Green River, Running Red Quotes
"Roads age and change the way people do, so subtly that nobody notices the first faint wrinkles and loss of rosy innocence."
"Often, the good things are just gone one day and few remember when they disappeared."
"Disasters often begin silently with an almost imperceptible shift in the way things are expected to be."
"By the time human beings find themselves in the path of destruction, it is all too often too late to save them."
"Except for the people who had known and loved her, and the Kent Police Department, Wendy Coffield’s murder didn’t make much of a blip on the awareness of people who lived in King County, Washington."
"AND THEN THE EARTH SHIFTED and more stones bounced quietly down a mountain of catastrophe."
"The first Green River suspect to merit headlines was Debra Bonner’s lover/pimp, Max Tackley."
"It was too early in a killing spree to look at the total number of murdered women throughout 1982 and see them as unknown and interchangeable entities who could very well be Green River victims."
"For the Green River Task Force, it was akin to playing a game with no rules."
"The arena of forensic science has expanded again and again since 1982, and as Dick Kraske’s task force began to pencil in a rough list of young female murder victims who might be connected, they suspected that they were dealing with a force of evil far greater than the general public realized."
"There is strength in facing the worst and not caring, because it couldn't hurt you if you've been hurt enough already."
"I never met a funnier girl—or one more in pain."
"She explained that it was because they were strong women doing creative work."
"We were a bunch of people with great potential but low self-esteem."
"She had always been attracted to people who were down on their luck."
"It hit a little close to home, and I knew what she was thinking. We were all dreamers."
"FRESH AIR, views of Elliott Bay, and even windows had never been perks for detectives in the King County Sheriff’s Office."
"Maps and charts and victims’ photographs were tacked on the walls. Stacks of paper piled up, waiting to be sorted. The phones rang constantly. It was a 'boiler room' in every sense of the term."
"Most of the missing women had last been seen in the south county area, not in the north end. 'Technically,' Holter said, 'we’re not calling this a murder—we don’t have enough to go on for that—but the results are the same. She is dead, and we don’t know why or how.'"
"For them, murder is addictive, and it takes more and more of the 'substance' to satisfy them, or to make them feel, as two infamous serial murderers have said, 'normal.'"
"He enjoyed hurting things, killing birds in the fruit trees in his backyard. But, then, so did his brothers. They shot at birds with their BB guns and laughed when they dropped to the ground."
"But his mother wanted things really clean and scrubbed away at his genitals after he wet the bed. Once aware that hands touching his penis felt good, he thought about sex quite a bit."
"Her mother came home from work early one day and caught him throwing a rocking chair at Keli. Her leg was already bruised from a beating with a wooden coat hanger."
"I didn’t think of this section of Pac HiWay as part of the Strip; the dangerous part was supposed to be several miles north, near the airport."
"Despite their best efforts, Curt could recall nothing beyond the odd, frozen look on Gail’s face the last time he saw her."
"The man who killed her had sat in his barber chair regularly for decades, chatting amiably and laughing at Don’s jokes."
"It got so bad that I couldn’t even take her shopping. My mom would take her, and when Tracy brought home her clothes, I had to pretend to dislike the things I did like."
"Tracy used to tell me, ‘You’re more concerned about what I wear than about who I am!’ And all I could do was shake my head and say, ‘You’re changing so fast, I don’t know who you are….’"
"Mom, I’m amazed that you have any friends at all."
"I love you more than you love Chip…or Kevin."
"I couldn’t let two young kids close up the place all by themselves."
"I’m okay, Mom. I’m okay now. Don’t worry about me. Everything’s okay."
"I talked to one of the jailers on that last weekend when Tracy was in there, and she told me, ‘She has no business being here; she’s like a frightened rabbit.’"
"The punishment for prostitution should not be death."
"All I could do was tell her that I was sorry, and that I knew that must have hurt her feelings, and that they shouldn’t have done that to her."
"He’s a con man. He’s slick and he’ll change her so you won’t even recognize her."
"No way is this guy gonna get in any river, get wet and dirty, and then show up in court."
"I thought to myself, ‘No way is this guy gonna get in any river, get wet and dirty, and then show up in court.’"
"He wasn’t sure what he might see, and he really didn’t think he was going to be lucky enough to find them doing something incriminating just as he drove by, but he felt compelled to check on them."
"But once the man—Ingmar Rasmussen*—took the girl into his house, he refused to take her back to the highway."
"Responding to their complaints, King County executive Randy Revelle called a meeting in the Tukwila City Hall."
"The Green River Killer had no reason to stop killing."
"Unless such murderers are arrested and incarcerated for other crimes or they become physically unable to stalk victims or they die, they keep going."
"Violence against women is an All-American sport."
"He had come up in the world in his jobs and in buying more and more expensive houses, but he kept striking out with women."
"He was enjoying the media coverage. He loved the attention, having been underrated all his life by most people, including his parents."
"Despite the fact that the letter writer had referred to heretofore unpublished information like 'One black in river had a stone in the vagina. Why?'"
"I didn’t want a divorce—I loved him—and I didn’t even know enough to get a lawyer."
"I learned about ‘Christmas trees’—dexadrine and blackberry flips."
"I got pregnant again," she remembered, shaking her head sadly. "I thought he’d be happy when I told him, but he said, ‘It’s not mine.’"
"I took Seconal and everything I could find that I’d bought over-the-counter, and I passed out, unconscious."
"But my best friend talked me out of it," she said. "And we raised her together. I’m so grateful that I didn’t let Libby* go—she means the world to me."
"For the first time in my life, I was in charge in my relationships."
"That’s where I met him—at Parents Without Partners."
"I can’t remember that he ever brought me gifts, but I think he bought me a couple of cards."
"I didn’t know what I could do," Mertie remembered, "but I agreed to call her."
"There was just too much cumulative pain among the families and they felt they couldn’t do their jobs if they allowed themselves to be caught in it."
"Most of these people are very, very human. The majority are normal in appearance and conversation, and certainly not insane or bizarre."
"I took some of Mary’s ashes home with me. And I liked having them there, but they made me sad, too."
"The psychics are afraid that if they tell anyone who the Green River Killer is, they’ll be killed before the police would take any action, so they’re not saying anything—and they never will."
"I pretended I was dead," Moira later told a female F.B.I. agent.
"All victims are believed to have suffered from either manual or ligature strangulation, the ligature being that of the killer or the clothing of the victim."
"Not only was the GRK still free, it appeared that there would be no end to the rising death toll."
"It would be poetic justice if the owner of the Lincoln turned out to be the killer. But he wasn’t."
"Some of the smartest detectives in the Northwest had worked on this thankless case for three and a half years."
"I myself believed that the 'fox'—actually 'the wolf'—would be penned up and punished."
"Forensic anthropologists could establish race and sex from bare skulls, and odontologists could match bite marks to attackers and teeth to dental charts."
"Every detective on the task force still had a favorite suspect—or two or three."
"He will not stop killing until he is caught."
"There was no physical evidence to prove that Gary Ridgway was anything more than a slightly creepy guy."
"The hardest part of being a detective on a task force like this is not becoming obsessed with finding the killer."
"The death toll caused by the Green River Killer extended far beyond his victim count."
"I’m married now," she explained, "and I don’t live the same kind of life at all. But then I did pick up men at bars and taverns, and I was drinking too much."
"I met this one guy at a tavern near Beaverton. It seemed to me that he was taller than average, and I do remember that he had one of those great big country-western-style belt buckles."
"Afterward, I started walking back to his truck and he suddenly reached out his arm and grabbed me by the elbow. I looked down and saw that I had almost fallen into what looked like an open grave."
"I turned the information over to the Green River Task Force, just one of more than the thousands of possibles it would document, but I kept her name out of it."
"Marisa’s recall of her meeting with a stranger was, however, precise. I don’t know her real name, but everything she told me about life in The Camp during the early to mideighties was validated by official police files."
"She broke her second rule, one shared by most working girls: never leave the downtown area."
"Suddenly, the stranger leapt from the bed, and grabbed a rifle from behind a door, aiming it at her."
"He continued to spray her with the Mace. 'I grabbed a pillow on the couch near the door to protect my face. I kept him thinking he was winning so he wouldn’t get even more forceful.'"
"She knew she had to get out because the Mace and her injuries were wearing her down."
"Marisa herself went to New Beginnings in 1985, got off the street, and changed her life completely."
"He was a night owl, though, and would often be barbecuing in the backyard at two or three AM."
"But no one ever thought of him as a threat; he was just different."
"He had to be placed in an isolation section in the King County Jail after he told a judge that he had two hundred pages of notes from his interviews with another prisoner who was a convicted murderer."
"He was unrecognizable as the man whose picture appeared on front pages from British Columbia to California, Washington, and Oregon to Idaho."
"I’ve never been afraid of snakes, so one of my oddest holiday rituals was to get my picture taken with Bill Haglund’s twenty-plus-foot boa constrictor."
"HAGLUND had gathered more than two hundred sets of dental charts, mostly from Seattle area women, but some included missing persons from Florida, Oklahoma, and Montana."
"But there was something else in the air, something almost undefinable. A ripple of rumors, barely distinguishable at first from other whispers that something big might be happening in the Green River case."
"Dave Reichert was almost fifty, and his hair, although still thick, was rapidly turning silver."
"He was medium height, medium build, totally average-looking, a man who scarcely resembled what they believed him to be—the most infamous and prolific serial killer ever known in America."
"Gary Ridgway didn’t care about them, but the task force detectives knew them as well as anyone they’d known in their lives, and they cared deeply about each victim."
"Day after day, they went back into the stuffy room to listen to Gary Ridgway spew out more venom and, almost worse, to hear him discuss his crimes with completely dispassionate recall of what he had done."
"The one I covered with a bag was special," Ridgway admitted."
"For the first time, Ridgway showed a bit of remorse. 'I laid her faceup, put the grocery bag over her head, and lay down with her,' he said. 'I cried because I killed her.'"
"He didn’t understand DNA but he knew they could figure out something that way, and it might help them catch him."
"Violent thoughts appeared to have been part of his thought processes for most of his life."
"Perhaps his smartest move in avoiding suspicion was that he talked to no one about what he had done."
"He even left a hair pick used to groom Afros, thinking the investigators would suspect a black pimp."
"Ridgway wasn’t crazy—his attorneys hadn’t even suggested a multiple personality defense—and he certainly wasn’t a genius."