by Ann Rule
“It doesn’t matter what color somebody is, or—”
“That’s your opinion,” Peters pointed out. “What do you think Gary’s opinion is?”
“Well, he works with all kinds of different people at work, and he talks to them and all.”
The woman before her was in complete denial, struggling to hold her world together even as it broke into shards and began to slip away, but Sue Peters knew she had to ask certain questions. “I’m asking you questions to find out what type he is, because I don’t know him and you do.”
“He’s understanding. He’s gentle. He’s soft-spoken—and he’s always smiling.”
Matt Haney asked Judith about the area where she was living when she first met Gary, and the detectives realized that she’d been only a block or two from where most of the dead girls had vanished. Judith described their dates in fast-food restaurants on the Strip, and their camping trips to bleakly familiar areas.
But she was unshakable in her insistence that Gary rarely, if ever, went anywhere by himself except to work. “We talked earlier about your relationship with Gary,” Haney began, “and I know that all marriages have their ups and downs.”
“He makes me feel like a new woman every day,” Judith cut in quickly. “That’s how I feel. He just makes me feel good.”
“How does he do that?” Haney asked.
“Just by being himself. He’ll come through the door and say, ‘Hello, I’m home,’ with a big smile and give me a hug and a kiss, and [say] ‘What’s new?’ Or years ago, he’d always ask me what needs to be fixed, and, you know, I’d say, ‘The faucet’s leaking,’ and he’d fix it or the washer.” She spoke faster and faster, afraid to let Matt Haney interrupt her. “He’s just always made me feel so good, ’cause he’s always smiling and happy and pleasant.”
“So for sixteen years, you’ve never had a ripple?”
“No, just a couple of little ups and downs, you know.”
“Did you go to court with him the other day?” Sue Peters asked.
“No, it was early in the morning.”
“Did he plead guilty or not guilty?”
“He said he pleaded guilty,” Judith said softly.
“Why would he do that?”
“Because,” she said with a trembling voice, “it would’ve cost a whole lot for lawyers.”
“How much did it cost him to plead guilty? Did he have to pay court fees?”
“He had to pay a fine. It was $700. He said the lawyers would have cost more than that. [He paid it] so that he wouldn’t have to have the lawyers and pay all that, and have all that kind of money going out.”
“So as far as you’re concerned,” Matt Haney asked, “that incident is behind you now?”
“I believe him and I trust him.”
Haney had talked with Mary and Tommy Ridgway a few days after the 1987 search and they had formed a solid wall against the police. In their opinion, their son was being singled out unfairly. But when Haney pointed out lies Gary had told them, their attitude changed. Still, they, like Judith, remained in denial, and when the task force found no solid evidence to arrest Gary, the unpleasantness was all “put in the past.”
Judith said now that she had never asked questions that might have upset him, or, perhaps more frightening, whose answers would have destroyed her perfect marriage. They had been talking for half an hour when Sue Peters asked Judith about her sex life with Gary. Somewhat discomfited, Judith described it as quite normal, although Gary desired intercourse a little more often than she did. No, he wasn’t kinky and he didn’t watch porno movies. Maybe, early in their relationship, they might have watched movies like that once or twice. She thought she might have borrowed some from a relative of hers, but that was mostly out of curiosity. Gary didn’t buy off-color books or magazines. He had never tied her up to have sex, and Judith seemed surprised to be asked such a question. As for “outdoor sex,” why would they want to do that when they had comfortable beds at home and in their motor home?
“All right,” Sue Peters said. “Has he ever done anything that made you feel uncomfortable?”
“No, never.”
Finally, Haney and Peters asked Judith if she remembered that there had been a lot of circumstantial evidence in 1987 to lead detectives to believe Gary might have been responsible for the deaths of the Green River victims. “Are you familiar with the Green River [cases]? Have you followed it through the years?”
“I’ve seen the pictures, and how many vic—And, you know, it’s sad.”
“Is there any information in your house about Green River?” Peters asked. “Any books, or reading?”
Judith’s answer was surprising. “Yes. I’ve kept it, and tucked it away, you know, in the bottom of a drawer, put away. It’s not Gary’s choice. It was my choice. I just kind of kept them and folded them up and stuffed them away.”
They were just at the point in their questioning when it seemed as if Judith Ridgway was going to tell them something important, when the doorbell rang, followed by the phone. All three of them tensed. It was eighteen minutes to four when they had to pause the tape. Haney and Peters knew the media must have discovered Gary’s arrest, and they would all be trying for a scoop for the five o’clock news.
Judith answered the phone. Luckily, it was one of her sisters-in-law, and, without letting her speak, Judith quickly said “I’m busy” and hung up. But then she moved to the front door where someone pounded insistently. Sue Peters managed to step in front of her before she could be blasted by a zealous reporter’s question. Judith didn’t know yet that Gary had been arrested, and having a microphone stuck in her face to hear her initial reaction would be a cruel thing. News cameras caught just a glimpse of Judith’s startled face at the door, then cut fleetingly to Peters before she firmly closed the camera out. What she had to tell Judith was going to be overwhelming. The woman deserved some time to absorb what would change her life forever.
They were back on tape, and back to discussing Green River, but the phone rang constantly, until Matt Haney asked Judith if they could temporarily disconnect it.
“What’s going on?” Judith asked, suddenly suspicious. “Don’t I have a right to know?”
Haney and Peters said they were trying to tell her. “Gary was a Green River suspect back then,” Peters said, speaking of April 1987, “and we recently sent a lot of samples from these women to the crime laboratory for DNA purposes. It turns out that we have three cases now—confirmed—that Gary’s DNA was left inside them, meaning he had sex with them. His DNA was left on three of the prostitutes. So, again, he is the focus of the investigation by the Green River Task Force. And now we have the recent incident on Pacific HiWay on the sixteenth, and it was an undercover police decoy and Gary was trying to meet up with her again for sex—for thirty dollars. I know this is probably shocking to you—”
“Um-hm,” Judith said, her face paling.
“Can you even—Is it feasible that he had sex with these women? I mean, do you believe that?”
Judith shook her head, crying now. But she admitted that Gary had saved some of the articles written about the Green River Killer. Shocked almost silent, Judith agreed to continue to answer questions on tape. She didn’t know that the task force investigators had been following her husband, and she clearly had no idea that he had been driving side roads and making detours on his way to work. She thought he got up before four AM just to be sure he was on time for work at six thirty.
He didn’t shower in the morning, only shaved, drank tea or coffee, and left. She assumed he’d been at Denny’s having pancakes. She was sure Gary had never rented storage space, and nothing in their homes had ever been off-limits to her. She kept repeating that he had no secrets from her. But there was so much about her husband that she obviously hadn’t known. She was stunned.
The floodgates had opened and Judith answered their questions now, flinching at the meaning behind them. No, he had never tried to choke her. He’d never frightened
her, beyond coming around the side of their house and saying “Boo!”
“I know you care a lot about him, and you didn’t know him in the early eighties,” Sue Peters said now. “If this ever comes to trial, how would you feel about testifying to what you told us. About the man you know.”
“The man I know is wonderful,” Judith said quietly.
“So would you mind testifying to that in court—the things you know about Gary?”
“I would tell them everything is good about him. He’s been the best. I love him.”
“She was in shock,” Sue Peters recalled. “I don’t think she had any idea that this could happen. She was upset and kept denying that it could be true.”
It was hard not to feel sorry for Judith Ridgway. Gary had come along and brought love into her life when she was crushed by the tawdry end of her first marriage. More than anything, she had clung to the haven of her own house and yard, the husband she trusted. Now, Peters and Haney told her that she would have to pack a bag because a search warrant would be served on that house and property.
“We’re going to take you to a hotel,” Peters said.
“My cats…the kittens…,” Judith protested.
“We’ll see that they’re fed and taken care of,” Matt Haney told her. And they were.
Judith wouldn’t be able to come home for more than a week, hidden from a rabid press in a hotel room. And when she did come home again, it would never be the same. It would never really be her house again. Without Gary to bring in his paycheck, there was no way she would be able to keep it.
50
GARY RIDGWAY might never come home at all. He was now fifty-two years old, and the photographs Randy Mullinax and Jim Doyon took of him at the Regional Justice Center showed an almost expressionless man, save for a vertical crease that had deepened over the passing years so that it bisected his forehead. Combined with the heavy hooding of his upper eyelids, the crease gave him an almost evil mien. In some photos he wore blue jeans and the familiar plaid shirt. In others he wore only white jockey shorts. One picture, given the suspicion that this was the weapon used to take dozens of lives, was chilling; it was his right arm from the elbow down. It didn’t appear muscular and the hand itself showed fingers gnarled by the beginning of arthritis.
Brought to earth at last, the man they had considered a preying wolf had a meek presence. But at that point he refused to answer Mullinax’s and Doyon’s questions and he seemed determined not to do so. He wanted to talk to an attorney.
Ridgway was placed in an “ultra security” cell in the King County Jail, high up on the hill behind the courthouse and the Public Safety Building, where guards would check on him twenty-four hours a day. His mug shot was on the front page of every newspaper from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco by morning, along with speculation that he might be guilty of scores of unsolved homicides in those areas.
I looked at the picture in the Seattle papers on December 1, 2001, wondering if I had ever seen this face before, and I cannot say that I recognized it. But my daughter did. Leslie called me and said in a hushed voice, “Mom, remember how I told you about that man who came to our book signings? The one who leaned against the wall and just watched you? The one who never said anything and never bought any books?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It was him.”
“It was who?” I asked.
“Gary Ridgway. He’s the man I saw.” She paused. “He was even in the audience one time when you were giving a talk at a bookstore and you said ‘Nobody knows who the Green River Killer is or what he looks like. For all I know, he could be sitting here tonight.’ I guess he was.”
People usually chuckled when I said that. It was a way to put an audience at ease and, at the same time, make them realize that serial killers didn’t look like monsters. But it certainly gave me pause as I realized Ridgway must have been sitting in a darkened high school auditorium in Burien or Auburn or Tacoma as I showed slides of other serial killers I’d written about.
DESPITE THE ELATION that Dave Reichert voiced during the news conference he’d called, his media spokesman, John Urquhart, was cautious, as he always was. “What we’re saying is we have not caught the Green River Killer,” he told reporters later. “What we’re saying is we’ve arrested a suspect in the deaths of four women who happen to be on the list of Green River victims. We don’t know who killed those other forty-five women. Period. We’re up to our eyeballs in police work.”
And, indeed, they were. It wasn’t over by a long shot. Every single case, each dead girl, most of whom would have been in their late thirties and early forties by 2001, would be scrutinized again. Authorities currently had only enough evidence to link Ridgway to four murders, and even those might be squeakers. But Norm Maleng’s King County prosecutor’s office had been with the task force every step of the way as they planned the arrest, skillfully fortifying any weak spots. They would continue to do that. It was a matter now of one step at a time.
First, there would be massive searches for possible new evidence. When Ridgway was arrested, crime scene specialists were already primed to employ their expertise in forensic science. “We knew a couple of days in advance that he was going to be arrested, and so we were prepared to search four homes, including the one where he’d lived for so long on Military Road,” one of the technicians said.
They would have precious little daylight; in Seattle in December, the sun sets before four PM. The weather was miserable as rain fell heavily and relentlessly, and fierce winds blew branches from evergreens, closing some streets and knocking out power lines, but the dark skies couldn’t quash the jubilance of the task force. There was a huge break in an investigation that almost everyone had given up on. At the same time, it brought back the memories of so many young women long dead, some of whose bodies had yet to be found.
Members of the Crime Scene Response Team from the Washington State Patrol were assigned to do thorough searches of houses where Gary Ridgway had lived over the prior twenty years. The forensic technicians hoped to find links between the suspect and many more than four victims. He had lived in the small house near the Pacific Highway all during the peak years of disappearances; they suspected that it might hold the most secrets.
It had been a long time since Ridgway occupied the now blue-gray house off Military Road, and the family who lived there in 2001 barely spoke English. They were cooking dinner when the WSP team arrived, surprised to find a crew of crime scene technicians about to swarm over their two-bedroom home.
“We had to convey to them that they would have to leave,” Cheryl Rivers, a technician recalled. “That’s the way it has to be.”
Wearing coveralls, latex gloves, and “booties” to cover their shoes so they would not inadvertently shed evidence themselves, the WSP team moved in. Back in the eighties, Ridgway’s old neighbors had been mystified by how he could have spilled enough red paint to destroy a carpet. There was an air of expectation as the crime scene experts pulled up the current carpets. They could see fibers from various old rugs below, but when they tested the layers beneath for signs of blood or body fluids, they got negative results.
That was disappointing. Green River investigators suspected that Ridgway had taken his victims to one of the bedrooms, probably the spare bedroom. But they knew that he shared his house from spring to late fall in 1982 with a couple to help pay his mortgage. He had fashioned a space for himself—a combination bedroom/storage area—in the garage, living there weekdays and disappearing each weekend. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to bring girls to his house during those months. Still, he had lived there alone for two years before Judith moved in.
Even though the crime scene technicians worked their way down to the underlying carpet pads, bare floors, and baseboards, they found nothing of evidentiary value. They looked at the walls for signs that they had been repainted, but whatever had happened here had taken place long ago. It seemed impossible that there was no
sign of the hapless girls trapped alone with a killer, their screams—if any—drowned out by the constant roar of the freeway just beyond the edge of the backyard. Even the crawl space beneath the house was empty of clues.
Finally the crime scene technicians were done, and the bewildered family who currently occupied the residence were allowed to come back in. Did they even know what might have happened in the house where they lived? With their tentative grasp of English, it was hard to tell. The county would, of course, replace and repair the torn carpets and baseboards, restoring the house to the way it had been.
Next, the state patrol teams moved several miles south to the Ridgway’s interim home in Des Moines near Salt Water State Park and the big house in Auburn. Each move had been to a better neighborhood, and their current house was a much larger and more expensive home. In both the Des Moines and Auburn searches, they looked for souvenirs, photos, hairs, fibers, prints or blood, mementoes from the victims, hidden jewelry, bloodstained clothing, weapons, anything that might link Ridgway to the victims with hard physical evidence. He had been married to Judith for a long time, but she was not a suspect, even though she had lived with him in all these houses.
Most serial killers cannot resist keeping a cache of items to remind them of their crimes. And Judith never questioned her husband about anything. It would have been comparatively easy for him to hide something from her, stowed up in rafters or behind insulation.
They found nothing like that.
Ridgway was in jail, and Judith hidden away in a hotel, still dazed by the way her life as she had known it had come to a halt. The only remaining occupants of their house in Auburn were feline. There were cats and kittens all over, playing and dashing around, and the criminalists had been instructed, “Don’t let the kittens out!”
They were careful to shut the doors so that the animals were safe. The team’s goal was to find as much as they could without doing damage to the house itself. If need be, there were techniques to X-ray the walls later. “My impression was that it was a very nice home,” one of the forensic searchers said, “but its decor was old-fashioned, outdated, and it looked like it had been decorated with things from the seventies, even though it wasn’t that old. It was so feminine. There was no indication at all that a man lived there. It was cluttered with plants, knickknacks, dolls, crocheted doilies, and things some women like. Every flat surface was covered with collectibles and ‘stuff.’ There was nothing at all of him there.”