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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 35 |
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and his 20-year hunt for America's No. 1 serial killer  |
Reichert's book sheds light
on the 'Green River' case
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
oN Aug. 15, 1982, Sheriff's Officer Dave Reichert was summoned to supervise the recovery of two dead bodies spotted along a stretch of the Green River where it runs through the Seattle, Washington, suburb of Kent. He didn't know it at the time, but the investigation he began that day would occupy him for the next 20 years and become the primary focus of his professional life.
The bodies would turn out to be those of two missing Seattle area prostitutes. Both had been strangled and mutilated by the insertion of triangular-shaped stones into their vaginas. Reichert feared these distinctively "signed" murders meant a serial killer was on the loose in his domain--King County, Washington.
He was absolutely right. Those killings were among the first of a shrewd and elusive murderer named Gary Ridgway who would be nicknamed "The Green River Killer." Before his rampage was over, this man would kill at least 48 more young women and probably many others as well. He holds the unsavory record for mass murder in America, based on the 48 killings he ultimately would confess to committing.
"We know he was responsible for at least 50," says Reichert. "We hope to learn about all his murders eventually, but there's one question we don't think we'll ever answer: Why did he do it?"
Now 53, Reichert is the sheriff of King County and a renowned lawman who's currently running as a Republican for a seat in Congress. Everybody in his part of the country knows about Reichert's dogged hunt for The Green River Killer over more than 20 years. The fact that Ridgway finally was arrested, tried and convicted of the crimes under Reichert's watch is expected to give him a tremendous lift toward claiming a seat in Congress. Now he's also riding the crest of the publicity wave for "Chasing the Devil" (Little Brown, $24.95), the riveting book he authored (with the help of a ghost writer) about the tracking down of Gary Ridgway.
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readers an intensely personal inside view of the hunt for America's worst serial killer. |
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"It was a personal battle," Reichert says of his determined effort to solve the case. Yet he wants to make sure we don't forget it also was a personal quest for nearly all the hordes of detectives and police officers who worked so hard to close the Pacific Northwest's most protracted serial murder case.
Trim, fit and ruggedly handsome, Reichert turned up at Village Books in Bellingham, WA, last week to talk about the case and sign copies of his book. Despite heavy rains, a capacity crowd showed up to hear Reichert, a compelling speaker who loves to walk through the audience while telling his story, fielding questions along the way.
My questions for him concerned what he learned about handling these complex and frustrating serial killer cases from his long involvement with this one. During the course of his investigation, Reichert had been involved in every aspect of the case--from initial crime scene investigation, then running the special task force set up to catch the killer and finally as the top administrator of the whole effort.
He explained that a primary lesson learned was to set up a system to gather evidence and information from all possible jurisdictions, right from the start, and to coordinate the develop and study of the evidence.
There are a number of reasons why that lesson sank in. One involved the case of Marie Malvo, a prostitute who was picked up by a man driving a paint-speckled pickup truck. The girl's pimp, worried about her safety, followed the truck until he lost it in traffic. Marie never came back from that ride. Worried that police wouldn't take the word of a pimp, the man teamed up with Marie's parents to try and find her.
Because the pimp had seen the pickup truck and a glimpse of the white man who was driving it, he led a street by street search of the greater Seattle area with the Malvos. After scouring most of the city, they finally found the very pickup truck in a driveway in the suburb of Des Moines. They reported it to the local police, who expected little from a tip from a pimp. However, they did knock on the door to ask who owned the pickup. The pickup owner denied ever picking up Marie Malvo and that was all there was to it.
The pickup owner was Gary Ridgway. Had his name and the pimp's story been passed on to the Green River Task Force, Reichert believes they would have found Ridgway's name on a list of potential suspects they already had drawn up, based on arrest sheets for men charged with soliciting prostitutes in the very area where all the murdered girls were working as street hookers.
Reichert says the investigation was hampered by a number of things. First, there were no computers being used in Seattle law enforcement until very late in the history of the case.
"There were more than 10,000 items of evidence collected," says Reichert, "and from 10-15,000 potential suspects. We had to cross reference all this information by hand."
From 1982-87, when most of the murders were committed and the case was getting national attention, there was no use of DNA technology in criminal investigations, Reichert added. (DNA evidence found on a small number of the victims' bodies finally led to Ridgway's arrest.)
Reichert also complains bitterly in the book about the intrusive actions of media reporters. In some cases, TV crews raced police to crime scenes by monitoring police broadcasts. In others, critical newspaper stories discouraged witnesses from coming forward.
Reichert also says the investigation was hurt by allegations that the police really didn't care about the victims because they were criminals (prostitutes). He denies this, claiming most of those involved in the long hours of investigation were dedicated professionals. Reichert personally spoke with members of each victim's family before formal charges were filed against Ridgway, seeking their approval of plans to accept Ridgway's confession to 48 murders in return for guaranteeing him life in prison without parole.
"We all agreed that was the right thing to do," Reichert says of the final decision by lawmen to spare Ridgway's life. They believed the parents of girls whose bodies hadn't been found needed Ridgway to reveal the location of their remains in order to bring them peace. Only a few parents still insisted on the death penalty.
Reichert also says it was extremely discouraging for the news media to so often suggest the investigators were "inept" for not stopping the wave of murders earlier. Though Reichert's book makes a strong case for the determination of the detectives involved, he does underscore certain incidents that don't exactly have "competence" written all over them.
For example, Reichert was unhappy about the efforts of the FBI to take control of the investigation, though he welcomed some of the technical help federal agents were able to employ. He reminds us that the FBI agents assigned to the case had less experience with homicide than the local detectives had. He even had to explain standard terms like "rigor mortis" and "lividity" to the FBI agents.
Another reason why Ridgway was so hard to catch is that he was a quiet, undistinguished worker who was married and had children. He was careful not to leave fingerprints at the crime scenes and he strangled all his victims with ligatures (cords, ropes, etc.) rather than murder them violently, leaving lots of blood and gore on the murder scenes.
Reichert doesn't delve deeply into the mind of Ridgway for his motives and one gets the impression he's not keen on authors who let egomaniacal serial killers go on and on about their murders. Reichert not only spent hours personally interviewing Ridgway, but also went to Florida to interview serial killer Ted Bundy, seeking possible understanding of how a serial killer's mind works, before Bundy was executed. He came away from all those interviews convinced that both Bundy and Ridgway craved public attention and were anxious to have their place in the "record book" of mass murder.
No movie or TV program has been made about the Green River murders since the capture of Gary Ridgway, but Sheriff Reichert told me ABC is negotiating for the rights to film his book as a two-part miniseries.
Now that more than two decades have passed since he first became involved in the Green River case, Reichert admits his life has been profoundly affected by the "work" of this sociopathic murderer. Because the case was solved and Reichert deserves much of the credit, he undoubtedly realizes it has been a plus fos his career. Still, there are times when it seems as if he wished he'd never been through it all.
"I've been to all those crime scenes, often to help recover those bodies, seeing up close what happened to those girls," says Reichert. "Those are memories you don't ever forget."
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo
of Sheriff Reichert is courtesy of the official King County Sheriff's
Office website. The book cover reproduction is courtesy of Little,
Brown.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
In his youth, he was a police reporter and covered several serial
murder cases.
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