56

TWO DAYS BEFORE Ridgway’s sentencing, Dave Reichert visited him again. As always, he was in full uniform, which gave him a distinct psychological advantage over the prisoner in his bright red jail scrubs over a long-sleeved maroon T-shirt. Reichert hitched up his chair and stared disconcertingly at Ridgway.

“How long you been here?” he asked.

“Six months, I guess. I came here on Friday, the thirteenth—in December.”

He was wrong. Six months ago it had been June. He had lost track of time.

Reichert baited Ridgway: “How do you think things have been going?”

“Pretty good,” Ridgway said, summing up what he had told Peters, Mullinax, Jensen, and Mattsen. “We’re up to seventy-one victims, but there’s six sites where we haven’t found the bodies.” He seemed to consider himself part of the team. It was not “they”; it was “we.”

“Do you think we should call in the F.B.I.?”

This was obviously another carrot, with Reichert feigning ineptitude, tacitly admitting that his department couldn’t carry out a search as well as the feds. Ridgway pondered that and answered that an organization as prestigious as the F.B.I. might have new search devices that could pick up some minerals in bones. Despite their last encounter, he appeared to be at ease, facing the sheriff man to man, discussing a mutual problem.

“What are some good things that have happened in the time you’ve been here?” Reichert eased the point of a hook in, tantalizing him, but Ridgway didn’t get it yet.

“Well, sometimes we find an extra body, one they didn’t account for,” Ridgway said. And it was “good” that each find took more pressure off him, releasing a tightness in his chest. “I celebrate that I found another person.”

“Why?”

Ridgway clearly flailed around in his mind to find an answer that would show he cared about the victims’ families. But his answers were self-serving and completely off the point. And Reichert kept responding with “Why?” to everything he said.

Ridgway spoke of some of the clever things he had done to fool the Green River Task Force. “I didn’t lick the letter I sent to the paper,” he said.

“Why?”

It was DNA that had trapped Ridgway, but he would not say that term. He only repeated that he had not licked the flap of the envelope. He pointed out that he had typed the letter instead of writing it in longhand. He thought that had been smart.

“You did a good job in court,” Reichert said suddenly.

“Thank you.” Ridgway explained that he was concerned, though, about the sentencing. He was afraid he might trip walking in, given the restriction of his leg shackles, or that he would cry or the families would yell at him. He wanted them to know that some of the victims had “touched” him.

Disbelief in his tone, Reichert asked him just how they had done that, and the prisoner reached into his memory and pulled out Debbie Abernathy’s name.

Reichert wanted to know in what way.

“Because it was on Chad’s birthday,” Ridgway said. It was obviously almost impossible for him to connect with the women he had murdered, or to see them as human beings. He had to connect any sadness to something or someone involved with himself. He said he felt bad about Colleen Brockman because he killed her on Christmas Eve. And he was sorry because “Meehan” had been pregnant, and he hadn’t noticed that. He felt bad, he said, about Connie Naon “because she was beautiful.”

But all in all, he thought that the session where he had pleaded guilty “went real good.”

“What about Thursday?” Reichert asked, referring to the sentencing date.

Ridgway said he’d read some of the letters the families had sent—the ones who couldn’t be there—but he didn’t want to discuss them much. The families had called him evil, and he thought that was probably true, but he hastened to point out that it wasn’t his fault if he was. He had done it all from “lack of love.” He figured it might take five or six hours for the families to say what they wanted to say.

“But I have remorse—sadness in my heart. I’ll answer their questions,” he said confidently.

“You won’t have a dialogue with them,” Reichert said. “Would it matter to you if someone killed your son, what they said to you? Would it matter if they said, ‘Sorry, I’m the devil and I’m evil’?” And then in a conversational tone, Reichert asked, “Why did you [kill them]?”

“I had a craving, because they were prostitutes. I wanted to kill them…. Wanted to control them.”

“You can control people without killing them.”

Reichert kept pelting Ridgway with “Whys?” as he searched hard to find reasons for his killing rampages.

“I was mad at them,” he finally blurted. He had tried to impress the task force investigators all along with his explanation that he had actually killed the “hookers” to help them keep the streets clean. The detectives had never appreciated what he had done for them.

There was no disguising Dave Reichert’s profound hatred for the man in front of him. It seeped out of his pores. It had gone beyond a contest between a lawman and a killer, and he probably had to fight an impulse to put his hands on Ridgway.

Reichert believed Ridgway was withholding information, and he hoped to find more answers. He pointed out that Ridgway was still making all kinds of excuses, even though there was no way to justify what he had done. “They were ‘garbage’ all along; they had no meaning to you,” the sheriff said.

“They have meaning now.” Ridgway speculated that he should go back to Woodside School, that he needed to go back in time to cure the “learning disability” that had caused him to lack “caring” for others. That made little sense, but it still would allow him to take the stain of his crimes off his hands.

He told the sheriff that he could not recall killing anyone in the sixties or seventies, only the time when he stabbed the neighborhood kid, and, after all, he hadn’t died.

“We were looking forward to six months more with you,” Reichert said. “But you shut down after you pleaded guilty. Why should you talk to us now? Don’t you have a nice place to stay back there?”

“Yeah. My stay here has been good. They’ve treated me really good.” Ridgway agreed that the little room in the task force headquarters was probably a lot nicer than his prison cell would be. He knew that he would need to have his “back to the wall,” because other inmates would try to kill him. He’d listened to advice from inmates at the King County Jail and they had warned him about that.

Reichert reminded him that once he went to prison, he wouldn’t have all the benefits he currently enjoyed, and urged him to give up the rest of the secrets he held on to so tightly. But everyone had noticed that he had changed. He wasn’t telling them all he knew. “You’re cocky now.”

The sheriff said that Sue Peters, Randy Mullinax, Jon Mattsen, and Tom Jensen were walking out of interviews angry because Ridgway had stopped giving them information. He had only two more days to tell them what he knew. Then he was going away, headed for prison. “My detectives are pissed, tired of your lies, your crap, your bullshit,” Reichert said. “You’re still hiding secrets. All the souvenirs that would give you credibility. I’m going to find them. We’re going to X-ray your houses—But we’re not going to come over there [to prison] to talk with you.”

Ridgway wasn’t concerned about that. He planned on detectives from other counties—Snohomish, Pierce, and maybe San Diego—visiting him to ask questions. What he couldn’t recall right now, he figured he could spend his time in prison trying to remember—if there were murders he’d forgotten.