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, “Ann, we’re going to catch him—and then you can write the book.”

And I always said, “I know, and I will.”

As the world entered the millennium, the investigators who had worked on the Green River cases for so long had shifted their focus from the men they had suspected most in 1982 to 1984. But some of them were difficult to forget. Tom Jensen kept himself aware of where Gary Ridgway was. “Why doesn’t he leave—move to California or some other place,” he wondered. “I believe he thinks he’s gotten away with it. He has no need to leave.” Jensen believed that when Ridgway passed the polygraph he felt he was home free.

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 beginning of a weekend even worse than usual. By late afternoon the storm grew in intensity. It was high tide and the waves of Puget Sound were crashing high over my bulkhead. But there was something else in the air, something almost undefinable. A ripple of rumors, barely distinguishable at first from other whispers that something big might be happening in the Green River case. Such rumors had, of course, boomed to megaphone-like shouts several times over the prior twenty years, and then subsided.

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 connected to serial murder or the Green River cases when official sources were clamming up. And at the moment, the sheriff’s office wasn’t saying anything, but reporters had tracked detectives to the Kenworth plant and to Judith and Gary Ridgway’s home near Auburn.

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, Ann,” he said. “We’ve arrested the Green River Killer!”

FOR ME, it was one of those moments when I will always remember just where I was when I heard the news. Pearl Harbor. Kennedy’s assassination. Ted Bundy’s arrest. The explosion of the Challenger. And now, after nineteen and a half years: “We’ve arrested the Green River Killer!”

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 beginning of a kind of horror that no one who had followed the Green River story could even have imagined.

In the end, there would be nothing hidden, no hideous detail omitted in what would become the hardest story I ever had to tell.

48

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 beginning remained to see the ending. Just as the passage of twenty years changes all lives, retirements, transfers, new jobs, illnesses, and deaths had decimated the roster of those investigators who began the quest for justice in 1982. Only those who were in their twenties and early thirties at the beginning were still on the sheriff’s department. Despite all the sixty-plus-year-old actors who play detectives on television cop shows, there are precious few sexagenarians who still wear a badge in real life.

As the world entered the millennium, most of the investigators who had worked on the Green River cases for years had shifted their focus from the men they had originally suspected from 1982 to 1984. But some of them were difficult to forget.

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 planned to be a physical education teacher, but when she earned her degree in P.E. at Central Washington University, she found that teaching jobs in her field weren’t plentiful. She wasn’t really disappointed, because another career had been tugging on her sleeve for years. From the time she was a child, Peters spent her summers east of the Cascade Mountains in Ritzville, Washington, where her grandmother was a deputy sheriff in rural Adams County. In those days, female deputies worked only with women prisoners or as matrons in the jail, but even so Peters was fascinated with the mystique of police work. As a teenager, she hung “Wanted” posters on her wall instead of those featuring rock stars. Peters graduated from the police academy in May 1982, two months before Wendy Coffield’s body was found floating in the Green River. As a young deputy, she had joined Dave Reichert on the second river body site, but Peters wouldn’t actually be assigned to the Green River Task Force until 1986. After working patrol for three years, she went undercover with a proactive narcotics team investigating drug traffic in high schools—she could easily look like a teenager. She also investigated sexual assault cases.