The Green River case is the most unusual case,
I think, in the history of this country.
Explorer scouts have found the remains of another human body
buried on a wooded hillside near Seattle.
You're talking about 60, 70, possibly 80 victims.
We spent so much time recovering remains
that there wasn't that much time
to actually investigate the murders.
I can remember saying,
"If we can get some other forensic evidence,
we got him."
Advances in technology helped solve this case.
No doubt about it.
He was the most prolific serial killer
in the history of the United States.
It was like looking into the eyes of pure evil.
This is the most unusual case,
I think, in the history of this country.
Having been a police officer for 33 years,
being the lead detective on that,
that's the experience that I speak from.
This case took 20 years.
Not one, not five, not ten, not fifteen.
It took twenty.
Kent is south of Seattle,
about 30 miles or so.
And the Green River is just kind of a slow,
meandering river
that goes through the South Seattle Valley.
In 1982,
when I started this case,
it was a pretty peaceful, kinda out of the way place.
On August 15th, I got a phone call.
I was called to go to the Green River.
A rafter had seen what he first thought
were mannequins pushed up along the river bank.
We began to interview the rafter...
and told us that
he saw a white male,
who waves at him...
Then he quickly gets in a pickup truck
and drives off.
Then he said, as he got closer...
he recognized that these weren't mannequins.
They were... They were dead bodies.
I remember this victim.
One of her hands and arms were free...
And as the water gently flowed down the river,
her hand was waving in the current...
Sort of like, y'know, "Here I am...
Help."
Next I had to figure out,
how did the suspect get the bodies to that point?
Did he carry them?
Were they still alive when he
took them down to the river bank?
Were they already dead?
And then
I discovered another body.
She was a young African-American female
who was partially nude.
The next step in trying to solve a case like this
is through the autopsy.
There were two victims that contained bodily fluids
left behind by someone
who had a *** encounter with them.
Those samples today would be
immediately tested for DNA.
But back in 1982,
DNA was an unknown technology.
The samples collected were frozen,
and the best that we could hope for
was a blood type.
But the victims could be identified through
fingerprints and dental records.
The one on the bank was Opal Mills,
and the two in the river
Cynthia Hinds and Marcia Chapman.
I was one of the women that was
assigned to working in *** crimes.
When we identified Marcia Chapman
as being one of the women in the river...
that struck me hard,
because I had probably,
within the few months prior to her death,
met her,
and she had been a victim of an assault.
someone I had tried to help
ended up running across somebody that...
killed her.
So I had a personal connection with that particular case.
And so I was asked to join the team
that was gonna be looking at the initial victims
who were found on the Green River.
When I started this case
on that August 15th,
I was already working a case in January of 1982.
A 16-year-old girl, Leann Wilcox,
who had been working the street, who'd been killed.
And in July of 1982...
Wendy Caulfield was found in the Green River.
And then on August 12th,
Debbie Bonner had been discovered.
With the victims found in the Green River,
that was six dead bodies.
As we look into who the victims are...
the connection was prostitution.
Very often we're talking about
a 15 year old little girl, a 16 year old little girl
coming from dysfunctional homes.
There's domestic violence,
and they end up on the street,
working on what we called "the Strip" back then.
There was a lot of prostitution activity,
a lot of drug activity, and a lotta crime.
On a Friday night,
you could count hundreds of young women
standing on the street corner.
We also discovered the victims were all strangled.
The reality that hit us
was that all of these young girls
could've have been killed by the same person
and we need to have a task force.
So we had started out with about 20 or 25 detectives
because we were very certain
that we had a serial murderer on our hands.
Most serial murder cases
are stranger homicides.
There is no connection
that you can investigate in the victim's background
that's gonna bring you to the suspect.
They come together for the first time...
And that's usually the last time for the victim.
That makes it difficult
to solve a serial murder case.
When you know you're working a serial killer,
a lot of things start running through your mind.
The thought was
anything is possible with this guy.
We don't know if he's a resident here.
We don't know if he's a transient...
And it's always at the forefront of your mind
that the next day you could find another victim.
I think history has shown us that,
unless they're in jail, or in prison, or dead,
they don't stop.
Serial killers don't stop.
They have to keep doing it.
The news that we were
investigating a serial murder case
spread rather rapidly.
And sometimes that brings
certain people out of the woodwork
that want to be involved
in investigations like this.
I had already called the FBI Behavioural Science Center
and they said one of the things that a killer might do
is to call and say,
"I wanna help. I wanna be involved."
And what that does, of course,
is gives them the opportunity
to know what's going on if they get close enough.
County Sheriff's office.
A guy, Melvyn Foster,
called and offered his help,
and said,
"I think I may have known some of these victims."
Thanks for your call.
We discovered
he was a cab driver.
He was out and about in the areas
where the young women were engaged in their activities
and/or missing.
So that, y'know, certainly set up red flags for us.
So we brought him in.
He was one of those characters
that you couldn't ignore.
We interviewed him.
We discovered he had warrants out for his arrest.
We asked him to take a polygraph test.
The polygraph is a device
that's designed to measure your heart rate,
your blood pressure, your skin conductance,
and your respiration rate.
And it's based on the idea that by measuring those,
it can capture when a person's lying.
He said he knows some of the victims...
Then he says he doesn't know some of the victims...
Then he says he does know.
As his stories changed...
Melvyn Foster failed the polygraph test.
So we put him under surveillance.
We spent a lotta time on him.
We got a search warrant for his house...
and we found some
photographs of * women.
But we found no physical evidence
that connected him directly
to any of the bodies that we found.
And all we had was a failed polygraph.
This was not enough to make
any sort of a case and arrest him.
After not making any progress
with Melvyn Foster,
there was a decision made in late '82
that the task force would be cut back.
For the most part in 1983,
we weren't finding any more victims.
And I think, at that point,
it may have been just Reichert and I
who were left to follow up on this case.
You had victims' families who were angry,
they were disappointed in us,
they were critical of us,
they felt that we didn't care...
We're calling attention to the fact
these women are being killed,
and anything is better than nothing.
It hurt, for people to feel that way.
I mean, we were, from sun up to sun down,
weekends, driving around,
y'know, following leads, followin' tips.
We were committed to solving the case.
While victims' families
accused us of not caring.
I think that, with prostitutes on the street,
the other part of the community didn't really care.
Y'know, when I used to work late at night on this case,
I'd park and watch people
comin' and going to whatever in their busy lives.
Didn't see me...
But they also, sadly,
didn't see the young girls who were standing
right there on the street corner, right in front of 'em.
I left home when I was in high school
because of domestic violence...
And I think that
helped me understand
why these young kids would leave their homes.
And then...
other bodies started to be found.
In Seattle,
another grim discovery today
that could be connected to the string of Green River murders,
which have shaken that west coast city.
Late into 1983,
we had 13 victims.
This investigation ebbed and flowed.
In '84,
all of a sudden, it ramped up again.
In Seattle this morning,
police are hunting a mass murderer
believed to have killed as many as 21 prostitutes
in the last 22 months.
David Burrington reports.
Been called the Green River Killer
ever since the first bodies,
five of them, were pulled from this river.
Since then, seven more bodies have been discovered nearby,
all those of young prostitutes,
according to police.
And the number of missing increases steadily.
Two were added to the list this week.
Every month we were finding two or three more bodies.
We spent so much time recovering remains
that there wasn't that much time
to actually investigate the murders.
You can't be a robot in this job.
There's no way in the world
that you can't get emotionally involved
when you collect bodies day after day,
week after week.
The visions of those bodies stay.
They stay in your memory forever.
But about 1985,
we got a computer...
And the computer allowed us
to organize the evidence that we had gathered.
And a recurring thing that we found
was a greenish-colored pickup
that was seen in the area,
or possibly with the victim.
One of them was the woman identified as Kim Nelson.
We learned that Kim Nelson
and this other gal, Paige Miley,
were standing by the side of the road...
And Paige got picked up...
leaving Kim Nelson there by herself.
And then when Paige came back,
Kim was gone.
from a group of six photographs.
He was called Gary Ridgway.
We discovered that Ridgway
lived in the neighborhood just off the Strip.
He came across as this very meek,
mild-mannered person
who gave people the impression that he couldn't hurt a fly.
But he had a prior arrest
for patronizing a prostitute.
He worked at Kenworth Trucking
as a painter in Renton,
which was maybe 40 minutes from his home.
We found that there was
a definite spike in the number of cases
when there was a strike at Kenworth,
and Gary was off work for a lot of that time.
So he was available 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
As we looked at Ridgway,
he just got more and more interesting,
and we eventually got to a place where
we had probable cause to search his home.
In forensic science,
we're trying to place people at a scene,
or we're trying to place people together.
So we work off the Principle of Exchange.
And that means that when people
come into contact with each other,
there's very likely
some exchange of some fiber,
a hair, or body fluid.
And our job as forensic scientists
is to make sure we collect any of those fibers, or hairs,
or fluids that have been exchanged.
We're looking for anything that is
connecting any of the victims
together with Ridgway.
Any stray hairs,
any fibers on the carpet,
paint samples from his coveralls...
anything that could match
the clothing items that we found on our early victims
to build a case and arrest him.
In '87, '88, '89,
we kept finding bodies.
Police in Washington State
believe they've found the remains
of another victim of the so-called Green River Killer.
Seventeen year old Cindy Ann Smith
was last seen in March of 1984.
Police believe that Smith
is the killer's 37th known victim,
all of them women ranging from
16 to 36 years of age...
There were so many missing young girls now
who had been known to work on the street.
You're talking about 60, 70,
possibly 80 victims on a list.
The missing person count is going up,
and the number of victims had gone up...
And our main focus was Gary Ridgway.
he would stop and pick up a prostitute.
let's give Ridgway a polygraph test.
Although the polygraph is
very popular with law enforcement agencies,
it is not foolproof at all.
On the polygraph, if a person is very nervous,
they will look like a liar.
For people who are maybe comfortable lying,
the polygraph will not detect any anxiety,
as measured by changes in heart rate,
skin conductance, and blood pressure.
And they will look calm, and relaxed,
and truthful.
Well, Ridgway passed the polygraph test.
We're going, okay, uh...
One of the things that we did in '87
was ask him to chew on a gauze...
And that gauze collected saliva.
And that gauze was
put in a test tube and frozen.
If we were to take a swab from someone today,
we'd be able to determine,
without a doubt, their DNA.
But, in the '80s,
what you could learn from a saliva test
was the person's blood type.
That's all we could determine.
There was a lot of evidence
gathered from Gary Ridgway's house.
It took years for the crime lab
to thoroughly analyze all of it.
But in the end,
nothing matched up well enough
with anything that we had forensically
to give us what we needed
to put us over the top and charge him.
With the investigation not making any progress...
There was a decision finally made in the late '80s...
to begin to downsize the task force.
I took a sergeant's desk, I got promoted...
But the Green River case was not far away.
I was working in an area that was right on the Strip.
It never left my heart, it never left my mind...
So...
Yeah, that was a tough... 1990 was a tough time.
A lot of the women who get involved in prostitution
have had some sort of...
It could've been me.
And I say that because I was also abused
when I was a child growing up.
For me,
it gave me a special passion
to work on this case.
But around January 1989,
I moved on from the investigation.
It was pulling on my heart too much.
I just... Y'know, I just...
I just needed to go.
Time marched on,
and the voters of King County
decided to go back to an elected Sheriff.
That was in March of '97.
And I ran for election that year and won,
and I'm sworn in as the Sheriff.
I was thinking all this time,
after I left in 1990,
maybe the case could be reopened.
Well, now I'm the Sheriff,
so that's what I did.
In 1997, I reopened the case.
I said, "Look, I want all the evidence in this case
thoroughly reviewed."
We learned of two labs on the east coast
that were involved and engaged in
a new science called "DNA."
The job of a forensic scientist
is to provide support to investigators
that are trying to solve these very difficult crimes.
And that's why the evolution of DNA
has been so amazing.
We knew we had the saliva samples,
and we knew we had the spermatozoa samples.
And we sent them to one of the labs.
They took a look at them and tried a comparison.
But they couldn't come up with any definitive answers for us.
They said, "Look",
"the science is progressing.
"Wait a little longer,
"because your samples are
"so fragile and so minute
that we could destroy them if we did anything further."
In 2001,
the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab
came on board with the STR, PCR technologies
that can analyze really minimal samples.
It was really a breakthrough in forensic DNA analysis.
Before we started using PCR,
we had to have a stain that was relatively large.
PCR allows us to take small amounts of DNA
and copy regions of it,
over and over and over again,
until we have more copies of that particular area
of the DNA that we're interested in.
In early 2001,
I sent the samples to the lab
and I asked them to analyze the material.
We felt this could be
the last chance we got with this evidence.
We started with the girls found in the Green River.
On some of the autopsy evidence,
the swabs,
they were completely taken off of the sticks
and used in past technologies.
We had limited sperm
come off those sticks,
but enough to generate a male profile
from two of the victims.
We had the same male profile
from another victim in a separate crime scene...
But we didn't know who it was.
We had reference samples
collected from potential suspects in the past...
Those reference samples were run...
One of them matched that of the evidence
from the Green River victims.
I got a call from the State Crime lab.
They asked me to come down.
They had something they needed to tell me.
I was away for four or five days
and Tom waited until I came back...
All I knew is that
he wanted to sit down and talk to me.
So he had three sheets of paper...
And he flipped over the first sheet.
And Tom had drawn the charts out
so they were easy to understand.
And I explained to him that this is the DNA profile
that was found with Opal Mills.
Then he flipped over a second piece of paper.
"This is the DNA profile
that was lifted from Marcia Chapman."
And then I said,
"And then this is the DNA profile of the Green River killer."
And he said, "Look,
you'll notice that the DNA chart is the same."
I said, "Tom, are you trying to tell me that we...
we know who this guy is?"
And he goes, "Yeah."
And he pulls out an envelope...
It's Gary Ridgway.
A pretty emotional moment,
as you might guess, for all of us.
I remember that.
Man, what a sense of relief, almost to tears.
Y'know, it's like, finally...
Finally...
We know who it is, finally.
So we called the team together,
and we started to decide, okay, now what's our next...
What's our next move?
Gary Ridgway had been our prime suspect since 1987.
We just didn't have the evidence.
So we put him under surveillance.
And as we do that, we learn that, yes,
he's still contacting
young women, prostitutes on the street.
And at the same time,
we're working with the Prosecutor's Office
in building that case to arrest him.
When we finally arrested Ridgway in 2001...
it was like the world's weight
has been lifted from my shoulders.
They brought him to the Regional Justice Center
where the command post had been set up.
And then I looked at him, and I said,
"Gotcha, ***
Today at approximately 3 PM,
detectives from the King County Sheriff's Office
arrested a 52 year old man
for investigation of homicide.
The man arrested
is Gary Leon Ridgway.
Once he's taken to jail
and he's got attorneys,
they can start to build their defense...
Mr. Ridgway, his plea is "not guilty" to all charges.
And their defense was,
"We recognize, after talking to our client,
that he frequented prostitutes..."
"And if his DNA happened to be
"in the bodies of three of the victims,
that doesn't mean that he killed those victims."
"It means he was a customer some time before their death."
There's always a chance that
a defense like that presented could stand up in Court,
if that's all the evidence we had.
I can remember saying, "Look",
"if we can get three or four more victims
"with some other forensic evidence
tied to Gary Ridgway..."
"We've got him."
Some of the investigators
and the prosecutors working on the case
learned of this new process
that was being used by a microscopic analysis lab.
We were asked if we would
get involved in looking at the evidence
and sort of acting as general consultants in trace evidence.
For six months of pretty intensive work...
Picking through tiny particles,
preparing them for analysis, analyzing them...
we had no associations that we could draw.
However, as microscopists,
we couldn't help looking at
the fine dust in the victim's clothing.
So we vacuumed some of the clothing,
which was in pretty bad shape...
and then we started picking through the dust.
And that's often one of these eureka moments you have
when you're looking at trace evidence.
You find sort of the particle, or something odd.
And we started seeing these colored spheres of spray paint.
But why is it that half a dozen prostitutes
have spray paint on their clothing?
We had at this time the ability to do
high-quality infrared micro spectrophotometry.
It's a way of obtaining
a chemical signature of a compound.
We're able to identify this as Imron paint.
This is a very unusual paint,
based on its infrared spectrum,
which was being used at the Kenworth Truck factory,
while Ridgway was working there.
In the Green River murders,
one of the reasons we were brought in
is because Ridgway said, "I frequented prostitutes.
Of course my DNA is in a lot of prostitutes."
But now we have something completely independent of that...
Spray paint.
With this evidence,
in the Spring of 2003,
Gary Ridgway was charged with four new counts of murder,
making it seven at that point.
Within about a month,
we started hearing rumours that the defense was considering
the possibility of having Gary Ridgway confess...
in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.
Discussions began on Ridgway coming forward,
admitting guilt,
and telling us about 65 murders
and showing us where other bodies were.
I thought that was a good thing,
because there were many victims who were still missing.
And the families needed to have some resolution to that.
We took him to our task force headquarters
and discussions began about where the bodies were,
what he did to the bodies, why he killed them,
all those questions that everybody
wanted to have answered.
We used to take
what we called "road trips" with Ridgway,
showing us where other bodies were.
And we were focusing on the Mary West case.
In the '80s,
Mary West was found in Seward Park in Seattle,
just off of Rainier Avenue.
Take a right on Henderson.
He directed the driver
exactly down the right roads...
At this light, take a right.
There was no wrong turns anywhere.
The park is straight ahead.
We get into the park,
he goes right to a spot that I was at years earlier.
And he said...
Right in here's where I killed her.
After you killed her, then what did you do?
I drug her in further on a trail that was back there.
Y'know, to be there, years later,
and with him...
It's... It's a feeling you can't describe.
We're trying to take you back to that first one and figure out...
Every day, for hours on end,
he was interviewed by
a team of four detectives.
Why did you like killing people?
I just hated women,
and they're the vulnerable people to do it.
I mean, it's just so hard to describe.
Surreal.
It felt good to kill a woman.
It felt good to take their life, and...
It was like looking into the eyes of pure evil.
What got Gary Ridgway to the point
where he put his hands on somebody
and he took their life that day?
What was different that day?
That was the day of, uh,
creating a new me...
A new, uh...
a new killer.
He had an empty feeling.
No soul kind of a look to him.
We corroborated his statement with
his description of the sites...
Okay, right about in here...
I just drove in with my pickup and camper,
and parked it, brought her body over,
and put it a little bit over the hill.
Enough to the point
where we felt comfortable
that we could charge him with 48 murders.
And so he's scheduled to go to court,
face the judge,
and the judge asks him the question...
So this hearing, Mr. Ridgway,
is your last chance to say
that you did not commit these 48 counts of aggravated murder.
Do you understand that?
Mr. Ridgway,
the state has charged you with 48 counts of aggravated murder in the first degree.
How do you plead?
Guilty.
They freely would give their bodies
without thinking about how valuable they are.
And it was the most heart-wrenching,
the most challenging case
I'd ever worked on.
I was sitting in the front row
of a jam-packed courthouse.
I mean, it was really emotional,
because the families can get up and say their peace.
She was just an immature teenager
trying to find her way in life
before it was snuffed out by Gary Ridgway.
Some that had the courage to say "I forgive you..."
Mr. Ridgway...
my daughter,
she was 16
at the time you killed her.
You've made it difficult
to live up to...
what I believe...
And that is what God says to do,
and that's to forgive.
And he doesn't say to forgive just certain people.
He says to forgive all.
So you are forgiven, sir.
"I forgive you."
Forgive you for killing my daughter?
I mean, boy...
That's quite a faith to have.
I felt a sense of relief
when he was sentenced.
A sense of satisfaction that he was gonna be
held accountable for doing what he did.
The most important thing to remember, though,
is the families.
Because their loved one
was taken in such a tragic, violent way,
remembering that they will never, ever forget.
The pain will never go away.