Most of you will have no idea who Mia Zapata is. But for us in Seattle, and anyone who followed the alternative music scene in the early 1990’s, this is very big news.
The short version: She was the lead singer of a white-hot local punk/grunge band, The Gits, when her body was found on the street. She had been beaten and raped, and was killed by strangulation. She was 27. It was utterly horrifying.
The local police had no leads, and there was an ugly scene here in town as the authorities were accused of foot-dragging and lack of interest. Night marches through the neighborhood where she was found were organized, and led to the founding of personal-safety groups and the like. Other local musicians funded private investigations, to no avail.
And since July of 1993, the case remained open, but as cold as her corpse: until now. As the national DNA database gets built, and as police work through old cases, submitting what evidence they have, connections are being drawn. That’s what happened here, according to the article, and a match was made with DNA from saliva found on the body. A quick cross-country hunt found the alleged killer in Florida. Naturally, he’s fighting extradition, because the rape on top of the murder means he could be facing the death penalty.
I don’t expect this to mean a lot to most people, but for us in the Pacific Northwest, this is, potentially, a weight lifted from our souls, especially coming as it does so soon after the arrest, finally, of a leading candidate for the Green River Killer. We have a reputation as a nice, friendly city, but it’s amazing, really, how many demons we’ve managed to quietly acquire over the years.
I only saw The Gits once, in college, and the sound system was so crappy all I heard was a wall of amplified noise. But damn, Mia ruled the stage. We were all heartbroken, ten years ago. This, at long last, is a brief flicker of good news in Rain City.