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: 35 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

55

GARY RIDGWAY was expected to plead guilty on forty-eight murder counts on November 5, 2003. Prosecuting attorney Norm Maleng and Sheriff Dave Reichert and their staffs held a meeting that almost all of the victims’ families attended. So there would be no surprises in the courtroom, they wanted the families to know why they had chosen the path they were taking, and to discuss their reasons for accepting Ridgway’s guilty plea. The State had agreed to the Defense’s proffer way back in June, but absolute secrecy was maintained. Accepting a guilty plea to aggravated murder in the first degree where the death penalty can be invoked violates statutes because, essentially, it allows a defendant to commit suicide. This plea bargain would save Ridgway’s life, effectively eliminating the possibility of his being executed. For five months, he had allegedly been cooperating with the Green River Task Force, although some investigators thought he was still minimalizing his crimes.

The majority of the survivors accepted Norm Maleng’s choice to plea bargain; some did not. They wanted to see Ridgway dead. They always would.

It had not been an easy decision for Maleng to make, nor a popular one with some voters, but politics had never driven him. In the end, he knew that he was doing the best thing for the most people. If his office had proceeded to what would be endless trials and appeals, Maleng doubted many questions would have been answered for those who still grieved for their children. He knew the pain of losing a child. One wintry day in 1989, his daughter, twelve-year-old Karen Leslie Maleng, was killed in a sledding accident on a snowy public street. Seattleites remembered that and the prosecutor’s quiet courage in the face of such tragedy.

On that first Thursday in November, Superior Court Judge Richard A. Jones’s courtroom was filled with families and friends, investigators and the media, all of whom had passed through heavy security. Ridgway shuffled in wearing his jail scrubs, his back to the gallery, a harmless-looking little man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses.

Gary Ridgway’s voice was calm and emotionless as he acknowledged that he fully understood that he had signed away his rights to a trial in return for avoiding execution. He said, “Yes, I did” when Jeff Baird asked him multiple times if he had signed one clause or the other with his initials. Yes, he knew he would have no jury, no appeals, no new trials, no hope of ever walking free again. But he would live. He was an automaton now, carefully keeping his back to the gallery behind him, and he seemed no threat.

But the depth of his perversion would soon destroy that illusion. Although the defense quickly waived Baird’s reading the entire sixteen pages of the charges, the gallery would hear enough.

Judge Jones had asked Ridgway to state, in his own words, why he was pleading guilty to forty-eight counts of murder, and he complied, although his confession had more legalese in it than he might generally use.

There was no way for the prosecution team to describe what Ridgway had done in “an antiseptic manner,” Baird warned the judge and observers. The language would be graphic and disturbing, just as the hundreds of hours of taped interviews had been. Now, the public heard some of the worst of the acting out of Gary Ridgway’s fantasies.

As Baird read Ridgway’s statement aloud, there were muffled gasps and grief-stricken faces in the crowd on the other side of the courtroom’s rail. “I killed the forty-eight women listed in the State’s second amended information. In most cases, when I murdered these women, I did not know their names. Most of the time, I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory of their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight….

“I killed them all in King County. I killed most of them in my house near Military Road, and I killed a lot of them in my truck, not far from where I picked them up. I killed some of them outside. I remember leaving each woman’s body in the place where she was found…. I picked prostitutes because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without being caught.”

The entire summary of evidence would be released later. Baird and the other prosecutors had brilliantly winnowed down thousands of pages of police follow-ups and statements into a horrendous document recounting the crimes of a man consumed with cruelty and killing for more than forty years.

It didn’t seem to trouble him; Ridgway answered “Guilty” in a monotone voice forty-eight times as the names of the dead girls—and four who had no names—were read aloud. Either he didn’t care about them or he had no affect at all. It was probably the former. Never once in discussing his crimes had Ridgway appeared to have any remorse or regret as he talked with detectives about the murders he had committed; any emotional pain he’d felt was for his losses. There was no way to describe it verbally, but now they saw what he was, a roving predator who had perfected his techniques for luring the vulnerable with the same bland vacuity he demonstrated in court, killing them efficiently as he robbed them of air, allowing himself no more than an hour to load them into his truck—headed for the wilderness where he would throw them away.

Any living creature deserved better, and these were human beings sacrificed to fulfill his sexual appetite and assuage his rage, a rage the cause of which seemed unclear even to him. Gary Ridgway demonstrated a seemingly endless capacity as a killing machine.

As the charges were read, it was apparent that there were some unexpected and heretofore unknown victims who came after the young women who had become familiar to those who followed the Green River cases. In the months of interrogation, Ridgway’s questioners had discovered that the murders had not stopped in 1984 or even 1985. After Judith moved in with him, the fires of his rage had been somewhat banked but not extinguished. He continued to patronize prostitutes and sit in dark spots along the Strip, watching the girls, seeking prey. On weekends, he had attended swap meets and garage sales with his trusting wife, gone camping and gardened. And he’d rarely missed work. But he had still found time for his favorite hobby: killing.

And killing was what he was all about. The spontaneous erections of his teenage years were long since gone even in the eighties. The women who went with him had had to perform oral sex to harden his penis enough so he was able to get behind them for intercourse. More important, he’d needed that position so he could choke them with his forearm. If they didn’t die from his throttling them, he stood on their necks to finish the job.

He had perfected the murder part, and he got better over the years at hiding the dead girls. It must have been a matter of some pride for him that it had taken so many years to find some of the victims from the 1982 to 1984 spate of killing. He had apparently varied his master plans to throw the detectives off as the years rolled by—into the nineties, probably past the turn of the century.

THE BODY OF CINDY SMITH, the “Punky Brewster” girl who had just come home from California happily betrothed, hadn’t been found for thirty-nine months. Children playing in a ditch near Green River Community College in June 1987, took a stick to poke at a pile of debris. They screamed and ran home when a human skull rolled out. With dental records, Cindy had been identified almost immediately. Ridgway had been confident that he could lead task force investigators to where he had left the rest of her body, but he faltered. He was confused because he was certain he had left Cindy as a beginning focal point to start another cluster site, and failing to locate the bodies he considered his property upset him. Finally, it became obvious that new roads had been built, changing the topography of the area. He could only place Cindy’s resting spot from aerial photos. Once he did that, he visibly relaxed.

 

THE SECOND VICTIM he’d disposed of in that general area fit his description of the S.I.R. auto race way site, but she hadn’t been on the Green River list. Patricia Barczak was nineteen when she was last seen on October 18, 1986. A pretty, bubbly young woman with thick, frosted brown, shoulder-length hair, she had just completed a course in a culinary school and was on her way to fulfilling her dream of becoming a baker of wedding cakes. Like most girls her age, Patty was somewhat gullible when it came to men. Just before she disappeared, she was dating a man who’d led her to believe he had a successful career working at the Millionair’s Club. Because she lived in Bellevue, she didn’t know that the club, spelled without the usual e, wasn’t an exclusive social spot but rather a shelter for down-and-outers, a longtime Seattle fixture that provided meals and day jobs for men on the streets. After she discovered that her boyfriend had grossly exaggerated his status, she had trouble getting him out of her house and out of her life. To avoid him, she had to meet her girlfriends someplace else, just to get a breath of fresh air, hoping in vain that he would be gone when she returned. But he had no home to go to, and he had staked out a claim on the couch of the apartment Patty shared with her roommates. He became an early suspect in her case.

Her worried mother told Bellevue detective Jim Hansen that Patty hadn’t picked up her paycheck at the Winchell’s Donut Shop where she worked. When Hansen found many of her things, including her backpack filled with personal and religious items that mattered to her, in her “boyfriend’s” possession, he was on the hot seat, though the detective couldn’t absolutely link him to her disappearance.

So Patty Barczak wasn’t placed on the Green River victim list. When her skull was found in February 1993, two hundreds yards off Highway 18, near the entrance to the S.I.R., sheriff’s captain Mike Nault was doubtful that she could be a Green River victim. The timing was off; the profile for the GRK said he liked to leave the bodies of his victims in the wilderness where he could revisit them and fantasize. Patty’s skull was out in the open, near a freeway.

Even so, the girl who hadn’t called her frantic mother for seven years shared certain characteristics with the other victims. Animals might well have moved her skull from where it had been originally. There was a remote, but possible, chance she had met the Green River Killer. But it was impossible to determine the cause of her death because no other bones were found. Her skull was buried in an infant’s casket.

Ridgway had missed the news stories in 1993 when Patricia’s skull was found, and that disturbed him. He had meant to surprise the task force investigators by giving them this new cluster, offering up at least one new victim. Although he cared nothing for their names, faces, or lives, he prided himself on keeping track of their bodies. And he was slipping. He was finally able to verify that he’d left Patricia Barczak close to the S.I.R. exit from the freeway, and within a half mile of Cindy Smith’s skull. He referred to her as his “S.I.R. Lady,” just as he called other victims things like “the Log Lady” and “the Water Tower Lady.” He remembered that Patty had been a little overweight, and had dark hair, which, for him, was a detailed description. Only he knew if he’d left complete bodies or just their heads. Toward the later years, he had apparently decapitated many bodies, leaving the heads many miles apart from the torsos to confuse the task force.

 

ONE OF THE PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN VICTIMS that Gary Ridgway presented to his questioners was Roberta Hayes, twenty-one. She was “Bobby Joe” to her family. She had rounded cheeks and a wide smile, resembling Sally Field in her Flying Nun role. Despite her hard life, Bobby Joe looked younger than her years. But she had lived and lost so much in two decades, always seeking love and a permanent place that would be home to her. She was raised by her father and her stepmother, but she struck out on her own at the age of twelve, ill equipped for the challenge of the streets. Bobby Joe may have been running away from housework and child-care responsibilities at home. And yet she would give birth to her first child at fifteen and to four more in the next six years, all of them released to state agencies to be adopted.

Bobby Joe could be counted upon to show up at her maternal grandparents’ house for Christmas and her birthday. She said she wanted to live with them, and while she was there, things were fine. But the lure of the streets always took her away. She was two people, really, trusting and almost naive when she was with her aunts, uncles, grandparents, and brothers, but flinty and obstinate when they ran into her on the streets somewhere, even though they pleaded with her to walk away from that life. No one in her family could totally convince her of how much they loved her. It was as if the time to be loved had passed her by and she could no longer accept it without question.

Bobby Joe had close companions in “the life,” and she was drawn to them, too. She was a good and faithful friend. She usually worked the Aurora Avenue red-light area, a petite blond, blue-eyed girl who looked totally out of place. She didn’t hate cops, and often stuck her head into a police unit to say “Hi” to the patrol officers who were trying to clean up the street. They tried to reason with her, too, but no one could warn her convincingly enough that she was playing with danger.

Sometimes Bobby Joe Hayes was far from home—in Sacramento, California, or in Portland. The last time anyone recalled seeing her she was in Portland, and it was February 7, 1987. Police in the Rose City had picked her up for prostitution and released her when she said she intended to go back to Seattle.

For some reason, she was never on the Green River victim list either. Looking back, February 1987 was a period when Gary Ridgway felt very confident that he would never be identified. Matt Haney’s April 8 search warrants wouldn’t be served for two months, and Ridgway had no idea that he was under surveillance.

At some point, he slid under the radar and killed Bobby Joe Hayes. As usual, he remembered very little about her. He thought she had had blondish brown hair and been “skinny.” In 2003, he was able to draw an accurate map of the dead-end road off Highway 410 where he had left her body and, later, lead detectives to the site.

All the sixteen years Bobby Joe had been gone, her family had hoped that she would pop in at Christmas or for her birthday, yelling “Surprise!” Of course, as time passed, that possibility waned. But they didn’t know what had happened to her—not until the investigators called them in the first week of November 2003 and told them that Ridgway had confessed to killing Bobby Joe. It was both a gift and a heartbreak. They no longer had to worry if she was lost, trapped, or in pain, but they knew she was gone forever.

Marta Reeves was a delicately featured brunette woman of thirty-six, estranged from her husband and her four children, and seriously addicted to cocaine. Her only way to live and to feed her habit was to prostitute herself, and she worked the Central Area in Seattle, caught in an increasingly downward spiral. She called her husband asking for money sometime in March 1990, and he told her no. “Okay,” she said wearily, “then I’ll have to work all night.”

That was Marta’s last contact with anyone who knew her. In April, her husband received an envelope with the U.S. Postal Service’s return address. Inside was Marta’s driver’s license, which had either been found and turned in to a post office or dropped into a mailbox. By the time her husband took it to the police, it was smudged with dozens of fingerprints superimposed upon one another, making it impossible to find even a portion of a clear print large enough to feed into the AFIS computers.

Six months after Marta’s last phone call, mushroom hunters found scattered bones and some rotted clothing near the Highway 410 body cluster east of Enumclaw. That was in late September 1990; but it would be January 1991 before they were identified as Marta’s.

Marta’s body lay in a familiar woods that Gary Ridgway had described often during his almost daily interviews. He remembered the loop road off Highway 410 and pinpointed on the map where he had left Marta. As usual, he could not remember where he had picked her up, how he had killed her, or whether she was black or white. Six years after the height of his murder rampage, he was apparently stalking and killing less frequently, but the victims’ humanity was still meaningless to him.

 

ONE MURDER Ridgway admitted would never have been known had he not told the detectives about it. Originally, it had been written off as an “accidental death.” Patricia Yellow Robe was a tall, very thin woman, quite lovely when she wasn’t using drugs. She was a member of the Chippewa-Cree nation, registered at the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation in Montana. She’d grown up in Havre and then Great Falls as the oldest of ten children who had complicated connections because their parents had married and remarried. They were a handsome family—all of them—and many of Trish’s siblings were professionals, but she had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction for most of her life. In 1998, she was thirty-eight and living her usual precarious existence.

“She was always fun,” recalled a younger sister who did legal work for a prosecutor. “She was ten years older than I was, and she took care of me—I could talk to her. She took me to the fair and on shopping sprees, and she taught me how to drive.”

The Yellow Robes’ grandmother was blind, and it was Trish who had been her “eyes,” leading her gently wherever she needed to go. But later, Trish’s lifestyle was unpredictable and she would take off on a whim. She had hooked up with men who took care of her for a while, but, inevitably, those relationships ended and her family worried about her. And then she would show up like Auntie Mame, sweep up her nieces and nephews and take them for ice cream or on some adventure. Trish had three children of her own: Diamond, Emerald, and Matthew. They were raised by their fathers or her mother, who saw they needed some stability.

“We’d lose track of Trish,” her sister said with a sigh. “We asked her just to check in with us every two or three months so we would know she was okay, and usually she would. We sat together on the porch once toward the end of her life, and she told me how much she wanted to get clean and sober. She said she was sure she could beat it. She wanted to live.

“And I told her she was going to die if she didn’t,” her younger sister said. “I told her she was stronger than that, but then bad things happened and she would be gone again.”

If Trish Yellow Robe had a new boyfriend or something else she wanted to show her siblings, she would come sweeping into their offices unexpectedly. They didn’t mind because they loved her, and when she was happy, she was fun to have around. In August of 1998, the family was planning a dinner to celebrate one brother’s birthday on the eighth. “We’d just heard from her on August 4,” her sister said, “and she was due to come for dinner on his birthday. She was planning on it.”

Trish Yellow Robe didn’t make it. On the morning of Thursday, August 6, the owner of All City Wrecking, a business in the South Park area of Seattle, moved toward his locked cyclone fence and saw a woman lying just outside that fence in a gravel parking lot. At first he thought she was sleeping or had passed out, but she was dead. She was fully clothed in a T-shirt, jeans, underwear, socks, and boots.

It was Trish Yellow Robe. An autopsy revealed no possible cause of death beyond what was indicated in a tox screen of her blood, and the pathologist concluded: “The cause of death is acute, combined opiate and ethanol intoxication. The circumstances, scene investigation and postmortem examination, did not reveal evidence of significant injury. The manner of death is probable accident.”

Her family viewed her body, saddened that Trish had died so young. “We thought it was an overdose,” her sister said. “We could accept that. But she was bruised on her eye. The [prosecutors] told us that was postmortem lividity. We didn’t question that because we all knew that Trish would be the first to go.”

The task force detectives had never included Trish Yellow Robe as a possible Green River victim, and they had no information on her during the summer of 2003 as they questioned Gary Ridgway. Still, he had brought up South Park three times in June and July, all the while insisting he hadn’t killed anyone he dated in the nineties.

As they drove him around on field trips, they used the South Park parking lot as a “false site” to test him. And despite new construction over the prior decade, Ridgway recognized the site, and it stirred something in his memory. He was able to describe Trish Yellow Robe’s body placement perfectly, although actually killing a woman there was foggy in his mind.

It had taken a forensic psychologist to dredge up what Ridgway clearly did not want to remember. He was more at ease talking about the women who had died way back in the early eighties. Now it was apparent that he had murdered at least one woman fourteen years after he claimed to have stopped killing.

He didn’t recognize a photo of Trish Yellow Robe in life, but he did identify a photo of her body. Again, there was a coincidence of dates that so often happened in the Green River probe. It was August 8, 2003, when Ridgway’s memory of killing Trish popped up, five years and two days after her murder.

“I remember that one,” he said. “The one at South Park. She wouldn’t let me get behind her and screw her, and so I got madder and madder. And when we got out of the back of the truck, I opened the door for her and started choking her.”

It had been her own fault, he pointed out. “She didn’t want to spend an extra three or four minutes to have me climax and be a customer. She just said, ‘You’re over with’—something like that, and [she] got dressed, and I was still angry with her and choked her and after that I panicked. I didn’t put her in the back of the truck and take it some place. I just left it there.”

A reporter called Trish’s sister, Alanna, in late October 2003, and blurted out that Trish had just been added to the Green River list. “I thought it was a bad joke,” she said. “We had grieved for her, thinking she had died of an overdose. I told the reporter he was wrong, but he said he’d already talked to my father and it was true. Now we had to start a different kind of grieving.”

With tears marking his face, Dave Reichert read all the lost girls’ names aloud. They meant a great deal to the Green River Task Force even though they appeared to be negligible to the man who had just pleaded guilty.

Families watching and listening in the gallery would have their turn to speak, but not for weeks. Judge Jones set Ridgway’s sentencing for Thursday, December 18, 2003, exactly a week before Christmas. In thirty years of covering murder trials in Seattle, I had attended many trials that had their denouement during the holidays, always aware of the dichotomy between the decorated tree in the lobby of the King County Courthouse and the grim proceedings on the upper floors. And yet this time it seemed right. All those families who had endured so many Christmases with a hollow spot that would never be filled, an empty place at their table, or around their tree would at least have a modicum of justice.

IT WAS OBVIOUS from the time the interviewing process began that Gary Ridgway considered Dave Reichert the “Man,” the leader of all cops, the most daunting of opponents, and that he was tantalized by the idea of meeting him personally. He was, after all, the “High Sheriff,” the boss of the detectives who questioned him every day. On some of his field trips, Ridgway thought he’d glimpsed Reichert in a car driving by and asked hopefully if it was him, only to be told “No.”

They had met earlier that summer when Reichert, dressed in his perfectly pressed uniform with hash marks and gleaming brass, had come into the interview room at task force headquarters. Their first encounter had been a bit bizarre. Virtually nose-to-nose, Reichert stared at Ridgway, leaning further in toward the prisoner as his quarry shrunk back until it seemed they would both lose their balance and tip out of their chairs. They appeared not unlike a cartoon cat and mouse, with Reichert having the advantage. Minutes went by without his saying a word. Although Ridgway was clearly sweating, he had seemed unable to look away from Reichert’s piercing blue eyes. Whatever he had expected to happen if they were ever to meet, it was obvious that this silent stare wasn’t it.

The sheriff hadn’t presided over the daily interviews, but he had monitored many of them. His personal animus toward Gary Ridgway was palpable, but when he finally spoke, Reichert played with the prisoner, seemingly almost genial at first. Ridgway was too dense and too intimidated to catch on.

Reichert remarked upon their many similarities—in age and in the region where they were both raised. He even confided in Ridgway that he, too, had suffered from dyslexia when he was a boy, and could understand why Ridgway had been worried that he would have to ride the “short bus” to Woodside School, the Highline School District’s designated school for developmentally disabled students. It was a classic “You and me together” technique, and Ridgway, still wary, relaxed a little.

The sheriff commented on the irony of their ending up here in this interview room—one of them a confessed serial killer and the other the sheriff. He dangled a carrot. Wouldn’t it be something if the two of them went on the road together, giving talks and seminars to law enforcement groups and psychiatrists and psychologists? He suggested that many people would be fascinated with what each of them had to say. There had never been anything like it, but he said he figured there was a huge potential audience for a man who had killed as many victims as Ridgway had.

Ridgway nodded nervously. He didn’t know what to expect. He smiled tentatively as if he believed that Reichert was really going to take him on buses and trains and planes on some macabre dog and pony show. That would, of course, be the pinnacle of his life—to stand shoulder to shoulder with this man he clearly both admired and feared, and they would both discuss how successful he had been as a serial killer.

Sue Peters and Randy Mullinax, Jon Mattsen, Tom Jensen, and Jim Doyon had asked him questions, brought him up short and urged him to tell the truth, to stop “bullshitting” them, Drs. Chris Harris, Robert Wheeler, and Mary Ellen O’Toole had asked him the most intimate questions, and Ridgway had managed to look back at them with some shred of self-confidence. But the sheriff kept him off-balance. Reichert smiled at him, but not with his eyes. He seemed to be offering him the world, but he might jerk it back if Ridgway reached for it.

Their conversations had eventually turned into interrogations, of course. But it was much easier for Ridgway to give up secrets to the detectives with whom he felt more at ease. He could call them by their first names; Reichert was always the man in charge.