Green River, Running Red

  “Yes.”

  He explained that he and Judith were having a nice life, vacationing in Las Vegas or Reno, gambling a little bit. They also went to Disneyland. He was trying to forget all about the bad time when he was alone and killing women. But he’d been angry again when the investigators from the task force served their search warrants in 1987. He was upset because they came to his work and said they were from the Green River Task Force. At that point, he was trying to forget all the murder stuff.

  Ridgway’s biggest fear in the summer of 2003 was that he might not be able to lead detectives to the bodies of his victims who were still missing, that his memory might fail him. If that happened, he felt he would probably be executed because they would think he was lying and failing to keep his part of the plea agreement.

  He had thought a lot about the death penalty. He figured it wouldn’t happen for seven or eight years, and he’d read about lethal injections. “It’s a process that you just go to sleep and your heart stops, so there’s very little pain.”

  Wheeler asked if he worried about being dead. Ridgway said he did, but he figured that if he told the truth and prayed, he would go to Heaven. Other prisoners had told him it would be worse to go to prison for the rest of his life. Still, all things considered, he wanted to live.

  He was afraid of dying, he told Dr. Wheeler, and he wanted to get all the killings off his chest. “Confessing, and trying to help the families, and to give the best I can on that.”

  “And why do you want to help the families?”

  “Because they’d like closure. They want to have a place for where their daughter or wife is buried.”

  “I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Ridgway,” Dr. Wheeler said carefully, “but why didn’t you help the families in 1985?”

  “Because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

  Gary Ridgway’s thoughts always circled back to himself. He said that he cried a lot, at first attributing that to the number of lives he had taken.

  “You took a lot of lives mostly sometime before 1990…. Why are you crying about it now, rather than then?”

  “Well, because I screwed up. How I screwed up on killing them. Maybe leaving too much evidence at the time.”

  Ridgway said he never thought about escaping, although he fantasized about there being an earthquake where he could just walk out of jail. But he knew there would be a price on his head and no one would care if he was dead or alive to collect “$100,000” reward. And where could he go? He didn’t speak any foreign languages.

  The only thing he had to look forward to were the “field trips” to look for bodies, even though the detectives wouldn’t let him out of the car very often. He still liked the experience of going out on the same roads he took to deposit the bodies of his victims.

  OF COURSE, one of Gary Ridgway’s greatest anxieties was alleviated during those field trips, when he was successful in leading the task force searchers to the remains of Pammy Avent. Tips had said Pammy was living in Hollywood, or Denver, had given birth to a baby girl, and even that she was still working as a prostitute in a motel in the Seattle area. But she hadn’t been in any of those places. Ridgway took the investigators to Highway 410 just east of Milepost 26. After six days of digging and raking, they’d found Pammy next to the fallen cedar log, the passing of seasons had buried her six inches beneath the forest floor.

  Unerringly, again and again, he had led the task force detectives to isolated locations where Green River victims had been discovered over the years since 1982. To test his truthfulness, some of the sites they took him to were “false sites” where no women had ever been found. He never missed. There was no question that Gary Ridgway was the Green River Killer. He knew bleak facts that no one else could know, and his very life depended on his finding the truly lost victims. And now it looked as if he would, indeed, never have to enter either the gallows room or the fatal injection chamber at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

  What he would face might be worse than the gallows. In November 2003, Gary Ridgway would have to plead guilty to aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of forty-eight young women, and do so in the presence of those who had loved his victims. And, in December, his punishments would be meted out. Sentencing might be easier than listening to the words of those same survivors.

  55

  GARY RIDGWAY was expected to plead guilty on forty-eight murder counts on November 5, 2003. Prosecuting attorney Norm Maleng and Sheriff Dave Reichert and their staffs held a meeting that almost all of the victims’ families attended. So there would be no surprises in the courtroom, they wanted the families to know why they had chosen the path they were taking, and to discuss their reasons for accepting Ridgway’s guilty plea. The State had agreed to the Defense’s proffer way back in June, but absolute secrecy was maintained. Accepting a guilty plea to aggravated murder in the first degree where the death penalty can be invoked violates statutes because, essentially, it allows a defendant to commit suicide. This plea bargain would save Ridgway’s life, effectively eliminating the possibility of his being executed. For five months, he had allegedly been cooperating with the Green River Task Force, although some investigators thought he was still minimalizing his crimes.

  The majority of the survivors accepted Norm Maleng’s choice to plea bargain; some did not. They wanted to see Ridgway dead. They always would.

  It had not been an easy decision for Maleng to make, nor a popular one with some voters, but politics had never driven him. In the end, he knew that he was doing the best thing for the most people. If his office had proceeded to what would be endless trials and appeals, Maleng doubted many questions would have been answered for those who still grieved for their children. He knew the pain of losing a child. One wintry day in 1989, his daughter, twelve-year-old Karen Leslie Maleng, was killed in a sledding accident on a snowy public street. Seattleites remembered that and the prosecutor’s quiet courage in the face of such tragedy.

  On that first Thursday in November, Superior Court Judge Richard A. Jones’s courtroom was filled with families and friends, investigators and the media, all of whom had passed through heavy security. Ridgway shuffled in wearing his jail scrubs, his back to the gallery, a harmless-looking little man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses.

  Gary Ridgway’s voice was calm and emotionless as he acknowledged that he fully understood that he had signed away his rights to a trial in return for avoiding execution. He said, “Yes, I did” when Jeff Baird asked him multiple times if he had signed one clause or the other with his initials. Yes, he knew he would have no jury, no appeals, no new trials, no hope of ever walking free again. But he would live. He was an automaton now, carefully keeping his back to the gallery behind him, and he seemed no threat.

  But the depth of his perversion would soon destroy that illusion. Although the defense quickly waived Baird’s reading the entire sixteen pages of the charges, the gallery would hear enough.

  Judge Jones had asked Ridgway to state, in his own words, why he was pleading guilty to forty-eight counts of murder, and he complied, although his confession had more legalese in it than he might generally use.

  There was no way for the prosecution team to describe what Ridgway had done in “an antiseptic manner,” Baird warned the judge and observers. The language would be graphic and disturbing, just as the hundreds of hours of taped interviews had been. Now, the public heard some of the worst of the acting out of Gary Ridgway’s fantasies.

  As Baird read Ridgway’s statement aloud, there were muffled gasps and grief-stricken faces in the crowd on the other side of the courtroom’s rail. “I killed the forty-eight women listed in the State’s second amended information. In most cases, when I murdered these women, I did not know their names. Most of the time, I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory of their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight….

  “I killed them all in King County. I killed most of them in my ho
use near Military Road, and I killed a lot of them in my truck, not far from where I picked them up. I killed some of them outside. I remember leaving each woman’s body in the place where she was found…. I picked prostitutes because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without being caught.”

  The entire summary of evidence would be released later. Baird and the other prosecutors had brilliantly winnowed down thousands of pages of police follow-ups and statements into a horrendous document recounting the crimes of a man consumed with cruelty and killing for more than forty years.

  It didn’t seem to trouble him; Ridgway answered “Guilty” in a monotone voice forty-eight times as the names of the dead girls—and four who had no names—were read aloud. Either he didn’t care about them or he had no affect at all. It was probably the former. Never once in discussing his crimes had Ridgway appeared to have any remorse or regret as he talked with detectives about the murders he had committed; any emotional pain he’d felt was for his losses. There was no way to describe it verbally, but now they saw what he was, a roving predator who had perfected his techniques for luring the vulnerable with the same bland vacuity he demonstrated in court, killing them efficiently as he robbed them of air, allowing himself no more than an hour to load them into his truck—headed for the wilderness where he would throw them away.

  Any living creature deserved better, and these were human beings sacrificed to fulfill his sexual appetite and assuage his rage, a rage the cause of which seemed unclear even to him. Gary Ridgway demonstrated a seemingly endless capacity as a killing machine.

  As the charges were read, it was apparent that there were some unexpected and heretofore unknown victims who came after the young women who had become familiar to those who followed the Green River cases. In the months of interrogation, Ridgway’s questioners had discovered that the murders had not stopped in 1984 or even 1985. After Judith moved in with him, the fires of his rage had been somewhat banked but not extinguished. He continued to patronize prostitutes and sit in dark spots along the Strip, watching the girls, seeking prey. On weekends, he had attended swap meets and garage sales with his trusting wife, gone camping and gardened. And he’d rarely missed work. But he had still found time for his favorite hobby: killing.

  And killing was what he was all about. The spontaneous erections of his teenage years were long since gone even in the eighties. The women who went with him had had to perform oral sex to harden his penis enough so he was able to get behind them for intercourse. More important, he’d needed that position so he could choke them with his forearm. If they didn’t die from his throttling them, he stood on their necks to finish the job.

  He had perfected the murder part, and he got better over the years at hiding the dead girls. It must have been a matter of some pride for him that it had taken so many years to find some of the victims from the 1982 to 1984 spate of killing. He had apparently varied his master plans to throw the detectives off as the years rolled by—into the nineties, probably past the turn of the century.

  THE BODY OF CINDY SMITH, the “Punky Brewster” girl who had just come home from California happily betrothed, hadn’t been found for thirty-nine months. Children playing in a ditch near Green River Community College in June 1987, took a stick to poke at a pile of debris. They screamed and ran home when a human skull rolled out. With dental records, Cindy had been identified almost immediately. Ridgway had been confident that he could lead task force investigators to where he had left the rest of her body, but he faltered. He was confused because he was certain he had left Cindy as a beginning focal point to start another cluster site, and failing to locate the bodies he considered his property upset him. Finally, it became obvious that new roads had been built, changing the topography of the area. He could only place Cindy’s resting spot from aerial photos. Once he did that, he visibly relaxed.

  THE SECOND VICTIM he’d disposed of in that general area fit his description of the S.I.R. auto race way site, but she hadn’t been on the Green River list. Patricia Barczak was nineteen when she was last seen on October 18, 1986. A pretty, bubbly young woman with thick, frosted brown, shoulder-length hair, she had just completed a course in a culinary school and was on her way to fulfilling her dream of becoming a baker of wedding cakes. Like most girls her age, Patty was somewhat gullible when it came to men. Just before she disappeared, she was dating a man who’d led her to believe he had a successful career working at the Millionair’s Club. Because she lived in Bellevue, she didn’t know that the club, spelled without the usual e, wasn’t an exclusive social spot but rather a shelter for down-and-outers, a longtime Seattle fixture that provided meals and day jobs for men on the streets. After she discovered that her boyfriend had grossly exaggerated his status, she had trouble getting him out of her house and out of her life. To avoid him, she had to meet her girlfriends someplace else, just to get a breath of fresh air, hoping in vain that he would be gone when she returned. But he had no home to go to, and he had staked out a claim on the couch of the apartment Patty shared with her roommates. He became an early suspect in her case.

  Her worried mother told Bellevue detective Jim Hansen that Patty hadn’t picked up her paycheck at the Winchell’s Donut Shop where she worked. When Hansen found many of her things, including her backpack filled with personal and religious items that mattered to her, in her “boyfriend’s” possession, he was on the hot seat, though the detective couldn’t absolutely link him to her disappearance.

  So Patty Barczak wasn’t placed on the Green River victim list. When her skull was found in February 1993, two hundreds yards off Highway 18, near the entrance to the S.I.R., sheriff’s captain Mike Nault was doubtful that she could be a Green River victim. The timing was off; the profile for the GRK said he liked to leave the bodies of his victims in the wilderness where he could revisit them and fantasize. Patty’s skull was out in the open, near a freeway.

  Even so, the girl who hadn’t called her frantic mother for seven years shared certain characteristics with the other victims. Animals might well have moved her skull from where it had been originally. There was a remote, but possible, chance she had met the Green River Killer. But it was impossible to determine the cause of her death because no other bones were found. Her skull was buried in an infant’s casket.

  Ridgway had missed the news stories in 1993 when Patricia’s skull was found, and that disturbed him. He had meant to surprise the task force investigators by giving them this new cluster, offering up at least one new victim. Although he cared nothing for their names, faces, or lives, he prided himself on keeping track of their bodies. And he was slipping. He was finally able to verify that he’d left Patricia Barczak close to the S.I.R. exit from the freeway, and within a half mile of Cindy Smith’s skull. He referred to her as his “S.I.R. Lady,” just as he called other victims things like “the Log Lady” and “the Water Tower Lady.” He remembered that Patty had been a little overweight, and had dark hair, which, for him, was a detailed description. Only he knew if he’d left complete bodies or just their heads. Toward the later years, he had apparently decapitated many bodies, leaving the heads many miles apart from the torsos to confuse the task force.

  ONE OF THE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN VICTIMS that Gary Ridgway presented to his questioners was Roberta Hayes, twenty-one. She was “Bobby Joe” to her family. She had rounded cheeks and a wide smile, resembling Sally Field in her Flying Nun role. Despite her hard life, Bobby Joe looked younger than her years. But she had lived and lost so much in two decades, always seeking love and a permanent place that would be home to her. She was raised by her father and her stepmother, but she struck out on her own at the age of twelve, ill equipped for the challenge of the streets. Bobby Joe may have been running away from hous
ework and child-care responsibilities at home. And yet she would give birth to her first child at fifteen and to four more in the next six years, all of them released to state agencies to be adopted.

  Bobby Joe could be counted upon to show up at her maternal grandparents’ house for Christmas and her birthday. She said she wanted to live with them, and while she was there, things were fine. But the lure of the streets always took her away. She was two people, really, trusting and almost naive when she was with her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and brothers, but flinty and obstinate when they ran into her on the streets somewhere, even though they pleaded with her to walk away from that life. No one in her family could totally convince her of how much they loved her. It was as if the time to be loved had passed her by and she could no longer accept it without question.

  Bobby Joe had close companions in “the life,” and she was drawn to them, too. She was a good and faithful friend. She usually worked the Aurora Avenue red-light area, a petite blond, blue-eyed girl who looked totally out of place. She didn’t hate cops, and often stuck her head into a police unit to say “Hi” to the patrol officers who were trying to clean up the street. They tried to reason with her, too, but no one could warn her convincingly enough that she was playing with danger.

  Sometimes Bobby Joe Hayes was far from home—in Sacramento, California, or in Portland. The last time anyone recalled seeing her she was in Portland, and it was February 7, 1987. Police in the Rose City had picked her up for prostitution and released her when she said she intended to go back to Seattle.

  For some reason, she was never on the Green River victim list either. Looking back, February 1987 was a period when Gary Ridgway felt very confident that he would never be identified. Matt Haney’s April 8 search warrants wouldn’t be served for two months, and Ridgway had no idea that he was under surveillance.