/ Green River Killer

Ridgway court documents reveal mind of killer

05:22 PM PST on Thursday, November 6, 2003

Associated Press

SEATTLE — The court documents compiled about Green River Killer Gary Ridgway portray a man proud of and highly successful in his avocation, who once described his decades of homicide as his “career.”

In page after page of a summary of evidence against Ridgway, King County prosecutors describe evil beyond their understanding: A man who worked to perfect his killing craft, who enjoyed seeking out his victims, strangling them during sex and then revisiting their bodies after he hid them. A man who noted that by killing prostitutes, he saved money on sex; who choked a woman to death as his 7-year-old son was nearby in his truck, then debated whether he should kill him, too.

KING/NWCN Gary Ridgway during court proceedings November 5, 2003.

“I’m sorry for doing it but ... I wasn’t killin’ a person, I was killin’ a ... they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ridgway is quoted in an excerpt from an interview.

The 54-year-old Ridgway doesn’t fit the stereotype of a serial killer, the summary says.

A married man with a child, he worked for more than 30 years as a truck painter for Kenworth Truck Co., where he won commendations for attendance. Even at his court hearing Wednesday, he presented himself as dispassionate, calm and businesslike as he firmly and clearly answered “guilty” 48 times to the murder counts against him.

“He was not a ‘loner,’ he controlled his anger, he had no significant (known) juvenile or violent criminal history,” the summary says.

“Even after his arrest in 2001, longtime co-workers, former girlfriends and family members expressed sympathy for him and doubted that he could be a killer.”

Multimedia

KING 5's Linda Byron reports Reading of Ridgway statement Ridgway enters guilty pleas King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng King County Sheriff Dave Reichert A defense attorney's perspective

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Court documents Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader

Prosecutor's summary of evidence The plea agreement Ridgway's statement Second amended information

But Ridgway “deliberately cultivated the innocuous aspects of his personality — his nonthreatening, unimpressive appearance, meek demeanor, and small stature. In this way he conned scores of victims who had survived years using street-smarts.”

His willingness to cooperate with Green River Task Force investigators was disarming, the summary says. He agreed to be interviewed without an attorney, passed a polygraph test, and when he allowed his home to be searched, nothing could be found.

“He expressed pride in being able to hide bodies that the Task Force never found. ... He felt that no investigator had caught him; rather, he was the victim” of new DNA analysis techniques that finally linked him to his victims.

“What got me caught was technology,” Ridgway is quoted as saying.

In cold narrative, the summary tells how Ridgway figured he saved money by killing prostitutes, young women unlikely to be missed, and then by having sex with their dead bodies. The thought of having killed so pleased him that he would often visit the places where he had dumped the bodies, enjoying his secret.

At one point, he talked his parents into buying a membership at a campground near where he had left victims, “because I could always go up and walk that road and, uh, knowing that there’s a woman there.”

Sometimes, he said, he’d take his wife and young son along on the stroll.

Psychologists and investigators noted that Ridgway resented his mother, fantasized about hurting her or other members of his family, and once stabbed a little boy when he was a teenager, seriously injuring the boy.

In an especially chilling exchange with a psychologist, Ridgway demonstrated a highly stylized concept of remorse as he told of killing a woman while his little boy waited in his truck.

Killing the woman with the boy nearby was “not the right thing to do,” Ridgway said, because the boy “mighta saw something.”

Not only would the boy have that memory, he might be a witness, too, Ridgway noted.

Doctor: “If you had ... if he had observed you kill one of the women, would you have killed him?”

Ridgway: “No, probably not, I don’t know.”

Doctor: “Possibly, though?”

Ridgway: “It’s possible.”

“Why did Ridgway kill?” the summary concludes. “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, 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 his evil and unfathomable desires.”