Prosecutor Norm Maleng announced that he would not plea bargain with Ridgway. If convicted, he would face either the death penalty or life in prison without possibility of parole. He said that senior deputy prosecutors Jeff Baird and Marilyn Brenneman would represent the prosecutor’s office in the marathon legal procedures that lay ahead.

Without a defendant to film, the media turned to the usual interviews that accompany every high-profile crime. The Ridgways’ neighbors and co-workers voiced their shock that someone on their street or in their workplace should be arrested for such heinous crimes. They recalled a quiet man who had seemed anxious to make friends, their reactions very much like those Matt Haney had evoked when he canvassed Gary’s former neighborhood in 1987.

The only thing Ridgway had done to annoy any of his neighbors around his Auburn property had been to cut down many of the towering firs on his large lot, but that was his choice. And back on 218th and 32nd Avenue South, neighbors who had lived there in the eighties recalled how he had tried to organize a block watch targeting prostitutes, telling them that he suspected sex workers and their johns were parking nearby, leaving needles and condoms in the street. He had appeared to be obsessed with the wickedness of prostitutes, even though it seemed unlikely that their quiet street would attract sex for sale.

At the Kenworth plant in Renton, Ridgway’s co-workers realized how on target they had been when they referred to him as “G.R.” and “Green River Gary.” Aside from his tendency to invade the personal space of female employees, he had been a somewhat pathetic fixture at Kenworth, a rather slow man who tried to be gregarious. “He’d go out of his way to be friendly,” one co-worker said. “You’d see him coming down the hall and he’d be smiling and all happy. If he didn’t know your name, he’d still say, ‘Hi, friend!’ If he was standing by the coffee machine and you walked by, he’d stop you and buy you a cup. In the cafeteria, he’d sit with groups and join in the conversation, but he wouldn’t contribute much. He just wanted to belong real bad.”

Other Kenworth employees remembered Ridgway’s bizarre transformations from a Bible-quoting fanatic to a man who made obscene sexual remarks as he sat in the cafeteria. In either mode, his actions had been inappropriate, but not ominous. A few people who had known him said “I told you so,” but not many. Most were flabbergasted to see the man nobody had paid much attention to at the top of the nightly news.

THERE WERE RUMORS that Ridgway’s wife and brothers had come to visit him in jail, but they weren’t substantiated.

Jon Mattsen interviewed Ridgway’s younger brother, who was currently living on their deceased parents’ property. Although Gary had once helped him get a job at Kenworth, it was obvious the brothers weren’t close to one another or to their older brother. Younger than Gary by two years, Tom Ridgway appeared to know virtually nothing about him, his life, his motivations, his fears, or what hobbies he might have. “I know he always had a girlfriend, somewhere,” Tom told Mattsen, but he didn’t know anything much about Gary’s three marriages beyond what Mary Ridgway had told him.

There was a strange disconnect among the Ridgway brothers, almost as if they had been raised in a vacuum where family ties meant little. The last times Tom and Gary had been together were at their mother’s funeral and a few years before that, at their father’s funeral. Pressed to recall any other interaction, Tom remembered that he had asked Gary to find a part for his Suzuki Samurai, a 4×4 truck designed to drive off-road. “My life revolves around that Samurai,” he said, and Mattsen looked up sharply to see if he was serious. He seemed to be.

Tom said Gary had to be pretty well set financially because he had thirty-five years at Kenworth, “and he’s a penny-pincher and a Dumpster-diver…. He’d go down to Levitz where they throw [broken] glass-top tables into the Dumpster at night and pick it up. ‘Oh, it just needs a sheet of glass. I’ll just [get] glass and set it on there’ and he’s got a brand-new table. So for a freebie, he’s making thirty bucks.”

Gary’s younger brother was adamant that Gary was always with Judith, and read only free magazines you could pick up at the grocery store like Little Nickel want ads. As far as Gary’s arrests for approaching prostitutes, he’d never heard of them. Tom hadn’t the faintest idea about Gary’s sex life. Indeed, he knew so little about his own brother that an interview with a stranger on the street might have elicited more information.

“What do you think about everything that’s going on?” Mattsen asked, referring to the Green River arrests. “Do you think he could be responsible for—”

“Well, anything is possible, but I just can’t picture it. ’Cause he’s opposite of what I am, you know. I was always the wild one.”

Tom said that Gary had taken their parents’ deaths hard, but that was because Gary hadn’t been the one looking after them—Tom said he and his wife were the caregivers, so Gary seemed surprised to find out how close to death they’d been.

GARY RIDGWAY would be a curiosity in jail, but not a popular inmate. Some of the men in nearby cells recalled that he was pleasant enough and didn’t cause any trouble, but none of them had any respect for a man who had reportedly killed dozens of young women. Later, those who could get close enough urinated outside his cell so that the yellow puddles would flow toward him.

He received a visit from one of Seattle’s venerable criminal defense attorneys—Tony Savage, a gentle and rumpled bear of a man whose signature brown beard of the sixties was now white. For decades, Savage was known for taking on any number of infamous cases where the death penalty seemed sure to be invoked. He was a strong voice for the defense, and one who had always been against the death penalty. Savage had defended dozens of Washington’s most loathsome clients—clearly not with the hope of acquittals but to save their lives. He was a brilliant and kind man who seemed worn down by the decades of dealing with defendants accused of ghastly crimes, but he was good, and if he consented to represent him, Ridgway could not do better.

Asked about Gary Ridgway’s state of mind during the days after his arrest for murder, Savage said, “I think he’s doing very well, considering the pressure he’s under.”

Could Ridgway afford someone like Tony Savage? Probably not, unless Savage did it pro bono or was appointed as a public defender. It was difficult to imagine how any attorney could prepare for a trial where the victim toll might swell to almost four dozen. How long would it take in trial? Years, certainly.

If Savage was going to take on Ridgway, he would need help, a whole phalanx of lawyers and legal assistants. Gary and Judith Ridgway had some equity in their house, though no one knew how much, and several vehicles. There was the house left by Mary and Tommy Ridgway, reportedly for sale for $219,000. But any sale proceeds had to be split three ways, and allegedly the three brothers had already squabbled over that division of property. Even millionaires could go broke paying for the best criminal defense attorneys for years.

It seemed ironic now that Ridgway hadn’t wanted to pay an attorney to defend him on the loitering for prostitution charge. Realistically, the trials that lay ahead were going to cost an estimated $12 million. And most of it would probably come from King County taxpayers.

51

NOW THAT Gary Ridgway had become the defendant and not merely the suspect that many detectives and leaders in the sheriff’s office had long since dismissed, their recollections changed. Everyone from the sheriff on down had jumped onto the “Ridgway Did It” bandwagon, most asserting that they had been convinced of his guilt all along.