Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (5 page)

When fifty-four-year-old Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in November 2003 to the murder of forty-eight prostitutes in Washington State in the 1980s, and as the result of his plea was spared the death penalty, the media lamented that there was nothing new to learn about serial killers from Ridgway.
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Even though he now holds the record in the United States for killing the most victims—and perhaps for evading authorities the longest—Ridgway seems to have eluded the kind of frenzied press coverage that serial homicide cases frequently attract. Ridgway was so typical and his victims, as street prostitutes, held in such low esteem in society that even the remarkable number of deaths did not evoke more than mildly routine press coverage outside the Washington State area.

Indeed, Ridgway does represent everything typically known about serial killers. Born in 1949, he is the middle child of three sons who grew up in a working-class neighborhood south of Seattle. His mother was reportedly highly domineering over the sons and her husband. According to one of Ridgeway’s former wives, she once broke a dinner plate over the father’s head.
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As a child Ridgway was a slow learner, failed twice in school, committed acts of arson, suffocated a cat, and paid a little girl to allow him to molest her, and as a teenager he nearly stabbed to death a six-year-old boy for no apparent reason.

He was married three times. His first wife claims their marriage failed because his mother dominated him. She described him, however, as socially and sexually normal.

When arrested, Ridgway was steadily employed as a $21/hour truck painter at the same place he began working in after graduating high school thirty-two years earlier. His fellow workers remembered him as a gregarious and pleasant fellow worker and would socialize with him after work. Some of the women he supervised recalled that he was a patient instructor who never yelled at them.

He owned a $200,000 house, had a son, walked his dog, was friendly with his neighbors, went to church, held garage sales, sold Amway products, had friends, and read the Bible avidly, and for a while he proselytized door to door, calling on his neighbors to come closer to God. He also strangled at least forty-eight prostitutes, dumped them in wooded areas in what he called “clusters,” and would return routinely to have sex with their decomposing corpses.

His second wife remembers him as a loner obsessed with anal and oral sex. Both his second and third wives recalled he used to like having sex outdoors. Only after his arrest did they realize that those locations were at or near those where some of his victims were dumped.

He killed most of his victims in a two-year span between 1982 and 1984. He carefully deposited cigarette butts and chewing gum belonging to others at the crime scenes and body dumps to mislead police. (He did not smoke or chew gum.) He trimmed the victims’ fingernails in case there was evidence lodged under them. He dropped advertising leaflets around the body of one victim, hoping to mislead investigators, and transported the skeletal remains of two victims in the trunk of his car to another state while on a camping trip with his son. Ridgway confessed that he had placed a mound of sausage, trout, and a wine bottle on one victim’s body, creating a “Last Supper” scenario in order to deliberately confuse the police. In police terminology, Ridgway’s attempt to give a false meaning to the crime scenes is called
staging.

Ridgway became a suspect in 1984 when police caught him soliciting prostitutes; his co-workers often kidded about it behind his back, calling him “Green River Gary” and joking that the initials of his name were the same as in Green River. As soon as he became a suspect, Ridgway appeared to almost cease committing murders—he confessed to one in 1986, one in 1988, and another in 1998. Police suspect, however, that he may have committed another twenty murders in other jurisdictions. Only advances in DNA technology led to Ridgway’s arrest in 2001, nearly twenty years after most of the murders.

Ridgway explained to police that he chose to kill prostitutes because they would not be missed: “Prostitutes were the easiest. I went from having sex with them to just plain killing them . . . The young ones stood out more when they talked when they were dying.”

According to his plea-bargain statement, “I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away, and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

By now Ridgway is almost indistinguishable from other serial prostitute killers. Just like Richard Cottingham, Ridgway was steadily employed and had a wife, a house, and children (just like fifty-year-old Robert Yates, who had five children, a wife, a house, and a mortgage. Like Ridgway, Yates quoted biblical scriptures as he murdered thirteen women in the Spokane region.) Although many of them were in failed relationships, the failures were often no more extraordinary than the typical divorce. Cottingham, for example, had separated from his wife, but had a relationship with a girlfriend until the day he was arrested. She described him as entirely “normal” even though he did take her several times to the same Quality Inn in New Jersey where he murdered two of his victims and was arrested torturing his last. William Lester Suff (thirteen prostitute murders) and Arthur Shawcross (eleven victims) were in long-term relationships when they committed their murders.

Ridgway represents truly everything we know about serial killers today—everything and nothing at the same time—because the answer to the main question of
why
continues to elude us.

The Serial Killer Epidemic: The Statistics of Murder

How many serial homicides take place? Almost every month somewhere in the world a new case of serial homicide is reported by the police, and except for Antarctica, no continent has been spared. From Alaska to New Zealand, from South Africa to China, cases of serial murder appear to be on the increase—slowly in the Third World, and alarmingly rapidly in the industrialized nations. Anybody could be a potential victim of a serial killer—absolutely anybody: man, woman, child, old, rich, poor, obscure, or famous—nothing makes one immune from being a potential victim, as the murder of Gianni Versace demonstrated. And should anybody suggest the obvious, there is even a case of a serial killer being killed by another serial killer! (In August 1970, Dean Corll, who murdered at least twenty-seven male youths, was killed by Elmer Wayne Henley, one of his partners in the murders.)

As noted earlier, while not all serial killings are stranger-on-stranger, many are. Serial murder statistics are buried somewhere within the rising rate of “motiveless” and stranger murders, which have been on a breath-takingly dramatic rise since the 1970s. The FBI reported that motiveless crimes accounted for 8.5 percent of all homicides in 1976; 17.8 percent in 1981; and 22.5 percent in 1986.
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Serial murders were considered motiveless and fell into that category. (Today, serial murders, because of their sexual component, are often defined as felony-related.)

By 1995, when the aggregate numbers of homicides in the United States peaked, an extraordinary 55 percent of victims were slain by strangers
and persons unknown
—a total of 11,800 people!
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Before going further here, however, we should make one thing clear: “Strangers” means that the investigation determined definitively that the victim did not know the killer. This includes not only random victims of serial killers, but also, for example, store clerks shot dead by strangers in the course of a robbery. “Persons unknown” on the other hand, means precisely that—investigators simply did not know whether the victim knew the murderer; it does not necessarily mean that the perpetrator was a stranger—only that the relationship to the victim was not determined or not entered into a supplementary report upon which these statistics are based. There has been a tendency in the past, especially on the part of the media, to lump together “stranger” and “unknown” killings and issue alarmist reports that serial homicides by strangers are approaching 50 percent of all murders, without drawing attention to the ambiguity in the categories as explained here. Moreover, the FBI has done little to discourage that practice for its own political reasons, as we shall see further on.
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However, the fact remains that serial murder victim totals fall into those two categories—stranger and unknown—and the proportions of these categories among total murder statistics continue to rise.

Throughout most of the 1990s, the murder rate in the United States (as opposed to aggregate numbers of murders) has been dramatically declining, with a drop from 9.8 per 100,000 citizens in 1991 to a record low of 4.1 by 2000.
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But since 2001 the rate has begun to creep upward again, and this is without including the deaths on 9/11 incurred during the terrorist attacks that year. Moreover, the volume of homicides by persons unknown and strangers continued to climb steadily to a current rate of 57.7 percent of all murders in 2001.
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Of that number, strangers perpetrated 13.1 percent, while in the remaining 44.6 percent of homicides the relationship between victim and offender was simply unknown. There are no precise figures as to how many of those homicides were committed by serial killers. This does not bode well when accompanied by the fact that in 2001, only 62.4 percent of homicides were cleared, a percentage that has been continually declining since 1961, when 94 percent of the 8,599 U.S. murders that year were routinely solved.
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Today one’s chances of getting away with a “perfect murder” are steadily creeping toward fifty-fifty.

How many unidentified serial killers are currently out there? Serial killers stop murdering because they move to a different jurisdiction, are arrested for some other crime, die, are killed, commit suicide, or simply grow old, mature, and become bored with or burned out on their fantasy by the process described previously. Many such unresolved serial murders seem to mysteriously cease on their own, such as the infamous Zodiac Killer, who killed between six and thirty-seven victims in San Francisco between 1968 and 1969; the Southside Slayer, who killed twelve black women in Los Angeles beginning in 1984; and the Black Doodler, who killed fourteen gay men in San Francisco nearly two decades ago. The Green River killings appeared to mysteriously cease in 1984 and remained unsolved until 2001.

Serial killers sometimes do burn out, and depending on the personality of the individual they either allow themselves to be captured, commit suicide, or cease killing on their own and quietly fade away back to where they came from. Some are arrested for other crimes after they stop killing and end up suddenly confessing, like Albert DeSalvo (the Boston Strangler) or Danny Rolling (the Gainesville Ripper). Obviously there is no known fixed number of victims before a serial killer stops: Edmund Kemper killed ten women before he ended his career by killing his mother and then surrendered quietly to the police. Henry Lee Lucas, on the other hand,
began
by killing his mother and went on killing for decades before he murdered the only person he said he truly loved—his thirteen-year-old common-law wife—who, at least according to Lucas, was his 360th victim. (Lucas’s claim is highly contestable.)

Nothing, however, short of capture, will stop a serial killer if he is in his midcycle of murder. Arthur Shawcross first killed two children in upstate New York, was quickly arrested, and served fourteen years in prison before being released in 1987. He immediately began where he left off and killed eleven women in a twenty-one-month period in Rochester, New York, before being rearrested.

In New Jersey in 1958, Richard Biegenwald was arrested after committing his first murder and served seventeen years before being released in 1975. When he was rearrested in 1983, he had killed at least seven additional victims by then.

In Toronto, Canada, seventeen-year-old Peter Woodcock murdered two boys and a girl between September 1956 and January 1957. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined in a psychiatric facility. He was treated for thirty-five years and was eventually groomed for gradual release back into society. On July 13, 1991, the now fifty-two-year-old Woodcock was given his first three-hour pass allowing him to leave the grounds of the psychiatric facility to go for a walk in town and buy a pizza to bring back to the hospital. Before he could make it off the hospital grounds, Woodcock battered, hacked and stabbed to death, then sodomized a fellow inmate in a bushy area on the facility’s perimeter. Using his pass, he then walked two miles to a nearby police station and confessed to the crime.

Serial killing appears to be incurable: Time or prison does not relieve the need that serial killers feel for murder—only killing does.

It is impossible to get an accurate estimate of how many serial killers and victims there are. In 1987, the U.S. Department of Justice estimated that serial killers murdered between 1,000 and 2,500 people that year.
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Other sources cited a number as high as 6,000 a year.
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In the Green River region in Washington Gary Ridgway murdered forty-eight women by himself in a twenty-month period in 1982–1984.