Divine Justice

Kathy Devine was 14 when she left Seattle on November 25, 1973, planning to hitchhike to Oregon. She was last seen near Aurora Avenue North. On December 6, a couple doing cleanup work found her body at the Margaret McKenny Campground in Capitol State Forest, southwest of Olympia. She had been strangled and her throat had been cut.

For years many people, including her family, believed Kathy was an early victim of Ted Bundy. Thurston County detectives doubted the Bundy theory, and Bundy denied the killing shortly before his execution. The real killer was a man nobody had seriously looked at. William Cosden Jr., a Marine veteran from Maryland, had been found insane in a 1967 killing there and committed to a state hospital. After his release he moved to Thurston County, near his father’s Restover Truck Stop on Interstate 5, a spot popular with hitchhikers. In 1976 he was sentenced to 48 years for a rape committed in Thurston County the year before.

In 2002, the Washington State Patrol crime lab matched DNA from evidence collected in 1973 to Cosden, who was still in prison. He was charged that March. A Thurston County jury convicted him of murder in July 2002, nearly 29 years after Kathy’s death, and he was sentenced to life without release. He died in custody in 2015.