“We’re going to take you to a hotel,” Peters said.

“My cats…the kittens…,” Judith protested.

“We’ll see that they’re fed and taken care of,” Matt Haney told her. And they were.

Judith wouldn’t be able to come home for more than a week, hidden from a rabid press in a hotel room. And when she did come home again, it would never be the same. It would never really be her house again. Without Gary to bring in his paycheck, there was no way she would be able to keep it.

50

GARY RIDGWAY might never come home at all. He was now fifty-two years old, and the photographs Randy Mullinax and Jim Doyon took of him at the Regional Justice Center showed an almost expressionless man, save for a vertical crease that had deepened over the passing years so that it bisected his forehead. Combined with the heavy hooding of his upper eyelids, the crease gave him an almost evil mien. In some photos he wore blue jeans and the familiar plaid shirt. In others he wore only white jockey shorts. One picture, given the suspicion that this was the weapon used to take dozens of lives, was chilling; it was his right arm from the elbow down. It didn’t appear muscular and the hand itself showed fingers gnarled by the beginning of arthritis.

Brought to earth at last, the man they had considered a preying wolf had a meek presence. But at that point he refused to answer Mullinax’s and Doyon’s questions and he seemed determined not to do so. He wanted to talk to an attorney.

Ridgway was placed in an “ultra security” cell in the King County Jail, high up on the hill behind the courthouse and the Public Safety Building, where guards would check on him twenty-four hours a day. His mug shot was on the front page of every newspaper from Vancouver, British Columbia, to San Francisco by morning, along with speculation that he might be guilty of scores of unsolved homicides in those areas.

I looked at the picture in the Seattle papers on December 1, 2001, wondering if I had ever seen this face before, and I cannot say that I recognized it. But my daughter did. Leslie called me and said in a hushed voice, “Mom, remember how I told you about that man who came to our book signings? The one who leaned against the wall and just watched you? The one who never said anything and never bought any books?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It was him.”

“It was who?” I asked.

“Gary Ridgway. He’s the man I saw.” She paused. “He was even in the audience one time when you were giving a talk at a bookstore and you said ‘Nobody knows who the Green River Killer is or what he looks like. For all I know, he could be sitting here tonight.’ I guess he was.”

People usually chuckled when I said that. It was a way to put an audience at ease and, at the same time, make them realize that serial killers didn’t look like monsters. But it certainly gave me pause as I realized Ridgway must have been sitting in a darkened high school auditorium in Burien or Auburn or Tacoma as I showed slides of other serial killers I’d written about.

DESPITE THE ELATION that Dave Reichert voiced during the news conference he’d called, his media spokesman, John Urquhart, was cautious, as he always was. “What we’re saying is we have not caught the Green River Killer,” he told reporters later. “What we’re saying is we’ve arrested a suspect in the deaths of four women who happen to be on the list of Green River victims. We don’t know who killed those other forty-five women. Period. We’re up to our eyeballs in police work.”

And, indeed, they were. It wasn’t over by a long shot. Every single case, each dead girl, most of whom would have been in their late thirties and early forties by 2001, would be scrutinized again. Authorities currently had only enough evidence to link Ridgway to four murders, and even those might be squeakers. But Norm Maleng’s King County prosecutor’s office had been with the task force every step of the way as they planned the arrest, skillfully fortifying any weak spots. They would continue to do that. It was a matter now of one step at a time.

First, there would be massive searches for possible new evidence. When Ridgway was arrested, crime scene specialists were already primed to employ their expertise in forensic science. “We knew a couple of days in advance that he was going to be arrested, and so we were prepared to search four homes, including the one where he’d lived for so long on Military Road,” one of the technicians said.

They would have precious little daylight; in Seattle in December, the sun sets before four PM. The weather was miserable as rain fell heavily and relentlessly, and fierce winds blew branches from evergreens, closing some streets and knocking out power lines, but the dark skies couldn’t quash the jubilance of the task force. There was a huge break in an investigation that almost everyone had given up on. At the same time, it brought back the memories of so many young women long dead, some of whose bodies had yet to be found.

Members of the Crime Scene Response Team from the Washington State Patrol were assigned to do thorough searches of houses where Gary Ridgway had lived over the prior twenty years. The forensic technicians hoped to find links between the suspect and many more than four victims. He had lived in the small house near the Pacific Highway all during the peak years of disappearances; they suspected that it might hold the most secrets.

It had been a long time since Ridgway occupied the now blue-gray house off Military Road, and the family who lived there in 2001 barely spoke English. They were cooking dinner when the WSP team arrived, surprised to find a crew of crime scene technicians about to swarm over their two-bedroom home.

“We had to convey to them that they would have to leave,” Cheryl Rivers, a technician recalled. “That’s the way it has to be.”

Wearing coveralls, latex gloves, and “booties” to cover their shoes so they would not inadvertently shed evidence themselves, the WSP team moved in. Back in the eighties, Ridgway’s old neighbors had been mystified by how he could have spilled enough red paint to destroy a carpet. There was an air of expectation as the crime scene experts pulled up the current carpets. They could see fibers from various old rugs below, but when they tested the layers beneath for signs of blood or body fluids, they got negative results.

That was disappointing. Green River investigators suspected that Ridgway had taken his victims to one of the bedrooms, probably the spare bedroom. But they knew that he shared his house from spring to late fall in 1982 with a couple to help pay his mortgage. He had fashioned a space for himself—a combination bedroom/storage area—in the garage, living there weekdays and disappearing each weekend. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to bring girls to his house during those months. Still, he had lived there alone for two years before Judith moved in.

Even though the crime scene technicians worked their way down to the underlying carpet pads, bare floors, and baseboards, they found nothing of evidentiary value. They looked at the walls for signs that they had been repainted, but whatever had happened here had taken place long ago. It seemed impossible that there was no sign of the hapless girls trapped alone with a killer, their screams—if any—drowned out by the constant roar of the freeway just beyond the edge of the backyard. Even the crawl space beneath the house was empty of clues.

Finally the crime scene technicians were done, and the bewildered family who currently occupied the residence were allowed to come back in. Did they even know what might have happened in the house where they lived? With their tentative grasp of English, it was hard to tell. The county would, of course, replace and repair the torn carpets and baseboards, restoring the house to the way it had been.