The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  “Yeah,” Bundy said, then asked if he could “get a smoke off somebody.”

  “Ted, I had some inquiries from Illinois and New Jersey,” the warden continued.

  “Okay,” Bundy answered. “Well, let’s just deal with whatever is outstanding like that. I can say without any question that there is nothing that I was involved in in Illinois or New Jersey.”

  “How about Burlington, Vermont?” the warden asked. “Nothing there? Texas?”

  “No,” Bundy answered, his voice getting softer.

  “Miami?” the warden continued.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” the warden said. “That’s all we’ve got. Okay, Ted, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Bundy said, and that was the end of the final interview he gave to law enforcement about his crimes on the last night of his life.

  I don’t know what secrets Bundy took to the grave with him, crimes that he was either too embarrassed to talk about or too close to the victim to reveal. He had indicated to me that there were crimes that serial killers would never reveal to authorities because they held a special meaning to them.

  Very early the next morning, Ted Bundy walked the steps to the chamber where he would be strapped into the electric chair. Outside, the protesting, chanting, and celebrating crowds watched for the lights to dim, the indication that the execution was actually under way. At the moment the switch was thrown, even amid the chants from some of the spectators, there was still a pervasive silence from most of the people outside the gate. Bundy had officially gone into history and the cheering and jeering that followed the path of the hearse taking his body out of the prison was almost pro forma.

  In the end it was the system that had trapped a frantic Bundy in its web and wouldn’t let him crawl out. Bundy had tried everything—defending himself, using the appeals process, and finally employing a desperate gambit to trade names of victims and confessions for time. But the State of Florida gave him no wiggle room at all. And when the Supreme Court would not give him another stay of execution, it was the end of him.

  Ridgway, starting his confession strategy, perhaps with Bundy in mind, at the beginning of the process rather than after a death sentence, will have a different end. He will live out his life in prison, but the outside world will come to him in the form of interviews and questions. Dave Reichert was right when he said he knew from the look in Ridgway’s eyes that “he had fooled me. He had fooled the detectives.”

  For over twenty, perhaps even thirty years, Ridgway had killed and escaped to kill again. He was the consummate serial offender, venting his anger on victims who, because they lived outside the law, were the perfect targets for a perfect serial killer. “It was technology that caught me,” Ridgway said after having slipped through two lie detector tests and a number of police interviews for homicides he knew he’d committed. So at the end, when he knew that there were crimes the police would never solve but for him, he played the card that Bundy should have played at the beginning. And in so doing, Ridgway now moves from invisible phantom, through the court system, and into prison, proud of his crimes and even prouder of his last-minute strategy that spared his life.

  20

  Gary Ridgway in Court

  The Investigation and the Plea Bargain

  According to the prosecutor’s summary of evidence submitted by the King County District Attorney to the court, on December 5, 2001, the King County Prosecuting Attorney charged Ridgway with four counts of aggravated murder in the first degree for the murders of Carol Christensen, Cynthia Hinds, Marcia Chapman, and Opal Mills. In three of the four counts, DNA evidence linked Ridgway to the victims. The body of Cynthia Hinds was discovered within a few feet of two other victims, leaving no doubt that the same killer was responsible. On April 2, 2002, the prosecutor notified the court that the state would seek the death penalty against Ridgway.

  After finding microtrace evidence of paint on the bodies of additional victims whose bodies had been discovered at sites near the bodies the women whom Ridgway was already charged with murdering, the prosecutor filed additional charges of murder in the first degree against the accused for the murders of Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Debra Estes.

  Despite large numbers of additional victims, the prosecutor revealed, it was clear that the evidence developed by the police would allow the state to prosecute Ridgway only for those seven victims. The dearth of any other evidence pointing to any suspect meant in all likelihood that, absent a confession, the cases would remain unsolved. Gary Ridgway faced seven counts of aggravated first degree murder, but he could not be charged with more than a fraction of the Green River killings.

  Shortly after his arraignment on the amended information, Ridgway’s attorneys contacted the King County prosecuting attorney and asked whether the prosecutor would forgo seeking the death penalty against Ridgway in exchange for pleas of guilty to the charged counts and a number of additional cases. They subsequently prepared a proffer declaring that Ridgway was willing to plead guilty to the seven charged counts and to 40 to 47 additional counts of murder in exchange for the prosecutor’s agreement to forgo the death penalty. Ridgway offered to provide a completely candid account of his criminal activity in King County, and to direct investigators to the undiscovered remains of a number of his victims.

  Thus, in April 2003, the prosecutor faced a decision: He could reject Ridgway’s proffer and proceed to trial on the seven charged counts alone. This would allow a jury to decide whether Ridgway was guilty of the charged crimes and, if so, whether he should be sentenced to death. A jury verdict of death would create the possibility that, after Ridgway had exhausted decades of appeals, he might be executed before he died of natural causes in prison. A fraction of the Green River killings would be avenged. Or, the prosecutor could deprive the jury of an opportunity to sentence Ridgway to death. If he did so, the truth about the Green River killings would be known, and the community’s most enduring nightmare would be over, no longer a tragic enigma in the history of King County. The families of the dozens of victims of the uncharged killings would find a measure of justice and resolution at last. Ridgway would be held accountable for all the murders he committed, not just a select few. He would not be executed, but his convictions could not be appealed and he would die in prison.

  On June 13, 2003, the King County prosecuting attorney and Ridgway entered into an agreement where, in exchange for avoiding the possibility of execution, Ridgway agreed to provide complete, truthful, and candid information concerning his crimes in King County and answer all questions during interviews conducted by the police or the prosecuting attorney. Ridgway agreed to disclose the existence and precise location of all undiscovered physical remains of his victims. Ridgway agreed to plead guilty to aggravated murder in the first degree for all the murders he’d committed in King County.

  The terms of the contract specifically required Ridgway to address not only the “official” list of 49 victims, but any and all other crimes he may have committed before 1982 or after 1984. In addition to the finality this would provide the victims’ families and the community at large, the contract served another purpose. By identifying unsolved murders for which Ridgway was not responsible, police could investigate these cases with an eye toward developing other viable suspects.

  The Ridgway Interviews

  In June 2003, and continuing over the next five months, the task force interviewed Ridgway extensively. Detectives confronted him with all of the Green River murders and similar unsolved homicides. In all, Ridgway claimed that he killed more than 60 women in King County. As part of the process of testing his claim to be the Green River Killer, Ridgway led the police to the places he left bodies and described what he did there. His memory for these locations surpassed all the information provided to his attorneys and the knowledge of detectives who had worked on the case for decades. In addition, he identified several dump sites on cases that were never considered Green River cases; information about these ca
ses had not been provided to the defense.

  Ridgway led the task force to numerous sites where he claimed to have left undiscovered bodies. To date, four sets of human remains have been discovered at those sites, including three of the “missing” victims on the original Green River list: Pammy Avent, April Buttram, and Marie Malvar. Even as the killer himself appeared in court to hear his confessions read into the record and acknowledge them before the families of the victims, detectives investigating the case were still trying to identify the fourth set of recovered remains.

  In their attempt to come to grips with the nature of the individual whose murders had shocked the community and had dominated the national news during the 1980s, detectives spent more than four months interviewing Ridgway about specific homicides as well as delving into his general habits and thoughts related to the killings. Detectives quickly learned, as I had learned over the years of interviewing Ted Bundy and other serial killers, that the information came in bits and pieces.

  Initially, despite his obvious incentive to be truthful in the interviews, Ridgway greatly minimized his behavior and acknowledged that he was a pathological liar. In candid moments, Ridgway acknowledged that it was difficult for him to be truthful after being so successfully deceptive about the killings for decades. Ridgway also suggested another reason why he would lie or minimize his conduct. He believed that a popular true-crime author would write a book about him and thus wanted to portray himself in the best possible light. However as the interviews progressed, Ridgway himself confessed to being a “pathological liar” and said that he had kept on killing well beyond 1985, only stopping in 2001 shortly before his arrest. There are still some murders Ridgway would not admit to, telling his interviewers, “Why, if it isn’t mine? Because I have pride in … in … what I do, I don’t wanna take it from anybody else.”

  In many respects, Ridgway was typical of serial killers for whom their victims have no meaning as individuals other than that they were victims of opportunity—they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Ridgway himself told police interviewers, he killed simply to satisfy his needs, For Ridgway, his victims existed only to satisfy his needs. “Like I said before, they don’t mean anything to me…. Once I’ve killed ’em, I didn’t kept it in memory. I just knew where they … I dumped ’em.” When shown photographs of the victims, Ridgway almost invariably said he did not recognize them. “The women’s faces don’t … don’t mean anything to me…. There were … the bodies, if they had a … had a pussy, I would screw and that was it.”

  Ridgway—like Bundy, who seemed to have an uncanny understanding of the Riverman’s motivations—made killing his specialty, devoting hours of his day before and after work trolling, (“patrolling,” he called it) those areas where prostitutes were known to congregate to pick up their “dates.” One of his favorite locations was the Pacific Highway South, where he would back his pickup truck into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven and, in his words, “watch the traffic.” Sometimes, he said, he even raised the hood on his truck so as to allow him to pretend to work on it while he watched the highway. And killing prostitutes consumed most of his waking hours. He only slept a few hours a night because the rest of his time, outside of work, was devoted to hunting for victims, killing them, and disposing of their bodies.

  Ridgway told police he killed prostitutes because, he said, “prostitutes were the, the easiest. I went from, uh, havin’ sex with ’em to just plain killing ’em.” Ridgway claimed that he also picked these young women because he believed the police would not look as hard for a missing prostitute. Also, he claimed that because prostitutes were frequently on the move, it was more difficult for police to determine where and when they had been killed. Ridgway’s assessment was correct. Police were often delayed in their investigation because no missing-persons report was filed; and, even when a disappearance was reported, it was difficult for investigators to pin down where the victim had last been seen. Complicating matters were numerous alleged sightings of the “missing” victims long after they had been killed. But Ridgway didn’t kill men because, he told police and was quoted in the prosecutor’s summary evidence as having said, “ ’Cause they didn’t give no sexual gratification to me.”

  Among the women he killed, he seemed to enjoy killing younger victims, those in their teens, more than women in their twenties or older because younger victims tended to plead for their lives more and were less hardened than older street prostitutes. “The young ones,” he said, “stood out more when they were dying.”

  Ridgway made it clear to investigators and prosecutors that these were carefully planned, premeditated killings, not sudden impulses. “When I get in the truck,” he said, “when I’m driving and, ah, might pick up a woman, ah, wanna be in the mood to kill. I … I don’t have the mood, ah, like I don’t get her in the truck and drive down the road and all of a sudden, you know, ah, jump on her and start chokin’ her. No.” However, he said, “I always had it in my mind to kill them.”

  Those killings he couldn’t facilitate, especially after he had spent considerable energy on an intended victim, frustrated and enraged him to the point where he took it out on his next victim. He said, “I’m really mad at some of ’em because I … I didn’t get a chance to pick ’em up, they want too much, they, ah, they were, ah, the pimp was followin’ me or somethin’ and so I’m … I just lost one, the next one I’m gonna do everything I can to sweet talk her … I’m gonna talk her into getting her out so I can … kill the bitch, kill the … first one I didn’t get a chance to kill today, I’m gonna kill this one and I’m gonna strangle her head … strangle her neck so it … it breaks …”

  During the mid-1980s, publicity about the Green River murders was at its height with television specials and news coverage profiling the Sea-Tac strip and other areas where prostitutes had disappeared. Yet, during the height of this publicity, Ridgway told police, he kept right on killing. When an intended victim asked straight out if he was the Green River Killer, he simply denied it, telling them, “Uh, do I look like the Green River Killer? And says ‘no, you don’t.’ They always thought it was a big tall guy, about 6′ … b-big guy. So, 6′3″, 185 pounds or some’n like that.” He had more trouble sometimes, he said, convincing prostitutes that he wasn’t an undercover police officer, which was one of the reasons he liked to carry beer in his truck.

  Ridgway developed a number of ruses to get the women to trust him. He offered to become a regular customer, to lend them his vehicles, to get them jobs, to feed them. He didn’t have to worry about keeping these promises, because, as he said, “They were already dead. And I would … talk to her about that and get her mind off of the, uh, anything she was nervous about. And think, you know, she thinks, oh, this guy cares, and which I, I didn’t. I just wanted to, uh, get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her.”

  Ridgway killed many of his victims in his own house. In fact, he said, one of his ruses to gain the trust of his victims was to take them into his son’s room. He even carried a photograph of his son with him as a way to get intended victims, who might have been nervous about the murder spree in King County, to relax. After all, he told police, they’d see a photograph of a young kid next to Ridgway’s own identification and they would lower their guard. Once at his house, they’d look around his son’s bedroom, see the toys, and figure, “Hey, this guy has a son. He’s not gonna hurt anybody. His name’s written on the door and it’s empty and it’s got his bunk bed there, toys on the floor.”

  From the testimony that some of the informants gave to the Green River Murders Task Force and from Ridgway’s own confession, he often negotiated with his intended victims for what he called a “half and half,”—oral intercourse followed by genital intercourse. He told police he wanted them as naked as possible. And when he took women to his house, he would encourage them to use the bathroom before they had sex. This was not for their benefit: He knew from experience that victims of strangulation frequently become incontinent. He
told police, “I don’t, I was in the idea of getting them in there and killing them. I didn’t want them to shit in the bed. So that was the main reason.”

  During the sex act, the prosecutor wrote in his submission of evidence, Ridgway would tell the woman that he could only have an orgasm while entering her from behind. When the woman was on her knees—“doggie style”—he would get behind her. At the appropriate time, Ridgway claimed, he would wait for his victim to raise her head, and attack.

  As Ridgway told a psychiatrist: “And after I got behind them, penis/vagina, I would climax and usually the woman would raise her head because, you know, the guy’s through, I can get dressed. Usually when she raised her head up, I would wrap my arm around her or put something around her neck and choke her.”

  Other times, Ridgway said, he employed a variation on that ruse. “I’d tell ’em, ‘Here’s a car coming,’ so guess what, she lifts up her head like that…. She’s not thinking anything of it. Her hands are down normal and it’s my time to wrap my arm around her neck and to choke her and not have … get in the way of her mouth. I got bit in the hand with a mouth one time … But it’s my idea to get her head up so I could get a clear shot of her neck to kill her.”

  Ridgway described one technique he said was particularly effective. When he began to strangle the women, he told them that if they stopped struggling, he would let them go. He said that a number of women ceased to struggle when he said this, and were easier to kill.

  “But I wasn’t gonna let her go,” he said. “It was just my way of lying to her to keep her from fighting. She stopped fighting and I just kept on chokin’.”

  Ridgway arrived at this solution to the “fighting” problem by trial and error. If they sensed that he was going to kill them, he said, his victims often would plead with him to spare their lives. Among the entreaties they used, he said, were: “Don’t kill me”; “I’m too young to die”; “I’ve got family I’m taking care of”; “I’ve got a daughter at home”; “I don’t want to die.” These pleas did not persuade him, but, Ridgway said, he soon settled on telling the women that if they stopped struggling, he would release them. But he didn’t release them. In fact, he told police, he choked his victims “’cause that was more personal and more rewarding than to shoot her.” He also said that he didn’t experiment with other ways of killing women because choking worked so well. “Choking is what I did, and I was pretty good at it.”