In February 1984, Ridgway wrote a letter to a local newspaper that was designed to throw police off the track. The poorly typed letter was entitled “What you need to know about the Green River man” and contained many references to the killings, and a number of falsehoods about the killer’s identity. The letter suggested that the killer was a traveling salesman or a long-distance trucker, and that the killings were motivated by profit or revenge. The letter mentioned that the victims’ fingernails had been cut, a fact not known to investigators until Ridgway told them this in 2003. The task force sent the letter to the FBI for analysis, and an “expert” there proclaimed that the letter was not written by the killer. In 2003, Ridgway provided details about the crimes that he had included in the letter, providing additional confirmation that he was indeed the Green River Killer. Thus, the letter became evidence against him, but only after he had already confessed to the crimes.
Ridgway also returned to one of his dump sites, retrieved the remains of Denise Bush and Shirley Sherrill, and transported them to Tigard, outside Portland, where they were found in 1985. This was high-risk behavior, but he did this in order to convince police that the Green River Killer had moved south. The ruse worked. The prosecutor wrote in his summary of evidence that Green River investigators went to Tigard to investigate the discovery of the bodies. Ridgway further covered his tracks by paying for the trip in cash so that he would leave no paper trail.
Ridgway’s History of Childhood Violence
It is now almost a matter of lore that most serial killers manifest problems early. They display a fascination with fire and engage in arson, they display abnormal cruelty to animals, and they may be dangerously violent toward other children. Ridgway displayed all this behavior. As a child, according to the prosecutor’s summary, Ridgway was a “slow learner” and a poor reader. According to him, as an adolescent he also dabbled in arson, paid a child to let him fondle her genitals, committed a number of minor property offenses, and killed a cat by suffocating it.
Ridgway also admitted that he was sexually attracted to his mother. Ridgway’s feelings toward his mother during this time in his life seem an admixture of lust and humiliation. Ridgway, who was a bed wetter until his early teens, seemed to have vivid memories of having his genitals washed by his mother. This imagery may have contributed to his sexual development, in that he fantasized about showering with prostitutes. But his attraction to his mother was accompanied by homicidal thoughts about her, such as entertaining thoughts of mutilating her, killing her, or burning down the house with her inside. As Ridgway described it to police: “I thought about stabbing her in the chest or in the heart maybe, uh … um … maybe, uh … cut her face and chest.” Later, Ridgway tried to minimize the fantasy of cutting his mother. He said, “Just, you know, just a little whim of just, you know, cutting her just to, you know, take a knife and slicing her, not the whole defile.”
Ridgway admitted to police that he had begun stalking his peers in elementary school, an early indicator of what he later would tell police was behavior he called “patrolling” and what investigators today describe as “trolling for victims.” Ridgway described an incident in which he would surreptitiously follow girls home while in junior high school in a state of sexual arousal. “I’d have a … a hardon and … think of the woman as a goal and be on the opposite side of the street. And find out where she lived.” This history of acting out a childhood sexual-control fascination was another early manifestation of behavior that would become later violence.
Ridgway also described an incident which took place, he said, in the late 1960s, where he “tried forcing sex” on a young woman. In this early example of his failure to control his sexual impulses, he said he picked the girl up at the Seattle Center and offered to drive her home. He pulled off to the side of the road, asked her to have sex with him, and fondled her breasts. According to Ridgway, he allowed the girl to leave his car. But for Ridgway’s backing off and letting his victim go, this was a prefiguration of the behavior that would become the methodology of his murders as the Green River Killer.
In one startling section of the prosecutor’s summary, there is a confession and confirmation from the victim of Ridgway’s first attempted murder when he was a teenager. For me, this story is an example of Ridgway’s history of homicidally violent predilections, even when he was a kid; he had exhibited the exact same type of overly narcissistic, self-serving behavior most killers exhibit when they experiment with violence.
According to Ridgway’s confession, when he was 15 or 16 years old, he approached a first-grade boy near some bushes on a street corner, and stabbed the boy in the side with a knife. According to Ridgway, he never learned what happened to the boy, who ran off clutching his side. Ridgway said to his interviewers, “Ah, he was playin’ with a stick like, cowboys and Indians or somethin’ like that. And, ah, he, ah, bent … bent down to pick up somethin’ or somethin’ and I just took the knife outta my pocket and stabbed him in the ah, side. He grabbed his side and ran away, and I ran up the hill.”
Ridgway told police he simply “wanted to see how to stab somebody.” Ridgway said the boy “cried and ran,” but in his adult description of the event from his teens, he seemed remarkably unperturbed about the consequences to the boy or his own responsibility for the stabbing. Instead, he took a fatalistic view, and suggested that the incident was a coincidence: “Place at the right time I guess what you’d call it.”
A task force detective managed to locate the person Ridgway stabbed some forty years later. Now living in California, the man confirmed Ridgway’s account of the incident without any prompting from the detective. He said that he was six years old at the time, and in the first grade. He was playing near a wooded area close to his house and an adjacent school. He was wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, two “six-guns,” and a toy rifle—and he was playing with a stick. The victim said he was approached by a boy who, he estimated, was eight or ten years older than he was. This boy asked him if he wanted to build a fort, and the victim agreed. According to the victim, the boy who approached him said, “You know, there’s uh, there’s people around here that, that like to kill little boys like you.” He led the little boy to the wooded area behind the school and stabbed him through the ribs and into his liver.
The victim reported, “And I asked him why he, why he killed me … I watched too many cowboy movies, you know! … And the, you know, and I saw all the blood pumpin’ outta me…. It was, it was profusely. I mean, it was already runnin’ down my leg into my boots…. And uh, with every heartbeat it was just pumpin’ out…. It was the whole front a’ my shirt was soaked…. And he, uh, started laughin’, and he had a smile on his face and he stood there for a minute and he had his knife in his hand, and I didn’t want him to stab me again, but he reached toward me and he just wiped the knife off—both sides of the blade, so he wiped it once across my shoulder and twice across my shoulder on the other side a’ the blade…. Folded [the knife] back up, and he says, ‘I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.’”
According to the victim, Ridgway seemed rather pleased with the experience. “Then he started walkin’ down that knoll and he was laughin’, you know, kinda puttin’ his head in the air, you know, and laughin’ real loud.”
Ridgway’s Persistent Return to Violence
Despite what the public believed about the Green River case, the killings did not stop in 1985 or 1986. In fact, they continued off and on for the next fifteen years. Ridgway confessed that although he slowed down, he never stopped killing until his arrest in 2001. Although he claimed he was “semi-retired” and an “amateur” compared to his earlier killing spree, he said that “[i]t was, like I said, like I was back starting all over again and I wasn’t a well-greased machine. I was … I was rusty.”
The Gary Ridgway Confession
Gary Ridgway finally stood up in court to admit to the crimes he’d committed. He had provided investigators with information about all 48 crim
es in the state’s charges against him and added details about his life and the nature of his crimes. That information corroborated what killers like Bundy had already said, but some of it was still startling.
In Ridgway’s own words:
In most cases when I murdered these women, I did not know their names. Most of the time, I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory for their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.
I killed them all in King County. I killed most of them in my house near Military Road, and I killed a lot of them in my truck not far from where I picked them up. I killed some of them outside. I remember leaving each woman’s body in the place where she was found. The plan was: I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.
I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.
Another part of my plan was where I put the bodies of these women. Most of the time I took the women’s jewelry and their clothes to get rid of any evidence and make them harder to identify. I placed most of the bodies in groups which I call “clusters.” I did this because I wanted to keep track of all the women I killed. I liked to drive by the “clusters” around the county and think about the women I placed there. I usually used a landmark to remember a “cluster” and the women I placed there. Sometimes I killed and dumped a woman, in tending to start a new “cluster” and never returned because I thought I might get caught putting more women there.
Gary Ridgway, Serial Killer
Ridgway’s confessions don’t even come close to answering the basic questions of what drove him, what it was that motivated his compulsion to kill. And investigators probably won’t get at that truth—if they ever do—for a while, because what Ridgway disclosed was only the tip of the iceberg. It was enough to satisfy the plea bargain and allow the police to close the cases. But there may be many more. As Ridgway himself admits, the 48 victims described above represent only a portion of the women he killed.
Why did he kill so many young women? Even the prosecutor in his summary of evidence concedes that the investigators cannot answer that question.
However, the prosecutor wrote, some of Ridgway’s admissions reveal a deeply rooted psychopathy. It is readily apparent that Ridgway does not suffer from any mental disease or defect that would absolve him from responsibility for his crimes. While lawyers and psychiatrists can debate the nature of mental disease, this is primarily a legal question, depending upon the definition of insanity that appears in a state’s criminal statute. In the Revised Criminal Code of the State of Washington, per RCW 9A.12.010, insanity, so as to be a defense to murder, is an an affirmative defense that requires that “at the time of the commission of the offense, as a result of mental disease or defect, the mind of the actor was affected to such an extent that he was unable to perceive the nature and quality of the act with which he is charged or he was unable to tell right from wrong with reference to the particular act charged.” And because insanity is an affirmative defense, the burden is on the accused to establish that defense by a preponderance of the evidence. As Ridgway’s own words in his confessions reveal, he knew that what he was doing was wrong, and he certainly understood and perceived the nature of the acts he was performing. Thus, he was not legally insane in the State of Washington.
The prosecutor’s report also said that nothing in Ridgway’s history, apart from the crimes recounted in his confessions, suggested serious mental illness. As a child, Ridgway said, he was never sexually molested or physically abused, and he denied contemplating suicide. When a forensic psychiatrist asked Ridgway if he thought he had a mental illness, Ridgway replied that he used to have a problem with “killing women.”
Asked why he thought that this was an illness, Ridgway responded “I don’t, I don’t know if it was an illness, or just uh, I just wanted to kill.” Asked if there was any additional evidence of mental illness, Ridgway cited his propensity to have sex with the women after they were dead. Asked if there was any evidence of mental illness apart from homicide and necrophilia, Ridgway replied: “No, I don’t think so.”
Ridgway told interviewers, including a psychologist, that he never gave a thought to how the victims felt while he was killing them. Asked by a forensic psychologist if he thought there was something missing in him that was present in other people, Ridgway replied: “Caring.” This is a generally typical response by a sociopathic killer at the extreme end of the continuum of narcissistic behavior. His victims exist for him. Their dump sites are his private territory. His ownership extends over all of it and all of it exists to satisfy him. Also, whatever crimes he committed, as interviewers gleaned from talking to Ted Bundy, were crimes that glorified the killer. In Ridgway’s case, his admissions frequently seemed motivated by a pride in his criminal accomplishments.
Ridgway told a forensic psychiatrist that he did not want to die, but that he thought he should be executed “for killing that many women.” He expressed pride in being able to hide bodies that the task force never found and he was pleased that the detectives had to use ropes and ladders to recover the bodies he placed at Mountain View Cemetery. He felt that no investigator had caught him. Rather, he believed that he was a person police had talked about as far back as 1983, but that he was now the victim of new technology. He said, “What got me caught was technology got me caught.” Inasmuch as the police had to wait until the PCR DNA analysis procedure was invented so as to utilize what DNA they had from the victims to see if they could get a match, Ridgway may not be far off in his assessment.
The prosecutor wrote that Ridgway once described his homicidal behavior as his “career.” He said that he was “good in one thing, and that’s killing prostitutes.” His urge to kill, however, extended beyond just prostitutes. Ridgway acknowledged that he had to struggle with the temptation to kill his current wife and other family members. Ridgway reported that he rejected these thoughts because he recognized that he was likely to be caught if he did so, an awareness of the nature of homicide, which, under any legal statute, would probably exclude an insanity defense.
Ridgway adamantly insisted that he was not a rapist, claiming a near aversion to a sexual compulsion. He said, in a perversely logical disclaimer,
I go with the, uh, a person that volunteers to have sex to, and then kill ’em. Where if I went and raped somebody and killed ’em, uh, that is uh, not what I would do … would be low on my uh, category of, of people. I am not a rapist, no. No, I’m not a rapist. I’m … I’m not a rapist I’m a … I’m a murderer I’m not a rapist.
Strictly following his logic, he was correct in his self-description. Ridgway was a serial murderer who used the easiest method of getting a victim under his control: he bought them. This is one of the reasons why Bundy looked down upon the Riverman, even though the presence of another serial killer in Bundy’s territory was driving him into a frenzy. Bundy used what he would call his “charm” and “broken-wing act” to lull his victim into a false sense of security before he clubbed them with a tire iron. But he predicted that the Riverman—and Ridgway proved him to be correct—would make himself seem as nonthreatening as possible so as to convince his intended victim that he only wanted to buy sex for a few hours. Both of them used a ruse and both of them were murderers first, looking down with revulsion upon any hint that they were rapists, even though both were necrophiles and sexual offenders.
Periodically during the interviews, Ridgway would use the word “remorse.” It appeared to investigators and prosecutors that Ridgway really meant something more like “regret.” On one occasion, when Ridgway appeared to cry for his victims, a forensic psychologist challenged him.
DOCTOR: I mean if you killed these women before 1990 why are you crying about it now rather than …
GR: Well, because of how I screwed up. How I screwed up on killing them. Maybe leaving too much … mostly on …
DOCTOR: Did you say leaving too much?
GR: Too much …
DOCTOR: … evidence.
GR: Evidence at the time.
Another time, Ridgway said that he felt “a little bit of remorse” after killing a woman while his son was nearby in his truck.
GR: Killing her with Matthew by was not the right thing to do.
DOCTOR: Why was that wrong?
GR: Because Matthew mighta saw somethin’.
DOCTOR: Why would that be a problem?
GR: Well he’d have that … have that memory for his life.
DOCTOR: Maybe he would be a witness against you.
GR: And maybe he would be a witness against me too.
DOCTOR: If you had … if he had observed you kill one of the women, would you have killed him?
GR: No, probably not, I don’t know.
DOCTOR: Possibly, though?
GR: It’s possible.
DOCTOR: Did you think about that at the time?
GR: Yeah.
Occasional expressions of what appeared to be empathy for a victim usually transformed into something else when Ridgway was encouraged to elaborate. Ridgway told a forensic psychologist that he once departed from his usual method of killing his victims from behind, and faced a 16-year-old girl while he strangled her. He said that looking at her face while killing her was “painful to see.”
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 64