year-old prisoner might very well die before he could be executed.

If Maleng’s office accepted the defense proffer, the case would be over, there would be no trial. But, after all the years, there would be answers. “The community’s most enduring nightmare would be over, the families and survivors of the victims of the uncharged killings would find a measure of justice and resolution at last,” Jeff Baird recalled in his summary. “Ridgway would be held accountable for all the murders he committed, not just a select few.”

Part of the agreement would block any chance that Ridgway could appeal his four dozen life sentences without possibility of parole, and he would die in prison. An acceptance of this proffer would, however, cover only King County, and would be automatically void if Ridgway failed to include every single victim within its borders. It would not apply to any murders he might have committed in other counties or other states.

In many ways, it was an agonizing choice for the State to make. Everyone who had seen the agony and tragedy of a twenty-two-year series of unsolved murders of young women wanted to see Gary Ridgway face a jury of his peers, to watch him sit in court and face the terrible evidence of what he had done. But he would only be prosecuted for seven murders; there was simply no way to find further physical evidence linking him to all the dead girls.

On June 13, 2003, the prosecutors’ office and the defense team entered into an agreement. The State would not seek the death penalty, but Ridgway would have to plead guilty to aggravated murder in the first degree for all the homicides he’d committed in King County. And this didn’t mean only the forty-nine victims on the official list. If he had killed before 1982 or after 1985, he had to admit those murders, too.

The agreement was not revealed to the public. Norm Maleng’s prosecution team, Sheriff Dave Reichert, and the task force would have to meet with the survivors before they did that, and even before they talked to the victims’ families, they needed to pursue interrogation of Gary Ridgway to see if he meant to keep his promises.

IT WAS MID-JUNE of 2003 when the rumors began. Where was Ridgway? One thing was certain; he was no longer in the King County Jail. Katie Larson, speaking for the task force, acknowledged that he had been moved from his cell there, but said any information on his whereabouts had been sealed by a judge. She acknowledged that she knew where he was, but she wasn’t at liberty to say. Larson assured the public that Ridgway was in a secure facility and there was no need to worry that he might be able to escape. “He has a right to privacy,” Larson said, although most citizens didn’t much care about Ridgway’s privacy.

His most likely hiding place was Western State Hospital in Steilacoom, a state mental institution. Someone who was in a position to know told me that Ridgway required treatment for mental illness, and authorities had spirited him to the Steilacoom high-security wing late at night, but that wasn’t true.

Reporters had attempted to find him by checking to see if Ridgway was an inmate in the Pierce County Jail, the Snohomish County Jail, or in the State Hospital. If he was, he was listed under another name.

Something seemed to be happening, however. Green River Task Force members and Search and Rescue teams were spotted in rugged areas where victims’ bodies had been found and in similar regions around King County. It had been a long time since Green River investigators had been a staple on the nightly news, but suddenly they were a familiar sight again. Had they simply gone back to look for something they might have missed earlier, or was it possible that the prosecutor’s office had struck some kind of a deal with the defense team—Ridgway’s life for information the task force needed to find more victims?

Larson said they were only doing “routine searches,” based on reviewing cases and following up tips that had come in from the public. And yet it seemed that every weekend, they were spotted somewhere in some woods. However, the seven or eight hours the searchers spent each day clambering up and down deep ravines apparently netted nothing at all.

But something had to be going on. Throughout July and August, and into the fall, the Green River teams were visible in the south county area or near North Bend. They wore jeans and shirts, civilian clothes with baseball caps or other hats to protect them from an unusually hot summer sun. Most of the areas they searched were dry as dust, but, on occasion, they had to dig into thick mud—the most difficult digs.

Katie Larson, who was a pretty, slender blonde, worked double-duty; she joined the diggers during the day and then faced the cameras, but she declined to be specific about what they were looking for, or who, if anyone, had directed them to a particular site. Barred from getting as close as they would like, television cameramen used telephoto lenses to show the men and women working with shovels, trowels, rakes, buckets, and screens. I recognized a lot of the task force members, but the rest were strangers to me. That was to be expected—I’d been away at trials in Texas and Florida and didn’t know most of the younger investigators. Two local newspaper reporters who had haunted the task force for years tried to cross the yellow “crime scene” tape on a site near Des Moines and were turned away. I admit that I was tempted to drive down the hill and watch, too, but I didn’t because I didn’t want to get in the way and it would have been embarrassing to be asked to move on.

Privately, the new task force had dubbed Seattle police detective Kevin O’Keefe the official “bone man.” He had an unerring talent for discerning immediately whether a bone was animal or human. “We found so many bones from dogs, cats, and wild animals,” Sue Peters said. “We’d toss them to Kevin and he could tell us at once what we had. But one time we threw what we thought was an animal bone to him, and he said, ‘Whoa…hand these to me gently. This is human.’ ”

On August 16, 2003, they found human bones in the woods near Enumclaw. They were identified as belonging to Pammy Avent, Keli McGinness’s closest friend in the Camp in Portland. Both of them had come back to Seattle in 1983, only to disappear. Keli was still missing; the last sighting of Pammy was on October 26 of that year. For Pammy’s family, it was both a closure and the end of all hope.

On August 23, the task force detectives revisited a four hundred by one hundred–foot lot off the Kent–Des Moines Road, ground they had checked in June only to be stymied by a morass of ten-foot-tall Himalayan blackberry vines. Now the prickly vines had been cleared with machetes and they were able to divide the lot into a grid pattern.

And here they found nineteen human bones. They had no idea whom they belonged to, or if they had come from one person or several people. It would take a while to get the results from mitochondrial DNA tests, and many of the victims’ mothers had died over the twenty-two years since the killings began. All the years of changing seasons had covered the lost girls more deeply than their killer had buried them. It seemed a miracle that any of their poor bones had been found.

In September 2003, the Green River Task Force investigators located more bones in Snoqualmie, near North Bend and I-90, another familiar body-cluster site over the years. On September 16, the King County Medical Examiner’s Office identified them as belonging to April Dawn Buttram. She was the seventeen-year-old girl from Spokane whose mother had caught her crawling out the window, running away to a more exciting life in Seattle. She hadn’t found what she was looking for. She had found only death. April had vanished almost twenty years to the week that her bones were discovered.