“All of a sudden, in 1985,” Wheeler asked incredulously, “when you got angry, you raked the lawn?”

“Yes.”

He explained that he and Judith were having a nice life, vacationing in Las Vegas or Reno, gambling a little bit. They also went to Disneyland. He was trying to forget all about the bad time when he was alone and killing women. But he’d been angry again when the investigators from the task force served their search warrants in 1987. He was upset because they came to his work and said they were from the Green River Task Force. At that point, he was trying to forget all the murder stuff.

Ridgway’s biggest fear in the summer of 2003 was that he might not be able to lead detectives to the bodies of his victims who were still missing, that his memory might fail him. If that happened, he felt he would probably be executed because they would think he was lying and failing to keep his part of the plea agreement.

He had thought a lot about the death penalty. He figured it wouldn’t happen for seven or eight years, and he’d read about lethal injections. “It’s a process that you just go to sleep and your heart stops, so there’s very little pain.”

Wheeler asked if he worried about being dead. Ridgway said he did, but he figured that if he told the truth and prayed, he would go to Heaven. Other prisoners had told him it would be worse to go to prison for the rest of his life. Still, all things considered, he wanted to live.

He was afraid of dying, he told Dr. Wheeler, and he wanted to get all the killings off his chest. “Confessing, and trying to help the families, and to give the best I can on that.”

“And why do you want to help the families?”

“Because they’d like closure. They want to have a place for where their daughter or wife is buried.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect, Mr. Ridgway,” Dr. Wheeler said carefully, “but why didn’t you help the families in 1985?”

“Because I didn’t want to go to jail.”

Gary Ridgway’s thoughts always circled back to himself. He said that he cried a lot, at first attributing that to the number of lives he had taken.

“You took a lot of lives mostly sometime before 1990…. Why are you crying about it now, rather than then?”

“Well, because I screwed up. How I screwed up on killing them. Maybe leaving too much evidence at the time.”

Ridgway said he never thought about escaping, although he fantasized about there being an earthquake where he could just walk out of jail. But he knew there would be a price on his head and no one would care if he was dead or alive to collect “$100,000” reward. And where could he go? He didn’t speak any foreign languages.

The only thing he had to look forward to were the “field trips” to look for bodies, even though the detectives wouldn’t let him out of the car very often. He still liked the experience of going out on the same roads he took to deposit the bodies of his victims.

OF COURSE, one of Gary Ridgway’s greatest anxieties was alleviated during those field trips, when he was successful in leading the task force searchers to the remains of Pammy Avent. Tips had said Pammy was living in Hollywood, or Denver, had given birth to a baby girl, and even that she was still working as a prostitute in a motel in the Seattle area. But she hadn’t been in any of those places. Ridgway took the investigators to Highway 410 just east of Milepost 26. After six days of digging and raking, they’d found Pammy next to the fallen cedar log, the passing of seasons had buried her six inches beneath the forest floor.

Unerringly, again and again, he had led the task force detectives to isolated locations where Green River victims had been discovered over the years since 1982. To test his truthfulness, some of the sites they took him to were “false sites” where no women had ever been found. He never missed. There was no question that Gary Ridgway was the Green River Killer. He knew bleak facts that no one else could know, and his very life depended on his finding the truly lost victims. And now it looked as if he would, indeed, never have to enter either the gallows room or the fatal injection chamber at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

What he would face might be worse than the gallows. In November 2003, Gary Ridgway would have to plead guilty to aggravated first-degree murder in the deaths of forty-eight young women, and do so in the presence of those who had loved his victims. And, in December, his punishments would be meted out. Sentencing might be easier than listening to the words of those same survivors.

55

GARY RIDGWAY was expected to plead guilty on forty-eight murder counts on November 5, 2003. Prosecuting attorney Norm Maleng and Sheriff Dave Reichert and their staffs held a meeting that almost all of the victims’ families attended. So there would be no surprises in the courtroom, they wanted the families to know why they had chosen the path they were taking, and to discuss their reasons for accepting Ridgway’s guilty plea. The State had agreed to the Defense’s proffer way back in June, but absolute secrecy was maintained. Accepting a guilty plea to aggravated murder in the first degree where the death penalty can be invoked violates statutes because, essentially, it allows a defendant to commit suicide. This plea bargain would save Ridgway’s life, effectively eliminating the possibility of his being executed. For five months, he had allegedly been cooperating with the Green River Task Force, although some investigators thought he was still minimalizing his crimes.

The majority of the survivors accepted Norm Maleng’s choice to plea bargain; some did not. They wanted to see Ridgway dead. They always would.

It had not been an easy decision for Maleng to make, nor a popular one with some voters, but politics had never driven him. In the end, he knew that he was doing the best thing for the most people. If his office had proceeded to what would be endless trials and appeals, Maleng doubted many questions would have been answered for those who still grieved for their children. He knew the pain of losing a child. One wintry day in 1989, his daughter, twelve-year-old Karen Leslie Maleng, was killed in a sledding accident on a snowy public street. Seattleites remembered that and the prosecutor’s quiet courage in the face of such tragedy.

On that first Thursday in November, Superior Court Judge Richard A. Jones’s courtroom was filled with families and friends, investigators and the media, all of whom had passed through heavy security. Ridgway shuffled in wearing his jail scrubs, his back to the gallery, a harmless-looking little man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses.

Gary Ridgway’s voice was calm and emotionless as he acknowledged that he fully understood that he had signed away his rights to a trial in return for avoiding execution. He said, “Yes, I did” when Jeff Baird asked him multiple times if he had signed one clause or the other with his initials. Yes, he knew he would have no jury, no appeals, no new trials, no hope of ever walking free again. But he would live. He was an automaton now, carefully keeping his back to the gallery behind him, and he seemed no threat.

But the depth of his perversion would soon destroy that illusion. Although the defense quickly waived Baird’s reading the entire sixteen pages of the charges, the gallery would hear enough.

Judge Jones had asked Ridgway to state, in his own words, why he was pleading guilty to forty-eight counts of murder, and he complied, although his confession had more legalese in it than he might generally use.

There was no way for the prosecution team to describe what Ridgway had done in “an antiseptic manner,” Baird warned the judge and observers. The language would be graphic and disturbing, just as the hundreds of hours of taped interviews had been. Now, the public heard some of the worst of the acting out of Gary Ridgway’s fantasies.