After the task force investigators searched his locker, Ridgway got another nickname at work. Even though the searches of April 1987 were accomplished with little fanfare and, to Jim Pompey’s relief, no media blitz, other employees at Kenworth knew the detectives had questioned him, searched his belongings, and taken pictures of his truck in the company parking lot. Nobody really thought he was capable of killing more than three dozen prostitutes, but there was the similarity of his initials that begged for jokes at his expense: “G.R.” for Gary Ridgway, and “G.R.” for Green River. He soon became “Green River Gary” at Kenworth.
It was just a joke, but he didn’t find it amusing. Even so, the search warrant’s execution hadn’t damaged his career at Kenworth; he was too dependable an employee.
John O’Leary worked at Kenworth, too, but he was much farther up the corporate ladder than Ridgway could ever hope to be. O’Leary was a finely tuned long-distance runner in the mideighties and early nineties, and he and his running partner were interested in true-crime cases. “In our ninety-minute to two-hour training runs,” he recalled, “we would spend a lot of time talking about the Bundy case as we read the various books. We also talked a lot about the Green River case since it was on the news constantly.
“I later became the CFO [chief financial officer] of the Kenworth plants in Tukwila and Renton from 1997 to late 2000. Although I wasn’t friends with Ridgway, I certainly knew who he was. It was common knowledge that he had been a Green River suspect, but that he had been cleared.”
Jim Pompey was relieved that Matt Haney had managed to keep a lid on the details of the April 1997 searches. Even the media, which dogged the detectives’ footsteps, seemed chastened in the aftermath of the Tikkenborg search chaos.
It would take several weeks before all the tests on evidence taken from Ridgway’s house, locker, and vehicles were finished and they would know if any usable physical evidence might emerge. In the meantime, Ridgway, albeit with his new nickname, went back to his everyday life. He didn’t threaten to sue anyone, and the vast majority of the Seattle public wasn’t even aware of his moment in the harsh spotlight.
Al Matthews, the prosecutor who had worked with the task force for four years, was as bitterly disappointed as Matt Haney and Sue Peters were when he had to tell them that there just wasn’t enough physical evidence to get an arrest warrant for Gary Ridgway. They had done all they could, but the Ridgway part of the Green River probe had to be shelved until something that would hold up in court should surface.
Haney was convinced it wasn’t over for good. When he could, he kept checking for connections between Gary Ridgway and the Green River victims.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was a big year for forensic science. A September 21 article out of London, England, was headlined “Genetic Sample Leads to Suspect in Killing.”
For the first time a police department somewhere in the world had used a scientific technique known as “genetic fingerprinting.” In their determination to solve the two-and-a-half-year-old rape murders of two teenage girls in the village of Enderby, Leicester County, English investigators took blood and saliva samples from more than 5,500 adult males who lived in the community. After exhaustive testing and the elimination of all other subjects, they charged a twenty-seven-year-old baker with the crimes.
Geneticist Alex Jeffreys of Leicester University had discovered that DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid—found in the chromosomes of all living beings can be charted as a series of bands, unique to each person. In 1987, the test was effective on dried blood as old as five years, and dried semen up to three years old. The chance that two humans would have identical patterns was between 30 billion and 100 billion to one. It seemed very Brave New World, and DNA testing wasn’t perfected yet by any means. Plus, the cost could be prohibitive. But when Gary Ridgway was questioned and searched in 1987, Matt Haney had nothing to lose by taking a sample of his saliva.
UNEXPECTEDLY, and tragically, the Green River Task Force would have yet another commander. Jim Pompey went SCUBA diving with sheriff’s detective Bob Stockham, Stockham’s brother, and Roger Dunn, who, along with Bob Keppel, were the King County detective partners who had tracked Ted Bundy back in the midseventies. Dunn now ran his own private investigating company.
They were diving off Richmond Beach in the north end of Seattle, where Pompey was going to use a new speargun to catch fish. But almost as soon as they descended to depths close to a hundred feet, Pompey began to have trouble with his oxygen tank regulator. Stockham saw that the Green River commander was on the verge of panicking and tried to help him get to the surface, but they got separated and Pompey rose through the water much too fast.
Coast Guard rescuers took Pompey to a Seattle hospital by helicopter and he appeared to be regaining consciousness. But terrible damage had been done to his lungs. He didn’t live to be placed in the decompression chamber.
When “Doc” Reay performed an autopsy on Jim Pompey, he found that he had succumbed to a pulmonary embolism. He wasn’t forty yet, and he’d probably been in better physical shape than anyone on the task force, but now he was gone.
Lieutenant Greg Boyle stepped in to pick up the reins, and then Bobby Evans took over in December 1987. The Green River Task Force assignment would take its toll on any number of comparatively young men. Danny Nolan died of a leukemia-like blood disorder and so did Paul Smith. Ralf McAllister had a massive coronary and died in his cabin on Snoqualmie Pass. One detective retired after an emotional breakdown. Homicide detectives live under so much pressure and stress that the attrition rate from sudden death is higher than in most jobs, but the Green River case seemed to be taking an even greater price.
The same is true for the parents of young murder victims, particularly their fathers. Their perceived failure to protect their children eats away at the parents who could not save those they loved the most. It had happened in the Bundy cases and it was happening in the Green River cases. The grief of families is often so profound that they lose their will to live. The death toll caused by the Green River Killer extended far beyond his victim count.
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AT LEAST four missing women who matched the victim type preferred by the Green River Killer came from the Portland area. Trina Hunter, the woman whose relatives reportedly kept her locked in an attic, had been found in a swamp near Vancouver, Washington, and her murder was still unsolved. Two of the sets of remains in the Tigard/Tualatin area were still unidentified, but Portland detectives doubted that the GRK was operating in their jurisdiction. It was a difficult call, given the constant travels of working girls from Portland to Seattle and back.
If Portland and Multnomah County police were hesitant to accept that they might have to form a task force of their own, no one could blame them. It’s an old joke among homicide detectives that, given a “loser” case, they might just drag the body over a county or state line and let some other department solve the crime. With all the hassles the Washington investigators had endured over the past five years with the Green River case, no other jurisdiction envied them.
Meanwhile, prostitutes had begun to disappear from the streets of Vancouver, British Columbia—only a four-hour drive north of Seattle. Indeed, the whole West Coast seemed to be riddled by the newest identifiable scourge known in criminal history: the serial killer. And Portland was having its own siege. By midsummer 1987, more prostitutes were missing in Portland. The incident reports sounded all too familiar. One young woman was picked up as she walked toward a 7-Eleven to buy cigarettes. The male driver looked innocuous and seemed quite pleasant. However, he drove past her neighborhood, and as they left the urban area, he tromped hard on his accelerator and told her that he had always wanted to take a woman into the woods, tie her up, and have sex with her. As he hit speeds near sixty miles an hour, she decided to take a chance. Anything would be preferable to being alone with this man who was clearly dangerous. She brought her elbow down on the door handle and tumbled out of the moving car. She hit the road hard. Although she was badly injured and bleeding from “road rash,” she was alive when a truck driver found her lying on the highway and called for an ambulance.