Either this was another personality fighting its way out of the “New Gary” of 2003, or it was a clumsy attempt to present himself as a multiple personality. “I had sex with them afterward. They weren’t human, I guess. I didn’t give a shit. I bit [one of them] on the breast. I didn’t know Mary was pregnant. The New Gary is a wimp.”

Ridgway seemed genuinely angry as he spouted out filthy admissions for half an hour, his eyes squeezed shut. Jensen and Mattsen picked up on the dual method of interrogation the prisoner was suggesting. Perhaps even he couldn’t tell them everything he had done unless he could hide behind “the Old Gary.” That was fine with them. They pretended to respond to this angry man.

“The man who talked to us yesterday, the New Gary, was a real man,” Tom Jensen said, but the personality now onstage wasn’t buying it. The Old Gary was in charge and he insisted that he didn’t let women control him. “I had sex with every one of them but the pregnant one. I dumped a bag with cans [off the bridge] on 216th. Maybe they had prints on them.”

He continued to talk about how much he hated women, interspersing his monologue with details about evidence. “I left some jewelry by a tree near IHOP. I’m in charge now and I’m not gonna take it. I took three or four pictures of women under the Red Lion, and then I tore them up. I did write to the Times or the P.I. Don’t waste your time looking under my houses.

“I killed two ladies after I met Judith.”

Ridgway, whichever version this was, swore frequently although his grasp of scatological words wasn’t very extensive. “Old Gary” or “New Gary,” he had a limited vocabulary. He recalled killing one victim on the floor of his white van, using a cord pulled tight. “They’re all pieces of trash to me—garbage.”

“Why?” Jensen asked.

“Women always had control of me. They used me. I did cry after sometimes, but that was the good part of me. I’m the Old Gary now. The jewelry’s gone. I left it at Kenworth or in the airport and some Laundromat. I left some in a covered part of a light pole, and in a seam in some concrete beside the Safeway, and then I peed in a corner by the fence.”

They let him vent as he jumped from one subject to the next, not sure if this was an act. “That ‘burn’ on my arm isn’t acid,” he said. “It’s where Marie Malvar scratched me. I had scratch marks on my back…. Once I dropped [a victim] on her head off the tailgate.”

Jon Mattsen asked him about the cluster site near Exit 38 near North Bend, but Ridgway wasn’t sure. “I did roll one down the hill at Star Lake,” he said. “I didn’t kill no damn dog. I had control of those bitches. I didn’t have no love. Nobody loved me. So fuck ’em all! The New Gary is too soft. He’s not gonna hurt anyone.”

“What’s the Old Gary gonna tell us?”

Still turned away from the detectives questioning him, Ridgway’s eyes remained closed. “I killed a black lady in Ballard and one by a hospital. I took two to a graveyard by Washelli, and there’s one by Kmart, one by Leisure Time. I did take a head to the Allstate parking lot in Oregon. There was blond hair on the head. There’s three separate parts of bones on that funny-sounding road [Bull Mountain Road in Tigard], but I had a head that I lost.”

This seemingly furious Ridgway told them that he’d worn gloves and switched his shoes from tennis shoes to his Kenworth shoes in an effort to throw them off. He’d replaced the tires on his 1975 Ford pickup so they couldn’t be traced. He’d cut out some newspaper clips for information on what the task force was doing, and said he’d read four pages of a book that had information on evidence. He’d given two earrings to a girlfriend’s daughter. Now he moved on to the girl who got away: Penny Bristow.

“There was one lady I strangled without killing—on 188th. Nice lady. Dark hair. I left her there, naked, and took her purse, but she didn’t have any money. Sometimes I took their wallets and put their money in my pockets.”

He mentioned a woman he’d talked to near the airport, and had “motel sex” with. “I picked her up later and I took her someplace and I killed her. I know that for sure.”

He was probably referring to Keli McGinness, who had never been found. It may have been her severed head he took to Oregon with him, losing it in a culvert near the Allstate building.

The Old Gary was on a roll of rage, but it was sporadic now. “I didn’t hug ’em and kiss ’em at all. I didn’t give a crap about ’em. I had sex with a dead body [near where Connie Naon was found]. The other Gary’s [the New Gary] all screwed up. If you want to know what I did, talk to me. I’m the one who did it. Sometimes I tore up I.D. on the highway and threw it out. For that short time, I was in control. I’m the one with the devil in my head. The New Gary didn’t want me to come out. I don’t have rage anymore, but I got mad last night. I don’t have no rage no more.

“I’m in control now. You put words in his mouth. I didn’t give a shit about sleeping with them. The numbers of victims came from me. I don’t know if the New Gary can get back in. I killed ’em at S.I.R. [Seattle International Raceway], Green River College, 410, Riverton, Highway 18. I didn’t shoot no women. Two on Black Diamond Road, Carnation Road…”

He faltered. “The old one…The new one just flipped back in.”

Gary Ridgway’s voice was softer, tired sounding, but he hinted he had more to say. Mattsen and Jensen tried to bring the Old Gary back, but he wouldn’t come out. It was doubtful that Ridgway was a multiple personality. It seemed more believable that he had seen too many movies about multiples. And, in the Northwest, there had been massive coverage of the tapes of the “Hillside Strangler”—Kenneth Bianchi, arrested in 1980 for serial murders of young women in Los Angeles and Bellingham, Washington. Bianchi had done a very convincing double-personality. Ridgway’s acting wasn’t even in the ballpark.

Still, the session was very productive, if repugnant. Whether it was the Old Gary or the New Gary, he had admitted countless murders provoked by his fury at women in general. He had planned the murders and the disposal of the victims’ bodies.

It wasn’t yet nine thirty in the morning and he had filled the interview room with ugly admissions. The man Mattsen and Jensen had encountered at first seemed to have had his say, but the New Gary wanted to tell them things. He wanted to talk about the death of Giselle Lovvorn, the seventeen-year-old genius whose body was found at the south end of the deserted airport property.

“Chad was with me when I picked her up,” he said. It had been on a weekend, and his son was staying with him.

Jensen and Mattsen exchanged a quick glance. This seemed so far outside the pale of what any father would do. But Ridgway went on talking, and he was currently “the New Gary,” at that. But he assured them that he had left Chad—eight or nine at the time—in his truck while he walked the woman he called “LaVerne” well out of sight. The sex was over quickly, he explained, and then he had choked her with his forearm as a plane flew over.

“To be sure, I tied my black socks together and around her neck, and twisted the knot with a twig until it broke.”

“Did she fight you?” Mattsen asked.

“I can’t remember.”

“How could you kill a woman right in front of your son?” Jensen asked.

“I was in charge,” Ridgway said, but in the New Gary’s mild-mannered voice. “We were out of sight.”

“How long were you gone from Chad?”

“Probably five or ten minutes. When I came back, Chad asked where did the girl go. I just told him she lived nearby and she’d decided to walk home.” He remembered that he took his son someplace, then came back alone to move the girl’s body deep into the weeds.

They took a break. If Ridgway didn’t need one, the two detectives certainly did.