by Ann Rule
Haney knew Randy Mullinax was sick of hearing Ridgway’s name. “Randy and I were, and are, great friends and he’s a good detective, but he didn’t think Ridgway was the killer and he couldn’t bring himself to investigate him any longer. He left the task force in 1986 or ’87.”
When Haney lost Mullinax as a partner that year, he got a new one. “Sue Peters transferred in and became my partner,” Haney, now the chief of police of Bainbridge Island, Washington, remembered being enthusiastic about that. “Sue’s the best homicide detective in the King County Sheriff’s Office,” he said, “the best interviewer.”
Haney had left the King County force after the task force was dissolved and was recruited by two Alaskan police departments, first King Salmon on Bristol Bay and later Homer. Aleut natives were not fond of police officers, but Haney was welcomed. They thought he was an “Outside Native,” while in truth he is half-Korean. “I’m a war baby,” he said with a smile, “adopted in 1956.”
Haney loved Alaska, but after six years he deferred to his family’s desire for less snow and more daylight in the winter, and came back to Washington State. He was quickly hired as a lieutenant by Chief Bill Cooper of the Bainbridge Island Police Department. He had only worked for his new department for two weeks when, in mid-October 2001, he got an on-duty phone call from Sue Peters.
“I have to talk to you,” she said.
“Good,” Haney said. “We’ll have lunch soon.”
“No, Randy and I have to talk to you tonight.”
It was nine o’clock, but whatever was on Peters’s mind was urgent. Haney agreed to take the ferry to the mainland and meet Peters and Mullinax near midnight at the latter’s house in South King County. If Haney had been the type to gloat and say “I told you so,” this would have been the time to do it.
“When I got there, Sue and Randy were sitting by the fireplace,” Haney recalled, “and Sue said, ‘Matt, you were right all along. We’re focusing on Gary.’ Mullinax nodded. ‘It’s Ridgway. We have DNA.’ ”
“It was great just being able to tell him,” Peters said later, “because that was someone he ‘worked’ for a while. Our team would be coming back together, but we didn’t have a minute to let it sink in.”
Haney recalled a meeting Dave Reichert had called six months earlier for all former task force members to discuss the possibility that an advanced DNA test might work on body fluids and hairs found with Opal Mills and Carol Christensen’s bodies. Matt Haney and Jim Doyon had taken Gary Ridgway to the Kent Police Department fourteen years earlier as multiple search warrants, under Haney’s direction, were served on the extended Ridgway family properties. Although a superior court judge had felt at the time that it would be too invasive to demand a blood sample from Gary Ridgway, he had permitted the part of the search warrant that sought hairs from his head and pubic area, and added, “Saliva samples will be allowed.”
Fortunately, reporters hadn’t thought to stake out the police facilities in Kent, and that was where WSP criminalist George Johnston had handed Ridgway the small square of gauze and asked him to chew on it. Haney and Doyon oversaw the pulling and plucking of hair samples, and all this possible physical evidence had remained pristinely preserved in a freezer.
But Haney had heard nothing more after that. Now he learned that in March 2001, Tom Jensen had submitted biological samples from six victims to the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in the hope that criminalists would find semen and be able to isolate DNA. Forensic scientist Beverly Himick compared the vaginal swabs from Marcia Chapman to Gary Ridgway’s known DNA and got a positive match. Pubic hair combings from Opal Mills also carried his DNA.
At the WSP lab, criminalist Jean Johnston had also accomplished a positive match. She reported that a tiny bit of sperm on a vaginal swab from Carol Christensen’s body was so consistent with Ridgway’s DNA that only one person in the entire world, save an identical twin, would have this DNA profile.
Sue Peters explained to Haney that Dave Reichert was about to start up a secret task force to surveil and hopefully arrest Gary Ridgway. And Haney was the detective who knew Ridgway the best, the one who had always been convinced that he was the Green River Killer.
“We need you back with us,” Peters said. “But you can’t tell anyone—not even your new chief. He has to loan you to us blind. No questions answered.”
Chief Bill Cooper wasn’t thrilled about letting Haney go back to King County without a good reason, but Haney just shook his head and said he couldn’t tell him why. Cooper finally asked, “Does this have something to do with your past?”
“Yes,” Haney said.
“Okay. You can go. Tell me about it later.”
IN November 2001 the reborn task force emerged. Haney, Peters, and Mullinax would be as close to the heart of the Green River probe as any investigator ever was—too close, perhaps, for them to ever completely stop thinking about it. It would play like a subliminal song in their brains twenty-four hours a day for month upon month.
There were also a number of detectives on the reactivated investigation who had been teenagers when the seemingly endless stream of murders began. The Green River Task Force became charged with energy again, albeit so quietly that the public didn’t realize its vitality, and in mid-November, the probe began to hum. Ironically, the man who was now dead center in their sights obviously believed he was home free. Gary Leon Ridgway, the truck painter, had long since returned to his old haunts and sexual obsessions.
THE PAC HIWAY WAS a far less friendly environment for prostitutes than it had been twenty years earlier. The cheap motels were either cheaper or gone completely, and there were many more upscale hotels constructed close to the airport. Casey Treat, a minister made popular by his television appearances, presided over a huge church complex he had built at the south end of the onetime Strip, and most of the legitimate businesses and stores had expanded.
Even so, there were teenage girls whose purpose for being on the highway was obvious—some of them second-generation prostitutes, the daughters and nieces of the lost young women of the eighties. One of them was Keli McGinness’s daughter, who had been adopted when Keli never returned for her. She had grown into a beautiful woman, even lovelier than the mother she couldn’t remember. Sue Peters, who was assigned Keli’s case, found her daughter instead. The girl was alive and well, but in as much potential danger as her mother once was. Peters did her best to persuade the young woman to contact Keli’s extended family.
There were other circular patterns that had emerged in the twenty-year search for the Green River Killer. Was it possible that tracing the similarities would help to build a circumstantial case against Gary Ridgway to add to the positive DNA results the task force had?
It would seem so.
The detectives assigned to the new, clandestine task force pored over all of the earlier information gleaned on Ridgway, looking for anything that might have been missed, evaluating his past in light of what they now knew, and searching for what motivation he could have had to kill dozens of women. He had been married three times, but Green River investigators who located his first two wives were told that his mother never really let go of running his life.
His first wife, Heather, wasn’t a “slim blonde” as he’d once claimed. She had been an overweight brunette teenager, and their marriage had been fine for the first few months. She remembered that she and Gary had made some friends in San Diego, playing cards and visiting back and forth.
“Her father and I never could see why Heather married him,” Heather’s mother said. “When they were dating, he would come to our house and sit there like a stump. He never ate, never said a word. One day, he sat in a chair for about eight hours—and he didn’t speak to us at all. He didn’t even get up to go to the bathroom, for that matter. But we figured Heather must have seen something in him we couldn’t see. He seemed affectionate with her, and when he was in the Philippines, he sent us one of those velvet paintings for Christmas. It sounds strange to
say now, but we thought at least Heather would be safe with him as a husband, and we thought his mother was very nice.”
Heather had been surprised, though, to see how shocked Gary was by the price of things in San Diego. “He’d never had to pay for anything before,” she said. “His mother, Mary, had always bought everything for him. And he was afraid people would steal things from him, too. At night, he didn’t just lock our car, he took out the radio and what he said were very expensive parts from the engine because he said somebody might steal them.”
Heather’s opinion about Mary Ridgway would change radically after the young couple returned, albeit separately, from San Diego after Gary got out of the navy. It was true that Heather didn’t drive up to Seattle with him, but that was because she was taking a course in school in San Diego, and Gary wouldn’t wait for her to finish. He wanted to get home to his mother.
“When Heather flew up a few weeks later, Mary wouldn’t hear of their getting their own apartment,” Heather’s mother recalled. “She wanted them to live in a camper on her property, and they ended up moving into the house with her and Tommy. Mary ruled the roost—I felt sorry for her husband. She made Gary give her his paycheck, and he and Heather had to go to her to get a few dollars a day.”
Mary Ridgway kept Gary’s checkbook and she had to okay any purchase they wanted to make. She wouldn’t even let her daughter-in-law get her ears pierced without her permission. “Heather saw it wasn’t going to change. She just packed her bag and went back to San Diego—she’s lived there ever since,” her mother said. “Gary held on to everything they had. We’d given them all the appliances you could think of—toaster, Mixmaster, blender, things like that—and he kept them. But Heather had a real nice white bed and her grandmother made her a canopy for it. Heather wanted that. Well, I called Mary Ridgway to ask about it and she just screamed at me. I’ve never heard anyone so furious.”
Gary demanded Heather’s rings back, even though the diamond was almost too small to see, and the set had cost only a hundred dollars. Heather remained in San Diego for thirty years, and she never saw Gary again.
Jim Doyon, Matt Haney, and Carolyn Griffin had talked in depth to Gary Ridgway’s second wife, Dana, in September 1986. While Heather had only lasted a year with him, Dana stayed seven and bore his only child, their son, Chad. “I was his housekeeper, secretary—I did everything for him—all his laundry. But I never saw his paychecks or anything. I never saw his pay stubs. Most of the times on weekends, we spent at his parents’. He never wanted to have any friends.”
Heather had never mentioned any unusual sexual demands, but Gary had apparently been more adventurous with his second wife. Although Dana said she hated it, he insisted on anal sex and he sometimes tied her hands and feet with belts from bathrobes. She didn’t mind that so much because it didn’t hurt her.
But once he had choked her. They had been out someplace and she’d had too much beer. “I was a little drunk,” Dana told the detectives, “and I got out of our van and stumbled. I started to reach for the door and the next thing I knew he had his hands around my neck and he was choking me from behind.”
The hands on her throat grew tighter and tighter and Dana said she had started to scream. “I realized it was him and I started fighting him. He finally let go and he kind of pushed me. By the time I got my balance back, he had walked around to the other side of the van and tried to convince me that there was somebody else there who had run off. I tried to get him to call the police, but he wouldn’t.”
She explained to Jim Doyon that Gary had first put his forearm around her neck in a “police-type choke hold,” and then had grasped her throat with both hands. That hurt her and frightened her because he was much rougher than usual. “He always liked to sneak up on me and scare me. He would hide around the corner or something and scare me. He was always coming up behind me and taking me in this arm-type hold—not to hurt me, just to grab me. He liked to see how softly he could walk so that he’d be just totally noiseless, and he could do it, too!”
As he would later do with Darla, his hiking girlfriend from Parents Without Partners, Gary had enjoyed having oral sex in his vehicles and particularly liked to have sex outside. Dana remembered their spreading blankets in a wooded area near Ken’s Truck Stop off the old I-90 highway. And he had other favorite places—Greenwater east of Enumclaw and close by the Green River. They often rode their bikes along Frager Road, next to the river.
“Did you ever stop and have sex along the Green River?” Doyon asked.
“Geez, yes…lots of places,” Dana answered, a little embarrassed.
“Where?”
“On the banks, in the tall grass.”
NOW MATT HANEY and Jim Doyon revisited the mass of circumstantial evidence they had uncovered fourteen years earlier, once again incredulous that it hadn’t resulted in the discovery of absolute physical evidence during the 1987 search warrants.
That September, Haney and Doyon had picked Dana up early in the morning and they began a long, meandering drive as she directed them to various locations where Gary had taken her during their marriage. The hairs had stood up on the backs of their necks as they realized they were being taken on a tour of most of the body-cluster sites, although they hadn’t told Dana that. First, they’d headed northeast on Highway 18 until they reached the I-90 junction, then turned toward North Bend and the road near Ken’s Truck Stop. Dana had pointed out places where she and Gary had once stopped to have outdoor sex. They’d also come close to unofficial garbage dumps and a spot where Gary had enjoyed sliding down snow-covered slopes in an inner tube. Headed south, they’d reached the area east of Enumclaw along Highway 410.
Dana had even pointed out that the Mountain View Cemetery Road was a favorite shortcut for Gary, although she hadn’t recognized the Star Lake site. New construction made it look entirely different from the way it had a year or two earlier. She’d indicated many spots along Frager Road where she and Gary had made love: next to the PD&J Meat Company, under a large tree near the Meeker Street (Peck) Bridge, and in Cottonwood Park.
When Haney asked if she and Gary had ever gone to any areas near the SeaTac Airport, she nodded. “We used to pick blackberries and apples near the empty houses—close to the runway lights.”
Like Heather before her, Dana had quickly discerned that Mary Ridgway “wore the pants” in her family. If Gary wanted to buy a truck with money from his own bank account, Mary wouldn’t let him withdraw the cash until he agreed to buy the pickup she and his father had chosen. As for Tommy Ridgway, Gary’s father, he’d had little clout in the family. Mary screamed and scolded him much of the time. Once, she got so angry with him that she had broken a plate over his head. Dana had come to feel sorry for her father-in-law.
Although Mary Ridgway often criticized Dana’s housekeeping or accused her of neglecting Chad’s health, the two women reached an uneasy peace because Gary was very devoted to his mother. He worried about her and sought her approval.
Oddly, just as Dana and Gary moved in together in 1972, Mary Ridgway told her son that she was receiving threatening and obscene phone calls. “Gary would go and give her a ride to her car [at work] and make sure it was okay,” Dana said. Gary had even told Dana that some man had exposed himself to his mother.
“You never knew who it was that was threatening his mother?”
Dana shook her head. “No. No. But it went so far that she got a gun and carried it with her. There was somebody—a man—calling and making suggestions over the phone.”
Dana didn’t mention anything about Gary’s alleged jealousy when she went out dancing with friends or stayed until closing at the Eagles’ Lodge, and they didn’t ask her. According to her, their marriage had ended for more mundane reasons. “There was no communication,” she said. “There was no real relationship. I felt that he just wanted somebody to keep a house clean for him and do the shopping and the cooking. He was always in the garage with his cars, working on them, doing something. A
ll he wanted was food and sex, and that was it. Any time we did talk, it would end up in arguments.”
Jim Doyon had asked if her husband ever verbally degraded or criticized her. “He ever call you a bitch or a whore when you were having sex? Ever try to slap you around? Knock you down? Keep you under his thumb, so to speak? Belittle you?”
And Dana had shaken her head. “No, no. He liked playing little games. Chased me around the house, and caught me in the hallway and took my clothes off there. You know, things like that.”
Whatever Gary Ridgway might have done to strangers, he apparently hadn’t carried any grossly perverted fantasies into his home—at least with his first two wives. A lot of men are intrigued with thoughts of bondage, far fewer with choking, and that activity had happened only once with Dana. So far, the investigation into his domestic life indicated that he was somewhat selfish, domineering with wives, but submissive to his mother.
Mary Ridgway had directed a large part of her son’s life—his finances, his wives’ housekeeping, child care, his clothes, his major purchases—and, not surprisingly, his first two wives had resented it, although each of them acknowledged that his reading skills were those of a third-grader and paperwork confused him.
It had been different with his third wife. Rather than resent her mother-in-law, Judith Ridgway had admired her. And Judith had been with Gary for twenty years. Indeed, Judith had apparently taken over Mary’s role as Gary’s caretaker. Green River investigators would find that she was anything but domineering, but in many areas of his third marriage, Judith handled their money as if Gary was a child who couldn’t cope with the daily tasks of life. While he was a punctual and steady worker at Kenworth, she paid their bills and gave him spending money. They were both frugal people who preferred saving money to spending it.
Mary Ridgway died of colon cancer in the summer of 2001, and by then Judith had taken over the things Gary wasn’t able to do well.