Even so, there were teenage girls whose purpose for being on the highway was obvious—some of them second-generation prostitutes, the daughters and nieces of the lost young women of the eighties. One of them was Keli McGinness’s daughter, who had been adopted when Keli never returned for her. She had grown into a beautiful woman, even lovelier than the mother she couldn’t remember. Sue Peters, who was assigned Keli’s case, found her daughter instead. The girl was alive and well, but in as much potential danger as her mother once was. Peters did her best to persuade the young woman to contact Keli’s extended family.

There were other circular patterns that had emerged in the twenty-year search for the Green River Killer. Was it possible that tracing the similarities would help to build a circumstantial case against Gary Ridgway to add to the positive DNA results the task force had?

It would seem so.

The detectives assigned to the new, clandestine task force pored over all of the earlier information gleaned on Ridgway, looking for anything that might have been missed, evaluating his past in light of what they now knew, and searching for what motivation he could have had to kill dozens of women. He had been married three times, but Green River investigators who located his first two wives were told that his mother never really let go of running his life.

His first wife, Heather, wasn’t a “slim blonde” as he’d once claimed. She had been an overweight brunette teenager, and their marriage had been fine for the first few months. She remembered that she and Gary had made some friends in San Diego, playing cards and visiting back and forth.

“Her father and I never could see why Heather married him,” Heather’s mother said. “When they were dating, he would come to our house and sit there like a stump. He never ate, never said a word. One day, he sat in a chair for about eight hours—and he didn’t speak to us at all. He didn’t even get up to go to the bathroom, for that matter. But we figured Heather must have seen something in him we couldn’t see. He seemed affectionate with her, and when he was in the Philippines, he sent us one of those velvet paintings for Christmas. It sounds strange to say now, but we thought at least Heather would be safe with him as a husband, and we thought his mother was very nice.”

Heather had been surprised, though, to see how shocked Gary was by the price of things in San Diego. “He’d never had to pay for anything before,” she said. “His mother, Mary, had always bought everything for him. And he was afraid people would steal things from him, too. At night, he didn’t just lock our car, he took out the radio and what he said were very expensive parts from the engine because he said somebody might steal them.”

Heather’s opinion about Mary Ridgway would change radically after the young couple returned, albeit separately, from San Diego after Gary got out of the navy. It was true that Heather didn’t drive up to Seattle with him, but that was because she was taking a course in school in San Diego, and Gary wouldn’t wait for her to finish. He wanted to get home to his mother.

“When Heather flew up a few weeks later, Mary wouldn’t hear of their getting their own apartment,” Heather’s mother recalled. “She wanted them to live in a camper on her property, and they ended up moving into the house with her and Tommy. Mary ruled the roost—I felt sorry for her husband. She made Gary give her his paycheck, and he and Heather had to go to her to get a few dollars a day.”

Mary Ridgway kept Gary’s checkbook and she had to okay any purchase they wanted to make. She wouldn’t even let her daughter-in-law get her ears pierced without her permission. “Heather saw it wasn’t going to change. She just packed her bag and went back to San Diego—she’s lived there ever since,” her mother said. “Gary held on to everything they had. We’d given them all the appliances you could think of—toaster, Mixmaster, blender, things like that—and he kept them. But Heather had a real nice white bed and her grandmother made her a canopy for it. Heather wanted that. Well, I called Mary Ridgway to ask about it and she just screamed at me. I’ve never heard anyone so furious.”

Gary demanded Heather’s rings back, even though the diamond was almost too small to see, and the set had cost only a hundred dollars. Heather remained in San Diego for thirty years, and she never saw Gary again.

Jim Doyon, Matt Haney, and Carolyn Griffin had talked in depth to Gary Ridgway’s second wife, Dana, in September 1986. While Heather had only lasted a year with him, Dana stayed seven and bore his only child, their son, Chad. “I was his housekeeper, secretary—I did everything for him—all his laundry. But I never saw his paychecks or anything. I never saw his pay stubs. Most of the times on weekends, we spent at his parents’. He never wanted to have any friends.”

Heather had never mentioned any unusual sexual demands, but Gary had apparently been more adventurous with his second wife. Although Dana said she hated it, he insisted on anal sex and he sometimes tied her hands and feet with belts from bathrobes. She didn’t mind that so much because it didn’t hurt her.

But once he had choked her. They had been out someplace and she’d had too much beer. “I was a little drunk,” Dana told the detectives, “and I got out of our van and stumbled. I started to reach for the door and the next thing I knew he had his hands around my neck and he was choking me from behind.”

The hands on her throat grew tighter and tighter and Dana said she had started to scream. “I realized it was him and I started fighting him. He finally let go and he kind of pushed me. By the time I got my balance back, he had walked around to the other side of the van and tried to convince me that there was somebody else there who had run off. I tried to get him to call the police, but he wouldn’t.”

She explained to Jim Doyon that Gary had first put his forearm around her neck in a “police-type choke hold,” and then had grasped her throat with both hands. That hurt her and frightened her because he was much rougher than usual. “He always liked to sneak up on me and scare me. He would hide around the corner or something and scare me. He was always coming up behind me and taking me in this arm-type hold—not to hurt me, just to grab me. He liked to see how softly he could walk so that he’d be just totally noiseless, and he could do it, too!”

As he would later do with Darla, his hiking girlfriend from Parents Without Partners, Gary had enjoyed having oral sex in his vehicles and particularly liked to have sex outside. Dana remembered their spreading blankets in a wooded area near Ken’s Truck Stop off the old I-90 highway. And he had other favorite places—Greenwater east of Enumclaw and close by the Green River. They often rode their bikes along Frager Road, next to the river.

“Did you ever stop and have sex along the Green River?” Doyon asked.

“Geez, yes…lots of places,” Dana answered, a little embarrassed.

“Where?”

“On the banks, in the tall grass.”

NOW MATT HANEY and Jim Doyon revisited the mass of circumstantial evidence they had uncovered fourteen years earlier, once again incredulous that it hadn’t resulted in the discovery of absolute physical evidence during the 1987 search warrants.

That September, Haney and Doyon had picked Dana up early in the morning and they began a long, meandering drive as she directed them to various locations where Gary had taken her during their marriage. The hairs had stood up on the backs of their necks as they realized they were being taken on a tour of most of the body-cluster sites, although they hadn’t told Dana that. First, they’d headed northeast on Highway 18 until they reached the I-90 junction, then turned toward North Bend and the road near Ken’s Truck Stop. Dana had pointed out places where she and Gary had once stopped to have outdoor sex. They’d also come close to unofficial garbage dumps and a spot where Gary had enjoyed sliding down snow-covered slopes in an inner tube. Headed south, they’d reached the area east of Enumclaw along Highway 410.