Текст книги "Green River, Running Red. The Real Story of the Green River Killer - America's Deadliest Serial Murderer"

Автор книги: Ann Rule

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

40

ALTHOUGH Frank Adamson was doing his best to sound optimistic about the Green River investigation, it wasn’t easy. Nineteen eighty-six was almost over, and they seemed no closer to arresting the killer than they had ever been. The task force was being downsized, and Adamson had had to give the bad news to a number of detectives that they were being transferred. Twenty-five percent of the task force was gone.

The board beneath his own feet was becoming more and more unstable. He was frustrated, disappointed, sorry about the circus that the search of the fur trapper’s home had become, sad because of all the young women who were still unavenged. And he knew his time was coming.

“Vern Thomas called me in and said, ‘I don’t want any argument. The decision is made, Frank. You can remain in charge, or you can be promoted to major.’ ”

Thomas, who wouldn’t be sheriff much longer himself, offered Adamson the opportunity to command the new sheriff’s precinct that would be in Maple Valley. The unspoken alternative for Adamson was that he would be off the task force anyway.

“I took the second option,” Adamson recalled, “and Vern said ‘You made the right choice.’ ”

It felt good to get off the hot stove. Frank Adamson would be the longest surviving commander of the Green River Task Force. He had begun in November 1983, and he officially left the task force in January 1987.

Captain Jim Pompey had been with the department since 1972 and was promoted to captain in 1983, making him the highest ranking African American in the sheriff’s office. He had been in charge of the county’s SWAT Team and its marine unit. Now he moved in to head the much-reduced Green River Task Force amid rumors that it was being absorbed into the Major Crimes Unit where it would quietly evaporate. He admitted that he was not up to speed on the Green River cases, while Frank Adamson, Dave Reichert, Jim Doyon, Randy Mullinax, Sue Peters, Matt Haney, and dozens of other detectives who had lived and breathed the Green River story for years were familiar with every aspect of it.

Matt Haney had joined the Green River Task Force on May 1, 1985, replacing Paul Smith when Smith was diagnosed with leukemia. Sue Peters, the rookie who responded to the second Green River site in August 1982, was a detective by 1986 and had come on board the task force, too. Even though the number of investigators had shrunk, Jim Pompey would be commanding the cream of the crop.

As the Green River Task Force continued to shrink due to budget cuts, King County found money in its budget to “rehabilitate” the Green River itself—partially to take away the onus put upon it by the thirty-six unsolved murders and dozens of missing women. The county’s Natural Resources and Parks Division hired artist Michael McCafferty to design a master plan that would change the image of the Green River along its entire thirty-mile course. McCafferty suggested several educational stations, some bronze sculptures, reseeding to “help the fish,” and a small memorial of black and purple flowers to honor the murder victims. This last—unsolicited—suggestion from McCafferty alarmed the King County Arts Commission. “It’s inappropriate,” one member of the commission said. “This [serial killer] hasn’t yet been caught. He might think of it as a memorial to him. If he had been apprehended, we might feel differently.”

Left unspoken was the hope that the murders would be forgotten and the Green River would once again be known for its rippling waters, salmon runs, great blue herons, and serenity. Honoring the dead would keep reminding people of what had happened.

Linda Barker, speaking for the victims’ families, found the thought of a memorial extremely appropriate. “Society and the community need to say these girls were valuable people and their deaths mean something to us.”

In the end, the $10 million project went through with a bike and jogging path along the river, a golf course near the Meeker Street Bridge…but no remembrance at all of the Green River victims.

JIM POMPEY, the new head of the Green River Task Force, was a great guy with a booming laugh that was instantly recognizable. A graduate of Washington State University’s law enforcement program, he was a dedicated “Cougar.” A physical training enthusiast, he exercised several times a week lifting weights at a health club near the Burien Precinct. My son, Mike, also a Cougar, worked out with Pompey and another African-American officer, a member of the K-9 Unit.

“I remember him as being very strong,” Mike recalled. “And he was always looking to get more hats and shirts from WSU. Every time I went to Pullman, he’d ask me to bring him back something with the Wazzu cougar on it.”

Not surprisingly, Pompey was also an excellent swimmer and a SCUBA diver, skills that came in handy when he headed the marine unit. Seattle and King County have water in almost every direction and drowning rescues are common.

Pompey felt he was up to the challenge of catching the Green River Killer, although it wasn’t a job he had sought out deliberately. Like each new commander, he came in fresh and enthusiastic even though morale among the detectives still left was running low. Even Dave Reichert, who had been with the investigation since day one, sometimes wondered if they were ever going to catch the man who had eluded them for so long. It would be fair to say that it had become a personal life challenge for Reichert.

SOME of the preeminent suspects from the early days had long since been cleared; others remained in the “A” category, while a few moved up the dubious ladder to a point where it seemed prudent to look at them from another angle. And then there was always the chance that task force detectives might come across an entirely new suspect, a name they had not heard before.

One of the earliest suspects, when reevaluated, began to look much more interesting. The hard-won, state-of-the-art computer that Frank Adamson, Bob Keppel, Sheriff Vern Thomas, and former county executive Randy Revelle had fought for was a new and almost miraculous tool. It had taken time for clerks to enter the thousands upon thousands of tips and field investigation reports, the information about both the victims and possible suspects, into the computer. It continued to scan for connections among victims and connections between victims and possible suspects.

One name that caught the detectives’ attention was the mild-mannered man who drove pickup trucks and liked to watch prostitutes on the Strip. He appeared to have been intricately linked to the investigation. Sergeant Frank Atchley had always found him intriguing. Matt Haney noted computer hits on his name were piling up.

The Seattle Port Authority Police, who patrolled airport property, had listed the “street name” of a pretty woman parked with him in 1982. It was an alias for Keli Kay McGinness, the beautiful blonde who was still missing after leaving the Three Bears Motel.

He was, of course, the man who had started to strangle Penny Bristow after he said she had bitten him during oral sex. He had admitted that the incident had happened.

Jim Doyon had talked to him in front of Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Strip near the crossing where most of the dead and missing women had last been seen.

This same man lived just south of 216th off Military Road. Indeed, he lived in the house where Marie Malvar’s father and boyfriend had watched Des Moines detective sergeant Bob Fox question the owner. Fox had walked away, convinced that Marie wasn’t in his house, nor had she ever been there.

He habitually drove older pickup trucks, all of which matched the descriptions given by witnesses or women who had escaped from a man they believed to be the Green River Killer.

At the request of his neighbors, even I had turned in this man’s name in early 1987. There probably were other tips about him somewhere in the computer.

Still, in many ways he didn’t fit within the parameters of the standard serial killer profile. He was apparently happily married, a homeowner with a young son. In 1984, he had passed a polygraph regarding the murders of young women. And he’d been steadily employed at the same company—the Kenworth Truck Company where he was a custom painter—for more than two decades.

He wasn’t the typical serial killer—who was usually a loner without a lasting relationship with a woman. He wasn’t a job hopper. He wasn’t from a broken home. He’d grown up in the south end of King County and his high school was only a few blocks off the Strip, as was his parents’ home.

He’d gotten his hair cut at Don the Barber’s ever since he was in junior high school. He’d worked in hotels and surplus stores on the Strip as a teenager, and, as an adult, he shopped there.

His name was Gary Leon Ridgway, and he was thirty-seven years old, a few months older than Dave Reichert. Haney felt there were too many hits on the computer to ignore, but even so, they were all circumstantial. There was no physical evidence to prove that Gary Ridgway was anything more than a slightly creepy guy who had been single during the peak years that the killer murdered the most victims: 1982 to 1984. The Green River investigators had come across a lot of guys who were creepy and, married or single, liked to stare at prostitutes and pay money to have sex with them.

Five years earlier, Melvyn Foster had looked perfect as a suspect. A year before, the fur trapper had seemed like a sure thing when he proved to be totally innocent. And that belief had gotten the task force the worst press yet. There had been a number of other men who seemed more likely candidates to be the GRK than this guy, men the public never heard about. And yet Gary Ridgway warranted a closer look.

When I glanced at the first notebook to tumble out of the file boxes about the Green River killings that I had saved for more than twenty years, I was startled to read my own printing scrawled across a whole page:

Gary Leon Ridgway—Physical Ev? may have ties to GR victim

Went to Tyee

Class of ’67 or ’68 turn W on 220 21859 32

Half of those notes would turn out to be wrong. But thinking I had something that the task force might want to see, I either filled in one of the tip sheets they’d given me, or, more likely, typed up what his neighbors told me when I met with them after they called me some time in 1987.

Seventeen years ago, feeling truly dumb about playing detective, I put on sunglasses and a scarf, borrowed a car, and drove past Gary Ridgway’s house on 32nd Avenue. It wasn’t hard for me to get there; I lived then on S. 18th and 240th. There was nothing even slightly unusual about his house. There was no one around and the windows were covered by drapes or blinds. If he had been in the yard, I wouldn’t have known it; I didn’t even know what he looked like.

I had no idea in 1987 that the Green River Task Force investigators were way ahead of me. They never told me one way or the other whether any of the information I passed on to them was useful. I didn’t expect them to.

In fact, the task force investigators and uniformed deputies had been watching Ridgway on and off for months.

Early on, Matt Haney had chosen Ridgway as his favorite suspect, and the more he found out about him, the more enthusiastic he grew. Haney probably worked on more police departments in more assignments than any cop under fifty. Beginning on the Kent Police Department, he investigated a homicide involving the first “government protected witness” in America to be wrenched from his East Coast organized-crime roots. Haney was in his early twenties at the time. He went next to the King County Sheriff’s Office where he was first a patrol deputy, then a homicide detective, and would one day be in charge of Special Operations (K-9s and Air Support), as well as training officer.

Haney conferred with Pompey and senior deputy King County prosecutors Marilyn Brenneman and Al Matthews, sharing his convictions that the task force should make a move—obtain a search warrant, if necessary—to find out more about Gary Ridgway.

Brenneman and Matthews were enthusiastic about focusing on Ridgway. Pompey also wanted to monitor Ridgway’s comings and goings. So far, their surveillance hadn’t netted them much. He went to work and he came home. He sometimes stopped to eat at fast-food restaurants. That was about the extent of it.

41

ON APRIL 8, 1987, Gary Ridgway’s sense of invulnerability was severely shaken. He had no idea that he was being surveilled, and he certainly didn’t expect the execution of a search warrant on his house, his locker at Kenworth Trucking, and the three vehicles he currently had available to him—his own Ford pickup truck, his father’s Dodge pickup, and the Dodge Dart that his wife, Judith, drove. The search warrant drawn up by Matt Haney and okayed by senior deputy prosecutors Al Matthews and Marilyn Brenneman, also specified that there was probable cause for Ridgway himself to give up hair samples.

The search, done discreetly and rapidly, went well. Haney and Doyon took Gary Ridgway to Kent police headquarters where they photographed him and bagged plucked samples of his head and pubic hair into evidence. While hair is not the optimum source to find DNA, if hair follicles (skin tags) are present it can be done. Almost as an afterthought, Matt Haney asked George Johnston from the Washington State Patrol crime lab to swab the inside of Ridgway’s mouth and cheek. The gauze pledget holding the saliva was bagged, labeled, and frozen against a day in the distant future when it might be important.

Sue Peters was a little chagrined to draw only Ridgway’s Kenworth locker, which, at the time, didn’t seem likely to give up anything vital to the case. She bagged and tagged his white coveralls, stained with myriad paint splotches.

Other searchers took away rope, tarps, paint samples, of which there were many, some carpet threads and fibers.

Gary Ridgway had always been proud of his job with Kenworth and the image he had there, or believed he had. He was a dependable, punctual employee, and he usually managed to follow the computer instructions provided to mix the paint that stylized the big rigs. But sometimes his dyslexia made it difficult for him to remember the numbers on the computers associated with specialty paint jobs. On a bad day, he might ruin a couple of jobs by getting mixed up on a three-color trim, and then he raged at himself. One day he “ruined several trucks” because he got the sequences mixed up. He even had one three-day period when he added the wrong chemicals to the paint. Worst of all, he occasionally painted the wrong truck entirely. The bosses always let him do it over, and he did without protest. One of his nicknames around the plant was “Wrong-Way” and he hated that. But he couldn’t show his anger at work because he feared being fired. In the employee break room, some of his co-workers found him inordinately religious, even a zealot, as he read aloud from the Bible. He was a paradox: Sometimes he was far too touchy-feely with women employees and made them nervous when he crept up behind them. Alternately, he would go through his preaching phases where he spouted his opinion about harlots and loose women until spittle flew out of his mouth.

After the task force investigators searched his locker, Ridgway got another nickname at work. Even though the searches of April 1987 were accomplished with little fanfare and, to Jim Pompey’s relief, no media blitz, other employees at Kenworth knew the detectives had questioned him, searched his belongings, and taken pictures of his truck in the company parking lot. Nobody really thought he was capable of killing more than three dozen prostitutes, but there was the similarity of his initials that begged for jokes at his expense: “G.R.” for Gary Ridgway, and “G.R.” for Green River. He soon became “Green River Gary” at Kenworth.

It was just a joke, but he didn’t find it amusing. Even so, the search warrant’s execution hadn’t damaged his career at Kenworth; he was too dependable an employee.

John O’Leary worked at Kenworth, too, but he was much farther up the corporate ladder than Ridgway could ever hope to be. O’Leary was a finely tuned long-distance runner in the mideighties and early nineties, and he and his running partner were interested in true-crime cases. “In our ninety-minute to two-hour training runs,” he recalled, “we would spend a lot of time talking about the Bundy case as we read the various books. We also talked a lot about the Green River case since it was on the news constantly.

“I later became the CFO [chief financial officer] of the Kenworth plants in Tukwila and Renton from 1997 to late 2000. Although I wasn’t friends with Ridgway, I certainly knew who he was. It was common knowledge that he had been a Green River suspect, but that he had been cleared.”

Jim Pompey was relieved that Matt Haney had managed to keep a lid on the details of the April 1997 searches. Even the media, which dogged the detectives’ footsteps, seemed chastened in the aftermath of the Tikkenborg search chaos.

It would take several weeks before all the tests on evidence taken from Ridgway’s house, locker, and vehicles were finished and they would know if any usable physical evidence might emerge. In the meantime, Ridgway, albeit with his new nickname, went back to his everyday life. He didn’t threaten to sue anyone, and the vast majority of the Seattle public wasn’t even aware of his moment in the harsh spotlight.

Al Matthews, the prosecutor who had worked with the task force for four years, was as bitterly disappointed as Matt Haney and Sue Peters were when he had to tell them that there just wasn’t enough physical evidence to get an arrest warrant for Gary Ridgway. They had done all they could, but the Ridgway part of the Green River probe had to be shelved until something that would hold up in court should surface.

Haney was convinced it wasn’t over for good. When he could, he kept checking for connections between Gary Ridgway and the Green River victims.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was a big year for forensic science. A September 21 article out of London, England, was headlined “Genetic Sample Leads to Suspect in Killing.”

For the first time a police department somewhere in the world had used a scientific technique known as “genetic fingerprinting.” In their determination to solve the two-and-a-half-year-old rape murders of two teenage girls in the village of Enderby, Leicester County, English investigators took blood and saliva samples from more than 5,500 adult males who lived in the community. After exhaustive testing and the elimination of all other subjects, they charged a twenty-seven-year-old baker with the crimes.

Geneticist Alex Jeffreys of Leicester University had discovered that DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—found in the chromosomes of all living beings can be charted as a series of bands, unique to each person. In 1987, the test was effective on dried blood as old as five years, and dried semen up to three years old. The chance that two humans would have identical patterns was between 30 billion and 100 billion to one. It seemed very Brave New World, and DNA testing wasn’t perfected yet by any means. Plus, the cost could be prohibitive. But when Gary Ridgway was questioned and searched in 1987, Matt Haney had nothing to lose by taking a sample of his saliva.

UNEXPECTEDLY, and tragically, the Green River Task Force would have yet another commander. Jim Pompey went SCUBA diving with sheriff’s detective Bob Stockham, Stockham’s brother, and Roger Dunn, who, along with Bob Keppel, were the King County detective partners who had tracked Ted Bundy back in the midseventies. Dunn now ran his own private investigating company.

They were diving off Richmond Beach in the north end of Seattle, where Pompey was going to use a new speargun to catch fish. But almost as soon as they descended to depths close to a hundred feet, Pompey began to have trouble with his oxygen tank regulator. Stockham saw that the Green River commander was on the verge of panicking and tried to help him get to the surface, but they got separated and Pompey rose through the water much too fast.

Coast Guard rescuers took Pompey to a Seattle hospital by helicopter and he appeared to be regaining consciousness. But terrible damage had been done to his lungs. He didn’t live to be placed in the decompression chamber.

When “Doc” Reay performed an autopsy on Jim Pompey, he found that he had succumbed to a pulmonary embolism. He wasn’t forty yet, and he’d probably been in better physical shape than anyone on the task force, but now he was gone.

Lieutenant Greg Boyle stepped in to pick up the reins, and then Bobby Evans took over in December 1987. The Green River Task Force assignment would take its toll on any number of comparatively young men. Danny Nolan died of a leukemia-like blood disorder and so did Paul Smith. Ralf McAllister had a massive coronary and died in his cabin on Snoqualmie Pass. One detective retired after an emotional breakdown. Homicide detectives live under so much pressure and stress that the attrition rate from sudden death is higher than in most jobs, but the Green River case seemed to be taking an even greater price.

The same is true for the parents of young murder victims, particularly their fathers. Their perceived failure to protect their children eats away at the parents who could not save those they loved the most. It had happened in the Bundy cases and it was happening in the Green River cases. The grief of families is often so profound that they lose their will to live. The death toll caused by the Green River Killer extended far beyond his victim count.