King County prosecutors on Thursday charged a 57-year-old man with premeditated first-degree murder with sexual motivation, accusing him of luring, raping and killing a Seattle girl in summer 1994 after spotting her at a school across the street from his mother’s house.
Arrested and booked into the King County Jail on Tuesday after DNA evidence connected him with the homicide of 14-year-old Tanya Frazier, Mark Anthony Russ is being held without bail and faces a de facto life sentence if convicted.
Seattle police Chief Shon Barnes announced the arrest of a suspect in the 31-year-old homicide case at a Wednesday news conference at police headquarters, saying he was grateful “we have finally found the man responsible for taking her life.”
Up until a few years ago, Russ was in prison for more than two decades on other charges.
In 1996, two years after Tanya’s body was found in a wooded area 10 blocks from where classmates last saw her alive outside Meany Middle School on Capitol Hill, Russ forced his way into a Tukwila home, where he attempted to rape a house cleaner and held her at knifepoint while he raided the house of jewelry, court records show.
Convicted of attempted first-degree rape, first-degree robbery and first-degree burglary in the Tukwila case, Russ was sentenced to life in prison as a persistent offender under the state’s three strikes law.
One of his underlying strike offenses was a 1991 second-degree robbery charge. When the state Legislature dropped second-degree robbery from the list of strike offenses in 2021, Russ was resentenced to a little over 15 years for the Tukwila home invasion and released from prison that October, according to court records.
He appears to have misdemeanor charges for assault and harassment pending in Seattle Municipal Court from 2023 and 2024, respectively, and is out of compliance with requirements he register as a sex offender based on his attempted rape conviction in the 1996 Tukwila case, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Mary Barbosa wrote in Thursday’s charging documents.
Barbosa noted that Tanya was a stranger to Russ. He seemingly chose her at random and “induced her to talk to him by ruse.
“The viciousness of her injuries, the hiding of her body in a wooded area, the defendant’s violent sexual history, the prison range he faces in this case and the fact that he has ignored court orders renders him not only a serious flight risk but an extreme danger to the community,” Barbosa wrote in charging papers.
The investigation
Seattle police homicide Detective Rolf Norton, who inherited the case from earlier detectives and who also spoke at Wednesday’s news conference, authored the probable cause statement detailing the timeline of the three-decade investigation into the hunt for Tanya’s killer.
The statement, which is included with the charging documents, says Tanya’s family reported her missing on July 18, 1994, after she attended a summer class at Meany Middle School but then failed to arrive at her summer job at the Chicken Soup Brigade.
Five days later, a man walking his dog in the 2200 block of East Highland Drive smelled a strange odor, looked down into the ravine and saw the body of a young female who was obviously dead and in an advanced stage of decomposition, the charges say. He summoned police and medics and told detectives he had smelled the odor two days earlier but did not get closer to look into the ravine, according to the charges.
The girl, later identified as Tanya Frazier, was found lying on a slope in a brush-covered area between Highland Drive and 23rd Avenue East, partially clothed in underwear and a bra that had been pushed down to expose her body, charging papers say. She had severe cut wounds to her neck and the King County medical examiner’s office later determined she died from multiple sharp force injuries to her head and neck, according to the charges.
Her classmates told detectives they saw a man approach Tanya outside of Meany Middle School after class on the day she disappeared, the charges say. They described him as a Black man in his 20s or 30s with an unkempt Afro, wearing dark clothing, and appearing unclean. They saw her walk with him to a beat-up black or maroon vehicle, though none of them saw her get inside, charging papers say.
It was the last time Tanya was seen alive.
That September, scientists at the Washington State Patrol crime lab analyzed Tanya’s underwear and swabs taken of her body during her autopsy for the presence of semen but didn’t find anything, the charges say.
Two months later, in December 1994, a woman walking along Longfellow Creek in West Seattle came across a pile of schoolbooks, clothes and a wallet that turned out to belong to Tanya, according to the charges. The woman told police she walked the area often and was sure the items hadn’t been there three or four weeks earlier.
Seven years after that discovery, detectives asked the scientists at the crime lab to run another analysis of evidence from the case, including the autopsy swabs. In May 2004, a mixed DNA profile was recovered from blood swabbed from Tanya’s right leg — the profile included Tanya’s DNA and unknown male DNA, the charges say. The male DNA was run through CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Identification System, but came back without any hits.
In 2018, detectives attempted to use genetic genealogy — using publicly shared DNA profiles to build family trees and identify potential crime suspects — but the mixed nature of the DNA profile was too complicated to use that strategy, according to the charges.
Another six years went by.
Matching DNA
In May 2024, crime lab scientists extracted another mixed DNA profile from up to four people from the exterior panel of Tanya’s underwear, the charges say. The same male DNA profile first identified twenty years earlier was one of the contributors.
Using enhanced DNA extraction methods, the scientific analysis continued into this year. Then last month, on Oct. 16, the crime lab reported scientists had found a single source male DNA profile from semen taken in a swab of Tanya’s leg during her autopsy, according to the charges.
The DNA profile was consistent with the male DNA profile first identified in 2004 and was again run through CODIS, this time matching to Russ, the charges say.
As an aside, CODIS wasn’t fully functional until 1998, after Russ had been sentenced to life in prison for his then third strike in the 1996 Tukwila home invasion. Court records from his 2021 resentencing show he was ordered to provide a DNA sample at the time the court ordered his release — and presumably, that’s when his DNA profile would have been entered into the system.
After detectives got the CODIS hit matching Russ to Tanya’s killing, detectives researched him and learned his mother lived on the block across the street from Meany Middle School in July 1994, in the 2100 block of East Thomas Street, the charges say.
In summer and fall of 1994, Russ, who was 26 at the time, was associated with or lived at a home in West Seattle, a little over a half mile from where Tanya’s schoolbooks, clothing and wallet were found, according to the charges.
Russ is scheduled to be arraigned on the murder charge on Wednesday.
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