by Ann Rule
He’d gotten his hair cut at Don the Barber’s ever since he was in junior high school. He’d worked in hotels and surplus stores on the Strip as a teenager, and, as an adult, he shopped there.
His name was Gary Leon Ridgway, and he was thirty-seven years old, a few months older than Dave Reichert. Haney felt there were too many hits on the computer to ignore, but even so, they were all circumstantial. There was no physical evidence to prove that Gary Ridgway was anything more than a slightly creepy guy who had been single during the peak years that the killer murdered the most victims: 1982 to 1984. The Green River investigators had come across a lot of guys who were creepy and, married or single, liked to stare at prostitutes and pay money to have sex with them.
Five years earlier, Melvyn Foster had looked perfect as a suspect. A year before, the fur trapper had seemed like a sure thing when he proved to be totally innocent. And that belief had gotten the task force the worst press yet. There had been a number of other men who seemed more likely candidates to be the GRK than this guy, men the public never heard about. And yet Gary Ridgway warranted a closer look.
When I glanced at the first notebook to tumble out of the file boxes about the Green River killings that I had saved for more than twenty years, I was startled to read my own printing scrawled across a whole page:
Gary Leon Ridgway—Physical Ev? may have ties to GR victim
Went to Tyee
Class of ’67 or ’68 turn W on 220 21859 32
Half of those notes would turn out to be wrong. But thinking I had something that the task force might want to see, I either filled in one of the tip sheets they’d given me, or, more likely, typed up what his neighbors told me when I met with them after they called me some time in 1987.
Seventeen years ago, feeling truly dumb about playing detective, I put on sunglasses and a scarf, borrowed a car, and drove past Gary Ridgway’s house on 32nd Avenue. It wasn’t hard for me to get there; I lived then on S. 18th and 240th. There was nothing even slightly unusual about his house. There was no one around and the windows were covered by drapes or blinds. If he had been in the yard, I wouldn’t have known it; I didn’t even know what he looked like.
I had no idea in 1987 that the Green River Task Force investigators were way ahead of me. They never told me one way or the other whether any of the information I passed on to them was useful. I didn’t expect them to.
In fact, the task force investigators and uniformed deputies had been watching Ridgway on and off for months.
Early on, Matt Haney had chosen Ridgway as his favorite suspect, and the more he found out about him, the more enthusiastic he grew. Haney probably worked on more police departments in more assignments than any cop under fifty. Beginning on the Kent Police Department, he investigated a homicide involving the first “government protected witness” in America to be wrenched from his East Coast organized-crime roots. Haney was in his early twenties at the time. He went next to the King County Sheriff’s Office where he was first a patrol deputy, then a homicide detective, and would one day be in charge of Special Operations (K-9s and Air Support), as well as training officer.
Haney conferred with Pompey and senior deputy King County prosecutors Marilyn Brenneman and Al Matthews, sharing his convictions that the task force should make a move—obtain a search warrant, if necessary—to find out more about Gary Ridgway.
Brenneman and Matthews were enthusiastic about focusing on Ridgway. Pompey also wanted to monitor Ridgway’s comings and goings. So far, their surveillance hadn’t netted them much. He went to work and he came home. He sometimes stopped to eat at fast-food restaurants. That was about the extent of it.
41
ON APRIL 8, 1987, Gary Ridgway’s sense of invulnerability was severely shaken. He had no idea that he was being surveilled, and he certainly didn’t expect the execution of a search warrant on his house, his locker at Kenworth Trucking, and the three vehicles he currently had available to him—his own Ford pickup truck, his father’s Dodge pickup, and the Dodge Dart that his wife, Judith, drove. The search warrant drawn up by Matt Haney and okayed by senior deputy prosecutors Al Matthews and Marilyn Brenneman, also specified that there was probable cause for Ridgway himself to give up hair samples.
The search, done discreetly and rapidly, went well. Haney and Doyon took Gary Ridgway to Kent police headquarters where they photographed him and bagged plucked samples of his head and pubic hair into evidence. While hair is not the optimum source to find DNA, if hair follicles (skin tags) are present it can be done. Almost as an afterthought, Matt Haney asked George Johnston from the Washington State Patrol crime lab to swab the inside of Ridgway’s mouth and cheek. The gauze pledget holding the saliva was bagged, labeled, and frozen against a day in the distant future when it might be important.
Sue Peters was a little chagrined to draw only Ridgway’s Kenworth locker, which, at the time, didn’t seem likely to give up anything vital to the case. She bagged and tagged his white coveralls, stained with myriad paint splotches.
Other searchers took away rope, tarps, paint samples, of which there were many, some carpet threads and fibers.
Gary Ridgway had always been proud of his job with Kenworth and the image he had there, or believed he had. He was a dependable, punctual employee, and he usually managed to follow the computer instructions provided to mix the paint that stylized the big rigs. But sometimes his dyslexia made it difficult for him to remember the numbers on the computers associated with specialty paint jobs. On a bad day, he might ruin a couple of jobs by getting mixed up on a three-color trim, and then he raged at himself. One day he “ruined several trucks” because he got the sequences mixed up. He even had one three-day period when he added the wrong chemicals to the paint. Worst of all, he occasionally painted the wrong truck entirely. The bosses always let him do it over, and he did without protest. One of his nicknames around the plant was “Wrong-Way” and he hated that. But he couldn’t show his anger at work because he feared being fired. In the employee break room, some of his co-workers found him inordinately religious, even a zealot, as he read aloud from the Bible. He was a paradox: Sometimes he was far too touchy-feely with women employees and made them nervous when he crept up behind them. Alternately, he would go through his preaching phases where he spouted his opinion about harlots and loose women until spittle flew out of his mouth.
After the task force investigators searched his locker, Ridgway got another nickname at work. Even though the searches of April 1987 were accomplished with little fanfare and, to Jim Pompey’s relief, no media blitz, other employees at Kenworth knew the detectives had questioned him, searched his belongings, and taken pictures of his truck in the company parking lot. Nobody really thought he was capable of killing more than three dozen prostitutes, but there was the similarity of his initials that begged for jokes at his expense: “G.R.” for Gary Ridgway, and “G.R.” for Green River. He soon became “Green River Gary” at Kenworth.
It was just a joke, but he didn’t find it amusing. Even so, the search warrant’s execution hadn’t damaged his career at Kenworth; he was too dependable an employee.
John O’Leary worked at Kenworth, too, but he was much farther up the corporate ladder than Ridgway could ever hope to be. O’Leary was a finely tuned long-distance runner in the mideighties and early nineties, and he and his running partner were interested in true-crime cases. “In our ninety-minute to two-hour training runs,” he recalled, “we would spend a lot of time talking about the Bundy case as we read the various books. We also talked a lot about the Green River case since it was on the news constantly.
“I later became the CFO [chief financial officer] of the Kenworth plants in Tukwila and Renton from 1997 to late 2000. Although I wasn’t friends with Ridgway, I certainly knew who he was. It was common knowledge that he had been a Green River suspect, but that he had been cleared.”
Jim Pompey was relieved that Matt Haney had managed to keep a lid on the details of the April 1997 searches. Even
the media, which dogged the detectives’ footsteps, seemed chastened in the aftermath of the Tikkenborg search chaos.
It would take several weeks before all the tests on evidence taken from Ridgway’s house, locker, and vehicles were finished and they would know if any usable physical evidence might emerge. In the meantime, Ridgway, albeit with his new nickname, went back to his everyday life. He didn’t threaten to sue anyone, and the vast majority of the Seattle public wasn’t even aware of his moment in the harsh spotlight.
Al Matthews, the prosecutor who had worked with the task force for four years, was as bitterly disappointed as Matt Haney and Sue Peters were when he had to tell them that there just wasn’t enough physical evidence to get an arrest warrant for Gary Ridgway. They had done all they could, but the Ridgway part of the Green River probe had to be shelved until something that would hold up in court should surface.
Haney was convinced it wasn’t over for good. When he could, he kept checking for connections between Gary Ridgway and the Green River victims.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was a big year for forensic science. A September 21 article out of London, England, was headlined “Genetic Sample Leads to Suspect in Killing.”
For the first time a police department somewhere in the world had used a scientific technique known as “genetic fingerprinting.” In their determination to solve the two-and-a-half-year-old rape murders of two teenage girls in the village of Enderby, Leicester County, English investigators took blood and saliva samples from more than 5,500 adult males who lived in the community. After exhaustive testing and the elimination of all other subjects, they charged a twenty-seven-year-old baker with the crimes.
Geneticist Alex Jeffreys of Leicester University had discovered that DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—found in the chromosomes of all living beings can be charted as a series of bands, unique to each person. In 1987, the test was effective on dried blood as old as five years, and dried semen up to three years old. The chance that two humans would have identical patterns was between 30 billion and 100 billion to one. It seemed very Brave New World, and DNA testing wasn’t perfected yet by any means. Plus, the cost could be prohibitive. But when Gary Ridgway was questioned and searched in 1987, Matt Haney had nothing to lose by taking a sample of his saliva.
UNEXPECTEDLY, and tragically, the Green River Task Force would have yet another commander. Jim Pompey went SCUBA diving with sheriff’s detective Bob Stockham, Stockham’s brother, and Roger Dunn, who, along with Bob Keppel, were the King County detective partners who had tracked Ted Bundy back in the midseventies. Dunn now ran his own private investigating company.
They were diving off Richmond Beach in the north end of Seattle, where Pompey was going to use a new speargun to catch fish. But almost as soon as they descended to depths close to a hundred feet, Pompey began to have trouble with his oxygen tank regulator. Stockham saw that the Green River commander was on the verge of panicking and tried to help him get to the surface, but they got separated and Pompey rose through the water much too fast.
Coast Guard rescuers took Pompey to a Seattle hospital by helicopter and he appeared to be regaining consciousness. But terrible damage had been done to his lungs. He didn’t live to be placed in the decompression chamber.
When “Doc” Reay performed an autopsy on Jim Pompey, he found that he had succumbed to a pulmonary embolism. He wasn’t forty yet, and he’d probably been in better physical shape than anyone on the task force, but now he was gone.
Lieutenant Greg Boyle stepped in to pick up the reins, and then Bobby Evans took over in December 1987. The Green River Task Force assignment would take its toll on any number of comparatively young men. Danny Nolan died of a leukemia-like blood disorder and so did Paul Smith. Ralf McAllister had a massive coronary and died in his cabin on Snoqualmie Pass. One detective retired after an emotional breakdown. Homicide detectives live under so much pressure and stress that the attrition rate from sudden death is higher than in most jobs, but the Green River case seemed to be taking an even greater price.
The same is true for the parents of young murder victims, particularly their fathers. Their perceived failure to protect their children eats away at the parents who could not save those they loved the most. It had happened in the Bundy cases and it was happening in the Green River cases. The grief of families is often so profound that they lose their will to live. The death toll caused by the Green River Killer extended far beyond his victim count.
42
AT LEAST four missing women who matched the victim type preferred by the Green River Killer came from the Portland area. Trina Hunter, the woman whose relatives reportedly kept her locked in an attic, had been found in a swamp near Vancouver, Washington, and her murder was still unsolved. Two of the sets of remains in the Tigard/Tualatin area were still unidentified, but Portland detectives doubted that the GRK was operating in their jurisdiction. It was a difficult call, given the constant travels of working girls from Portland to Seattle and back.
If Portland and Multnomah County police were hesitant to accept that they might have to form a task force of their own, no one could blame them. It’s an old joke among homicide detectives that, given a “loser” case, they might just drag the body over a county or state line and let some other department solve the crime. With all the hassles the Washington investigators had endured over the past five years with the Green River case, no other jurisdiction envied them.
Meanwhile, prostitutes had begun to disappear from the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia—only a four-hour drive north of Seattle. Indeed, the whole West Coast seemed to be riddled by the newest identifiable scourge known in criminal history: the serial killer. And Portland was having its own siege. By midsummer 1987, more prostitutes were missing in Portland. The incident reports sounded all too familiar. One young woman was picked up as she walked toward a 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes. The male driver looked innocuous and seemed quite pleasant. However, he drove past her neighborhood, and as they left the urban area, he tromped hard on his accelerator and told her that he had always wanted to take a woman into the woods, tie her up, and have sex with her. As he hit speeds near sixty miles an hour, she decided to take a chance. Anything would be preferable to being alone with this man who was clearly dangerous. She brought her elbow down on the door handle and tumbled out of the moving car. She hit the road hard. Although she was badly injured and bleeding from “road rash,” she was alive when a truck driver found her lying on the highway and called for an ambulance.
Exactly a month later, on August 7, 1987, a Portland woman who also worked Union Street screamed desperately for help, shouting, “Rape! Help…Rape!” Nearby residents rushed to their windows. In the Denny’s parking lot far below, they saw a man bent over a naked woman, raising his arm again and again. By the time they reached her, however, she was dying from stab wounds to the chest.
As horrible as her murder was, it was far from the worst of it. Oregon detectives traced the license-plate number one witness was able to memorize and linked it to thirty-three-year-old Dayton Leroy Rogers. Rogers, a well-known auto repairman in the hamlets of Woodburn and Canby (about twenty-four miles south of Portland), was married with a toddler son. But he also had a record for sexual assaults going back many years. He had been in prison and then diagnosed as mentally ill, but he had slipped through Oregon’s parole system. He was familiar to prostitutes as a foot fetishist, a bondage fan, and as a client who was stimulated by inflicting pain.
When a decomposed female body was found in the Molalla Forest on August 31, Clackamas County, Oregon, detectives recalled Rogers’s sexual penchants. He was a known sadist, and he lived less than fifteen miles away. As deputies and dogs conducted a sickening search of the ninety-thousand-acre timber farm, they found six more female bodies. Four of them were within fifty yards of one another on an almost vertical slope. They had been covered with brush and then “self-buried” as weeds and brush grew over and around them.
Dr. Larry Lewman, the Oregon
State Medical Examiner, went through the two hundred dental records the King County M.E. had gathered after the Green River murders, searching for matches to the seven victims found between August 31 and September 5, 1987, in the remote forested area ten miles southeast of Molalla, Oregon. He was able to identify most of them by their dental work, even though some of their charts were more than ten years old. But none of them were missing young women in the Green River files. All but one of these known victims had ties to prostitution. One would never be identified. The worst part, however, was the fact that the killer had cut his victims’ feet off, probably with a hacksaw.
The Green River Task Force sent detectives to the Molalla Forest to help in working the outdoor body site, a cluster site like those where the Washington State victims had been found. And of course they wondered if they might find evidence that would link these murders to the Green River cases. Since the man they sought had apparently stopped taking victims in King County, he might well have moved south to begin with a clean slate.
Rogers scarcely looked like a killer. He wasn’t very tall, and had a slight build and a baby face. He would certainly appear innocuous to women who stared through a car window at him. He was also an alcoholic who never went anywhere without a supply of tiny vodka bottles—the kind used on airplane flights. Several of the bottles were found close to the bodies in the Molalla Forest.
But could Dayton Leroy Rogers be the Green River Killer? Not likely. Some elements were the same, but some were very different. As far as the task force investigators could tell, Rogers hadn’t traveled to Washington. Although most of the King County victims weren’t found until they were skeletonized, none of the bones showed signs of nicking or breaking from bullets or a knife. None of the first victims found had been stabbed, they were younger than the Molalla victims, and there was no indication that their feet had been cut off. No, the Portland area had its own serial killer.