I Thought I was Doing You Guys a Favour: The Green River Killer

 

The Green River killer was a serial killer operating in the state of Washington, in the north-west of the United States. He murdered at least forty-two women, and for a long time it looked as if he would never be caught. The public record of the serial killer, the string of perhaps sadistic and brutal killings with all their peculiar circumstances that make up the hallmark of the particular psychopath, is very often widely at variance with his everyday persona. The serial killer is often a quiet, ordinary-looking and ordinary-behaving person holding down an ordinary job. This mismatch is why he often remains unidentifiable, why he often remains uncaught for a long time.

In July 1982, two boys were cycling beside the Green River close to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. They were carrying their fishing gear with them and contemplating an afternoon’s fishing in the river, when one of them noticed what he thought was a log floating in the shallow water near Peck Bridge. He was curious about it and waded in with the idea of rolling it in to the bank to get a better look. He was shaken when he saw that it was a girl’s body. In fact it was the body of a sixteen year old called Wendy Coffield and she was the first victim, as far as was then known, of the Green River Killer.

At first the police treated it as a fairly straightforward sex killing. Police officer Lieutenant Jackson Berd speculated that it was probably the usual case of a man who had had too much to drink, picked up a girl for sex, encountered resistance to his advances and tried to use force; the girl started screaming; the man tried to silence her, instinctively putting his hands to her mouth and throat (the source of the noise); the girl died by suffocation or strangulation and then her body was dumped. It was crime that happened all too often, a nasty crime, but far removed from the cold-blooded serial killing this would turn out to be.

Wendy Coffield was a runaway, a child prostitute who had been missing for three months when her body was found. She fitted Jackson Berd’s sex killing pattern. It was thought at the time that Wendy Coffield was the Green River Killer’s first victim, but there may have been others earlier. Six months before, the body of Wendy Coffield’s friend Leanne Wilcox was found on waste ground several miles from the river. As the investigation progressed and more women fell victim to the killer, it began to look as if the murder of Leanne Wilcox was one of the series.

Five weeks later, the picture in any case changed significantly. In one day, the bodies of three more young women were found at separate locations along the same river. In August, forty-one year old Robert Ainsworth was in his rubber raft drifting down the Green River, south towards the outer edge of Seattle, a trip he had made many times. This time he noticed a balding middle-aged man standing on the river bank and another sitting nearby on a pickup truck. He assumed they were there for the fishing and asked the older man if he had caught anything. The man said he hadn’t and asked Ainsworth if he had found anything, which was an odd question. The two men left in the old pickup truck and a few moments later Robert Ainsworth looked down into the water to see the eyes of a young black woman staring back up at him just below the surface of the water.

At first Ainsworth thought it was a mannequin and tried to catch it with a pole. In trying to dislodge it from a rock he overturned his raft and fell into the river. Then he realized that it was a woman’s body. Just seconds later, he saw a second corpse floating by, a half-naked black woman. Ainsworth swam to the river bank where the truck had been standing a minute earlier. He sat down, badly shaken and waited for help to arrive. Eventually a man with two children on bicycles came by and he sent them off to get the police. When the police arrived, they sealed off the area and found a third body in the grass no more than thirty feet from where the other two had been floating in the water. This young woman had a pair of blue underpants knotted round her neck. She had bruises on her arms and legs, showing that there had been a struggle before she was overpowered. She was identified as Opal Mills. She was sixteen. The other two young women were thirty-one-year-old Marcia Chapman and seventeen-year-old Cynthia Hinds. They were both weighted down with rocks and, peculiarly, both had pyramid-shaped stones inserted into their vaginas.

The post mortem examinations showed that although the bodies were all found in the same place at the same time, they had not all died at the same time. Cynthia Hinds had been dead for a few hours only, while Marcia Chapman had been dead for several days. The implication is that the men in the pick-up had killed the three women one by one over a period of time, stored their bodies somewhere else, and then taken them to a quiet spot on the bank of the Green River to dump them – perhaps only minutes before Robert Ainsworth arrived. Yet the bodies in the water had evidently been immersed for quite long time. Just possibly the men in the pickup were nothing to do with the three murders.

A few days before the discovery of the three bodies, a single body was found, strangled and slumped over a log; she was Deborah Bonner. During the years that followed, more bodies appeared, all of women between the ages of fifteen and thirty-six, all across King County, the district crossed by the Green River. Two bodies were found just across the state border, in Oregon.

A huge police investigation costing more than £14 million was set up to identify and capture the Green River Killer. A Green River Task force was set up, working in shifts round the clock. A major problem faced by the King County police was the attitude of the local people. They were very frightened of being attacked by the serial killer who was on the rampage. But at the same time there was an unhealthy complacency; because many of the victims were prostitutes, and they were the killer’s target group, the great moral majority had nothing to worry about. But the Yorkshire Ripper murders were to show how false that kind of thinking can be. You do not have to be a prostitute to fall victim to a committed prostitute-slayer; you only have to be mistaken for a prostitute by someone who, by definition, is not thinking straight. It may be that in the killer’s mind a particular hairstyle or location is associated with prostitutes. Then, just by virtue of having long dark hair or walking along a particular street, you become a prostitute in the killer’s warped imagination. Complacency can be very dangerous.

Another problem for the investigation was that prostitutes were understandably reluctant to co-operate with the police. The police discovered that many of the murder victims knew one another. It seemed likely that the killer would be found operating in the area frequented by the girls, that he was picking them up in the same relatively small area. Police interviewed many of the prostitutes working central Seattle, to get information on their clients. Not surprisingly, the women were unwilling to share this information.

One prostitute reported a man to the police. He had raped her and talked about the Green River murders; she suspected that he was the murderer. On 20 August 1982, the police announced that they had taken into custody the man she reported. They were unable to find anything that definitely connected him with the murders and had to release him.

Two separate incidents seemed likelier leads. One young prostitute was picked up by a middle-aged man in a blue and white truck. Once she was in the truck, he pointed a gun at her and drove her at speed to a remote spot, where he raped her violently. Afterwards, he was driving her either back or on somewhere else, and she managed to escape when he stopped at a traffic light. She was able to make out part of the registration number as the truck sped off.

A girl of fifteen had a similar experience. A man in a blue and white truck approached her and offered her a lift. Once she was inside, he became aggressive, pulling a gun out and pointing it at her head. He drove her to some woodland, where he forced her to give him oral sex. Then he handcuffed her and released her in the woods. If these young women were victims of the killer, they were lucky to escape with their lives.

Shortly afterwards, a butcher called Charles Clinton Clark was stopped by police in the centre of Seattle. He was driving a blue and white truck. The police did a check on Clark’s background and found that he owned two handguns. The investigators thought they had found the Green River Killer. They showed Clark’s driving licence photo to the two young women who had been raped. Both identified him as their attacker. Charles Clark was arrested. His truck and house were searched, and the two handguns were found. After police interrogation, Clark admitted attacking the women.

The two sex crimes were solved, but was Clark the Green River Killer? The fact that Clark allowed his victims to escape made him different from the Green River Killer, so there was some doubt. It also emerged that Clark had strong alibis for the times when many of the murders had taken place. In fact, one of the victims, Mary Meehan, went missing while Clark was in custody being charged with rape.

One of the detectives on the Task Force, Detective Reichert, became suspicious that one of the civilian volunteers working on the case might be the killer. A forty-four-year-old unemployed taxi driver became the prime suspect, because his profile was thought to fit the profile assembled by FBI agent John Douglas. Douglas asserted that the killer was a confident but impulsive middle-aged man who would be likely to frequent the murder scenes in order to re-enact and relive the crimes more vividly in his imagination. The killer would be familiar with the area. He would be interested in police work and might even contact the police under the pretence of assisting the investigation. Unfortunately, this profile was likely to incriminate anyone who came forward to try to help the police. Little wonder, then, that people are increasingly wary of police officers!

Detective Reichert’s hunch, based on agent Douglas’s profile, led to the close monitoring of the taxi driver’s movements though the winter of 1982. During this time, he continuously denied having any connection with the Green River murders, but remained the Task Force’s prime suspect. After weeks of scrutiny, it was plain that there was no evidence against him whatsoever, except that he knew five of the victims. The Task Force could not pin the murders on him, so they arrested him for failing to pay parking tickets instead.

The mother of one of the victims made a very interesting observation. She complained that people were missing the point by demanding tougher action against prostitution. ‘Our kids are being penalized again. It sounds silly, but how can you be penalized any more after you’ve been murdered? We admit that our kids had problems but Tracy didn’t deserve to die because she wasn’t living what was perceived to be a perfect life. The issue was and is this maniac out there, not the lives that some of his victims were leading.’

The Green River Killer was believed to be of the same psychological type as the Zodiac Killer and Jack the Ripper, a psychopathic sex killer who goes on killing until he is stopped. Lieutenant Nolan was second-in-command of the Green River Task Force. He developed a strong feeling about the type of man he was looking for. ‘The man we are looking for is a shade of grey. He is very innocuous, fits right into the community. That is what makes him so very dangerous.’

In order to retain the integrity and effectiveness of the investigation, the Task Force revealed as little as possible of what they have learnt about their nameless suspect. They did, even so, release a photofit picture, so that potential victims at least had a chance of avoiding danger. The Task Force released a few details, though. The killer was middle-aged, an outdoor type who knows the mountains, ravines and streams like the back of his hand. He was physically strong: strong enough to be able to carry the body of a full-grown woman for some distance.

There were a few sightings by witnesses. These were moments when people saw the victims in the company of a strange man shortly before they were murdered. From these fragmentary descriptions, the Task Force assembled what they believed were significant details about the killer. The believed the killer drove a pale blue pickup speckled with primer paint to cover spots of rust – a distinctive-looking vehicle.

The forensic evidence from the victims’ bodies gave more specific information about him. The Green River Killer was a sexual psychopath. He was a deeply troubled, disturbed and tormented personality, with a sexual personality twisted by some terrible childhood secret that left him simmering with anger against women. The Task Force decided not to reveal any details of the way he killed his victims, though it emerged that strangulation was his favoured method and that it was favoured so that the killer could watch his victims suffer.

The open country within a radius of forty-five miles of Seattle was the killer’s dumping ground, though it is not clear from the information released whether the victims were killed where their bodies were found. The bodies were discovered by a wide variety of visitors to the countryside: walkers, joggers, hunters, fishermen, mushroom pickers and boy scouts.

The Task Force was inundated with 10,000 phone calls offering ideas and information. Inevitably there were several false confessions from insane attention-seekers. Lieutenant Nolan was disappointed not to have caught the killer and brought him to justice, but he and his team got used to the disappointment. By the spring of 1983, the investigation was clearly collapsing. There were more and more killings, there was more and more evidence, but none of the sightings or suspects seemed to lead anywhere. By 1985, the Task Force was calling in clinical psychologists to help them deal with their stress and their sense of failure. Typically, Nolan became obsessed with the killer. ‘I would love to capture him, to get him to sit down and tell me just why he did this, what drove him. I don’t have any idea what this guy’s going to tell me, what his secret is.’

Perhaps inevitably, what did develop within the Task Force was a kind of sneaking admiration for the Green River Killer’s intelligence. It is recognized that the killer chose his victims very cunningly, leaving the police very little in the way of witnesses, sightings or clues. The killer was good at concealing corpses, which in turn created a range of difficulties for the police. The longer the time that elapses between the murder and the discovery of the body, the harder it is to determine the time of death, and in some cases even the cause of death, as we shall see in the case of Milly Dowler.

The Green River killings ended in the late 1990s. Why did they come to an end then? It is very unlikely, given the psychological profile, that the Green River Killer would simply voluntarily stop killing because he had had enough – still less seen the error of his ways. Someone who has killed that number of people, forty-two at least, is unlikely to find that he has had enough of killing or decide that he really shouldn’t be doing it.

By chance, in 1987, the investigators stumbled on a new suspect. He was taken into custody by the police for trying to pick up a policewoman posing as a prostitute. He was released, but the investigators looked at his background and found that he was accused of throttling a prostitute near the airport in 1980; he had pleaded self-defence and was released. In 1987 the police released him after he had passed a lie detector test. One of the investigators, Detective Haney, decided to pursue this suspect and delved further. He found that in 1982 the suspect had been stopped and questioned by police while he was in his truck with a prostitute. The prostitute was Keli McGinness, who was one of the Green River Killer’s victims. The police had interviewed the suspect again in 1983 in connection with the kidnapping of another of the murder victims. A witness, the prostitute’s boyfriend, had followed the pickup truck to the suspect’s house. Detective Haney realized he was on to something when he interviewed the suspect’s ex-wife and discovered that the dumping sites for the bodies were all haunts frequented by the suspect.

The clinching evidence was that when the suspect’s work record was examined he was absent from work on every occasion when a victim vanished. On 8 April 1987, police searched the suspect’s house. There was still insufficient evidence to justify an arrest and the police had to release him from custody. The suspect’s name was Gary Ridgway. He was the Green River Killer, but the police had to let him go.

The Green River killings might have stopped, but the remains of victims came to light intermittently, as if to remind the Task Force that it had still not solved the case. The buried skeleton of a woman was discovered by three boys; she was a seventeen-year-old called Cindy Smith and she had been missing for three years. Two more bodies that came to light were those of Debbie Gonzales, aged fourteen, and Debra Estes, aged fifteen. Debra had gone missing six years before her body was found.

Another new suspect appeared in December 1988. A television true crime detection programme was broadcast and in response several viewers phoned in proposing William J. Stevens as a suspect. When the Task Force investigators checked his background, they found that he had already surfaced before as a suspect. But in spite of having a criminal record, there was nothing at all to tie him to the Green River murders and he was cleared of all suspicion.

Meanwhile, more human remains kept coming to light, some of them with a strange story to tell. In February 1990, the skull of Denise Bush was found in woodland in Tukwila, Washington. The rest of her body was found in Oregon five years later. For some reason, perhaps to confuse the investigators, the murderer was moving body parts around. By 1991, the investigative team had all but admitted total defeat.

In April 2001, with more advanced forensic testing including DNA testing available, Detective Reichert, now Sheriff of King County, reopened the investigation. He was still obsessed with solving the case. All the evidence was re-examined and some semen samples found on the bodies of three victims were tested for their DNA profile. The DNA profiles were compared with samples taken from Gary Leon Ridgway in 1987. On 10 September 2001, the spectacular news came through from the lab: the profiles matched. On 30 November, Gary Ridgway was intercepted on his way home from work and arrested on four counts of aggravated murder. It was a start. At last, the man the police had been hunting for twenty years was in custody.

Ridgway, born in Salt Lake City in 1949, was working for a computer firm when he was arrested. At the time when the murders were committed, and for a period of thirty years, Ridgway was employed as a truck painter at the Kentworth truck factory in Renton, Washington.

Ridgway was sexually insatiable, wanting sex several times a day. He also like having sex in public areas or in woods – even in areas where his victims were dumped. Ridgway had fanatical religious beliefs and these, combined with his strong sex drive, generated the tension within him that resulted in serial murder. He had a love-hate relationship with prostitutes. He complained to neighbours about prostitutes working in the area, but was also a frequent client. He functioned in a typically psychopathic way; he did not regard his victims as real people with separate identities, but wrote them off as disposable thrills.

 

I killed some of them outside. I killed most of them in my house near Military Road. I killed a lot of them in my truck not far from where I picked them up. I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught . . . I thought I was doing you guys a favour.

 

How much of this plea bargain statement represents what Ridgway actually thought is hard to tell; he was picking up quite a lot from his interrogators and giving them back what he thought they wanted to hear, with a view to winning a significant favour.

On 5 November 2003, Gary Ridgway, then fifty-four years old, avoided the death penalty by confessing to the murders of forty-eight women. Most of the murders took place in 1982–84. The deal struck between Ridgway and the authorities was that he would co-operate with them in closing these cases in exchange for forty-eight life sentences without parole. The problem with plea bargaining is that it does not necessarily lead to the truth. There is little doubt now that Gary Ridgway was responsible for some, possibly most of the Green River murders, but was he really responsible, solely responsible, for all forty-eight of them – and only those forty-eight? That was what the authorities wanted to hear, so that was what Ridgway told them. The possibility remains that someone else may have been involved. The plea bargaining has introduced the added complication that it looks as if justice is being bent, negotiated. US citizens are asking who is eligible for the death penalty if Gary Ridgway isn’t?

Why did he do it? It was partly the enormous stress generated by the polarization of his fanatical religious beliefs and his powerful sex drive. It was also to an extent an overwhelming sense of disempowerment. The killing was exciting, dangerous and gave his dull life as a truck painter the colour it otherwise lacked. On the other hand, millions of people feel frustrated and disempowered without resorting to serial killing.

But the pattern of the crimes does not quite add up. We are still not seeing the whole picture. We are being asked to believe by the King County officials, who want to see the case closed, that Gary Ridgway went on a frenzied killing spree in 1982–84, and then stopped killing – completely – until he murdered once more in 1990 and on one final occasion in 1998. If that is what really happened, it is unique in the history of serial killing. What usually happens is that there is a killing spree, which involves one or more murders, followed by a cooling-off period, then another killing spree, and so on, rather like cyclical pattern of activity in a volcano. If Ridgway really killed forty-six women in the space of two years, he could not have gone on for twenty years after that nourished by only two more killings. This is a case that appears to be solved, but is not. The solution is probably that Ridgway killed many more women, outside King County. These are murders which he will never own up to because it is only in King County that he has been exempted from the death penalty.