That was understandable. A long time later, it was hard enough for me to watch the interviews, caught on DVDs, without having to have been there, masking the revulsion that came with his unfeeling recitation of his crimes. The questioning was usually accomplished in an hour-and-a-half to two-hour segments.

A team of two detectives sat at a round, Formica-topped table across from Ridgway, who was manacled even inside the task force headquarters, although he could move his hands enough to take notes or drink from his bottle of artesian water. He wore jail “scrubs,” usually bright red, sometimes white. At a rectangular table, just out of camera view, members of Ridgway’s defense team listened and watched. A wrinkled gray painter’s tarp covered the wall behind the prisoner, although other detectives could observe and hear what was going on through the closed-circuit television system.

“We quickly learned how to deal with him,” Peters recalled. “He would have enjoyed talking for sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but none of us wanted to listen that long. At first he seemed to think he was running the show. When we gave him a choice of what he wanted for breakfast or lunch, he got the wrong idea and thought he was in some kind of control, so after that he ate whatever we decided he should get.”

If he was particularly forthcoming, Ridgway realized small rewards—a salmon dinner, or extra pancakes, something he wanted to read—although his dyslexia made that difficult for him.

They established a routine. Most of their morning interview sessions began shortly after eight with a recitation of what the prisoner had eaten for breakfast: “Pancakes, an egg, sausage,” Ridgway would say with a smile. And then he evaluated the quality of his sleep during the night while the detectives feigned interest. He appeared to be sleeping remarkably well, given the ghastly imprints laid down in his memory. But since this was all about him, the memories of the dead didn’t disturb him.

They never had.

WATCHING the videotapes that caught every word of the interrogations of Gary Ridgway during those four months of 2003 would have been an unsettling experience for anyone, hundreds of hours of grotesque recollections from a man who looked totally harmless as he described killing dozens of women in a halting, dispassionate voice. Like all criminals, he minimalized his crimes initially, only slowly admitting the monstrous details. While he had ample motivation for telling the truth—his life—he said he knew he was a pathological liar.

“Ridgway also suggested another reason why he would lie or minimalize his conduct,” Jeff Baird, the chief trial deputy, wrote in the prosecutor’s summary of evidence. “He believes that a popular ‘true crime’ author will write a book about him, and he wanted to portray himself in the best possible light.”

In the beginning, Ridgway denied any premeditation to murder, claiming that he killed when he was in a rage. It was the victims’ fault because they didn’t seem to be enjoying sex with him or they made him hurry. “When I get mad, I shake. Sometimes I forget to breathe and things get all blurry,” he said.

Of course, the anger wasn’t his fault either; he blamed his failure to be promoted at Kenworth on women, who got the best and easiest jobs. His first two divorces were his ex-wives’ fault, as were the child support payments he’d had to make for Chad even though he hadn’t wanted a divorce in the first place. Small things enraged him; when he bought his house, the sellers were so cheap they had taken all the lightbulbs. All these things made it difficult for him to sleep, and he said the only way to release the “pressure” had been to kill women.

That wasn’t true, and his specious reasoning soon faltered. He had wanted to kill for the sake of killing, although even he may not have known why. Again and again, he would repeat, “All I wanted to do was have sex with them and kill them.”

It was obvious early on that Ridgway could remember neither his victims’ faces nor their names. His memory wasn’t all fuzzy, but it was compartmentalized. He recalled every vehicle he’d ever owned, houses he’d lived in when he was a child, his various shifts at Kenworth—basically inanimate objects. (Ted Bundy had been like that, too. He could cry over a dented Volkswagen or an abandoned bicycle, but not a human being.)

Gary Ridgway had maps in his head and sharp recall of where he had left bodies, but the dead girls were apparently interchangeable in his mind. Who they were or what they might have become made no difference to him. They had existed only to please him sexually for a short time and they were then disposable.

Some he had deliberately let go, saying, “You’re too cute for a guy like me.” But that, he explained, was only so he would have witnesses, if he should ever need them, that he was a good guy.

“A couple of times the urge to kill wasn’t there. It could have been where I had a real good day at work. Somebody patted me on the back, ‘You did a good job today,’ which was a rarity. It could have been maybe on my birthday…or maybe I just didn’t have time to kill them and take them someplace.”

The detectives worked out ways to stimulate Ridgway’s memory. They did their best to keep him on track, and to recall one victim at a time. When his train of thought began to wander away, they brought him back. Sue Peters often showed him photographs of the living girls, and he shook his head. They didn’t look familiar to him. He had never really bothered to look at them in the first place. He recognized photos of locations, however, saying that fences, trees, or road signs helped him pinpoint them.

The investigators used innovative ways to reach the stuttering, expressionless prisoner. He seemed cowed by the strength of the male questioners, perhaps more responsive to the female interrogators, but there wasn’t a vast difference in his response from one to the other. He may have felt powerful with his victims, but they were such pathetically easy targets. He seemed a mouse now.

“Think of it as a paint job,” Tom Jensen said, as he attempted to trigger Ridgway’s recollection of his crimes. “What do you do first?”

“Well, you prep it. Do the taping and all.”

“So, how did you prep taking the women?”

“I asked if they were ‘dating,’ and told them what I wanted and I waved money at them, and we decided that.” He said he offered them more than they usually got, but that didn’t matter because he knew he wouldn’t have to pay them anyway.

Some of the victims were killed out of doors on the ground after he had spread a blanket he carried in his truck. Some died in the back of his truck. During the times when he lived alone in the little gray house off Military Road, his preference had been to take the women, whom he ironically referred to as “ladies,” to his house. He set their minds at ease in different ways. “A lot of them asked me if I was the Green River Killer when I picked them up,” Ridgway said. “I told them ‘No, of course not. Do I look like the Green River Killer?’ And they says, ‘No, you don’t.’ They always thought it was a big tall guy—about six three, 185 pounds.”

There were women who refused to “date” Ridgway because they were afraid he was an undercover cop. He alleviated their concerns by keeping beer in his truck and offering it to them, and they relaxed because a police officer wouldn’t do that.

He had most of his bases covered. To allay the fears of the frightened girls, he kept some of Chad’s toys on his dashboard. He wanted to appear as an ordinary Joe, a good guy who was a single father. He kept cartons of cigarettes to give away. Sometimes he groomed girls by dating them a few times, offering to help them get jobs, to become a regular customer they could count on, or let them use his car. “And they think, you know, ‘This guy cares,’ and…which…I didn’t. I just wanted to get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her.”