Manhunters

  The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to bring about his identification. A young couple in Mission Viejo were attacked in their home. The Night Stalker shot twenty-nine-year-old Bill Carns through the head while he slept, and then raped his partner on the bed next to the body. He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for money and jewelry. Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head. After making her repeat that she loved Satan, he left.

  A thirteen-year-old boy, James Romero, was repairing his motorcycle when he noticed an orange Toyota driving slowly past, and the driver peering around as if looking for a place to rob. And when he saw the car a second time half an hour later, he made a note of its license plate number. When he heard about the rape, he alerted the police. LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in the Los Angeles Chinatown district while the owner was eating in a restaurant. The Night Stalker abandoned it soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in the Los Angeles Rampart district. It was taken away for forensic testing, and a single fingerprint was successfully raised from behind the rearview mirror.

  The identification was described by the forensic division as “a near miracle.” The computer system had only just been installed, and this was one of its first trials. Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after January 1, 1960. Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.

  The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news. At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo. On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph on the front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.

  In the bus station he went into the men’s room to finish off the cocaine, and then into a liquor store to buy Pepsi and sugared donuts. Waiting for his change, he saw his own face looking up at him from a newspaper, and as someone said, “It’s him,” he ran from the shop. Stimulated by the cocaine, he raced two miles, and into the Hispanic district. In a parking lot he tried to drag a woman from her car, but was chased by passers-by. Seeing a red Mustang in a yard he jumped into it, but the owner, who was underneath it, emerged and grabbed him by the collar. Ramirez reversed into the garage wall and the car stalled. Once again he began running. He tried to pull another woman from her car, but failed and fled, now pursued by a crowd. Racing ahead, he stopped to stick out his tongue at his pursuers. Minutes later, he was caught, and dragged down by a crowd. At that moment, a young policeman arrived, and Ramirez shouted, “Save me before they kill me.”

  In his hometown of El Paso, on the Texas-Mexico border, acquaintances said Ramirez had become a Satanist in negative reaction to Bible-study classes, and that he had spent his teens as a loner, smoking marihuana and listening to heavy metal music.

  In spite of his own desire to plead guilty, his lawyers entered a plea of not guilty. The defense strategy was to play for delays, and the case came to trial only after three and a half years, in October 1988. Ramirez was finally sentenced to death in November 1999, telling the court, “You maggots make me sick.”

  At a second trial in San Francisco, he was besieged by enthusiastic female groupies who lined up to visit him in jail. He married one of his admirers in October 1996.

  The kind of good fortune that identified Richard Ramirez from a single fingerprint failed to favor the police in the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, which illustrates the difficulty of capturing an elusive criminal in a crowded urban area. In a deal to save himself from the death penalty, he offered to give the details of fifty-nine murders. In fact, he admitted that the actual number was closer to ninety.

  The first corpse was discovered in the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, Washington, on July 15, 1982, and was identified as a sixteen-year old prostitute, Wendy Coffield.

  Gary Ridgway prepares to leave the courtroom where he was sentenced in King County, Washington. Ridgway received a life sentence for each of forty-eight counts of murder in what became known as the “Green River Killer” serial murder case that began in 1982 and was the largest unsolved serial murder case in American history. (Associated Press/Joshua Trujillo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

  The second, twenty-three-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as “Dub,” was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute. Her body was found on August 12, 1982, also in the Green River. Between then and March 21, 1984, forty victims were found in the Seattle-Tacoma area, many from the strip around Sea-Tac airport, known as a haunt of prostitutes.

  Within three days of the finding of Dub Bonner, Dave Reichert, the detective in charge of the case, heard that two more bodies had been found in the Green River. Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks. They were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub had been found, and had almost certainly been there at the time.

  As Reichert walked along the bank toward that site, he discovered another body. Like the other two, she was black, and was later identified as sixteen-year-old Opal Mills. The fact that rigor mortis had not yet disappeared meant that she had been left there in the past two days—which in turn meant that if the police had kept watch on the river, the killer would have been caught before this young woman had died.

  It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history. The next—and perhaps the worst mischance—occurred two days later, when a local TV station announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, thus destroying all chance of catching the killer on a return visit.

  No less than twenty-six women vanished in 1983, and the remains of eight of them were found near Sea-Tac Airport or close by. In March, special investigator Bob Keppel, known for his brilliant work on the Ted Bundy case, was asked to write up a report on the investigation. It was devastating, with hundreds of examples of incompetence and failure to follow up on leads. For example, when the driving license of one victim, Marie Malvar, was found at the airport, and the police notified, they did not even bother to collect it—although it might well have contained the killer’s fingerprint.

  In 1984, four victims were found together on Auburn West Hill, six more in wooded areas along State Route 410, and two near Tigard, Oregon, the latter giving rise to the speculation that the killer had moved. In January, a Green River Task Force of thirty-six investigators was formed, with a $2 million budget. (By 1988 the bill would have reached $13 million.)

  Among the hundreds of suspects interviewed by the police was Gary Leon Ridgway, thirty-five, a short, mild-looking man with fishlike lips, who worked for the Kenworth Truck Plant and was known to pick up hookers—he even admitted to being obsessed by them. He also confessed to choking a prostitute in 1982, but claimed this was because she bit him.

  By 1986, with the investigation stalled. Ridgway’s file was reopened, and his ex-wife interviewed about his preference for sex in the open, often near the Green River. Ridgway was placed under surveillance. And still women disappeared—although no longer with quite the same frequency. And so throughout the 1990s, the case marked time, while Reichert, the chief investigator, admitted that his obsession with the killer had caused serious problems in his marriage.

  Since genetic fingerprinting had first been used in 1988 to convict the South Side Rapist, Timothy Spencer, it had led to the solution of many murders. The main problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old. In 2001, a major breakthrough came when the Washington State crime lab acquired the equipment to extract usable DNA from old samples and multiply the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats. Now a major review of samples of semen evidence began. And by September 2001, it had paid off. Semen samples, taken from Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, and Carol Christensen, three of the earliest
victims, proved to be from Gary Ridgway. Paint fragments and fiber evidence taken from the grave of Debra Estes in 1988 were also linked to Ridgway. When Ridgway was finally arrested on November 30, 2001, he was charged with four counts of murder.

  At first pleading innocent, he later agreed to change his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty.

  Ridgway’s account of how he became a serial killer occupies the most fascinating chapter of Reichert’s book Chasing the Devil. As with so many killers, the problems started with a domineering mother. Born in 1949, he was a chronic bed wetter, and she would drag him out of bed and parade him in front of his brothers, and then make him stand naked in a tub of cold water. His father seems to have been a timid nonentity. But as an employee of a mortuary he strongly influenced his son’s fantasies by describing at length interrupting someone having sex with a corpse. Ridgway began to fantasize about this. When he saw his mother sunbathing he had imagined having sex with her, but now he dreamed of killing her and violating the body. All this seems to imply some inbuilt or genetic tendency to sexual violence.

  Like so many serial killers he was sadistic to animals, and once killed a cat by locking it in a refrigerator. He also claimed that, as a teenager, he drowned a little boy by wrapping his legs around him and pulling him under the water. And later he would stab and injure another boy, because, he said, he “wanted to know what it was like to kill someone,” although he was never caught.

  Sent to the Philippines as a sailor, he began to use prostitutes, and they quickly became a lifelong obsession.

  He had discovered he enjoyed choking when he was quarrelling with his second wife, Marcia, and wrapped his arm round her neck from behind (a method also used by the Boston Strangler). In addition he enjoyed tying her up for sex. In 1975 they had a son, Matthew, whom he adored. A religious phase lasted until 1980, when they divorced. But during their marriage, he still hired prostitutes.

  He embarked on killing them after his divorce. Because he seemed a “milquetoast,” they felt no alarm about him, and allowed him to get behind them. He often took them back to his house, had sex, and then killed them. Later, he found he preferred to kill them first and have sex with the bodies. He also confessed to revisiting bodies several times for more sex.

  On one occasion, he even took his son with him in his pickup truck when he went into the woods with a prostitute; when the boy asked what had happened to her, Ridgway told him that she lived nearby and had decided to walk home.

  He even admitted to a scheme—never carried out—to overpower a prostitute and then impale her with an upright pole in her vagina—a favorite practice of the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

  And so this apparently harmless little man was able to carry on killing for many years. Reichert emphasizes that Ridgway was full of self-pity, regarding himself as the helpless victim of these sinister urges. On November 5, 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty-eight murders, and received forty-eight life sentences.

  Joel Rifkin bore a certain physical resemblance to Gary Ridgway and, like him, had a curious urge to kill the prostitutes who exercised such a fascination over him.

  In late June 1993, soon after dawn, two New York State troopers patrolling Long Island’s Southern State Parkway noticed that a station wagon ahead of them lacked a license plate. When they signaled it to stop, it swerved off the freeway into the streets of Wantaugh. The troopers pursued—reaching speeds of ninety miles an hour—with sirens wailing. Five additional police cars joined the chase before the station wagon veered out of control and hit a telephone pole. The driver proved to be bespectacled thirty-four-year-old Joel Rifkin. He claimed to have no explanation for his wild flight, but when the troopers noticed a foul order emanating from the car, they checked the back of the wagon. There, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the naked, decomposing corpse of a woman. She was a twenty-two-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani, who had vanished three days earlier. Rifkin confessed to strangling her as they had intercourse, and taking her back to the house in East Meadow, Long Island, where he lived with his mother and sister.

  It was hot weather and the corpse began to decompose quickly, so he decided to dump it among some bushes on rough ground near the local airport. And he went on to admit that he had made a habit of picking up prostitutes and strangling them—seventeen in all. (The police decided the number was actually eighteen, and that Rifkin had simply lost count.)

  Rifkin was an unemployed landscape gardener, and he had been picking up prostitutes on average three times a week since he was eighteen. In his bedroom, police found victims’ ID cards, driving licenses, credit cards, and piles of women’s underwear: panties, bras, and stockings. In the garage, which smelt of decaying flesh, they found the panties of his last victim, Tiffany Bresciani.

  As information about Rifkin began to emerge, it became clear that—once more—he was basically an inadequate. An illegitimate child, he had been adopted a few weeks after his birth in January 1959 by a Jewish couple, Ben and Jeanne Rifkin, who also adopted a girl.

  The children seemed to have been well treated, but Joel was backward at school; he mumbled, walked with hunched shoulders, and was dyslexic. (As with Bundy, there was probably a lack of “bonding” with his mother immediately after birth.) His schoolfellows called him “turtle” and made fun of him. When he left home he tried various jobs, on one occasion working in a record store, but he was usually late, and would turn up with rumpled clothes and dirty fingernails.

  Rifkin’s dream was to become a famous writer, and it could be argued that he had the right kind of preparation—a certain amount of childhood and adolescent frustration often seems to be good for writers. Rifkin spent hours writing poetry in his bedroom. But a few half-hearted attempts at further education fell through because he had no ability to concentrate. He began to work as a landscape gardener, but with such inefficiency that he usually lost his customers within days.

  He was already in his late twenties when his stepfather was diagnosed as suffering from prostate cancer, and committed suicide because he could not bear the pain. Jeanne Rifkin was shattered and went into a depression.

  Not long after, Rifkin met an attractive blonde in a coffee shop; he was scribbling, and they began a casual conversation; he was impressed when she told him she was writing a film script.

  He told her—untruthfully—that he was also writing a film script, and that he was a university student. When she took a small apartment, she even invited him to move in, to help her with her script. Rifkin had hoped that this was the beginning of a love affair; but she refused even to let him kiss her. A few weeks later, she tired of his laziness and untidiness and threw him out. After Rifkin’s arrest it was reported that she had worked as a streetwalker, and was suffering from AIDS, although it is not clear whether he was aware of either of those facts.

  What is certain is that he began to kill prostitutes in 1989, picking them up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many prostitutes turned him down because he looked and smelled peculiar. But one with whom he had sex on two occasions said he seemed perfectly ordinary and normal, and made no odd sexual demands. Another prostitute, however, refused when he asked for oral sex.

  Rifkin continued to commit murder after murder for almost five years, killing seventeen or eighteen prostitutes, many of them drug addicts. He may well have had sex with the corpses since he often took them home and kept them for days before he disposed of them. One body that he tossed on waste ground near JFK Airport was still there, more than a year later, under a mattress. Other bodies were placed in metal drums and thrown in the East River.

  Rifkin’s motivation has never been adequately explained. What is clear is that he was, like so many serial killers, an inept underachiever, a person who found life too much for him. As one of his schoolmates told a reporter, he was a lifelong loser. We can only assume that he killed because violence satisfied some long-held fantasy, and because it gave him a bizarre sense of achievement, a feeling that, in spite of a habit of
failure, he was a “somebody,” a multiple killer, a man to be reckoned with.

  Yet soon after his arrest, one of the policemen involved in the chase commented that he had probably wanted to be caught, since driving with a corpse in a car without license plates seems to be asking for trouble.

  On May 9, 1994, Joel Rifkin was sentenced to 203 years in prison.

  Probably the most widely publicized American case of the 1990s was that of Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual killer who murdered and cannibalized seventeen young men.

  Dahmer, born in 1960, was arrested on July 22, 1991. Late that evening, a slim black man ran out of the Oxford Apartments in a rundown area of Milwaukee, shouting for help, and waved a police car to a stop. He was wearing a handcuff on one wrist, and explained that a white youth was trying to kill him.

  The police went up to Apartment 213, and the door was answered by a tall, good-looking young man who apologized for causing a disturbance. His manner was so believable that the police were about to go away when one of them noticed a strong smell of decay emanating from the flat. As they tried to force their way in, the young man—Dahmer—became hysterical. When a policeman opened the door of the refrigerator, he found himself looking at a decapitated human head. They found another severed head in the freezer, three skulls in a filing cabinet, and four more elsewhere around the flat. A kettle contained severed hands and male genitals, and packets of meat that proved to be of human flesh. The man who had raised the alarm, Tracy Edwards, thirty-two, described meeting Dahmer in a shopping mall. Dahmer invited him to a party, but there was no one else in the apartment when they arrived. Edwards accepted several drinks, after which he became sleepy. Then Dahmer snapped a handcuff on his wrist and held a butcher’s knife against his throat, forcing him to sit still as he watched a videotape of The Exorcist. When Dahmer said he intended to kill Edwards and eat his heart, Edwards managed to kick him and run for the door.