Nov 24, 2018 -
The victim vanished. The convicted predator is on the verge of walking free.
She is petite, about 5 feet tall and around 90 pounds, with a homemade star tattoo on the web of her left hand between her thumb and forefinger. She is smiling, her chin on her hand and her straight hair parted down the middle.
Marable was last seen getting into a maroon truck on April 23, 1991, in a parking lot behind the Yakima Sports Center bar.
It was the same downtown parking lot from which John Robinson abducted her in June 1990.
After forcing her into his car, Robinson raped her. Bound at her wrists and ankles, Marable escaped when Robinson stopped for gas, opening a window and flinging herself on the ground. Two men standing nearby came to her aid.
“He had her in his car all night. She was brave,” said Marable’s youngest sister, Robyn Shortt-Peery.
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Robinson was convicted in 1990 of kidnapping and raping Marable. Sentenced in 1991 for that and another kidnapping case, he served his time, but authorities considered Robinson so dangerous they sent him to the state’s Special Commitment Center on McNeil Island, a treatment institution where he has lived among dozens of other sexually violent predators since 2006.
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Once conditions are set, there is a 30-day public notification time. If approved, that could mean Robinson’s release in either late December 2018 or early January 2019. For Shortt-Peery, that’s much too soon.
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Robinson was in jail when Marable went missing. She disappeared about eight weeks after Robinson threatened her and her family in open court, Shortt-Peery said.
Marable came home to Aberdeen for a short visit after her abduction and rape, which she never discussed with her family.
“I said ... ‘You don’t have to leave. Please don’t leave.’ She was standing on the porch getting ready to go. ... I just knew I wasn’t going to see her again. It was just the eye contact we made,” Shortt-Peery recalled.
“I said, ‘I love you, please be careful.’ We never heard from her again.”
She was 34.
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The last time Vargas saw Marable was a few weeks before she disappeared.
Wary in the wake of Robinson’s threats, Marable scrutinized potential tricks more closely than usual. When someone offered to take her to safety until the trial and conviction fallout blew over, she accepted.
“She got into the van. She was scared. She kept saying she knew they were watching her,” Vargas recalled. The driver “was gonna get her out of town, supposedly.”
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Marable was trying to leave the streets. She hated her life, Shortt-Peery said. She remembered Marable’s last visit to Aberdeen and seeing the track marks on her body from the heroin needles when she got out of the tub. Marable called drug treatment facilities, seeking an open bed, but she couldn’t find one.
“This is the ugly reality. This isn’t ‘Pretty Woman,’ there’s no Richard Gere,” she said. “It’s not pretty stuff.”
As much as she loves her sister, Shortt-Peery doesn’t sugarcoat the truth. Marable was a street prostitute addicted to drugs. But she also survived and testified about Robinson, who was arrested and charged with several sexually motivated crimes starting in the 1970s, prosecutors with the state Attorney General’s Office have said. Until he was found guilty of kidnapping and raping Marable, he avoided conviction.
Her horror may have saved others from the same fate, Shortt-Peery said.
“It could have saved a lot of lives. She spared a lot of people and their families from the hell we’ve gone through,” she said. “He’s a monster.”
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As children they lived in Aberdeen, where the girls grew up in a boisterous Italian-American family. Dad was a high school teacher and mom was a housewife.
Of her four sisters, Marable was her favorite, said Shortt-Peery, who is the youngest. She’s 51; Marable would be 62.
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Marable graduated with a nursing degree in 1977 and began working in the maternity ward at Grays Harbor Community Hospital.
“She always wanted to be a nurse. She was the one sister who knew what she wanted to be,” Shortt-Peery said. “She worked in the ward with the babies; she loved it. She was perfect for that.”
It was through her role as a nurse that Marable met a doctor and began dating him, Shortt-Peery said.
“Her life was pretty stable for many years. ... She got into a relationship with a doctor there. He got her using some kind of prescription drugs at some point,” she recalled.
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When Shortt-Peery was a sophomore in 1982, her sister met another man and moved in with him. But unknown to Marable’s family, he was pot dealer and got busted.
“It was all over the paper. This is a small town,” Shortt-Peery said. “She lost her nursing license. Some of her friends completely turned on her. It just broke her heart.”
Once he left prison after three years, Marable and her boyfriend reunited. One August night less than a month out of prison, they headed to the Grays Harbor County Fair. That night, as Shortt-Peery sat on the back steps, she heard sirens. The phone rang. There had been a fatality.
“They were in separate cars; she was following him,” she said. “He hit the back of a logging truck. It caved in his chest.”
Her sister was still in love with him, Shortt-Peery said.
“It was at some point after that when she got into heroin. ... That’s when she hit the hard stuff for whatever reason. I don’t know how or who may have introduced it to her,” she said.
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She has requested dozens of pages of court documents and other public records. Like many other relatives and friends of missing people, she has become an investigator.
“I just got tired of them telling me to be patient. Don’t you think 27 years is patient enough?
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Shortt-Peery will never stop searching for her sister, she wrote in a post on the Facebook page devoted to Marable.
“I’m not giving up Susan,” she wrote. “I promise.”
The victim vanished. The convicted predator is on the verge of walking free.
