“Oak Harbor resident Debra Fine returned from Spokane late Wednesday satisfied that the man who killed her sister and at least 17 other women has finally been caught and will face justice.She heard from the serial killer task force, before the media was alerted, that former Oak Harbor resident Robert Yates will be formally charged with the murder of her sister Shawn Johnson.Thursday afternoon, Yates, a 1970 graduate of Oak Harbor High School, was charged with eight counts of first-degree murder as well as single counts of attempted first-degree murder and first-degree robbery in Spokane County Superior Court.Dave Reagan, the public information officer for the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, said investigators recently found a woman who survived a brush with Yates. The attempted murder and robbery charges are connected with the survivor.Reagan said the prosecutor decided not to charge Yates in Spokane court with Tacoma-area murders that investigators have linked to him.After years of investigation into the serial killings – which went back at least to 1990 – detectives arrested Yates at his Spokane home April 18 on suspicion of murdering Jennifer Jones, a 16-year-old girl found dead near Mount Spokane in 1997.After the arrest, many police agencies in areas where Yates once lived started looking for possible links between him and other unsolved murders. Reagan said the task force has received inquiries from two foreign countries and 30 different agencies in the nation about the case against Yates.One of those was the Island County Sheriff’s Office.Sheriff Mike Hawley said he’s been in touch with Spokane investigators and has sent DNA evidence from the scene of an unsolved murder to the state crime lab for comparison to Yates. Nineteen-year-old Teresa Hesselgrave’s body was found in a wooded area near her Coupeville home April 15, 1977. She had been bound and gagged but there was no evidence of sexual assault. She died from asphyxiation.According to a story in the Spokesman-Review, the German federal police are looking into the deaths of 26 prostitutes, with assistance from U.S. Army Criminal Investigative Command. Yates, a former Navy helicopter pilot, was stationed in Goeppingen, Germany from 1988 to 1991. The FBI has found the black van he allegedly owned in Germany and has searched it for evidence.In Oak Harbor, many of Yates former classmates still live locally and were dumbfounded by the news of his arrest. Those who remember him, like Oak Harbor dentist Gary Berner and Burlington resident Al Gatti, say that Yates was a very nice, quiet boy who grew up in a religious household.Fine said she is still reeling from the irony that she moved to the city where her sister’s alleged killer grew up.”