We Are the Cops (18 page)

I think these people are a creation of the Vietnam War. They seemed to be total psychopaths. He’s dead, but the guy that was involved in some of these other cases is still alive but we can’t prove anything because all of our information is what they call ‘hearsay’. So it was a really bizarre case. It’s still under investigation.

The murder of the real estate agent – the guy who got the whole thing started – we strongly suspect that it was a contract murder. We say that because it was the only murder that he didn’t tell his wife about. All the other ones had a justification – if you can justify killing somebody. He seemed to have that justification, at least in his own mind; guy was screwing my friend’s wife; this guy had screwed my other friend’s wife; this guy was calling and bugging my wife over a debt; another guy, he killed him so he couldn’t fire his friend – those are the ‘justifications’ for those murders. He was very loyal to his friends! But there doesn’t seem to be a connection to the real estate agent. So we strongly suspect it was a contract killing. That’s probably why he never told his wife about it, because he couldn’t be as proud of it or was more ashamed of it. She might think less of him.

We’ve got five murders we know he did or was involved in – and that’s just the ones we know about.

I know there’s nothing funny about death, but it is pretty funny. This thing happened in a really nice part of our area, which is hard to believe but there is one or two blocks in Harlem that are really nice – very rich people live in them – and there’s this one
building that is really nice.

Now, a majority of the time when you get somebody dead in an apartment, you just sit outside; you’re not going in there. Once everything is done, you’re waiting for them to come get the body, so you’ve got to stay on the door because you don’t want nobody else going in there or anything happening. So somebody – an officer – gets left with the body. So ninety-nine percent of the time you’re literally standing in a hallway; you don’t ever see the body because you don’t want to sit on anything in the apartment. But there was this really nice building and in this apartment somebody had chopped up a body – it was chopped up into piece and put in the bathtub. So it’s a big crime scene and this officer is left behind to wait for the guys to come and remove the body.

So, he’s in there – with the cable TV and nice furniture – sitting around watching TV and he thinks, ‘Oh, this is pretty cool, I like this.’ And then he thinks, ‘I wonder if they’ve got anything to drink? Maybe I’ll get a beer.’

So he opens the refrigerator and goes, ‘Oh fuck!’ He gets on the radio and says, ‘Yeah, erm… Are the detectives still around? Yeah, erm… could you come back?’

‘Why? What’s the matter?’

He goes, ‘Yeah, one of you guys forgot some of your equipment. You’ll need to come back.’

He didn’t want to say it over the radio but when he opened the refrigerator, there was a leg – from the knee down with the sock still on it. Two legs, in fact. Then he opened the freezer and there was the head with icicles sticking off it. It was almost surreal.

So obviously there was another body that was chopped up that nobody found. Well, originally the whole crime scene appeared to be in the bathroom, so why would you be looking in the freezer? The kitchen was perfectly clean. There was no reason to look for anything; nobody else was missing. So it turns out there were two bodies.

But the best thing about the crime scene pictures was seeing the socks – the leg from the knee down with the sock still on.

Last year, an officer calls me, ‘Commander, we’ve got a body in the river.’

That happens. People jump in the river, so okay, whatever. It’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m on my way into work.

So I get to work and I said, ‘So, what have you got?’

And they go, ‘Well, it’s not a body; it’s a torso.’

‘A torso? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I thought we told you.’

‘No. There’s no head?’

‘No.’

‘No arms? No legs?’

‘No, just a torso.’

So I say, ‘Let’s go take a look.’

But then he gets a phone call and he says, ‘Oh my God. There’s a second torso.’

I said, ‘Stop messing with me.’

‘No Commander, it’s a second torso. A female.’

So we go down to the river and the border patrol is out there
and they get the bodies. Then the news media shows up, and being a smart Commander, I said, ‘No, no, no. Stay away from the crime scene. Move over there. This is a crime scene. I know what I’m doing, you go over there.’

They bring these two bodies – these two torsos – ashore. Then some fisherman comes walking up. He says to the guys from the news crew, ‘What’s going on?’

They tell him, ‘They found two bodies over there.’

He says, ‘Oh my God. That’s terrible. So why are you over here?’

‘Well, the Commander told us to stay away from the crime scene.’

‘Oh, sorry, that really sucks.’

The guy goes fishing and he throws out his line and looks down and all the body parts are in the water. So we didn’t know it but I’d sent them to the crime scene. The water was clear that day – it’s usually murky – they look down, a suitcase had popped open and there was one of those battery-powered saws and he had cut off their heads, their hands and their legs and stuff and put them in the suitcase. I’d sent the news crew to the crime scene.

Then they call me and say, ‘Hey!’

I’m like, ‘What?’

‘Come over here.’

‘What?’

‘We think we found your crime scene.’

‘Why?’

‘Look!’

So it’s shit like that, you think, what else can go wrong? I’d followed the book but it still didn’t work out.

Anyway, they caught the guy who did it. He was a jilted boyfriend from years ago who had asked these women, ‘Hey, can I stay with you a little bit? I’m down on my luck.’ They said, ‘Yeah.’ I think it was around Christmas time or New Year’s. But then he didn’t want to move out so he killed them both.

The Green River murders; that was a case that started in ‘82. July of ‘82 was the first victim. The guy was killing prostitutes. The first five that were found, were found in the Green River. The Green River runs through the Kent valley in Washington State and eventually dumps into Puget Sound.

The first victim was actually in the city of Kent. The second one was outside the city of Kent, not too far away and the third, fourth and fifth were found all at the same time, again, outside the city of Kent.

The murders were originally investigated by David Reichert, who at the time was a detective but later became the sheriff of King County. He was the sheriff when we finally solved it. He worked on the case from ‘82 to ‘84 with only a little bit of help. Then in ‘84 he got a lot of help and they formed a taskforce, because by then there were fourteen known victims and probably another six or seven suspected victims – people who were missing – who were all prostitutes. So we started this taskforce in ‘84 and over the next year we probably found another twenty-five victims. By the end, the count was up to nearly fifty or something
like that.

The prostitutes – the victims – were picked up on either Pacific Highway South, which is Highway 99, or in Downtown Seattle. Some of them were on Aurora Avenue, which is an extension of Highway 99. Highway 99 runs through Seattle but north of town it’s called Aurora Avenue. Before they built freeways, it was the main road that ran north and south from Washington to California, so there were a lot of motels along it that catered to the travellers back in the day. But once they built the freeway, these motels ended up becoming sleazy. They weren’t frequented as much, they didn’t look after them but they were still there, so they were used a lot by prostitutes.

I think Gary Ridgway came to the attention of the taskforce two or three times over the years but never popped to the top until about ‘87. There was enough evidence at that time to get some search warrants so we searched his house. All we had to look for were some fibres and hopefully some evidence that might link him to one of the victims, but nothing ever came up. But at the time, they got a cheek swab from him or a gauze chew or whatever and then a couple of years later DNA started coming into its own, although it took a lot of sample in order to get anything. We had a couple of victims that had sperm observed in their vaginal fluids, that were collected after they were found but that was just the first five. After the first five victims, almost everything that we found was skeletal. There was only one other victim that was not skeletal and we did eventually get DNA out of her too. So we tried some DNA work in ‘88, ‘89 but it didn’t work out. Everything
was said to be too degraded – our samples had been sitting there, in the freezer, for seven years. So the samples went back in the freezer and stayed there. We were kind of waiting for the technology to get better. We didn’t know how much sample they had used up, so we didn’t know how much was left.

I think we started looking into it again in late 1999 or early 2000. There were lots of new techniques that had come into play in the development of DNA, particularly with some of the degraded stuff. So we submitted the gauze chew they had got from Gary Ridgway in ‘87 to the crime lab along with some blood from a couple of other suspects. And we submitted the vaginal fluids that we had tested previously and a couple of others where sperm wasn’t necessarily observed but we wanted to give it a try and see what we could come up with anyway. And then – I think it was September of 2001 – we got word that they had matched a sample from one of the river victims with Gary Ridgway. It was from one of the three victims that were found at the same place all at the same time. It was a pretty good match and at the same time we had a partial profile that also couldn’t be excluded. So with that, we started a new task force.

They processed another one of the victims – an intact body – and they got a full hit. A full hit! You know, smack-dab! So now we had him on two cases and a partial on the other one. So we linked him to two different scenes and we were getting ready to arrest him, as we now know that we’ve got the right guy.

If it had just been one hit, he could have said, ‘Yeah, I do prostitutes all the time, and I had sex with her but I can’t help it
if someone killed her later.’ But now we’ve got two hits with fresh samples from him. And then later on, one of the scientists that had been working on one of the cases – one from the river which was real weak – got a lab slide on which they had mounted a pubic hair. She took that, washed it and found one sperm on the hair. Then she processed that and she got a full hit. So now we’ve got three full hits – three positive matches on the guy.

We made the arrest and proceeded as if we were going to go to trial and it was a big production because he had quite a large defence team. And we had a pretty good size prosecution team with our task force. We had five lawyers – that’s five prosecutors working with us. We had a pretty good team. We moved the whole operation out to a building by King County airport. We were about fifteen months or thereabouts into it, preparing for trial. But we had also submitted some evidence to a microscope trace evidence guy who specialised in paint. You see, Ridgway was a truck painter – he worked for a company which makes these big trucks. He was in the paint shop and when you spray paint, the paint that hits the truck goes ‘splat’ and sticks, but the paint that doesn’t hit anything, as it travels through the air it gets hard and it forms itself into a really little ball, so it ends up basically being dust. So Gary Ridgway was, on a daily basis, carrying these dust balls around with him, everywhere he went – little paintballs, paint spheres – and so everywhere he went and everything he touched ended up having these paint spheres on it. We ended up submitting all of our victims’ clothing and I think it was early 2003, we got word that this microscope expert had positively
identified the paint. The paint was unique; the truck paint was a particular brand of paint with a certain molecular structure. The expert positively identified the paint that he had recovered from some of the victims’ clothes, as being a positive match to the paint used by the company where Ridgway worked on these trucks. So with that, we then charged Ridgway with three more murders.

Before, we only had three DNA matches and another victim at one of the scenes who was just going along for the ride – because her body was there, he had to have done that one also. So we only had four charged cases, although we had some forty-odd victims, but we charged him with three more homicides based on this paint evidence. I think the defence thought they could attack the DNA evidence but now, with the paint, there was a totally separate physical evidence field – physical evidence that positively linked him to additional victims – and I think they felt that if he wanted to make a deal, now was the time. Somebody over there convinced him – or he decided – that it was in his best interest to plead guilty if they would forgo the death penalty.

It was a controversial thing because after he got charged with these murders, the prosecutor said, ‘I will not make a deal on the death penalty. There’ll be no plea bargaining with the death penalty.’

But as it turned out, although we had seven charges, he was willing to plead guilty and confess to forty-eight or forty-nine. It seemed like the trade-off was certainly worth it and it would save millions of dollars in trial costs. It wasn’t done for the money though; basically we got answers for forty-two more families than
we would have if we had just gone to trial.

We were going to interview him, so we had to try and figure out where to do it and we looked at all the options. It had to be a secret. He had to totally cooperate. If he didn’t totally cooperate, the deal was off and we’d go back to where we were. So the pressure was kind of on him but he was also a psychopath and a dumb shit. He had an IQ of something like 85. So the whole thing had to be done in total secrecy; the world couldn’t know we were doing it, in case the deal fell through and we had to go back to prosecuting him. It could taint the jury pool and then we would have a real tough time prosecuting him.