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If Gary Ridgway was obsessed with killing hapless young women, Dave Reichert was obsessed with tracking him down and seeing him arrested and convicted. It was really no contest. Throughout the years, I had always believed that Reichert, Randy Mullinax, Tom Jensen, Jim Doyon, Matt Haney, and Sue Peters would one day catch the Green River Killer. As the new sheriff, Reichert sometimes said to me, “A
And I always said, “I know, and I will.”
As the world entered the mille
After the task force was revived, both Reichert and Jensen suspected they were watching the right man, even though Melvyn Foster was still around and occasionally talking about the case. The people who were definitely not talking about it were the Green River Task Force members. If an arrest was imminent, the public had no inkling.
November 30, 2001, was a Friday, and the wind whipped and tore angrily as a pounding rain fell, making commuter traffic at the begi
My phone rang often that afternoon, and either reporters or cops I knew asked, “Have you heard that they might have him?”
No, I hadn’t. We all knew who they meant by “him” without speaking it aloud. I hadn’t heard anything. But something was up. By five that afternoon, all three major network affiliates sent reporters and cameramen to my house. I was usually a dependable “talking head” for any story co
My phone rang again around six. The answering machine picked it up. It was Dave Reichert, his voice full of barely contained enthusiasm. “We caught him, A
FOR ME, it was one of those moments when I will always remember just where I was when I heard the news. Pearl Harbor. Ke
I saved the tape of Dave Reichert’s triumphant and yet incredulous voice telling me that what had seemed impossible had finally come to pass.
I had written nineteen books while I was waiting for the Green River story to end in an arrest, always thinking that surely it would be my next book, always deciding not to throw away any of the files of information—just in case. As a crime writer, I was elated. And yet Gary Ridgway’s arrest was the begi
In the end, there would be nothing hidden, no hideous detail omitted in what would become the hardest story I ever had to tell.
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IT HAD TAKEN so long, and yet when it came together, all the ragged segments glided into place perfectly. Even so, the arrest had been precipitous. The investigators weren’t quite ready to pounce. Ironically, Ridgway’s own actions put a crimp in their plans and the detectives had to move in.
On November 16, 2001, he had told his wife, Judith, that his truck was low on gas and she gave him thirty dollars to fill the tank. She didn’t often give him more money than he needed to buy breakfast or lunch. But on this day, the thirty dollars in Ridgway’s wallet apparently spiked old appetites.
He slowed down when he spotted an attractive young woman strolling provocatively along the curb on the Pac HiWay. And then he pulled out the money his wife had given him and waved it at the girl. She asked him what he wanted to buy. He told her—and she promptly arrested him. Gary Ridgway had been tricked by a decoy prostitute, an undercover deputy who was working in another unit and was unaware of the task force’s plans for him. He was arraigned on a charge of loitering for prostitution, but was soon released on his own recognizance.
HE WASN’T really worried, thinking that it would cost him only the towing charge on his truck. Judith had never doubted his word and he could explain it to her as a case of mistaken identity. She trusted him completely and never questioned his explanations. He was totally unaware that his name had become number one on a dark list.
Not many of the detectives who worked the Green River murders from the very begi
As the world entered the mille
There were many detectives who had never found Gary Ridgway a credible suspect in the Green River killings, preferring those with more complicated and sophisticated personalities. And there was just a handful who had always thought the deceptively meek and ordinary-looking man was exactly who they should be concentrating on.
Randy Mullinax, who had been with the first and second task forces, had written Ridgway off after he passed two polygraph tests. Mullinax came to law enforcement almost as an afterthought. One of several brothers who grew up in the south-end Boulevard Park community, he married at twenty and went to work for the Water District in Burien, Washington, but not for long. “I got tired of using my back,” he recalled, “and standing outside in the rain, so I went to college.”
Mullinax took a few police science courses as electives and soon found himself hooked. He had hired on with the King County Sheriff’s Office in January 1979. Sue Peters and Mullinax had joined the sheriff’s office within three years of each other and worked together on the Green River investigation in the eighties.
Peters never really thought about law enforcement as a career either. She had always pla