The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (84 page)

Why did he kill so many young women? Even the prosecutor in his summary of evidence concedes that the investigators cannot answer that question.

However, the prosecutor wrote, some of Ridgway’s admissions reveal a deeply rooted psychopathy. It is readily apparent that Ridgway does not suffer from any mental disease or defect that would absolve him from responsibility for his crimes. While lawyers and psychiatrists can debate the nature of mental disease, this is primarily a legal question, depending upon the definition of insanity that appears in a state’s criminal statute. In the Revised Criminal Code of the State of Washington, per RCW 9A.12.010, insanity, so as to be a defense to murder, is an an affirmative defense that requires that “at the time of the commission of the offense, as a result of mental disease or defect, the mind of the actor was affected to such an extent that he was unable to perceive the nature and quality of the act with which he is charged or he was unable to tell right from wrong with reference to the particular act charged.” And because insanity is an affirmative defense, the burden is on the accused to establish that defense by a preponderance of the evidence. As Ridgway’s own words in his confessions reveal, he knew that what he was doing was wrong, and he certainly understood and perceived the nature of the acts he was performing. Thus, he was not legally insane in the State of Washington.

The prosecutor’s report also said that nothing in Ridgway’s history, apart from the crimes recounted in his confessions, suggested serious mental illness. As a child, Ridgway said, he was never sexually molested or physically abused, and he denied contemplating suicide. When a forensic psychiatrist asked Ridgway if he thought he had a mental illness, Ridgway replied that he used to have a problem with “killing women.”

Asked why he thought that this was an illness, Ridgway responded “I don’t, I don’t know if it was an illness, or just uh, I just wanted to kill.” Asked if there was any additional evidence of mental illness, Ridgway cited his propensity to have sex with the women after they were dead. Asked if there was any evidence of mental illness apart from homicide and necrophilia, Ridgway replied: “No, I don’t think so.”

Ridgway told interviewers, including a psychologist, that he never gave a thought to how the victims felt while he was killing them. Asked by a forensic psychologist if he thought there was something missing in him that was present in other people, Ridgway replied: “Caring.” This is a generally typical response by a sociopathic killer at the extreme end of the continuum of narcissistic behavior. His victims exist for him. Their dump sites are his private territory. His ownership extends over all of it and all of it exists to satisfy him. Also, whatever crimes he committed, as interviewers gleaned from talking to Ted Bundy, were crimes that glorified the killer. In Ridgway’s case, his admissions frequently seemed motivated by a pride in his criminal accomplishments.

Ridgway told a forensic psychiatrist that he did not want to die, but that he thought he should be executed “for killing that many women.” He expressed pride in being able to hide bodies that the task force never found and he was pleased that the detectives had to use ropes and ladders to recover the bodies he placed at Mountain View Cemetery. He felt that no investigator had caught him. Rather, he believed that he was a person police had talked about as far back as 1983, but that he was now the victim of new technology. He said, “What got me caught was technology got me caught.” Inasmuch as the police had to wait until the PCR DNA analysis procedure was invented so as to utilize what DNA they had from the victims to see if they could get a match, Ridgway may not be far off in his assessment.

The prosecutor wrote that Ridgway once described his homicidal behavior as his “career.” He said that he was “good in one thing, and that’s killing prostitutes.” His urge to kill, however, extended beyond just prostitutes. Ridgway acknowledged that he had to struggle with the temptation to kill his current wife and other family members. Ridgway reported that he rejected these thoughts because he recognized that he was likely to be caught if he did so, an awareness of the nature of homicide, which, under any legal statute, would probably exclude an insanity defense.

Ridgway adamantly insisted that he was not a rapist, claiming a near aversion to a sexual compulsion. He said, in a perversely logical disclaimer,

I go with the, uh, a person that volunteers to have sex to, and then kill ’em. Where if I went and raped somebody and killed ’em, uh, that is uh, not what I would do … would be low on my uh, category of, of people. I am not a rapist, no. No, I’m not a rapist. I’m … I’m not a rapist I’m a … I’m a murderer I’m not a rapist.

Strictly following his logic, he was correct in his self-description. Ridgway was a serial murderer who used the easiest method of getting a victim under his control: he bought them. This is one of the reasons why Bundy looked down upon the Riverman, even though the presence of another serial killer in Bundy’s territory was driving him into a frenzy. Bundy used what he would call his “charm” and “broken-wing act” to lull his victim into a false sense of security before he clubbed them with a tire iron. But he predicted that the Riverman—and Ridgway proved him to be correct—would make himself seem as nonthreatening as possible so as to convince his intended victim that he only wanted to buy sex for a few hours. Both of them used a ruse and both of them were murderers first, looking down with revulsion upon any hint that they were rapists, even though both were necrophiles and sexual offenders.

Periodically during the interviews, Ridgway would use the word “remorse.” It appeared to investigators and prosecutors that Ridgway really meant something more like “regret.” On one occasion, when Ridgway appeared to cry for his victims, a forensic psychologist challenged him.

DOCTOR:  I mean if you killed these women before 1990 why are you crying about it now rather than …

GR:  Well, because of how I screwed up. How I screwed up on killing them. Maybe leaving too much … mostly on …

DOCTOR:  Did you say leaving too much?

GR:  Too much …

DOCTOR:  … evidence.

GR:  Evidence at the time.

Another time, Ridgway said that he felt “a little bit of remorse” after killing a woman while his son was nearby in his truck.

GR:  Killing her with Matthew by was not the right thing to do.

DOCTOR:  Why was that wrong?

GR:  Because Matthew mighta saw somethin’.

DOCTOR:  Why would that be a problem?

GR:  Well he’d have that … have that memory for his life.

DOCTOR:  Maybe he would be a witness against you.

GR:  And maybe he would be a witness against me too.

DOCTOR:  If you had … if he had observed you kill one of the women, would you have killed him?

GR:  No, probably not, I don’t know.

DOCTOR:  Possibly, though?

GR:  It’s possible.

DOCTOR:  Did you think about that at the time?

GR:  Yeah.

Occasional expressions of what appeared to be empathy for a victim usually transformed into something else when Ridgway was encouraged to elaborate. Ridgway told a forensic psychologist that he once departed from his usual method of killing his victims from behind, and faced a 16-year-old girl while he strangled her. He said that looking at her face while killing her was “painful to see.”

GR:  The … the way she was lookin’ at me and … and beggin’ for her life.

DOCTOR:  Yeah.

GR:  And that taught me a lesson not ever to choke ’em …

DOCTOR:  I bet it did.

GR:  … with my hands ’cause the 16-year-old or 17-year … it would be … I didn’t want them to … I didn’t want that part to
be memorized in my mind, I wanted the … the back of the head ’cause I couldn’t see their face.

DOCTOR:  So she’s looking at you look at her.

GR:  She’s looking at me and … and … tryin’ to get me to stop, “Please, please don’t.” But I still kept on chokin’ her, I couldn’t let go. She was … she’d turn me in and I wouldn’t be able to kill anymore. And that meant a lot to me … to kill.

What does this admission say about the type of killer Ridgway was? Was he driven by a sexual compulsion? Probably not. It’s more the force of anger, an anger that’s exciting him to the kill because he claims here that he cannot look into the eyes of his victim. Her accusatory stare threatens to dissipate his anger. Her immediate awareness that she is staring into the eyes of her killer freezes him and, if only for a moment, interferes with Ridway’s desire to kill.

He wants to kill, not to have sex. Sex is a means to entice his victims into his control. Sex is what he exacts from his victims as a form of punishment for being prostitutes. And after he has sex, he wants to plug up his victim’s vagina, just like he wanted to sew up his mother’s vagina, so his victim can never be penetrated again, not even by her killer.

Ridgway also suggested that some of the responsibility for the murders should be attributed to his second wife, from whom he separated shortly before the first of the Green River victims was murdered. Frequently during the interviews, Ridgway attempted to blame his second wife for his current situation. According to Ridgway, if he had only killed his second wife when he had the chance, things might have turned out better for the community too. He said, “If I would have killed her then it’s possible that it might have changed my life. I’d only have one instead of 50 plus.”

Ridgway said he considered killing her. A divorce would be costly and, because he had already been divorced once, he “didn’t want another one that’s … label myself as, you know, a loser.” Another problem Ridgway said, was that he would be an obvious suspect in her death because his wife’s father knew that Ridgway had assaulted her in the past.

I couldn’t even you know set the house [on] fire with her. I couldn’t arrange any kind of accident or something like
that. Because it had been obvious. Her sister or mother, dad knows I choked her.

Ridgway expressed similar sentiments about the woman he was dating after his second divorce, referring to her as his “girlfriend” during 1982 to 1984, when he killed dozens of women. Ridgway speculated that there might have been “a hell of a lot less people dying if I had a, a nice woman to go home, go home to.” This is a stunning admission in light of Ted Bundy’s prediction that a significant hiatus in the killing series might have resulted from the killer’s getting into some extended relationship. But it wasn’t the sexual component of a relationship that Bundy meant, it was the assuaging of the killer’s anger that kept him from going out onto Pacific Highway South to find his victims. A “nice” woman, in Ridgway’s terms, meant a woman under his control who, in turn, controlled his anger. A nice woman was someone other than his mother, someone whose sexual presence was not such a threat to Ridgway that he would have to kill and close her up just to remove that threat from his psyche. Bundy, talking more about himself than the Green River Killer, probably revealed more about his own motivations in making his predictions about a killer he had never met but who, in his own mind, was a projection of himself.

Psychologist Richard Walter has said that serial killers are pathologically selfish. They represent the absolute extension of self, of narcissism. Everything is an extension of them and a reflection of them. Accordingly, it makes perfect sense that Ridgway had little regard for his wife and his girlfriend, and no empathy at all for the women he killed. Moreover, he seemed to find this perfectly normal. In the midst of an interview about stealing money from the victims after killing them, Ridgway said

I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing, killing prosti tutes, here you guys can’t control them, but I can. You can’t hurt anybody. You can’t, you can arrest them and put cuffs on them, might be a little bit rough on them a little bit. But you can’t, uh, you can’t stop the problem. I was doing, uh, like I said, doing you a favor that you couldn’t, you guys couldn’t do. You couldn’t, uh, I mean if it’s illegal aliens, you can take ’em to the border and fly ’em back outta there. But if it’s a
prostitute, you’d arrest ’em, they were back on the street as soon as they get bail and change their, uh, name, and you guys, you guys had the problem. I had, I had the answer.

The prosecutor’s report suggested that Ridgway did not judge himself too harshly.

DETECTIVE:  You’re obviously a serial killer, obviously you’ve killed many, many people.

GR:  Un-huh [yes].

DETECTIVE:  And now we have the scale say one to five, and five being the worst possible evil person that could have done this kind of thing.

GR:  Un-huh [yes].

DETECTIVE:  Where do you wanna fall on the scale?

GR:  I’d say a three.

DETECTIVE:  Three?

GR:  Un-huh [yes]. For one thing is, ah, I killed ’em, I didn’t tor ture ’em. They went fast.

Even when Ridgway claimed to feel remorse, his expressions of this sentiment were patently false. He said, “I’m sorry for doing it but, um, it just, I wasn’t killin’ a person, I was killin’ a … a … ah, I don’t know how I … how I’m gonna say it but, ah, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

This is a man devoid of human sentiment. He preyed upon a community’s most vulnerable members, and still attributes their deaths to fate. As confounding as this seems, from the perspective of a Ted Bundy, as he explained it to me, it makes perfect sense because, in Bundy’s own words, “Some murders are okay.”

Why did Ridgway kill? He suffered from no mental illness that would absolve him of responsibility for these crimes. He murdered his victims deliberately, methodically, and systematically. He was uninhibited by any moral concerns. In five months of interviews with investigators and forensic psychologists, he displayed no empathy for his victims and expressed no genuine remorse. He killed because he wanted to. He killed because he could.

He killed to satisfy evil and unfathomable desires.

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Gary Ridgway and His Victims