The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (95 page)

It cannot be determined whether or not Patricia urinated at the time of her death. However, according to Ridgway, the vast majority of his victims were naked when he murdered them, and therefore could not have “wet their pants.”

During the rest of the psychologist’s interview, Ridgway occasionally protested that his memory about the incident was vague. However, he provided considerable detail about the murder. He said he had sex with her in a parking lot “right next to the freeway on a, um, dead-end driveway.” This, he said, was also where he left the body. He explained: “I left her in the … in the park … in the, ah, dead-end circle you drive around. I think I just left her on the
ground.” The parking lot where Patricia’s body was found was, indeed, a dead end.

Ridgway also told the psychologist that he had sex with the woman in the back of his truck at that location, but did not kill her then. He said he killed her after she’d re-dressed and was standing at the passenger door of the truck, preparing to get in the passenger compartment. Asked to describe her, Ridgway said that she was “a little skinny and, um, um, hundred and a … maybe a hundred and thirty-five pounds, hundred and forty.”

According to the autopsy report, Patricia was 5 foot 10 inches in height and weighed 132 pounds. Ridgway told the psychologist that the murder at South Park was somewhat abnormal for him. This killing was not as well planned as the others. He said he became enraged when Patricia’s sexual performance failed to meet his expectations: “I just didn’t wanna pay for somebody just layin’ around.”

On the following day, July 31, 2003, detectives showed Ridgway an aerial photograph depicting the wrecking yard, the parking lot, and Highway 99 as they appeared in 1998. He pointed to the location where Patricia’s body was discovered. When the detectives showed him a photo of her body lying at the scene, he said, “Yeah, that looks, looks like her, yeah.” Ridgway could not identify Patricia from a photograph taken of her while alive. Ridgway also told detectives that he recalled that the business nearby was not open and the gate was closed. Detectives later interviewed the owner of the fenced business (the wrecking yard) adjacent to the parking lot where Patricia’s body was found. The body was left in the parking lot on a Wednesday, when the fenced gate to that business had indeed been locked.

On August 8, 2003, Ridgway’s memory of killing Patricia Yellowrobe seemed to have improved. “I remember that one,” he told interviewers. “Uh, uh, the one at South Park, yeah…. she wouldn’t, uh, she wouldn’t, uh, let me get behind her and, uh, and screw her. And so, uh, I got madder and madder. And when we got out, uh, the back of the truck, I opened the door for her and I started choking her.”

Later, he contended that Patricia was responsible for her own death:

She didn’t want to spend an extra three or four minutes to, to, uh, have me climax and be, have a customer. She just
uh, said, “You’re over with,” you know, some’n like that, and, uh, got dressed and when we got out I was still angry at her, and ch-choked her and I, after that I panicked. I didn’t, I didn’t put her in the back ’a the truck and, and take her some place. I just left it there.

Later still, Ridgway told detectives again that he did not “climax” during intercourse with Patricia. Ridgway’s admissions were brought to the attention of the King County Medical Examiner. According to the medical examiner, manual strangulation can be accompanied without any physical findings whatsoever. It is possible that Patricia Yellowrobe’s level of intoxication compromised her ability to withstand even a few seconds of asphyxia.

On June 13, 2003, the first day of interviews with the task force, Ridgway described a site off the Kent-Des Moines Road and stated that he was “100 percent certain” that the victim’s remains were still there. He stated that he drove by frequently and always remembered it as a dump site. He stated that this victim was not on the list of missing Green River Killer victims and described her as white, 16 to 20 years old, skinny, approximately 135 pounds with brown or blond shoulder-length hair. When Ridgway made this disclosure, no remains had been found at that location. Ridgway gave inconsistent accounts of when he’d killed the girl or young woman he said he’d dumped at that location. He stated that the murder occurred during 1982 or 1983, but he also acknowledged that it could have occurred in the 1970s.

In August 2003, Ridgway visited the site and pointed to a specific area. The task force then recovered approximately 23 human bones. No skull was found. To date, the victim has not been identified. A mtDNA profile confirmed that the victim is female, but the profile does not match that of any of the official missing Green River Killer victims. A forensic anthropologist with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office has suggested that the bones are consistent with a 13- to 24-year-old female. The age of the bones is estimated to be at least ten years old but likely as much as twenty plus years.

Task force detectives are continuing to attempt to identify this victim.

Based upon Ridgway’s statements, investigators believe or strongly suspect that he is responsible for the disappearance of at least three women on the “Green River” list who remain missing: Keli McGinness, Kase Lee, and Patricia Osborn.

Keli McGinness was a prostitute who worked in Seattle, Portland, and California. She disappeared on June 28, 1983, after checking into a motel on Pacific Highway South. Ridgway was known to have dated Keli several months before she disappeared. During interviews in 2003, he claimed that he killed her. He has suggested multiple sites where he may have left Keli’s body but has been inconsistent about the circumstances of her murder.

Ridgway also suggested that he killed Kase Lee. Kase, who also worked as a prostitute, disappeared on August 28, 1982, after leaving her apartment near Pacific Highway South. Ridgway has suggested that Kase Lee may be a woman that he killed and left in south King County. However, he was unable to recognize a photograph of her, and it is impossible to search the site because of development.

Ridgway also thought that he may have killed Patricia Osborn. Patricia worked as a prostitute and disappeared from Aurora Avenue in October 1983. Ridgway could not, however, provide any details about her or where he placed her body.

Investigators continue to work on these cases.

In addition to these three missing women, Ridgway has claimed that he left victims at a number of locations. In some cases, he has provided a general description of the victim. In others, he claims to remember virtually nothing other than the act of placing a victim in that location. The task force has searched all of the areas where subsequent development has not made it impossible.

To date, no remains or other evidence has been found there.

Conclusion
The Politics of Serial Murder
 

As the prosecutor’s plea agreement contract made clear, Gary Ridg-way was to be honest, forthright, and truthful in his admissions to his crimes. If he deliberately held back or if the State found another crime he committed to which he did not plead, he could be prosecuted for that crime. Thus, it was in Ridgway’s best interest to confess to what-ever he could remember, lest a prosecutor somewhere find a crime with which he could charge Ridgway and so open up the door to an-other prosecution, this one resulting in the death penalty. The result was the revelation of the official list of Green River victims and other victims whose deaths fit the Green River profile, but for one reason or another did not make the list. The other result was the revelation that Ridgway continued to kill after the official Green River murders seemed to have stopped in 1985, killings that went on almost up to Ridgway’s arrest. As in the case of Patricia Yellowrobe, the killing might not have been a planned event, but it was nevertheless a killing that fit the same pattern as Ridgway’s Green River murders.

When a serial killer, especially one who has terrorized a commu-nity for decades, is finally identified in public, arrested, and confesses
the secrets of his crimes, the community is usually shocked. For example, in Ridgway’s case, how could he have remained at large for so long? He was tipped off to the police on at least three to four occasions, interviewed, and left on the street. At least one liv-ing victim came forward to report that she believed he was the Green River Killer and that she was his victim who escaped. Yet Ridgway talked his way out of it, even though other evidence al-ready in possession of the police should have corroborated Rebecca Guay’s accusation.

Ridgway’s intuitive methodology when it came to understanding police procedures were surprisingly accurate, just as Bundy had predicted. Ridgway sent police on fruitless searches and proved to be as invisible to authorities as other serial killers have been even while he was in plain sight and sometimes even visible to his victims. But all the while, even as far back as 1983, Gary Ridgway’s name was in a database, not only because he had been tipped off to local Des Moines police by Marie Malvar’s boyfriend, but also because he had been arrested by an undercover anticrime officer on a solicitation of prostitution charge.

The other surprise was that it continued to be easy for Ridgway to find victims at the height of the Green River murders scare. With television specials, local news coverage, large headlines announcing every body discovery, and rampant rumors about the identity of the killer, Gary Ridgway did what he told his interviewers he did best: He approached his victims, made himself as nonthreatening as possible, took them back to the privacy of his own house or his favorite locations in the woods, and, when they were at their most vulnerable, applied a stranglehold that was his favorite method of murder. Why weren’t his victims supicious?

The same question can be asked of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims in Milwaukee during the height of the missing-young-men scares in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And the same answer is that a serial killer lives and navigates amid his victim pool. He is indistinguishable from anyone else in that community. Dahmer was a young gay man on the streets of Milwaukee soliciting for models and paying for their time. Bundy was a young college-type guy hobbling about with an injured limb, looking for help. Gary Ridgway was a typical john looking for a date. He was like the other johns driving by in a car or a truck along Pacific Highway South, catching a prostitute’s
eye, flashing money, and speaking their language. “How much for a car date or a half and half?” Bundy accurately predicted this as well. He knew because he was there.

Gary Ridgway wasn’t about to fight pitched battles with his victims. He picked the most vulnerable of a vulnerable lot, the teenagers and runaways, 15-, 16-, and 17-year-olds. He picked victims who were so desperate for a hit from a crack pipe that they would do anything for a five- or ten-dollar bill. This is what serial killers do, and police still have to reconcile themselves with the rel-ative ease with which serial killers do it.

The Green River case has spanned decades, remaining constant even as the scenes changed around it. Dave Reichert cut his teeth on the Green River case. As a young detective wielding a difficult press camera, he fell ass-backward over a victim’s floating body in the tall weeds along the banks of the Green River as he was trying to compose a shot. He went on, as the case progressed, to rise through the police department until he entered politics and won election as sheriff. Reichert prevailed and caught his man. Maybe he will be a future governor of Washington.

I began as a street cop with the King County Sheriff, cut my teeth on the Bundy case, went on to consult on the Green River case, and wound up an associate professor of criminology and author of the textbooks criminal investigators will read as they move through their careers.

Gary Ridgway left the navy, got a job as a truck painter, and kept that job for the two-plus decades he made a career out of murder. He got better and better at it until, in his own words, he was caught by technology.

When I went to Florida to visit Ted Bundy on death row, Ridgway was one of five key suspects the task force was interviewing. We’d had a cab driver, we’d had a law student flashing police badges around, and we had a truck painter who’d been tipped off by one of his unhappy victims. We had no DNA we could use. It took the development of technology invented by Kary Mullis at Berkeley called Polymerase Chain Reaction—it’s similar to taking
a photocopy of DNA so as to get it to reproduce—that allowed task force detectives to harvest just enough of the DNA left on a victim to match it with a Ridgway specimen that had been taken in 1987 during the midst of my conversations with Bundy. And in 2001, when Detective Tom Jenson, the lone detective on the Green River Murders Task Force, told Dave Reichert that Gary Ridgway’s DNA had tested positive against the DNA found on victims Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, Carol Christensen, and Marcia Chapman, Reichert knew he had enough probable cause to go to the King County Prosecutor.