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The Man Who Hid in Plain Sight: How a Truck Painter Became a Monster · True Nightmare Stories

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The gauze sat in an evidence envelope for 14 years,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: collected in 1987, tested twice, maybe three times, inconclusive every times,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: inconclusive every time, and then, in 2000, and one, a
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: new testing method turned that single swab of dried saliva
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: into the most damning piece of evidence in Washington state history.
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: The man it identified had been painting trucks in Renton
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: the whole time, living in the same house, married to
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: his third wife, going to church on Sundays. 49 women
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: were dead, and the answer had been sitting in a
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: lab drawer. There is something in this case that I
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: have not been able to shake since I first went
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: through the files. Not the number, not even the method.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: It is the sheer amount of time the world had
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: to stop this and did not. Every entry point that
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: should have worked and didn't. That is what this story
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: is actually about. On July 15, 1982, a group of
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: children playing near the Green River in Kent, Washington, made
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: a discovery that would name a killer 20 years before
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: he was caught. A body. A 16-year-old girl, a sex worker,
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: pulled from the water near Fragger Road. She had been
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: dead for roughly one week. The river had taken most
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: of what investigators needed. Within days, a second body surfaced downstream,
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: then a third. By the end of that summer, a
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: King County Sheriff's Office had formed what they called the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: Green River Task Force, led jointly by Surgeons Frank Axtell
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: and Bob Lamolia at its peak. The task force was
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: recovering victims two to three times per week. The investigators were,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: by their own accounting, two to three years behind the
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: man they were chasing. The suspect pool, according to those
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: early briefings, was every male over 17 or 18 in
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: the entire world. The stretch of road that would define
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: this case runs south from Seattle toward the airport, Pacific
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Highway South, Sea-Tac Strip. In the early 1980s, it was
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: a corridor of motels with broken signage, fast food lots
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: lit by a single overhead lamp, and women standing at
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: the shoulder after dark, waiting for someone to slow down.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: It was the kind of place that existed just outside
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: the city's line of sight. Deliberately so. Gary Ridgway knew
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: every curve of it. He was born in 1949 in
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Salt Lake City, the middle son in a family neighbors
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: later described as unremarkable. His childhood was not. His mother,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: by multiple accounts, was controlling in ways that went far
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: beyond discipline. She washed his genitals until he was approximately
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: 13 years old. As an adult, Ridgway admitted to a
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: psychiatrist that he had developed lustful feelings toward her. He
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: was held back two grades in school. At 16, he
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: stabbed a six-year-old boy in the liver. The child survived.
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: Ridgway was never identified, never charged. He joined the Navy
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: in 1969 and spent those years as a regular patron
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: of prostitutes. He contracted a venereal disease. The anger that followed...
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: He would later describe in clinical terms, as if accounting
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: for a debt, two marriages came and went, a second
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: producing a son. By 1981, he was divorced again, newly
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: fervent in his religious practice, reading scripture aloud to anyone
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: who would listen. In 1982, he was arrested for soliciting
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: a prostitute, a formal charge processed and filed, then effectively forgotten.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: He worked as a truck painter at the Kenworth plant
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: in Renton. He drove a pickup. He had a routine.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: a reporter who later profiled him for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: Elaine Porterfield spent time reviewing what people said about him
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: and arrived at a single, quietly devastating description. She called
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: him largely unremarkable, almost uninteresting, maybe a little bit odd.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: That phrase is worth holding because unremarkable was not a
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: failure of perception. It was a feature. Ridgway had understood
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: something very early about how invisibility works. In 1985, he
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: met the woman who had become his third wife, She
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: managed their finances. She was methodical, organized steady. Years later,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: after everything came out, she said something that has stayed
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: with investigators and journalists alike. She believed she had saved
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: many lives because her presence slowed him down. She was
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: not wrong. She also had no idea what she had slowed.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: The women he targeted were not random in his mind,
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: though the terror he created was total. He worked the
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: SeaTac strip after his shift ended, driving slowly, offering money, selecting.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: He transported victims to isolated riverbanks or roadside curves, where
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: he could see oncoming headlights from a distance. Strangulation from behind,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: unconsciousness in approximately 10 seconds. Bodies left in clusters, near
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: water when possible, because moving water destroys trace evidence, because
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: decomposition does the rest. By the end of 1982, 11
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: women were confirmed dead. Most of the world did not
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: know their names, but somewhere in King County... A detective
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: named Deborah Estes was walking out of a motel on
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: September 20th, dropped off earlier that afternoon by another detective,
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: who had been investigating a completely different rapist. Dot, and
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: stepping toward the shoulder of Pacific Highway South, she was
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: a runaway. She was looking for a ride. She would
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: be dead within 90 minutes. Her body would not be
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: found for nearly six years, and when it was, it
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: surfaced almost exactly where she had been taken. The task
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: force kept working. The numbers kept climbing. and Gary Ridgway
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: kept painting trucks in the morning and driving south at night.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: By the end of 1982, investigators had recovered 11 bodies.
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: They had a task force, a name for the killer,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: and a river that kept giving them back what someone
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: else had thrown away. What they did not have was
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: a single viable suspect, Surgeons Frank Axtell and Bob Lamolia.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: The Joint Supervisors of the Green River Task Force were
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: working a case where the suspect pool was, by their
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: own admission, Every male over 17 or 18 years old
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: in the entire world. That is not an exaggeration pulled
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: from hindsight. That was the actual operational reality in the
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: fall of 1982. They had no physical evidence linking anyone.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: They had decomposed bodies that the river had already worked over.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: They had victims whose lives made them easy to dismiss
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and hard to trace. And then the numbers kept climbing.
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: By the end of 1983, 24 confirmed dead. By the
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: end of 1984-42, investigators were finding new victims two to
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: three times a week. The task force was perpetually running
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: two to three years behind the actual killing. Every time
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: they cataloged a death, he had already moved on, already
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: chosen someone else, already returned to the river or the
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: tree line to visit what he had left there. That
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: last part matters. He went back. Ridgway did not simply
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: dispose of bodies. He revisited them. He knew where each
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: cluster was. He had organized them into sites. The Green
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: River itself. Star Lake Road. Stretches of wooded roadside. One
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: location across the state line in Oregon. Others pushing north
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: toward British Columbia. He chose dumping spots along isolated curves,
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: where he could watch for oncoming headlights. The geography was deliberate.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: The return visits were deliberate. when investigators eventually mapped all
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: the sites, what emerged was not random violence. It was
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: a system. The rational explanation investigators kept reaching for was
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: that this was opportunistic. A predator working one strip, escalating,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: eventually making a mistake. Killers like this get caught because
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: they get sloppy, or because a witness steps forward. Neither happened.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: He was not getting sloppy. He was getting better. He
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: switched from manual strangulation which left bruising on his own
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: forearms to ligatures, precisely to reduce the evidence left on
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: his own body. That is not a killer unraveling. That
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: is adaptation. Marie was 18 years old, a sex worker,
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: picked up on the Sea-Tac strip in the spring of 1983.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: Her boyfriend watched her climb into a truck. He saw
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: the truck. He could describe it. When investigators eventually questioned
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: the truck's owner, they noted the conversation, filed it, and
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: did not pursue the lead. The name in that file
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: was Gary Ridgway. Marie's body would not be found for
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: 20 years. There is no clean way to hold that fact.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: A man was questioned. His name went into a file,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: and 23 more women died after that conversation happened. Then
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: there was Carol Ann. She was 21, a waitress, not
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: a sex worker. She knew Ridgway personally. She was killed
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: on May 3rd, 1983. and her body was found roughly
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: 20 miles east of the Sea-Tac strip near Maple Valley.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: The distance alone was strange. He had moved her far
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: from his usual pattern, but the staging is what pulled
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: investigators up short. A grocery bag over her head, two
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: gutted fish placed on her body, two gutted fish placed
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: on her body, an empty wine bottle resting on her torso,
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: ground-up sausage pressed into her hands. Investigators worked through every
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: possible interpretation of those objects, ritualistic staging, A message. A mockery.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: A signature. None of the frameworks resolved it cleanly. And
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: one detail from the investigation files, added later, made it worse.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Ridgway reportedly lay beside Carol Ann's body and wept. Whatever
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: that means. And investigators have never fully agreed on what
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: it means. It describes something more disturbing than a man
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: who felt nothing. It describes a man who felt something
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: and kept going anyway. April 8th, 1987. The Green River
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Task Force served a search warrant at Gary Ridgway's home
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: in Renton. He had come onto their radar repeatedly by
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: this point. The Marie lead from 1983, a 1982 soliciting
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: arrest on the Sea-Tac Strip, a formal charge on record,
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: a behavioral profile that kept circling back to a man
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: who was unremarkable in every external way, who worked a
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: steady job as a truck painter, who had recently found religion,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: who smiled easily when questioned, and never seemed to sweat.
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: They entered the house. They went straight for the carpet.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Ridgeway had redecorated the green carpet, the carpet that investigators
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: had reason to believe might carry fiber evidence connecting him
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: to the victims, had been removed and replaced. Whatever had
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: been underneath it was gone. The vacuum cleaner they seized
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: yielded nothing of use. The house was clean in a
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: way that felt less like tidiness and more like preparation.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: Ridgway's mother was there. She was loud and defensive, inserting
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: herself between her son and the investigators, arguing demanding. Ridgway
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: stood quietly behind her and let her run interference. Think
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: about what that scene looked like. A man standing in
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: the center of a police search of his own home, calm.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: while his mother shouted at the detectives, not nervous, not angry, patient.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Investigators left that day with almost nothing, almost. One of
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: them collected a saliva sample, a gauze pad pressed to
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: the inside of Ridgway's cheek, sealed, labeled, placed into evidence.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: The sample was submitted for DNA analysis. The technology available
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: in 1987 returned inconclusive results. They submitted it again, inconclusive,
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: a third attempt. Still inconclusive, the case stalled. The task force,
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: which had once been operating at near-emergency capacity, was scaled back.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: The killings appeared to have slowed, though the confirmed victim
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: count already stood at 46 by the spring of 1987.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: Ridgway met his third wife that same year, married her,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: settled into something that looked from the outside like a
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: quiet domestic life. She managed his finances. She said later
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: with apparent sincerity that she believed she had saved lives
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: by keeping him grounded. She did not know. That is
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: the documented fact. She did not know. The gauze sat
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: in evidence storage for 14 years. In 2001, Dr. Beverly
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: Heimick at the Washington State Crime Lab applied STR testing,
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: short tandem repeat DNA analysis, to the 1987 sample. The
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: technology had advanced enough. The match was conclusive. The saliva
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: on that gauze matched Gary Ridgway. On November 30th, 2001,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: police ran a sting operation targeting men soliciting undercover officers
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: on the Sea-Tac Strip. Ridgway drove up, made his approach,
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: and was arrested. He was 52 years old. He had
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: been killing since 1982. He had sat across from investigators.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: He had replaced his carpet. He had stood in his
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: own living room during a search warrant and let his
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: mother do the talking. The arrest was for solicitation. The
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: charge that stuck was DNA. The question that investigators, journalists,
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: and the families of 49 women have never been able
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: to answer cleanly is not who or how those are resolved.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: The question is how long and what exactly allowed it.
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: Ridgway was questioned in 1983 after a witness placed him
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: with Marie. He was not pursued. He had a soliciting
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: arrest on record from 1982 that should have kept him
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: in the active suspect pool. He was unremarkable enough that
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Elaine Porterfield, the Seattle Post intelligence reporter who spent years
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: covering the case, described him as largely unremarkable, almost uninteresting,
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: maybe a little bit odd, not dangerous, not memorable, odd.
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: That ordinariness was not a disguise he constructed. It was
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: simply what he was. There is a version of this
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: case where investigators find something in the carpet in 1987,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: where the vacuum cleaner yields a fiber where the DNA
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: technology of the time is sufficient to close the match.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: In that version, the case ends in 1987 with 46
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: confirmed victims. Becky, Bobby Joe Hayes' best friend, her body
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: found by accident in December of 2010, never becomes the
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: 49th name on the list. But technology does not run
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: on urgency. It runs on what it can do with
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: what exists. What the gauze represents is not a failure.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: It is the opposite of a failure. It is a
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: piece of evidence collected correctly, stored correctly, and submitted multiple
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: times by investigators who did not give up on it,
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: even when the results came back inconclusive. They kept the sample.
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: They kept resubmitting. And when the science finally caught up,
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: the evidence was still there. The rational framework around this
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: case keeps colliding with one immovable fact. He was there
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: the whole time. He lived in the same region. He
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: drove the same roads. He worked at the same Kenworth
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: plant in Renton. He attended church, he had a wife
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: who believed their marriage had made him safer, and 49
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: women were dead. Deborah Estes was dropped at her motel
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: by a detective, a detective actively investigating another rapist. On
• 14:48
  Speaker 1: September 20th, 1982, Ridgway picked her up that same afternoon.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: She was dead within 90 minutes. Her body was found
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: nearly six years later, close to where she was taken.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: The detective who drove her there did not know, could
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: not have known. The case had not yet produced a face,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: A truck. A name. That is the detail that does
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: not release. Not the monster hiding in plain sight. That
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: framing is too clean. Too cinematic. The harder truth is
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: that the systems designed to find him were working. The
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: task force existed. Investigators were in the field. A detective
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: was actively working a related case on the same strip,
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: on the same day, and drove one of Ridgway's future
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: victims to within reach of him. There is no version
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: of this story where everything makes sense. What remained, after
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: the arrest, after the plea, after the sentencing, was the accounting.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: 48 counts on November 5th, 2003. 48 consecutive life terms. Then,
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: seven years later, the 49th body, Becky, found by accident
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: in a Washington field. Taught a cat by accident, and
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: a Washington's added to a stack that already had no end.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Ridgway's final statement in court named what he had always
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: been after. He wanted to kill as many women he
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: thought were prostitutes as he possibly could, not rage, not
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: compulsion framed as illness. A goal stated plainly by a
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: man who had achieved it for nearly two decades before
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: a piece of gauze in a storage locker finally caught
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: up with him. On November 30, 2001, Gary Ridgway walked
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: into a sting operation and solicited an undercover police officer.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: The arrest itself was ordinary. What followed was not. Detectives
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: matched his DNA to the saliva-soaked gauze collected during the
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: 1987 search of his home, the same sample that had
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: been submitted two or three times before, and returned inconclusive
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: each time. The technology had finally caught up to what
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: the evidence already held. Fourteen years of waiting, and the
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: answer had been sitting in a lab envelope the entire time.
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: Police could formally charge him with only four murders at
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: the moment of arrest. Four out of 49, that number
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: was enough for the death penalty. And that gap between
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: four and 49 became the negotiating lever that changed everything.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: Ridgeway's attorney made the offer, waive death penalty, receive life
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: in prison, give the families their answers. The King County
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: prosecutors accepted. What investigators could not accomplish in two decades
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: of searching, a legal agreement accomplished in a conference room.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: On November 5th, 2003, Gary Ridgway stood before King County
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: Superior Court in Seattle and pleaded guilty to 48 counts
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: of aggravated murder. He was sentenced to 48 consecutive life
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: terms without the possibility of parole. Families who had waited
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: 20 years to know where their daughters were sat in
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: that courtroom and watched him speak. Some got closure, some
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: got a location, some got nothing more than a name
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: on a sentence. There is something that has stayed with
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: this story since the first time it was reported. The
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: third wife's statement. She said she believed she had saved
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: many lives by slowing him down. She managed his finances.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: She structured his time. She was, by every account, a
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: person who loved her husband, and she was right. In
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: the most unbearable way possible, the years she occupied likely
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: cost him opportunity that is not comfort. It is a
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: different kind of horror, the horror of proximity without knowledge
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: of closeness that was never protection. In December 2010, Nearly
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: seven years after the guilty plea, a 49th set of
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: remains was found in Washington by accident. Her name was Becky.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: She had been Bobby Joe Hayes' best friend. Bobby Joe
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: had been picked up in February of 1987. Her remains
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: were found in 1991 on Highway 410 in Auburn. Becky
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: had been missing the whole time. Found by accident, Ridgway
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: received one additional life sentence for her death. The final
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: count stood at 49. At sentencing, Gary Ridgway was given
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: the opportunity to speak. He said, I wanted to kill
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: Not rage, not a breakdown, a statement of intent delivered
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: in the past tense, as if describing a professional goal
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: he had largely achieved. The Green River Task Force had
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: formed in August of 1982, when bodies were surfacing two
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: to three times a week. Investigators described their caseload as
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: two to three years behind the killer at any given moment.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: 49 women, a saliva sample in a gauze pad. a
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: piece of carpet that had already been pulled up and
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: replaced before the detectives walked through the door. Ridgway had
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: stood in his own kitchen in 1987, calm, while his
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: mother yelled at the officers searching the house. He knew
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: what they would not find. What ended him was not
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: a break in the case. It was not a witness
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: coming forward. It was not an investigator who finally saw
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: the pattern. It was a biological sample and a laboratory
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: technique that did not exist when the sample was discovered. applied.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: Fourteen years later, by a forensic scientist named Dr. Beverly
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: Heimick at the Washington State Crime Lab, the case lives
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: on in one specific way. Among the 49, not every
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: family received an answer that felt like one. Some bodies
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: were found years after death, in conditions that made identification
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: difficult and certainty harder. Some families know where their daughter
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: is buried. Others know only that she was counted. A
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: journalist who covered the story at the time described Ridgeway
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: as largely unremarkable, almost uninteresting, maybe a little bit odd.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: That description has followed the case ever since, not because
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: it explains anything, but because it doesn't. 49 women, and
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: the man responsible was unremarkable. That word has no place
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: to land. It just stays there. Becky's remains were found
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: by accident in 2010. No search, no tip, no confession
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: that led anyone there by accident. She was the last
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: one found, and the circumstances of her discovery carry the
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: same weight as everything else in this case. The system
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: did not find her. Chance did. Gary Ridgway remains imprisoned.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: No parole, no release date. The 49 names exist in
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: the court record, in the task force files. and in
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: the memory of the people who waited years to hear
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: them spoken aloud in the courtroom. Most of those people
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: are still waiting for something that a guilty plea cannot provide.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: The kind of answer that has no legal category. The
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: kind that a sentence of 48 consecutive life terms does
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: not touch. The gauze is still in evidence storage. The
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: carpet was gone before anyone thought to look for it.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: This show is made by Oba Media.