At the request of his neighbors, even I had turned in this man’s name in early 1987. There probably were other tips about him somewhere in the computer.

Still, in many ways he didn’t fit within the parameters of the standard serial killer profile. He was apparently happily married, a homeowner with a young son. In 1984, he had passed a polygraph regarding the murders of young women. And he’d been steadily employed at the same company—the Kenworth Truck Company where he was a custom painter—for more than two decades.

He wasn’t the typical serial killer—who was usually a loner without a lasting relationship with a woman. He wasn’t a job hopper. He wasn’t from a broken home. He’d grown up in the south end of King County and his high school was only a few blocks off the Strip, as was his parents’ home.

He’d gotten his hair cut at Don the Barber’s ever since he was in junior high school. He’d worked in hotels and surplus stores on the Strip as a teenager, and, as an adult, he shopped there.

His name was Gary Leon Ridgway, and he was thirty-seven years old, a few months older than Dave Reichert. Haney felt there were too many hits on the computer to ignore, but even so, they were all circumstantial. There was no physical evidence to prove that Gary Ridgway was anything more than a slightly creepy guy who had been single during the peak years that the killer murdered the most victims: 1982 to 1984. The Green River investigators had come across a lot of guys who were creepy and, married or single, liked to stare at prostitutes and pay money to have sex with them.

Five years earlier, Melvyn Foster had looked perfect as a suspect. A year before, the fur trapper had seemed like a sure thing when he proved to be totally innocent. And that belief had gotten the task force the worst press yet. There had been a number of other men who seemed more likely candidates to be the GRK than this guy, men the public never heard about. And yet Gary Ridgway warranted a closer look.

When I glanced at the first notebook to tumble out of the file boxes about the Green River killings that I had saved for more than twenty years, I was startled to read my own printing scrawled across a whole page:

Gary Leon Ridgway—Physical Ev? may have ties to GR victim

Went to Tyee

Class of ’67 or ’68 turn W on 220 21859 32

Half of those notes would turn out to be wrong. But thinking I had something that the task force might want to see, I either filled in one of the tip sheets they’d given me, or, more likely, typed up what his neighbors told me when I met with them after they called me some time in 1987.

Seventeen years ago, feeling truly dumb about playing detective, I put on sunglasses and a scarf, borrowed a car, and drove past Gary Ridgway’s house on 32nd Avenue. It wasn’t hard for me to get there; I lived then on S. 18th and 240th. There was nothing even slightly unusual about his house. There was no one around and the windows were covered by drapes or blinds. If he had been in the yard, I wouldn’t have known it; I didn’t even know what he looked like.

I had no idea in 1987 that the Green River Task Force investigators were way ahead of me. They never told me one way or the other whether any of the information I passed on to them was useful. I didn’t expect them to.

In fact, the task force investigators and uniformed deputies had been watching Ridgway on and off for months.

Early on, Matt Haney had chosen Ridgway as his favorite suspect, and the more he found out about him, the more enthusiastic he grew. Haney probably worked on more police departments in more assignments than any cop under fifty. Beginning on the Kent Police Department, he investigated a homicide involving the first “government protected witness” in America to be wrenched from his East Coast organized-crime roots. Haney was in his early twenties at the time. He went next to the King County Sheriff’s Office where he was first a patrol deputy, then a homicide detective, and would one day be in charge of Special Operations (K-9s and Air Support), as well as training officer.

Haney conferred with Pompey and senior deputy King County prosecutors Marilyn Brenneman and Al Matthews, sharing his convictions that the task force should make a move—obtain a search warrant, if necessary—to find out more about Gary Ridgway.

Brenneman and Matthews were enthusiastic about focusing on Ridgway. Pompey also wanted to monitor Ridgway’s comings and goings. So far, their surveillance hadn’t netted them much. He went to work and he came home. He sometimes stopped to eat at fast-food restaurants. That was about the extent of it.

41

ON APRIL 8, 1987, Gary Ridgway’s sense of invulnerability was severely shaken. He had no idea that he was being surveilled, and he certainly didn’t expect the execution of a search warrant on his house, his locker at Kenworth Trucking, and the three vehicles he currently had available to him—his own Ford pickup truck, his father’s Dodge pickup, and the Dodge Dart that his wife, Judith, drove. The search warrant drawn up by Matt Haney and okayed by senior deputy prosecutors Al Matthews and Marilyn Brenneman, also specified that there was probable cause for Ridgway himself to give up hair samples.

The search, done discreetly and rapidly, went well. Haney and Doyon took Gary Ridgway to Kent police headquarters where they photographed him and bagged plucked samples of his head and pubic hair into evidence. While hair is not the optimum source to find DNA, if hair follicles (skin tags) are present it can be done. Almost as an afterthought, Matt Haney asked George Johnston from the Washington State Patrol crime lab to swab the inside of Ridgway’s mouth and cheek. The gauze pledget holding the saliva was bagged, labeled, and frozen against a day in the distant future when it might be important.

Sue Peters was a little chagrined to draw only Ridgway’s Kenworth locker, which, at the time, didn’t seem likely to give up anything vital to the case. She bagged and tagged his white coveralls, stained with myriad paint splotches.

Other searchers took away rope, tarps, paint samples, of which there were many, some carpet threads and fibers.

Gary Ridgway had always been proud of his job with Kenworth and the image he had there, or believed he had. He was a dependable, punctual employee, and he usually managed to follow the computer instructions provided to mix the paint that stylized the big rigs. But sometimes his dyslexia made it difficult for him to remember the numbers on the computers associated with specialty paint jobs. On a bad day, he might ruin a couple of jobs by getting mixed up on a three-color trim, and then he raged at himself. One day he “ruined several trucks” because he got the sequences mixed up. He even had one three-day period when he added the wrong chemicals to the paint. Worst of all, he occasionally painted the wrong truck entirely. The bosses always let him do it over, and he did without protest. One of his nicknames around the plant was “Wrong-Way” and he hated that. But he couldn’t show his anger at work because he feared being fired. In the employee break room, some of his co-workers found him inordinately religious, even a zealot, as he read aloud from the Bible. He was a paradox: Sometimes he was far too touchy-feely with women employees and made them nervous when he crept up behind them. Alternately, he would go through his preaching phases where he spouted his opinion about harlots and loose women until spittle flew out of his mouth.