Even when he had the girls in his house, he showed them his son’s bedroom with its toys and souvenirs, keeping up his pretense of normalcy. Once in his house near the Pac HiWay, Ridgway said he usually asked the women to go into his bathroom to wash their “vaginas” while he watched through the open door. Aside from crude slang, he didn’t know how to describe the female anatomy. He used the word vagina when he meant vulva. He insisted that none of the young prostitutes objected to his watching them through the open bathroom door.

He also urged them to urinate before sex. That way they wouldn’t be as likely to wet his bed when he killed them. Indoors or outside, he had discovered that having intercourse “doggy style” gave him a physical advantage. Entering them from the rear—but never, he insisted, for anal penetration—gave him a physical advantage. After he ejaculated, he sometimes told them “I hear someone,” and they lifted their heads to listen. Or they tilted their heads back as they reached for their clothing. With their throats exposed and extended, it was easy for him to press his right forearm against their larynxes and cut off their breath, choking them.

“If we were outside near the airport, they would look up as a plane went over, and that was when I did it,” he said matter-of-factly. “If my right arm got tired, I used my left, and if they really fought, I would put my legs around them. I told them if they stopped fighting, I would let them go. But I was always going to kill them.”

It was an eerie experience for anyone watching and listening. Ridgway’s voice was tight, as if it was emerging under great pressure, and his words came out in bursts. Even so, he seemed quite comfortable about answering probing questions.

Because the victims meant nothing at all to him, he apparently had no preference about race or body type. He had “dated” some of the women before, but knowing them made no difference to him. “I just wanted to kill them. If they told me to hurry, that made me angry. And I would kill them.”

Many of the girls had pleaded for their lives, telling him they had children at home, a family to take care of, or, quite truthfully, “I don’t want to die.” Of course, it didn’t matter to him. Nothing that the hapless women could do dissuaded Ridgway from his goals. “Some went easily,” he recalled, “and some fought hard, but they all died.” He estimated that even the most violent struggle didn’t last longer than two minutes.

He had never used a gun to kill, or a knife. “It would have been messy, and they still might be able to scream.”

“Why did you choke them?” he was asked.

“ ’Cause that was more personal and more rewarding than to shoot her.”

He was indignant about the young women who had fought him, leaving bite marks or scratches. He had switched to ligatures that gave his arms more protection—anything that was handy or something he had prepared: towels, belts, extension cords, ropes, his necktie, socks, jumper cables, even his T-shirt.

Only one of the girls Ridgway brought to his house had fought him hard enough to escape his bedroom, managing to reach the front door. She was inches away from freedom when he caught her and killed her in his living room. Although it was impossible to know which victim that had been, it was likely that it was Kim Nelson, who was also known as Tina Tomson.

Had they not been attacked when they were completely off-guard, some of the women he killed might well have bested him. Tina Tomson was many inches taller than he was and weighed as much. Marie Malvar was small but she had hurt him badly, scratching him until he bled and leaving scars that he’d had to pour acid over to hide. Marie had made him very angry—so angry that he said he decided to leave her body all alone in a different place from the other girls. Later, he had tried to find her but he’d been consumed with such blind rage when he left her that he couldn’t find her again for a long time.

Even though Ridgway claimed his anger was a natural reaction to having been cuckolded by his second wife, his interviewers knew that during the time after his divorce from Dana, he had had many consensual sexual partners. It hadn’t mattered. He’d still roved along the highways, continually looking for prostitutes.

He described how he planned in advance how he’d get rid of the still-warm bodies of the victims he choked in his bedroom, protecting his mattress with plastic in case they urinated or evacuated their bowels as they died. “If that happened, then I would have to clean up,” he said mildly, “and do laundry. I never closed their eyes or touched their faces. I dragged them out of the house on plastic or an old green rug I had, and put them in my truck. I got rid of them right away.”

Once, he’d put a small woman into a blue metal footlocker that belonged to his son, Chad.

“What did you do with that trunk?”

“Afterward I sold it at a swap meet.”

Wherever he had formed his ethics—or lack of them—about sex, he was alternately lewd and prim. He explained that he considered masturbation a greater sin than going to prostitutes. Sometimes, he’d had no choice but to seek out the women on the street. He didn’t like “labels,” and took offense when any of his questioners called him a serial rapist. “I’m not a serial rapist,” he complained. “I’m a serial killer.”

Ridgway’s stalking hours depended on what shift he was working at Kenworth, his vacation time, or whether Kenworth employees were on strike. He could verify dates by checking his job schedules. His own memories were precise only in his recall about whether the weather was warm or cold, wet or dry, when he picked up his prey.

53

ONE MORNING a few days after Gary Ridgway began his confessions to Green River Task Force detectives, Jon Mattsen and Tom Jensen were puzzled to find a man whose attitude was much changed. As if by rote, Ridgway gave them his breakfast menu, but rather than smiling at them and saying good morning, he turned away and sat with closed eyes, his back to them.

It was June 18, 2003, and his voice was tinged with anger as he said he’d awakened in the night and begun to think. “The Other Gary came into my mind,” he said.

They wondered who the “Other Gary” was, but it soon became obvious that he was referring to a stronger, angrier persona than he had demonstrated so far.

The Other Gary, he told them, was enraged because of the power and control the detectives had over him. “You guys are trying to control me, but I never slept with a dead woman. Sure, I screwed them a couple of times. The ‘New Gary’ wants me to candy-coat this.”

It was apparent that the man they had talked to until this morning was the “New Gary,” a reasonable man who was pleasant and cooperative. The “Other Gary,” who was also the “Old Gary” didn’t want to talk about the murders and resented being controlled.

“I killed them because I wanted to,” the Old Gary said. “I was mad. I killed forty-nine or fifty people between 1982 and 1985. I killed a lot of them because of my rage and anger at my ex-wife.”

Now the Old Gary wanted to go out and find the bodies of his victims. He would call the shots about where they would go. The man with closed eyes stuttered as he said, “I hated ’em—hated ’em.”

It had started, he said, with Wendy Coffield. “I don’t give a shit about where I killed ’em. I didn’t give a shit about them or their jewelry. Carol Christensen meant nothing to me. The fish I put on her were to attract animals. I dragged ’em by their feet. All of them didn’t piss me off. Some I wasn’t mad enough to kill.”