I remember the Green River killer very well. No, I didn’t know him personally. But I wrote about him.
Gary Ridgway’s recent admissions of guilt in the case brought up a lot of memories for me.
The fourth day on my first reporting job at the Highline Times in Burien – Oct. 27, 1983 – our managing editor came into the newsroom and said skeletal remains had been found near Sea-Tac Airport. We needed to send a reporter.
“I’ll go,” I said in my youthful enthusiasm.
“Stay here and work on your story, rookie,” the editor told me.
I didn’t write about that one, our regular crime reporter did. Two days later, another set of remains was found.
In those days, the bodies were being found at such a rate it was easy for us who had work connected with it to temporarily forget that those “remains” had each been a person.
Their names were Connie Naon, 21, and Kelly Ware, 22.
Since it was my job to cover the airport and surrounding communities, I was assigned a story to talk to residents about what it was like to have murder victims found near their homes. The remains had been found in an area called the “clear zone,” where houses had been bought and cleared out by the Port of Seattle because jet noise had increased in the area so as to make it unliveable.
Naturally, the grim discoveries were a little unnerving to people living in the area. Though the victims were prostitutes, most of whom lived on the street, there was still plenty of concern. These girls and women were being killed practically in the residents’ back yards. And nobody knew why, or who would be next, or when. Some of the residents carried picket signs on Pacific Highway South in protest of prostitution.
In mid-November, when I hadn’t been on the job even a month, another set of bones was found in the same area – Mary Bridget Meehan, 18. This time, our police reporter was out of the office and I was the one to write the story.
I still remember the Port of Seattle police information officer filling me in on the details of how the bones were found. Someone on a walk through the field saw part of a skull protruding from the earth – “just the teeth,” she said.
I included this detail in my article. It wasn’t edited out. My editors felt the same as I did, that it was important to remind people how horrible the events that were taking place really were.
One day in 1984 or 1985, a man came into our office and walked right past the reception area, into my editor’s office and shut the door behind him. He told my editor the killer was his neighbor and that she should listen.
She phoned out to the receptionist and asked her to bring her a specific item, their agreed-upon code for the receptionist to call the police. Shortly, two detectives were in the office talking with my editor and the man.
Nothing came of it that we know of. I don’t know if this man was Ridgway’s neighbor or not.
I had little direct contact with the case until our police reporter left in 1985 and I took over the beat. By then, thankfully, the killings had slowed down considerably.
The Green River Task Force, the special unit created by the King County Sheriff to investigate the case, was headquartered less than a mile from our office in the Burien police precinct. Prior to that, our police reporter had access to all the regular reports and postings in the back meeting room. After the Task Force came, we had to be handed the reports over the front counter and sit and go over them in the lobby.
One night in 1985 or 1986, police searched the home of a “person of interest” in the case. His house was only a block or two off Pacific Highway, and I remember that as we reporters and a crowd of onlookers gathered, people from nearby businesses had set up food-and-drink stands. The sad case had become a circus. The man whose home was searched was never arrested.
As I moved on, both geographically and in my career, the case faded from my memory. The killer seemed to have stopped or left the area. Even when Ridgway was first arrested two years ago, it was hard to believe he could be the one. After all, how could someone who is deranged enough to commit such terrible acts, and so many of them, function day-to-day for 20 years in the same community?
I wonder how people get this way, how they can develop such a combination of rage and lack of conscience that would lead them to do such things. I wonder to what extent they’re born that way and to what extent they’re made. And I wonder how much this kind of thing happens in other countries.
This should not be construed as any kind of a call for mercy. I just pray that somehow, someday, the answers to these questions can be found.
Bill Sheets is editor of the Edmonds edition of The Enterprise.
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