The Devil We Now Know

There was something ritualistic, almost sacred, in the guilty pleas last week of Gary Leon Ridgway, the man that much of America now knows as the Green River Killer. Behind tight security, in the gray brick mausoleum that is the King County Courthouse in Seattle, a venue so densely packed with the relatives of the dead that there was no room for the general public, Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird intoned, and the penitent Ridgway responded. "You say, 'I picked her up, planning to kill her,'" Baird read solemnly from Ridgway's statement of admissions. "'After killing her, I left her body . . . '" And here Baird would fill in the legally required detail of just where Ridgway said he had left each victim, the place where, as the years passed, most became skeletons, then dust. "Is that your statement?" Baird would ask, again and again. "Yes it is," Ridgway would reply, again and again. "Is it true?" Baird would ask. "Yes it is," Ridgway would respond. It was a sort of catechism. As the roll of the dead was read by Bairdfrom Wendy Lee Coffield in 1982 to Patricia Yellowrobe 16 years later in 1998, almost exactly the length of Coffield's short lifetimethe courtroom of Judge Richard Jones took on the mien of a holy place, somehow venerating the victims and serving as the altar for exorcism of unfathomable evil from our midst, an evil that had once seemed to be the work of the devil himself.

But it was only Gary Ridgway of Auburn, a nondescript 54-year-old painter at the Kenworth truck factory in Renton, a man so plebeian in his tastes and demeanor through the years that no one would have believed that he had murdered at least 48 women, most of them less-experienced prostitutes or runaway teens, many of them in his own house, in his own bed.

The ceremony of the pleas went so smoothly that one might think the participants rehearsed their parts beforehand, as for a wedding or a church confirmation. Once the 48 guilty pleas were entered, the harder work of justifying the deal began. And in this, all sides likewise were prepared.

In agreeing to drop the death penalty in return for Ridgway's promise to cooperate with the police in their investigation of the horrific Green River murders, King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng made the best of two bad choices. Without the deal, Maleng's office would almost certainly have been able to obtain Ridgway's conviction on seven charged counts of aggravated murder, and likely the death penalty as well. But against that likelihood, Maleng's office had to consider that many of the most important questions posed by the nation's longest string of unsolved serial killings might never be answeredamong them, the whereabouts of the remains of seven presumed victims, as well as the rather crucial question of whether Ridgway was indeed the killer, or whether there was someone else still out there. In the end, after almost a month's deliberation, Maleng chose truth over the uncertainty of Ridgway's state-sanctioned demise.

"The question leaped out to me just as it does to you," Maleng said in a press conference following the pleas. "How could you set aside the death penalty in a case like this? Here we have a man presumed to be a most prolific serial killer, a man who preyed on vulnerable young women. I thought, as many of you might, if any case screams out for consideration of the death penalty, this was it."

Maleng went on to note that, almost from the day of Ridgway's arrest in late fall 2001, he had said his office would not "plea bargain the death penalty." To many, that meant the way it sounded: There would be no deals for Gary Ridgway, who, as far as anyone now knows, is the worst serial murderer in American history. Maleng considered the choiceslife or death for Ridgway, and truth or obscurity for the victims, their families, and the communityand came to believe his office had a higher duty. "This case squarely presented another principle that is the foundation of our justice system: to seek and know the truth," Maleng said.

Among the family members who packed the courtroom: Nancy Gabbert, mother of Ridgway victim Sandra Gabbert. (Pool photo by Peter haley / Tacoma News Tribune)

"I saw," Maleng said, "that the justice we could achieve could bring home the remains of loved ones for burial. It could solve unsolvable cases the [Green River] Task Force had spent 20 years investigating. It could begin the healing for our entire community. The justice we could achieve was to uncover the truth.

"When I see the face of justice in this case, it is those young women I see," Maleng continued. "They deserve to have the truth of their fates known to the world." So, too, with families of the victims: "They deserve to know the truth about the fate of their loved ones. . . . Finally, the face of justice reflects our whole community. We have all suffered this terrible trauma known as the Green River murders. We deserve to know the truth."

So, in a way, the proceeding in which Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 counts of murder last week was a sanctification of the value of truth and its triumph over death.