Transcript of The Green River Killer - Gary Ridgway (Part 1)

Hey weirdos, I'm Elena. I'm Ash, and this is Morbid. Hiya! Hello. Um, this is gonna be a 4-part series. I'm just gonna tell you right off the bat.

Elena has showed up for work this week.

Yeah, it's gonna be a 4-part series because we are Finally covering the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway. Which is one we've been just— I don't know, we weren't waiting for any particular time to do it. It just is such a giant case.

People ask for this one a lot.

So this is 4 because he is a wildly prolific serial killer. He was thought for, I mean, he was for a long time the most prolific serial killer in the United States.

Wow.

He is not anymore. Samuel Little is. Oh yeah. I think he killed 93 people that they know of. But yeah, he's— this is a rough one. And I want to tell you right off the bat.

Yeah.

This is rough. It's pretty graphic. I'm not going to get crazy with it.

With the details. Yeah.

But even just brushing over what's happening is very awful and upsetting. So I just want everybody to know that there is rape involved in this. Some of the victims are younger, like 15, 16. Oh, that's so sad. It's just really sad. Yeah. So I just wanted to put that out there. All right. And now that I've talked about that, I don't feel super comfortable doing any business right now.

I was going to say, we don't really need to.

So I think we should just get right into it.

Yeah, let's do that.

So this started off in the early '80s. So in the spring of 1982, 16-year-old Wendy Caulfield was struggling at home and at school. Uh, her mother Virginia said, she had a way of running into trouble. She was real mischievous. I don't think she was what you'd call real trouble. A year earlier, Wendy's parents had divorced and she and her mother moved from the family farm that Wendy grew up on into subsidized housing.

Oh, that's like a really big change. Well, and also like it's tough anytime your parents get divorced, but when you're 15, 16, that's rough. And she's lived in this one place her whole life.

Like a farm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the only thing Virginia could afford was subsidized housing at the time. She's a single mom now. Yeah. The disruption definitely proved significant for Wendy. She started drinking at school, hanging out with an older crowd, getting involved with some trouble. Soon after, Wendy would disappear for days at a time, but Virginia never considered her a runaway because Wendy always came back, right? In late winter 1982, Wendy was arrested for stealing lunch tickets from a local middle school intending to sell them. Oh, the theft resulted in her being sent to a juvenile detention facility for 2 months.

Jesus, I know, that feels like a big leap.

It's wild. So Wendy had only been home for a short time when in late May she was arrested again, this time for stealing food stamps from a neighbor.

Oh, that's really sad.

And Virginia said she was trying to help me, she thought. Yeah, it's just really sad. Like this, I don't think this is a, a kid intending to do things to piss people off or just to be trying to get by. She's trying to help her mom. Yeah, she thinks she's doing the right thing.

That's really, really sad.

She's just a little lost. So the second offense prompted the court to remove Wendy from her mother's care and place her in a foster home in nearby University Place.

Because that always helps us.

The facility Wendy was placed in was supposed to have strict rules and a non-negotiable curfew, but it seems that the curfew was rarely imposed. On July 8th, Wendy left the foster home planning to visit her grandmother who lived a few miles away. But she never made it there. And by the next day, Wendy was reported missing. Now, a week later, on July 15th, two boys were riding their bikes along the banks of the Green River and stopped to rest on Peck Bridge. Looking over the side of the bridge, they spotted something in the water tangled up in the brushes, the brush and the, like, the branches, all that stuff. Looking closer, they realized that the thing in the water was in fact the nude body of a young woman.

Oh.

And they noticed that she had pants tied tightly around her neck.

Jesus.

Terrified, of course, they ran to the nearest phone and called the police. Now, the discovery was reported to the local papers, which described the victim as, quote, about 25 years old, 5 foot 4, and she weighed about £140. The girl had no identification on her and the clothing was not distinct enough to really provide any leads. So detectives asked the press to publish photographs of her tattoos in the hopes that someone would recognize them and come forward to identify her. It took several days, but eventually a local tattoo artist did recognize them as the tattoos he'd given his former girlfriend, Wendy Caulfield.

Oh, man.

And he told them, I believe she lives with her mother. Then to correct the earlier press descriptions, he added, she's only 16, which is so sad.

Yeah.

Detectives didn't have a lot to work with here. It seemed unlikely Wendy had been killed where her body was found. Yeah. Her killer had probably placed her body in the river and it was carried downriver until it got hung up on some branches. That meant that she could have been killed as much as a mile from where she was found, and there was no indication where it could have been. The only other evidence were flecks of unusual industrial spray paint on the pants tied around her neck. Oh, but they didn't seem to point to anything, so they were just kind of set aside. According to the medical examiner, the cause of death was strangulation, and it appeared Wendy had been sexually assaulted, but her body had been in the water for nearly a week at this point, and if any evidence was there, it was washed away.

Yeah.

The investigation into the disappearance and death of Wendy quickly went cold. There were no leads, no evidence. Detectives really had nowhere to go in this case. Wendy was, according to them, a frequent runaway who struggled with substance abuse and had allegedly been engaging in some form of sex work on and off.

Okay.

Which surely had obviously put her into some dangerous situations with some dangerous men. Mm-hmm. It was a tragic story, but it was one that detectives in the Tacoma region had come to know all too well, unfortunately.

Yeah.

Wendy was one of the countless young women on the streets who disappeared only to turn up dead a few days later.

Right.

Pretty awful.

It's so sad that that was just a regular occurrence.

Yeah, just a regular. They had no way of knowing this murder wasn't similar to the other stories they had seen. No way of knowing it was the start of something so much bigger and so much more terrifying. Yeah. Now, on August 12th, one month after Wendy's body was discovered in the river, P.D. J. Meat Company employee Frank Leonard stepped out behind the slaughterhouse to take a break and smoke a cigar. Decades before this, that slaughterhouse had been built high on the banks of the Green River, where all the blood and slop from the butchering process would just be dumped into the river and taken away by the current. Oh, that seems fine. Yeah.

Yeah, that seems sanitary.

That's probably environmentally sound.

Yeah, for sure.

Luckily, that process of removal had ceased more than 20 years earlier, so the river was clean and beautiful again. But like, that's what that was built for. That afternoon, Leonard looked out over the river as he smoked his cigar, and just below the slaughterhouse, there was like this movement in the current, and it had caused the water to swirl and foam up around a section of gravel and weeds. So it just caught his eye because it was something weird. It seems strange to Frank that such a little movement of the water would cause so much chaos to churn up the water in that way. So staring at it a little longer, he was like, wait, am I— what am I looking at right now? And then he realized he was looking at a pale object, perhaps a dead animal.

Oh.

So he was curious. So he walked down the little path that led from the slaughterhouse down to the banks of the river to get a better look. And he had taken one step into the shallow water at the bank when he finally saw the outline of a woman's body come into view.

Oh.

The woman was face down. Her hair was floating on the surface of the water above her. And there was no doubt to Frank that this woman was very obviously dead. Frank ran back up the bank to the slaughterhouse and called the police to report the discovery. Then he hung up and set about running around the factory telling everyone what he had found because he was like, ah, look what I've seen.

Well, I mean, that's horrifying.

By the time officers arrived at the scene, nearly every man working at the factory was crowding around the scene to see the body, which is like, maybe don't do that. Like, I know humans are curious, but like, that could compromise a scene. Yeah. Now, King County Major Crimes Detective David Reichert was the first detective on the scene. With just 7 years on the force, Reichert was already a pretty hardened detective.

I was going to say, in California in the '80s.

Well, and he had literal scars to prove it. Several years earlier, he was stabbed in the neck multiple times by a suspect after he had broke into a home to rescue a woman trapped inside.

The fuck? Stabbed in the neck? First of all, just even once is crazy. Multiple times.

Yeah. Damn. And he was saving a woman in a house, like broke into a house. Yeah.

Holy shit.

So basically it was going to take a lot to rattle David Reichert.

Yeah. After being stabbed in the neck, you couldn't tell me shit.

But that afternoon by the river, he said he was deeply rattled.

Really?

By what he saw. It was the body of 21-year-old Deborah Lynn Bonner floating face down in the river. And when he arrived, he could see Deborah's hands sticking up out of the water and he said said as though it was waving or reaching out for help.

Oh.

Now, the last time anyone had seen Deborah was on July 25th, when she left her room at the Three Bears Motel, telling her friends she was hoping to, quote, catch some dates. It seemed likely that Deborah had met a client nearby who had sexually assaulted and strangled her, then dumped her body nude into the river. The discovery of Deborah Lynn Bonner's body reminded Reichert of the discovery of Wendy Caulfield's body one month earlier.

Yep.

Now, after identifying the victim, Reichert got to the address of Debra's parents and made the unfortunate notification. The Bonners were devastated by the news of Debra's death. Uh, the last time they'd seen her was 3 weeks earlier, uh, not long before she had told her friend she was going out to make some money. They told the detective that if someone had murdered their daughter, it was probably her boyfriend Martin. Oh wow. Who they described as a petty thief with convictions for assault and drug possession. The lead about Deborah's boyfriend seemed solid, but Reichert had barely had any time to follow up when just 3 days later, another report of a woman's body had been called into the sheriff's office. And this time, it was more than one victim.

Oh.

In the late morning of August 15th now, a man who'd been, quote, treasure hunting in a rubber raft on the Green River was shocked when he came upon the horrific sight of two women half submerged in the shallow water along the banks. Their bodies were tangled up in the grass and overgrowth. Not wanting to abandon the scene because he was like, I don't know what's going to happen here.

Yeah.

The treasure hunter managed to flag down some pedestrians along the shore and asked them to call for police. And Major Dick Kraski later said, in a way, I knew it was something big. I had the same feeling I had when I was a lieutenant and my boss, Nick Mackey, called me out to Issaquah because they found Bundy's victims. Oh, he told me to put on a tie and sport coat and meet him out there. This time I put on my tie and sport coat and went out to the Green River. By the time Kraski arrived at the river, David Reichert was already there, along with rookie patrol officer Sue Peters. Reichert and Peters could clearly see two bodies floating side by side along the banks. The first woman looked to be in her late 20s or early 30s, while the other one appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s. Both women were nude, and Reichert immediately instructed the assembled officers to start combing the riverbank, looking for any indication of how these people had come to be in the water while he was interviewing the rafter who discovered the bodies, the treasure hunter.

Other than the people who responded to his cries for help, he said he'd only seen one other person that morning.

Okay.

Not long after he went out on his raft, he said he spotted a young man on the shore.

Not a young man.

The rafter waved at this man and shouted a greeting because this guy is just—

He's treasure hunting.

He's treasure hunting.

Yeah.

He yelled a greeting and he said the man waved back politely, then walked back to his pickup truck and drove away.

Spooky.

So that was that. Now, after interviewing the witness, Reichert began walking the banks himself to see if he could make out any trail left by the killer. After walking about two dozen feet down the river, the weeds and grass became really tall and thickly settled. But he didn't want to miss any evidence and he was like doing his fucking job.

Hell yeah. We love A seasoned detective.

We love when they are like, I will not rest.

Yes.

So he got down on his hands and knees to push through the grass because he said if anything was on the ground, he was gonna find it.

Good. I mean, you have 4 dead bodies now. Women.

This is when he came face to face with the body of a third woman.

No.

Yes. 3 women found in the same spot.

Holy shit, dude.

The young woman on the ground looked to be really a girl. She looked to be in her mid to late teens.

Oh.

And unlike the two bodies in the river, she was still partially dressed. Her shirt and bra had been pulled up to expose her chest, and her pants were tied tightly around her neck. It occurred to Reichert that the killer had probably intended to place this third young woman in the water with the others. Then saw the treasure hunter. But he'd either been spooked by the sound of nearby activity or become too tired to carry her the rest of the way, so just dropped her in the weeds and left the scene. Now, in the days after this, the 3 new victims would be identified as 31-year-old Marcia Chapman, 17-year-old Cynthia Hines, and 16-year-old Opal Mills.

My God, just like, think of who you were at 16 years old and 17 years old at the end. That's awful. And even 31, like, literally, you're still a young person.

There didn't appear to be any connection between the young women at first, though they were all either suspected or known to have engaged in sex work in recent months. Now remember, suspected, because that's not always the case. Yeah. They just— everyone presumed that's how they might have met their killers or killer.

Well, and sadly, like, it probably made some people feel better. Oh, yeah. They didn't think it would happen to them.

Us dead.

Mm-hmm.

And I only mention this, their jobs now, because it does become an important part of the story. That's the only reason. Okay. Because at the time of the discoveries, the Tacoma region was experiencing a rise in sex work worker arrests and complaints from residents. By the summer of 1982, the quote-unquote— and this is what one reporter called it— the flourishing prostitution business—

Jesus Christ—

had become so significant that the sheriff's department developed a task force to address what, you know, the problem. Stricter enforcement of the laws and more severe penalties had cut down on the number of women who openly conducted business on the streets, but out of sight did not mean out of business. And unfortunately, these stiffer penalties and increased risks of punishment meant that most sex workers were unlikely to report assaults or other victimization to the police, because then they're worried about getting in trouble themselves, putting them in more danger, right? And it made them far less likely to cooperate with investigators when crimes were committed against others in their community. So it was kind of similar with these latest victims, as Reichert and the other investigators attempted to find out more about their lives and piece together their final As the first and oldest of the 3 new victims to be identified, detectives had some success digging into Marcia Chapman's history, if only because she had lived more years than the others and some of them had been documented with some arrests.

Yeah, more established, like, timeline.

At the time of her death, Marcia had been living on the SeaTac Strip with her 3 children, ages 11, 9, and 3.

Oh my God, that's awful.

On August 1st, Marcia left her apartment and told her children she would be back soon. When she hadn't returned the next day, she was reported missing.

Oh, those poor babies.

Like the previous victims, Chapman had been sexually assaulted. This is really graphic. I just need to point that out.

Okay.

She had been sexually assaulted, but it appeared— they called the rape almost symbolic rather than biological, because upon examination, the medical examiner discovered that the killer had shoved several small stones inside of her. Oh, quote, so tightly that they had to be surgically removed.

What the fuck?

Yeah.

Yeah. What the fuck is wrong with this guy?

To Reichert and the other detectives in Major Crimes, this was a significant twist that suggested the killer might not have been able to achieve erection or had perhaps, they had to consider, even be another woman.

Wow.

Yeah, that's wild. I know. The next victim identified was 17-year-old Cynthia Hines, the other body found in the water. Hines was also a sex worker, and according to those who knew her, she had always felt safe working the strip. Because she had what she referred to as a protector, but he was really nothing more than a pimp. Yeah. When detectives interviewed him, he said he had last seen Cynthia on August 11th near the Pacific Highway on-ramp just off the Strip. He told detectives he watched her get into a black Jeep, but he didn't think to write down the license plate or get a good look at the driver. What a great protector. To Reichert's surprise, 16-year-old Opal Mills, the third victim discovered in the grass that day, had no history of sex work. That's why I made sure to point that out, that you suspected, right? Uh, and didn't match the profile of the others whatsoever. Opal lived with her family on the outskirts of Kent and had disappeared just 3 days before her body was discovered. According to her mother, Opal left for work on the morning of August 12th and called later that afternoon from a pay phone, which is the last time she heard from her.

Kathy Mills told the detective that Opal was excited because she was going to make money painting houses with her friend Cookie.

Oh, Opal and Cookie, stop it.

I know. Kathy didn't know it at the time, but Opal's friend Cookie was Cynthia Hines. Oh, so there is a connection.

Okay.

The detectives learned that for most of her life, Opal had been something akin to a tomboy at first.

Okay.

And it was only— it was— she spent a lot of time with her older brother and his friends, like, doing that kind of stuff. But recently, like, getting to be like 15, 16, she was starting to like kind of figure out what she liked, and she was starting to get into, like, more, like, typical teenage girl stuff. Yeah. And when she wasn't with her brother, because they had a really close relationship, or in school, Opal could typically be found in Seattle's Church of God in Christ Church, where her family regularly attended services, sometimes several times a week.

Wow.

To the detectives, Opal Mills was clearly a curious outlier among the victims, right? But the press made no such distinction.

Nice.

In one article published just a few days after the bodies were discovered, a school official— a school official told a reporter that, quote, Opal's pimp picked her up from school the day she went missing.

What the fuck is wrong with people?

You want to know who that pimp was who picked her up from school?

Was it her brother?

It was her brother, just making sure that she got home from school safe.

That's nice.

But that's cool. Like, don't, don't bother looking into that. That's fine.

The press, man.

Sometimes in the '80s, it's like, fuck.

I was gonna say, back then it was so fucking bleak.

At a press conference the day after the bodies were discovered, representatives from various law enforcement agencies saw no reason to keep their suspicions from the public. Uh, Dick Kraske told reporters, "There's probably one suspect at this time," basically confirming the speculation in the press that the murders of the 5 women found in the river were committed by the same person and there was a serial killer.

Yeah.

They also made sure the public was aware the victims were all assumed or confirmed sex workers.

But one of them wasn't. Yep.

Now, in 1982, the murders committed by Ted Bundy were still fresh in the minds of people living in the Pacific Northwest. Oh yeah. And the recent discovery of 5 victims, presumably murdered by the same person, sent a wave of terror through the residents of Tacoma. I can't imagine—

they thought they were done with that—

living in this area at this time. That must have been so fucking scary.

Yeah.

To demonstrate that they were taking the case seriously and applying what they'd learned from the Bundy case, uh, Kraski assembled a 25-person task force to conduct what he assured the press was, quote, the department's largest murder investigation since the Ted slayings in the mid-1970s.

Wow.

Because the bodies had been in the water anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks, it was impossible for the medical examiner to figure out exactly when the women or young girls were killed.

Yeah.

But based from the last time each of the victims was seen alive, the timeline revealed a killer who was claiming victims with alarming frequency.

Yeah, I mean, to find 3 bodies at one scene—

the 3 victims who were found on August 15th, for example, were all seen within 2 weeks of their bodies being discovered. Wow, that's crazy.

This, uh, this reminds me a lot of the Long Island Serial Killer. It's very similar circumstances. Well, now we can because it's solved.

Yeah. And you know who does a really great job with— Alexis Linkletter just wrote a book. You should go preorder it.

Let's go see what it's—

because I did. And she's done years of research on this case. She's been at all the court hearings. Like, she's like boots on the ground. Like, I would trust her on this case for sure. Not the Green River Killer, the Lisk killer.

It's called Between the Devil and the Tide: A True Story of Obsession, Power, and the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer.

Yes.

So again, Between the Devil and the Tide by Alexis Linkletter. If you go to her Instagram, it's just Alexis Linkletter. The pre-order link is available.

Yeah, I would definitely trust her with that case for sure. So just a little shout out for Alexis.

There you go.

Because that's pretty badass.

Yeah, she's a little bit Alexis. A little bit Alexis.

She's a lot Alexis, I think. Yeah, so that would— that's one we'll definitely cover at some point.

But hearing this, it just reminded me of it.

Yeah, it does. It's, it's, it's got a similar vibe and a similar scene in some ways. Yeah, I think so too. But no matter how you looked at this, 5 victims in 1 month was an alarming number of victims in a pretty relatively short amount of time. I mean, yeah. Now, despite that alarm, the rest of August passed without any new victims, and some in the press and law enforcement were starting to wonder, they were like, did the danger pass? Which I think was like kind of like presumptive. Yeah, I was just going to say, I was like, I mean, like, I understand you want that to be the case, but I'd be like, stay alert. Yeah, stay, stay ready.

Too preemptive.

Even in 1982, the public had a vague awareness that some killers were drifters who found a victim or two while passing through a state or town.

Yeah.

Then moved on. So it was possible that that was what happened in SeaTac. Now, in the weeks that followed, the members of the task force were consumed with the flood of tips coming into the hotline, and they were sorting the information gathered by the friends and families of the victims at that point. And in fact, they were too busy with their own 5 victims that it never really occurred to them to look at the open missing persons cases that had come into the department around the time that these bodies had shown up to see if the profiles matched their victims. Okay. Like most law enforcement agencies around the country at the time, the Tacoma Police Department didn't always approach missing persons cases as seriously as they probably could have or should have.

But I'm sure especially young girls who were known to be or suspected to be sex workers.

Well, and also especially the missing— if the missing person was an adult. Yeah. They really let it go.

They were just like, yeah, they wanted to be missing.

There was a generally accepted belief among the officers that when an adult went missing, they probably done it on purpose and disappearing on purpose wasn't necessarily illegal.

All right.

As for teenagers, that was a little more complicated. They're not taken much more seriously, to be honest.

Yeah, they probably just ran away. They'll come back.

According to author Carlton Smith, quote, often when detectives took a missing report involving a teenager seriously, the teenager, when simply located, simply refused to go home. And to look for a missing teenager with a record of prostitution arrests was an even larger waste of time. Many police officers felt this way. That's a quote, by the way, at the time. There were an estimated 600 teenagers living on the streets of King County.

Oh, that's so sad.

Isn't that horrifying?

600.

All of whom could have been considered missing persons, and many of them supported themselves through sex work.

Yeah, I mean, they're young people. Like, what else are they gonna do?

In a practical sense, it would have been impossible to investigate that many runaways, so investigators typically prioritize the reports made by parents or family members. Because of this, when cab driver James Tyndall reported that his friend, 17-year-old Giselle LaVorne, had gone missing, the report was filed and then it got little attention from investigators.

That's unbelievable.

Now, Tyndall had met Giselle a couple years earlier, not long after she'd run away from home in Northridge, California. Uh, he later claimed that he and Giselle had fallen in love and moved to Los Angeles before finally settling in Seattle earlier that year. Not long after getting there, he found work driving a cab, and Giselle supplemented their income with sex work. On July 17th, just one week after Wendy Caulfield was murdered, Giselle left their apartment headed in the direction of the Strip to make some money, but she never came back.

Okay.

When Giselle didn't meet, uh, Tyndall at his cab stand later that night as they had planned, he was concerned, but his concern didn't turn into real alarm until he returned to the apartment And he was like, all of her belongings are still here. Like, this is strange. Yeah. Not wanting to panic, though, he called around to a few hospitals to see if she checked in. And when he had no luck there, he decided to wait a bit and see if she returned home.

Well, and you have to imagine too, like, not wanting to panic and also not wanting to get her into trouble.

Yeah. There's a lot of pieces here.

Right.

But when he still hadn't heard from her the next day, he went to the police department and filed a report. Now, if detectives had looked at the timeline, they would have noticed that the 5 victims disappeared roughly 1 week apart from one another.

Jesus.

With a week-long gap between Wendy and Deborah Bonner. It was in that week that Giselle LaVourne disappeared. That's the missing week.

Just a week is crazy.

Every week. Every week.

That's like—

Yeah.

You don't run into that a lot.

No. With everything going on at the time, detectives didn't have much time for a missing persons report. Especially according to them, especially a sex worker with an arrest record.

Oh, nice.

Because they're not an actual person.

No, no one cares about that.

No. Tyndall tried to explain that it was not in Giselle's personality to just disappear, and he even tried to give them a list of her usual clients, but they weren't interested and simply insisted she'd turn up. Nice. And they said, maybe.

Yes, let's not think about the 5 other girls that you have dead.

Well, unfortunately, the officers that he spoke to turned out to be right. She did turn up. On September 25th, a young man riding his dirt bike on an abandoned road near the airport found Giselle's body hidden in the underbrush. She was completely nude except for the pair of men's socks tied tightly around her neck.

Sounds familiar.

By the time she was discovered, decomposition had made identification nearly impossible. They were only able to confirm that this was Giselle due to a small tattoo of a bird on her chest, which was strangely still visible despite the changes to her remains.

That's interesting.

Because of the decomposition and exposure to animals and the elements, the medical examiner was unable to determine when Giselle had been killed, but he estimated that she had likely been there for about 4 to 6 weeks, which would put her death squarely between when he— That missing week.

Yep.

With 6 victims now and no suspects, the public expected a strong response from law enforcement. But after more than 2 months, they were no closer to identifying a motive or a killer. Speaking on behalf of the Green River Task Force, Pat Ferguson more or less admitted that in a press conference following the discovery of Giselle's body. Uh, he said the detectives have speculated on many theories. Maybe the killer was a sexual psychopath killing for the sake of killing, or maybe it was some sort of pimp war with the men who lived off these women protecting their territory. Saying like maybe these men are killing other pimps' women to like protect theirs.

I feel like that's kind of a stretch.

Without evidence or any strong leads, there was simply no way to know who was responsible or why.

Yeah.

And little did investigators know, while the task force was just trying to pursue every small lead that came their way, the killer was back out on the streets looking for another victim.

Mm-hmm.

Is that their attorney? And on September 26th, he found her. Like many of the other victims, 16-year-old Linda Rule came from a difficult background. She dropped out of school before finishing junior high and started hanging out with a slightly older crowd of kids. A year before, before she went missing, Linda's parents divorced and she moved with her mother and sister to a motel room in the city. In the months that followed, there was a lot of tension between Linda and her mother. There were a lot of arguments. By the fall of 1982, their relationship had kind of deteriorated, and Linda decided she didn't want to live in the motel anymore. So she and her boyfriend, a 24-year-old man named Bobby— she's 16, by the way—

yeah, Bobby, what the fuck are you doing?

They began sharing a room at a nearby Aurora motel. Although she was happy to be, you know, in another environment, neither Linda nor Bobby had stable employment, and money was scarce. So she turned to sex work to support them. On the afternoon of September 26th, Linda, dressed in pinstripe jeans and a nylon jacket, told Bobby she was going out to shop for clothes at the Kmart at the nearby Northgate Mall, then she was going to try to make some money. When she didn't come home that night, Bobby at first said, "I assumed she'd been arrested." Mm-hmm. That's what he told Detective Bob Holt. He said, "It was daytime and she would have been working on Aurora in the afternoon." Mm-hmm. Days later, Bobby had called around to the jails and hospitals looking for Linda, and he checked the places he thought she might have gone, and no one had seen or heard from her since she left the motel on the 26th. Yeah, Bobby kept detailed notes of where he looked and who he spoke to, which he handed over to the police.

Oh, good job, Bobby!

When he filed the report, but it wasn't much help. To the extent that the Seattle police looked for her at all, there was no trace of her. So as fall passed into winter, the Green River Task Force toiled away, and this huge open office at the Major Crimes Unit located at the back of the King County Courthouse where the Bundy Task Force had worked the previous decade. Oh, wow. Run primarily by Dave Reichert and former sex crimes detective Faye Brooks, the group fielded endless streams of calls from anxious parents with missing children and the other leads from concerned citizens, which typically went nowhere. Mm-hmm. Since the discovery of Giselle LaVorne's body in late September, The killer looked like they had gone a little silent, and months passed without any new victims. Then, on January 31st, 1983, a call came from the construction site at the Northgate Hospital. A pipefitter had been clearing an area next to the hospital when he discovered the mostly skeletal remains of what he thought to be a child.

Oh.

With no soft tissue remaining, the medical examiner could provide very little information other than to say the remains were those of a young woman in her teens or early 20s. The victim's teeth, though, were far more useful, and within a few days, the coroner's office was able to identify the remains as Linda Rule. Now, at the time, the Seattle Police Department's homicide unit was well aware that a serial killer had been killing sex workers and dumping their remains in the Green River. But with the exception of how she'd made money, it didn't seem to investigators that Linda was a Green River case.

Okay.

She hadn't been left near the river. The location where she was found was actually quite a distance from where the other victims were found.

Hmm.

I guess Detective Holter told reporters, technically, we're not calling this a murder. We don't have enough to go on for that. But the results are the same. She's dead and we don't know why or how.

Yeah.

Which I get. They only found skeletal remains.

Okay.

She could have died of exposure. She could have died of something else.

Yeah.

They can't definitively say she was killed without having that. Like, it obviously seems that way, but like, they can't be like that. In fact, it would be some time before investigators would actually identify Linda as one of the Green River Killer's victims.

Really?

Yeah. We'll get there. Not today, though. Despite having successfully profiled, caught, and repeated widely interviewed killers like Ted Bundy. Criminal psychologists working in the early 1980s still knew, like, relatively little about the pathologies and behaviors of serial killers. It was kind of new. But in the fall of 1982, the task force, with the help of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit— ay, I want Mindhunter to come back. That's the stupidest cancellation ever.

There was like a rumor going around that it was going to come out, a season 3 was going to come out.

What's up with that?

Where did that go?

I have no idea. Are you listening? If you know something, can you tell us? Please bring it back. That fucking show ruled. Bring back my show. Exactly. So with the task force, got the help of the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, and they put together a profile of the killer, which they shared with the press. King County Police spokesman Frank Kinney said, it didn't give us any suspects, but it told us we were probably going in the right direction. It confirms our original suspicions that one person probably is responsible. For all the deaths. That fall, the FBI's profile led detectives to make their first arrest. Oh, didn't stick.

But I was going to say, that's early on.

I was like, and that's it.

I was like, I heard this is 4 parts. Interesting that we have an arrest in part 1.

They arrested 44-year-old Melvin Foster, an unemployed cab driver living with his father in Seattle.

Okay.

On paper, he checked a lot of the boxes on the profile. He was familiar with the area. He had a job that put him in contact with sex workers, including the victims. He was also known to associate with the local sex workers and the unhoused community. And most importantly, he managed to insert himself into the investigation by offering to act as an informant.

Okay.

Although he denied any involvement in the murders, Foster failed a polygraph exam, which bumped him up the position to primary suspect at the time. Okay. Which I get.

Hot dog, trench coat, but okay.

But there's a lot more. There's other things. I was gonna say, that's not alone. Although Melvin Foster looked like a strong suspect in the context of the FBI profile, there were several things about him that made it unlikely. For one, in March 1982, Foster had sustained an injury where he tore a bunch of cartilage in his knee. Ooh. So it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to carry the weight of a body other than his own. Yeah. There was also the fact that around the time that people began appearing in the river, Foster's car was broken down, so he wouldn't have been able to transport the bodies to the dump sites. A few months later, Melvin Foster was officially ruled out as a suspect, and by January, the task force was just right back where they started. Oh man, 7 victims, no suspects. Even more curious was the fact that as suddenly as the victims had started appearing, it looks like it stopped again. So it seemed. While the medical examiner had been unable to identify an exact time of death for the last victim, Linda Rule, it was likely that she had been killed around the same time she went missing in late September.

But since the discovery of her body in January, 4 months had passed without a sign of the Green River Killer. It wasn't until May 1983 that the task force was notified of their next victim, but this one wasn't like the others. This one's really upsetting. Just letting you know, they're all upsetting, but the way this—

of course—

the way this particular woman is found is very upsetting. 22-year-old Carolyn Christiansen was a mother of 5 young children living out by the Pacific Highway South. She was unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. For months, she had desperately been searching for work, but as far as anyone knew, she had never engaged in sex work, which made her an outlier. The last anyone had heard from her, Carol Ann was ecstatic because after months of searching, she had finally landed a job waiting tables at the Bar— uh, Barn Door Tavern near the highway, which was also just a few blocks from the trailer park where she lived. She had only worked a day or two at the Barn Door when she disappeared on May 3rd. When Carol Ann didn't come home after a night at work, her mother became anxious, and the next day she was reported missing. 5 days later, a family discovered Carol Ann's body while they were mushroom hunting in Maple Valley. Oh, about 20 miles from the strip where the other victims worked. When they came upon the body, Carol Ann was in a half-sitting position but had fallen onto her back.

Her hands were folded across her chest, and there was a small pile of ground sausage placed atop them.

On top of her hands?

Yep. Across her throat, the killer had placed two gutted and cleaned trouts, and an empty wine bottle had been placed on its side across her stomach.

What the fuck?

And maybe most disturbing, whoever killed her had placed a brown paper bag over her head.

Oh. Oh my God.

Ugh. Picturing this visual is— diabolical. I mean, this is like really fucked up.

And just like, what does that all mean?

That's the thing. Like, what is going on?

It makes me think of the body that's discovered in True Detective.

That's what I immediately thought of.

And with all the like symbols, all the shit around it, like, yeah. Oh my God. And this poor woman is a mother of 5 who just got—

who was promising new jobs— that she had just got a job to help her kids.

And days into that job.

This little fuck. Go look up Gary motherfucking Ridgeway, everybody. Go look.

I actually don't think I have looked for a long time.

Nasty little shit. And he, he's disgusting. He's such a disgusting little shit.

For real.

But it makes sense that Carol Ann was not immediately identified as one of his victims, right? She wasn't a sex worker. She wasn't found in or near the river. And most importantly, the scene had clearly been staged.

Uh, yeah, well, the others had just been dumped, you know. Yeah, that is weird.

According to the medical examiner, Carol Ann had been sexually assaulted, and it appeared her killer had made at least some attempt to redress her before leaving her body in the woods. Her bra had been put on inside out, and her shoes had been put on but not laced. The way that the scene was staged to suggest some sort of ritual certainly set her apart from the other victims, but it kind of— it definitely suggested that they were dealing with a sexual psychopath. Yeah, this was not the act of a person who killed impulsively or in the heat of the moment. No, this took planning, this took intentionality. Among the more interesting aspects was the fact that while Carol Ann's body hadn't been found in or near the water, according to the medical examiner, quote, the faint washerwoman wrinkles in the hands and soles of the feet suggest that the body might have been immersed for some time.

That's strange.

Like, you know how when you're in water for too long, you get the wrinkles? Yeah, you get the croony hands. That's what she had.

So had he like soaked her in a tub? I have no idea. Or like washed her down or something?

It was that last aspect though that led investigators to suspect that that despite the more obvious aspects of the scene and the ritualistic nature of the killing in this setting, Carol Ann was very likely a victim of the Green River Killer.

Were there other victims later on? Obviously, I know you're going to tell me, but like found like this, like staged to this degree?

You'll have to see.

Okay.

Now, if the killer had been trying to throw detectives off with the staging, which was what they did think, they were like, maybe he went so far the other way so we wouldn't even consider him.

Yeah.

He hadn't been very thoughtful in his approach, because while it may not have looked like a Green River Killer victim upon first look, a simple check into the evidence and the victim's background proved otherwise. Not only did Caroline Christensen live and work in the area where the other victims had been picked up, but the detectives were able to trace the paper bag to a grocery store not far from the killer's usual hunting grounds.

Oh, that wasn't smart.

Which also was like good detective work.

Yeah, yeah, that was really good detective work.

As for how she wound up with the killer, That would remain a mystery for years to come. But since Carol Ann had no car and was known to walk everywhere, including the several miles to her new job, it was likely that the killer had simply pulled over on the evening of May 3rd and offered her a ride to work. Yeah.

How sad is that? And she's just like trying to get to work on time.

Yeah. That she, she supported her 5 children.

She supported her 5 children.

She walked to work every day.

So that was probably just a welcome, like, oh my gosh, absolutely.

Oh my gosh, you're going to help me?

Like, that's so sad.

And of course, this kind of stuff gets—

when you think like the California, the '80s, you're 22 years old, you don't think anything excepting a ride, really.

Yeah, nobody was thinking about it. Now, the disappearance and eventual discovery of Carol Ann Christiansen's body put an end to the misplaced hope that the Green River Killer had moved on or just stopped killing. In fact, it was only after the killer was arrested that the breaks in activity would be explained. There wasn't.

Okay.

In the meantime, investigators chalked it up to the fact that winter in Washington was very, very cold and there were far fewer sex workers on the streets than there would be in more warmer months.

Oh, I said California earlier. My bad.

Oh yeah, and I agreed with you, honestly. Um, you're near California. Yeah, you know. But with the onset of spring and the promise of warmer weather, the detectives on the task force knew the women who worked the Strip and the surrounding area were going to be back on the streets in much larger numbers. Even with the knowledge that a dangerous predator stalked those same streets, some of them didn't have a choice. Yeah. One of the more frustrating parts of tracking the Green River Killer wasn't just the frequency with which the victims were showing up, but the fact that the discoveries of remains were often very out of order.

Oh, okay.

Like, a woman might appear in one month and her— or disappear in one month, and then her remains might not be discovered until several months later, right? And in the meantime, the killer might have claimed several more victims. Um, and that was the case, uh, with 18-year-old Shonda Leah Summers. The last time anyone saw Shonda was sometime around October 7th, though no one could really be sure. She had left her mother and brothers in San Diego several months earlier and come out to live with her father in Seattle, where she had a boyfriend. When Shonda was arrested one night on a prostitution charge, her father was so angry that he refused to bail her out of jail. So she spent the night in jail. After that night, she refused to return home and instead took off with her boyfriend.

Well, she was also probably scared to go home because her dad was mad.

Yeah. By October 1982, Shonda was supporting herself and said boyfriend through sex work. Uh, he should have got a job.

Yeah, he definitely should have.

Despite having multiple close contacts in Seattle, nearly a month would pass before anyone reported Shonda missing.

That's weird.

And when they finally did, no one seemed to be able to recall any detail about the last time they they'd seen her. In fact, according to Carlton Smith, the details of the entire situation were so murky that, quote, the Seattle Police Department refused to take any report. Her father, Steve Summers, insisted she'd run off with her boyfriend and would eventually come back. Her boyfriend insisted she'd run off with some new guy and claimed he hadn't seen her. The truth was, no one had seen Shonda Summers for at least a month, because by the time they got around to reporting her missing she was already long dead.

That's so sad.

On August 11th, 1983, nearly a year after Shonda went missing, a couple on a date to pick apples behind some abandoned houses near the strip stumbled across a badly decomposed body in some underbrush by the apple trees.

Oh my God.

Not far from where Giselle Lavorn's body had been discovered the previous year. This body was in such an advanced state of decay that identification was impossible. But among the dental records of missing women the task force had collected, there was a match for Shondish Summers. As with many of the other victims, this again advanced state of decomposition made it impossible to also figure out a cause of death.

Right.

And there were no obvious breaks or fractures to indicate what injuries she may have sustained. Under normal circumstances, the medical examiner would have closely analyzed the tiny neck bones for signs of strangulation.

I was just going to ask about the hyoid bone.

Yeah, but by the time Shonda's remains were discovered, animals had scattered several of her tiny bones around the area. Um, although they couldn't say with certainty that Shonda was a Green River victim, she certainly fit the profile, so she was added to the list as victim number 9.

When she's so close, like, to the area.

What the task force didn't know at the time was that Shonda was in fact victim number 12.

Oh.

But the order in which the women were killed would remain something of a mystery for some time.

12 women and we are in part 1.

Yeah. All the task force investigators knew was that the killer hadn't stopped. And as 1983 came to a close, that would become abundantly clear. And we are going to end part 1 on that because that's a lot of victims.

It sure is.

For part 1. And I want everyone to sit with that. Yeah. Because we have a lot more coming up, which is pretty unbelievable to think about.

Also, Gary Ridgway is like a little rat.

He is a literal rat.

He looks like a rat.

Yeah. Like, Oh, he's disgusting.

Ew. How— what a tragic case. I've never— I know about like this case and, you know, some of the details, but I don't know that I've ever listened to full coverage on this. And it's so sad.

Well, he, in case you're wondering and you haven't looked it up or anything, I think he was convicted in the end of murdering 49 young women and girls.

49?

Convicted. And then he later confessed. He admitted to 65. Yeah.

Oh my God. How do you— how did he get away with that for so long?

He got away with it for a long time. It was early '80s into the '90s. He's— he goes for a long—

like almost a decade.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then when you find out who he is, you're like, how the fuck did this little turd get away from it? From everybody?

Wow.

That's unbelievable. It's a horrific case. It really is. He is a, he's one of the most evil men the world has seen.

And he looks like it too.

He does. He's so fucking gross.

For that to be the last face you ever see is just so horrific. Little rat bitch. There's really no great way to transition, but we always have to give you a little bit of a palate cleanser at the end.

Yeah, just so we can leave you with a little bit of something.

So let's give you a little fun fact. You know, I didn't even realize that this one would be so necessary. The average person living in Sweden eats about £22 of chocolate per year.

That's pretty awesome.

I'd like to live my life that way.

I was going to say Sweden knows what they're doing.

They really do. I think they eat the most candy in the world.

Good for them.

Isn't that pretty great?

Have you guys ever had Swedish candy?

Swedish candy? They know what the fuck they're doing.

Get yourself some and do that. Just type in Swedish candy.

Yeah.

And you will find what it is. I'm telling you, go get some.

The gummy candy. I am a sucker for gummy candy. Like, I love gummy bears. I love those Squashies that we just recently discovered.

So Swedish candy, there's these one, this one type that's like a little log, like a kind of roll, and it has like, sometimes it has like creamy kind of stuff in the middle. It sounds weird, I know.

It sounds gross, but it's got like gummy on the outside.

It's It's one of the yummiest things I've ever eaten in my life.

Actually, one of— one of you guys sent us Swedish candy one time, and it was really fucking cool of you.

And I think it was called like Sweetish Candy. Yes, is that what it was?

Yeah, good fucking memory, dude.

I wonder if we've mentioned this before. If we haven't, I'm sorry, because that shit was the coolest thing ever.

You kept us fed.

Go find Sweetish Candy.

Sweetish.

It was The shit.

It was hella sweet and delicious. Oh, I want fucking candy now.

Yeah, we're gonna order some. I actually just bought squashy, so hell yeah, some. All right, well, we hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it weird.

You know not to keep it as weird as fucking everything we talked about today.