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

Автор книги: Ann Rule

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

“Um-hm,” Judith said, her face paling.

“Can you even—Is it feasible that he had sex with these women? I mean, do you believe that?”

Judith shook her head, crying now. But she admitted that Gary had saved some of the articles written about the Green River Killer. Shocked almost silent, Judith agreed to continue to answer questions on tape. She didn’t know that the task force investigators had been following her husband, and she clearly had no idea that he had been driving side roads and making detours on his way to work. She thought he got up before four AM just to be sure he was on time for work at six thirty.

He didn’t shower in the morning, only shaved, drank tea or coffee, and left. She assumed he’d been at Denny’s having pancakes. She was sure Gary had never rented storage space, and nothing in their homes had ever been off-limits to her. She kept repeating that he had no secrets from her. But there was so much about her husband that she obviously hadn’t known. She was stunned.

The floodgates had opened and Judith answered their questions now, flinching at the meaning behind them. No, he had never tried to choke her. He’d never frightened her, beyond coming around the side of their house and saying “Boo!”

“I know you care a lot about him, and you didn’t know him in the early eighties,” Sue Peters said now. “If this ever comes to trial, how would you feel about testifying to what you told us. About the man you know.”

“The man I know is wonderful,” Judith said quietly.

“So would you mind testifying to that in court—the things you know about Gary?”

“I would tell them everything is good about him. He’s been the best. I love him.”

“She was in shock,” Sue Peters recalled. “I don’t think she had any idea that this could happen. She was upset and kept denying that it could be true.”

It was hard not to feel sorry for Judith Ridgway. Gary had come along and brought love into her life when she was crushed by the tawdry end of her first marriage. More than anything, she had clung to the haven of her own house and yard, the husband she trusted. Now, Peters and Haney told her that she would have to pack a bag because a search warrant would be served on that house and property.

“We’re going to take you to a hotel,” Peters said.

“My cats…the kittens…,” Judith protested.

“We’ll see that they’re fed and taken care of,” Matt Haney told her. And they were.

Judith wouldn’t be able to come home for more than a week, hidden from a rabid press in a hotel room. And when she did come home again, it would never be the same. It would never really be her house again. Without Gary to bring in his paycheck, there was no way she would be able to keep it.

50

GARY RIDGWAY might never come home at all. He was now fifty-two years old, and the photographs Randy Mullinax and Jim Doyon took of him at the Regional Justice Center showed an almost expressionless man, save for a vertical crease that had deepened over the passing years so that it bisected his forehead. Combined with the heavy hooding of his upper eyelids, the crease gave him an almost evil mien. In some photos he wore blue jeans and the familiar plaid shirt. In others he wore only white jockey shorts. One picture, given the suspicion that this was the weapon used to take dozens of lives, was chilling; it was his right arm from the elbow down. It didn’t appear muscular and the hand itself showed fingers gnarled by the beginning of arthritis.

Brought to earth at last, the man they had considered a preying wolf had a meek presence. But at that point he refused to answer Mullinax’s and Doyon’s questions and he seemed determined not to do so. He wanted to talk to an attorney.

Ridgway was placed in an “ultra security” cell in the King County Jail, high up on the hill behind the courthouse and the Public Safety Building, where guards would check on him twenty-four hours a day. His mug shot was on the front page of every newspaper from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco by morning, along with speculation that he might be guilty of scores of unsolved homicides in those areas.

I looked at the picture in the Seattle papers on December 1, 2001, wondering if I had ever seen this face before, and I cannot say that I recognized it. But my daughter did. Leslie called me and said in a hushed voice, “Mom, remember how I told you about that man who came to our book signings? The one who leaned against the wall and just watched you? The one who never said anything and never bought any books?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It was him.”

“It was who?” I asked.

“Gary Ridgway. He’s the man I saw.” She paused. “He was even in the audience one time when you were giving a talk at a bookstore and you said ‘Nobody knows who the Green River Killer is or what he looks like. For all I know, he could be sitting here tonight.’ I guess he was.”

People usually chuckled when I said that. It was a way to put an audience at ease and, at the same time, make them realize that serial killers didn’t look like monsters. But it certainly gave me pause as I realized Ridgway must have been sitting in a darkened high school auditorium in Burien or Auburn or Tacoma as I showed slides of other serial killers I’d written about.

DESPITE THE ELATION that Dave Reichert voiced during the news conference he’d called, his media spokesman, John Urquhart, was cautious, as he always was. “What we’re saying is we have not caught the Green River Killer,” he told reporters later. “What we’re saying is we’ve arrested a suspect in the deaths of four women who happen to be on the list of Green River victims. We don’t know who killed those other forty-five women. Period. We’re up to our eyeballs in police work.”

And, indeed, they were. It wasn’t over by a long shot. Every single case, each dead girl, most of whom would have been in their late thirties and early forties by 2001, would be scrutinized again. Authorities currently had only enough evidence to link Ridgway to four murders, and even those might be squeakers. But Norm Maleng’s King County prosecutor’s office had been with the task force every step of the way as they planned the arrest, skillfully fortifying any weak spots. They would continue to do that. It was a matter now of one step at a time.

First, there would be massive searches for possible new evidence. When Ridgway was arrested, crime scene specialists were already primed to employ their expertise in forensic science. “We knew a couple of days in advance that he was going to be arrested, and so we were prepared to search four homes, including the one where he’d lived for so long on Military Road,” one of the technicians said.

They would have precious little daylight; in Seattle in December, the sun sets before four PM. The weather was miserable as rain fell heavily and relentlessly, and fierce winds blew branches from evergreens, closing some streets and knocking out power lines, but the dark skies couldn’t quash the jubilance of the task force. There was a huge break in an investigation that almost everyone had given up on. At the same time, it brought back the memories of so many young women long dead, some of whose bodies had yet to be found.

Members of the Crime Scene Response Team from the Washington State Patrol were assigned to do thorough searches of houses where Gary Ridgway had lived over the prior twenty years. The forensic technicians hoped to find links between the suspect and many more than four victims. He had lived in the small house near the Pacific Highway all during the peak years of disappearances; they suspected that it might hold the most secrets.

It had been a long time since Ridgway occupied the now blue-gray house off Military Road, and the family who lived there in 2001 barely spoke English. They were cooking dinner when the WSP team arrived, surprised to find a crew of crime scene technicians about to swarm over their two-bedroom home.

“We had to convey to them that they would have to leave,” Cheryl Rivers, a technician recalled. “That’s the way it has to be.”

Wearing coveralls, latex gloves, and “booties” to cover their shoes so they would not inadvertently shed evidence themselves, the WSP team moved in. Back in the eighties, Ridgway’s old neighbors had been mystified by how he could have spilled enough red paint to destroy a carpet. There was an air of expectation as the crime scene experts pulled up the current carpets. They could see fibers from various old rugs below, but when they tested the layers beneath for signs of blood or body fluids, they got negative results.

That was disappointing. Green River investigators suspected that Ridgway had taken his victims to one of the bedrooms, probably the spare bedroom. But they knew that he shared his house from spring to late fall in 1982 with a couple to help pay his mortgage. He had fashioned a space for himself—a combination bedroom/storage area—in the garage, living there weekdays and disappearing each weekend. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to bring girls to his house during those months. Still, he had lived there alone for two years before Judith moved in.

Even though the crime scene technicians worked their way down to the underlying carpet pads, bare floors, and baseboards, they found nothing of evidentiary value. They looked at the walls for signs that they had been repainted, but whatever had happened here had taken place long ago. It seemed impossible that there was no sign of the hapless girls trapped alone with a killer, their screams—if any—drowned out by the constant roar of the freeway just beyond the edge of the backyard. Even the crawl space beneath the house was empty of clues.

Finally the crime scene technicians were done, and the bewildered family who currently occupied the residence were allowed to come back in. Did they even know what might have happened in the house where they lived? With their tentative grasp of English, it was hard to tell. The county would, of course, replace and repair the torn carpets and baseboards, restoring the house to the way it had been.

Next, the state patrol teams moved several miles south to the Ridgway’s interim home in Des Moines near Salt Water State Park and the big house in Auburn. Each move had been to a better neighborhood, and their current house was a much larger and more expensive home. In both the Des Moines and Auburn searches, they looked for souvenirs, photos, hairs, fibers, prints or blood, mementoes from the victims, hidden jewelry, bloodstained clothing, weapons, anything that might link Ridgway to the victims with hard physical evidence. He had been married to Judith for a long time, but she was not a suspect, even though she had lived with him in all these houses.

Most serial killers cannot resist keeping a cache of items to remind them of their crimes. And Judith never questioned her husband about anything. It would have been comparatively easy for him to hide something from her, stowed up in rafters or behind insulation.

They found nothing like that.

Ridgway was in jail, and Judith hidden away in a hotel, still dazed by the way her life as she had known it had come to a halt. The only remaining occupants of their house in Auburn were feline. There were cats and kittens all over, playing and dashing around, and the criminalists had been instructed, “Don’t let the kittens out!”

They were careful to shut the doors so that the animals were safe. The team’s goal was to find as much as they could without doing damage to the house itself. If need be, there were techniques to X-ray the walls later. “My impression was that it was a very nice home,” one of the forensic searchers said, “but its decor was old-fashioned, outdated, and it looked like it had been decorated with things from the seventies, even though it wasn’t that old. It was so feminine. There was no indication at all that a man lived there. It was cluttered with plants, knickknacks, dolls, crocheted doilies, and things some women like. Every flat surface was covered with collectibles and ‘stuff.’ There was nothing at all of him there.”

Most of the decor did smack of another era, but it appeared to be a comfortable home where an average American family might live. There were multicolored crocheted afghans with the familiar zigzag pattern draped over the backs of couches and recliners, flowered pillows, life-size ceramic cats on the floor, a fully equipped oak entertainment center, arrangements of artificial flowers, wood stacked by the fireplace, and framed prints of angels, flowers, and ships. One frame held twenty family pictures. Mary Ridgway was in several, wearing harlequin glasses with her black hair teased into a high bouffant style. There were photos of Chad as a child, and some that were probably of Gary and his brothers in their early years.

The furniture was plush and solid. None of it seemed brand-new, but it looked cozy. “They were major pack rats, though,” one of the searchers said. “There was too much of everything in that split-level house, but it was clean, dusted, and reasonably neat in the living room and kitchen area.”

The master bedroom had a lovely floral bedspread and its double closet was filled with his and her clothing, ironed and carefully hung on hangers that all pointed the same way, shoes lined up neatly beneath.

When the crime scene team moved to the other bedrooms, however, they opened doors and stood back, stunned. “Oh, man!” one breathed.

Every available space, except for pathways, was filled with towering stacks of things. These rooms obviously weren’t to be lived in, but were only for the storage of items that had been packed tightly and saved, or possibly resold. Both of the Ridgways appeared to be consumed with a desire to squirrel things away, possibly just for the sake of having them. The forensic searchers had heard that they were regulars at swap meets, but this was bizarre. The rooms were orderly enough, but chock-full. The couple must have spent hours arranging and stacking their obviously secondhand possessions.

The living-dining area and the kitchen were sprinkled liberally with knickknacks, but these rooms were packed so tightly that the Washington State Patrol technicians couldn’t begin to process them for possible evidence, and they were grateful that that wasn’t part of their assignment; the task force detectives would have to go through the boxes and bins.

Although Judith had said she was rarely away from Gary, she had visited relatives from time to time. The WSP technicians knew there were often spots suspects didn’t think about wiping clean. In each house they processed, the team members looked for latent fingerprints and flecks of blood under protected surfaces, along edges of shelves and on the undersides of tables. Picture frames were often a good source for partial prints.

They lifted several for comparison, but these, too, would prove to be disappointing.

Outside the Auburn house, investigators were carefully turning dirt over around rhododendrons and other bushes, lifting up sod and leaving excavated squares and rectangles in an organized grid dig. Judith had been upset at the thought that her beloved poodle might be dug up from its grave, so they were careful to rebury it. “They were digging the heck out of the yard,” one state technician commented, “but really trying not to kill the stuff that was growing there.”

Even in gray December, anyone interested in gardening could tell that this was a carefully tended yard, and the Ridgways’ neighbors told detectives and reporters that gardening was one of Gary’s main topics during over-the-fence chats. He kept his lawn in top shape, and he and Judith spent a lot of time working side by side in their garden spots. All of the earth moved in the massive digs was replaced, but no buried bones were found. Wherever the bodies of the still missing victims were, they weren’t hidden within the sanctity of Gary Ridgway’s properties or former homes.

After she was allowed to move back into her house, Judith Ridgway went to the sheriff’s department’s Burien precinct and waited patiently to see someone. She seemed so lost and timid that a Community Service Officer and a volunteer who often helped out with clerical tasks approached her to see if they could help her. They were surprised when they heard her last name.

“She had come to find out how she could file for damage compensation for her house after it was searched,” the volunteer recalled. “She seemed bewildered by everything that had happened. She told us that the police wanted her to testify against her husband, but that she couldn’t do that—she was too frightened at the thought of getting up in front of all those people in the courtroom. We felt sorry for her.”

From jail, Ridgway wrote to Judith in his cramped, misspelled style. Trusties Xeroxed his letters, hoping to sell them as collectors’ items, perhaps on eBay, unaware that, legally, the contents belonged to him and not to them. He told Judith that his years with her were the happiest of his life. And while that may well have been true, investigators were not at all convinced that he had stopped his stalking and prowling during the many years they had been together.

Predictably, he had been denied bail when his case came before a judge. Gary Ridgway did not appear in person but waived that right and let his attorneys Mark Prothero and James Robinson, from the Associated Counsel for the Accused, speak for him. As for the information that the public waited for avidly, there wasn’t much. They weren’t even afforded a glimpse of Ridgway being led down the marbled halls of the courthouse in the custody of several armed deputies.

On December 5, Gary Ridgway was formally charged with four counts of aggravated murder in the deaths of Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Every corpse but “Cookie” Hinds’s had provided DNA that matched Ridgway’s, but the circumstantial evidence linking Hinds to the other cases was overwhelming. Again, Ridgway remained in his ultra-security cell, perhaps afraid to face the public’s rage. Legally, he wasn’t obligated to appear at these early hearings, but, at some point, he was going to have to come out and enter a plea.

Prosecutor Norm Maleng announced that he would not plea bargain with Ridgway. If convicted, he would face either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. He said that senior deputy prosecutors Jeff Baird and Marilyn Brenneman would represent the prosecutor’s office in the marathon legal procedures that lay ahead.

Without a defendant to film, the media turned to the usual interviews that accompany every high-profile crime. The Ridgways’ neighbors and co-workers voiced their shock that someone on their street or in their workplace should be arrested for such heinous crimes. They recalled a quiet man who had seemed anxious to make friends, their reactions very much like those Matt Haney had evoked when he canvassed Gary’s former neighborhood in 1987.

The only thing Ridgway had done to annoy any of his neighbors around his Auburn property had been to cut down many of the towering firs on his large lot, but that was his choice. And back on 218th and 32nd Avenue South, neighbors who had lived there in the eighties recalled how he had tried to organize a block watch targeting prostitutes, telling them that he suspected sex workers and their johns were parking nearby, leaving needles and condoms in the street. He had appeared to be obsessed with the wickedness of prostitutes, even though it seemed unlikely that their quiet street would attract sex for sale.

At the Kenworth plant in Renton, Ridgway’s co-workers realized how on target they had been when they referred to him as “G.R.” and “Green River Gary.” Aside from his tendency to invade the personal space of female employees, he had been a somewhat pathetic fixture at Kenworth, a rather slow man who tried to be gregarious. “He’d go out of his way to be friendly,” one co-worker said. “You’d see him coming down the hall and he’d be smiling and all happy. If he didn’t know your name, he’d still say, ‘Hi, friend!’ If he was standing by the coffee machine and you walked by, he’d stop you and buy you a cup. In the cafeteria, he’d sit with groups and join in the conversation, but he wouldn’t contribute much. He just wanted to belong real bad.”

Other Kenworth employees remembered Ridgway’s bizarre transformations from a Bible-quoting fanatic to a man who made obscene sexual remarks as he sat in the cafeteria. In either mode, his actions had been inappropriate, but not ominous. A few people who had known him said “I told you so,” but not many. Most were flabbergasted to see the man nobody had paid much attention to at the top of the nightly news.

THERE WERE RUMORS that Ridgway’s wife and brothers had come to visit him in jail, but they weren’t substantiated.

Jon Mattsen interviewed Ridgway’s younger brother, who was currently living on their deceased parents’ property. Although Gary had once helped him get a job at Kenworth, it was obvious the brothers weren’t close to one another or to their older brother. Younger than Gary by two years, Tom Ridgway appeared to know virtually nothing about him, his life, his motivations, his fears, or what hobbies he might have. “I know he always had a girlfriend, somewhere,” Tom told Mattsen, but he didn’t know anything much about Gary’s three marriages beyond what Mary Ridgway had told him.

There was a strange disconnect among the Ridgway brothers, almost as if they had been raised in a vacuum where family ties meant little. The last times Tom and Gary had been together were at their mother’s funeral and a few years before that, at their father’s funeral. Pressed to recall any other interaction, Tom remembered that he had asked Gary to find a part for his Suzuki Samurai, a 4×4 truck designed to drive off-road. “My life revolves around that Samurai,” he said, and Mattsen looked up sharply to see if he was serious. He seemed to be.

Tom said Gary had to be pretty well set financially because he had thirty-five years at Kenworth, “and he’s a penny-pincher and a Dumpster-diver…. He’d go down to Levitz where they throw [broken] glass-top tables into the Dumpster at night and pick it up. ‘Oh, it just needs a sheet of glass. I’ll just [get] glass and set it on there’ and he’s got a brand-new table. So for a freebie, he’s making thirty bucks.”

Gary’s younger brother was adamant that Gary was always with Judith, and read only free magazines you could pick up at the grocery store like Little Nickel want ads. As far as Gary’s arrests for approaching prostitutes, he’d never heard of them. Tom hadn’t the faintest idea about Gary’s sex life. Indeed, he knew so little about his own brother that an interview with a stranger on the street might have elicited more information.

“What do you think about everything that’s going on?” Mattsen asked, referring to the Green River arrests. “Do you think he could be responsible for—”

“Well, anything is possible, but I just can’t picture it. ’Cause he’s opposite of what I am, you know. I was always the wild one.”

Tom said that Gary had taken their parents’ deaths hard, but that was because Gary hadn’t been the one looking after them—Tom said he and his wife were the caregivers, so Gary seemed surprised to find out how close to death they’d been.

GARY RIDGWAY would be a curiosity in jail, but not a popular inmate. Some of the men in nearby cells recalled that he was pleasant enough and didn’t cause any trouble, but none of them had any respect for a man who had reportedly killed dozens of young women. Later, those who could get close enough urinated outside his cell so that the yellow puddles would flow toward him.

He received a visit from one of Seattle’s venerable criminal defense attorneys—Tony Savage, a gentle and rumpled bear of a man whose signature brown beard of the sixties was now white. For decades, Savage was known for taking on any number of infamous cases where the death penalty seemed sure to be invoked. He was a strong voice for the defense, and one who had always been against the death penalty. Savage had defended dozens of Washington’s most loathsome clients—clearly not with the hope of acquittals but to save their lives. He was a brilliant and kind man who seemed worn down by the decades of dealing with defendants accused of ghastly crimes, but he was good, and if he consented to represent him, Ridgway could not do better.

Asked about Gary Ridgway’s state of mind during the days after his arrest for murder, Savage said, “I think he’s doing very well, considering the pressure he’s under.”

Could Ridgway afford someone like Tony Savage? Probably not, unless Savage did it pro bono or was appointed as a public defender. It was difficult to imagine how any attorney could prepare for a trial where the victim toll might swell to almost four dozen. How long would it take in trial? Years, certainly.

If Savage was going to take on Ridgway, he would need help, a whole phalanx of lawyers and legal assistants. Gary and Judith Ridgway had some equity in their house, though no one knew how much, and several vehicles. There was the house left by Mary and Tommy Ridgway, reportedly for sale for $219,000. But any sale proceeds had to be split three ways, and allegedly the three brothers had already squabbled over that division of property. Even millionaires could go broke paying for the best criminal defense attorneys for years.

It seemed ironic now that Ridgway hadn’t wanted to pay an attorney to defend him on the loitering for prostitution charge. Realistically, the trials that lay ahead were going to cost an estimated $12 million. And most of it would probably come from King County taxpayers.