09:40 AM PST on Thursday, November 6, 2003

Associated Press

SEATTLE — Green River Killer Gary Ridgway, who pleaded guilty Wednesday to 48 murders, disclosed an icy practicality in discussions with investigators and psychiatrists after signing a plea agreement in June.

“Like I said before, they don’t mean anything to me,” he said of his victims.

Ridgway’s comments on selecting his victims, putting them at ease, killing them and avoiding detection for nearly two decades are contained in King County prosecutors’ 133-page evidence summary.

He pleaded guilty to 42 of the 49 slayings on the official Green River victims list, as well as six others, but did not take responsibility for the remaining seven on the official list. Investigators say he remains a suspect in those cases.

“Because I have pride in ... what I do, I don’t want to take it from anybody else,” Ridgway said.

Gary Ridgway Gary Ridgway is questioned in a Seattle court about his plea agreement in the Green River killings.

When he trolled for new victims, some of the women asked if he was the killer. “No, I’m not. Uh, do I look like the Green River killer?” Ridgway would reply. “ ... They always thought it was a big tall guy.”

Ridgway is short, with glasses.

He portrayed himself as a family man to put potential victims at ease.

“So every time I opened up my wallet there would be a picture o’ my son ... and that would, uh, lower any big defenses,” he said. Ridgway’s son was born in 1975.

He often preferred to kill at home.

“They look around ... they’re getting more secure as you go,” he said. His victims would see his son’s room and think “ ‘Hey, this guy has a son, he’s not gonna hurt anybody.’”

He preferred to kill from behind, wrapping his arm around a victim’s neck to choke her “and not ... get in the way of her mouth. I got bit in the hand one time.”

Just once, he faced a victim as he throttled her, but she was “painful to see.”

The unidentified teen begged him to stop, but “I couldn’t let go ... she’d turn me in and I wouldn’t be able to kill anymore. And that meant a lot to me ... to kill.”

Choking, his method of choice, “was more personal and more rewarding than to shoot her,” the killer said. A knife “would have been messy.”

“Choking is what I did and I was pretty good at it,” he said.

For a time he had sex with the bodies. “And that’d last for two or three days ... till the flies came.”

Why? “Just wanted sex. And it was free.”

He stripped the victims and stole their jewelry, sometimes leaving it in the women’s restroom at Kenworth Truck Co., where he painted trucks.

“And my favorite thing was maybe if someone’s walking around with a piece of jewelry that they found in the bathroom.”

Sometimes he left multiple bodies at a site, “clusters so I won’t forget where ... they are.”

Until the bodies were discovered, they were “my property.” He moved some remains to Oregon because “I didn’t want any more to be found” and to throw investigators off the trail.

When he strained himself moving dead bodies, “I’d just blame it on work so State Industrial (worker’s compensation) would pay for it.”

He was careful, cutting a victim’s nails if she scratched him; getting new tires when his truck might have left tracks. When one victim left deep gouges in his forearms, he used battery acid to disguise the wounds.

He knew his steady job and marriages were good cover.

“I look like an ordinary person ... my appearance was different from what I really was.”

In 1984, he wrote a letter about the “Green River man” — with details about the killings and lies about the attacker — to a local newspaper. An FBI expert determined the letter was not written by the killer, a mistake Ridgway corrected this year.

He sometimes claimed his first victim was 16-year-old Wendy Coffield, whose body was the first discovered, in the Green River, in July 1982. Other times he claimed not to remember his first.

But he admitted stabbing a child when he was 16 or 17. He said the boy “cried and ran,” and he never knew what became of him.

A Green River Task Force detective found the boy, now an adult. The victim recalled the blood soaking his shirt and his attacker saying, “I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.” Then, the victim said, his assailant walked away “laughin’ real loud.”

The boy was hospitalized for weeks, a foot-long incision marking the repair to his liver.

While most of the Green River killings occurred in the 1980s, Ridgway pleaded guilty to two more recent deaths. He told his interviewers he “went off the wagon” in 1990. He called a 1998 murder an aberration after he was semiretired.

Still, he acknowledged seeking out prostitutes until his November 2001 arrest, the sight of them “like candy in a dish.”

Ridgway said if he’d killed his second wife “it’s possible ... I’d only have one instead of 50 plus.”

They divorced in 1981.

He decided against it, knowing her family would suspect him.

Ridgway married a third time in June 1988; he filed for legal separation in September 2002, nearly a year after his arrest.

On a scale of 1 to 5, with a 5 being “the worst possible evil person,” Ridgway ranked himself a 3. “For one thing ... I didn’t torture ‘em. They went fast.”

At one point, he appeared to weep for his victims. When challenged by a forensic psychiatrist, he said the tears were “because of how I screwed up ... in killing them. Maybe leaving too much ... evidence.”

“I’m sorry for doing it but ... I wasn’t killing a person, I was killing a ... they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He expressed “a little bit of remorse” for killing a woman while his son was in his truck.

The boy “mighta saw something,” he said. Then he’d have that memory, Ridgway said. “And maybe he’d be a witness against me too.”

Would he have killed the boy if he’d witnessed the killing?

“No, probably not, I don’t know. ... It’s possible.”