road, Case rarely gets the chance to enjoy the creature comforts of "normal" life. Plopping herself on a couch, she looks over the room, smiling: "It's nice to be home."

This is the home Neko Case adopted when she left Seattle nearly three years ago. Along with a hundred or so other artists, Case had been ejected from her live/workspace in the Washington Shoe Building, cleared out so it could be remade as a luxury high-rise. The eviction was the final straw in Case's growing disenchantment with the local government's shabby, often two-faced treatment of its arts community.