Gary L Ridgway.
Judge Richard Jones, appointed to the bench nine years earlier, had maintained a relatively serene courtroom despite the incendiary possibilities in the hearings of such a high-profile offender. Jones was an outstanding jurist who had lectured often to attorneys at Continuing Legal Education classes and to bar associations. The brother of music legend Quincy Jones, he was very accomplished in his own field.
Judge Jones had read the letters from the anguished parents thoughtfully, and he recalled one. “There is a hole in my heart,” a mother had written. “A vacancy that only my child can occupy. The emptiness is deep and it hurts.”
He also quoted the poet John Dryden: “Murder may go unpunish’d for a time, but tardy justice will oertake the crime.” And, indeed, it had. Now he ordered Gary Ridgway to turn toward the gallery and look at the faces of those who grieved, suggesting that these tearstained faces should be the last memory he had of the free world. “The remarkable thing about you,” Judge Jones commented, “is your Teflon-coated emotions and complete absence of genuine compassion for the young women you murdered.”
And that was, indeed, what anyone who observed Gary Ridgway would remember—the automaton, the robot, the true animal who appeared to operate from the limbic system of his brain with no censoring from the frontal lobe. He had admitted to detectives and psychologists that he might have killed his own son, his wife, his mother, anyone who interfered in his survival and his continuous pursuit of sadism and pleasure.
Judge Jones honored the memory of the victims as he prepared to sentence Ridgway. He asked for forty-eight seconds of silence before he pronounced the sentences.
Gary Ridgway was sentenced to forty-eight life sentences without possibility of early release or parole, sentences that will, indeed, run consecutively. He will be liable for all the fines the prosecution had mentioned. Judge Jones added a final, somewhat bizarre, punishment. Ridgway had to give up his permit to carry a firearm. That seemed to be the least of his worries.
As former deputy prosecutor Al Matthews observed the final denouement of the Green River murders case, he was ambivalent. Like all of the others who had worked for decades to convict a killer, he felt a sense of triumph for the final resolution.
He didn’t regret that he hadn’t gone ahead in 1987 and pushed for a State case based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence. “I felt strongly that he was the one. If I filed the case and tried it, I [believed] I could get past a half time motion for dismissal. The problem was that with no physical evidence, there was no telling what a trial would bring. And, of course, we would only get one shot at him.”
He meant that double jeopardy would attach if Ridgway was acquitted, and he could have walked away, knowing that he could not be tried twice for the same crimes.
“Only one thing bothers me,” Matthews would recall. “It was all a matter of a savage who had to be in control. At the very end, he still was. He avoided the death penalty by controlling the situation and providing the information to keep himself alive.”
AND AT LAST it was over. The sun was still shining and the air smelled good as I walked out of the courthouse to be interviewed by Nancy Grace of Court TV. Shell-shocked family members were all around me, negotiating their way past construction barricades around the aging courthouse, ducking the microphones thrust into their faces, hurrying away from what must have been one of the worst days of their lives.
I saw a familiar face from the eighties. Melvyn Foster, no longer a “person of interest,” had come to watch the sentencing. He wore a jacket advertising the popular forensic detective series of the day: CSI.
And then I saw Dick Kraske standing off to one side, watching new, young detectives being interviewed. Dave Reichert stood in the center of the media’s lights, but he wasn’t a young detective any longer either. So many years had passed.
It was the end of a terrible era.
Afterword
THE GREEN RIVER TASK FORCE, much diminished, continues to follow up unsolved crimes and unidentified bodies that may be linked to Gary Ridgway. The consensus is that there will be more corpses surfacing in the months and years to come. In the meantime, the world moves on without him.
Dave Reichert is still the sheriff of King County, but perhaps not for long. Ridgway’s capture made Reichert a media star. For two years, rumor had it that Reichert would run for governor. Instead, he set his sights on Washington, D.C., and, in 2004, became a Republican candidate for Congress representing the Eastside of King County. If he should go to Washington, it is likely that Tom Jensen and John Urquhart will go with him.
Sue Peters went to Africa on safari in early 2004, about as far as she could get from the cloistered interview room at Green River headquarters where she spent six months in 2003. She continues to work on the Green River cases, hoping, especially, to find an answer to Keli McGinness’s fate.
Some years ago, Peters and Detective Denny Gulla, determined to save as many young women as they could, put together a program called the Highway Intelligence Team (H.I.T.). With detectives Jesse Anderson and Christine Bartlette, they go back once a month, to the Strip and other locations where prostitution is rife, looking for the working girls of a new generation. They are not there to arrest them but rather to check on their welfare.
“I give them my card,” Peters says, “and tell them they can call me twenty-four hours a day if they need help. I do my best to put them in touch with services they need and, hopefully, to get them off the street.”
Peters and the other three detectives are available all the time, and she has received phone calls from desperate girls at all hours of the day and night. “When I get to know them, I ask for the names of the motels where they usually stay, for their dental information, and if they have any significant scars,” Peters says. “Sometimes they ask me why I need to know that, and I tell them the truth: ‘So we can identify your body if something happens to you.’ That shocks them and makes them realize how dangerous it is to be out there.”
A few of Peters’s and Gulla’s “regulars” call once or twice a week just to check in. It gives them a lifeline and a connection to someone who cares about them. Although gathering information is definitely not the primary purpose of H.I.T., many of the young women report “bad dates” and their license plate numbers. Some of their warnings have led to the arrests of serial rapists.
Randy Mullinax has put together a comprehensive seminar on the Green River investigation that is much in demand with law enforcement agencies all over the country.
Bob Gebo, Ed Streidinger, and Kevin O’Keefe have returned to the Seattle Police Department. Frank Adamson has retired. Richard Kraske has retired. Cherisse Luxa has retired. Ben Colwell has retired. Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay has retired, and lives on an island in Puget Sound where he recently completed a class on repairing boat motors—as far from forensic pathology as he could get.
Bill Haglund continues to aid in identifying victims of terrorist slaughters in foreign countries.
Danny Nolan, Paul Smith, Ralf McAllister, Jim Pompey, Dr. John Berberich, and Tonya Yzaguerre are deceased.
Matt Haney is the chief of police of Bainbridge Island, Washington. Robert Keppel is a professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, teaching criminology and investigative techniques.
Judith Ridgway lives in seclusion, but has told friends that she plans to write a book about her marriage to Gary Ridgway.
Chad Ridgway is in the marines in California.
Judy DeLeone, Carrie Rois’s mother, broke her ankle a few years after Carrie’s remains were found. An undiagnosed blood clot formed, and she died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism.
Mertie Winston suffered a stroke shortly after Tracy Winston’s remains were identified, but has fought her way back to complete recovery.
Suzanne Villamin lives with her little dog in an apartment in downtown Seattle, surrounded by memories of her daughter, Mary Bello.
Looking thro
ugh a two-foot-high stack of emails, letters, and phone notes I received over twenty-two years, I was once more amazed at the diversity of Green River Killer suspects: doctors, lawyers, psychologists, cops, pilots, writers, blue-collar workers, students, cultists, salesmen, cabdrivers, bus drivers, parolees, ministers, teachers, politicians, actors, and businessmen. In the end, it came down to the realization that the Green River Killer could have been almost anybody.
Almost anybody but a boring little man of seemingly predictable habits, a penny-pincher, miser, a collector of junk, and a target for jokes and demeaning nicknames. And yet it was Gary Ridgway’s protective coloration that let him stay free for more than twenty years. That and his uncommon ability to mask what lay beneath his bland facade and to hide his rage and frustration from his ex-wives, numerous girlfriends, his family, and even the woman who became his third wife. Judith Ridgway appeared to have truly believed that she and Gary “did everything together.” She was confident that neither of them had a need for friends or other diversions.
Gary Ridgway was good at only one thing. He was an efficient killer who was so inept at everything else that it was easy for him to hide in plain sight. In a way, he achieved what he had sought for most of his life. At last, people noticed him and he got his name and picture in the paper and on television.
For six months, he spent his time with detectives who, although they were much smarter than he, were obliged to come to him for answers. He got to go on field trips, and if their body site searches continued over a mealtime, he got to order fishwiches or hamburgers and french fries at fast-food drive-throughs.
In January 2004, when Ridgway was transferred, secretly of course, to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, he fully expected that he would continue to be a celebrity. He was taken first to the M.H.U.—the Mental Health Unit—where he would stay until May undergoing various tests.
“He had a cocky attitude,” an observer said. “You could tell that he thought he was superior to the other prisoners—that he was special.”
He soon learned that he was not. The stream of detectives he had expected to visit him did not appear, although he was flown once to Snohomish County, just north of King County, to go on field trips there. Nothing significant was found. The media was unaware of the quick trip.
Ridgway is considered prey in the Walla Walla prison for several reasons: most prisoners despise him for his crimes against women—rapists and child abusers are on the very bottom rung in the penitentiary; some convicts are related to the victims or their friends and would jump at the chance to wreak vengeance. Perhaps most of all, the prison hierarchy would reward any man who killed Ridgway. It would be a real feather in the cap of the con who managed to accomplish such a difficult feat. Wisconsin serial murderer Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t survive long in prison; he was murdered in the shower room. In 2003, a Catholic priest convicted of child abuse was strangled shortly after he entered the General Population.
During Ridgway’s first few months in the M.H.U. in Walla Walla, one prisoner managed to get very close to him before he was spotted, quickly restrained, and hustled away. Ridgway will, indeed, have to keep his back to the wall—even when he is in solitary.
In May 2004, Ridgway was transferred to the I.M.U.—the Intensive Management Unit—where the most dangerous and difficult prisoners are housed in single, boxlike cells, shut off from the General Population of the prison. There, he is confined to his cell twenty-three hours a day. His accommodations are spartan, and it is rare to see a woman in the I.M.U. He is housed with the worst of the worst: women killers, sexual perverts, convicts whose crimes once made sensational headlines but who have long since been forgotten—shut off from the world with no hope of parole.
One of the other inmates on his tier laughed as he told a visitor about Gary Ridgway’s first night in the I.M.U. He had activated the emergency signal. When a guard responded, Ridgway complained loudly that there was a “hole in my blanket.”
“Then put your toe in it,” the guard responded. “And never ring that alarm again unless you have a real emergency.”
Just before Ridgway was sentenced to forty-eight life terms, he said that his worst fear was that he had forgotten some of his victims and the places where he left them. There is every likelihood that he has not yet revealed everything he has done. He knows full well that his plea bargain will be voided if it can be proved that he purposely held back information. And he has no plea bargains with other jurisdictions; he has admitted to leaving bodies or parts of bodies in Oregon, but insists that he committed all his murders in King County, Washington.
The geographical location of murders still undiscovered may yet see Gary Ridgway die in the death chamber.
Acknowledgments
OVER the past twenty-two years, scores of people have helped me with various aspects of my research, writing, and preparing this book to go to the printer. I am so afraid I will forget someone, but I’m going to try to go back to July 1982 and thank everyone who played a part. In some instances, I will use an alias or only a first name. The reasons, I think, will be obvious, and I know readers will understand.
It hasn’t been easy for grieving families to answer some of the questions I asked them, and I am forever grateful that they were willing to talk to me about the good days and the sad days of their lives.
Bill Aadland, Frank Adamson, Mike Barber, Linda Barker, David Bear, Brook Beiloh, Moira Bell,* Bren and Sharon, Marilyn Brenneman, Darla Bryse,* Lorrie C.,* Lynne Dickson, Gerald “Duke” Dietrich, Val Epperson, Families and Friends of Violent Crime Victims, Gene Fredericksen, Betty Pat Gatliff, Bill Haglund, Matt Haney, Ed Hanson, Jon Hendrickson, Maryann Hepburn,* Edward Iwata, Robert Keppel, Jean Knollmeyer, Dick Kraske, Katie Larson, Pat Lindsay, Lorna, Cherisse Luxa, Rebecca Mack, Norm Maleng, Josh Marquis, Al Matthews, Bruce McCrory, Dennis Meehan, Garrett Mills, Randy Mullinax, Kevin O’Keefe, Princess Oahu, John O’Leary, Sue Peters, Charlie Petersen, Barbara Potter, Don Reay, Barbara and John Reeder, Dave Reichert, Robert Ressler, Elizabeth Rhodes, Cheryl Rivers, Ruby, Mike Rule, Austin Seth, Paul Sherfry, Norm Stamper, Anne Stepp, Tenya, Kay Thomas, Kevin Wagner, Don White, Don Winslow, Mertie Winston, Chuck Wright, Suzanne Villamin, and Luanna Yellow Robe.
I APPRECIATE my friends who have forgiven me for staying glued to my computer these past six months: my always dependable first reader Gerry Brittingham Hay; my organizer Kevin Wagner; Betty May Settecase and the rest of the “Jolly Matrons,” a secret—but friendly—society who have known each other since we were seventeen, Joan Kelly, Sue Morrison, Sue Dreyer, Patricia Potts, Shirley Coffin, Gail Bronson, Alice Govig, Shirley Jacobs, Joyce Schmaltz, and Val Szukovathy. To my fellow writers Donna Anders and Leslie Rule, and all my old pals with whom I’m going to go out to lunch again: Shirley Hickman and Rosalie Foster, Claudia House, Chirlee House, Margie McLaughlin, Cece Coy, Jennifer Heimstra, Marnie Campbell, Bonnie Allen, Elisabeth Fredericksen, Janet West, Patty Greeney, Gretchen DeMulling, Dee Grim, and Maureen Woodcock.
I am very lucky indeed that I still have my editorial and publishing team at Free Press/Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books as we work on our seventeenth book together. Authors need editing and more editing, a clear legal head to advise them, production people, proofreaders, designers in the art department, an enthusiastic marketing department, creative publicists, and accurate printers. This is my writing home, and I am glad I found it! Thank you all for so many years of support and friendship: Carolyn Reidy and Martha Levin (publishers); Fred Hills and Burton Beals (editors); Kirsa Rein (editorial assistant); Isolde Sauer, Jane Herman, Betty Harris, and Eva Young (copyediting); Jennifer Weidman (legal); Carisa Hayes and Liz Keenan (publicists); Karolina Harris (text design); Hilda Koparanian (production); and Eric Fuentecilla (cover design).
I chose the best literary agents in the world—at least for me—thirty-five years ago, and Joan and Joe Foley are, happily, still with me. Thanks to Ron Bernstein of International Creative Management for representing my theatrical rig
hts.
There is also an irreplaceable team in Seattle who never let me down as the deadlines creep up: Roadrunner Print and Copy, Entre Computer, and the FedEx folks at the SeaTac Airport who hold the door open as I come racing up with finished manuscript pages due in New York City overnight.
And, finally, to my “writing dogs”—Lucy and Willow—and the cats who sit on my warm computer—Fluffbutt, Beanie, Bunnie, and Toonces. They all keep me from getting lonesome when days go by without my seeing human beings.
About the Author
ANN RULE is the author of twenty-one New York Times national bestsellers, all of them still in print. A former Seattle police officer, she has a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, an A.A. in Criminal Justice from Highline Community College, and a Ph.D. in Humane Letters from Willamette University. She is a certified instructor for police, probation, and corrections officers, and for CLE and CME, and has taught seminars to many law enforcement groups, including the F.B.I. Academy, for many years. She has been an active advocate for victims’ rights organizations for three decades. She has testified before U.S. Senate judiciary subcommittees twice, and was one of the five civilian advisers on the VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) Task Force to set up its program to track and trap serial killers. Ann is currently at work on two new books. She lives near Seattle, and can be contacted through her website pages at www.AnnRules.com.
Ann Rule, standing beneath the Peck Bridge on the edge of the Green River in Kent, Washington, at the exact spot where Wendy Lee Coffield’s body was found in July 1982. No one could imagine then that Wendy was only the first of more than fifty victims.