Next, the state patrol teams moved several miles south to the Ridgway’s interim home in Des Moines near Salt Water State Park and the big house in Auburn. Each move had been to a better neighborhood, and their current house was a much larger and more expensive home. In both the Des Moines and Auburn searches, they looked for souvenirs, photos, hairs, fibers, prints or blood, mementoes from the victims, hidden jewelry, bloodstained clothing, weapons, anything that might link Ridgway to the victims with hard physical evidence. He had been married to Judith for a long time, but she was not a suspect, even though she had lived with him in all these houses.

Most serial killers cannot resist keeping a cache of items to remind them of their crimes. And Judith never questioned her husband about anything. It would have been comparatively easy for him to hide something from her, stowed up in rafters or behind insulation.

They found nothing like that.

Ridgway was in jail, and Judith hidden away in a hotel, still dazed by the way her life as she had known it had come to a halt. The only remaining occupants of their house in Auburn were feline. There were cats and kittens all over, playing and dashing around, and the criminalists had been instructed, “Don’t let the kittens out!”

They were careful to shut the doors so that the animals were safe. The team’s goal was to find as much as they could without doing damage to the house itself. If need be, there were techniques to X-ray the walls later. “My impression was that it was a very nice home,” one of the forensic searchers said, “but its decor was old-fashioned, outdated, and it looked like it had been decorated with things from the seventies, even though it wasn’t that old. It was so feminine. There was no indication at all that a man lived there. It was cluttered with plants, knickknacks, dolls, crocheted doilies, and things some women like. Every flat surface was covered with collectibles and ‘stuff.’ There was nothing at all of him there.”

Most of the decor did smack of another era, but it appeared to be a comfortable home where an average American family might live. There were multicolored crocheted afghans with the familiar zigzag pattern draped over the backs of couches and recliners, flowered pillows, life-size ceramic cats on the floor, a fully equipped oak entertainment center, arrangements of artificial flowers, wood stacked by the fireplace, and framed prints of angels, flowers, and ships. One frame held twenty family pictures. Mary Ridgway was in several, wearing harlequin glasses with her black hair teased into a high bouffant style. There were photos of Chad as a child, and some that were probably of Gary and his brothers in their early years.

The furniture was plush and solid. None of it seemed brand-new, but it looked cozy. “They were major pack rats, though,” one of the searchers said. “There was too much of everything in that split-level house, but it was clean, dusted, and reasonably neat in the living room and kitchen area.”

The master bedroom had a lovely floral bedspread and its double closet was filled with his and her clothing, ironed and carefully hung on hangers that all pointed the same way, shoes lined up neatly beneath.

When the crime scene team moved to the other bedrooms, however, they opened doors and stood back, stunned. “Oh, man!” one breathed.

Every available space, except for pathways, was filled with towering stacks of things. These rooms obviously weren’t to be lived in, but were only for the storage of items that had been packed tightly and saved, or possibly resold. Both of the Ridgways appeared to be consumed with a desire to squirrel things away, possibly just for the sake of having them. The forensic searchers had heard that they were regulars at swap meets, but this was bizarre. The rooms were orderly enough, but chock-full. The couple must have spent hours arranging and stacking their obviously secondhand possessions.

The living-dining area and the kitchen were sprinkled liberally with knickknacks, but these rooms were packed so tightly that the Washington State Patrol technicians couldn’t begin to process them for possible evidence, and they were grateful that that wasn’t part of their assignment; the task force detectives would have to go through the boxes and bins.

Although Judith had said she was rarely away from Gary, she had visited relatives from time to time. The WSP technicians knew there were often spots suspects didn’t think about wiping clean. In each house they processed, the team members looked for latent fingerprints and flecks of blood under protected surfaces, along edges of shelves and on the undersides of tables. Picture frames were often a good source for partial prints.

They lifted several for comparison, but these, too, would prove to be disappointing.

Outside the Auburn house, investigators were carefully turning dirt over around rhododendrons and other bushes, lifting up sod and leaving excavated squares and rectangles in an organized grid dig. Judith had been upset at the thought that her beloved poodle might be dug up from its grave, so they were careful to rebury it. “They were digging the heck out of the yard,” one state technician commented, “but really trying not to kill the stuff that was growing there.”

Even in gray December, anyone interested in gardening could tell that this was a carefully tended yard, and the Ridgways’ neighbors told detectives and reporters that gardening was one of Gary’s main topics during over-the-fence chats. He kept his lawn in top shape, and he and Judith spent a lot of time working side by side in their garden spots. All of the earth moved in the massive digs was replaced, but no buried bones were found. Wherever the bodies of the still missing victims were, they weren’t hidden within the sanctity of Gary Ridgway’s properties or former homes.

After she was allowed to move back into her house, Judith Ridgway went to the sheriff’s department’s Burien precinct and waited patiently to see someone. She seemed so lost and timid that a Community Service Officer and a volunteer who often helped out with clerical tasks approached her to see if they could help her. They were surprised when they heard her last name.

“She had come to find out how she could file for damage compensation for her house after it was searched,” the volunteer recalled. “She seemed bewildered by everything that had happened. She told us that the police wanted her to testify against her husband, but that she couldn’t do that—she was too frightened at the thought of getting up in front of all those people in the courtroom. We felt sorry for her.”

From jail, Ridgway wrote to Judith in his cramped, misspelled style. Trusties Xeroxed his letters, hoping to sell them as collectors’ items, perhaps on eBay, unaware that, legally, the contents belonged to him and not to them. He told Judith that his years with her were the happiest of his life. And while that may well have been true, investigators were not at all convinced that he had stopped his stalking and prowling during the many years they had been together.

Predictably, he had been denied bail when his case came before a judge. Gary Ridgway did not appear in person but waived that right and let his attorneys Mark Prothero and James Robinson, from the Associated Counsel for the Accused, speak for him. As for the information that the public waited for avidly, there wasn’t much. They weren’t even afforded a glimpse of Ridgway being led down the marbled halls of the courthouse in the custody of several armed deputies.

On December 5, Gary Ridgway was formally charged with four counts of aggravated murder in the deaths of Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Every corpse but “Cookie” Hinds’s had provided DNA that matched Ridgway’s, but the circumstantial evidence linking Hinds to the other cases was overwhelming. Again, Ridgway remained in his ultra-security cell, perhaps afraid to face the public’s rage. Legally, he wasn’t obligated to appear at these early hearings, but, at some point, he was going to have to come out and enter a plea.