CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-19-GARY LEON RIDGWAY

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GARY LEON RIDGWAY:
THE GREEN RIVER KILLER
THE TRIAL OF GARY LEON RIDGWAY, THE GREEN RIVER KILLER, WAS ONE OF THE MOST SENSATIONAL EVER TO TAKE PLACE IN AMERICA. RIDGWAY CONFESSED TO FORTY-EIGHT CONFIRMED MURDERS, WHICH MAKES HIM OFFICIALLY THE MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLER IN AMERICAN HISTORY TO DATE. THE TOTAL COUNT OF HIS VICTIMS, WHO WERE MOSTLY PROSTITUTES, IS THOUGHT TO BE MUCH HIGHER. FOR MANY YEARS, HE ESCAPED DETECTION, EVEN THOUGH HE WAS CONSIDERED A SUSPECT.

A series of police task forces were mounted to solve the case, but time and time again, the trail went cold. In the end, it was DNA technology that finally enabled the police to nail this brutal killer, who is now serving a total of forty-eight life sentences in jail.

Teenage prostitutes
On 15 July 1982 a group of children discovered the body of sixteen-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, in the Green River, Kent County, Washington State. She had drifted up against a piling near the Meeker Street Bridge, naked save for her tennis shoes, strangled by her own blue jeans. On 13 August that same year, a slaughterhouse worker came across the body of Deborah Bonner, and only two days after that, a man rafting the same stretch of river saw in the shallows what turned out to be seventeen-year-old Cynthia Hinds. Next to her was another body, that of 31-year-old Marcia Chapman. All had been strangled. When police searched the area they found the body of another girl, Opal Mills, sixteen, on the nearby bank, dead by no more than twenty-four hours. The King County Sheriff's Department were hot on the heels of a serial killer, but it was as close as they would get for some time.

The victims of the Green River Killer belonged to a very specific demographic. All of them were women. All of them were believed to be prostitutes. And only a handful of them were older than twenty-one; almost half were eighteen or younger. Unfortunately, there was no shortage of these extremely vulnerable young women in the Washington area. Street prostitution in and around Seattle during the years of the Green River Killer was rife, and changes in state legislature had meant that young runaways could no longer be forcibly detained. As a result, there was an abundance of isolated, inexperienced and defenceless teenage girls who were prepared to climb into a car with a strange man as a way of making a living. When the act of running away had been decriminalized, police no longer even kept records on missing teenagers. Had they continued to do so, the monstrous scale of these murders might have been apparent much earlier.

The killing ground
The area in which the prostitutes plied their trade straddled the city limits: when the Sheriff's Department were cracking down on the strip, these women went north to the city, and when the Seattle Police Department did the same, the women came back to the strip. The two forces never combined their efforts, and this problem in dealing with street prostitution made Seattle a rich killing ground for a serial killer.

Furthermore, vice officers for King County did not work weekends, when trade was busiest, and some even freelanced as security in local strip clubs, ensuring prostitutes were kept out of the lounges, forcing them out onto the streets, where they were most at risk. Similarly, in the city itself, police conducted a series of raids on brothels, although none of the girls that worked in them had ever fallen prey to the killer. When arrests were made in the red light district it was invariably the prostitute that was arrested, rather than her customer. There was no effort being made to keep a systematic record of these 'johns', not even of the licence plates on their cars. Inadvertently, the Green River Killer was being given a free hand.

On 16 August 1982, King County assembled its Green River Task Force. It was headed by Police Major Richard Kraske, and comprised twenty-five officers, the biggest task force since the Ted Bundy murders seven years earlier – although, as it transpired, these officers were far less experienced. The day after Kraske's appointment, the task force staked out the river, and an overhead news helicopter broadcast their position to anyone with a television. The first suspect emerged that September; a cab driver and ex-con named Melvin Wayne Foster, who had approached police to inform on other cabbies he considered suspicious. A psychological profile of the Green River Killer had already been performed by FBI agent John Douglas, and police considered Foster to fit perfectly. He was put under twenty-four-hour surveillance. After searches of his house, he was given a lie detector test, which he failed. Foster attributed his failure to a nervous condition. However, despite constant police observation, young women continued to disappear. Eventually, the task force had to admit they had been looking at the wrong man.

Meanwhile, the death toll had risen to sixteen. The killer was disposing of the bodies faster than the Sheriff's Department could discover them. The first task force was disbanded when Sheriff Bernard Winckoski left his position in January 1983, to be replaced three months later by Sheriff Vern Thomas. Thomas began campaigning immediately for a new, larger task force. It took the rest of the year to organize, and to overcome his colleagues' concerns of the strain it would put on resources. By January 1984, a task force of forty officers was ready to look again at the Green River Killer, and every one of them must have felt the pressure: the killer was operating seemingly unhindered in a small area that was routinely patrolled by uniformed and plain clothes officers. Furthermore, while Sheriff Thomas had been planning and politicking, these murders had showed no sign of stopping.

Finger-tip search: investigators search for the remains of one of Gary Leon Ridgway's victims at an unknown location

Closing in on the killer
In a change of tactics, Thomas' task force began to arrest the prostitutes' clients instead of the prostitutes. Prior to this, arrests of women prostitutes were three times greater than the number of men arrested for trying to buy sex. Soon, the ratio was almost reversed, and the killings seemed to tail off. Progress was being made at last.

The killer had been scared away, or so it appeared. Police began to speculate that the culprit had moved, or was operating elsewhere. Although much good work had been done, the killer remained free, and morale in the task force began to plummet. Bodies continued to be discovered, but leads were few and far between. There were no physical descriptions of the killer, for the simple reason that no victim ever escaped.

When the sixth victim, Marie Malvar, got into a green pickup with a dark-haired man on 30 April 1983, her boyfriend was there to see it. He followed in his own car, noticing that the two seemed to be arguing, and then lost them at a traffic light near Des Moines. He reported her missing four days later. He returned to the area with her brother and father, and searched the streets, looking for the pickup, which they found in a driveway. The Des Moines police sent a detective, but she was not inside the house. It was three months before Des Moines police informed King County homicide of the incident. It was three years before King County factored it into their investigations (another victim, Kimi Kai Pitsor, had also been seen getting into a similar vehicle, but the two events were never connected).

Jose Malvar Jr, brother of Marie Malvar, on the witness stand at Gary Ridgway's trial. Malva Jr, his father and Marie's boyfriend searched the streets for the green pickup that Marie was last seen getting in to

A strange loner
Gary Ridgway was not unknown to police. He was a strange man that people described as friendly but odd, who had been raised in Seattle. His mother was a domineering woman, and he wet the bed as a child, but there was nothing in his childhood to suggest the burning rage that led him, as an adult, to become a serial killer. As a young man, he joined the Pentecostal church, and often collected for the church door to door. However, at the same period, he began visiting prostitutes for sex, and developed an intense hatred for these mostly young, inexperienced women. In 1980, he was accused of choking a prostitute, but police let him go. In 1982 he was interviewed in a car with prostitute Kelli McGinness (an eighteen-year-old who disappeared the following year), and the same year pleaded guilty to soliciting a decoy female police officer. In 1984, he approached Thomas' Green River Task Force to offer information, and was given a lie detector test, which he passed. Later that year, when police ascertained that he had contact with at least three of the victims, Ridgway finally became chief suspect. However, a house search provided no clues. In 1986, he passed another polygraph test ('I was too relaxed,' he later said). The following year, bodily samples were taken. Yet, despite the fact that he had been in the area, and had had contact with the women who were killed, Ridgway was not arrested.

The vital clue
After this period, the killings tailed off dramatically, and by 1991 the Green River Task Force was staffed by a single officer. But there were many who had not forgotten the victims of the Green River Killer, and who were determined to seek justice for their murders. In 2001 King County gained a new sheriff, Dave Reichert, who formed a new team to solve the case, largely consisting of forensics and DNA experts. All viable evidence the county had collected was sent to the laboratory for investigation.

It was this initiative that was finally to yield results. The experts started with three of the earliest victims, killed in 1982 and 1983; Mills, Chapman, and Carol Christensen. Semen from the bodies was tested using new DNA technology and the match with Gary Ridgway's sample was positive. The Green River Killer had been found.

Justice at last
Ridgway was fifty-two years old when he was arrested on 30 November 2001 on four counts of murder. At first the killer maintained his innocence, but as testing continued on further remains, the evidence become incontrovertible. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of murder, mostly in 1982 and 1983, but one in 1990, and one as late as 1998.

Ridgway confessed to killing forty-eight women over fifteen years. He was sentenced to life imprisonment –– commuted from the death sentence in return for helping police find the bodies

In July 2003 Ridgway was moved from the county jail to an undisclosed location amid reports that he was prepared to co-operate if he could escape the death penalty. The plea bargain was defended by the prosecution as 'an avenue to the truth' for the victims and their families. While not all the families were happy with this, forty-one victims were named in court who would never otherwise have been mentioned, and as a result, some of the bodies were located and given proper burial.

It is generally thought that Gary Ridgway killed many more than forty-eight women. Chillingly, he himself has admitted he cannot remember all of the women he put to death. However, through a combination of police work and forensic technology, the case was finally solved, and he was made to pay for at least some of his hideous crimes. Today, with forty-eight life sentences to serve, there is absolutely no doubt that he will remain in jail for the rest of his life. After years of being hunted down, the Green River Killer is finally behind bars – for good.