Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  When it came to describing the man (or men) last seen with the victims, there was even more variation. Witnesses tend to be less observant when they are upset or frightened, of course. They are most often wrong about height. And it would be learned in retrospect that many of the women the GRK encountered, the women who got away, never reported it. They were either too frightened or in a business where their view of the police was not favorable.

  All the Seattle-area witnesses had said the suspect was Caucasian with blond to light-brown hair, and between five feet eight inches to five feet eleven inches tall. He was almost always described as being in his early to midthirties. And he usually wore a plaid shirt and sometimes a baseball cap. Most of the witnesses who had seen the dead and missing girls for the last time thought the man they left with had a mustache, a scrubby little mustache. In essence, he was “Mr. Average,” driving down a busy highway in a nondescript pickup truck.

  But who was he? And where was he?

  Like most people, I tended to believe the Green River Killer was either dead or in prison. Every once in a while the news services would carry stories about a breakout of serial murder in some state far away from the Northwest and I would wonder if he was there now. But usually there was an arrest and it wasn’t anyone who sounded like the King County description.

  Tom Jensen and Jim Doyon manned the massive Green River Task Force computer, and then the state-of-the-art computers that took over the job as technology moved forward. They stood guard over files stacked to the ceiling that held a seemingly endless outpouring of tips and information, much of it disturbing and macabre. And still they had not found their man.

  Part Three

  47

  2001. IT WAS A NEW CENTURY, and he hadn’t moved away, at least not very far. He liked his life in King County, and he had years of job seniority that he didn’t intend to lose. He had a wife who suited him. She was a homebody who took care of things there, paid the bills, kept the house nice, and trusted him.

  That gave him a sound base to work from. It no longer mattered that for much of his life people had pegged him as slow or dumb. It was really an added bonus because he had taken on the big boys and beaten them handily. The newspapers were full of stories about how many detectives had tried to catch him, and how many millions of dollars they’d spent—and now they were all gone and he was living in a big new house with a great yard. He had tried to up the ante on the game by writing to them and giving them hints, but they hadn’t seemed to connect him to his helpful advice. As far as he could figure it, the time they came snooping around at Kenworth and pawed through his house was just because he had been stopped on the highway too often. He knew he was only one of a lot of men who cruised the Strip. They hadn’t been able to prove anything more than that. He had passed their lie detector tests, and that slowed them down. The rest of it was because he studied why other guys had been caught, and he made sure he didn’t make mistakes.

  They had come so close to him that it had unnerved him a little bit, but they went away with their hats in their hands. So who was dumb now? He could still drive by the places he had left the women and relive what he had done to them any time he wanted. He was hiding in plain sight, going over to Renton to work at Kenworth as he always had, and even though guys at work sometimes still called him Green River Gary, that wasn’t so bad. It was a joke to them; nobody knew how right they were.

  He had read a lot about Ted Bundy, and knew that Bundy was supposed to be practically a genius. But Bundy didn’t last very long, and he didn’t have nearly as many “kills” as Green River Gary.

  GARY and Judith Ridgway had moved several times, and they’d always bought up. By 2001, they lived on S. 348th Street, with an address on the West Hill of Auburn. Their place was nicer than anything his parents ever had. He let Judith decorate it however she wanted. She liked “girly” stuff like dolls and artificial flowers and crocheted afghans and frilly lacy things on the couch and chair arms. They were both acquisitive, and they had about a dozen of everything because of the swap meets and garage sales they went to most weekends. Judith displayed the things she liked, and they stored extra stuff in boxes and bins in their spare bedrooms.

  Their yard was showy, with lots of evergreens, rhododendrons, ferns, and flowers. Judith loved her flowers and he kept the lawn looking nice. Inside, she had more house plants than anyone they knew.

  Judith’s girls were now out on their own and his son, Chad, was in the marines. He and Judith could do pretty much whatever they wanted. They had a very fancy motor home, he had a practically new pickup, and she had a nice sedan. In another ten years, he could retire and they’d be set for life. They had some investments, the company retirement plan, and social security to count on. Judith liked that secure feeling; she even kept cash hidden in the house and in the motor home—stacks of five- and ten-dollar bills—so they’d always have grocery and gas money.

  She didn’t know everything about him, of course. There was a whole hell of a lot she didn’t know. That was his life, the things that made him feel good. It wasn’t that he wasn’t being faithful to her. All men cheated. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  THERE WERE THINGS he didn’t know either. The task force wasn’t really dead, after all; in computer language, it was in “standby mode.” If it had been dead and buried as he thought it was, the room on the top floor of the King County Courthouse would no longer be full of black binders, physical evidence, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of follow-up information.

  Frank Adamson had moved out to the new Criminal Justice Center south of the airport to become chief of the Criminal Investigation Division; Bob Keppel got his doctorate, wrote a couple of well-received books, and taught an immensely popular course called Homicide at the University of Washington all through the nineties. Dave Reichert had moved up through the ranks of the brass in the sheriff’s office.

  In early 1997, there would be big changes in the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Jim Montgomery was offered the job of police chief in suburban Bellevue, and he accepted. That meant that King County had a vacancy for sheriff. Frank Adamson passed on the offer from King County executive Ron Sims. Adamson was looking forward to retirement, and so were several other command officers Montgomery considered.

  Dave Reichert was almost fifty, and his hair, although still thick, was rapidly turning silver. His enthusiasm for higher office continued, and he wanted to be the sheriff of King County. He was happy to accept Sims’s appointment in 1997. Adamson supported Reichert, and so did many others in the sheriff’s department. Remembering how hard Reichert had worked on the Green River Task Force, I was glad to help raise money for his campaign when the next sheriff’s election came up. He proved to be a natural politician; a mature, handsome, and assured man instead of the “Davy” he had been back in 1982. He won the election easily and was, at long last, in a position to reopen the hunt for the man who had evaded him and scores of others for almost twenty years.

  Unlike most of the men who had been sheriff, Reichert usually wore his full uniform rather than a business suit. He was still a cop, and he had kept himself in top physical condition, working out and lifting weights as he always had. During the World Trade Organization convention that brought riots to Seattle in 2000, news cameras caught Reichert chasing down looters who had just smashed the window of a jewelry store. It was reassuring in a time of chaos to see the sheriff himself out there in the streets dealing with lawlessness. He admitted with a grin, however, that he couldn’t run as fast as he had twenty years ago.

  If Gary Ridgway was obsessed with killing hapless young women, Dave Reichert was obsessed with tracking him down and seeing him arrested and convicted. It was really no contest. Throughout the years, I had always believed that Reichert, Randy Mullinax, Tom Jensen, Jim Doyon, Matt Haney, and Sue Peters would one day catch the Green River Killer. As the new sheriff, Reichert sometimes said to me, “Ann, we’re going to catch him—and then you can write the book.�
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  And I always said, “I know, and I will.”

  As the world entered the millennium, the investigators who had worked on the Green River cases for so long had shifted their focus from the men they had suspected most in 1982 to 1984. But some of them were difficult to forget. Tom Jensen kept himself aware of where Gary Ridgway was. “Why doesn’t he leave—move to California or some other place,” he wondered. “I believe he thinks he’s gotten away with it. He has no need to leave.” Jensen believed that when Ridgway passed the polygraph he felt he was home free.

  After the task force was revived, both Reichert and Jensen suspected they were watching the right man, even though Melvyn Foster was still around and occasionally talking about the case. The people who were definitely not talking about it were the Green River Task Force members. If an arrest was imminent, the public had no inkling.

  November 30, 2001, was a Friday, and the wind whipped and tore angrily as a pounding rain fell, making commuter traffic at the beginning of a weekend even worse than usual. By late afternoon the storm grew in intensity. It was high tide and the waves of Puget Sound were crashing high over my bulkhead. But there was something else in the air, something almost undefinable. A ripple of rumors, barely distinguishable at first from other whispers that something big might be happening in the Green River case. Such rumors had, of course, boomed to megaphone-like shouts several times over the prior twenty years, and then subsided.

  My phone rang often that afternoon, and either reporters or cops I knew asked, “Have you heard that they might have him?”

  No, I hadn’t. We all knew who they meant by “him” without speaking it aloud. I hadn’t heard anything. But something was up. By five that afternoon, all three major network affiliates sent reporters and cameramen to my house. I was usually a dependable “talking head” for any story connected to serial murder or the Green River cases when official sources were clamming up. And at the moment, the sheriff’s office wasn’t saying anything, but reporters had tracked detectives to the Kenworth plant and to Judith and Gary Ridgway’s home near Auburn.

  My phone rang again around six. The answering machine picked it up. It was Dave Reichert, his voice full of barely contained enthusiasm. “We caught him, Ann,” he said. “We’ve arrested the Green River Killer!”

  FOR ME, it was one of those moments when I will always remember just where I was when I heard the news. Pearl Harbor. Kennedy’s assassination. Ted Bundy’s arrest. The explosion of the Challenger. And now, after nineteen and a half years: “We’ve arrested the Green River Killer!”

  I saved the tape of Dave Reichert’s triumphant and yet incredulous voice telling me that what had seemed impossible had finally come to pass.

  I had written nineteen books while I was waiting for the Green River story to end in an arrest, always thinking that surely it would be my next book, always deciding not to throw away any of the files of information—just in case. As a crime writer, I was elated. And yet Gary Ridgway’s arrest was the beginning of a kind of horror that no one who had followed the Green River story could even have imagined.

  In the end, there would be nothing hidden, no hideous detail omitted in what would become the hardest story I ever had to tell.

  48

  IT HAD TAKEN so long, and yet when it came together, all the ragged segments glided into place perfectly. Even so, the arrest had been precipitous. The investigators weren’t quite ready to pounce. Ironically, Ridgway’s own actions put a crimp in their plans and the detectives had to move in.

  On November 16, 2001, he had told his wife, Judith, that his truck was low on gas and she gave him thirty dollars to fill the tank. She didn’t often give him more money than he needed to buy breakfast or lunch. But on this day, the thirty dollars in Ridgway’s wallet apparently spiked old appetites.

  He slowed down when he spotted an attractive young woman strolling provocatively along the curb on the Pac HiWay. And then he pulled out the money his wife had given him and waved it at the girl. She asked him what he wanted to buy. He told her—and she promptly arrested him. Gary Ridgway had been tricked by a decoy prostitute, an undercover deputy who was working in another unit and was unaware of the task force’s plans for him. He was arraigned on a charge of loitering for prostitution, but was soon released on his own recognizance.

  HE WASN’T really worried, thinking that it would cost him only the towing charge on his truck. Judith had never doubted his word and he could explain it to her as a case of mistaken identity. She trusted him completely and never questioned his explanations. He was totally unaware that his name had become number one on a dark list.

  Not many of the detectives who worked the Green River murders from the very beginning remained to see the ending. Just as the passage of twenty years changes all lives, retirements, transfers, new jobs, illnesses, and deaths had decimated the roster of those investigators who began the quest for justice in 1982. Only those who were in their twenties and early thirties at the beginning were still on the sheriff’s department. Despite all the sixty-plus-year-old actors who play detectives on television cop shows, there are precious few sexagenarians who still wear a badge in real life.

  As the world entered the millennium, most of the investigators who had worked on the Green River cases for years had shifted their focus from the men they had originally suspected from 1982 to 1984. But some of them were difficult to forget.

  There were many detectives who had never found Gary Ridgway a credible suspect in the Green River killings, preferring those with more complicated and sophisticated personalities. And there was just a handful who had always thought the deceptively meek and ordinary-looking man was exactly who they should be concentrating on.

  Randy Mullinax, who had been with the first and second task forces, had written Ridgway off after he passed two polygraph tests. Mullinax came to law enforcement almost as an afterthought. One of several brothers who grew up in the south-end Boulevard Park community, he married at twenty and went to work for the Water District in Burien, Washington, but not for long. “I got tired of using my back,” he recalled, “and standing outside in the rain, so I went to college.”

  Mullinax took a few police science courses as electives and soon found himself hooked. He had hired on with the King County Sheriff’s Office in January 1979. Sue Peters and Mullinax had joined the sheriff’s office within three years of each other and worked together on the Green River investigation in the eighties.

  Peters never really thought about law enforcement as a career either. She had always planned to be a physical education teacher, but when she earned her degree in P.E. at Central Washington University, she found that teaching jobs in her field weren’t plentiful. She wasn’t really disappointed, because another career had been tugging on her sleeve for years. From the time she was a child, Peters spent her summers east of the Cascade Mountains in Ritzville, Washington, where her grandmother was a deputy sheriff in rural Adams County. In those days, female deputies worked only with women prisoners or as matrons in the jail, but even so Peters was fascinated with the mystique of police work. As a teenager, she hung “Wanted” posters on her wall instead of those featuring rock stars. Peters graduated from the police academy in May 1982, two months before Wendy Coffield’s body was found floating in the Green River. As a young deputy, she had joined Dave Reichert on the second river body site, but Peters wouldn’t actually be assigned to the Green River Task Force until 1986. After working patrol for three years, she went undercover with a proactive narcotics team investigating drug traffic in high schools—she could easily look like a teenager. She also investigated sexual assault cases.

  Ralf McAllister, who had died of a sudden heart attack—and whose wife, Nancy, took his place on the task force—had always been one of those who felt Ridgway was probably the Green River Killer. Frank Atchley was one of the few who shared this conviction. But it was Matt Haney, who had been absolutely convinced that Ridgway was guilty and tracked him doggedly in 1986 and 1
987, who was the most disappointed when interest in the truck painter faded.

  “Everything fit, when Randy and I went to Las Vegas and, as a last resort, agreed to have Paige Miley hypnotized to see what she could remember about the man who asked her about ‘Star’ [Kim Nelson/aka Tina Tomson],” Haney recalled. “And her directions to the police artist gave us a drawing that looked just like Ridgway. Randy and I had been assigned to track down the owner of the burgundy red pickup with the white canopy, and we found that Ridgway had a truck like that. That was the one that Marie Malvar’s family found in his driveway.”

  Paige Miley insisted that she had memorized the license number of the red pickup truck, jotted it down on a scrap of paper, and called it in to the first Green River Task Force. Unfortunately, the detective whose name she gave did not recall whether he had followed up the lead, and three years later, even with hypnosis, Paige couldn’t remember it. She believed it began with a K and had a 1, followed by four or five numbers. It wasn’t enough information to trace. In the first two years, there was such an avalanche of tips coming in that no one could be blamed for inadvertent mishaps that, in retrospect, became important.

  Back then, Tom Jensen, keeper of the computer, was one of the detectives who dismissed Ridgway with a shrug. He was adamant that Gary Ridgway’s two clean polygraph tests proved that he could not be the Green River Killer, saying that any continued belief that he was the one was only smoke and mirrors.