Donna Perry: The Spokane River Murders
In the early 1990s, a series of women vanished along the margins of Spokane’s sex-work corridor. Their bodies surfaced near the riverbanks—discarded, unidentified, and quickly forgotten by a system that never protected them. For decades, the files sat unsolved. No witnesses. No fingerprints. No suspect who made sense.
But time has a way of exposing what people try to bury.
This episode follows the case from the discovery of the first victim, through the slow, meticulous investigative steps that finally revealed a name detectives didn’t expect—and a past that had been deliberately rewritten. Before the arrests, before the headlines, before the courtroom debates over identity and motive, there were three women whose lives were stolen and whose stories were almost lost.
We bring their names forward.
We walk through the evidence as investigators found it.
And we follow the path that eventually led to the person responsible for the Spokane River Murders.
This is the Donna Perry case—an examination of the victims, the investigation, and the truth that emerged when detectives refused to let these women disappear into the pines.
