Judith said that the current year—2001—had been a difficult one for Gary. His mother had died of cancer and, at the end, he and Judith had taken turns caring for her so she could stay in her own home. His father had died in 1998 after a battle with Alzheimer’s. After his father passed away, she and Gary had chosen their current house because it sat on a shy acre and had extra bedrooms. “We thought we were going to take care of his mother because his daddy died and his mother got sick.”

“Did he [Tommy Ridgway] stay at home, or did he go to an outside facility?”

“He stayed at home mostly, and I would go and help his mother, help take care of his daddy. And Gary would stop by to see his father every single day after work. And his mom would have a glass of juice or coffee or a cookie on the table for him, and say ‘Hi.’ After his daddy died, he’d still stop by every day to make sure his mom was okay and to comfort her.” But then Mary Ridgway was diagnosed with cancer. “They gave his mother ten months, and she died ten months to the day.”

Judith spoke rapidly and breathlessly as if she were afraid of an empty spot in their conversation where they would tell her something she didn’t want to hear, all the while adding positive strokes to her word portrait of her perfect husband, the perfect son. Gary and his two brothers were in the process of selling their parents’ house. Judith felt that Gary’s younger brother had always gotten more attention from their mother, but hastened to add that Mary was the “sweetest mother-in-law.”

Mary had made the major decisions for the family, as Tommy, Gary’s father, had been a quiet man. Gary’s older brother was in charge of their parents’ estate, but Judith wasn’t sure what he did—he was a businessman of some kind who worked in a “big building” in downtown Seattle, while his younger brother was more of a “mountain man.”

Peters asked about Gary and Judith’s hobby of seeking out yard sales, swap meets, and discarded items they could use. “You don’t have any particular areas where you’d go constantly, where, you know, people dump things—there was one on Highway 18 and I-90….”

Puzzled, Judith shook her head. “Oh, we never go to places like that. If we went in that direction, we’d go to the campground, Leisure Time Resorts.”

They both loved to camp out and had steadily upgraded their trucks and campers to the twenty-seven-foot Class-C Coachman that Peters and Haney had seen in the yard. Where their bathroom facilities had once been only “a coffee can,” Judith said with a laugh, they now had the $22,000 motor home with its own bathroom. They spent long weekends and vacations in campgrounds in many spots in Washington and along the Oregon coast. They had gone to Canada a long time ago.

Peters changed the subject. “You were upset when we came to the door, and you mentioned that there had been something that just recently happened to Gary—out on Pacific HiWay. What do you know about that, Judith?”

“He told me that he stopped and had to close the window on the door on his truck—the back one—and that’s why they came over and arrested him.”

“Did he tell you what he was arrested for?”

“Well, he didn’t exactly, but the officer that called and talked to me said it was ‘soliciting.’ I said, ‘That can’t be.’ It didn’t sound like him.”

“What did the officer actually tell you?” Peters and Haney could see that Judith was either truly naive and trusting, or was trying to shade the truth.

“That some people’s husbands go out and do things—” She fought now for composure.

“That the wives don’t know about?” Haney asked.

“Um-hum.”

“Did that upset you?”

“Well, yes. I got a little shook, but he wouldn’t do anything like that. He’s friendly. He’s a friendly person. So he probably just looked at somebody and smiled.”

“And you think the officer might have just arrested him because of that?” Peters asked.

“He’s always friendly. Even when you’re walking by somebody, like in a store or you’re shopping, and, you know, he’ll smile and say ‘Hello.’ ”

Judith recalled that Gary had called her from jail, and she had asked him if he was okay and he said he was and that he hadn’t done anything. She had gone at once to pick him up when he was released. He had jogged down to the Kmart from jail and together they’d picked his truck up from the impound lot.

“Did you have any conversation when he got home about the situation? I mean, did he tell you?”

“No.” Gary’s wife seemed incredibly passive and accepting, and Peters pressed a little. But Judith insisted she could understand completely why his back window might have been open and he would have had to stop to close it. “He drives through Sea-Tac every day, but he can’t now.”

“Would it surprise you,” Peters asked carefully, “if he was trying to date a girl on the highway, a prostitute?”

“Yes, it would surprise me. It would hurt me, and, you know, I’d wonder what did I do wrong or—”

“Or what he did wrong. Not necessarily you, right?”

Judith was very nervous now. Asked if Gary had been arrested in the past for picking up a prostitute, she vaguely recalled something like that years earlier, just before they got married. “He was on his way home and someone would see the same truck driving by, and they stopped him and arrested him.”

Peters turned to Matt Haney and asked him to remind Judith about the time in April 1987 when he had obtained search warrants for Judith and Gary’s house just off Military Road, for the Kenworth plant, and Gary’s locker, and even for his parents’ home.

Haney nodded, reconstructing some details of that day. Judith had been working at the day-care facility in Des Moines then. Finally, she allowed that memory to come back. The first house she shared with Gary was searched, and deputies picked her up at work on that day. But she had never believed Gary had done anything wrong, and she didn’t think about it afterward.

“Do you remember him ever telling you, before the search warrant, that he’d been arrested earlier in his life?” Peters asked. “In the early eighties—that he’d been arrested for picking up prostitutes?”

“No. What eighties?”

“May 1982,” Matt Haney said.

“I didn’t know him then.”

“So that’s new information that you’ve never known?” Peters asked. “Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Has he ever said anything to you about prostitutes, like, you know, they’re garbage, or he likes talking to them, or they’re just ordinary people, or ‘What’s your feeling?’ What do you think he thinks of prostitutes, or what has he told you he thinks of them?”

“We’ve never talked about them.” Judith’s absolute trust in her husband had been badly shaken, but she was still doing her best to describe him as a good man.

“Does he have any [feelings] about someone’s particular race. Does he treat blacks and whites the same, do you know?” Peters asked. “How does he feel about blacks…or Filipinos?”

“It doesn’t matter what color somebody is, or—”

“That’s your opinion,” Peters pointed out. “What do you think Gary’s opinion is?”

“Well, he works with all kinds of different people at work, and he talks to them and all.”

The woman before her was in complete denial, struggling to hold her world together even as it broke into shards and began to slip away, but Sue Peters knew she had to ask certain questions. “I’m asking you questions to find out what type he is, because I don’t know him and you do.”

“He’s understanding. He’s gentle. He’s soft-spoken—and he’s always smiling.”

Matt Haney asked Judith about the area where she was living when she first met Gary, and the detectives realized that she’d been only a block or two from where most of the dead girls had vanished. Judith described their dates in fast-food restaurants on the Strip, and their camping trips to bleakly familiar areas.