But who was he? And where was he?

Like most people, I tended to believe the Green River Killer was either dead or in prison. Every once in a while the news services would carry stories about a breakout of serial murder in some state far away from the Northwest and I would wonder if he was there now. But usually there was an arrest and it wasn’t anyone who sounded like the King County description.

Tom Jensen and Jim Doyon manned the massive Green River Task Force computer, and then the state-of-the-art computers that took over the job as technology moved forward. They stood guard over files stacked to the ceiling that held a seemingly endless outpouring of tips and information, much of it disturbing and macabre. And still they had not found their man.

Part Three

47

2001. IT WAS A NEW CENTURY, and he hadn’t moved away, at least not very far. He liked his life in King County, and he had years of job seniority that he didn’t intend to lose. He had a wife who suited him. She was a homebody who took care of things there, paid the bills, kept the house nice, and trusted him.

That gave him a sound base to work from. It no longer mattered that for much of his life people had pegged him as slow or dumb. It was really an added bonus because he had taken on the big boys and beaten them handily. The newspapers were full of stories about how many detectives had tried to catch him, and how many millions of dollars they’d spent—and now they were all gone and he was living in a big new house with a great yard. He had tried to up the ante on the game by writing to them and giving them hints, but they hadn’t seemed to connect him to his helpful advice. As far as he could figure it, the time they came snooping around at Kenworth and pawed through his house was just because he had been stopped on the highway too often. He knew he was only one of a lot of men who cruised the Strip. They hadn’t been able to prove anything more than that. He had passed their lie detector tests, and that slowed them down. The rest of it was because he studied why other guys had been caught, and he made sure he didn’t make mistakes.

They had come so close to him that it had unnerved him a little bit, but they went away with their hats in their hands. So who was dumb now? He could still drive by the places he had left the women and relive what he had done to them any time he wanted. He was hiding in plain sight, going over to Renton to work at Kenworth as he always had, and even though guys at work sometimes still called him Green River Gary, that wasn’t so bad. It was a joke to them; nobody knew how right they were.

He had read a lot about Ted Bundy, and knew that Bundy was supposed to be practically a genius. But Bundy didn’t last very long, and he didn’t have nearly as many “kills” as Green River Gary.

GARY and Judith Ridgway had moved several times, and they’d always bought up. By 2001, they lived on S. 348th Street, with an address on the West Hill of Auburn. Their place was nicer than anything his parents ever had. He let Judith decorate it however she wanted. She liked “girly” stuff like dolls and artificial flowers and crocheted afghans and frilly lacy things on the couch and chair arms. They were both acquisitive, and they had about a dozen of everything because of the swap meets and garage sales they went to most weekends. Judith displayed the things she liked, and they stored extra stuff in boxes and bins in their spare bedrooms.

Their yard was showy, with lots of evergreens, rhododendrons, ferns, and flowers. Judith loved her flowers and he kept the lawn looking nice. Inside, she had more house plants than anyone they knew.

Judith’s girls were now out on their own and his son, Chad, was in the marines. He and Judith could do pretty much whatever they wanted. They had a very fancy motor home, he had a practically new pickup, and she had a nice sedan. In another ten years, he could retire and they’d be set for life. They had some investments, the company retirement plan, and social security to count on. Judith liked that secure feeling; she even kept cash hidden in the house and in the motor home—stacks of five- and ten-dollar bills—so they’d always have grocery and gas money.

She didn’t know everything about him, of course. There was a whole hell of a lot she didn’t know. That was his life, the things that made him feel good. It wasn’t that he wasn’t being faithful to her. All men cheated. What she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

THERE WERE THINGS he didn’t know either. The task force wasn’t really dead, after all; in computer language, it was in “standby mode.” If it had been dead and buried as he thought it was, the room on the top floor of the King County Courthouse would no longer be full of black binders, physical evidence, and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of pages of follow-up information.

Frank Adamson had moved out to the new Criminal Justice Center south of the airport to become chief of the Criminal Investigation Division; Bob Keppel got his doctorate, wrote a couple of well-received books, and taught an immensely popular course called Homicide at the University of Washington all through the nineties. Dave Reichert had moved up through the ranks of the brass in the sheriff’s office.

In early 1997, there would be big changes in the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Jim Montgomery was offered the job of police chief in suburban Bellevue, and he accepted. That meant that King County had a vacancy for sheriff. Frank Adamson passed on the offer from King County executive Ron Sims. Adamson was looking forward to retirement, and so were several other command officers Montgomery considered.

Dave Reichert was almost fifty, and his hair, although still thick, was rapidly turning silver. His enthusiasm for higher office continued, and he wanted to be the sheriff of King County. He was happy to accept Sims’s appointment in 1997. Adamson supported Reichert, and so did many others in the sheriff’s department. Remembering how hard Reichert had worked on the Green River Task Force, I was glad to help raise money for his campaign when the next sheriff’s election came up. He proved to be a natural politician; a mature, handsome, and assured man instead of the “Davy” he had been back in 1982. He won the election easily and was, at long last, in a position to reopen the hunt for the man who had evaded him and scores of others for almost twenty years.

Unlike most of the men who had been sheriff, Reichert usually wore his full uniform rather than a business suit. He was still a cop, and he had kept himself in top physical condition, working out and lifting weights as he always had. During the World Trade Organization convention that brought riots to Seattle in 2000, news cameras caught Reichert chasing down looters who had just smashed the window of a jewelry store. It was reassuring in a time of chaos to see the sheriff himself out there in the streets dealing with lawlessness. He admitted with a grin, however, that he couldn’t run as fast as he had twenty years ago.