The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (79 page)

Bundy believed that part of the Riverman’s success in finding victims quickly and eluding police was the result of his confidence both in his dealing with members of the victim pool and his access to them. And Ridgway himself confirmed that Bundy was right. For example, Dawn White’s account of her encounter with the stranger to the Green River Task Force also demonstrates how confident the stranger was. First, he encountered Dawn and her friend at the same time and negotiated with both about the costs of a double date. If the stranger was afraid, he certainly didn’t show it. Moreover, he demonstrated a shared knowledge of the dating rules with Dawn White and her friend, chose the woman he wanted to have the date with, and simply asked her to wait for him until he returned. Dealing for him appeared easy and he seemed to be completely confident of his date’s waiting for him. Even though she thought him “weird,” if she was afraid of him, she didn’t show it by her behavior.

Bundy believed that his Riverman might have used a “cop approach” to lure victims into his car. By showing them a badge, which could be purchased at any store selling police paraphernalia, he could have easily overcome his potential victim’s reluctance to talk to a complete stranger on the street and even gained his victim’s confidence to the point where she would get into his car. In
Bundy’s attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in Utah he used just such a cop ruse, which got the potential victim into his car long enough for him to try to apply the handcuffs.

The King County affidavit quotes Marcia Winslow, Gary Ridgway’s second wife, describing how she first met Ridgway on the Renton loop. “Marcia, who was with a girlfriend at the time, was pulled over by Ridgway in what she described as a ‘police-like stop.’” Also, Girlfriend C told King County Green River Murders Task Force detectives that “Ridgway once told her he had applied to become a police officer somewhere in this area after getting out of the Navy. However, Girlfriend C believed he failed the exam.”

Bundy used a number of different approaches to lure his victims. He posed as a detective to Carol DaRonch, an injured guy with his arm in a sling in need of help at Lake Sammamish, and a guy on crutches in the Vail, Colorado, murder of Julie Cunningham. Bundy hypothesized that his Riverman might also use different methods of approach. He described the cop approach, which he believed would be effective in asserting control over prostitutes. But he said that prostitutes were most comfortable dealing with regular johns who did not come on like criminals but were potential customers simply looking for a quick date.

Both Rebecca Garde Guay and Dawn White described just such a typical john approach in their statements to task force detectives, according to the King County affidavit. Guay told police she was hitchhiking when the stranger who later assaulted her picked her up and negotiated with her for oral sex, and Dawn White described the encounter with the stranger driving the pickup truck along Pacific Highway South. Neither Rebecca Garde Guay nor Dawn White had any reason to believe, at first, that the man who picked her up was anything other than a potential customer looking for a date, and both women agreed to do business with him. And Ridgway himself told police that he would show a photo of his son to those potential victims who were suspicious of him so as to gain their confidence.

Bundy tried to adopt the camouflage of normalcy in every aspect of his dealing with people, so he assumed that his Riverman would have done the same. Bundy practiced his approach to women and was confident enough of his ability to modify his demeanor that even when he was rebuffed at Lake Sammamish, he was able to bounce back and pick up Janice Ott after Mary Osmer had slipped out of his grasp. His approach was so confident that he didn’t appear needy or strange at all. After Mary Osmer had declined to go with him because he hadn’t told her that the sailboat he needed to load onto his car was at his parents’ house, Bundy modified his approach to Janice Ott thirty minutes later, explaining that he needed help loading a sailboat that was at his parents’ house. Ott agreed and became one of his victims. Osmer declined to go with him and lived to tell the police about it.

So it was with almost all of the witnesses who told their stories to the Green River Murders Task Force. Although Dawn White described the stranger she encountered as weird, he wasn’t enough of an oddball to turn her off. In fact, she felt so guilty about having to break their date that she called the man to set up another date.

Marcia Winslow said that although she first met her future husband when he stopped her in a “police-like” way, she always thought of him as nice, even though she described an incident to police in which Ridgway had placed her in a police-type choke hold and applied pressure. But, she said, she attributed her husband’s behavior in that particular incident, to their having had too much to drink at a party.

As a method of introduction, Bundy predicted, his Riverman might ask a potential victim about one of her friends, a person the Riverman knew, or even one of his own victims. It would be a way to
start a conversation, to break the ice, particularly at a time when news might have been spreading within the victim pool about missing women.

In her statement to the task force, Paige Miley explained that one of the elements of her conversation with the stranger along Pacific Highway South was his mention of her friend Kim Nelson, who was a missing person. Miley was in the process, she said, of arranging a date with this stranger when his mention of Kim Nelson, with whom she had only turned tricks once, made her nervous. Nelson had disappeared on the one and only day she and Miley had been out together, and Miley became suspicious.

If, in fact, Bundy’s prediction was accurate about his Riverman’s using friends’ names to further a conversation, in this one instance it turned out to be the factor that caused Paige Miley to report to the task force, even though she admitted that both she and Kim Nelson had been out soliciting dates.

Bundy believed that because of the time that had elapsed between the disappearance of the victims and the recovery of their bodies, his Riverman didn’t need to dispose of his victims immediately. Accordingly, Bundy believed, his Riverman lived alone.

Rose Hahn, a tenant who rented Gary Ridgway’s house, gave a statement to Green River Murders Task Force detectives in which she described how her landlord shared the kitchen and bathroom facilities in the main house with them, but lived alone in the garage. “While they lived in the house,” the affidavit states, referring to Rose Hahn and her husband, “Ridgway lived in the garage that had been converted into living quarters…. She said Ridgway rarely ate at home, if ever. Ridgway shared the kitchen and bathroom with her family so she had first-hand knowledge of his use of these facilities. Hahn said Ridgway was usually not at home in the evenings, and that if he was, he stayed in his room or outside.”

Marcia Winslow’s statement contained in the Green River Murders Task Force affidavit says, “Ridgway informed Marcia that the garage area was his private place and for her to stay away from
it…. Ridgway would often be gone during the evenings for long periods of time, often returning to the house dirty or wet. He explained his condition by saying his vehicle broke down while he was out driving. Marcia said that during the latter years of their marriage, Ridgway began coming home later and later without any logical explanation.”

Ridgway told police that when he lived alone, he brought victims back to his house, where he killed them.

Bundy believed that his Riverman had a stable job with a regular Monday-to-Friday work schedule. In fact, the affidavit states that for thirty years Gary Ridgway held a job as a painter at Kenworth Trucking, and that he had a Monday-to-Friday schedule, working a shift that began at 3:40
P.M.
and lasted until 12:10
A.M.
On those days when Green River victims disappeared, Ridgway was off work.

Something changed in the Riverman’s life, Bundy said. He noted the patterns of body recovery and hypothesized that his Riverman might have gone through significant life changes that altered the way he seemed to operate. He hypothesized that the Riverman might have gotten “filled with the Holy Spirit.”

In her interview with detectives that appears in the King County affidavit, Marcia Winslow says that after she married Ridgway and their son, Matthew, was born, “they began attending a Southern Baptist Church. She said Ridgway became ‘fanatical’ about religion. They later started going to a Pentecostal church, and Ridgway made the transition to his new church. Marcia said they had participated in going door to door, and that Ridgway would get angry when people would close their doors on them…. Marcia remembered that Ridgway would sit at night watching TV with an open Bible in his lap. Marcia also said that Ridgway would frequently cry during or after the church service.” Perhaps he tried to
refocus his anger or use religion to exorcise it, but Bundy was correct about Ridgway’s religious conversion.

One of Bundy’s most accurate observations was that his Riverman did not kill thirty-six-year-old Amina Agisheff. The Task Force had considered her one of the Green River Killer’s victims for years, but Bundy told me that he was very skeptical about that. Ted believed that her age—she was twenty years older than some of Ridgway’s younger victims—should have clued the Task Force that she did not fit the Riverman’s typical victim profile. He was after teenagers and younger women. And during Ridgway’s interviews with detectives after he was arrested, he not only refused to admit to having killed Agisheff, he most vociferously denied it. He wouldn’t cop to it, he said, “Because I have pride in … what I do. I don’t wanna take it from anybody else.”

Given the requirements of Ridgway’s plea bargain deal in which his full, complete, and honest confessions were the only way he could save himself from the death penalty, one would think that he would seek to err on the side of caution and plead out to every crime the prosecutors could possibly throw at him. And indeed, Ridgway mentioned crimes that the police didn’t even know about. So why would he deny a crime that detectives put onto the Green River list? Again, Bundy seemed to have pointed to a reason without realizing that he was describing something about serial killers in general.

When Bundy asked me to believe, really believe, that some murders were okay, and to treat his statement in a nonjudgmental way, he was also telling me to look beyond the immediacy of the crime into what the victim might have meant to the killer. Thus, he was predicting something that Ridgway was hinting at in his denial of the Agisheff murder. Ridgway needed to have sex with his victims, and, as he told police, he sometimes returned to their burial sites to have sex with their corpses. He was graphic in his descriptions of his sexual murders, explaining why he liked younger victims, why they were easier to control and manipulate, why he liked to hear them beg for their lives, and why he liked to wrap his legs around them while he was choking them to death. These teenage victims were his unwilling sexual partners. Thus, it is my guess, and probably Bundy’s experience, that Agisheff was not just outside of
Ridgway’s victim pool, she was repellant to him because of her age. Why?

Marcia Winslow Ridgway’s description of Gary Ridgway’s mother to Task Force detectives, as described in the Sue Peters affidavit, as “wearing a lot of makeup and tight clothes” so that she would “look like a prostitute,” and her asserting herself around the house and breaking a plate over Ridgway’s father’s head is very telling and may provide an answer. So is Ridgway’s revelation to police that he had violent sexual fantasies about his mother as well as sexual feelings and fantasized about “sewing up her vagina.” Were Ridgway’s sexual conflicts about his mother somehow a fuel for his sexual fury? If so, it would make sense that Agisheff, because of her age, not only repelled Ridgway, she frightened him as well and, if we take him at his word, would not have been one of his victims.

Ridgway’s overreaction to being asked about Agisheff might be only the tip of the iceberg of Ridgway’s feelings of violence towards prostitutes in general. Was his attraction to young girls and teenagers his way of deflecting his real feelings of hatred toward his mother, his real target victim? Teenaged prostitutes were easy prey for the older Ridgway, he admitted to police. But they well might have been surrogate victims. Only time and further interviews with Ridgway might reveal his deeper feelings about his victims. But for the present, Bundy was not only clearly right about Agisheff, he seems to have given an example of how, in his mind, some murders could be okay.

Bundy wasn’t psychic when it came to the Green River killings. He was simply creating a profile of the person he believed could commit these crimes based on his knowledge of himself, his knowledge of the area, and his knowledge of what it took to operate in the Green River Killer’s areas, abducting prostitutes as his victims. But profiles are also wrong in many key areas and sometimes lead police astray. For example, there were things that Bundy believed about the Riverman that were dead wrong. His biggest mistake was that he suggested that the Riverman was from Tacoma. Bundy based his opinion on where some of the bodies had been dumped, at least one of which was in Pierce County. Since Bundy was from Tacoma and knew the body dump sites, he figured, projecting
himself into the position of the Riverman, that the Riverman, too, had to be from Tacoma. Actually, that wasn’t the case. According to the King County affidavit, the individual they had under surveillance, Gary Ridgway, had a residence in Renton and was also from Auburn.