Facing his questioners, the regular Gary was still with them. He apparently didn’t get that whatever persona he affected, his confessions were odious. They had to convince him that nothing shocked them, but that wasn’t true. However experienced Ridgway’s questioners were, it was virtually impossible not to be taken aback by the complete and utter lack of feeling he demonstrated.

He did seem uncomfortable about giving the details of his intercourse with the corpses of the women he’d killed, and, for once, talked around his perversions, avoiding questions he seemed to anticipate.

“We have evidence of necrophilia,” Mattsen said calmly. “You wouldn’t be the first person, or the last, who did that.”

“Yes…I did lie about that. I had to bury them and take them far away so I wouldn’t go back to have sex with them. I had an urge to do that. It was a sexual release that I didn’t have to pay for. Maybe it gave me power over them.”

Ridgway admitted to returning to the bodies of about ten of the women he had left close to the Strip. “That would be a good day, an evening when I got off work and go have sex with her. And that’d last for one or two days till I couldn’t—till the flies came. And I’d bury them and cover them up. And then I’d look for another. Sometimes, I killed one one day and I killed one the next day [and] there wouldn’t be no reason to go back.”

He had returned to one victim to have intercourse with her body even though his eight-year-old son was asleep in his truck thirty feet away. When he was asked what would happen if his son remembered that and threatened to tell, he wasn’t sure.

“Would you kill him?”

“No…I might have.”

Penny Bristow, the one girl who got away from Gary Ridgway, had always felt that he only wanted her dead, and that live sex hadn’t mattered. Even though he’d demanded fellatio, he had no erection. “I don’t even know why he took his clothes off,” she said. “His face looked white, clammy, cold. His arms and everything were cold. His hands. He was a totally different person and he kind of made me think that, if he did kill me, since he wasn’t interested in me sexually before that, he probably would have tried to have intercourse if I was dead.”

DR. MARY ELLEN O’TOOLE may have come the closest to uncovering the early childhood events that had the devastating impact on the way Gary Ridgway viewed women and why he developed the aberrations that consumed him. O’Toole had initially explained that the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Science Unit didn’t have time to consider the cases of every serial killer referred to them, and they didn’t even care about how many victims a man might have taken. “They’re not all equally interesting to us,” she said. “I would need to put you through what I refer to as a ‘verification process.’ ”

It was a challenge Ridgway could hardly have resisted. He had always wanted to be interesting, and he’d been anxious to present his perversions to her.

“At what age did you realize that there was something wrong with you?” O’Toole asked.

He thought it was when he was about ten. His “red flags” were his forgetfulness, his breathing, his allergy problems, and his depression. Dr. O’Toole said that was not what she meant; she was more interested in his paraphilic behaviors, a term she had to explain to him, starting from “personality disorders,” which he seemed to grasp, and linking that to the abnormal sexual desires he had practiced: frotteurism, exposing himself, stalking, voyeurism, rape, murder for sexual release, and, finally, necrophilia.

Although he would deny it for a long time, Ridgway felt that the bodies of his victims “belonged” to him. As long as they weren’t discovered and removed by the Green River Task Force detectives, they were his. “A beautiful person that was my property—uh, my possession,” he told O’Toole, “something only I knew, and I missed when they were found or where I lost ’em.”

“How did you feel, Gary, back in the eighties when the bodies were found and taken away, those times they were discovered,” O’Toole asked. “How did it feel?”

“It felt like they were taking something of mine that I put there.”

That was, he explained later, why he had taken some of the skeletons or partial skeletons to Oregon. It was to confuse the task force detectives because he didn’t want them to find and remove any more of his possessions. He’d often wished he could find some of the old “bottomless” mine shafts that still existed in southeast King County so he would know he had a secure place to leave the corpses of his victims. The bodies were both a burden to get rid of and treasures he wanted to keep.

O’Toole was particularly interested in his relationship with his late mother, and it proved she had good reason to be suspicious. Gary Ridgway had, indeed, had an inappropriate relationship with Mary Ridgway. When he was thirteen or fourteen, she had both humiliated him and sexually stimulated him after he wet his bed, something that happened at least three times a week and sometimes every day. “She said to me, ‘Why aren’t you like [your brothers]—they don’t wet the bed. Only babies wet the bed. Aren’t you ever going to grow up?’ She degraded me. I didn’t feel much love at that time.”

But his mother spent fifteen minutes or more soaping, washing, and drying his penis and testicles, even though he often became erect when she did that. She had also appeared half naked in front of him, and even though he felt depressed and ashamed, he admitted to O’Toole that he had been sexually aroused. “Well, here’s a woman like the ones out of the dirty magazines—she’s got smooth legs, smooth figure, and breasts, tight skin…. She had breasts and a flat stomach and I probably saw her, maybe walked into the bathroom [when she was] on the toilet. She didn’t have a penis or anything like that. [She was] someone that could turn somebody on, turn me on a little bit.”

Ridgway admitted that he had peeked at his mother’s breasts when her robe fell open, looking down far enough to see her nipples. He had also developed a “hard on” when she measured his in-seam so she could buy the right size pants from Penney’s, where she worked. He didn’t know if she knew or not, but his mother often told his father and her sons about measuring male customers at work the same way, and feeling their penises become erect.

He insisted he had never touched his mother, although being so close to her physically when he was naked and she was partially undressed had made him want to touch a female. Nor had she ever caught him masturbating. He accomplished that after school in a locked bathroom before she got home from work at six. “I don’t think she even talked about masturbating. It’s like nasty to her to talk about it.”

He didn’t remember resenting his mother, although he admitted that he sometimes thought about stabbing her.

Quite probably stimulated by his mother’s inappropriate touching, Ridgway admitted that he had begun to stalk girls and women when he was about twelve, hiding as he watched them in his neighborhood or in class, then following them and peering at them from across the street. “I’d have a hard-on, and think of the woman as a goal, find out where she lived. And then in the morning, I’d go the same way and watch her.”

He admitted his compulsion not only to kill women but to have intercourse with them after they were dead. He pointed out he had not revisited all of his victims after death. The ones who had fought him and hurt him made him angry, and he punished them by leaving them in some deserted spot by themselves.

“Blondes were special,” Ridgway said. “And I think there were at least four or five blondes. I don’t remember having sex after I killed them. I always liked blondes with big breasts. They were the high-priced hookers and they were my special goal—to go out and get a blond lady and have sex with her and kill her. She was at the top of the list.”