Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was. He—or they—got away with it. Like Zodiac, wreaking havoc in the world, and walking.

    As Stephen Stanko researched killer after killer, one of his favorites—one he would return to, again and again, re-reading passages that he was already familiar with—was the prolific Gary Ridgway, aka “The Green River Killer.” He killed so many.
    There were different ways to rank the serial killers, but number of victims was the most scientific, and Ridgway was right up there. When he finally confessed, in 2001, he recalled murdering at least forty-eight women.
    The murders took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway killed both white and black women—when the assumption of the time was that heterosexual serial killers usually stuck to the opposite sex, but the same race. Not Ridgway. He was an equal-opportunity killer, choking his victims sometimes with his arm and sometimes using a ligature.
    He committed his crimes near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and earned his nickname by using the Green River as his initial dump site. The disposal ground, Stanko figured, was probably a matter of convenience rather than aesthetics—“down by the river” being a place where a fellow could have some privacy. Although he did spread his kills out over two decades, the great majority of them occurred in quick succession from 1982 to 1984.
    Unlike a lot of serial killers, Ridgway wasn’t very bright, with a two-digit IQ. Stanko certainly couldn’t identify with that. Stanko was a flippin’ genius.
    Ridgway committed his first violent act at sixteen and stabbed a six-year-old boy. Stanko read about Ridgway’s troubled mind. “I’d always wondered what it felt like to kill someone,” Ridgway said of his youth, and Stanko could feel him, man.
    Ridgway had served in Vietnam, aboard a navy patrol boat. Like Arthur Shawcross (“The Genesee River Killer”) in Rochester, New York, he graduated from harming children to murdering women down on their luck, prostitutes and runaways.
    He would use the same dump site repeatedly before moving; so when remains were found, bunches of remains were found. His dump sites were so secluded, however, that those remains were usually skeletal by the time they were discovered. The victims were left naked and sometimes posed in positions designed to degrade them further.
    Because of Ridgway’s venue, the Great Northwest, some of the detectives working his case had also been involved in the search for Ted Bundy. In fact, after Bundy was captured, detectives interviewed him in hopes he might be able to shed some light on the Green River case. Bundy gave it the old college try, but his expertise was unhelpful.
    During the long investigation, Ridgway was arrested twice, both times on prostitution-related charges. Following his first arrest, he was considered a suspect in the Green River killings, but he was crossed off the list after passing a polygraph examination with flying colors. Murderers with severe personality disorders, police had learned, sometimes could fool a lie detector because they lacked shame and guilt, and didn’t feel the normal stress when lying.
    In 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway; so, when DNA technology developed, these samples were used to match Ridgway with semen found on Green River victims. He was arrested in 2001 and, at first, charged with twenty killings. By the time he was convicted in court, twenty-eight more victims had been added to his kill list.

    Stephen Stanko was a straight guy, but his all-time favorite serial killer was gay: Jeffrey Dahmer. Maybe the gay aspect enhanced the grisliness of Dahmer’s tale for Stanko, but maybe not. Maybe it was just the fact that Dahmer was so completely sick in so many ways, he was number one, the ultimate nightmare.
    And he did it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—the most normal of cities.
    On the night of May 27, 1991, in Milwaukee, a naked fourteen-year-old Asian boy burst out through the front door of a house