The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (73 page)

In Detective Ralf McAllister’s investigation of this incident, he tape-recorded Ridgway’s account of Guay’s report. Ridgway had been advised of his constitutional rights, which he acknowledged and waived.

Ridgway told Detective McAllister that he picked up Rebecca Guay, who was hitchhiking at about five
P.M.
at South 200th Street and Pacific Highway South, as he was driving his maroon-colored Dodge pickup with its black canopy in place. Guay asked him after he picked her up if he had “dated,” to which Ridgway replied that he had, and they agreed to a twenty-dollar oral sex act. Ridgway and Guay performed their sexual act at 22nd South and South 204th, although he told police that he was not sure which of the two of them had chosen the location. He remembered wearing blue shorts at the time but seemed confused in the interview about the time of the year when the incident took place. He also said he couldn’t remember whether Guay examined his identification in his wallet because there had been “so many of ’em.” But Ridgway told police he and Guay walked seventy-five feet into the woods for privacy in case the police came by.

Ridgway admitted to police that he choked Guay after she had started to bite him. He kept choking her with his arm for ten to fifteen seconds, he said, after she bit him and he told her, “You bit me.” However, he said to police that he did not remember slapping her at any time, and after watching Guay escape, he observed her run to a nearby trailer and go inside. Then he put his clothing back on and left the area in his truck.

Ridgway admitted to Detective McAllister that he dated on Aurora Avenue and in the city of Seattle and said that he was still dating, primarily during the day because he worked from 3:40
P.M.
until 12:10
A.M.
He had been on nights, he explained, since Halloween 1983, and the only vehicle he had driven for the previous three years was his Dodge pickup; he owned no other vehicles. During the times his truck was in the shop getting fixed, he explained, he usually took the bus or got a ride with someone. He had even hitched rides a few times.

Ridgway dated in motels by the airport, a motel in Auburn, and
in a little field, as well as in other places the girls he dated had taken him. He admitted camping around the North Bend area and traveling through Enumclaw via Highway 410 to get to White Pass. He also admitted to dating missing person Keli McGinness, to having seen a lot of the victims and to probably dating some of them.

As a result of Detective McAllister’s investigation of the Guay assault and his interview with Ridgway, McAllister recommended that the Ridgway case be reviewed. The inquiry into Ridgway’s past was reopened and assigned to Detective Doyon, who was assigned out of state before he began his inquiry. The file on Ridgway was then turned over to FBI special agents O’Neill and Askeland.

On March 17, 1986, at the request of Special Agents O’Neill and Askeland, Gary Ridgway voluntarily came to the Green River Murders Task Force office for an interview. During it, he again admitted to the Guay incident, now saying that she had bit him hard enough to draw blood, but that it was the only time he had assaulted a prostitute. He also told the agents that he had not dated prostitutes during the previous one and a half years because of the Green River killings as well as his having caught venereal diseases at least fifteen times. He admitted to once having choked his ex-wife, Marcia, in 1972, saying also that he believed the incident had been reported to the police. He further told the agents that he had picked up prostitutes from the streets of Seattle and Tacoma using hotels, his vehicle, and prostitutes’ apartments for paid sex. He also said that he had parked his car near the cemetery on Aurora Avenue North and in the parking lots of motels such as the Red Lion Inn on Pacific Highway South and South 188th Street, both of which are popular areas for prostitution.

Ridgway said to his interviewers that he had a fixation with prostitutes and that during the past one and half years he picked up prostitutes only to talk to them. He said that he was compulsive about prostitutes, explaining that they affect him as “strongly as alcohol does an alcoholic,” and acknowledged that he had occasionally fished eastern Washington lakes as well as the Green River. At the conclusion of the interview, Ridgway was asked to take a polygraph test for the Federal Bureau of Investigation on March 20, 1986, which he agreed to do.

On the day set forth for the polygraph, attorney David Middaugh telephoned Special Agent O’Neill and advised that he was representing Gary Ridgway, who had contacted him after his interview with
O’Neill and Askeland. Middaugh advised that he did not want his client interviewed or talked to by any police officers or Federal Bureau of Investigation agents without Middaugh’s approval. Ridgway’s attorney said he had also advised his client not to take a second polygraph test. As a result of David Middaugh’s contact with Agent O’Neill, the investigation of Gary Ridgway was inactivated by the FBI, even though in August 1986, based on a review of the Ridgway information, Green River Murders Task Force detectives decided that there were still a number of unresolved questions regarding Ridgway and that more follow-up work was necessary. The case was reopened.

On August 12, 1986, the task force contacted Paige Miley in connection with victim Kim Nelson. Miley was a prostitute who knew and worked with Nelson in the Seattle area during 1983. Nelson’s skeletal remains were found off I-90 on Garcia Road on June 13, 1986, the same area in which two other Green River victims were found.

Nelson, who was released from the King County jail on October 30, 1983, joined Miley the same day. Miley, Nelson, and their pimps all stayed at the Ben Carol Motel on South 144th Street and Pacific Highway South for two nights. Nelson and Miley then traveled to the Evergreen Truck Stop in Federal Way at South 348th Street and 16th Avenue South for two nights, where they performed acts of prostitution; during this period, they seldom ventured out of their motel room except to go to the truck stop. Miley said she did not recall ever going with Nelson to Larry’s Market or the Kentucky Fried Chicken, which are located across from the Ben Carol Motel. Miley said she only worked with Nelson once on Pacific Highway South and had never known Nelson to work Pacific Highway South in the past.

After working the Evergreen Truck Stop for two nights, Miley got up on the morning of November 1, 1983, and decided to work Pacific Highway South to make rent money. At approximately eleven
A.M.,
Miley and Nelson left their room together and went to the covered bus stop in front of the car wash at South 144th Street and Pacific Highway South. Shortly after arriving there, Miley got a car date and left Nelson sitting alone at the bus stop. Miley turned the quick car date nearby and returned to the bus stop fifteen to twenty minutes
later to find Nelson gone. Nelson never returned and Miley never saw her again. This was, according to Miley, the one and only time she was on Pacific Highway South together with Kim Nelson. Nelson, police noted, was very distinctive in appearance because she was quite tall, 5 foot 11 inches, and had very short bleached-blond hair.

Several nights after Miley had left Nelson alone at the bus stop, Miley was working the same general area of Pacific Highway South in front of the Moonrise Motel when she was approached by a man driving a red pickup truck with a white cab-high canopy over the bed. She described the man as white with brown hair and a wispy mustache; in his late twenties to early thirties; wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap with some writing on the front; and drinking a can of Budweiser beer that he held between his legs. After talking about a date, the man asked Miley where her blond friend was. Miley told police she immediately became concerned that the man was aware of her and Kim Nelson’s presence on Pacific Highway South since the only time she had been seen with Nelson in that same area was during the brief period on the morning of November 1, 1983, immediately prior to Nelson’s disappearance from the bus stop.

Subsequent to this interview, Miley assisted in an artist drawing of the man she had described to police, which drawing, police said, was later found to have closely resembled Gary Ridgway. Police recontacted Paige Miley and showed her a photomontage of six photographs, from which she picked Ridgway’s picture as the person who had approached her on Pacific Highway South and asked about Kim Nelson.

After the task force reopened their investigation of Gary Ridgway, they conducted a number of interviews with individuals who said they had information about Ridgway. First among these was Dawn White, a prostitute who had tipped off Ridgway to the task force and was interviewed by Detective Randy Mullinax.

Dawn White told the police that in either December 1983 or January 1984, at about one or two
P.M.,
she and another prostitute were walking northbound on Pacific Highway South at approximately
South 160th Street when Ridgway approached them, driving his maroon-colored pickup with a primer spot on the passenger door and a canopy over the truck bed.

As White and her friend walked north along the highway, Ridgway continued to circle them. He finally contacted them in the parking lot of Larry’s Market at South 144th Street and Pacific Highway South, where White and her friend both got into the truck with him. Ridgway, White said, acted very paranoid, saying he had previously been arrested by two vice decoys. He made both of them show identification to prove they weren’t police officers and then they talked about dating. But Ridgway didn’t have enough money to date both of them, so he chose White, who was Caucasian, instead of her friend, who was African American. From this incident, Dawn White said, she got the impression that Ridgway did not like black people.

While she was sitting in Ridgway’s truck, White noticed a roll of plastic in the truck bed. She was also shown some identification belonging to Ridgway, she said, from which she learned his name.

Dawn White said that Ridgway agreed to date her but told her that first he had to leave for a short time to buy something for his truck. White believed it was either wire or a fan belt because, she said, she remembered thinking that it was something with which he would be able to choke her. She had become uneasy about Ridgway’s intentions, describing him to police as “weird and different.” But she waited for him after he left.

Shortly after he had gone, ostensibly to buy the item he said he was looking for, White and her friend were contacted by the King County police in the Larry’s Market parking lot. The police, she said, made them leave the area and the date she had agreed to have with Ridgway did not take place. She said she didn’t see Ridgway again that day, but later in the afternoon she looked up his name in the phone book and called him at home to tell him what had happened with the police.

At a later date, White said she had arranged a meeting with Ridgway at Randy’s Restaurant on East Marginal Way, to which she brought along her boyfriend and pimp. During the meeting, Ridgway talked about his history of both syphilis and herpes and said that he didn’t want to date her and transmit these diseases to her. He also talked about a girlfriend whom he said disappeared but was later found in Portland. After the meeting, which White said took about an hour, they went their separate ways. Nevertheless,
she told the police, Ridgway acted very strange during the meeting and behaved as though he had a guilty conscience.

Approximately a year and a half later, Dawn White and her husband she had since married saw Ridgway at a McDonald’s in downtown Seattle at approximately 6th and Westlake around three in the afternoon. She observed him continually looking at her and asked if he knew her because he kept staring at her. It was at this time she finally recognized him from their prior contact on Pacific Highway South.

After a short conversation, Ridgway gave her and her husband a ride in his brown four-door car to a location that, White told police, she could not remember. And that was the last contact White ever had with Ridgway.

Detective Randy Mullinax, along with FBI Special Agent John Gambersky, also interviewed Claudia Barrows (Ridgway), Gary Ridgway’s first wife. Barrows married Ridgway on August 15, 1970, after they had courted each other in the Seattle area. Often, she said, the couple would visit Seward Park, where on a few occasions Ridgway would polish his car. They once had sex in the woods in a park near Alki and also had sex in Ridgway’s car on a dead-end road off Military Road South, which overlooked the South center area.

Shortly after the couple married, they moved to San Diego, where Ridgway was stationed in the navy; soon after their arrival he was shipped out on a six-month western Pacific cruise. While her husband was gone, Claudia Ridgway became romantically involved with another man who was a mutual friend. They had all become friends prior to Gary’s departure on his cruise. When Ridgway returned from the cruise, he found Claudia living with another woman, who was white and had a black boyfriend. Claudia told investigators that Ridgway knew their marriage was in trouble as soon as he got back from his sea cruise.

When he was discharged from the navy in July 1971, Ridgway returned to the Seattle area; his wife came back to Seattle a few weeks after him. The couple lived in Ridgway’s parents’ residence for a short time before getting their own apartment somewhere off
of Pacific Highway South near the airport. Claudia said their attempts to reconcile their marriage failed and she then returned to San Diego to be with her boyfriend, whom she later married. Claudia, who said that Ridgway seemed to be normal sexually and a very social person, divorced her husband on January 14, 1972.

Ridgway himself subsequently told one of his girlfriends—“Girlfriend C,” according to the King County Police Department affidavit—that when he returned from the western Pacific cruise he found Claudia living with several black men and that, in his opinion, she had turned into a “whore.” He also said that Claudia had given him a case of genital warts before he left on the cruise. However, Ridgway’s navy medical records show that he had warts on both hands and his forearm in December 1970 and that he was diagnosed as having had gonorrhea in December 1969. Claudia Barrows denied ever having had any type of venereal disease.