Keli McGinness, who had never been found, had been the most beautiful, the blonde who fulfilled his fantasy. Detective Sue Peters had looked for Keli for such a long time. Ridgway insisted that he had picked up six or seven hundred women, and despite studying pictures of the forty-nine known victims, he often claimed he just couldn’t remember which ones he had killed or where he killed them.

“Did you take her to your house,” Sue Peters asked. “Did you kill her in your truck, or did you kill her out in the woods someplace on a date?”

“I had to kill her in the back of the truck.”

“That’s what you originally told us.”

“Well, I probably told you at my house, if I could have got her to my house.”

Peters persisted. “Do you remember getting Keli McGinness into your house…. This is the one with large breasts. Do you remember lying with her on your bed?”

“No, I don’t.” His vagueness was ultimately frustrating.

“Where do you remember her?”

“In the back of the truck—the maroon Dodge.”

“And when you picked her up on Pac HiWay—I don’t even care where on Pac HiWay—where did you take her to date her and kill her?”

He sighed as he searched his unreliable memory. “Over in the airport area where I killed—” He knew he had played volleyball near where he had killed her, but he couldn’t place the murder itself in his mind. “I remember vaguely killing somebody in that area—at least one or two.”

“Where’s her body?”

“Her body’s up at Leisure Time.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure, because before you gave her a fifty-fifty percent chance of being there at Leisure Time.”

“I’ll give her seventy-five, at least. The blond lady I took up there. It couldn’t have been April because now I know where April was.”

“Where was April?”

“I figure April was probably over at Lake Fenwick.”

And so it went in a seemingly endless series of dialogues. He had said he left Keli McGinness in the middle of a cleared field near Auburn. He had said he took her head to Oregon and lost it in a culvert in the Allstate parking lot. If he really knew, he wasn’t telling.

It was so mindless and so cruel.

Ridgway knew that he had picked up a small, thin black girl in the Rainier Avenue area, although, of course, he could not say when that was nor could he remember her face. “She had something wrong with one of her feet,” he commented. “It was thinner than the other and it turned in funny.”

“Did she have difficulty getting up into your pickup truck?” a detective asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you help her up?”

“No.”

That would have been tiny Mary Exzetta West, sixteen, who was newly pregnant and scared in 1984. He didn’t remember her face, but he remembered that he left her body in Seward Park after he killed her.

He gazed at the investigators day after day, sipping from his bottle of water, jotting notes on his yellow pad, his face as bland and unthreatening as the Pillsbury Doughboy’s. But the investigators sensed the evil energy behind his eyes, and it was always good to walk out of the Green River Task Force headquarters, smell clean air, and realize that he was an aberration, unlike the vast percentage of human beings.

And he was caught, trapped so he could never kill again.

54

ALTHOUGH Gary Ridgway said he had left all of his victims lying on their backs, he added, “I didn’t look in their faces. It was dark.”

“Were their eyes open?” Jon Mattsen asked him.

“No. I don’t know. I never closed their eyes,” he said again. “I undressed them after they were dead, but I never touched their faces.”

He recalled one woman whom he’d choked in the back of his truck. He had tried to bring her “back to life” with closed chest compressions. “But I couldn’t.”

Sometimes, in his house, he said he’d put plastic bags over the dead girls’ heads to see if he could detect any breath left in them. “But I never had one wake up on me.”

“Why did you try to resuscitate the one woman?” Tom Jensen asked.

“I panicked. I don’t know why. It was daytime.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. A white woman.”

Ridgway admitted to killing Linda Rule, the blond girl whose skeleton had been found near Northgate Hospital, a homicide that had not been attributed to him. For some reason, he said he had set fire to her hair after she was dead, but he had become alarmed that someone would see or smell the smoke and put it out.

There were so many young women who had died, most of them with no forewarning. Gary Ridgway didn’t care about them, but the task force detectives knew them as well as anyone they’d known in their lives, and they cared deeply about each victim. As Ridgway described their last moments, other faces flashed in the four investigators’ consciousness—all the parents, sisters and brothers, even children of the lost girls. Each detective dealt with memories of the victims in his or her own way; some allowed themselves to remember the details of the lost lives, and some had to keep emotional distance for their own equilibrium.

And yet, day after day, they went back into the stuffy room to listen to Gary Ridgway spew out more venom and, almost worse, to hear him discuss his crimes with completely dispassionate recall of what he had done.

The interviews had to be accomplished, and they went on with little respite for more than a hundred hours. Outside, it was an unusually nice summer in Seattle, people were sunbathing along Puget Sound and flowers were blooming. For the task force detectives, and their prisoner, most of their ventures outside were the grim field trips to body sites.

“The one I covered with a bag was special,” Ridgway admitted, as he spoke of Carol Christensen. He had known her, he had liked her, and she had been nice to him. He knew she had a little girl and that she was excited about her new job, but in terms of her chance for survival, it didn’t matter. He recalled picking her up near her job at the Red Barn Tavern, and taking her to his home. According to him, she had enjoyed sexual intimacy with him, but on May 3 she was in a hurry to get home. “I wasn’t satisfied,” he remembered. “It made me mad. I got behind her and choked her with my arm.”

Afterward, he had redressed Carol Ann, realizing that he had her bra on backward, but it didn’t matter to him. He took time, he said, to drink the Lambrusco wine. Then he took the empty bottle, the trout that someone had given him, and the sausage along when he drove Christensen’s body to the woods at Maple Valley. In the first ten days of questioning, he stressed that he wasn’t “staging” a body scene as the F.B.I. agents deduced. “I left the fish and sausage to attract animals. I didn’t want that stuff because I didn’t cook.”

For the first time, Ridgway showed a bit of remorse. “I laid her faceup, put the grocery bag over her head, and lay down with her,” he said. “I cried because I killed her.”

By all that was holy, he should have been caught that afternoon. As he drove out of the road to the woods where Carol Christensen’s body lay, he said he saw a WSP patrol car coming out of the next road down. “I stopped at the first stoplight, and put on my signal to turn. I checked in the mirror to see if he had turned into the road I’d just left, but he didn’t, and he didn’t pay any attention to me.”

Through sheer coincidence, Matt Haney, who was a King County new hire at the time, had stopped his patrol unit to talk with another officer a fraction of a mile away when the call about the body in the woods came from the sheriff’s dispatcher.

But Gary Ridgway had slipped away. Given the chances he took and the degree of police activity hunting for him, he was diabolically lucky. Or perhaps, despite his initial protests, he’d been very careful. He’d been afraid of being caught after the first murder. But not since. Although he couldn’t remember Wendy Coffield, he recalled that he had redressed her, and that the buttons on her blouse were the size of “dimes.” Christensen was only the second victim he redressed.