Green River, Running Red

by Ann Rule

  Marie Malvar had been gone a few months longer, snatched by the stranger in the burgundy red pickup truck driving off into the night, even though her boyfriend tried to follow. The trauma of her disappearance, exacerbated by her father’s certainty that he had found her killer’s house but couldn’t go inside, had pretty much destroyed her family.

  Ex-commander of the task force Frank Adamson believed that Bob Fox of the Des Moines Police Department should have taken the concern of Marie Malvar’s father and boyfriend more seriously in 1983 when they took him to the house where Ridgway lived. They were sure the dark red pickup parked in his driveway was her abductor’s vehicle. Had the Des Moines police gone inside, they might not have saved Marie, but it was possible they could have found evidence of a crime and stopped further killings.

  For a long time, the Malvars had gathered on April 1 to celebrate Marie’s birthday and pray for her safe return. No longer. Marie’s parents were long-divorced and her father was living in the Philippines and remarried with a young daughter he’d named after his missing Marie. Her mother was in California, ill and suffering from dementia, with Marie’s only sister, Marilyn, caring for her. Her four brothers were scattered.

  But at last the searchers had found Marie’s earthly remains, only bones now, in a deep ravine near Auburn where someone had thrown her away. With each new discovery of partial skeletons secreted in the wilderness, the rumors grew stronger. Ridgway had to be telling the task force searchers where to look; they couldn’t be so unerring in their discoveries unless someone had mapped it out for them.

  The rumors were correct, of course, but they didn’t go far enough. Gary Ridgway’s attorneys had successfully plea-bargained in their fight to save his life. But it would be months before anyone officially announced that.

  There was shocking news yet to come. All through the summer months of 2003, the mystery about where Gary Ridgway was being housed remained. He wasn’t in any jail, any hospital, any prison. At least there was no record of his being there, and it seemed impossible that someone as infamous as a suspected serial killer could be hidden for months. There were new reports that were disquieting: Ridgway was said to be housed in a two-bedroom apartment under secure guard. Surely, that couldn’t be. How could he be living in comparative luxury after what he was alleged to have done?

  Finally, when the gossip swelled, Katie Larson was instructed to announce where he was. Gary Ridgway wasn’t residing in any comfortable apartment. Not at all. He had been living, quite literally, with the Green River Task Force investigators—in the office complex where they worked each day. It was the last place anyone thought to look. No police agency had ever taken such a bold step. During their frequent brainstorming sessions, someone had come up with the idea and the detectives and prosecutors who first scoffed at the idea began to toss it around. At that point, Ridgway had been in custody for six months and hadn’t given up any secrets, protected as he was by his flying buttress wall of attorneys. In the county jail, other inmates watched what went on, and they were quick to tell each other and their visitors what Ridgway was up to and who was coming to see him. But now everything had changed.

  In order to get inside the head of the one person in the world who could tell them whom he had harmed, why he had done it, and where he had secreted their bodies, the Green River Task Force investigators decided to do something off the charts. Although he didn’t appear to care about the lives of anyone else, Ridgway wanted to live. That’s true of most serial killers whose own survival is paramount. Behind closed doors, the prosecutors and the defense team had come closer to a decision everyone might be able to live with.

  It was difficult for the detectives. No investigative team had ever agreed to spend so much time with a cold-blooded killer. But there he was, thirty feet from Sue Peters’s desk, sleeping on a mattress in a barren, closely guarded room. He was a constant, malevolent presence. When Peters came to work, Ridgway called out “Hi Sue!” and she forced herself to answer back cheerfully. He learned the names of most of the personnel in the task force office, and he seemed to think that it would be like his days back at Kenworth, where he was always smiling and trying to make conversation with people.

  It was like having the fictional Dr. Hannibal Lecter living down the hall, albeit a far less charismatic “Lecter.” Cocooned, however sparsely, in terms of the amenities of life, Gary Ridgway was a captive—but he had a captive audience, too. As Ted Bundy had once delighted in the attention paid to him by Florida detectives after his 1978 capture, Ridgway would now be able to discuss the ghastly details of his crimes. He was a macabre champion of sorts. He held records that no one else would want to brag about.

  Up to the moment of his arrest, Ridgway had been a nonentity, a boring little man of meager intelligence, a joke, someone to tease, and, worst of all for his ego, someone to ignore. But beginning in mid-June 2003, he made himself available as a subject who was quite willing to participate in long hours of questioning, day after day after day. He loved it. He had always found pleasure in demonstrating his expertise in the art of murder, and he was talking to his ideal audience—the very detectives who had faced his deadly handiwork for so many years. He knew that psychiatrists and psychologists, homicide detectives and F.B.I. agents were curious about him, and he enjoyed being the center of attention.

  For his questioners, it was exhausting, disgusting, shocking, frustrating, and horrific work. And sometimes, yes, boring, as Ridgway often repeated himself or stumbled awkwardly as he searched his memory in vain.

  After the public found out where he was living, and that he was admitting his crimes, there would be yet another shocking revelation about Gary Ridgway. One of the faces in the telephoto shots of the cars full of investigators that turned into the woods and mountains should have been familiar. Anyone who watched television or read the papers knew that face. Gary Ridgway accompanied the task force investigators on what they called “field trips.” He had been hidden in plain sight.

  Except when they were in deep woods, Ridgway was never allowed to get out of the police units; that might have allowed someone to recognize him. But he was there, an interested spectator as well as a guide who led detectives back to where he’d left the bodies of his victims more than twenty years earlier. In order to learn what they needed to know, detectives had to allow him to revisit these sites that he had returned to often over the years of his freedom. He brightened, smiling in anticipation, as they got closer to his trophy areas.

  And no one outside the investigation ever suspected.

  Ridgway was guarded on every side and hampered by handcuffs with chains attached to a chain on his waist, along with leg irons. There was no chance he could escape. He rode in a locked police vehicle with two detectives accompanying him and two more in a car following. Prosecutors and his own attorneys were also in the search parties.

  “He never knew when we were going,” Sue Peters recalled. “We might wake him up before the sun rose, or take him in the middle of an interview. He had no forewarning. He liked the field trips, but we couldn’t help that. Whatever he was reliving, it was something we had to know.”

  For the most part, the interviews themselves were handled by four Green River detectives: Randy Mullinax, Sue Peters, Tom Jensen, and Jon Mattsen. Occasionally, psychiatrists spent hours with Ridgway, and Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole from the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Science Unit flew in to talk with him in her soft, feminine voice, her eyes unblinking as he spoke of his perverted fantasies. “We were relieved when the F.B.I. or the doctors talked to him,” Peters remarked. “It gave us some time away from him.”

  That was understandable. A long time later, it was hard enough for me to watch the interviews, caught on DVDs, without having to have been there, masking the revulsion that came with his unfeeling recitation of his crimes. The questioning was usually accomplished in an hour-and-a-half to two-hour segments.

  A team of two detectives sat at a round, Formica-topped table across from Ridgway, who
was manacled even inside the task force headquarters, although he could move his hands enough to take notes or drink from his bottle of artesian water. He wore jail “scrubs,” usually bright red, sometimes white. At a rectangular table, just out of camera view, members of Ridgway’s defense team listened and watched. A wrinkled gray painter’s tarp covered the wall behind the prisoner, although other detectives could observe and hear what was going on through the closed-circuit television system.

  “We quickly learned how to deal with him,” Peters recalled. “He would have enjoyed talking for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but none of us wanted to listen that long. At first he seemed to think he was running the show. When we gave him a choice of what he wanted for breakfast or lunch, he got the wrong idea and thought he was in some kind of control, so after that he ate whatever we decided he should get.”

  If he was particularly forthcoming, Ridgway realized small rewards—a salmon dinner, or extra pancakes, something he wanted to read—although his dyslexia made that difficult for him.

  They established a routine. Most of their morning interview sessions began shortly after eight with a recitation of what the prisoner had eaten for breakfast: “Pancakes, an egg, sausage,” Ridgway would say with a smile. And then he evaluated the quality of his sleep during the night while the detectives feigned interest. He appeared to be sleeping remarkably well, given the ghastly imprints laid down in his memory. But since this was all about him, the memories of the dead didn’t disturb him.

  They never had.

  WATCHING the videotapes that caught every word of the interrogations of Gary Ridgway during those four months of 2003 would have been an unsettling experience for anyone, hundreds of hours of grotesque recollections from a man who looked totally harmless as he described killing dozens of women in a halting, dispassionate voice. Like all criminals, he minimalized his crimes initially, only slowly admitting the monstrous details. While he had ample motivation for telling the truth—his life—he said he knew he was a pathological liar.

  “Ridgway also suggested another reason why he would lie or minimalize his conduct,” Jeff Baird, the chief trial deputy, wrote in the prosecutor’s summary of evidence. “He believes that a popular ‘true crime’ author will write a book about him, and he wanted to portray himself in the best possible light.”

  In the beginning, Ridgway denied any premeditation to murder, claiming that he killed when he was in a rage. It was the victims’ fault because they didn’t seem to be enjoying sex with him or they made him hurry. “When I get mad, I shake. Sometimes I forget to breathe and things get all blurry,” he said.

  Of course, the anger wasn’t his fault either; he blamed his failure to be promoted at Kenworth on women, who got the best and easiest jobs. His first two divorces were his ex-wives’ fault, as were the child support payments he’d had to make for Chad even though he hadn’t wanted a divorce in the first place. Small things enraged him; when he bought his house, the sellers were so cheap they had taken all the lightbulbs. All these things made it difficult for him to sleep, and he said the only way to release the “pressure” had been to kill women.

  That wasn’t true, and his specious reasoning soon faltered. He had wanted to kill for the sake of killing, although even he may not have known why. Again and again, he would repeat, “All I wanted to do was have sex with them and kill them.”

  It was obvious early on that Ridgway could remember neither his victims’ faces nor their names. His memory wasn’t all fuzzy, but it was compartmentalized. He recalled every vehicle he’d ever owned, houses he’d lived in when he was a child, his various shifts at Kenworth—basically inanimate objects. (Ted Bundy had been like that, too. He could cry over a dented Volkswagen or an abandoned bicycle, but not a human being.)

  Gary Ridgway had maps in his head and sharp recall of where he had left bodies, but the dead girls were apparently interchangeable in his mind. Who they were or what they might have become made no difference to him. They had existed only to please him sexually for a short time and they were then disposable.

  Some he had deliberately let go, saying, “You’re too cute for a guy like me.” But that, he explained, was only so he would have witnesses, if he should ever need them, that he was a good guy.

  “A couple of times the urge to kill wasn’t there. It could have been where I had a real good day at work. Somebody patted me on the back, ‘You did a good job today,’ which was a rarity. It could have been maybe on my birthday…or maybe I just didn’t have time to kill them and take them someplace.”

  The detectives worked out ways to stimulate Ridgway’s memory. They did their best to keep him on track, and to recall one victim at a time. When his train of thought began to wander away, they brought him back. Sue Peters often showed him photographs of the living girls, and he shook his head. They didn’t look familiar to him. He had never really bothered to look at them in the first place. He recognized photos of locations, however, saying that fences, trees, or road signs helped him pinpoint them.

  The investigators used innovative ways to reach the stuttering, expressionless prisoner. He seemed cowed by the strength of the male questioners, perhaps more responsive to the female interrogators, but there wasn’t a vast difference in his response from one to the other. He may have felt powerful with his victims, but they were such pathetically easy targets. He seemed a mouse now.

  “Think of it as a paint job,” Tom Jensen said, as he attempted to trigger Ridgway’s recollection of his crimes. “What do you do first?”

  “Well, you prep it. Do the taping and all.”

  “So, how did you prep taking the women?”

  “I asked if they were ‘dating,’ and told them what I wanted and I waved money at them, and we decided that.” He said he offered them more than they usually got, but that didn’t matter because he knew he wouldn’t have to pay them anyway.

  Some of the victims were killed out of doors on the ground after he had spread a blanket he carried in his truck. Some died in the back of his truck. During the times when he lived alone in the little gray house off Military Road, his preference had been to take the women, whom he ironically referred to as “ladies,” to his house. He set their minds at ease in different ways. “A lot of them asked me if I was the Green River Killer when I picked them up,” Ridgway said. “I told them ‘No, of course not. Do I look like the Green River Killer?’ And they says, ‘No, you don’t.’ They always thought it was a big tall guy—about six three, 185 pounds.”

  There were women who refused to “date” Ridgway because they were afraid he was an undercover cop. He alleviated their concerns by keeping beer in his truck and offering it to them, and they relaxed because a police officer wouldn’t do that.

  He had most of his bases covered. To allay the fears of the frightened girls, he kept some of Chad’s toys on his dashboard. He wanted to appear as an ordinary Joe, a good guy who was a single father. He kept cartons of cigarettes to give away. Sometimes he groomed girls by dating them a few times, offering to help them get jobs, to become a regular customer they could count on, or let them use his car. “And they think, you know, ‘This guy cares,’ and…which…I didn’t. I just wanted to get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her.”

  Even when he had the girls in his house, he showed them his son’s bedroom with its toys and souvenirs, keeping up his pretense of normalcy. Once in his house near the Pac HiWay, Ridgway said he usually asked the women to go into his bathroom to wash their “vaginas” while he watched through the open door. Aside from crude slang, he didn’t know how to describe the female anatomy. He used the word vagina when he meant vulva. He insisted that none of the young prostitutes objected to his watching them through the open bathroom door.

  He also urged them to urinate before sex. That way they wouldn’t be as likely to wet his bed when he killed them. Indoors or outside, he had discovered that having intercourse “doggy style” gave him a physical advantage. Entering them from the rear—but never, he i
nsisted, for anal penetration—gave him a physical advantage. After he ejaculated, he sometimes told them “I hear someone,” and they lifted their heads to listen. Or they tilted their heads back as they reached for their clothing. With their throats exposed and extended, it was easy for him to press his right forearm against their larynxes and cut off their breath, choking them.

  “If we were outside near the airport, they would look up as a plane went over, and that was when I did it,” he said matter-of-factly. “If my right arm got tired, I used my left, and if they really fought, I would put my legs around them. I told them if they stopped fighting, I would let them go. But I was always going to kill them.”

  It was an eerie experience for anyone watching and listening. Ridgway’s voice was tight, as if it was emerging under great pressure, and his words came out in bursts. Even so, he seemed quite comfortable about answering probing questions.

  Because the victims meant nothing at all to him, he apparently had no preference about race or body type. He had “dated” some of the women before, but knowing them made no difference to him. “I just wanted to kill them. If they told me to hurry, that made me angry. And I would kill them.”

  Many of the girls had pleaded for their lives, telling him they had children at home, a family to take care of, or, quite truthfully, “I don’t want to die.” Of course, it didn’t matter to him. Nothing that the hapless women could do dissuaded Ridgway from his goals. “Some went easily,” he recalled, “and some fought hard, but they all died.” He estimated that even the most violent struggle didn’t last longer than two minutes.