Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  A single cell from a fragment of sample could now be amplified exponentially, producing billions of DNA copies within hours. It does, however, take a “rocket scientist” or the equivalent to understand DNA, and there was quite possibly a three- to five-year lag in isolating Gary Ridgway’s DNA profile.

  Unfortunately, not only was Jensen’s request several years late, the state patrol laboratory was overwhelmed with backed-up requests from other agencies. The state lab, of necessity, prioritized samples for cases that already had trial dates.

  Howard Coleman, CEO of GeneLex, a Seattle-based DNA testing corporation, said his lab had been using the new technique for the Indiana State Police crime lab for five years. Had Jensen and Reichert thought to send the Green River DNA to a private lab, it would have been expensive but Ridgway might have been arrested much sooner. “There’s no one answer why we didn’t [request the tests earlier],” John Urquhart said. “It’s a confluence of factors. To begin with, the Washington State Patrol crime lab is our primary lab.” Urquhart went on to say that the expense of a private lab wasn’t the main reason for the delay; it was more that Tom Jensen had been working as the only Green River detective. “He’s had a lot to do.”

  Any investigative team faced with the challenges of at least four dozen serial killings would have made mistakes and misjudgments. All Reichert could do was hope that there had been no new victims during the years when the DNA tests could have been carried out. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty, and the rejuvenated task force investigators moved into 2002, confident that they would uncover evidence that would convict Gary Ridgway in the trials to come.

  The important thing was that they finally had a suspect in custody and charged with four counts of aggravated murder. If things worked out well, the task force could hope to increase those charges to include several more victims. County Executive Ron Sims announced some positive financial help on December 8, 2001. The federal government would contribute $500,000 to help pay for DNA tests on the forty-five victims’ cases where there were no charges yet filed.

  Back at the Ridgways’ home in Auburn, two Christmas stockings still hung from their fireplace mantel, the names “Gary” and “Judith” embroidered on them, but the couple wouldn’t be sharing the holiday. Instead, Ridgway appeared in court for arraignment on the four aggravated murder charges. Court watchers and television viewers were somewhat surprised to see the meek-looking man in white scrubs with “Ultra Security” stamped on the back of his shirt. Was this the infamous Green River Killer? He looked more like Caspar Milquetoast.

  He pleaded “not guilty” and was led back to his cell.

  CAPTAIN BRUCE KALIN now commanded the newest Green River Task Force and Sheriff Reichert added a sergeant, D. B. Gates, and two more detectives to bring the number of investigators up to ten. He would soon beef up the task force even more. The command officers in the sheriff’s office, the task force members, and the prosecution team held frequent meetings to discuss how they would proceed. Matt Haney recalled that he admired the attitude in the task force where everyone, no matter the rank, was encouraged to say what they thought and to suggest ways to proceed. And everyone listened. “We tried to think ‘out of the box,’ ” Sue Peters said. “It didn’t matter how odd or strange a suggestion sounded. We weren’t going to proceed according to the way it was always done—always had been done. This was a very unusual investigation, and we were going to do whatever it took.”

  And they were going to do it as secretively and cautiously as they could. One of their first goals was to try to locate the scores of vehicles once owned by Gary Ridgway. His frequent sightings in pickup trucks suggested that some of the victims might have been killed or transported in those trucks. They found one of them, a 1977 black Ford pickup, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where its current owner, a soldier formerly stationed in Washington, lived. They paid $2,500 to buy it back. A number of Ridgway’s vehicles had long since been crushed into squares of scrap metal, but some still existed and could contain telltale physical evidence.

  Every possible item that might become useful evidence—garbage at body sites, the contents of the boxes and bags in the Ridgway house—was photographed, bagged, and labeled: thousands of pieces of jewelry, beads, buttons, hair samples, scraps of cloth, matchbooks, cigarette butts, intact and broken bottles, bone fragments found in envelopes in Ridgway’s houses, a possible skull bone from his vacuum cleaner, empty cans, and torn and rotten clothing. The list went on endlessly, and so did the photos that were downloaded onto DVDs. Judith and Gary had bought hundreds of cheap rings, pins, earrings, and bracelets at swap meets and yard sales so that it would be difficult to find out if any of them had come from the victims.

  OVER the past thirty years, I have read more than a thousand homicide case files. Most of them could be contained in a single binder or perhaps two binders, albeit each four or five inches thick. And those were cases that required a great deal of detective work. Each Green River victim’s file contained both important information and minutia. To grasp the work that early investigators had done and what the last task force would still do was akin to counting all the changing patterns of glass fragments in a kaleidoscope.

  The effort put forth by so many detectives and forensic experts was amazing.

  In early March 2002, the Green River Task Force moved into new offices in a glass-and-concrete building owned by King County. It was near Boeing Field, Seattle’s smaller airport, and not many miles from the Strip or Kenworth, for that matter. It was impossible to estimate how long they might be there. There were now fourteen investigators. No one outside the task force knew what avenue of investigation was being pursued, even though Dave Reichert held an open house to show off the new Green River headquarters. Beyond that, there wasn’t any information on the progress of the cases where no charges were pending.

  Detective Graydon Matheson was in the process of organizing the evidence they had gathered. Kevin O’Keefe was loaned back from the Seattle Police Department and Detective Katie Larson was the media spokesperson. From time to time, I talked to Katie and Sue Peters, but not about the Green River case. I knew I couldn’t ask and they couldn’t tell, so I didn’t even try. One of the many things Sue didn’t tell me was that the coveralls she had retrieved from Gary Ridgway’s locker at the Kenworth plant in the 1987 search had proved to be a gold mine of irrefutable evidence. They held tiny, tiny dots of paint that Skip Palenik had found to be microscopically identical to those found on three additional victims: Wendy Coffield, Debra Estes, and Debra Bonner.

  On March 27, 2002, Ridgway was charged with three more counts of aggravated murder because of what was found on those coveralls. Sprayed paint often dries in midair, leaving infinitesimal spheres that the naked eye can barely see. Many colors of paint that were once used in Gary Ridgway’s custom truck assignments were detected on the jeans knotted around Wendy Coffield’s neck, the black sweater buried with Debra Estes, and on Debra Bonner’s clothing. The paint’s chemical composition was identical to the DuPont Imron paint used at Kenworth in the eighties. It was very expensive paint and few other companies used it at the time.

  The passage of time and tremendous advances in forensic science were an enormous boon to the Green River investigators. As the years went by, one group of detectives built upon the work of those who preceded them. As Matt Haney said, “If it hadn’t been for the initial great work of the first detectives and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the evidence that trapped Gary Ridgway might have been lost—and we needed that. Fortunately, the DNA was preserved and the crime scenes were handled very professionally.”

  AND NOW THERE WERE seven counts of aggravated murder against Gary Ridgway. But when would he go to trial? By late 2002, I hesitated to plunge into a book on some other case because I didn’t want to be away from Seattle when Gary Ridgway’s trial began. Practically, it seemed unlikely that it would be soon because his star team of defense attorneys, which now included not only Tony Sava
ge and Mark Prothero, but also Todd Gruenhagen, David Roberson, Suzanne Elliott, and Fred Leatherman, wanted discovery of the endless files the Green River Task Force had amassed before arresting their client. That could take years. So far, they had been given 420,000 pages of files, and that was only the beginning.

  Moreover, there were rumors that they would ask for a change of venue. I wondered if there was any courtroom within the borders of Washington State where Ridgway and the Green River murders weren’t well known, and if moving the trial would make it any easier to find jurors who hadn’t formed an opinion.

  By June 2003, it looked as if Ridgway would be tried in King County. King County public defender Ann Harper said that her office was using the Ted Kaczynski “Unabomber” case as a model for allocating personnel for the defense. Ridgway would pay for one attorney, but he would be provided in total with 8 lawyers, 7.5 investigators, 2 clerks, and 6 paralegals.

  As for the trial, Paul Sherfry, King County Superior Court’s chief administrative officer, expected to face a courtroom situation very much like the O. J. Simpson trial, juggling families, media, and spectators. Jury summonses would be sent to ten thousand registered voters in the county, a huge roster that would then be winnowed down to five hundred prospective jurors. Covering Ridgway’s trial wouldn’t be like the scores of others I’d observed in the old courthouse, where I could arrive at nine twenty AM and expect to find a seat on one of the hard oak benches with enough elbow room to write in my lined yellow legal tablet.

  Still, the trial didn’t appear imminent. The first tentative date to begin was said to be July 2004. Once more, I kept the Green River Killer book on a back burner while I wrote two more books, and went on a book tour around America.

  52

  A TIGHT LID was being kept on what was happening behind the scenes. Not long after Gary Ridgway was arraigned on the three additional charges of aggravated murder in the deaths of Debra Estes, Debra Bonner, and Wendy Coffield, his attorneys had contacted Prosecutor Norm Maleng to ask if Ridgway might avoid the death penalty if they offered a proffer that he would plead guilty to the original counts and show the task force investigators where the bodies yet undiscovered were located.

  It was a difficult decision for Maleng and the five deputy prosecuting attorneys, Jeff Baird, Patricia Eakes, Bryan McDonald, Ian Goodhew, and Sean O’Donnell. The State could move ahead to trial and seek conviction and the death penalty on only seven of what Maleng suspected were more than fifty victims. The rest would go unavenged and their families would never know for sure what had happened to them. Given the lengthy appeals process, the now-fifty-four-

  year-old prisoner might very well die before he could be executed.

  If Maleng’s office accepted the defense proffer, the case would be over, there would be no trial. But, after all the years, there would be answers. “The community’s most enduring nightmare would be over, the families and survivors of the victims of the uncharged killings would find a measure of justice and resolution at last,” Jeff Baird recalled in his summary. “Ridgway would be held accountable for all the murders he committed, not just a select few.”

  Part of the agreement would block any chance that Ridgway could appeal his four dozen life sentences without possibility of parole, and he would die in prison. An acceptance of this proffer would, however, cover only King County, and would be automatically void if Ridgway failed to include every single victim within its borders. It would not apply to any murders he might have committed in other counties or other states.

  In many ways, it was an agonizing choice for the State to make. Everyone who had seen the agony and tragedy of a twenty-two-year series of unsolved murders of young women wanted to see Gary Ridgway face a jury of his peers, to watch him sit in court and face the terrible evidence of what he had done. But he would only be prosecuted for seven murders; there was simply no way to find further physical evidence linking him to all the dead girls.

  On June 13, 2003, the prosecutors’ office and the defense team entered into an agreement. The State would not seek the death penalty, but Ridgway would have to plead guilty to aggravated murder in the first degree for all the homicides he’d committed in King County. And this didn’t mean only the forty-nine victims on the official list. If he had killed before 1982 or after 1985, he had to admit those murders, too.

  The agreement was not revealed to the public. Norm Maleng’s prosecution team, Sheriff Dave Reichert, and the task force would have to meet with the survivors before they did that, and even before they talked to the victims’ families, they needed to pursue interrogation of Gary Ridgway to see if he meant to keep his promises.

  IT WAS MID-JUNE of 2003 when the rumors began. Where was Ridgway? One thing was certain; he was no longer in the King County Jail. Katie Larson, speaking for the task force, acknowledged that he had been moved from his cell there, but said any information on his whereabouts had been sealed by a judge. She acknowledged that she knew where he was, but she wasn’t at liberty to say. Larson assured the public that Ridgway was in a secure facility and there was no need to worry that he might be able to escape. “He has a right to privacy,” Larson said, although most citizens didn’t much care about Ridgway’s privacy.

  His most likely hiding place was Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, a state mental institution. Someone who was in a position to know told me that Ridgway required treatment for mental illness, and authorities had spirited him to the Steilacoom high-security wing late at night, but that wasn’t true.

  Reporters had attempted to find him by checking to see if Ridgway was an inmate in the Pierce County Jail, the Snohomish County Jail, or in the State Hospital. If he was, he was listed under another name.

  Something seemed to be happening, however. Green River Task Force members and Search and Rescue teams were spotted in rugged areas where victims’ bodies had been found and in similar regions around King County. It had been a long time since Green River investigators had been a staple on the nightly news, but suddenly they were a familiar sight again. Had they simply gone back to look for something they might have missed earlier, or was it possible that the prosecutor’s office had struck some kind of a deal with the defense team—Ridgway’s life for information the task force needed to find more victims?

  Larson said they were only doing “routine searches,” based on reviewing cases and following up tips that had come in from the public. And yet it seemed that every weekend, they were spotted somewhere in some woods. However, the seven or eight hours the searchers spent each day clambering up and down deep ravines apparently netted nothing at all.

  But something had to be going on. Throughout July and August, and into the fall, the Green River teams were visible in the south county area or near North Bend. They wore jeans and shirts, civilian clothes with baseball caps or other hats to protect them from an unusually hot summer sun. Most of the areas they searched were dry as dust, but, on occasion, they had to dig into thick mud—the most difficult digs.

  Katie Larson, who was a pretty, slender blonde, worked double-duty; she joined the diggers during the day and then faced the cameras, but she declined to be specific about what they were looking for, or who, if anyone, had directed them to a particular site. Barred from getting as close as they would like, television cameramen used telephoto lenses to show the men and women working with shovels, trowels, rakes, buckets, and screens. I recognized a lot of the task force members, but the rest were strangers to me. That was to be expected—I’d been away at trials in Texas and Florida and didn’t know most of the younger investigators. Two local newspaper reporters who had haunted the task force for years tried to cross the yellow “crime scene” tape on a site near Des Moines and were turned away. I admit that I was tempted to drive down the hill and watch, too, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to get in the way and it would have been embarrassing to be asked to move on.

  Privately, the new task force had dubbed Seattle police detective Kevin O’Keefe the official “bon
e man.” He had an unerring talent for discerning immediately whether a bone was animal or human. “We found so many bones from dogs, cats, and wild animals,” Sue Peters said. “We’d toss them to Kevin and he could tell us at once what we had. But one time we threw what we thought was an animal bone to him, and he said, ‘Whoa…hand these to me gently. This is human.’ ”

  On August 16, 2003, they found human bones in the woods near Enumclaw. They were identified as belonging to Pammy Avent, Keli McGinness’s closest friend in the Camp in Portland. Both of them had come back to Seattle in 1983, only to disappear. Keli was still missing; the last sighting of Pammy was on October 26 of that year. For Pammy’s family, it was both a closure and the end of all hope.

  On August 23, the task force detectives revisited a four hundred by one hundred–foot lot off the Kent–Des Moines Road, ground they had checked in June only to be stymied by a morass of ten-foot-tall Himalayan blackberry vines. Now the prickly vines had been cleared with machetes and they were able to divide the lot into a grid pattern.

  And here they found nineteen human bones. They had no idea whom they belonged to, or if they had come from one person or several people. It would take a while to get the results from mitochondrial DNA tests, and many of the victims’ mothers had died over the twenty-two years since the killings began. All the years of changing seasons had covered the lost girls more deeply than their killer had buried them. It seemed a miracle that any of their poor bones had been found.

  In September 2003, the Green River Task Force investigators located more bones in Snoqualmie, near North Bend and I-90, another familiar body-cluster site over the years. On September 16, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office identified them as belonging to April Dawn Buttram. She was the seventeen-year-old girl from Spokane whose mother had caught her crawling out the window, running away to a more exciting life in Seattle. She hadn’t found what she was looking for. She had found only death. April had vanished almost twenty years to the week that her bones were discovered.