GR: The … the way she was lookin’ at me and … and beggin’ for her life.
DOCTOR: Yeah.
GR: And that taught me a lesson not ever to choke ’em …
DOCTOR: I bet it did.
GR: … with my hands ’cause the 16-year-old or 17-year … it would be … I didn’t want them to … I didn’t want that part to be memorized in my mind, I wanted the … the back of the head ’cause I couldn’t see their face.
DOCTOR: So she’s looking at you look at her.
GR: She’s looking at me and … and … tryin’ to get me to stop, “Please, please don’t.” But I still kept on chokin’ her, I couldn’t let go. She was … she’d turn me in and I wouldn’t be able to kill anymore. And that meant a lot to me … to kill.
What does this admission say about the type of killer Ridgway was? Was he driven by a sexual compulsion? Probably not. It’s more the force of anger, an anger that’s exciting him to the kill because he claims here that he cannot look into the eyes of his victim. Her accusatory stare threatens to dissipate his anger. Her immediate awareness that she is staring into the eyes of her killer freezes him and, if only for a moment, interferes with Ridway’s desire to kill.
He wants to kill, not to have sex. Sex is a means to entice his victims into his control. Sex is what he exacts from his victims as a form of punishment for being prostitutes. And after he has sex, he wants to plug up his victim’s vagina, just like he wanted to sew up his mother’s vagina, so his victim can never be penetrated again, not even by her killer.
Ridgway also suggested that some of the responsibility for the murders should be attributed to his second wife, from whom he separated shortly before the first of the Green River victims was murdered. Frequently during the interviews, Ridgway attempted to blame his second wife for his current situation. According to Ridgway, if he had only killed his second wife when he had the chance, things might have turned out better for the community too. He said, “If I would have killed her then it’s possible that it might have changed my life. I’d only have one instead of 50 plus.”
Ridgway said he considered killing her. A divorce would be costly and, because he had already been divorced once, he “didn’t want another one that’s … label myself as, you know, a loser.” Another problem Ridgway said, was that he would be an obvious suspect in her death because his wife’s father knew that Ridgway had assaulted her in the past.
I couldn’t even you know set the house [on] fire with her. I couldn’t arrange any kind of accident or something like that. Because it had been obvious. Her sister or mother, dad knows I choked her.
Ridgway expressed similar sentiments about the woman he was dating after his second divorce, referring to her as his “girlfriend” during 1982 to 1984, when he killed dozens of women. Ridgway speculated that there might have been “a hell of a lot less people dying if I had a, a nice woman to go home, go home to.” This is a stunning admission in light of Ted Bundy’s prediction that a significant hiatus in the killing series might have resulted from the killer’s getting into some extended relationship. But it wasn’t the sexual component of a relationship that Bundy meant, it was the assuaging of the killer’s anger that kept him from going out onto Pacific Highway South to find his victims. A “nice” woman, in Ridgway’s terms, meant a woman under his control who, in turn, controlled his anger. A nice woman was someone other than his mother, someone whose sexual presence was not such a threat to Ridgway that he would have to kill and close her up just to remove that threat from his psyche. Bundy, talking more about himself than the Green River Killer, probably revealed more about his own motivations in making his predictions about a killer he had never met but who, in his own mind, was a projection of himself.
Psychologist Richard Walter has said that serial killers are pathologically selfish. They represent the absolute extension of self, of narcissism. Everything is an extension of them and a reflection of them. Accordingly, it makes perfect sense that Ridgway had little regard for his wife and his girlfriend, and no empathy at all for the women he killed. Moreover, he seemed to find this perfectly normal. In the midst of an interview about stealing money from the victims after killing them, Ridgway said
I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing prosti tutes, here you guys can’t control them, but I can. You can’t hurt anybody. You can’t, you can arrest them and put cuffs on them, might be a little bit rough on them a little bit. But you can’t, uh, you can’t stop the problem. I was doing, uh, like I said, doing you a favor that you couldn’t, you guys couldn’t do. You couldn’t, uh, I mean if it’s illegal aliens, you can take ’em to the border and fly ’em back outta there. But if it’s a prostitute, you’d arrest ’em, they were back on the street as soon as they get bail and change their, uh, name, and you guys, you guys had the problem. I had, I had the answer.
The prosecutor’s report suggested that Ridgway did not judge himself too harshly.
DETECTIVE: You’re obviously a serial killer, obviously you’ve killed many, many people.
GR: Un-huh [yes].
DETECTIVE: And now we have the scale say one to five, and five being the worst possible evil person that could have done this kind of thing.
GR: Un-huh [yes].
DETECTIVE: Where do you wanna fall on the scale?
GR: I’d say a three.
DETECTIVE: Three?
GR: Un-huh [yes]. For one thing is, ah, I killed ’em, I didn’t tor ture ’em. They went fast.
Even when Ridgway claimed to feel remorse, his expressions of this sentiment were patently false. He said, “I’m sorry for doing it but, um, it just, I wasn’t killin’ a person, I was killin’ a … a … ah, I don’t know how I … how I’m gonna say it but, ah, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
This is a man devoid of human sentiment. He preyed upon a community’s most vulnerable members, and still attributes their deaths to fate. As confounding as this seems, from the perspective of a Ted Bundy, as he explained it to me, it makes perfect sense because, in Bundy’s own words, “Some murders are okay.”
Why did Ridgway kill? He suffered from no mental illness that would absolve him of responsibility for these crimes. He murdered his victims deliberately, methodically, and systematically. He was uninhibited by any moral concerns. In five months of interviews with investigators and forensic psychologists, he displayed no empathy for his victims and expressed no genuine remorse. He killed because he wanted to. He killed because he could.
He killed to satisfy evil and unfathomable desires.
21
Gary Ridgway and His Victims
There are, of necessity, no conclusions drawn in the plain, deliberately colorless language of the prosecutor’s summary admitted into evidence in the case against Ridgway, pursuant to his plea bargain. This is not argument, it is evidence, a summary of the admissions Ridgway made after his arrest in order to avoid the death penalty. We can learn a lot from the admissions Ridgway made, especially when they are lined up in the prosecutor’s summary against what the police knew and discovered and the chronology of each victim’s story as she crossed paths with her killer, was murdered, was deposited at one of his dump sites, and then, perhaps, transported elsewhere by her obsessed killer, who wanted to maintain his control over the victim.
What we do learn, in addition, is how the killer grew in confidence and how he applied his experience as police discovered bodies months or even years after he’d deposited them. In my own mind, and from my own personal experience as the task force consultant, I can compare aspects of this case to the Yorkshire Ripper murders in Leeds, England, approximately seven years earlier. Prostitute-killer Peter Sutcliffe, like Ridgway married and living an otherwise normal life, led task force investigators in Leeds on an equally wild goose chase.
Although these two cases have some key aspects in common, the one thing that stands out in my mind upon a review of the King County prosecutor’s summary of evidence against Ridgway is th
at the killer usually understands not only the methods police use to investigate a case but also the thinking that supports those methods. This is why killers will change their modus operandi, transport the victims to different locations, and deliberately leave clues in one spot in order to get the police to use vital personnel resources in a vain effort to track down a false lead. In Green River, with the press and community demanding quick answers, police not only had to solve the case, they also had to appear successful as they were doing it. As anyone who has ever worked a serial murder case knows, until the offender is eventually caught, police can’t look successful, because if the press reports that, the killer might leave the area to find new hunting grounds. This is one of the paradoxes of conducting a serial murder investigation. It is also the lure that brings in the amateur and wannabe profilers who spring up like dandelions on television screens in the wake of any announcement that a serial killer is on the loose in a community.
Sometimes the public and even the police are surprised at a serial killer’s lack of remorse. This jumps out at anyone reading the prosecutor’s summary of evidence. Time and again detectives will comment about their amazement that the physical location of a dump site and the tiniest details about that location at that time will be more important to a serial killer than details about the victim. There is a reason for this, which Bundy made very clear, and which the investigators in the Ridgway case focused on. For a serial killer, his dump sites are living places that permeate his memory. This is where his “possessions” are located. He “owns” these locations just as he “owns” his victims. The details of the victims themselves fade into memory, but the details of the dump sites come alive every time the killer drives by to see if anyone has disturbed his property. Ridgway made this very clear to his interviewers, just as Ted made it clear to me.
As one can see from the prosecutor’s summary, whatever Ridgway believed about himself and his victims—and we still may be years away from learning the truth about that—he clearly believed in his own ability to stay ahead of the police. Moreover, because he believed he knew how the police would proceed in their investigation of the victim remains that were turning up all over King County, he actually placed parts of his victims in specific places, knowing that would create a false lead and trigger a blind-alley investigaton. Too many of these fruitless investigations tend to drain the resources of a task force, make them look inept in the eyes of their commanders, the politicians, and the public, and eventually can result in a level of frustration that cripples their ability to function. Thus, when one reads the prosecutor’s summary, one has to appreciate the determination of my former ad hoc partner, Dave Reichert, now King County Sheriff Reichert, in seeing this case to the end.
From the Prosecutor’s Summary of Evidence
The First Victim
Of vital interest to any serial killer investigation is the knowledge surrounding the killer’s first victim. Police usually spend a considerable amount of time interviewing the killer about his first victim because what the killer did and who the killer chose say a lot about the offender and the nature of his later crimes. In Ridgway’s case, he at first refused to admit to any victims before Wendy Coffield. Then in October 2003, he said that it was “very possible” that he killed a women in the 1970s, while living in Maple Valley with his second wife. He described one incident, claiming that he could recall no detail except that “some’n went wrong, uh, with the date and I, I killed her.”
As it turned out, the very first victim was the 6-year-old boy whom Ridgway stabbed with a knife in the incident described in the previous chapter.
The Final Victim
Detectives also focus their attention on the last victim because what they learn about the first and last victims and the comparisons between these crimes often shed light not only on the killer, his motivations, and methods, but also upon the evolution of the offender as he moves along the continuum of violence. In Ridgway’s case, he claimed at first not to be able to recall his last victim. He said that he only killed two women in 1985 and then stopped completely. But police confronted him with unequivocal evidence to the contrary.
He had informed detectives of a number of places on Highway 410 where, he said, he had dumped bodies that he was not sure had been recovered. At one of these sites—marked on a map drawn by Ridgway for the detectives—a body had been previously recovered. That victim (who was never part of the “official” list of Green River victims) was Marta Reeves, who disappeared in 1990. As soon as he was confronted with this evidence, Ridgway readily admitted killing the woman—and then admitted that he had continued to kill into the 1990s.
Later, when speaking to a psychiatrist, Ridgway suggested that this was an isolated incident. “In 1990, I … went off the wagon and killed.” Ridgway admitted later that he killed another woman in 1998, but he said that she was an aberration. He admitted to a forensic psychologist that his urge to kill persisted into the 1990s, although he said he could resist it for months at a time.
He acknowledged that he continued to seek out prostitutes until his arrest in 2001, and agreed that this was “kinda like a hunt.” He admitted that the sight of prostitutes was, for him, “like candy in a dish.” Indeed, even after he was transferred in the late 1990s from the Seattle Kenworth plant near Pacific Highway South to the Renton plant, Ridgway continued to drive the Pacific Highway South and Rainier Avenue, before and after work, looking for prostitutes. The crack epidemic had arrived, and Ridgway found that sex with cocaine-addicted prostitutes was cheaper than ever. Ridgway finally admitted that, although he slowed down, he never stopped killing altogether until his arrest in 2001.
According to him, his last killings were, in comparison to those of his more prolific period, the work of an “amateur.” In the 1990s, Ridgway said, he was “semi-retired.”
Although he admitted that his last kill was relatively close in time to his arrest in 2001, Ridgway insisted in 2003 that he could recall absolutely nothing about it. He professed an inability to understand why he was withholding information from his interrogators. He alternatively suggested that he remembered the murder, but did not want to disclose the details, or that the facts were locked away in his head and he could not access them. Ultimately, Ridgway said that the last murder he could recall committing was in 1998.
The Victims Placed in the Green River
Wendy Coffield
Of the seven counts of aggravated first degree murder Ridgway was charged with, five of the seven charged victims were found at the first known dump site, the Green River. There, on July 15, 1982, two boys on bicycles on the Peck Bridge in Kent discovered the body of Wendy Coffield floating in the water below them. Sixteen-year-old Wendy Coffield, known to work as a street prostitute along Pacific Highway South in King County, left her foster home on July 8, 1982, and was never seen alive again.
When she was discovered, Wendy was naked, with the exception of her shoes and socks. The remainder of her clothing—jeans, underpants, and shirt—were knotted around her neck like a ligature. An autopsy confirmed that Wendy had been strangled. She suffered a fractured hyoid bone as well as significant hemorrhaging in her neck muscles. In addition, her left humerus (the upper arm bone) was broken. The condition of her body was consistent with death having occurred shortly after her disappearance on July 8, 1982.
In March 2003, a private forensic laboratory, Microtrace, reported that it had discovered tiny paint spheres on the jeans that formed the ligature around Wendy’s neck. The paint composition of the spheres was identical to the DuPont Imron paint used at the Kenworth truck plant where Ridgway worked in 1982. In March 2003, the State charged Ridgway with the murder of Wendy Coffield. In subsequent interviews with the task force, he admitted to killing her and placing her body in the Green River.
Debra Bonner
Debra Bonner was last seen alive on the evening of July 25, 1982, when she left a motel on Pacific Highway South in King County to “catch some dates.” Debra was 22 an
d had a history of prostitution; during the previous 30 days, she had been arrested twice for prostitution on Pacific Highway South. Two and a half weeks later, on August 12, 1982, she was discovered in the Green River. Her body had apparently floated downriver until it was caught in a logjam. There was no clothing on the body. In March 2003, Ridgway was charged with the murder of Debra Bonner. In subsequent interviews with the Task Force, he admitted to killing her and placing her body in the Green River.
Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, and Opal Mills
In August 1982, 31-year-old Marcia Chapman was living with her three children in an apartment near Pacific Highway South. She was involved in prostitution. On August 1, 1982, Marcia left her apartment and was not seen again.
Ten days later, on the night of August 11, 1982, 17-year-old Cynthia Hinds was out on Pacific Highway South working as a prostitute. Her pimp last saw a man driving a black Jeep picking her up. She was never seen again.
One day later, on August 12, 1982, at approximately one P.M., 16-year-old Opal Mills placed a call to her parents from Angle Lake State Park, just off Pacific Highway South. After that call, she was never heard from again. Friends later reported Opal had been involved in prostitution.
On August 15, 1982, a man rafting down the Green River spotted two bodies in the water, approximately 600 yards from where Debra Bonner’s body had been found a few days earlier. The police responded and discovered Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds. They were a few feet apart in the river, pinned to the bottom by several boulders, and nude. Police found Opal Mills’s body on the banks of the river a short distance away.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 65