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Police morale was sinking. Not only were the cops unable to make an arrest, but the killer's taunts were getting to them. In mid-'85, they found part of the remains of Denise Bush on Bull Mountain, near King City in Washington County, Ore. Bush had been abducted in October 1982 from the strip in King County, Wash. Two Kings, two Washingtons. "That was really an in-your-face kind of thing," says Reichert. "It was like, 'Are you guys so stupid you can't make the connection?'"
A PERSON OF INTEREST
Ridgway came to police notice again in February 1984, when a prostitute, Dawn White, reported him after she became uneasy about the way he approached her for sex on the Pacific Highway. Ridgway was interviewed, given a polygraph and cleared. Later that year Rebecca Guay, another prostitute, came forward with a lurid tale of how Ridgway nearly strangled her back in 1982, after taking her into the woods and partly undressing her. Ridgway admitted being with Guay but said she had bitten him and denied choking her.
This was suspicious enough to persuade the cops to dig further into Ridgway's background. They found the records of his 1982 arrest for soliciting a police decoy and the 1983 incident near the school ballpark. From his two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend, they learned about his appetite for outdoor sex--and found he had arranged trysts, camped out or picked blackberries at as many as seven of the body dump sites.
His ex-wife Marcia said Ridgway had choked her in 1972--something Ridgway admitted to police. She also said she often saw him coming home late at night, his clothes wet and dirty. An ex-girlfriend told police that Ridgway came into a bar late on Christmas Eve in 1981 and told her he had just nearly killed a woman. Investigators worked out the details and found that on all the 27 dates and times that could be pinpointed for victims' disappearances, Ridgway was, in their words, "available as a suspect."
The evidence was all circumstantial, but it was enough for a local judge. In April 1987 the police got a search warrant and went through Ridgway's house looking for anything that would tie him to the murders. Under the warrant, they took hair cuttings and had Ridgway chew on a piece of gauze to take a sample of his saliva. Neither they nor their suspect realized how important that would be 14 years later.
Ridgway was now one of Reichert's "prime persons of interest" in the case. But Reichert knew he had nothing that would push the D.A. to prosecute, let alone convince a jury. And that year the task force was being wound down. Reichert was one of the last detectives to stay on the case, but in 1990 he was promoted to sergeant and assigned to other duties. It was one of the lowest points in his career; he felt he had let down the families of the victims. "You are their hope. They rely on you to find out what happened to their daughters," he says. The following year just a single detective, Tom Jensen, was put in charge of baby-sitting the case--responding to phone tips and keeping track of all the information collected. The "Green River Task Farce" was all but disbanded. And the murderer, whoever he was, remained free.
EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN