Twenty years before, Ridgway figured he would never be caught. He’d learned to cut their fingernails so he wouldn’t leave any of his skin beneath his victims’ nails. He took their clothing away and threw it in Goodwill bins so the detectives wouldn’t have any semen stains to test. He didn’t understand DNA but he knew they could figure out something that way, and it might help them catch him. And although he claimed at first that he only put the fish and sausage with Carol Christensen’s body to attract predatory animals, he had really done it to make the body scene look different. That would throw the police off, and it would taunt them, too. He thought the police wouldn’t connect him to a body that was in a different place, with different clues.

In the beginning, he was right. But he had left his DNA behind, his semen in her body. And that was one of the bigger mistakes he’d made. He didn’t realize that it was a ticking time bomb, albeit one that wouldn’t explode until 2001.

His research to perfect his crimes continued. He had not only taken great pains, he said, to remove all traces of himself from the victims, his house and trucks, but he had begun to plant “evidence.” He scattered cigarette butts and chewed gum at the cluster sites. (He didn’t smoke or chew gum, but he gathered it in other places.) He took motel pamphlets and car rental agreements he’d found around the airport and threw them around the body sites to make the detectives believe they were looking for someone who traveled. He even left a hair pick used to groom Afros, thinking the investigators would suspect a black pimp. And it was Gary Ridgway who left Marie Malvar’s driver’s license at SeaTac Airport so people would think she’d taken a flight of her own accord. And, of course, he admitted he had written letters to the Post-Intelligencer and Mike Barber and others with false tips about who the Green River Killer might be.

Perhaps his smartest move in avoiding suspicion was that he talked to no one about what he had done. He had no close friends, and he didn’t feel the need to brag about it. Most killers eventually feel compelled to talk about their crimes, if only to point out how cleverly they have avoided detection. Not Ridgway. He got enough gratification out of checking the sites where he’d left bodies years before. He was fascinated, he told detectives, that he found some skeletons virtually intact in areas where he had expected animals to dismantle them, and others, left in wide open fields, completely gone.

Later, Ridgway would say he lied to the task force detectives for the first ten days of the summer interviews in 2003. It was hard to tell sometimes if he had forgotten the truth, genuinely confusing the victims with one another, or if he was overtly lying. Sometimes he hinted that Wendy Coffield wasn’t the first murder at all, that when he told the woman he was dating in PWP in late 1981 or early 1982 that he’d “almost killed a woman,” he really had killed a woman. He even had vague feelings that he might have murdered a woman in the seventies, but he could not be sure.

Gary Ridgway had reasons to keep his interviewers on the hook. The longer he could delay making a formal guilty plea in court, the longer he could stay out of prison. His accommodations weren’t lavish, but they were a lot better than a stark prison cell. And, here, he was still able to talk about murder and pontificate on all aspects of homicide.

Ridgway wasn’t crazy—his attorneys hadn’t even suggested a multiple personality defense—and he certainly wasn’t a genius. In fact, his I.Q. tested at low normal. He may, however, have been an idiot savant, someone of very low intelligence who shows remarkable brilliance in one area. (For instance, an idiot savant may be a musical prodigy or able to memorize the numbers on the side of every freight car on a long train as it passes by, but developmentally disabled in every other area of intelligence.)

Violent thoughts appeared to have been part of his thought processes for most of his life.

From the time he was in his early teens, Ridgway had studied murder, twisting and turning it in his mind. In some of his interviews with Mary Ellen O’Toole, he spent hours discussing motivations for murder, about his thoughts on how someone other than he had murdered a female neighbor forty years before, and offering his insights. It left the question: Did he kill that woman? There was no way to tell.

He did describe stabbing the six-year-old boy when he was fifteen or sixteen. Remarkably, one of the task force investigators had located that child—now a man of forty-six living in California. He recalled the incident well. The man remembered being dressed in cowboy boots and hat, wearing toy pistols on his belt, when a much older boy asked him if he wanted to build a fort. He had agreed and followed him into the woods.

“Then he said, ‘You know, there’s people around here that like to kill little boys like you.’ ” He’d grabbed the youngster’s arm and led him farther into the trees. Suddenly, the teenager had stabbed him through his ribs into his liver.

“I asked him why he killed me. I watched too many cowboy movies, you know,” Ridgway’s early victim said, “and I saw all the blood pumping out of me. It was [bleeding] profusely—already running down my leg into my boots. With every heartbeat, it was just pumping out. The whole front of my shirt was soaked. And he started laughing, and had a smile on his face. He stood there for a minute, and he had the knife in his hand, and I didn’t want him to stab me again. But he reached toward me and just wiped the knife off—both sides of the blade—once across my shoulder and twice across my shoulder on the other side. He folded [the knife] back up and he says, ‘I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.’

“Then he started walking down that knoll and he was laughing, kinda putting his head in the air, you know, and laughing real loud.”

RIDGWAY told his interrogators that he had read a lot of crime magazines and books in the past. I was jolted to learn that he had read True Detective magazine and other fact-detective magazines that I wrote for early in my career—even more discomfited to hear my name come from his mouth as Ridgway talked with Dr. Robert Wheeler, a psychologist who asked him what books he’d read.

“I read so many of ’em that they all come together. I read quite a lot,” he said. “Zodiac, two or three of Ann Rule’s, and a bunch. But I don’t want to tell something that I haven’t learned from them.” He explained that he had read my books to learn how not to act in court. He was studying all the mistakes other defendants had made by jumping up in court when they should have kept quiet. He didn’t want to do that.

I didn’t want to be part of Gary Ridgway’s thought processes. There is always the chance that disturbed and obsessed individuals may read something I have written, and I accept that as part of being a true-crime writer, but writing about Ridgway was the most difficult endeavor I would undertake, and I had no desire to be inside his head or hear him say my name. The sheer cruelty that consumed him and his total inability to empathize with any living thing is unfathomable, a black cloud of evil that was so hard to erase from my own memory.

WHEN—IF EVER—Gary Ridgway had stopped stalking and killing women was an obvious question. Nineteen eighty-two to 1984 were undoubtedly the peak years, but it is almost unheard of for serial killers to simply stop. They usually accelerate.

In talking with Dr. Robert Wheeler, Gary Ridgway said the last time he killed was in 1985. He insisted that his period of extreme rage, anger, and frustration only lasted for three years. “After 1985, I had a new wife that cared for me,” he said. “I did yard work and stuff to help out with the anger.”