by Ann Rule
Ridgway admitted that he had peeked at his mother’s breasts when her robe fell open, looking down far enough to see her nipples. He had also developed a “hard on” when she measured his in-seam so she could buy the right size pants from Penney’s, where she worked. He didn’t know if she knew or not, but his mother often told his father and her sons about measuring male customers at work the same way, and feeling their penises become erect.
He insisted he had never touched his mother, although being so close to her physically when he was naked and she was partially undressed had made him want to touch a female. Nor had she ever caught him masturbating. He accomplished that after school in a locked bathroom before she got home from work at six. “I don’t think she even talked about masturbating. It’s like nasty to her to talk about it.”
He didn’t remember resenting his mother, although he admitted that he sometimes thought about stabbing her.
Quite probably stimulated by his mother’s inappropriate touching, Ridgway admitted that he had begun to stalk girls and women when he was about twelve, hiding as he watched them in his neighborhood or in class, then following them and peering at them from across the street. “I’d have a hard-on, and think of the woman as a goal, find out where she lived. And then in the morning, I’d go the same way and watch her.”
He admitted his compulsion not only to kill women but to have intercourse with them after they were dead. He pointed out he had not revisited all of his victims after death. The ones who had fought him and hurt him made him angry, and he punished them by leaving them in some deserted spot by themselves.
“Blondes were special,” Ridgway said. “And I think there were at least four or five blondes. I don’t remember having sex after I killed them. I always liked blondes with big breasts. They were the high-priced hookers and they were my special goal—to go out and get a blond lady and have sex with her and kill her. She was at the top of the list.”
Keli McGinness, who had never been found, had been the most beautiful, the blonde who fulfilled his fantasy. Detective Sue Peters had looked for Keli for such a long time. Ridgway insisted that he had picked up six or seven hundred women, and despite studying pictures of the forty-nine known victims, he often claimed he just couldn’t remember which ones he had killed or where he killed them.
“Did you take her to your house,” Sue Peters asked. “Did you kill her in your truck, or did you kill her out in the woods someplace on a date?”
“I had to kill her in the back of the truck.”
“That’s what you originally told us.”
“Well, I probably told you at my house, if I could have got her to my house.”
Peters persisted. “Do you remember getting Keli McGinness into your house…. This is the one with large breasts. Do you remember lying with her on your bed?”
“No, I don’t.” His vagueness was ultimately frustrating.
“Where do you remember her?”
“In the back of the truck—the maroon Dodge.”
“And when you picked her up on Pac HiWay—I don’t even care where on Pac HiWay—where did you take her to date her and kill her?”
He sighed as he searched his unreliable memory. “Over in the airport area where I killed—” He knew he had played volleyball near where he had killed her, but he couldn’t place the murder itself in his mind. “I remember vaguely killing somebody in that area—at least one or two.”
“Where’s her body?”
“Her body’s up at Leisure Time.”
“Are you a hundred percent sure, because before you gave her a fifty-fifty percent chance of being there at Leisure Time.”
“I’ll give her seventy-five, at least. The blond lady I took up there. It couldn’t have been April because now I know where April was.”
“Where was April?”
“I figure April was probably over at Lake Fenwick.”
And so it went in a seemingly endless series of dialogues. He had said he left Keli McGinness in the middle of a cleared field near Auburn. He had said he took her head to Oregon and lost it in a culvert in the Allstate parking lot. If he really knew, he wasn’t telling.
It was so mindless and so cruel.
Ridgway knew that he had picked up a small, thin black girl in the Rainier Avenue area, although, of course, he could not say when that was nor could he remember her face. “She had something wrong with one of her feet,” he commented. “It was thinner than the other and it turned in funny.”
“Did she have difficulty getting up into your pickup truck?” a detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“Did you help her up?”
“No.”
That would have been tiny Mary Exzetta West, sixteen, who was newly pregnant and scared in 1984. He didn’t remember her face, but he remembered that he left her body in Seward Park after he killed her.
He gazed at the investigators day after day, sipping from his bottle of water, jotting notes on his yellow pad, his face as bland and unthreatening as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. But the investigators sensed the evil energy behind his eyes, and it was always good to walk out of the Green River Task Force headquarters, smell clean air, and realize that he was an aberration, unlike the vast percentage of human beings.
And he was caught, trapped so he could never kill again.
54
ALTHOUGH Gary Ridgway said he had left all of his victims lying on their backs, he added, “I didn’t look in their faces. It was dark.”
“Were their eyes open?” Jon Mattsen asked him.
“No. I don’t know. I never closed their eyes,” he said again. “I undressed them after they were dead, but I never touched their faces.”
He recalled one woman whom he’d choked in the back of his truck. He had tried to bring her “back to life” with closed chest compressions. “But I couldn’t.”
Sometimes, in his house, he said he’d put plastic bags over the dead girls’ heads to see if he could detect any breath left in them. “But I never had one wake up on me.”
“Why did you try to resuscitate the one woman?” Tom Jensen asked.
“I panicked. I don’t know why. It was daytime.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. A white woman.”
Ridgway admitted to killing Linda Rule, the blond girl whose skeleton had been found near Northgate Hospital, a homicide that had not been attributed to him. For some reason, he said he had set fire to her hair after she was dead, but he had become alarmed that someone would see or smell the smoke and put it out.
There were so many young women who had died, most of them with no forewarning. Gary Ridgway didn’t care about them, but the task force detectives knew them as well as anyone they’d known in their lives, and they cared deeply about each victim. As Ridgway described their last moments, other faces flashed in the four investigators’ consciousness—all the parents, sisters and brothers, even children of the lost girls. Each detective dealt with memories of the victims in his or her own way; some allowed themselves to remember the details of the lost lives, and some had to keep emotional distance for their own equilibrium.
And yet, day after day, they went back into the stuffy room to listen to Gary Ridgway spew out more venom and, almost worse, to hear him discuss his crimes with completely dispassionate recall of what he had done.
The interviews had to be accomplished, and they went on with little respite for more than a hundred hours. Outside, it was an unusually nice summer in Seattle, people were sunbathing along Puget Sound and flowers were blooming. For the task force detectives, and their prisoner, most of their ventures outside were the grim field trips to body sites.
“The one I covered with a bag was special,” Ridgway admitted, as he spoke of Carol Christensen. He had known her, he had liked her, and she had been nice to him. He knew she had a little girl and that she was excited about her new job, but in terms of her chance for survival, it didn’t matter. He recalled picking her up near her job at th
e Red Barn Tavern, and taking her to his home. According to him, she had enjoyed sexual intimacy with him, but on May 3 she was in a hurry to get home. “I wasn’t satisfied,” he remembered. “It made me mad. I got behind her and choked her with my arm.”
Afterward, he had redressed Carol Ann, realizing that he had her bra on backward, but it didn’t matter to him. He took time, he said, to drink the Lambrusco wine. Then he took the empty bottle, the trout that someone had given him, and the sausage along when he drove Christensen’s body to the woods at Maple Valley. In the first ten days of questioning, he stressed that he wasn’t “staging” a body scene as the F.B.I. agents deduced. “I left the fish and sausage to attract animals. I didn’t want that stuff because I didn’t cook.”
For the first time, Ridgway showed a bit of remorse. “I laid her faceup, put the grocery bag over her head, and lay down with her,” he said. “I cried because I killed her.”
By all that was holy, he should have been caught that afternoon. As he drove out of the road to the woods where Carol Christensen’s body lay, he said he saw a WSP patrol car coming out of the next road down. “I stopped at the first stoplight, and put on my signal to turn. I checked in the mirror to see if he had turned into the road I’d just left, but he didn’t, and he didn’t pay any attention to me.”
Through sheer coincidence, Matt Haney, who was a King County new hire at the time, had stopped his patrol unit to talk with another officer a fraction of a mile away when the call about the body in the woods came from the sheriff’s dispatcher.
But Gary Ridgway had slipped away. Given the chances he took and the degree of police activity hunting for him, he was diabolically lucky. Or perhaps, despite his initial protests, he’d been very careful. He’d been afraid of being caught after the first murder. But not since. Although he couldn’t remember Wendy Coffield, he recalled that he had redressed her, and that the buttons on her blouse were the size of “dimes.” Christensen was only the second victim he redressed.
Twenty years before, Ridgway figured he would never be caught. He’d learned to cut their fingernails so he wouldn’t leave any of his skin beneath his victims’ nails. He took their clothing away and threw it in Goodwill bins so the detectives wouldn’t have any semen stains to test. He didn’t understand DNA but he knew they could figure out something that way, and it might help them catch him. And although he claimed at first that he only put the fish and sausage with Carol Christensen’s body to attract predatory animals, he had really done it to make the body scene look different. That would throw the police off, and it would taunt them, too. He thought the police wouldn’t connect him to a body that was in a different place, with different clues.
In the beginning, he was right. But he had left his DNA behind, his semen in her body. And that was one of the bigger mistakes he’d made. He didn’t realize that it was a ticking time bomb, albeit one that wouldn’t explode until 2001.
His research to perfect his crimes continued. He had not only taken great pains, he said, to remove all traces of himself from the victims, his house and trucks, but he had begun to plant “evidence.” He scattered cigarette butts and chewed gum at the cluster sites. (He didn’t smoke or chew gum, but he gathered it in other places.) He took motel pamphlets and car rental agreements he’d found around the airport and threw them around the body sites to make the detectives believe they were looking for someone who traveled. He even left a hair pick used to groom Afros, thinking the investigators would suspect a black pimp. And it was Gary Ridgway who left Marie Malvar’s driver’s license at SeaTac Airport so people would think she’d taken a flight of her own accord. And, of course, he admitted he had written letters to the Post-Intelligencer and Mike Barber and others with false tips about who the Green River Killer might be.
Perhaps his smartest move in avoiding suspicion was that he talked to no one about what he had done. He had no close friends, and he didn’t feel the need to brag about it. Most killers eventually feel compelled to talk about their crimes, if only to point out how cleverly they have avoided detection. Not Ridgway. He got enough gratification out of checking the sites where he’d left bodies years before. He was fascinated, he told detectives, that he found some skeletons virtually intact in areas where he had expected animals to dismantle them, and others, left in wide open fields, completely gone.
Later, Ridgway would say he lied to the task force detectives for the first ten days of the summer interviews in 2003. It was hard to tell sometimes if he had forgotten the truth, genuinely confusing the victims with one another, or if he was overtly lying. Sometimes he hinted that Wendy Coffield wasn’t the first murder at all, that when he told the woman he was dating in PWP in late 1981 or early 1982 that he’d “almost killed a woman,” he really had killed a woman. He even had vague feelings that he might have murdered a woman in the seventies, but he could not be sure.
Gary Ridgway had reasons to keep his interviewers on the hook. The longer he could delay making a formal guilty plea in court, the longer he could stay out of prison. His accommodations weren’t lavish, but they were a lot better than a stark prison cell. And, here, he was still able to talk about murder and pontificate on all aspects of homicide.
Ridgway wasn’t crazy—his attorneys hadn’t even suggested a multiple personality defense—and he certainly wasn’t a genius. In fact, his I.Q. tested at low normal. He may, however, have been an idiot savant, someone of very low intelligence who shows remarkable brilliance in one area. (For instance, an idiot savant may be a musical prodigy or able to memorize the numbers on the side of every freight car on a long train as it passes by, but developmentally disabled in every other area of intelligence.)
Violent thoughts appeared to have been part of his thought processes for most of his life.
From the time he was in his early teens, Ridgway had studied murder, twisting and turning it in his mind. In some of his interviews with Mary Ellen O’Toole, he spent hours discussing motivations for murder, about his thoughts on how someone other than he had murdered a female neighbor forty years before, and offering his insights. It left the question: Did he kill that woman? There was no way to tell.
He did describe stabbing the six-year-old boy when he was fifteen or sixteen. Remarkably, one of the task force investigators had located that child—now a man of forty-six living in California. He recalled the incident well. The man remembered being dressed in cowboy boots and hat, wearing toy pistols on his belt, when a much older boy asked him if he wanted to build a fort. He had agreed and followed him into the woods.
“Then he said, ‘You know, there’s people around here that like to kill little boys like you.’ ” He’d grabbed the youngster’s arm and led him farther into the trees. Suddenly, the teenager had stabbed him through his ribs into his liver.
“I asked him why he killed me. I watched too many cowboy movies, you know,” Ridgway’s early victim said, “and I saw all the blood pumping out of me. It was [bleeding] profusely—already running down my leg into my boots. With every heartbeat, it was just pumping out. The whole front of my shirt was soaked. And he started laughing, and had a smile on his face. He stood there for a minute, and he had the knife in his hand, and I didn’t want him to stab me again. But he reached toward me and just wiped the knife off—both sides of the blade—once across my shoulder and twice across my shoulder on the other side. He folded [the knife] back up and he says, ‘I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.’
“Then he started walking down that knoll and he was laughing, kinda putting his head in the air, you know, and laughing real loud.”
RIDGWAY told his interrogators that he had read a lot of crime magazines and books in the past. I was jolted to learn that he had read True Detective magazine and other fact-detective magazines that I wrote for early in my career—even more discomfited to hear my name come from his mouth as Ridgway talked with Dr. Robert Wheeler, a psychologist who asked him what books he’d read.
“I read so many of �
��em that they all come together. I read quite a lot,” he said. “Zodiac, two or three of Ann Rule’s, and a bunch. But I don’t want to tell something that I haven’t learned from them.” He explained that he had read my books to learn how not to act in court. He was studying all the mistakes other defendants had made by jumping up in court when they should have kept quiet. He didn’t want to do that.
I didn’t want to be part of Gary Ridgway’s thought processes. There is always the chance that disturbed and obsessed individuals may read something I have written, and I accept that as part of being a true-crime writer, but writing about Ridgway was the most difficult endeavor I would undertake, and I had no desire to be inside his head or hear him say my name. The sheer cruelty that consumed him and his total inability to empathize with any living thing is unfathomable, a black cloud of evil that was so hard to erase from my own memory.
WHEN—IF EVER—Gary Ridgway had stopped stalking and killing women was an obvious question. Nineteen eighty-two to 1984 were undoubtedly the peak years, but it is almost unheard of for serial killers to simply stop. They usually accelerate.
In talking with Dr. Robert Wheeler, Gary Ridgway said the last time he killed was in 1985. He insisted that his period of extreme rage, anger, and frustration only lasted for three years. “After 1985, I had a new wife that cared for me,” he said. “I did yard work and stuff to help out with the anger.”
“All of a sudden, in 1985,” Wheeler asked incredulously, “when you got angry, you raked the lawn?”