Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  NO U.S. SERIAL killer and sexual predator has been convicted of killing as many women as Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, has. On Criminal Minds, he merits four mentions, in the episodes “Unfinished Business” (115), “The Perfect Storm” (203), “About Face” (306), and “Catching Out” (405).

  In “About Face,” women see their faces printed on posters that say, “Have you seen me?” Shortly after the appearance of the posters, the women are murdered. The first victim is found sexually assaulted and with her face removed, weighted, and dumped in a creek.

  Although Gary Ridgway didn’t remove his victims’ faces or taunt them with posters of themselves, he was an aggressive predator who dumped his victims’ bodies in water. Beginning in July 1982, women—most of them prostitutes and teenagers—disappeared from the streets of King County, Washington. Later that month, their bodies started to turn up.

  The first was that of Wendy Coffield, sixteen, who was spotted by boys bicycling near the Green River. Coffield was Ridgway’s first confirmed victim, although he has claimed that there were at least five victims before her. Coffield was found naked except for shoes and socks. She had been strangled.

  Debra Bonner, twenty-two, came next. Like Coffield, she worked as a prostitute. Her body was discovered snagged on a logjam in the river.

  On August 1, a third prostitute, Marcia Chapman, thirty-one, vanished. That was followed on August 11 by the disappearance of a fourth prostitute, Cynthia Hinds, seventeen. The next day—the day Debra Bonner’s body was found—a sixteen-year-old prostitute named Opal Mills disappeared.

  A man rafting on the Green River on August 15 spotted two bodies in the river and called the police. They found Chapman and Hinds, nude and pinned by boulders to the river bottom. Both women had rocks inserted into their vaginas. On the banks nearby the police found Mills.

  King County law enforcement officials realized early that they had a serial killer in their midst, and they put together Washington State’s biggest task force since the Ted Bundy days of the 1970s.

  The next victim, fifteen-year-old Debra Estes, also a prostitute, disappeared in September and wasn’t found for six years.

  Throughout the next several years, the crimes continued, and more bodies appeared in King County’s wooded, remote areas. Most of the victims were teenagers, and most were found nude. Some bodies weren’t discovered for a year or more. Generally, Ridgway hid his victims in clusters so he wouldn’t forget where he had put them. Every time a dump site was compromised, he chose a new one.

  Sometimes Ridgway took pains to disguise his activities. Carol Christensen, twenty-one, was a waitress, not a prostitute. Her body had been posed. She was fully dressed, and he had put two trout on her breasts, a bottle of wine between her legs, and a sausage in her hands. Ridgway later admitted that he was trying to throw off the task force. Experts believed that the killer was making a reference to the Last Supper, but in fact the items were just things Ridgway happened to have on hand. Semen found in Christensen was eventually linked to Ridgway. Throughout the years, he tried tricks such as planting cigarette butts and used chewing gum near the bodies—he neither smoked nor chewed gum. He even took two bodies to Oregon, hoping to persuade the authorities that the killer had moved away from King County.

  In 1984, a victim finally escaped Ridgway’s clutches. A prostitute named Rebecca Garde Guay was performing oral sex on him when he claimed that she had bitten him, and suddenly he brutally attacked her. He got her in a choke hold, but she broke free and raced to a nearby trailer. She told the police that in order to prove that he wasn’t a cop, the man had shown her an employee ID card from the Kenworth Motor Truck Company, where Ridgway had worked for more than thirty years. She described Ridgway and his truck, and when she was shown a photomontage, she identified him.

  Ridgway was picked up in February 1985, and a task force detective questioned him. He admitted to the event, claiming that he frequented prostitutes and had become angry when Guay bit him. She decided against pressing charges, and Ridgway was released.

  This was his second encounter with the task force. In 1983, a witness described a truck like Ridgway’s in connection with the disappearance of prostitute Marie Malvar. Since Ridgway had been seen in the areas where prostitutes worked, he was questioned then. But the witness’s description had been vague, and Ridgway denied ever having met Malvar, so the investigators had nowhere to go with the interrogation.

  Ridgway easily passed a polygraph test. As a county prosecutor later explained, the Green River Killer’s psychopathology was such that he saw nothing wrong with murdering women, so he didn’t go into the test with the anxiety that one would normally have when lying.

  The detectives questioned him several more times, and once, in 1987, they served a search warrant on his home, his workplace, and several vehicles. They collected ropes, plastic tarps, and paint chips; they analyzed his financial data; and they even took a saliva sample, but they found nothing that tied him directly to any of the bodies. Again, they turned their attention elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, the body count kept rising. Ridgway claimed that he would have killed more if it hadn’t been for the trouble of dumping the bodies.

  His typical method was to cruise areas that prostitutes were known to frequent. If he saw one he liked, and there were no witnesses around, he would invite her into his truck. Sometimes he kept a spare tire in the front seat as an excuse for why they couldn’t have sex in the truck and would have to go to his house or some remote wooded location. He would show his identification to make the woman trust him—knowing that he was going to kill her anyway—and he would often let her see a picture of his son in his wallet. He believed that if the woman knew he had a son, she wouldn’t think he was going to hurt her.

  Whether these women went to his home or to the woods, he would have sex with the woman, usually from behind. After he had achieved orgasm, he would snake his right arm around her neck and strangle her to death. Later in his career he started using ligatures to bind the women so they wouldn’t injure him as they struggled.

  When a woman scratched him, he’d clip her nails to remove his skin from underneath them. If witnesses saw a woman get into his truck, he often went ahead with the “date” without murdering her, figuring that if the prostitutes saw him around from time to time, they wouldn’t be worried when he stopped for them. On those occasions, however, he had to find another victim right away.

  Sometimes he had intercourse with the bodies of the women after he killed them, sometimes until the smell of decomposition or the presence of flies made it too distasteful even for him. After he killed them, he disposed of their clothes. Their clothing—like the women themselves—was garbage at that point. He’d had what he wanted from the women, so they were worthless. He occasionally stole their jewelry and left it in the women’s bathroom where he worked, so that other women would take it. Seeing new women wearing the jewelry that he had taken from his victims aroused him.

  Ridgway, who was white, did not discriminate by race. Most of his victims were white, but many were also Asian or black. The common thread was that most were high-risk victims—their lives as prostitutes regularly put them in dangerous situations.

  Ridgway’s period of greatest “productivity” was between 1982 and 1984. After 1987, the murders tapered off almost completely. Between 1985 and 1991, more than forty prostitutes were murdered in San Diego, California, under circumstances that made the authorities wonder if the Green River Killer had moved south. Most of those murders have not been solved, but Ridgway never confessed to them, and no evidence links him to those crimes.

  Improvements in DNA analysis technology finally led authorities back to Ridgway in 2001. The saliva sample he gave matched the semen that was taken from Christensen and the DNA evidence found on Chapman, Hinds, and Mills. With that evidence in hand, the task force arrested Ridgway, and he started confessing to the other murders.

  Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949. The
re were some early signs that not all was right with the boy. He wet the bed well into his teens. He was sexually attracted to his mother and fantasized about murdering her. When he was sixteen, he stabbed a six-year-old boy, who recovered after surgery for his internal damage. Ridgway was married twice in relatively short order. His second wife claimed that he would sometimes come home late at night inexplicably dirty or wet, and as the marriage progressed he came home later and later. He once put her in a choke hold, and he demanded frequent sex, often outdoors, in locations where it was later determined he had hidden bodies. After his arrest, he declared that if he had just strangled his second wife when he had the chance, it might have saved fifty or more lives.

  Ridgway met his third wife in 1985 and married her in 1988, and he was still married when he was arrested. Some have speculated that it was her influence, somehow calming Ridgway, that led to the decrease in victims during those years. He admits that he never stopped soliciting prostitutes, however, and claims to have kept killing through the 1990s.

  Although Ridgway was convicted of murdering forty-eight women, he claims there are more victims, as many as sixty. He led investigators to dump sites where previously unknown bodies were found, but for the most part he doesn’t remember details about the women he murdered. They were just objects to be used and discarded.

  Ridgway adamantly insisted that he was never a rapist, that all the sex he’d had with his victims—including, presumably, postmortem—had been consensual. And he wasn’t a monster, he said, because he didn’t torture them. He said he was “good in one thing, and that’s killin’ prostitutes,” an activity that he referred to as his “career.” His idea of regret or remorse was to feel sorry that he had been caught. In the end, science nailed him—he’s spending the rest of his life in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

  GARY RIDGWAY is far from alone in targeting prostitutes, the number one prey for serial killers. Criminal Minds doesn’t neglect this common prey; episodes that focus at least in part on the murder of prostitutes include “The Last Word” (209), “Sex, Birth, Death” (211), “Legacy” (222), and the pair of episodes that wraps up the fourth season, “To Hell . . .” (425) and “. . . And Back” (426). While Ridgway plied the wilderness area of King County, Washington, a similar serial killer was working around an entirely different river—the Genesee—in New York State.

  The first female corpse to show up in the Genesee River Gorge broke through the ice and was found by a hunting party on March 24, 1988. She was identified as Dorothy Blackburn, a prostitute from nearby Rochester. She had been strangled and badly beaten, with teeth marks around her genital area.

  In September 1989, more bodies started turning up, and they came faster than ever in October.

  The Rochester police understood that a serial killer was at work, so they went out to the prostitutes in the area and solicited their cooperation. One woman, Jo Ann Van Nostrand, told a story about a strange john she had been with. He called himself Mitch, and he referred to “the Genesee River Strangler” several times in their conversation. He wanted her to lie still and play dead while they had sex. He seemed nervous, which made her nervous, and she showed him the knife she carried. He tried to hire her again after that night, but she avoided him.

  Although the hookers were forewarned, they kept disappearing. One woman’s body was found with leaves stuffed down her throat. Another woman, who was not a prostitute, turned up badly mutilated, gutted from the breasts to the pubic area, with her labia removed. The police weren’t sure how this woman, June Stott, fit into the case, since the victimology was so different and the mutilation so much more severe than they’d seen before.

  The Rochester police called in the FBI. By New Year’s Day, 1990, there were more missing women. Most of the ones who had turned up were buried, submerged in the river, or otherwise made invisible from above—a skill that made the police believe that their man might have law enforcement experience or a previous record—but they wanted to find the bodies, if they could, so as a last-ditch effort they tried a helicopter search. Despite the uncooperative weather, one last helicopter lifted off for a final sweep of the area in which the first body had turned up.

  The police got lucky. Near a bridge they saw a female body flattened on the ice, naked except for a white top. On the bridge was a car, and a man stood close to it, urinating.

  The body belonged to a streetwalker named June Cicero. Her genital area had been sawed into, possibly after she was frozen.

  The police wanted to talk to the man with his pants unzipped. The helicopter followed his car when he left, and some patrol units joined in. When the man parked at a nursing home, the patrol officers grabbed the driver. He identified himself as Arthur John Shawcross, and he assumed that he’d earned the overwhelming police presence for urinating in the woods. He didn’t have a driver’s license, and he admitted that he had once been in jail for manslaughter.

  Under further questioning, Shawcross told them that the trouble he’d been in before, in Watertown, New York, involved two kids who had died. Since Shawcross turned out to be an almost pathological liar, it was some time before the police got the whole story. He had befriended a young boy who lived across the street and had taken him fishing. The next day the boy disappeared. Shortly thereafter, an eight-year-old girl disappeared; her body turned up, bearing signs of anal rape and with leaves and mud jammed down her throat, under a bridge where Shawcross frequently fished. He ultimately confessed to both crimes and led the police to the boy’s body.

  Shawcross had been convicted, but he had been a model prisoner, deemed not a threat to society, and released after fifteen years. Parole officers tried to place him in a couple of different cities, but because of the heinous nature of his crimes, the locals resisted. Finally they settled him in Rochester and made it impossible for anyone—even the local police—to access his criminal record.

  The Rochester cops were furious. If they had known about the convicted murderer and sex offender in their midst, they would have had a starting point for their investigation much earlier.

  Shawcross confessed to the prostitute murders, but he tried to blame them all on events outside his control, and his lawyers used an insanity defense. Shawcross’s stories were all over the map. He claimed to have been a super-soldier of some kind in Vietnam and to have suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as a result, but a little checking showed that he had never witnessed, much less taken part in, the wartime atrocities he had described. He said that he had been a bed-wetter and a pyromaniac, the son of an abusive mother, yet other family members denied those claims. It was a fact that he had dropped out of school at nineteen, when he had finally made it to ninth grade, but that only proved that he was not very bright.

  In the trial preparation, a test showed that Shawcross had an extra Y chromosome, a condition once called the criminal karyotype and believed to cause antisocial, aggressive behavior and low intelligence. Later research disproved this, but some people still cling to it as an excuse for criminal acts (as did fictional murderer Henry Grace, in the Criminal Minds episode “Masterpiece” [408]).

  Finally, Shawcross was convicted on ten counts of murder (although his body count might be as high as sixteen) and sentenced to ten consecutive twenty-five-years-to-life sentences. He would have been eligible for parole after serving a mere 250 years, but he died of a pulmonary embolism on November 10, 2008.

  ROBERT HANSEN was yet another prostitute killer, albeit one with a more colorful MO. Reminiscent of the deranged brothers in the episode “Open Season” (221), Hansen hunted for sport.

  Hansen’s early life was marked by terrible acne, a stutter, and domineering parents who forced the naturally left-handed boy to use his right hand, a stress that he claims made his stutter even worse. He had few friends in high school and no girlfriends. He became an occasional shoplifter; this turned into a habit that would persist into his later years.

  After finishing high school, Hansen joined the
army, then went to work as a drill instructor at a police academy in Iowa. He had been married for a short time when his rage got the best of him and he burned down a school bus garage, supposedly in revenge for all the slights his town had visited upon him. His wife, humiliated, divorced him. Hansen served twenty months of a three-year sentence. A few months after being paroled, he married again.

  The Hansens decided to make a new start in life, and in 1967 they moved to Anchorage, Alaska. The final frontier seemed like a good match for a guy who had never fit in anywhere. Hansen became well known as a hunter, setting records with his rifle and his bow. His trophy room filled up with animal heads. After committing insurance fraud and acquiring an easy thirteen thousand dollars, he opened a bakery in town.

  But Hansen had another pastime that he didn’t tell his wife about. Anchorage’s Fourth Avenue was a hotbed of strip clubs and bars in which prostitutes plied their trade, and Hansen often visited them. Quick, impersonal sex didn’t turn out to be enough to satisfy his lust, however. At some point, probably around 1971, he turned violent and murdered one of the hookers. He discovered that he liked it.

  He committed more murders and began dumping the corpses of the women in a wilderness area. Then another idea came to him—a way to combine his dual passions. He would offer a prostitute a couple of hundred dollars for oral sex—which he claimed he would never ask of his respectable wife—and once the act was under way, he would handcuff the woman, take her someplace and brutally rape her, then fly her into the wilderness. There he would let the woman, usually unclothed, run off. After giving her a head start, he would hunt her down and kill her, leaving the body lost in the wild. Hookers and topless dancers made good prey, since their absences often went unreported.

  Hansen was arrested in 1977 for stealing a chain saw, and he was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder. Although he was ordered to take lithium, the order wasn’t enforced, and he stopped taking his meds. The authorities didn’t know there was a serial killer working their turf. Hansen wasn’t suspected of anything more serious than property theft.