by Ann Rule
49
WHEN MATT HANEY returned to the Green River Task Force on loan from his new position on Bainbridge Island, he fully expected to be part of the team that would arrest and question Gary Ridgway. He was the resident “Ridgway expert.” Just as he had carefully orchestrated the search warrants and sweeps of Ridgway’s property in April of 1987, he now outlined the questions that he would ask Ridgway when he was arrested. Because Ridgway had solicited sex from the police officer decoy, the task force’s time line had accelerated; they feared he was on the prowl for victims again. He’d been arrested before—back in the early eighties—and that hadn’t stopped him from killing. Haney worked overtime, wanting to be sure he had an organized approach for his part on the postarrest interview team.
And then, Lieutenant Jim Graddon called Haney in to inform him that he had been removed from the roster of those who would interrogate Ridgway. “You’ll be replaced by Jim Doyon,” Graddon said flatly.
Evidently there had been a meeting among the brass where the decision was made. Haney had no quarrel with Doyon, and he wondered if the last-minute edict was because he was no longer officially a King County officer. He suspected they had decided it would look better for the department to have someone from inside the sheriff’s office make Ridgway’s arrest.
It was a bitter disappointment for Haney, particularly after he had taken such an abrupt leave from his new job with the Bainbridge Island police to come back to help in the Green River probe. But he accepted his new assignment from Reichert and Graddon. Haney would not be there to see the denouement of his long held conviction that Gary Ridgway was the Green River Killer. Instead, he would accompany Sue Peters and question Judith Ridgway at the exact time Gary Ridgway was being arrested, and try to get her out of their home before the media trapped her.
Shortly thereafter, Dave Reichert and King County prosecutor Norm Maleng would call a press conference to announce that Ridgway had been captured. All of it would be carried out with a virtual synchronization of watches, as meticulously choreographed as a military invasion.
Ridgway had no idea that the trap he had evaded for two decades was about to slam shut on him. He went to work as usual on Friday morning, November 30. Haney and Sue Peters had already contacted the Kenworth plant supervisors to let them know that there would be police activity that Friday, but there must be no forewarning to anyone at Kenworth.
First, Peters and Detective Jon Mattsen drove to the Kenworth plant to interview Ridgway. He had been under surveillance for weeks, but he didn’t know it. When his boss told him someone wanted to talk to him about designing a truck, he walked toward the two detectives with no sign of recognition. He didn’t remember Peters or Mattsen from earlier conversations, and seemed surprised to hear that they were from the sheriff’s office.
They questioned him about Carol Christensen, telling him that her now-grown daughter wanted to know more about her, and they were following up on her mother’s case. Ridgway didn’t seem nervous as he looked from one detective to the other in response to their questions, his pale eyes blinking behind thick glasses. Yes, he said he had known Carol Christensen from going into the Barn Door Tavern.
“Did you ever date her?” Sue Peters asked.
He wasn’t sure about that. It had been a long time ago. He remembered talking with her at the Barn Door. He seemed to be under the impression that the two investigators were looking for a witness who might be helpful in a trial someday should anyone ever be charged with Carol Christensen’s murder. He had always enjoyed offering his theories on unsolved murder cases and now he seemed relaxed, even when their conversation continued for almost two hours. No sweat beaded on his forehead and his body language betrayed little tension.
The next question was very important to Peters and Mattsen. In evidence since May 1983 was the DNA that Carol Christensen’s killer had left inside her vagina. “Did you ever have any sexual contact with Carol Christensen?” Peters asked as casually as she could.
He shook his head slightly. “No…no. I didn’t.”
Bingo. That was the wrong answer as far as the truth went, but it was the answer they needed in order to arrest him as the Green River Killer. Still, it wasn’t quite time yet. Gary Ridgway smiled at the two detectives as they walked out into the rainy morning. He figured the only thing they could get him for was lying to a judge about propositioning the fake prostitute two weeks earlier.
After they left, he went to the lunchroom where he sat in his usual spot. He liked predictable routines. Changes disturbed him, but he hadn’t even detected the slight flicker in the investigators’ eyes as he denied having intercourse with Carol Christensen. Even though co-workers teased him a bit about the cops being there and asked if it was more Green River stuff, he was calm when he said “no.” He was sure the police believed him.
He drank his usual cup of tea, but his stomach was a little queasy; he ignored the frosted brownie and the bag of peanuts Judith had put in his lunch.
On that last day of November 2001, he was working the seven AM to three PM shift, and he walked out the door a few minutes after three, heading through the heavy weather toward his truck, unaware of a camera clicking silently, frame after frame. Randy Mullinax and Jim Doyon were waiting just out of his line of sight, and they noted that he looked over his shoulder and around the parking lot, almost as if he expected someone. Even so, he jumped when they walked up to him and told him he was under arrest for murder, and read him his rights under Miranda.
Detective Paul Smith hadn’t lived to see Gary Ridgway arrested; the marrow transfusion procedure to fight his leukemia had left him vulnerable to the infection that claimed his life when he was barely past forty. But now, Doyon and Mullinax placed Smith’s handcuffs around Ridgway’s wrists in a symbolic gesture that acknowledged Smith’s dedication to the Green River cases. Later, they would give the cuffs to Smith’s widow.
Mullinax and Doyon drove Gary Ridgway to the Regional Justice Center in Kent, where he was photographed wearing a plaid shirt and jeans—the attire so many witnesses had described. His face was expressionless. He was medium height, medium build, totally average-looking, a man who scarcely resembled what they believed him to be—the most infamous and prolific serial killer ever known in America.
Standing on the porch of a large house on a quiet street in Auburn, Sue Peters and Matt Haney were at Judith Ridgway’s door at the same moment her husband was being arrested. It was a little after three on Friday afternoon when she let them in and led them through her crowded living room past Gary’s exercycle. She seemed slightly surprised to see the two detectives, but certainly not shocked. She thought they were there to discuss Gary’s recent arrest on the highway. She knew that was just a mistake because he had told her it was.
“We wanted to tell her that Gary was being arrested for some of the Green River murders before reporters got to her,” Sue Peters recalled. “And we could see she didn’t know why we were there.”
On a normal Friday, Gary would have been home within a few minutes, asking about her day, telling her about his. Instead, he was in an interview room at the Regional Justice Center being questioned by Randy Mullinax and Jim Doyon. She didn’t know that yet.
Judith had no objection to being interviewed and agreed to let Haney and Peters tape their questions and her answers. Sue Peters began by asking her if she knew that detectives had spoken to her husband earlier in the day.
“Yes,” Judith said with a nod, but she didn’t know why.
“And what we’d like to do is verify some information that he’s provided,” Peters said, “as well as ask you some questions about your background with Gary, and go from there. Okay?”
“Okay.” She was a sparrowlike woman nearing sixty, neither fat nor thin, with blondish brown hair and little makeup. Matt Haney found her almost a cookie-cutter image of Gary’s first two wives, none of them with his late mother’s flair for makeup and fashion.
At Peters’s request, Judith recalled
the first time she’d met Gary at the White Shutters and their subsequent courtship. They had been together since 1985.
“What type of man was he [then]?”
“Oh, the best. Nice, sweet, gentle…. He comes home, and we’re still best friends.” She explained that Gary had few friends, just some men he talked to at work, although he didn’t socialize with them. He would rather be with her.
“What about female friends—female acquaintances, not a relationship-type thing, but a friendship?” Peters asked.
“No. I don’t know of any.”
“So you pretty much keep to yourselves and do your own thing?”
“Yes. If I’m at the grocery store I’ll, you know, notice what time it is. I know he’s coming home and I want to be here when he comes home every day.” Judith could not remember any trouble in her marriage or his prior unions, nothing more than slight arguments he might have had with his son’s mother, Dana. When Chad was a little boy, Gary’s mother had picked Chad up from his day care to bring him to Gary and Judith for his weekend visitations.
“Do you know why they broke up?”
“Oh, she [Dana] used to be a country-western singer and stayed out late with the band and groups, and he would be home babysitting. I don’t know all those details,” Judith said.
“He has mentioned that she was unfaithful to him. Do you know anything about that?”
“She was probably with some of the band people, maybe. I have no idea.”
As for Gary’s first wife, Judith knew virtually nothing about her. She had heard about some fight over furniture, but she thought that might have been Gary’s brother’s ex-girlfriend. Now that she thought about it, she didn’t think it was Heather who had demanded her furniture.
“Was there anything in particular you can think about any of his ex-wives that made him angry about them?”
“Real angry? Not real bad anger. He’s never been mad.”
“Okay. Does he have a bad temper?”
“No.”
“Have you ever seen him just out-of-control angry…or violent?”
“Not violent—he’s raised his voice to me one time. It was just something minor. I don’t remember exactly what it was.”
“Has he ever struck you, ever grabbed you? Have you ever had the police respond to any of your residences on a domestic violence?”
“No! Heavens, no. No.” Judith seemed shocked at the very idea of that.
“I’m just trying to get a better understanding of your relationship,” Sue Peters explained.
“He’s the best,” Judith said firmly. She still hadn’t asked them why they were questioning her. She and Gary got along just fine, always had.
“What’s Gary’s relationship with Chad?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. He’s the best,” Judith said. “They shake hands, give each other hugs. When it’s his birthday, I’ll send him some money. We forgot his birthday [this year] because so much was going on with Gary’s mom, when she was sick. Chad is just like his dad. He’s in the marines, eight years now, in Pendleton, California.”
Judith said that the current year—2001—had been a difficult one for Gary. His mother had died of cancer and, at the end, he and Judith had taken turns caring for her so she could stay in her own home. His father had died in 1998 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. After his father passed away, she and Gary had chosen their current house because it sat on a shy acre and had extra bedrooms. “We thought we were going to take care of his mother because his daddy died and his mother got sick.”
“Did he [Tommy Ridgway] stay at home, or did he go to an outside facility?”
“He stayed at home mostly, and I would go and help his mother, help take care of his daddy. And Gary would stop by to see his father every single day after work. And his mom would have a glass of juice or coffee or a cookie on the table for him, and say ‘Hi.’ After his daddy died, he’d still stop by every day to make sure his mom was okay and to comfort her.” But then Mary Ridgway was diagnosed with cancer. “They gave his mother ten months, and she died ten months to the day.”
Judith spoke rapidly and breathlessly as if she were afraid of an empty spot in their conversation where they would tell her something she didn’t want to hear, all the while adding positive strokes to her word portrait of her perfect husband, the perfect son. Gary and his two brothers were in the process of selling their parents’ house. Judith felt that Gary’s younger brother had always gotten more attention from their mother, but hastened to add that Mary was the “sweetest mother-in-law.”
Mary had made the major decisions for the family, as Tommy, Gary’s father, had been a quiet man. Gary’s older brother was in charge of their parents’ estate, but Judith wasn’t sure what he did—he was a businessman of some kind who worked in a “big building” in downtown Seattle, while his younger brother was more of a “mountain man.”
Peters asked about Gary and Judith’s hobby of seeking out yard sales, swap meets, and discarded items they could use. “You don’t have any particular areas where you’d go constantly, where, you know, people dump things—there was one on Highway 18 and I-90….”
Puzzled, Judith shook her head. “Oh, we never go to places like that. If we went in that direction, we’d go to the campground, Leisure Time Resorts.”
They both loved to camp out and had steadily upgraded their trucks and campers to the twenty-seven-foot Class-C Coachman that Peters and Haney had seen in the yard. Where their bathroom facilities had once been only “a coffee can,” Judith said with a laugh, they now had the $22,000 motor home with its own bathroom. They spent long weekends and vacations in campgrounds in many spots in Washington and along the Oregon coast. They had gone to Canada a long time ago.
Peters changed the subject. “You were upset when we came to the door, and you mentioned that there had been something that just recently happened to Gary—out on Pacific HiWay. What do you know about that, Judith?”
“He told me that he stopped and had to close the window on the door on his truck—the back one—and that’s why they came over and arrested him.”
“Did he tell you what he was arrested for?”
“Well, he didn’t exactly, but the officer that called and talked to me said it was ‘soliciting.’ I said, ‘That can’t be.’ It didn’t sound like him.”
“What did the officer actually tell you?” Peters and Haney could see that Judith was either truly naive and trusting, or was trying to shade the truth.
“That some people’s husbands go out and do things—” She fought now for composure.
“That the wives don’t know about?” Haney asked.
“Um-hum.”
“Did that upset you?”
“Well, yes. I got a little shook, but he wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s friendly. He’s a friendly person. So he probably just looked at somebody and smiled.”
“And you think the officer might have just arrested him because of that?” Peters asked.
“He’s always friendly. Even when you’re walking by somebody, like in a store or you’re shopping, and, you know, he’ll smile and say ‘Hello.’ ”
Judith recalled that Gary had called her from jail, and she had asked him if he was okay and he said he was and that he hadn’t done anything. She had gone at once to pick him up when he was released. He had jogged down to the Kmart from jail and together they’d picked his truck up from the impound lot.
“Did you have any conversation when he got home about the situation? I mean, did he tell you?”
“No.” Gary’s wife seemed incredibly passive and accepting, and Peters pressed a little. But Judith insisted she could understand completely why his back window might have been open and he would have had to stop to close it. “He drives through Sea-Tac every day, but he can’t now.”
“Would it surprise you,” Peters asked carefully, “if he was trying to date a girl on the highway, a prostitute?”
“Yes, it would surprise me. It would hurt me, and
, you know, I’d wonder what did I do wrong or—”
“Or what he did wrong. Not necessarily you, right?”
Judith was very nervous now. Asked if Gary had been arrested in the past for picking up a prostitute, she vaguely recalled something like that years earlier, just before they got married. “He was on his way home and someone would see the same truck driving by, and they stopped him and arrested him.”
Peters turned to Matt Haney and asked him to remind Judith about the time in April 1987 when he had obtained search warrants for Judith and Gary’s house just off Military Road, for the Kenworth plant, and Gary’s locker, and even for his parents’ home.
Haney nodded, reconstructing some details of that day. Judith had been working at the day-care facility in Des Moines then. Finally, she allowed that memory to come back. The first house she shared with Gary was searched, and deputies picked her up at work on that day. But she had never believed Gary had done anything wrong, and she didn’t think about it afterward.
“Do you remember him ever telling you, before the search warrant, that he’d been arrested earlier in his life?” Peters asked. “In the early eighties—that he’d been arrested for picking up prostitutes?”
“No. What eighties?”
“May 1982,” Matt Haney said.
“I didn’t know him then.”
“So that’s new information that you’ve never known?” Peters asked. “Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Has he ever said anything to you about prostitutes, like, you know, they’re garbage, or he likes talking to them, or they’re just ordinary people, or ‘What’s your feeling?’ What do you think he thinks of prostitutes, or what has he told you he thinks of them?”
“We’ve never talked about them.” Judith’s absolute trust in her husband had been badly shaken, but she was still doing her best to describe him as a good man.
“Does he have any [feelings] about someone’s particular race. Does he treat blacks and whites the same, do you know?” Peters asked. “How does he feel about blacks…or Filipinos?”