The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (83 page)

Ridgway killed for twenty years before he was charged with any of the Green River murders. He adopted the same unremarkable, non-threatening affect he used to lull his victims into complacency to avoid bringing himself to the attention of law enforcement. Remember, Ridgway was known to the task force and had been investigated by them, off and on, since 1987, all the time avoiding an arrest even though police knew he had been arrested for “offering and accepting” and had been tipped off by one of his victims. How was he able to maintain his innocence even in the face of police scrutiny?

The prosecutor said that when interviewed by the task force, his apparent forthrightness and willingness to cooperate was disarming. Ridgway would admit everything he believed the task force already knew about him, and just a little bit more. For example, when he knew he had been observed by a witness, he usually admitted that he had dated some of the victims. By admitting that he was “addicted” to prostitutes, Ridgway explained away a huge body of otherwise suspicious evidence. By agreeing to be interviewed without an attorney, and to take a polygraph examination, Ridgway avoided suspicion all the more.

And during the polygraph examination, Ridgway said, he simply relaxed and felt no stress at the questioning. The results were inconclusive, a technical pass, which did not give investigators at that time the evidence to draw the net tighter around him.

He also appeared to defy the typical behavior of serial killers by apparently seeming immune to an ego-driven desire to keep trophies of his kills. Searches of his residence yielded no evidence of any criminal activity of any kind. But, from my own experience, Ridgway’s behavior was more typical than not, because for Ridgway, his dump sites
were
his trophies. Just like Bundy, his sense of territoriality over the unknown presence of the bodies amounted to the killer’s trophy. Sure he was ego-driven like other serial killers; only the police didn’t know what he was ego-driven about.

Ridgway also took the jewelry from his victims after he killed them and placed pieces of that jewelry in the women’s bathroom at Kentworth. This allowed the jewelry to be dispersed into a population, but it was a population where Ridgway himself could observe it. Thus the jewelry was a souvenir and not an actual trophy: Ridgway got to see at from time to time, without the fear of someone’s associating him with evidence of his crime. It was almost the perfect way of taking a souvenir, keeping it in sight, and preserving its anonymity.

In fact, as Ridgway confessed to police, much of his behavior as he became more practiced amounted to an active methodology of throwing police off the trail. This is also typical of many long-term serial killers who know the habits of the police and know the evidence they’re looking for. Their knowledge trips up police investigations. For example, Ridgway placed fake evidence at the dump sites to deliberately mislead police: cigarette butts and chewing gum, since he neither smoked nor chewed gum. At one scene, he scattered airport motel pamphlets and car rental papers to imply that the killer was a “traveling salesman.” He tossed a hair pick at one scene, hoping that, if the body were discovered, investigators would suspect a “pimp.” And in one particular case, he left one victim’s driver’s license at Sea-Tac airport, to suggest that she had left town.

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.

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.”

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.”

Gary Ridgway finally stood up in court to admit to the crimes he’d committed. He had provided investigators with information about all 48 crimes 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.

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.