Trish Yellow Robe didn’t make it. On the morning of Thursday, August 6, the owner of All City Wrecking, a business in the South Park area of Seattle, moved toward his locked cyclone fence and saw a woman lying just outside that fence in a gravel parking lot. At first he thought she was sleeping or had passed out, but she was dead. She was fully clothed in a T-shirt, jeans, underwear, socks, and boots.

It was Trish Yellow Robe. An autopsy revealed no possible cause of death beyond what was indicated in a tox screen of her blood, and the pathologist concluded: “The cause of death is acute, combined opiate and ethanol intoxication. The circumstances, scene investigation and postmortem examination, did not reveal evidence of significant injury. The manner of death is probable accident.”

Her family viewed her body, saddened that Trish had died so young. “We thought it was an overdose,” her sister said. “We could accept that. But she was bruised on her eye. The [prosecutors] told us that was postmortem lividity. We didn’t question that because we all knew that Trish would be the first to go.”

The task force detectives had never included Trish Yellow Robe as a possible Green River victim, and they had no information on her during the summer of 2003 as they questioned Gary Ridgway. Still, he had brought up South Park three times in June and July, all the while insisting he hadn’t killed anyone he dated in the nineties.

As they drove him around on field trips, they used the South Park parking lot as a “false site” to test him. And despite new construction over the prior decade, Ridgway recognized the site, and it stirred something in his memory. He was able to describe Trish Yellow Robe’s body placement perfectly, although actually killing a woman there was foggy in his mind.

It had taken a forensic psychologist to dredge up what Ridgway clearly did not want to remember. He was more at ease talking about the women who had died way back in the early eighties. Now it was apparent that he had murdered at least one woman fourteen years after he claimed to have stopped killing.

He didn’t recognize a photo of Trish Yellow Robe in life, but he did identify a photo of her body. Again, there was a coincidence of dates that so often happened in the Green River probe. It was August 8, 2003, when Ridgway’s memory of killing Trish popped up, five years and two days after her murder.

“I remember that one,” he said. “The one at South Park. She wouldn’t let me get behind her and screw her, and so I got madder and madder. And when we got out of the back of the truck, I opened the door for her and started choking her.”

It had been her own fault, he pointed out. “She didn’t want to spend an extra three or four minutes to have me climax and be a customer. She just said, ‘You’re over with’—something like that, and [she] got dressed, and I was still angry with her and choked her and after that I panicked. I didn’t put her in the back of the truck and take it some place. I just left it there.”

A reporter called Trish’s sister, Alanna, in late October 2003, and blurted out that Trish had just been added to the Green River list. “I thought it was a bad joke,” she said. “We had grieved for her, thinking she had died of an overdose. I told the reporter he was wrong, but he said he’d already talked to my father and it was true. Now we had to start a different kind of grieving.”

With tears marking his face, Dave Reichert read all the lost girls’ names aloud. They meant a great deal to the Green River Task Force even though they appeared to be negligible to the man who had just pleaded guilty.

Families watching and listening in the gallery would have their turn to speak, but not for weeks. Judge Jones set Ridgway’s sentencing for Thursday, December 18, 2003, exactly a week before Christmas. In thirty years of covering murder trials in Seattle, I had attended many trials that had their denouement during the holidays, always aware of the dichotomy between the decorated tree in the lobby of the King County Courthouse and the grim proceedings on the upper floors. And yet this time it seemed right. All those families who had endured so many Christmases with a hollow spot that would never be filled, an empty place at their table, or around their tree would at least have a modicum of justice.

IT WAS OBVIOUS from the time the interviewing process began that Gary Ridgway considered Dave Reichert the “Man,” the leader of all cops, the most daunting of opponents, and that he was tantalized by the idea of meeting him personally. He was, after all, the “High Sheriff,” the boss of the detectives who questioned him every day. On some of his field trips, Ridgway thought he’d glimpsed Reichert in a car driving by and asked hopefully if it was him, only to be told “No.”

They had met earlier that summer when Reichert, dressed in his perfectly pressed uniform with hash marks and gleaming brass, had come into the interview room at task force headquarters. Their first encounter had been a bit bizarre. Virtually nose-to-nose, Reichert stared at Ridgway, leaning further in toward the prisoner as his quarry shrunk back until it seemed they would both lose their balance and tip out of their chairs. They appeared not unlike a cartoon cat and mouse, with Reichert having the advantage. Minutes went by without his saying a word. Although Ridgway was clearly sweating, he had seemed unable to look away from Reichert’s piercing blue eyes. Whatever he had expected to happen if they were ever to meet, it was obvious that this silent stare wasn’t it.

The sheriff hadn’t presided over the daily interviews, but he had monitored many of them. His personal animus toward Gary Ridgway was palpable, but when he finally spoke, Reichert played with the prisoner, seemingly almost genial at first. Ridgway was too dense and too intimidated to catch on.

Reichert remarked upon their many similarities—in age and in the region where they were both raised. He even confided in Ridgway that he, too, had suffered from dyslexia when he was a boy, and could understand why Ridgway had been worried that he would have to ride the “short bus” to Woodside School, the Highline School District’s designated school for developmentally disabled students. It was a classic “You and me together” technique, and Ridgway, still wary, relaxed a little.

The sheriff commented on the irony of their ending up here in this interview room—one of them a confessed serial killer and the other the sheriff. He dangled a carrot. Wouldn’t it be something if the two of them went on the road together, giving talks and seminars to law enforcement groups and psychiatrists and psychologists? He suggested that many people would be fascinated with what each of them had to say. There had never been anything like it, but he said he figured there was a huge potential audience for a man who had killed as many victims as Ridgway had.

Ridgway nodded nervously. He didn’t know what to expect. He smiled tentatively as if he believed that Reichert was really going to take him on buses and trains and planes on some macabre dog and pony show. That would, of course, be the pinnacle of his life—to stand shoulder to shoulder with this man he clearly both admired and feared, and they would both discuss how successful he had been as a serial killer.

Sue Peters and Randy Mullinax, Jon Mattsen, Tom Jensen, and Jim Doyon had asked him questions, brought him up short and urged him to tell the truth, to stop “bullshitting” them, Drs. Chris Harris, Robert Wheeler, and Mary Ellen O’Toole had asked him the most intimate questions, and Ridgway had managed to look back at them with some shred of self-confidence. But the sheriff kept him off-balance. Reichert smiled at him, but not with his eyes. He seemed to be offering him the world, but he might jerk it back if Ridgway reached for it.

Their conversations had eventually turned into interrogations, of course. But it was much easier for Ridgway to give up secrets to the detectives with whom he felt more at ease. He could call them by their first names; Reichert was always the man in charge.