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Serial Crime News - December

Looking at wives of serial killers

By Pam Sitt
Seattle Times staff reporter

Linda Yates slept for two years in a bedroom that had a body buried outside the window.

Ralphene Brudos' husband forbade her from visiting the garage; she had to call him on the intercom when she wanted something from the freezer.

Alice Carignan found a button from a woman's dress in her husband's car and began wondering about his trips to Canada.

Their husbands would become notorious in newspaper headlines as convicted serial murderers: Robert Yates, Jerome Henry Brudos, Harvey Carignan.

Yates pleaded guilty to 13 murders in Washington state last year. Brudos is serving a life sentence in Oregon for multiple murders there. Carignan is in a Minnesota prison for killing women near Minneapolis and is suspected of murders in Washington state.

The wives, meanwhile, became the focus of the stark question: How could she not have known?

Judith Ridgway doesn't have to answer that question just yet. She is the third wife of Gary Ridgway, who has been charged in four slayings attributed to the Green River killer but remains innocent until proven guilty.

Experts offer this: Serial killers wear a "mask of sanity." Wives don't ask questions. Marriage — any marriage — is complex.

Take Linda Yates' 26-year union with her husband. In an interview with The Spokesman-Review, one of the rare times she's spoken publicly at any length, Linda Yates divulged details of a troubled marriage: Suspicions of infidelity. Squabbles over money. Romance long gone.

She stayed for the children. "They loved their dad, and I just kind of suffered through it," she said.

Such marriages are many. Such outcomes are few. Experts say serial killers are rarely married during their killing sprees, although many marry — sometimes several times — at some point in their lives.

"They go through the motions, just like any other 'normal' person," said Michael Newton, author of The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, who estimates he has the names of 2,000 killers in his head. "Some of these men have been married more than Elizabeth Taylor, and it never sticks because they can't sustain any kind of relationship."

Little research exists on the women who marry serial killers, or the nature of those relationships. Those serial killers who stay married tend to have wives who are submissive, nonassertive, unquestioning and perhaps fearful of losing their men. When their husbands are discovered, the women stand to lose much more, including their privacy.

"I think people get the impression that a serial killer is someone you can spot a mile away," said Keith Kirkingberg, a chaplain at the Spokane County Sheriff's Department who worked with the Yates family. "That only adds to the burden of the wife, because when they say, 'I have no idea,' folks are saying, 'Oh, come on, how can they not know?' "

In retrospect, Linda Yates told NBC's "Dateline" last year, there were clues — for instance, who goes on a "hunting trip" wearing cologne, as her husband once said he was doing? But, she said, "He always had answers to everything. Already prepared in his mind, I think."

Serial killers can become pros at leading double lives, often hiding behind what several experts have termed a "mask of sanity."

"I don't think (the wife) 'had to know.' There are a lot of women who don't really know what their husbands are doing," said Ann Rule, a best-selling true-crime author and former Seattle policewoman.

"The average woman will imagine everything, including 'Is my husband gay?' or 'Does my husband have another woman?' before she thinks, 'Is my husband a serial killer?' "

Contrast that woman with the hundreds who have called Rule since 1982 to relay stories of bizarre and frightening behavior by their husbands or ex-husbands.

"The women I hear from are women who have suspicions they just don't want to believe," Rule said. "The men were gone odd hours, coming home dirty, wet, nervous, sleepy, drunk, smelling funny, without an explanation. ... All of these women heaved sighs of relief when I told them there were so many wives with the same stories whose husbands didn't turn out to be the Green River killer."

But like Linda Yates, there are plenty of women — suspicious or not — who stay in relationships that are far from perfect.

Laurie Strong has seen it many times in her work with couples as a clinical social worker.

"The reality is, marriage is very complex and meets a lot of needs. What's acceptable for one person may not be acceptable for another," said Strong, executive director of Jefferson Mental Health Services in Port Townsend. "My belief is that people stay in marriages that are uncomfortable for all kinds of reasons. It's far more complex than we as outsiders can blithely say."

The bottom line: It's not fair to judge the wife of the serial killer.

"The wife, if she sticks around, has to be either ignorant or submissive in some way," Newton said. "But there may be enough of a division there in (the killer's) personality ... I suppose we shouldn't rule out the possibility that even a monster can fall in love."

But Richard DeSalvo has said he will only provide the sample if Reilly will allow a member of the families' independent forensics team to observe the state's DNA testing.

Slayings may share killer's distinct style, or 'signature'

Seattle Times investigations editorRealizing that DNA evidence may link only a few of the 49 Green River killings to suspect Gary Leon Ridgway, authorities are hoping to connect him to other victims through a distinctive behavioral "signature" that might characterize his crimes.

December 5, 2001

Dave Reichert was a fresh-faced, 31-year-old detective when he started investigating the Green River killer case in 1982, with the discovery of a second dead woman in the Green River near Kent.

Late last Friday, the 51-year-old King County sheriff, just elected to his second term, gathered reporters to announce that his office had arrested Gary Leon Ridgway in the deaths of four women.

Far from ending the Green River saga, the arrest seems to create as many new questions as it answers old ones. In an interview yesterday, Reichert answered a few of those questions.

Q: With Gary Ridgway about to be charged with four of the Green River killings, how strong a case do you think you have? What are some of the specific things you'll be looking for to try to connect him to the rest?

Reichert: We have a very strong case, linked to DNA evidence. We also have other evidence, of course, that we collected back in the 1980s.

Some of the things we're going to be doing now are ... beginning to correlate the evidence we collected at the four searches that we have done. There will be additional information, I'm sure, coming from interviews we've done with neighbors and co-workers, and they may lead us to additional searches.

Q: Are there specific things in the evidence you already have in hand, from the task-force investigation, that you can mention as being particularly interesting?

Reichert: We collected a lot of evidence when we worked this case in the mid-'80s, over 10,000 items. ... So what we're hoping for is that some of those things that we collected during the (recent) searches might match some of those things that we collected from the bodies.

Q: You've said this week that your office will be looking at Ridgway in connection with the deaths or disappearances of 50 or 60 women in King County since the Green River killer supposedly stopped in 1984. Why? And what are some similarities you're looking at?

Reichert: Well, I think it's going to be more like 80 cases that we're going to be looking at, and those are cases that are unsolved female homicides. A number of those are prostitutes. It is my strong feeling that Gary Ridgway is absolutely responsible for these four homicides. He's been here this entire time. So I think in order to be responsible we need to look at him for those other murders.

Q: In 1987, it was decided that there wasn't enough evidence to charge Ridgway in connection with any of the Green River slayings. How was that decided?

Reichert: We had a number of ... pieces of information (for) ... probable cause to search the property that Mr. Ridgway lived at. We did that. And during that search, unfortunately, we didn't find evidence to connect him to any of these cases. ...

We have to have physical evidence. We have to have an eyewitness or we've got to have a confession by the suspect in order to charge (him).

Q: Looking back on the hunt for the Green River killer, and its ups and downs, what do you think the biggest mistake was? What would you do differently?

Reichert: We learned a lot. We didn't do everything right, obviously. We're human beings. But ... we were used as a model across the country in the way we organized ourselves. We were sought after as experts in outdoor-crime-scene processing, and collecting evidence and managing major cases.

I think one of the things we would certainly change is that in late 1982, there was a decision made to cut the task force back. That's when I was left alone, from fall of 1982 to ... late summer of 1983.

We lost a lot of precious time there, I think, in following up on a lot of leads. I couldn't do it all myself.

Q: You got your first DNA matches Sept. 4 but didn't make the arrest until Nov. 30. Why not? Why wasn't he placed under constant surveillance during that time?

Reichert: What we wanted to do is make sure we had a solid case. ... One DNA sample on one victim, in our opinion ... was not enough. So we submitted other very important evidence and hoped for the best. And we were able to make two other cases, which really strengthened our case, as you can imagine.

Not only did we have DNA matches from two (victims) at the river scene — one on the bank, Opal Mills, and the other, Marcia Chapman, in the river — now we could connect Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds because of the way they were staged at the riverside.

But we also had another body away from the river, 20 miles east in Maple Valley. And that was a huge step.

Ridgway was placed under loose surveillance. One of the things we learned about him is he always drove in an erratic manner — we learned this in the '80s — always looking for anybody who might be following him. And the last thing we wanted to do is alert him that we were onto him.

Q: Why wasn't Ridgway watched more closely between 1987 and now?

Reichert: We couldn't prove that he was the suspect. So how do you justify, to the powers-that-be that hold the purse strings, that 'We think this guy could be the killer, so we need $2 million a year to work him?' It just wasn't going to happen.

Q: How confident are you of closing more Green River cases? How many, realistically, do you think your detectives will be able to close?

Reichert: I feel confident that we're going to connect additional cases to Ridgway. And I'm confident that along the way we're going to solve some cases that (weren't committed by) Gary Ridgway.

Q: Would you be willing to trade the death penalty if Ridgway offered to cooperate in closing other cases?

Reichert: When we come to that bridge ... I will consult with (King County Prosecuting Attorney) Norm Maleng, and we will make a decision then.

Q: Are you still not ready to call him the Green River killer?

Reichert: What I want to do is make sure that we can tie him to as many of the (crime) sites as possible. And so, although he looks very good as the Green River killer, it's incumbent on us to be absolutely positive.

Authorities from Oregon and British Columbia sharing facts

Monday, December 3, 2001

By VANESSA HO
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Authorities in Vancouver, B.C., and Oregon will be investigating Gary Ridgway for possible connections to a string of unsolved cases in their jurisdictions -- particularly in light of reports from neighbors that Ridgway often traveled to British Columbia and Oregon in his motor home.

A Vancouver task force is investigating the disappearance of 45 women, most of them prostitutes who worked in the city's downtown Eastside neighborhood.

Yesterday, Constable Danielle Efford of the Vancouver Police Department said detectives are eager to talk more with King County investigators.

"We have been liaisoning with law enforcement authorities in Washington state regarding this gentleman," she said. "Of course, we are interested in him."

And last month, task-force investigators -- who are also from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police -- met with King County Sheriff Dave Reichert to share information.

In Oregon, authorities will reopen four cases that have been connected to the Green River killings. In 1985, the bodies of four women were found in Washington County, just southwest of Portland.

They were:

Tammie Liles, 16, who was last seen in downtown Seattle. Her remains were found April 23, 1985, in Tualatin, Ore.

• Denise Bush, 22, who was last seen leaving to buy cigarettes on Pacific Highway South. Her skull and other remains were found June 12, 1985, in Tigard, Ore. Other skeletal remains were later found in Tukwila in 1990.

   

   

• Shirley Sherrill, 18, who was last seen in Seattle's International District. Her remains were found in the same area as Bush's.

   

   

• The remains of an unidentified woman who was between 17 and 19 years old. She was found with Liles' remains.

   

  In Vancouver, the cases of the missing women span 17 years. Efford said investigators have reviewed thousands of files and tips and compiled a list of 600 suspects before Ridgway's arrest.

  Police have said the Green River killings stopped in 1984, but two unsolved cases in the early 1990s have led some to cast doubt on that timing.

  In 1991, the body of 17-year-old Sarah Habakangas of Virginia was found in North Bend. She had been strangled.

  In 1992, the body of 19-year-old Nicole French of Sacramento, Calif., was found near the same site. She, too, had been strangled.

  Both women had been prostitutes who hung out on Pacific Highway South. French disappeared from the same intersection as two of the Green River Killer's victims.

  Investigators at the time discounted a link between the women and the Green River Killer.

  They said the serial killer took more pains to conceal the bodies of his victims; the way the bodies of the two women were dumped didn't fit his pattern.

  But a 1998 APBnews.com report questioned the logic. It noted French had died the same way as many of the serial killer's victims -- strangled with her own sweat pants.

  King County Sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said previous decisions on whether to link certain homicide victims to the Green River cases were often subjective and controversial.

  He said detectives don't know when the killings stopped. But he said the current investigation will look at all unsolved killings of prostitutes in King County, regardless of when they were killed.

Monday, December 3, 2001

By ELAINE PORTERFIELD, MARGARET TAUS AND VANESSA HO
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

Since the first body was found on a summer day 19 years ago, the Green River killings have touched hundreds of lives.

Here is a glimpse at some of those stories:

Night after night for four months, Robert Rois walked some of Seattle and SeaTac's seamiest streets.

He was searching for Carrie Ann Rois, a pretty and inquisitive girl, who had vanished without a trace in 1983.

During those walks along First and Second avenues and Pacific Highway South, Rois was often accompanied by the young woman's grandfather -- his uncle.

"It was necessary," Rois said. "My uncle and I were very close, and she was his only granddaughter. He was very sad."

In March 1985, long after those walks ended, Carrie Ann Rois' remains were found in the Star Lake neighborhood in South King County, where she had been dumped.

With Friday's arrest, Rois is determined to sit back and watch the case unfold. For now, he's trying to reserve judgment.

"I'll wait and find out what his motive was," he said of the arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway.

"What surprised me was that he stayed in the area. But I guess if he had ran, to Kansas or wherever, the police would have been on his tail."

On Aug. 15, 1982, Donald Reay was finishing his rotation as the on-call pathologist when the call came in: There was a body in the Green River.

	Dr. Donald Reay answers questions during a 1986 interview regarding victims of the Green River Killer. / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

By the time he arrived, a second badly decomposed body had been found, and as the sun sank lower in the day, there was a third on the banks.

Reay was the chief medical examiner in King County during the height of the Green River investigation.

The serial killings had been the most frustrating cases in his career, and he still remembers that shocking day on the river 19 years ago.

Yesterday, he was thrilled with the break in the investigation.

"I thought this was a dead-end case," he said. "It was a total surprise to me."

As investigators handled an increasing number of Green River cases, Reay's office became a standard-bearer for death investigations and outdoor crime scenes nationwide.

Knowing that technology would someday advance, Reay instituted procedures for investigators to retain evidence samples "basically indefinitely."

And Reay's chief medical investigator, Bill Haglund, a forensic anthropologist, became known for his methodical work in processing skeletal remains.

	Bill Haglund, right, of the King County Medical Examiner's Office helps remove remains of two victims near a baseball field just north of Sea-Tac Airport. / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

Haglund's work on the Green River cases later led to work in exhuming bodies in Croatia for a war-crime tribunal, and in Guatemala, where 40,000 people were executed in the 1980s.

Mary Sue Bello disappeared Oct. 11, 1983.

It took one year and a day to find her remains.

Today, Bello's mother, who asked that her name not be used, still has nightmares of her daughter's death.

Her family, however, never held a memorial service for her daughter; Mary Sue Bello's grandparents couldn't bear it.

The Green River Killer, she said, destroyed so many lives, so many families and so many dreams.

Ridgway's arrest, though, has provided her with fresh hope that her own daughter's killer will be brought to justice.

"There's got to be closure," she said.

Her daughter was 25 when she vanished. She would have turned 44 Dec. 22.

"I remember how she used to be so happy," the mother said. "She was always helping others. She was so bighearted."

Galen Hirschi remembers the tennis shoes.

On July 15, 1982, Hirschi and his best friend were riding their bikes in Kent and Auburn.

They stopped on the Peck Bridge over the Green River to rest before pedaling up a hill.

That's when Hirschi, then 15, spotted something.

"I happened to look down and couldn't quite figure out what it was," he said yesterday from his Auburn home. "The thing that caught my eye was tennis shoes. That doesn't go away."

Wondering why they weren't moving in the current, he and his friend waded into the water. At first, Hirschi thought it was a mannequin, and he considered picking it up to move it. Then his friend saw the hair floating under water.

What the boys found that day was the body of Wendy Coffield, a 16-year-old runaway.

The following month, the bodies of four more young women and girls would be found, and police began to realized that they might be dealing with a serial killer.

Over the years, Hirschi has kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the Green River killings.

Since Friday's arrest, he's now buying stacks of newspapers.

"I've got to get a bigger book," he said.

Sept. 15, 1982, would mark the last time anyone would see Mary Bridget Meehan alive.

Her brother, Tim Meehan, was just a teenager then.

This weekend, Meehan, who's now married and lives in Maple Valley, is trying to explain to his young children what happened to the aunt they never knew.

"It still hurts, what happened," he said. "Someday it will be easier to sit down and talk about it and understand what happened back then."

Now that a suspect has been arrested in four of the slayings, Meehan wonders whether that means his sister's killer has been caught, too.

"We're excited that somebody has been caught," he said. "All I really want to know is if this is the guy that did it, and if it is, that justice be served."

For Meehan, justice means that prosecutors may have to offer Ridgway a deal to spare his life in return for telling them everything he may know about the Green River killings.

"I would hope they would ... swing that deal of life in prison over the death penalty to get the information out of him if he is the one that actually did it all."

This report includes information from KOMO-4 News.

Once-thriving SeaTac strip now home to lonely few

Monday, December 3, 2001

By JOSHUNDA SANDERS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

SEATAC -- In the shadow of Sea-Tac Airport, on this seedy stretch of state Route 99, it used to be so easy to sell sex on a Saturday night.

It was here, near a cluster of cheap motels -- the Ben Carol, the Spruce and the Moonrise -- that Gary Ridgway would cruise the strip, looking for hookers.

And it was here, near these motels, where some of the 49 wayward women killed in the Green River killings were last seen alive.

Before the murders began in 1982, the area between South 144th Street and 24th Avenue South used to be a prime spot for prostitution.

But now, you're not likely to see any women walking by themselves on this lonely stretch of highway.

In the cramped lobby of the Ben Carol Motel, the night manager, a small, blond woman, plays nervously with her pearls when asked about Ridgway.

She does not give her name, but mentions she has four adult daughters.

She has never seen Ridgway, but remembers the women who used to walk by in droves during the 1980s.

"There would be at least 50 of them," she says, tugging on her beige sweater and peering over her glasses. "They'd be walking up and down all night. I remember thinking I could do something to help them."

Then, the familiar faces started to disappear.

"The opportunity to turn their lives around was taken from them," she says, shaking her head. "It's such a shame. Most people forgot about this case until Friday."

The hotel's owner, Edward Lin, echoes the night manager.

In a breezy motel room that reeks of stale cigarettes, dingy blue curtains frame the window, and a tangerine-colored comforter is draped over the bed. The room is silent, except for the loud whir of the air conditioner.

"Prostitution is not completely gone, but it is better than it was at that time," says Lin, who took over the motel in 1984. "I would be very surprised to see one walking down the street now."

A familiar face

Two doors down behind the Spruce Motel, two women, Tree and Pat, are cooking turkey and Rice-a-Roni in a small room. Folded navy blue bandanas hang like ornaments from the ceiling fan.

	>"I remember thinking I could do something to help them," says the Ben Carol Motel's night manager of the women who used to walk by in droves, before the city incorporated. Jeff Larsen / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

When told about Ridgway's arrest, Tree grabs her cell phone.

"God, I have to call my mother," she says. "She used to be a prostitute back when that happened. The Green River Killer got one of her friends."

Tree was only a girl back then.

"We used to go to the Green River, and people used to tell us about that guy who was dumping girls in the river."

She stands up, then sits down.

She smokes a Newport, then dials her mother's number.

She pulls out pictures of her mother that she keeps in an old cell-phone box. The frail woman in the photo wears a long white T-shirt. She has haunting brown eyes, and there is not even a hint of a smile on her face.

Today, Tree's mother lives in Eastern Washington.

But this strip used to be her stomping grounds, before she quit "the business" in the late 1980s.

"It had nothing to do with the killings; she just wanted to stop," says Tree, 22.

When the food is almost done, a man wanders in. There is an awkward silence. Then Tree starts talking again.

At night, on the strip, six or seven prostitutes usually walk the streets, rain or not, she says.

"These girls out here don't care. How can you have a (prostitute) stroll near a police station?" she asks, referring to the bright white sign of the Tukwila Police Department substation nearby.

"There are no pimps anymore, that's how," answers Tree's aunt, Pat, who is braiding her own hair and drinking a beer.

As Pat stares blankly at the movie, "Sister Act 2," on the television, Tree quietly scans newspaper pictures of the Green River Killer's 49 victims.

She is looking for familiar faces.

Suddenly, her jaw drops.

"I think she used to prostitute for my uncle," she says when she reaches the picture of one woman.

"Damn."

Then, her thoughts turn to Ridgway and to Friday's arrest.

"My generation is just like my mom's people," Tree says. "Friends of mine are going to have to sell their bodies for money. People die all the time, but it doesn't draw attention until it's too late.

"I guess it all depends on who you kill."

She shrugs and warns her guests that her boyfriend will be home soon.

Everyone has to leave, except her Aunt Pat.

'A creepy feeling'

About a mile down the strip, the number of motels begins to dwindle.

Outside a bar, a fiery orange neon sign reads "Trudy's Tavern."

Inside, the clack of billiards competes with country music playing on the jukebox.

Beneath the two televisions over the bar, men hunched over tall glasses of beer watch CNN or a show about snow leopards on Animal Planet. Over a span of three hours, several women wander in and out.

Any of them could be looking for a "John," says Kristie, the bartender.

"They come in plain clothes," she says. "They'll bum a cigarette or try to get a beer from a guy."

Her feathery blond hair covers her face as she scans the newspaper. She fills a pitcher and talks without getting a bit of beer on her red shirt.

She talks about the women who frequent this bar; the women who come in minutes before closing; the women with street names like "Hootie."

Many, she says, are addicted to crack cocaine.

Sitting at the bar, a small man with glassy blue eyes will tell you that he's been addicted to the drug for about a decade. He recognizes some of the Green River Killer's victims.

"It made me break down and cry to hear about those murders," he says in a near whisper.

"It's a creepy feeling. I knew a lot of them by face."

It's now approaching 1 a.m. yesterday.

Back outside, on the strip, a few men in clusters stand under the bus shelters along the highway. But not a single woman is walking the strip.

Monday, December 3, 2001

By MARGARET TAUS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

On the morning of Aug. 15, 1982, Richard Kraske had returned home from the grocery store when his pager went off. The bodies of two young women had just been found in the Green River in Kent.

As King County police detectives scoured the scene, Detective Dave Reichert tripped over a third body in the grass.

	King County sheriff investigators check inside the front door of a home in SeaTac once lived in by Green River serial killer suspect Gary Ridgway. Jeff Larsen / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

A month earlier, two boys on bicycles had found the body of Wendy Coffield, a 16-year-old runaway, in the same river.

But it wasn't until the bodies of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds and Opal Mills turned up that August day that police started to track what they thought was a serial killer.

Another two years would pass before a truck painter named Gary Leon Ridgway approached detectives and said he had information about the Green River killings. Over the years, detectives would continue gathering evidence on Ridgway, who had emerged as one of the key suspects in the nation's largest unsolved serial homicide case.

There would be lie detector tests and DNA samples. There would be interviews and searches of his home and workplace. Yet, it would take police another 17 years before they finally had enough to arrest Ridgway.

Why did it take so long?

And is it possible that whoever killed all 49 women and dumped their bodies in or near the Green River suddenly stopped their murderous spree?

Although psychological profiles indicate that serial killers often continue their attacks until they're caught or die, Kraske points out that serial killers are individuals who think and act differently.

"I don't subscribe to the theory of the profilers that they keep killing," said Kraske, a police major who has since retired.

"I think a lot of times, they're out there to prove something. And they can rest back, take a break."

And he acknowledges that the investigation, in which police collected the names of 20,000 potential suspects, will be criticized.

"All the experts will come out and say, 'You didn't do this or didn't do that,"' he said.

"All I can say is, 'How many serial killers have you caught?'"

Investigation begins

Police knew that many of the victims were prostitutes or runaways who had strolled "the strip" near Sea-Tac Airport.

So in the beginning, police focused on that stretch of tawdry suburban sprawl.

They took down license numbers of customers as potential suspects; they gathered information from prostitutes and pimps; and they warned women they were in danger.

But they encountered their first stumbling block.

"The ladies working the strip didn't seem to take it serious, " Kraske said. "One of our teams warned one lady two days before she was found dead."

Officers also staked out the river.

Investigators, Kraske said, know that killers "always come back."

That part of the investigation, too, was hampered by a news helicopter, which flew over the scene and blew their cover.

One man whom Kraske considered a strong "person of interest" drove right into the midst of a TV crew.

By late 1982, detectives were focused on a suspect and searched his house. That man was never arrested or charged.

The investigation slowed as people were pulled off. In late 1983, Kraske transferred to the North Precinct.

"The thing was totally disorganized when I left," he recalled.

There was so much information, and yet detectives didn't have a computer to analyze it all.

That year, Vern Thomas became sheriff, head of the county police force, and he started pulling together tools for a multi-agency task force.

By then, the Green River Killer had become the target of the largest murder investigation in the country.

But the killings continued.

Enter Ridgway

By January 1984, the death toll had risen to 13.

That year, there were two significant developments in the investigation:

	On July 15, 1982, the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield was removed from the Green River, one of 49 known victims of a lone killer – or perhaps several. / Associated Press Click for larger photo

Thomas formed a task force with more than 50 investigators from various agencies and acquired a computer system with the help of $200,000 in state money and a $1 million grant.

That same year, Ridgway approached the task force offering to help, saying he had met one of the victims the year before.

Investigators had Ridgway take a lie detector test, which he passed.

But in 1985, a King County police detective named Matt Haney joined the task force, and he began taking a harder look at Ridgway.

His work is chronicled in the 1991 book "The Search for the Green River Killer."

Haney knew that in 1980, Ridgway was accused of choking a prostitute, but was released after he told police that the woman bit him first.

He knew that in 1982, Ridgway was arrested in a prostitution sting.

He found a 1982 Port of Seattle police report that showed Ridgway was parked in his pickup truck with a woman near a Little League field -- yards away from where a woman's skeleton would be recovered two years later.

Those police reports show that the woman in the truck with Ridgway that day gave police an alias. Her real name, however, matched that of one of the Green River Killer's victims.

And Haney learned of another chilling piece in Ridgway's past.

In April 1983, according to the book, Marie Malvar's boyfriend saw her get into a pickup truck. Malvar's boyfriend, who could not be reached yesterday, followed the truck, but lost it at a stoplight near Ridgway's home.

The following day, Malvar's father helped the boyfriend look for that pickup truck. They found it -- parked at Ridgway's home.

Malvar, considered one of the Green River Killer's victims, was never seen again. Ridgway denied ever meeting her.

About that time, Haney looked at Ridgway's 1984 lie detector test.

Experts later called it "incomplete," and Haney had Ridgway take another lie detector test two years later.

Ridgway passed this test, too.

Improved technology

Police conducted more interviews, and they compiled a list of suspect vehicles. Then, in 1987, police searched Ridgway's home and got a DNA sample from his saliva on a piece of gauze.

At the same time, they began questioning Ridgway's ex-wife. They had her tour remote areas with them, and she pointed out several areas where Ridgway had visited. Those areas, it turns out, were close to where some of the Green River Killer's victims had been dumped.

Nonetheless, Ridgway was never arrested in connection with any of the killings.

Alfred Matthews, a retired King County prosecutor, worked on the Green River slaying investigation team from 1983 to 1987.

Although Ridgway had been a suspect for years, the evidence at the time, including semen samples, was circumstantial, Matthews said yesterday.

Back then, semen samples were used only to determine blood type. And they could only narrow a suspect down to one in millions, not to a specific individual, as it can today.

Investigators also feared that if they tried Ridgway and he was acquitted, they would not be able to try him again because of double jeopardy.

So they waited.

Finally, DNA screening elevated the formerly circumstantial evidence into sufficient proof for prosecutors, and two months ago, they were finally able to get the evidence they needed.

Using new DNA technology, authorities say they were able to link Ridgway with the deaths of Chapman, Hinds and Mills.

Other unspecified factors link him to the death of Carol Christensen, whose body was found in woods in Maple Valley in 1983, police said Friday.

"We had good circumstantial evidence but we didn't have enough we believed," Matthews said yesterday. "DNA did that."

Haney, who moved to Homer, Alaska, in late 1996, returned to the area last year to be close to family. Now a lieutenant with the Bainbridge Island Police, he was called in about a month ago to help with the case. He wasn't immediately able to discuss it publicly.

In announcing the arrest last Friday, Reichert, the original lead detective, said Ridgway was always one of the top suspects.

He was careful, though, not to call him the "Green River Killer," as authorities have only linked him to four of the 49 deaths.

Ridgway is expected to be charged this week.

Now prosecutors and investigators have the capacity to narrow their resources to focus on a single person. At the time, there were many suspects. "There were always people coming up," Matthews said. "We had to work on each one."

The victim factor

Another reason that it may have taken so long to make an arrest was that over the years, leadership on the task force changed.

The group eventually wound down in 1990. For nearly a decade, King County Detective Tom Jensen was working alone on the case.

Bellevue police Chief Jim Montgomery served as King County sheriff from 1988 to 1997, and recalls the Green River case as one that frustrated police forensics at the time.

"It's one of those things that after two decades, one wondered if it would ever be solved," Montgomery said this weekend.

But during his tenure with the department, "people around the case felt it was solvable," he said. "In this case, the science had to catch up."

Looking back, the lack of scientific tools was a hindrance, Kraske said.

"Perhaps at that time, we were looking at (psychological) profiles as being as good an investigative source as DNA today," he said.

Kraske, too, remembers those early days of the investigation.

On that August day, when the bodies of Chapman, Hinds and Mills turned up, Kraske tried to keep the discoveries quiet to protect the scene.

"I tried to keep radio silence. When people drove by, I told them it was a training exercise," recalled Kraske, who investigated the Ted Bundy serial killings in the 1970s. "I didn't want to screw it up."

His low point in the investigation's early days was his perception that the victims, many of them prostitutes or runaways, weren't considered important.

"I always sensed that because of the nature of the victims out there, there wasn't nowhere near the interest that there was with the Bundy investigation."

Nineteen years later, he watched on television as Reichert, now the county sheriff, announced that authorities had arrested Ridgway as a suspect in four of the 49 deaths attributed to the Green River Killer.

Suspect arrested in deaths of 4 women in 80s

SEATTLE (AP) — A man was arrested Friday in connection with the slayings of four women whose deaths were believed to be part of the nation's worst unsolved serial killer sprees.

Police had blamed the four women's deaths on the so-called Green River Killer, who authorities have said was responsible for the slayings of 49 women in the Pacific Northwest. The killer has been sought since 1982, when the first victims were found near the river.

While authorities have questioned other suspects and made at least one arrest, in 1982, no one has ever been charged in the slayings.

On Friday, police arrested Gary Ridgway, 52, of suburban Auburn, for investigation of homicide. He was taken into custody as he left his job at Kenworth Truck Co., where he worked as a truck painter for 30 years. He was not immediately charged.

"I cannot say with certainty that Gary Ridgway is responsible for all of those deaths ... but boy, have we made one giant step forward," said Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was one of the original detectives on the serial killer task force.

Ridgway, who is married and has an adult son, was jailed pending an initial court appearance, which was set for Saturday. There was no answer at a number listed for a Gary Ridgway in Auburn. It wasn't immediately known if he had a lawyer

The sheriff said forensic scientists were able to link Ridgway's DNA to three of the women. He would only say "certain factors" tie Ridgway to the fourth woman.

Ridgway was first interviewed in the case in 1984, and a saliva sample was obtained by court order in 1987. He was the subject of intensive background investigation during that period, but he was not arrested in the case.

The first DNA test results linking Ridgway to the case came back two months ago, and authorities said they have had him under surveillance since then.

"I always felt that Gary Ridgway was one of the top five suspects," Reichert said.

No decision on charges against Ridgway will be made until early next week, said a spokesman in the prosecutor's office.

Ridgway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the river on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in woods in nearby Maple Valley.

Before Friday, the sheriff said Ridgway had been arrested twice in the past 19 years — in 1982 during a prostitution sting and earlier this month for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. He was found guilty or pleaded guilty in both cases, Reichert said.

The Green River Killer abducted and strangled most of his victims — mostly prostitutes and runaways — in a red-light district south of Seattle. Their bodies were found in or next to the nearby Green River, and in densely wooded areas near Seattle and Portland, Ore. from 1982 to 1984.

The bodies had all been reduced to skeletal remains by the time they were found, probably having decayed for several months.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," Reichert said Friday.

DEADLY TOLL: Fatal spree from 1982-84 claimed at least 40 victims in 2 states

Joseph Turner; The News Tribune

The first body was found in the Green River on July 15, 1982, by two boys who were bicycling across the Peck Bridge in Kent. It was that of a girl - Wendy Coffield, 16, of Puyallup. She had been strangled.

A month later, the body of another woman was spotted in the river by a meat company worker who saw it lodged on a sandbar while he was on an afternoon break.

Three days later - Aug. 15, 1982 - the bodies of three more women were discovered in and along the banks of the Green River, and King County police realized they had a serial killer on their hands.

Someone was picking up prostitutes and runaways on the "strip" of highway along Sea-Tac Airport, killing them and dumping their bodies into the river - at first, anyway. Later, detectives would find decomposed bodies and skeletal remains of more women in brushy areas around the airport and in forested parts of South King County. Still more victims were later found in Oregon.

No one knows exactly how many women died at the hands of the Green River Killer. At least 40. Maybe 49. Probably more. All of the verified victims were killed or disappeared between the summer of 1982 and the spring of 1984.

Then the killings seemed to stop. And it appeared the Green River Killer would never be caught.

But on Friday - 191/2 years after the first young woman disappeared - King County sheriffs' deputies arrested a man they believe is responsible for the deaths of the three women found on the same August day in 1982, as well as that of a fourth woman whose body wasn't discovered until May 8, 1983, in Maple Valley.

DNA evidence links the suspect, 52-year-old Gary Leon Ridgway, to three of the women, and other evidence ties him to the fourth killing, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said Friday. Reichert would not definitively say they caught the Green River Killer. But he said Ridgway is a key suspect in the remaining unsolved cases.

Reichert, as a detective, was a member of the original Green River Task Force. At one time, there were as many as 56 law officers from King County, Seattle, the Port of Seattle, Kent, Pierce County and the Washington State Patrol assigned to the unit. A dozen FBI agents also joined in the search for a time.

The task force followed tens of thousands of leads. In December 1988, the Green River Killer was prominently featured in a two-hour national television show, "Manhunt Live." The show produced thousands of leads, but no arrests.

In 1989, King County detectives announced they had a "viable suspect," a former Gonzaga law school student with a penchant for police uniforms and badges. His home was searched, but no conclusive evidence was found and no charges were filed.

Authorities said the lifestyles of the victims made the search for their killer difficult. Most were prostitutes or runaways or drug users who moved around a lot. Often, police would find the skeletal remains of a victim before the woman was even reported missing.

And although the killer appeared to end his deadly spree in early 1984, the remains of victims were being unearthed as late as 1988.

The man who authorities expect to charge next week was among the original list of suspects the task force came up with in 1984. Reichert said he was always in the "top five."

In fact, in April 1987, detectives searched his home and took samples of his saliva and hair to test against fluids found on the early victims of the Green River Killer. But again, police made no arrest.

The task force's failure to arrest the killer made it the target of criticism in the mid- and late 1980s. That criticism intensified in 1990 when the number of detectives assigned to the investigation was scaled back.

By 1991, only a single detective was still assigned to the case.

Reichert said the task force was revitalized several months ago when evidence from the first victims was subject to much more thorough DNA testing than existed in the 1980s.

Saturday, December 1, 2001

By TOM PAULSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The suspect in the Green River killings was identified using a relatively new kind of DNA technology that owes its existence to an eccentric scientist who advocates using LSD and to a bacterium found in the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park.

It's called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, and it's rapidly becoming one of law enforcement's most powerful scientific tools.

"PCR acts as a chemical photocopier," said Dr. Beverly Himick, a forensic scientist at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.

PCR can start with the tiniest DNA sample, Himick explained, and create identical copies at a rapid rate until investigators have enough DNA to compare in tests.

"That's great for forensics because we often get only small amounts," she said.

George Johnston, the crime lab's quality-assurance manager, noted that at the beginning of the Green River murder spree, forensic scientists could only compare blood types and other crude evidence. DNA typing came in the early 1990s, Johnston said, but the technique back then required large samples in order to do accurate comparisons.

About the same time, Kary Mullis was a chemist at the University of California-Berkeley focusing on catalysts. He was also experimenting with recreational drugs, as recounted in his autobiography, "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field," along with exploring the feasibility of travel in astral planes. This was Berkeley, after all.

Mullis had come up with the concept of PCR in the mid-1980s, for which he eventually won the Nobel Prize. But it took years for the technique to be perfected and accepted as reliable before it could be accepted in forensics.

Mullis' PCR technique works by first breaking apart the double-stranded DNA helix and exposing the two single strands to a soup containing enzymes known as "polymerases" and the four basic building blocks of DNA, nucleotides known as A, C, T and G.

One of the polymerases first used in PCR came from a bacterium found in Yellowstone's hot thermal pools, appropriately known as Thermus aqauticus.

The polymerases use the nucleotides floating around in the soup to rebuild each single strand back into a complete double helix. Where there was once just one complete strand of DNA, with PCR you get two ... then four, eight, 16, 32, 64, 128 and so on, until you halt the reaction.

"It hasn't been available to us until recently," Johnston said.

The crime lab began working with an even more refined version of PCR, known as "short, tandem repeats" PCR or STR-PCR, only on selected cases at first. It's now being used on other cold felony cases like the Green River killings.

Himick said investigators can identify individuals precisely by focusing on 13 sites on various chromosomes that contain these "short, tandem repeat" sections. No two individuals have the same STR patterns at these 13 sites, she said.

"This often works even with degraded DNA," Himick said.

Johnston said the lab was able to get a comparative match from Green River suspect Gary Leon Ridgway's saliva and evidence gathered at the crime scenes. "We're still examining other evidence right now," he said.

Many states have converted their crime labs to PCR-STR technology, Himick said. Washington has been keeping a DNA databank of all violent felons and sex offenders since 1990.

More than a dozen other states keep DNA samples of anyone convicted of a felony. With the use of PCR in forensics, many in law enforcement are revisiting older, unsolved cases and predicting more arrests.

Saturday, December 1, 2001

By GORDY HOLT, CANDACE HECKMAN AND ELAINE PORTERFIELD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

AUBURN -- In this neighborhood of ranch houses ablaze with Christmas lights, neighbors remember Gary Leon Ridgway as the guy in a baseball cap who loves his yard and likes to chop wood.

But for 17 years, police have considered Ridgway a likely suspect in some of the Green River killings.

He has been the subject of search warrants, lie-detector tests and hair and saliva samples.

All this from the ordinary guy with the friendly wave.

At the Kenworth Truck Co., where Ridgway worked for 32 years, co-workers knew he had been questioned in the slayings, and they called him "Green River Gary," or "G.R." for short.

"It was a joke," said Bob Schweiss, one of Ridgway's co-workers. "Nobody was really scared of him.

"He's a small man," Schweiss said, "not more than 160 pounds, maybe."

	Gary Leon Ridgway was photographed after a 1982 arrest. AP

Authorities first heard of Ridgway in 1980, when he was accused of choking a prostitute. Ridgway claimed the woman bit him, and police let him go.

In 1982, he was arrested again, this time for soliciting a policewoman posing as a prostitute. He was questioned and later released -- again.

On May 7, 1984, Ridgway took a lie detector test about the Green River killings. Ridgway, police say, was known to frequent prostitutes, and several witnesses said the killer's victims were seen getting into a pickup truck similar to the one he drove.

At first, the lie detector test cleared Ridgway, but police re-examined the results after two experts noted it didn't go far enough in clearing him.

So in 1986, Ridgway took another lie detector test.

He passed.

	A more recent booking photo of Ridgway.

Two weeks ago, Ridgway, 52, had been arrested on charges of loitering for prostitution. He pleaded guilty on Tuesday.

In their research over the years, detectives learned that Ridgway is a U.S. Navy veteran who worked the night shift as a painter at Kenworth. They searched his locker at work and pored over time sheets, which showed he was off when at least four of the Green River victims were slain.

Last night, in a driving rain, those in Ridgway's Lake Geneva neighborhood stood in knots, peering through the darkness as yellow police tape stretched across the road to Ridgway's home.

How could all of this be possible? they wondered.

After all, they remembered their neighbor, the man with a wife, a poodle and two cats.

"You never know," said Tony Williams. "You can't trust your neighbors, I guess."

Gary and his wife, Judith Ridgway, moved into the neighborhood from Maple Valley about three years ago. Since then, Clem Gregurek has had many conversations with Ridgway, mostly over the back fence, sometimes sharing a beer.

"He's a nice guy," Gregurek said. "I didn't notice anything weird. I just saw him out mowing his lawn, and we'd talk. If I could see him right now, I don't know what I'd say. It's unreal. I just saw Judith a couple of days ago."

The two neighbors talked mostly about their yards, about fishing and hunting and about chopping wood.

"He's got a mammoth wood pile," Gregurek said.

But there had been tension in the beginning.

According to Gregurek's wife, Sharon, the new neighbors felled a number of trees, too many she thought. It made for a tense introduction.

But eventually the couples patched up their differences and enjoyed a back-fence relationship.

In almost every way, the Ridgways were plain folks. They held garage sales. They had pets.

News that Gary Ridgway might have an awful, hidden past left Sharon Gregurek in a state of near shock.

"I'm doing fine," she said. "but I can't believe (a killer) lives in back of me. I'm just kind of shaking."

A next-door neighbor, Kim Straus, said her dog would often wander to the Ridgways, and, like any good neighbors, the Ridgways never complained.

"They were always very nice about it," Straus said. "They'd call us, and we would come get her."

Straus stood in the rain clutching an umbrella while her two young daughters gaped at the commotion. Police cars and media vans clogged the road. The neighborhood was abuzz.

Straus said she learned of the arrest when her sister called to say police had caught the Green River Killer.

"I asked her where. She said 'Federal Way.' I haven't called to tell her it was my back yard. That's yucky."

Saturday, December 1, 2001

By TRACY JOHNSON
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The young women's lifeless faces and the frustration of not finding their elusive killer have weighed on King County Sheriff Dave Reichert for nearly two decades.

But he said Friday night that never, even for a minute, did he give up hope that the Green River Killer would be caught. He always believed he would some day be able to tell the victims' relatives who had snatched so many young women from the streets in the early 1980s and discarded their bodies.

King County Sheriff Dave Reichert fields questions about the arrest in the Green River murder case. "I've always thought this case would be solved," he said. Jeff Larsen / Seattle Post-Intelligencer Click for larger photo

"It becomes depressing when all you do is collect the bones and you don't make any progress on who's taking these young lives," Reichert said. "But I've always been a positive thinker. I've always thought this case would be solved."

The big break came yesterday, when sheriff's deputies arrested a 52-year-old truck painter from the Auburn area. Reichert said new DNA tests on old evidence links Gary Leon Ridgway to the deaths of three of the young women. Circumstantial evidence allegedly ties him to a fourth victim. Linking him to the 45 other Green River victims could take months or years.

Reichert spent eight years as the lead detective on the case, but it has crept into his thoughts every day since it began. He'd drive east on Interstate 90, the beauty of the lush trees and snowy mountains utterly lost on him as his mind wandered to the women's bodies recovered not far from the freeway.

He'd find himself sitting in a dark corner at family gatherings, staring intensely into space and turning questions over in his mind: Who is he? Where haven't we looked? What haven't we done?

He remembers getting pay-phone calls at home from people who claimed to be the killer. He'd spend all night driving in circles, trying to track down the caller, then almost sleepwalk back to the office in the morning to start again. Each time a body turned up, detectives hoped it would hold the critical clue.

"It was like someone hitting you over the head with a two-by-four every time you turned around," Reichert said.

Investigators got the break they had sought for 19 long years when Detective Tom Jensen walked into Reichert's office and plunked down the results of recent DNA testing. Jensen, a rough-around-the-edges cop of nearly 30 years, had tears in his eyes.

"I thought at first he was joking," the sheriff said. "He looked at me and said, 'Dave, we got the guy.'"

Jensen has been the only full-time investigator on the case for nearly a decade. Detective Jim Doyon has also poured countless hours into the investigation during the past 16 years.

"Both of these guys are tenacious. You can look to them to do any job," Reichert said.

For Reichert it all began on Aug. 12, 1982, when he became the first detective on the case. He reported for a swing shift in homicide, and was sent out to a body found in the now-infamous south King County river. It was Debra Bonner, 24.

Three days later, two more bodies turned up. They were Marcia Chapman, 31, and Cynthia Hinds, 17. He was combing the tall grass of the riverbank when he nearly stumbled onto the body of Opal Mills, 16.

Those are the three victims now linked to Ridgway through DNA.

To this day, Reichert remembers each one. Chapman was on her back with one hand floating free in the current, he said, making it look almost as if she were waving.

Mills was partially nude and had a ligature around her neck. Reichert remembers her "peaceful young face" -- he had to stand motionless by her body for hours as investigators scoured the crime scene for evidence.

"I close my eyes and see her laying there, her pants tied around her neck," he said last night.

He's never been able to forget their desperate lives. Many of the women were ensnared in drugs and prostitution.

"These young ladies were out on the streets, looking for someone to care for them," he said, "when they picked the wrong person to get into a car with."

Saturday, December 1, 2001

By MARGARET TAUS, CANDACE HECKMAN AND ELAINE PORTERFIELD
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERS

A Seattle-area man was arrested yesterday after DNA in saliva samples taken nearly 15 years ago linked him to several of the Green River killings, the notorious slayings of dozens of women that remain the nation's largest unsolved serial murder case.

	Gary Ridgway in an undated King County Sheriff's booking photo.

Authorities apprehended Gary Leon Ridgway, 52, as he left his painting job yesterday afternoon at Kenworth Truck Co. in Renton. Last night, investigators were searching his house in the Auburn area near Lake Geneva.

King County Sheriff Dave Reichert was careful not to call Ridgway the "Green River Killer," so named because the first victims were found in the South King County river in 1982. But Reichert, the original lead investigator in the case, was ebullient.

"I cannot say with certainty that Gary Ridgway is responsible for all of those deaths ... but boy, have we made one giant step forward," said Reichert, who always believed Ridgway was one of the top five suspects. "This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career."

The Green River Killer was blamed for the deaths of 49 women between 1982 and 1984, many of them prostitutes and runaways believed to have been taken from the streets in the Puget Sound area and around Portland.

The case attracted national attention because of the number of killings and because it has been unsolved for so long. It cast a shadow over local law enforcement; detectives followed thousands of leads, but after years of work were stymied.

By last summer, King County sheriff's Detective Tom Jensen was the lone investigator in the case, holding out hope that DNA advances might help crack it.

The sheriff's office had been criticized for waiting until relatively late in the investigation to form a task force, and then for not devoting even more resources to capturing the killer.

Twice before, Ridgway was arrested on prostitution-related charges, to which he pleaded guilty. The first was in 1982; the second was just two weeks ago in SeaTac.

See a list of all victims attributed to the Green River Killer.

Reichert said Ridgway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the Green River on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in the woods in nearby Maple Valley.

Investigators had questioned Ridgway twice, first in 1984 and again in 1987, when they made him bite down on gauze to give a saliva sample that was preserved until DNA testing technology became available and reliable.

Two months ago, forensic scientists were able to link Ridgway's DNA to Mills, Chapman and Hinds, and authorities started watching him, Reichert said.

"Certain factors" link Ridgway to Christensen's death, the sheriff said, but he would not elaborate.

When King County vice officers arrested Ridgway two weeks ago for soliciting sex from a police decoy, they had no idea their colleagues had already linked him to the Green River killings. "Were they ever surprised," sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said of the vice officers when they learned about Ridgway's arrest yesterday.

Some detectives had been watching Ridgway, whom they had already linked to the murders through DNA evidence, for a little more than a month. But they had no idea he was once again cruising for prostitutes on Pacific Highway.

Urquhart said Ridgway was arrested and processed by vice officers on the solicitation charge without notice by homicide investigators, who didn't learn of the arrest until after he was released.

"The left hand didn't know who the right hand was arresting," Urquhart said, adding that authorities would continue to search his known residences.

"We are searching the house, the property and the yard. We are interested in every square inch of every place he's lived."

Ridgway's wife was home when police arrived. She was questioned and released.

Neighbor Clem Gregurek said Ridgway and his wife, Judith, moved into their home about three years ago.

Gregurek, whose property abuts the Ridgways', said his neighbors had previously lived in Maple Valley.

"He's a nice guy," said Gregurek, who occasionally cracked a beer with him. "I didn't notice anything weird. I just saw him out mowing his lawn, and we'd talk. If I could see him right now, I don't know what I'd say. It's unreal."

Formal charges are expected to be filed against Ridgway next week.

The Office of Public Defense has already appointed counsel for Ridgway, said attorney Todd Gruenhagen, who said he was frustrated by the lack of information he was given last night.

Sheriff's officials did not allow him to attend a crowded news conference about the case. He was not immediately able to find out which county jail held his client, let alone get a chance to talk to him, and he was worried about the unavoidably intense publicity.

"A case of this nature, certainly, is in all the newspapers," Gruenhagen said. "Access to a fair trial, many times, is impaired."

The Green River first figured in the serial killings case on July 15, 1982, when the fully clothed body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, a junior high school dropout and runaway from Pierce County, was recovered from the stream beside the Meeker Street bridge in Kent.

Two young boys riding their bicycles across the bridge spotted the body of the girl, whose clothing was snagged on an old piling.

Coffield's death, caused by ligature strangulation, was investigated in connection with the strangulation deaths of four other females, ages 16 to 27, found over the previous six months in King County.

Then in August 1982, the bodies of four more young women were found in or near the river -- Deborah Lynn Bonner, Chapman, Mills and Hinds. All had died of asphyxiation, and detectives believed the same person was responsible.

As the Green River case progressed, witnesses initially pointed police toward Ridgway, a truck painter who has worked at Kenworth for 32 years, because of his pickup truck and because, they said, he was known to cruise spots for prostitutes. But authorities said there was never enough evidence to make a connection to the Green River killings.

Co-workers called Ridgway "Green River Gary," because they knew he had been questioned by police about the slayings. "It was a joke," said Bob Schweiss, 37, who worked with Ridgway at Kenworth for eight years.

Tomas Guillen, author of "The Search For The Green River Killer" and an associate professor of journalism at Seattle University, has followed the case for almost 20 years.

"A lot of people have been waiting for this for many, many years," Guillen said. "I'm especially happy for the families of victims, because I hope that it will bring more closure."

Guillen was a reporter for The Seattle Times when the investigation began and remembers when police first began tracking Ridgway in the mid '80s. "I've thought about this constantly for years and years," he said.

"I was there when they went after him many years ago. They could have charged him back then, but they were missing some real evidence."

Guillen said the victims go beyond the slain women and their families.

"A lot of people have put a lot of years into this case. It has hurt a lot of relationships with police officers, reporters, family members. It has taken a great toll on a lot of people."

Investigators continue to explore the possibility that copycat killers may be responsible for some of the slayings attributed to the Green River Killer. Authorities are asking for the public's help with any more information about Ridgway and his activities for the past 19 years.

Reichert said detectives will work with police in the region to see if Ridgway can be linked to murders of other young women, especially in Vancouver, B.C.

Investigators with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have been in contact with King County detectives. Police in that country are investigating the disappearance of as many as 45 women from Vancouver.

RCMP investigators will now try to learn whether Ridgway has been in Canada, said Constable Danielle Efford, an RCMP spokeswoman. She said investigators have not made plans to question Ridgway.

Bob Keppel, a state investigator on the case and author of "Riverman," wrote a book about the killer based in part on interviews with notorious killer Ted Bundy, the handsome law student who preyed on college women around Seattle in the early 1970s.

"Green River was so difficult because it had no timely suspect data that the police could go on. They'd find out that some prostitute was identified from the bones, and go back and interview the people who last saw her, six or eight months later."

Reichert was near tears yesterday when he explained the satisfaction of Ridgway's arrest. He was a pallbearer at the funeral for one victim, and he still receives cards from many families.

"The families never give up hope," he said. "We are their lifeline ... to closure."

Suspect arrested in Seattle's 'Green River killer' case

November 30, 2001 Posted: 10:18 PM EST (0318 GMT)

Ridgeway

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) -- A man authorities believe may be the so-called Green River killer, linked to the deaths of as many as nine women beginning in 1982, was arrested Friday, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said.

Gary Leon Ridgeway, 52, of Auburn, was arrested as he left his job at the Kenworth Truck Co, the sheriff said. He said Ridgeway went with officers peacefully and was being interviewed Friday evening.

Reichert said Ridgeway is expected to be charged early next week.

The sheriff said DNA evidence from Ridgeway links him to at least three women whose bodies were found on the banks of the scenic Green River. The bodies of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds were found in August 1982.

Ridgeway is also suspected in the death of another woman whose body was found in the same region in 1983, he said.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," Reichert said at a news conference.

He has been working in the sheriff's department and on the case since the first body was found in 1982. In all, there are 49 unsolved murder cases involving women in western Washington since that time period, Reichert said.

"We have a lot of work to do to investigate these other cases to ensure we have the person who's responsible for those bodies," he said. "We may have some copycats."

Reichert said Ridgeway, who is married, had been identified as one of the top five suspects in the case as far back as 1984.

"We have watched him off and on, we have kept track of him off and on, and most recently we have kept track of his activities in a much closer way," he said.

Authorities are now searching Ridgeway's current home and previous residences.

Ridgeway was arrested in May 1982 on a charge of prostitution when he approached a law enforcement decoy in a sting operation. He was arrested again November 16 -- two weeks ago -- on a charge of loitering for the purpose of prostitution, Reichert said. Both charges resulted in guilty findings or guilty pleas, he said.

Ridgeway was interviewed by authorities in connection with the Green River murders in 1984 and again in 1987. In the intervening years, authorities conducted an extensive background investigation but found no evidence to link him with the crimes.

In the 1987 interview, Ridgeway was asked to chew on a piece of gauze, which investigators preserved. That gauze eventually turned up the DNA evidence linking him to some of the victims, Reichert said.

"We don't know if Ridgeway is responsible for the deaths of any more women, however, we will continue to investigate all unsolved homicides that may be linked to him or to any other suspects," the sheriff said.

Gary Leon Ridgway, who lives in the suburban Auburn area, was arrested as he left his job at a Renton truck company, Sheriff Dave Reichert said.

"I always felt that Gary Ridgway was one of the top five suspects," he said. "There was always a top five, and Gary Ridgway was always one of those, right up in front."

The serial killing spree was named for the south King County river where the bodies of the first victims were found in 1982. The killer was blamed for the deaths of 49 women.

"I cannot say with certainty that Gary Ridgway is responsible for all of those deaths ... but boy, have we made one giant step forward," the sheriff said.

Reichert said Ridgway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the river on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in woods in nearby Maple Valley.

Authorities began trying to contact relatives of the other victims earlier today, Reichert said.

The break in the case came when forensic scientists were able to link Ridgway’s DNA to Mills, Chapman and Hinds, the sheriff said. "Certain factors" link him to Christensen’s death, he added, but did not elaborate.

The first DNA test results linking Ridgway to the case came back two months ago, and authorities have had him under surveillance since then, Reichert said, as investigators continued trying to link him to other cases.

Ridgway, who is married and has an adult son, has worked for Kenworth Truck Co. as a truck painter for 30 years.

"He seemed like a pleasant fellow," said a woman who lived near the Ridgways and asked that her name not be used. She said she had talked to him once or twice and "he seemed normal."

Ridgway was first interviewed in the case in 1984, and a saliva sample was obtained by court order in 1987. He was the subject of intensive background investigation during that period, but he was not arrested in the case until today.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," said Reichert, who was one of the original detectives on the serial killer task force and has made it a priority for almost 20 years.

The sheriff said he expected charges could be filed next week.

Ridgway had been arrested twice in the past 19 years, Reichert said — in 1982 for approaching a police decoy during a prostitution sting and earlier this month, when he was arrested for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. He was found guilty or pleaded guilty in both cases, Reichert said.

The deaths of the victims — mainly young prostitutes and runaways taken from a red-light district south of the city — were attributed to the Green River killer from 1982 through 1984.

11/30/2001

NWCN.com

SEATTLE – A 52-year-old Federal Way, Wash. area man has been arrested in connection with the Green River Killings, a spree of 49 murders in the Northwest.

Gary Leon Ridgeway, a truck painter who lives in Federal Way and works in Renton, was arrested in connection with the deaths of four women, Opal Charmaine Mills, 16, Cynthia Jean Hinds, 17, Marcia Faye Chapman, 31, and Carol Ann Christinsen, 21.

All women are believed to have been killed by the Green River Killer.

Although King County Sheriff Dave Reichert did not definitively call Ridgeway the Green River Killer, he said Ridgeway was the “key suspect.”

Ridgeway was an early suspect in the case and has been twice arrested on charged related to soliciting prostitutes, according to Reichert.

Reichert was an officer with the Sheriff’s department when Ridgwey’s SeaTac home was searched in the 80s when the man first became a suspect.

An a late afternoon press conference on Friday, Reichert announced that Ridgeway’s DNA was linked to three of the four victims after modern DNA analysis was performed on a piece of gauze that Ridgeway was asked to chew on when he first became a suspect.

“I always felt that Gary Ridgeway was one of the top five suspects,” Reichert said.

The mystery of the Green River Killer - thought to have killed 49 people in the early 80s - has been solved.

Named for the river near Seattle where his early victims were found, the killer is believed to be responsible for the murder by strangulation of 49 people between 1982 and 1984.

Most were believed to be prostitutes, all from the Northwest.

Not all of the bodies have been recovered. Seven women thought to be victims of the Green River Killer have still not been found

And some of the victims are still turning up

Investigators two years ago identified the remains of Tracy Ann Winston, long believe to be another victim, 16 years after her initial disappearance. Winston was 19 when she vanished.

Like almost all the other victims, her body had been reduced to skeletal remains by the time it was found. in a park near the Green River.

She had been missing for three years.

In the immediate aftermath of the killings, the team investigating swelled to as many as 50 local police detectives and FBI investigators.

They considered 20,000 possible suspects, searched several homes and have even zeroed in on some suspects who turned out to be not connected to the case.

For the last several years, police have begun top believe that the killer has been in prison on an unrelated offense, dead or moved away.

After millions were spent on the case, all police had was a series composite drawings, any one of which could have been the killer and that he might have driven a primer paint-spotted pickup.

An FBI profiler suggested the killer was probably a white man in his 30s or 40s who had issues with women and spent a lot of time in the woods.

John Gillie; The News Tribune

Forty-nine women died in an unrelenting string of Northwest killings that came to be known as the Green River murders.

Police agencies spent millions of dollars gathering information, collecting clues and cataloging suspect names, but the search for their killer proved fruitless.

Detectives dubbed him the "Green River killer" because the first five victims' bodies were found near the Meeker Street bridge over the Green River in Kent.

And though the investigation eventually included murders that happened as far distant as Portland, the name stuck.

The victims, all killed between 1982 and 1984, were among society's most unfortunate. They were all relatively young women - the oldest was 33 - and rootless. They plied the streets as prostitutes, runaways or beggars. When they disappeared they often weren't missed for days.

King County and other jurisdictions mounted an unprecedented effort to track down their killer, but never succeeded.

In the process, the task force of detectives and investigators compiled a list of 20,000 potential suspects and thousands of clues. Investigators pioneered new forensics investigation techniques and used untried computer tools to search for patterns among the clues, but no solid case emerged.

In recent months, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert, who spent eight months heading the effort to find the killer, had decided to use new DNA identification techniques to search for a common biological clue among the evidence remaining from the killings.

Now that new investigation may be bearing fruit.

Sarah Duran; The News Tribune

Nineteen years after the first of 49 victims was discovered, the King County Sheriff's Office arrested an Auburn man suspected of being the Green River Killer.

Sheriff Dave Reichert said authorities arrested Gary L. Ridgway, 52, in connection with the deaths of four women. The investigation will continue to see if Ridgway can be linked to other victims, the sheriff said.

Ridgway has been interviewed by police twice before - in 1984 and 1987 - but detectives didn't have enough evidence, Reichert said.

Reichert said Ridgway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the south King County river on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in woods in nearby Maple Valley.

The break in the case came when forensic scientists were able to link Ridgway's DNA to three of the women, the sheriff said.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," said Reichert, who was one of the original detectives on the serial killer task force and has made it a priority for almost 20 years.

Authorities have tracked the killer since the first victim was discovered in 1982. The last official Green River victim disappeared in 1984. Most of the victims were young prostitutes and victims taken from the south Seattle area and dumped in South King County.

Recently, investigators began using recent advances in DNA testing to close the book on America's worst unsolved serial murder case.

At its peak, the sheriff's investigation was run by a task force of dozens of investigators. Detectives followed thousands of leads, interviewing victims' friends, witnesses, possible suspects.

But in the end, virtually all the task force could say about the killer was that he might be driving a primer-spotted pickup truck with a canopy, and he might look like one of several composite drawings.

An FBI profiler said the killer was probably a white man in his 30s or 40s who had issues with women and had spent a lot of time in the woods.

Victims' remains were discovered for years after the last official disappearance, but budget pressures and the lack of success saw the task force dwindle until, by the early 1990s. The lone investigator still on the case is sheriff's detective Tom Jensen, who works out of the Regional Justice Center in Kent.

No one knows why the killings stopped. For years, law enforcement officials speculated that the killer was in prison for another crime or had died.

Friday, November 30, 2001

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES

A 52-year-old man was arrested Friday for investigation of homicide in the deaths of four women slain by the so-called Green River Killer, the King County sheriff said.

The suspect, Gary Leon Ridgeway, lives in suburban Auburn and has worked for Kenworth Truck Co. for 30 years, Sheriff Dave Reichert said.

Reichert said Ridgeway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the south King County river on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in woods in nearby Maple Valley.

The Green River killer was blamed for the deaths of 49 women -- mainly young prostitutes and runaways taken from a red-light district in south King County -- between summer 1982 and early 1984. The bodies of some suspected victims have never been found.

The break in the case came when forensic scientists were able to "conclusively link" Ridgeway's DNA to three of the women, the sheriff said.

"We believe he is responsible for the fourth victim's death due to certain factors that tie him to the two others found in the river," Reichert added.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," said Reichert, who was one of the original detectives on the serial killer task force and has made it a priority for almost 20 years.

Reichert said Ridgeway first emerged as a suspect in 1984, when he was first interviewed by police. He was interviewed again in 1987; a saliva sample taken at that time provided the evidence for the DNA match that led to Ridgeway's arrest.

"I always felt that Gary Ridgeway was one of the top five suspects," he said.

"We don't know if Ridgeway is responsible for the deaths of any more women," Reichert added. "However, we will continue to investigate any other resolved homicides."

Ridgeway had been arrested twice, Reichert said -- in 1982 for approaching a police decoy during a prostitution sting and earlier this month, when he was arrested for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. He was found guilty or pleaded guilty in both cases, Reichert said.

KIRO 7 EYEWITNESS NEWS
SEATTLE -- A 52-year-old man was arrested Friday for investigation of homicide in the deaths of four women slain by the so-called Green River Killer, the King County sheriff said.

The arrested man, Gary Leon Ridgeway, lives in suburban Auburn and has worked for the same trucking firm for 30 years, Sheriff Dave Reichert said.

The Green River killer was blamed for the deaths of 49 women in the early 1980s.

Reichert said Ridgeway was being investigated in the deaths of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman and Cynthia Hinds, whose bodies were found in the south King County river on Aug. 15, 1982, and Carol Christensen, found May 8, 1983, in woods in nearby Maple Valley.

The break in the case came when forensic scientists were able to link Ridgeway's DNA to three of the women, the sheriff said.

"This has got to be one of the most exciting days in my entire career," said Reichert, who was one of the original detectives on the serial killer task force and has made it a priority for almost 20 years.

Ridgeway had been arrested twice, Reichert said -- in 1982 for approaching a police decoy during a prostitution sting and earlier this month, when he was arrested for loitering for the purpose of prostitution. He was found guilty or pleaded guilty in both cases, Reichert said.

The deaths of the victims, mainly young prostitutes and runaways taken from a red-light district south of the city -- were attributed to the Green River killer from 1982 through 1984.

An FBI profiler could say little more than that the killer was probably a white man in his 30s or 40s who had issues with women and had spent a lot of time in the woods.