The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (87 page)

In 1986, this roommate was shown a photographic lineup and picked a photo of Gary Ridgway as the person who “looked like,” she told her interviewers, the man who tried to pick her up the night that Smith disappeared from Pacific Highway South. Her identification was tentative; she said she thought the man had “longer hair and thinner lips.” In early 1987, she identified, but not positively, a photo of Ridgway’s pickup truck as the one driven by the man she saw on the night of Alma’s disappearance. Ridgway did not own a blue pickup truck at the time. However, his brother, who lived nearby, owned a 1969 one-half ton Dodge pickup that was painted turquoise. Gary’s girlfriend during this time confirmed that Ridgway would use his brother’s truck. In 2003, Ridgway admitted that he borrowed the truck and took at least one of his victims to Star Lake in that vehicle.

Another woman claimed that she knew one of Alma’s regular tricks and said that she dated him at his residence with Alma. She said the “trick” lived east of Pacific Highway South—Ridgway lived east of the highway at 216th Street. and Military Road at the
time—and drove a red pickup with a white canopy. Ridgway drove a maroon pickup with a white canopy. In 1986, this woman picked Ridgway’s photograph out of a “trick book” shown to her by a detective. She said the photo resembled Smith’s “regular trick.”

Smith’s remains—a scattered skeleton—were discovered on April 2, 1984, in the woods along Star Lake Road. The remains were approximately 50 yards off the road, 200 yards southwest of Gail Mathew’s dump site, and 200 yards northeast of the site where the remains of Sandra Gabbert were discovered.

In 2003, Ridgway told detectives that he remembered the night he killed Alma Smith and dumped her at Star Lake. He recalled these events, he said, because that was the night when he tried to kill two consecutive women. Ridgway said he picked up a woman one night near the bus stop at the corner of 188th Street and Pacific Highway South. This is the location of the Red Lion Inn, where Alma was last seen. He said he took the woman to his house, killed her, and dumped her at Star Lake. Ridgway said that killing Alma went smoothly. He recalled that she did not become incontinent when he strangled her, which meant that he did not have to put his bedding in the washing machine before leaving to dump the body. He said it only took him an hour or so to pick Alma up, take her to his house, kill her, dump the body, and return. He correctly recalled that he had already dumped, in his own words, “at least” one woman at the Star Lake site before he left Alma there. But he incorrectly believed that he had dumped Alma just uphill from Milligan. He had placed Delores Williams, the third victim, there.

Ridgway said that things went so smoothly that he decided to kill another woman that same night. According to Ridgway, as soon as he dumped Alma’s body, he returned to the same place where he had picked her up, and parked in the lot by the Red Lion Inn. He said he approached another woman and tried to date her. She refused, and, he told investigators, he was unable to find a second victim that night.

Were there times, like the night he killed Alma Smith, when Ridgway’s urge to kill overcame his customary caution? a psychiatrist asked him. Ridgway answered that he tried to kill two women on another occasion. He told his interviewer that he picked up a woman, killed her, dumped her body, and then returned to the same spot and tried to date another woman. This was a mistake because, he said, a witness at that spot had seen the first woman get into his truck.

Seventeen-year-old Delores Williams was the third victim that Ridgway dumped along Star Lake Road. Delores disappeared sometime between March 8 and March 17, 1983, within two weeks after Ridgway killed Alma Smith. The exact date of Delores’s murder is not known, but roommates with whom she was sharing an apartment on Pacific Highway South at the time of her disappearance recalled the night she went missing. Just like Alma Smith, the woman who preceded her to the Star Lake dump site, Delores vanished while working as a prostitute near the bus stop outside the Red Lion Inn at 188th Street and Highway 99. There were no witnesses. Ridgway was in King County, working the day shift at Kenworth, during the week or so in which Williams disappeared.

On March 31, 1984, Delores’s skeletal remains were discovered near the Star Lake Road. It appeared to investigators that Delores’s body—like many of the Green River victims at the Star Lake dump site and elsewhere—had been covered with branches and debris. No clothing was found with the body. A rock was found in the area of the pelvis.

In the fall 2003, Microtrace, a nationally renowned private forensic laboratory, reported that, even after multiple analyses, paint fragments recovered with Delores’s remains are indistinguishable from paint recovered with the remains of Cheryl Wims (disappeared May 1983, found at North Airport dump site) and Tina Thompson (disappeared July 1983, found at Highway 18).

Ridgway claimed he had no specific recollection of Delores Williams. He knew that her body was the second or third body he left at Star Lake. He “guessed” incorrectly that she was white. He knew that he had dumped her at Star Lake before he dumped “the lady by the log,” Sandra Gabbert.

On April 10, 1983, one month after Ridgway murdered Delores Williams and dumped her body at Star Lake, Gail Mathews disappeared. Like the women whose bodies preceded and followed hers
to the Star Lake dump site, Gail was working as a prostitute on Pacific Highway South. At 23, she was the oldest of the Star Lake victims. Gail’s boyfriend last saw her at approximately six
P.M.
on April 10, 1983, a Sunday when Ridgway was not at work.

When her boyfriend saw Gail, he was walking along Pacific Highway South, and she was sitting in the passenger seat of a pickup truck on that street. The truck, in the southbound lanes of the highway, was stopped at the traffic light at the intersection of Pacific Highway South and South 216th Street. The driver of the pickup was a man. Gail’s boyfriend watched as the light changed and the pickup truck turned left onto South 216th, heading east. He waved at Gail, trying to get her attention, but she did not appear to notice him. He never saw her again.

At the time, Ridgway lived one block south of South 216th, on Military Road. Military Road is east of Pacific Highway South, a little more than half a mile from the intersection where Gail was last seen in the pickup truck. South 216th Street is the most direct route to Ridgway’s house from that section of the highway.

Gail’s boyfriend said the driver of the pickup truck was a white man. He said the man had “blondish, curlyish hair.” This description, and the composite drawing he subsequently created, does not particularly resemble Ridgway. And Gail’s boyfriend variously described the color of the pickup truck in which he last saw her as pastel green, greenish, and blue. He said it had a canopy. While Ridgway did not own a blue pickup truck at the time, his brother, who lived nearby, owned a turquoise pickup.

In 2003, Ridgway told investigators that he used his brother’s truck to take at least one of his victims to Star Lake. Indeed, a color sample selected by Gail’s boyfriend in 1984 closely matches the color of Ridgway’s brother’s pickup truck at the time of Gail’s disappearance. After Gail disappeared, Ridgway painted his brother’s truck a different color.

Gail’s mostly skeletonized remains were discovered near Star Lake Road on September 19, 1983.

In 2003, Ridgway told detectives that he did not recognize Gail Mathews from a photograph. But he recalled a time when, contrary to his usual careful practice, he killed a prostitute even though a witness had seen him with her shortly before. He described picking a woman up on Pacific Highway South, taking her home, and killing
her. He remembered that, en route to his house, as he waited to turn left onto South 216th, a man standing on the street saw the woman in his truck and waved at her. Ridgway said the woman did not notice, but it appeared to him that the man knew her. Ridgway said he took the woman to his house, murdered her, and took the body somewhere in the pickup truck and dumped it. He said he could not recall where he dumped the body. However, when he later discussed the Star Lake site with the detectives, Ridgway said that one of the women he dumped there might have been the one who had been seen in his truck at Pacific Highway South and South 216th.

Seventeen-year-old Sandra Gabbert disappeared on Sunday, April 17, 1983, one week after Gail Mathews. Like Gail, Sandra was working as a prostitute along Pacific Highway South. Like Alma Smith and Delores Williams, who were killed and dumped at Star Lake before her, Sandra regularly worked at the bus stop outside the Red Lion Inn at 188th and Pacific Highway South. At the time of her death, Sandra and her boyfriend/pimp were living in a motel on the highway. That day, she returned to the motel room in the early evening and gave him $70 she had earned. She said she was going back out to catch two more dates at the covered bus stop nearby. He last saw her at the 7-Eleven at 142nd and Pacific Highway South—the same place, according to both Ridgway and a witness, Ridgway met Denise Bush before killing her. Sandra’s boyfriend never saw her again.

Sandra’s body was discovered on April 1, 1984, in the woods just 100 feet below Star Lake Road. The body was lying on a steep hillside, in a small depression between a large log and the uphill side of the slope, covered with brush and branches.

Joel Hardin, an expert tracker, analyzed the scene. After carefully examining the area around Sandra’s body, Hardin reported in 1984 that the body had been concealed by one man, who made repeated, calm, and organized trips from the body to a brush pile and back. According to Hardin, the man made no wasted movements, and showed no signs of panic.

A man who regularly jogged along Star Lake Road reported in 1984 that one morning in the spring of 1983 he ran past a pickup truck parked along the road just as a man stepped out from behind
the truck into his path. His description of that man was generic, but his description of the pickup truck is remarkably consistent with Ridgway’s brother’s truck.

As with virtually all his victims, Ridgway said he did not recognize Sandra Gabbert from a photograph. However, when Ridgway was taken to the Star Lake site in 2003, he remembered dumping a woman where Sandra’s remains were recovered. He recalled “rolling” the body down the hill and said that it came to rest against a large log. He said he camouflaged the body by covering it with brush—he called it “yard waste”—that someone had thrown down the slope. He said he made several trips from the brush pile to the body and back. He also said he did this during the daytime. All these facts are consistent with deductions Hardin made at the scene 20 years earlier.

Ridgway also correctly recalled that the woman he placed by the log was the “next to the last” woman he dumped at the Star Lake site. Moreover, he recalled that he placed her by the log before he killed Kimi-Kai Pitsor, whom he killed within a day of Sandra, and that during that same time he was also using the Mountainview Cemetery dumpsite.

Ridgway was asked if he recalled a jogger who might have encountered him returning to his truck along Star Lake Road. He said that there “might have been” such a man, but that it did not “faze” him because he had already dumped the body by that time.

The last known victim left near Star Lake Road, 15-year-old Carrie Rois, disappeared sometime between May 31 and June 15, 1983, although the circumstances of her disappearance are not known. She was the youngest of the Star Lake victims. Earlier that year, Carrie had been arrested for prostitution on Pacific Highway South, outside a motel at South 144th . According to a friend of hers, Carrie frequented the two-block area between South 144th and South 142nd on Pacific Highway South. This area includes the 7-Eleven where, according to both a witness and Ridgway, Ridgway met Denise Bush before he murdered her, and the sheltered bus stop where Sandra Gabbert was working when Ridgway killed her and dumped her at the Star Lake. Victims Tina Thompson, Martina Authorlee, Yvonne Antosh, and Kim Nelson were all staying in motels
at this location when they disappeared. While under surveillance in 1987, Ridgway was observed cruising for prostitutes at this location.

Carrie’s remains were found on March 10, 1985, in a relatively flat, swampy area approximately 50 yards downhill from Star Lake Road, and only about 25 yards downhill from Sandra Gabbert’s remains.

Two acquaintances of Carrie’s reported that she said she had an odd experience in the Spring of 1983 with a man who, she said, took her up to Snoqualmie Pass. Both of these individuals saw Carrie return from this trip in a pickup truck. One of these witnesses provided investigators with an extremely detailed description of the truck, which closely resembles the pickup truck owned at that time by Ridgway’s father, who lived in south King County.

As was almost inevitably the case, Ridgway failed to recognize Carrie from a photograph. He did, however, describe placing one of his Star Lake victims at the bottom of a hill below Sandra Gabbert’s remains. He did not recognize that scene in photographs, he said, because he placed her there at night.

Like Ted Bundy, Ridgway alternated between using several dump sites. After placing his first victim at Star Lake, he began another dump site, an area that would be called South Airport or “Tyee,” for a nearby golf course. This site would become the first discovered after the five women in the Green River, and with it, it became clear to law enforcement and to the community that a serial killer was operating in King County.

On October 27, 1983, on a stretch of land just south of the Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) International Airport, some citizens made a grisly discovery. Two people riding their bikes in the area of 25th South and South 192nd stumbled across a body buried in a shallow grave. Police responded and began processing the scene. It was decided, in light of the growing number of dead and missing prostitutes in the county, that an extensive search of the area was warranted. Using volunteer searchers and cadaver dogs, police began a methodical grid search of the vacant land surrounding the body. Two days into the search, one of those volunteers found another victim.