The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (96 page)

It was technology that brought Ridgway down in the end, a surprise to him but not to the investigators who had waited for the piece of technology to allow them to harvest what they prudently had saved over all those years.

Someday, a criminologist thinking out of the box will take the high-risk step of looking at the world from the serial killer’s point of view. In other words, since a serial killer sees the world in terms of victims upon whom he preys and police from whom he hides, what does the world look like? Were we to do that with Ridgway we’d get a view very different from that which Ted Bundy might have had.

When Bundy went prowling, no one even knew what a serial killer was, and his broken-wing ruse played on the honest trust of his victims. When Ridgway went prowling as early as 1982, most people knew what a serial killer was, especially in Seattle after Bundy, but didn’t know how to recognize one. More than 20 years later, that’s still the case. However, when one serial killer looks at another serial killer, it’s like looking at a subject through infrared goggles. It turned out that Bundy saw what investigators did not see, and his predictions about what we would find when we caught the Green River Killer were stunningly accurate.

Ridgway was right about his ability to elude police and keep on killing even while he was being interviewed by detectives until technology made the match that allowed the prosecutors to get a case against him into court. And Bundy was right about Ridgway.

Sheriff Dave Reichert himself, who had waited for more than 20 years to confront the man who so influenced his career and whom he’d vowed to bring to justice, noted that Ridgway believed he had won after all. But Reichert still had to be friendly with the smirking
smile sitting across from him. In fact, Reichert was quoted in the
Oregonian
as saying, “Sometimes you have to be the best friend in the world to a person you absolutely hate and despise. “There was a look in his eyes,” Reichert said, “a satisfaction on his face that, even though he’s been caught, he had fooled me and had fooled the detectives.”

Dave Reichert is the homicide detective who will always get the killer in the end, but Gary Leon Ridgway was determined never to give Dave that satisfaction. Now only time will tell what secrets are still to be revealed by the Riverman.