The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (82 page)

In 2003, Ridgway admitted to police that he had attempted to murder Rebecca Garde Guay.

Was Gary Ridgway a necrophile? Ted Bundy seemed to pick up on this possibility when he suggested to me that one of the ways to catch the killer would have been to stake out his body dump sites. Of course, Bundy, as he admitted to Colorado state investigators, did return to the places where he buried his victims to have “private moments” with them. He clearly recognized that the Green River Killer had the same tendencies. Ridgway admitted to police that he was a necrophile only gradually. At first he denied it, but then said that he ejaculated immediately after choking them to death. Days later during the interview process he admitted he had post-mortem intercourse with some of his victims. Soon thereafter, he admitted that a few of these women had been decomposed enough that maggots had begun to appear on the bodies.

Ridgway described his feelings about having sex with one of his dead victims: “That would be a … uh, that would be a good day, an evening or after I got off work and go have sex with her. And that’d last for one or two days till couldn’t … till the flies came. And I’d bury ’em and cover ’em up. Um, then I’d look for another….
Sometimes I killed one, one day, and I killed one the next day. There wouldn’t be no reason to go back.”

Ridgway’s desire for sexual intercourse with a corpse was apparently so strong that he would engage in risky behavior to accomplish it. He described an occasion where he drove back to visit the body of a woman he had killed, with his son in his truck. While his son slept in the truck, Ridgway got out, had intercourse with the body some thirty feet away, and returned to the truck. Ridgway assured the detectives that his son was a “hard sleeper.”

Ridgway talked to a psychiatrist after he was in custody about his having sexual intercourse with his dead victims, saying, at first, that it was “free sex.” When he sought out victims for sex, he said, he had to pay for it. But after he killed them, he took his money back. However, the energy, gas, and time he spent on finding and killing a victim was an overhead he didn’t have if he simply returned to a burial site and had sex with a victim he’d already killed. But he said it was difficult for him to achieve an erection over a dead body, and he eventually gave up having sex with the corpses of his victims.

Ridgway’s confessions to police about some of his more aberrant behaviors, such as inserting rocks into the vaginas of two of his victims, seem only to skim the surface of his darker visions. Perhaps there is more information that he divulged to detectives that has not yet seen the light of day. Perhaps, and this is more likely, Ridgway divulged only what he thought he had to divulge in order to satisfy the requirements of his plea agreement. As time goes on and Ridgway settles in to spend the rest of his life in prison, he may be more forthcoming in interviews about his darkest fantasies and explain them in greater detail.

During his interviews, Ridgway told detectives that he had inserted the rocks in order to “plug” up his victims. His second wife told police that Ridgway had threatened to “sew up” her vagina to prevent her from having an affair. Nevertheless, the description of Gary Ridgway’s mother provided to police by one of his former wives, that the older woman walked around the house dressed like a prostitute and ordered Ridgway’s father around as if he were a
servant, and Ridgway’s own descriptions of his conflicts with his mother, might, more than anything else, shed light on whatever visions he might have had about women with plugged or sewn vaginas that would keep them from being penetrated by other men. It might also shed light on the nature of his choice of prostitutes as victims. Perhaps they were more than convenient victims of opportunity and held out a special threat to him because of their availability.

For any killer, but for serial killers especially, the disposal of the body is one of the most important components of the crime. As I learned from Bundy, not only is there the absolute necessity of getting rid of the most significant piece of evidence as quickly and efficiently as possible, but the culmination of the murder is also the immediate and initial disconnect between the killer and his victim. This is the moment when he feels most vulnerable to discovery because the evidence of his crime is right there in front of him. Therefore, he must get rid of the body. Gary Ridgway’s admissions about his procedure for disposal of his victims was almost typical of what other serial killers have told police. Ridgway told detectives that after the kill, “I have a burden of having to find a place to put it.” He usually dumped the body within a half hour of having killed his victim.

Ridgway explained a simple but effective method of dumping the bodies. He would drive, usually at night, to a secluded spot, park his truck, and quickly pull the body out of the vehicle and dump it just off the roadway. Then he would drive up the road and park just far enough from the body so that if the vehicle was approached by a police officer, the body would not be discovered. Then, making sure no motorists could see him, he would walk back through the woods to the body, and drag it farther from the road.

Ridgway was concerned that a victim might regain consciousness while he transported the body in the back of his pickup truck. To prevent his victim from escaping, he confessed to police, he tied ligatures around the necks of some of these victims before putting them in the truck, and he would watch his mirror for any signs of movement.

For long-term control-type serial killers, the body dump sites preserve the privacy of their kills from police discovery and serves to prolong the relationship of the killer over his victim, helping to define the nature of relationship the killer has entered into with his victim. After he killed her, he had to get rid of her. Her presence was the blood on his hands. Once she was dead and in a private location, she was his possession. Therefore, the prosecutor wrote in his summary of evidence, of all his secrets, the most precious to Ridgway were the as-yet undiscovered bodies of his victims.

When talking to a forensic psychologist, Ridgway explained what a victim’s body meant to him. “She meant, she meant that uh, um, a beautiful person that was my property, my … uh, possession. Some’n only I knew and, I missed when they were found or where I lost ’em.” And when the police discovered one of his dump sites, it was as if they’d invaded a sacrosanct location and breached the privacy he had established with his victims, he confessed.

Ridgway’s sense of ownership and his need to retain possession of these bodies drove him to pin his third “river” victim beneath the surface of the Green River. It was an ordeal to hold the body at the bottom of the river and cover it with large rocks, but Ridgway did so because, he told his interviewers, “You had already found two of ’em by then. And she … I wasn’t going to let this other one get away.”

It was privacy, too, Ridgway told detectives, that explained why he had elected to take the drastic step of transporting victims’ remains to Oregon. It was to “throw off” the task force. It had to do with his fear of discovery as well as his desire to maintain his privacy with his victims. “ ’Cause the … bodies were already being found and I didn’t want any more to be found,” he said.

Prosecutors and detectives had speculated for years about the significance of the positions in which the Green River Killer had left the bodies of some of his victims. They appeared deliberately posed, on their backs, with their legs spread in unnatural positions. This mystery was resolved when Ridgway confessed that he had
post-mortem intercourse with a number of his victims in the privacy of his secret dump sites, and often had to forcibly spread their legs apart to accomplish this. Then he simply left the victims in that position when he was done with them.

Ridgway confirmed what investigators and prosecutors had long suspected, that he often placed the bodies near physical objects visible from a distance—large trees, guardrails, hills, large fallen logs—which served as landmarks. It was useful for Ridgway to put the victims in dump sites for another reason. It made it easier for him to determine whether or not the bodies had been discovered, and, thereafter, to avoid those sites. He said he buried his victims in “[c]lusters so I won’t forget where they … where they are…. So, I’ve done it before and, ah, just easy. When … if I drive by and think somebody’s been … you know, found ’em then that way I would stay away from them.”

Serial killers survive by being careful and private. Bundy was a master at leading a double life, hiding his criminal obsessions from even his fiancée and his closest friends, hiding it even while he worked at a rape crisis center. That care and deliberation extended, of necessity, to the commission of the actual crimes themselves and the disposal of his victims. Ridgway explained to police how careful he was not to be associated with any of the missing women. If another prostitute was present when he picked up his potential victim, he did not go through with the murder. Ridgway explained that he rarely picked up a woman at the curb where she was working. Rather, he would make eye contact with them and sometimes flash money at them as he drove by. Then he would pull off the road into the parking lot of an adjacent building, where there would be fewer witnesses, and wait for the woman to approach him.

If there was a witness to the pickup and conditions were not right for a kill, Ridgway might “date” the woman anyway. This practice had the added benefit of establishing that he was a good date with the prostitutes. He reasoned that, should he ever be caught, these women would serve as “references” to say that he had not hurt them. Ridgway also offered that another benefit to not killing every prostitute he dated was they served as a sort of “alibi” for him.

Ridgway took several steps to avoid picking up undercover police officers. He would usually watch women from a distance to see whether or not they were picked up by other “tricks.” He often waited to agree to pay for a sex act until a woman got into his own vehicle. Ridgway would also request prostitutes to show him their breasts or vagina before he would agree to pay for sex, believing that undercover officers would refuse to do so.

Ridgway’s chameleon-like behavior also extended to the crime scenes and his ability to recognize what forensic evidence was and how to leave as little of it as possible for crime scene investigators to find. He took precautions to leave no evidence at a scene. If one of his victims scratched him, he would cut her fingernails before disposing of the body so police would not find microtraces of his skin. In this way, he was able to elude detection precisely because he had left so little evidence behind. He told police, “Well, I was in a way a little bit proud of not being caught doing … like removing the clothes. Not leaving anything … any fingerprints on it, using gloves…. Not bragging about it. Not talking about it.”

The same care he practiced at crime scenes extended to his avoidance at being identified as having picked up a victim or at having arranged an assignation with her. He explained that if he killed a woman after arranging a date with her pimp over the phone, he had a special technique. Using the same false name he employed to set up the date, he would telephone the pimp to arrange another date with her. In this way, he figured, if the police ever figured out that Ridgway had dated the victim, Ridgway’s subsequent calls for the woman after her death would suggest he thought she was still alive and, therefore, could not be the killer.

In the case of Marie Malvar, the case that actually brought Ridgway to the attention of the local police and ultimately to the task force, his fear at being detected was so great that after Marie Malvar left deep scratches in Ridgway’s forearms as he struggled with her, he later disguised the long scratches by burning his flesh with battery acid. The scars are visible today, reminders of how he fought with her in the cab of his pickup truck as her boyfriend and pimp looked on. This was one of the cases that brought him to the attention of the police in Desplaines and later to the task force.

From my perspective, the Green River case still shows how the myth or aura of serial killers, along with many misconceptions, still
pervades popular thinking. Ridgway, like Bundy, who clearly empathized with him, was able to survive by doing many of the same things other long-term serial killers do. He was able to maintain his career not by dropping out of society but by keeping his physical presence in society and his killer psyche carefully compartmentalized so that no one would discover it. The most successful long-term serial killers, like John Gacy and Ted Bundy, aren’t loners, as most people believe. They maintain jobs, maintain relationships, are a part of the communities in which they live. Serial killers have children and go to church. Some have violent pasts, as did Ridgway, but that’s not the sine qua non of being a serial killer. Many self-described profilers still look for the wrong things about a serial killer and thus miss the obvious.

The case of Gary Ridgway is no different. The Green River Killer was not, of necessity, a loner, even though Ridgway himself was a loner only in his psyche. The part of him that he projected into society kept a job in Kentworth, married, had a child, and even became a Pentecostal Christian, just as Bundy predicted he would do. Police who had been investigating him since 1987 were not astonished to learn that even after his arrest in 2001, longtime coworkers, former girlfriends, and family members expressed sympathy for him and doubted that he could be a killer. This is a replay of what happened to Bundy after his arrest in Utah. Ridgway’s wife claimed their relationship was excellent. Even learning that Ridgway had admitted killing dozens of women, his brother insisted that Ridgway had never displayed any abnormal behavior in his presence. Those who thought they knew Ridgway best did not know him at all. This is exactly what Ann Rule and others have written about Ted Bundy.