by Ann Rule
At some point, he slid under the radar and killed Bobby Joe Hayes. As usual, he remembered very little about her. He thought she had had blondish brown hair and been “skinny.” In 2003, he was able to draw an accurate map of the dead-end road off Highway 410 where he had left her body and, later, lead detectives to the site.
All the sixteen years Bobby Joe had been gone, her family had hoped that she would pop in at Christmas or for her birthday, yelling “Surprise!” Of course, as time passed, that possibility waned. But they didn’t know what had happened to her—not until the investigators called them in the first week of November 2003 and told them that Ridgway had confessed to killing Bobby Joe. It was both a gift and a heartbreak. They no longer had to worry if she was lost, trapped, or in pain, but they knew she was gone forever.
Marta Reeves was a delicately featured brunette woman of thirty-six, estranged from her husband and her four children, and seriously addicted to cocaine. Her only way to live and to feed her habit was to prostitute herself, and she worked the Central Area in Seattle, caught in an increasingly downward spiral. She called her husband asking for money sometime in March 1990, and he told her no. “Okay,” she said wearily, “then I’ll have to work all night.”
That was Marta’s last contact with anyone who knew her. In April, her husband received an envelope with the U.S. Postal Service’s return address. Inside was Marta’s driver’s license, which had either been found and turned in to a post office or dropped into a mailbox. By the time her husband took it to the police, it was smudged with dozens of fingerprints superimposed upon one another, making it impossible to find even a portion of a clear print large enough to feed into the AFIS computers.
Six months after Marta’s last phone call, mushroom hunters found scattered bones and some rotted clothing near the Highway 410 body cluster east of Enumclaw. That was in late September 1990; but it would be January 1991 before they were identified as Marta’s.
Marta’s body lay in a familiar woods that Gary Ridgway had described often during his almost daily interviews. He remembered the loop road off Highway 410 and pinpointed on the map where he had left Marta. As usual, he could not remember where he had picked her up, how he had killed her, or whether she was black or white. Six years after the height of his murder rampage, he was apparently stalking and killing less frequently, but the victims’ humanity was still meaningless to him.
ONE MURDER Ridgway admitted would never have been known had he not told the detectives about it. Originally, it had been written off as an “accidental death.” Patricia Yellow Robe was a tall, very thin woman, quite lovely when she wasn’t using drugs. She was a member of the Chippewa-Cree nation, registered at the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation in Montana. She’d grown up in Havre and then Great Falls as the oldest of ten children who had complicated connections because their parents had married and remarried. They were a handsome family—all of them—and many of Trish’s siblings were professionals, but she had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for most of her life. In 1998, she was thirty-eight and living her usual precarious existence.
“She was always fun,” recalled a younger sister who did legal work for a prosecutor. “She was ten years older than I was, and she took care of me—I could talk to her. She took me to the fair and on shopping sprees, and she taught me how to drive.”
The Yellow Robes’ grandmother was blind, and it was Trish who had been her “eyes,” leading her gently wherever she needed to go. But later, Trish’s lifestyle was unpredictable and she would take off on a whim. She had hooked up with men who took care of her for a while, but, inevitably, those relationships ended and her family worried about her. And then she would show up like Auntie Mame, sweep up her nieces and nephews and take them for ice cream or on some adventure. Trish had three children of her own: Diamond, Emerald, and Matthew. They were raised by their fathers or her mother, who saw they needed some stability.
“We’d lose track of Trish,” her sister said with a sigh. “We asked her just to check in with us every two or three months so we would know she was okay, and usually she would. We sat together on the porch once toward the end of her life, and she told me how much she wanted to get clean and sober. She said she was sure she could beat it. She wanted to live.
“And I told her she was going to die if she didn’t,” her younger sister said. “I told her she was stronger than that, but then bad things happened and she would be gone again.”
If Trish Yellow Robe had a new boyfriend or something else she wanted to show her siblings, she would come sweeping into their offices unexpectedly. They didn’t mind because they loved her, and when she was happy, she was fun to have around. In August of 1998, the family was planning a dinner to celebrate one brother’s birthday on the eighth. “We’d just heard from her on August 4,” her sister said, “and she was due to come for dinner on his birthday. She was planning on it.”
Trish Yellow Robe didn’t make it. On the morning of Thursday, August 6, the owner of All City Wrecking, a business in the South Park area of Seattle, moved toward his locked cyclone fence and saw a woman lying just outside that fence in a gravel parking lot. At first he thought she was sleeping or had passed out, but she was dead. She was fully clothed in a T-shirt, jeans, underwear, socks, and boots.
It was Trish Yellow Robe. An autopsy revealed no possible cause of death beyond what was indicated in a tox screen of her blood, and the pathologist concluded: “The cause of death is acute, combined opiate and ethanol intoxication. The circumstances, scene investigation and postmortem examination, did not reveal evidence of significant injury. The manner of death is probable accident.”
Her family viewed her body, saddened that Trish had died so young. “We thought it was an overdose,” her sister said. “We could accept that. But she was bruised on her eye. The [prosecutors] told us that was postmortem lividity. We didn’t question that because we all knew that Trish would be the first to go.”
The task force detectives had never included Trish Yellow Robe as a possible Green River victim, and they had no information on her during the summer of 2003 as they questioned Gary Ridgway. Still, he had brought up South Park three times in June and July, all the while insisting he hadn’t killed anyone he dated in the nineties.
As they drove him around on field trips, they used the South Park parking lot as a “false site” to test him. And despite new construction over the prior decade, Ridgway recognized the site, and it stirred something in his memory. He was able to describe Trish Yellow Robe’s body placement perfectly, although actually killing a woman there was foggy in his mind.
It had taken a forensic psychologist to dredge up what Ridgway clearly did not want to remember. He was more at ease talking about the women who had died way back in the early eighties. Now it was apparent that he had murdered at least one woman fourteen years after he claimed to have stopped killing.
He didn’t recognize a photo of Trish Yellow Robe in life, but he did identify a photo of her body. Again, there was a coincidence of dates that so often happened in the Green River probe. It was August 8, 2003, when Ridgway’s memory of killing Trish popped up, five years and two days after her murder.
“I remember that one,” he said. “The one at South Park. She wouldn’t let me get behind her and screw her, and so I got madder and madder. And when we got out of the back of the truck, I opened the door for her and started choking her.”
It had been her own fault, he pointed out. “She didn’t want to spend an extra three or four minutes to have me climax and be a customer. She just said, ‘You’re over with’—something like that, and [she] got dressed, and I was still angry with her and choked her and after that I panicked. I didn’t put her in the back of the truck and take it some place. I just left it there.”
A reporter called Trish’s sister, Alanna, in late October 2003, and blurted out that Trish had just been added to the Green River list. “I thought it was a bad joke,” she said. “We had grieved for her, thinking sh
e had died of an overdose. I told the reporter he was wrong, but he said he’d already talked to my father and it was true. Now we had to start a different kind of grieving.”
With tears marking his face, Dave Reichert read all the lost girls’ names aloud. They meant a great deal to the Green River Task Force even though they appeared to be negligible to the man who had just pleaded guilty.
Families watching and listening in the gallery would have their turn to speak, but not for weeks. Judge Jones set Ridgway’s sentencing for Thursday, December 18, 2003, exactly a week before Christmas. In thirty years of covering murder trials in Seattle, I had attended many trials that had their denouement during the holidays, always aware of the dichotomy between the decorated tree in the lobby of the King County Courthouse and the grim proceedings on the upper floors. And yet this time it seemed right. All those families who had endured so many Christmases with a hollow spot that would never be filled, an empty place at their table, or around their tree would at least have a modicum of justice.
IT WAS OBVIOUS from the time the interviewing process began that Gary Ridgway considered Dave Reichert the “Man,” the leader of all cops, the most daunting of opponents, and that he was tantalized by the idea of meeting him personally. He was, after all, the “High Sheriff,” the boss of the detectives who questioned him every day. On some of his field trips, Ridgway thought he’d glimpsed Reichert in a car driving by and asked hopefully if it was him, only to be told “No.”
They had met earlier that summer when Reichert, dressed in his perfectly pressed uniform with hash marks and gleaming brass, had come into the interview room at task force headquarters. Their first encounter had been a bit bizarre. Virtually nose-to-nose, Reichert stared at Ridgway, leaning further in toward the prisoner as his quarry shrunk back until it seemed they would both lose their balance and tip out of their chairs. They appeared not unlike a cartoon cat and mouse, with Reichert having the advantage. Minutes went by without his saying a word. Although Ridgway was clearly sweating, he had seemed unable to look away from Reichert’s piercing blue eyes. Whatever he had expected to happen if they were ever to meet, it was obvious that this silent stare wasn’t it.
The sheriff hadn’t presided over the daily interviews, but he had monitored many of them. His personal animus toward Gary Ridgway was palpable, but when he finally spoke, Reichert played with the prisoner, seemingly almost genial at first. Ridgway was too dense and too intimidated to catch on.
Reichert remarked upon their many similarities—in age and in the region where they were both raised. He even confided in Ridgway that he, too, had suffered from dyslexia when he was a boy, and could understand why Ridgway had been worried that he would have to ride the “short bus” to Woodside School, the Highline School District’s designated school for developmentally disabled students. It was a classic “You and me together” technique, and Ridgway, still wary, relaxed a little.
The sheriff commented on the irony of their ending up here in this interview room—one of them a confessed serial killer and the other the sheriff. He dangled a carrot. Wouldn’t it be something if the two of them went on the road together, giving talks and seminars to law enforcement groups and psychiatrists and psychologists? He suggested that many people would be fascinated with what each of them had to say. There had never been anything like it, but he said he figured there was a huge potential audience for a man who had killed as many victims as Ridgway had.
Ridgway nodded nervously. He didn’t know what to expect. He smiled tentatively as if he believed that Reichert was really going to take him on buses and trains and planes on some macabre dog and pony show. That would, of course, be the pinnacle of his life—to stand shoulder to shoulder with this man he clearly both admired and feared, and they would both discuss how successful he had been as a serial killer.
Sue Peters and Randy Mullinax, Jon Mattsen, Tom Jensen, and Jim Doyon had asked him questions, brought him up short and urged him to tell the truth, to stop “bullshitting” them, Drs. Chris Harris, Robert Wheeler, and Mary Ellen O’Toole had asked him the most intimate questions, and Ridgway had managed to look back at them with some shred of self-confidence. But the sheriff kept him off-balance. Reichert smiled at him, but not with his eyes. He seemed to be offering him the world, but he might jerk it back if Ridgway reached for it.
Their conversations had eventually turned into interrogations, of course. But it was much easier for Ridgway to give up secrets to the detectives with whom he felt more at ease. He could call them by their first names; Reichert was always the man in charge.
56
TWO DAYS BEFORE Ridgway’s sentencing, Dave Reichert visited him again. As always, he was in full uniform, which gave him a distinct psychological advantage over the prisoner in his bright red jail scrubs over a long-sleeved maroon T-shirt. Reichert hitched up his chair and stared disconcertingly at Ridgway.
“How long you been here?” he asked.
“Six months, I guess. I came here on Friday, the thirteenth—in December.”
He was wrong. Six months ago it had been June. He had lost track of time.
Reichert baited Ridgway: “How do you think things have been going?”
“Pretty good,” Ridgway said, summing up what he had told Peters, Mullinax, Jensen, and Mattsen. “We’re up to seventy-one victims, but there’s six sites where we haven’t found the bodies.” He seemed to consider himself part of the team. It was not “they”; it was “we.”
“Do you think we should call in the F.B.I.?”
This was obviously another carrot, with Reichert feigning ineptitude, tacitly admitting that his department couldn’t carry out a search as well as the feds. Ridgway pondered that and answered that an organization as prestigious as the F.B.I. might have new search devices that could pick up some minerals in bones. Despite their last encounter, he appeared to be at ease, facing the sheriff man to man, discussing a mutual problem.
“What are some good things that have happened in the time you’ve been here?” Reichert eased the point of a hook in, tantalizing him, but Ridgway didn’t get it yet.
“Well, sometimes we find an extra body, one they didn’t account for,” Ridgway said. And it was “good” that each find took more pressure off him, releasing a tightness in his chest. “I celebrate that I found another person.”
“Why?”
Ridgway clearly flailed around in his mind to find an answer that would show he cared about the victims’ families. But his answers were self-serving and completely off the point. And Reichert kept responding with “Why?” to everything he said.
Ridgway spoke of some of the clever things he had done to fool the Green River Task Force. “I didn’t lick the letter I sent to the paper,” he said.
“Why?”
It was DNA that had trapped Ridgway, but he would not say that term. He only repeated that he had not licked the flap of the envelope. He pointed out that he had typed the letter instead of writing it in longhand. He thought that had been smart.
“You did a good job in court,” Reichert said suddenly.
“Thank you.” Ridgway explained that he was concerned, though, about the sentencing. He was afraid he might trip walking in, given the restriction of his leg shackles, or that he would cry or the families would yell at him. He wanted them to know that some of the victims had “touched” him.
Disbelief in his tone, Reichert asked him just how they had done that, and the prisoner reached into his memory and pulled out Debbie Abernathy’s name.
Reichert wanted to know in what way.
“Because it was on Chad’s birthday,” Ridgway said. It was obviously almost impossible for him to connect with the women he had murdered, or to see them as human beings. He had to connect any sadness to something or someone involved with himself. He said he felt bad about Colleen Brockman because he killed her on Christmas Eve. And he was sorry because “Meehan” had been pregnant, and he hadn’t noticed that. He felt bad, he said, about Connie Naon “beca
use she was beautiful.”
But all in all, he thought that the session where he had pleaded guilty “went real good.”
“What about Thursday?” Reichert asked, referring to the sentencing date.
Ridgway said he’d read some of the letters the families had sent—the ones who couldn’t be there—but he didn’t want to discuss them much. The families had called him evil, and he thought that was probably true, but he hastened to point out that it wasn’t his fault if he was. He had done it all from “lack of love.” He figured it might take five or six hours for the families to say what they wanted to say.
“But I have remorse—sadness in my heart. I’ll answer their questions,” he said confidently.
“You won’t have a dialogue with them,” Reichert said. “Would it matter to you if someone killed your son, what they said to you? Would it matter if they said, ‘Sorry, I’m the devil and I’m evil’?” And then in a conversational tone, Reichert asked, “Why did you [kill them]?”
“I had a craving, because they were prostitutes. I wanted to kill them…. Wanted to control them.”
“You can control people without killing them.”
Reichert kept pelting Ridgway with “Whys?” as he searched hard to find reasons for his killing rampages.
“I was mad at them,” he finally blurted. He had tried to impress the task force investigators all along with his explanation that he had actually killed the “hookers” to help them keep the streets clean. The detectives had never appreciated what he had done for them.
There was no disguising Dave Reichert’s profound hatred for the man in front of him. It seeped out of his pores. It had gone beyond a contest between a lawman and a killer, and he probably had to fight an impulse to put his hands on Ridgway.