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And they were going to do it as secretively and cautiously as they could. One of their first goals was to try to locate the scores of vehicles once owned by Gary Ridgway. His frequent sightings in pickup trucks suggested that some of the victims might have been killed or transported in those trucks. They found one of them, a 1977 black Ford pickup, in Johnstown, Pe
Every possible item that might become useful evidence—garbage at body sites, the contents of the boxes and bags in the Ridgway house—was photographed, bagged, and labeled: thousands of pieces of jewelry, beads, buttons, hair samples, scraps of cloth, matchbooks, cigarette butts, intact and broken bottles, bone fragments found in envelopes in Ridgway’s houses, a possible skull bone from his vacuum cleaner, empty cans, and torn and rotten clothing. The list went on endlessly, and so did the photos that were downloaded onto DVDs. Judith and Gary had bought hundreds of cheap rings, pins, earrings, and bracelets at swap meets and yard sales so that it would be difficult to find out if any of them had come from the victims.
OVER the past thirty years, I have read more than a thousand homicide case files. Most of them could be contained in a single binder or perhaps two binders, albeit each four or five inches thick. And those were cases that required a great deal of detective work. Each Green River victim’s file contained both important information and minutia. To grasp the work that early investigators had done and what the last task force would still do was akin to counting all the changing patterns of glass fragments in a kaleidoscope.
The effort put forth by so many detectives and forensic experts was amazing.
In early March 2002, the Green River Task Force moved into new offices in a glass-and-concrete building owned by King County. It was near Boeing Field, Seattle’s smaller airport, and not many miles from the Strip or Kenworth, for that matter. It was impossible to estimate how long they might be there. There were now fourteen investigators. No one outside the task force knew what avenue of investigation was being pursued, even though Dave Reichert held an open house to show off the new Green River headquarters. Beyond that, there wasn’t any information on the progress of the cases where no charges were pending.
Detective Graydon Matheson was in the process of organizing the evidence they had gathered. Kevin O’Keefe was loaned back from the Seattle Police Department and Detective Katie Larson was the media spokesperson. From time to time, I talked to Katie and Sue Peters, but not about the Green River case. I knew I couldn’t ask and they couldn’t tell, so I didn’t even try. One of the many things Sue didn’t tell me was that the coveralls she had retrieved from Gary Ridgway’s locker at the Kenworth plant in the 1987 search had proved to be a gold mine of irrefutable evidence. They held tiny, tiny dots of paint that Skip Palenik had found to be microscopically identical to those found on three additional victims: Wendy Coffield, Debra Estes, and Debra Bo
On March 27, 2002, Ridgway was charged with three more counts of aggravated murder because of what was found on those coveralls. Sprayed paint often dries in midair, leaving infinitesimal spheres that the naked eye can barely see. Many colors of paint that were once used in Gary Ridgway’s custom truck assignments were detected on the jeans knotted around Wendy Coffield’s neck, the black sweater buried with Debra Estes, and on Debra Bo
The passage of time and tremendous advances in forensic science were an enormous boon to the Green River investigators. As the years went by, one group of detectives built upon the work of those who preceded them. As Matt Haney said, “If it hadn’t been for the initial great work of the first detectives and the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, the evidence that trapped Gary Ridgway might have been lost—and we needed that. Fortunately, the DNA was preserved and the crime scenes were handled very professionally.”
AND NOW THERE WERE seven counts of aggravated murder against Gary Ridgway. But when would he go to trial? By late 2002, I hesitated to plunge into a book on some other case because I didn’t want to be away from Seattle when Gary Ridgway’s trial began. Practically, it seemed unlikely that it would be soon because his star team of defense attorneys, which now included not only Tony Savage and Mark Prothero, but also Todd Gruenhagen, David Roberson, Suza
Moreover, there were rumors that they would ask for a change of venue. I wondered if there was any courtroom within the borders of Washington State where Ridgway and the Green River murders weren’t well known, and if moving the trial would make it any easier to find jurors who hadn’t formed an opinion.
By June 2003, it looked as if Ridgway would be tried in King County. King County public defender A
As for the trial, Paul Sherfry, King County Superior Court’s chief administrative officer, expected to face a courtroom situation very much like the O. J. Simpson trial, juggling families, media, and spectators. Jury summonses would be sent to ten thousand registered voters in the county, a huge roster that would then be wi
Still, the trial didn’t appear imminent. The first tentative date to begin was said to be July 2004. Once more, I kept the Green River Killer book on a back burner while I wrote two more books, and went on a book tour around America.
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A TIGHT LID was being kept on what was happening behind the scenes. Not long after Gary Ridgway was arraigned on the three additional charges of aggravated murder in the deaths of Debra Estes, Debra Bo
It was a difficult decision for Maleng and the five deputy prosecuting attorneys, Jeff Baird, Patricia Eakes, Bryan McDonald, Ian Goodhew, and Sean O’Do