Gary L Ridgway.

Judge Richard Jones, appointed to the bench nine years earlier, had maintained a relatively serene courtroom despite the incendiary possibilities in the hearings of such a high-profile offender. Jones was an outstanding jurist who had lectured often to attorneys at Continuing Legal Education classes and to bar associations. The brother of music legend Quincy Jones, he was very accomplished in his own field.

Judge Jones had read the letters from the anguished parents thoughtfully, and he recalled one. “There is a hole in my heart,” a mother had written. “A vacancy that only my child can occupy. The emptiness is deep and it hurts.”

He also quoted the poet John Dryden: “Murder may go unpunish’d for a time, but tardy justice will oertake the crime.” And, indeed, it had. Now he ordered Gary Ridgway to turn toward the gallery and look at the faces of those who grieved, suggesting that these tearstained faces should be the last memory he had of the free world. “The remarkable thing about you,” Judge Jones commented, “is your Teflon-coated emotions and complete absence of genuine compassion for the young women you murdered.”

And that was, indeed, what anyone who observed Gary Ridgway would remember—the automaton, the robot, the true animal who appeared to operate from the limbic system of his brain with no censoring from the frontal lobe. He had admitted to detectives and psychologists that he might have killed his own son, his wife, his mother, anyone who interfered in his survival and his continuous pursuit of sadism and pleasure.

Judge Jones honored the memory of the victims as he prepared to sentence Ridgway. He asked for forty-eight seconds of silence before he pronounced the sentences.

Gary Ridgway was sentenced to forty-eight life sentences without possibility of early release or parole, sentences that will, indeed, run consecutively. He will be liable for all the fines the prosecution had mentioned. Judge Jones added a final, somewhat bizarre, punishment. Ridgway had to give up his permit to carry a firearm. That seemed to be the least of his worries.

As former deputy prosecutor Al Matthews observed the final denouement of the Green River murders case, he was ambivalent. Like all of the others who had worked for decades to convict a killer, he felt a sense of triumph for the final resolution.

He didn’t regret that he hadn’t gone ahead in 1987 and pushed for a State case based on a great deal of circumstantial evidence. “I felt strongly that he was the one. If I filed the case and tried it, I [believed] I could get past a half time motion for dismissal. The problem was that with no physical evidence, there was no telling what a trial would bring. And, of course, we would only get one shot at him.”

He meant that double jeopardy would attach if Ridgway was acquitted, and he could have walked away, knowing that he could not be tried twice for the same crimes.

“Only one thing bothers me,” Matthews would recall. “It was all a matter of a savage who had to be in control. At the very end, he still was. He avoided the death penalty by controlling the situation and providing the information to keep himself alive.”

AND AT LAST it was over. The sun was still shining and the air smelled good as I walked out of the courthouse to be interviewed by Nancy Grace of Court TV. Shell-shocked family members were all around me, negotiating their way past construction barricades around the aging courthouse, ducking the microphones thrust into their faces, hurrying away from what must have been one of the worst days of their lives.

I saw a familiar face from the eighties. Melvyn Foster, no longer a “person of interest,” had come to watch the sentencing. He wore a jacket advertising the popular forensic detective series of the day: CSI.

And then I saw Dick Kraske standing off to one side, watching new, young detectives being interviewed. Dave Reichert stood in the center of the media’s lights, but he wasn’t a young detective any longer either. So many years had passed.

It was the end of a terrible era.

Afterword

THE GREEN RIVER TASK FORCE, much diminished, continues to follow up unsolved crimes and unidentified bodies that may be linked to Gary Ridgway. The consensus is that there will be more corpses surfacing in the months and years to come. In the meantime, the world moves on without him.

Dave Reichert is still the sheriff of King County, but perhaps not for long. Ridgway’s capture made Reichert a media star. For two years, rumor had it that Reichert would run for governor. Instead, he set his sights on Washington, D.C., and, in 2004, became a Republican candidate for Congress representing the Eastside of King County. If he should go to Washington, it is likely that Tom Jensen and John Urquhart will go with him.

Sue Peters went to Africa on safari in early 2004, about as far as she could get from the cloistered interview room at Green River headquarters where she spent six months in 2003. She continues to work on the Green River cases, hoping, especially, to find an answer to Keli McGinness’s fate.

Some years ago, Peters and Detective Denny Gulla, determined to save as many young women as they could, put together a program called the Highway Intelligence Team (H.I.T.). With detectives Jesse Anderson and Christine Bartlette, they go back once a month, to the Strip and other locations where prostitution is rife, looking for the working girls of a new generation. They are not there to arrest them but rather to check on their welfare.

“I give them my card,” Peters says, “and tell them they can call me twenty-four hours a day if they need help. I do my best to put them in touch with services they need and, hopefully, to get them off the street.”

Peters and the other three detectives are available all the time, and she has received phone calls from desperate girls at all hours of the day and night. “When I get to know them, I ask for the names of the motels where they usually stay, for their dental information, and if they have any significant scars,” Peters says. “Sometimes they ask me why I need to know that, and I tell them the truth: ‘So we can identify your body if something happens to you.’ That shocks them and makes them realize how dangerous it is to be out there.”

A few of Peters’s and Gulla’s “regulars” call once or twice a week just to check in. It gives them a lifeline and a connection to someone who cares about them. Although gathering information is definitely not the primary purpose of H.I.T., many of the young women report “bad dates” and their license plate numbers. Some of their warnings have led to the arrests of serial rapists.

Randy Mullinax has put together a comprehensive seminar on the Green River investigation that is much in demand with law enforcement agencies all over the country.

Bob Gebo, Ed Streidinger, and Kevin O’Keefe have returned to the Seattle Police Department. Frank Adamson has retired. Richard Kraske has retired. Cherisse Luxa has retired. Ben Colwell has retired. Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay has retired, and lives on an island in Puget Sound where he recently completed a class on repairing boat motors—as far from forensic pathology as he could get.