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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. Episode 169. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Rosland Weyborg Thule.
Tonight, I bring to you Part 8 in the Green River Killer Saga. We are nearing the end of this marathon of a series. Last episode, we made a rendezvous with an old adversary, good old Ted Bundy. As promised, tonight we'll round off our visit at Florida State Prison Death Row and continue the hunt proper for America's second most prolific serial killer of all time.
Gary Leon Ridgeway. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Lisbeth, Marilyn, Meow, Nick, Oakley, Operation Brownie Pockets, Reed, Richard, Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Shauna, Sputnik, The Radio, Tim, Tony, Trent, Vanessa, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine if you will, dear listener, Theodore Robert Bundy, sitting across from Robert Keppel in an interview room at Florida State Prison. The room...
is grey, the furniture nondescript. Keppel has just laid a photo on the table in front of Bundy. The photograph is turned upside down. Bundy eagerly reaches for it. Keppel has planned this for a good while. The deal with Bundy was that they were not to discuss the crimes for which Bundy was charged, only the Green River case.
But Keppel has no qualms about using his time with Bundy to get confirmation about Bundy's involvement. The photo Bundy now has turned around and is looking at is that of Catherine Cathy Devine, who was murdered in December 1973. Her murder was never solved, but the case was one in which Ted himself was a prime suspect.
the vine was last seen getting into a green pick-up truck driven by a white male with a beard near ninetieth and aurora avenues in north seattle at that time
Ted Bundy owned a green pickup in addition to his Volkswagen Bug and was sporting a full beard. The Vine's body was found near a campground in southern Thurston County, about 15 miles south of Olympia, the capital of Washington, where Bundy worked.
Kathy was, as so many of Bundy's other victims, a pretty girl with long brown hair parted in the middle. She was only fourteen years old when she was murdered. Kathy's throat had been cut and she was laying face down. Her underwear had been ripped and cut open and she had been violently vaginally raped. The crime scene photos showed her body in situ.
Keppel was watching Bundy carefully as he looked at the photo. Immediately he knew that he had hit paydirt. Bundy stopped talking and looked transfixed at the photo, as if in a trance. His pupils dilated to an extreme degree, making his eyes appear almost completely black. His carotid artery started bulging and pulsing.
It was clear to Keppel that Bundy was imagining himself at the scene with Kathy. If he was simply fantasizing, or if he actually had been the one who killed Kathy, Keppel could not know for certain, unless Bundy confessed. He did not. But Keppel confirmed to himself that Bundy, not the Green River Killer, was the prime suspect in Kathy's case.
Here we pause for a brief moment, dear listener. You see, Keppel actually had it wrong when it came to Kathy Devine. 28 years after Kathy went missing, the case took a surprising twist. Authorities revealed DNA testing had identified 55-year-old William E. Carsten Jr. as Catherine's killer.
Carsten was already in prison for rape and had a history of sexual violence. Further evidence revealed that Carsten had been seen with what looked like bloodstains on his shirt in the early hours of 26th of November at a truck stop frequented by young hitchhikers.
Carsten had been suspected for a long time, but finally the DNA evidence was strong enough for a conviction. He was charged and found guilty of Catherine's murder. It is therefore interesting that Bundy apparently got such a thrill from looking at Cathy's crime scene photo. Probably he simply viewed photos of mutilated and violated murdered women the same way regular guys view porn.
In any case, Keppel's talks with Bundy regarding the Green River case eventually had to come to an end. Keppel simply could not spend that much time down in Florida talking to Ted Bundy when the Green River killer was not only not caught, but highly active. Keppel started to twist a knot on Bundy.
He asked Bundy, and I quote, How would you approach a convicted murderer that you know is in prison for murder and is responsible for cases that are technically unsolved? How would you approach an offender like that? I mean, they obviously know the system. They've been tried and convicted, maybe sentenced to death.
Then all of a sudden there are some unresolved matters of the past where this person is a suspect in those matters. How would you approach somebody like that? End quote. Bundy was seemingly not surprised by the question. He knew Keppel referred to him. He remained quiet for a very long time before answering in his typical roundabout way. Again, I quote,
Well, I don't. Again, each case is going to be different. I think generally you've got to... it depends. It's just an entirely different set of circumstances that you're going to have with somebody who's never been through the system, who's not convicted. And I guess that you'd have to be able to give him something. I don't know.
Let's say that you had the Green River guy locked up here. You had somebody locked up you thought was the Green River guy. May have been locked up for assault or something, and he's in Walla Walla Penitentiary. I mean, how would you go to him? I mean, how could you approach such a person who's familiar with the system?
who's locked up for 10 or 20 years to confess to something which obviously carried some pretty heavy penalties and resulted in being a very notorious guy in prison." In other words, Bundy was asking Keppel what deal he could offer him if he confessed. Specifically, could Keppel keep him from being fried alive in the electric chair?
Keppel's final visit was scheduled four days prior to his execution in January 1989. The conditions for his interview were horrible, and it was conducted in a circus-like atmosphere. Representatives from every major television and radio station and newspaper from Washington to Florida were congregating outside the gates of the Florida State Penitentiary to cover the story of his execution.
Keppel's role was to participate in his quote-unquote debriefing, which was not exactly the form that Keppel expected for Bundy's voluntary confession. One more time, Ted Bundy was going to manipulate him and everyone else around. This time it was Bundy's disorganized and unsuccessful effort to save his own life.
Unlike in the excellent Netflix movie No Man of God, concerning the last interviews with Bundy by Bill Hagmeier, Keppel was separated from Bundy by a plexiglass partition. Behind Bundy at all times were two police officers. Due to this, Bundy whispered his confessions to Keppel, or he wrote details down on notepaper and showed them to Keppel.
In my Ted Bundy expose, freely available to all my dear listeners, I go into detail about each and every murder and Bundy's confessions in his final days, as well as his execution. If you haven't listened to this series, go to where you listened to this podcast and go back to the 15th of October 2017 through the 1st of December 2017.
There you will find the Ted Bundy episodes 1 through 4. Enjoy. Let us thus wind back time from Ted's death in 1989 back to the 10th of March, 1985. Another partially buried body was found near Star Lake Road. The victim was eventually identified as Carrie Roy, only 15 years old.
She disappeared during the summer of 1983. In mid-June, a man bulldozing a patch of land in Teagard, Oregon, discovered the skeletal remains of two more women. The remains were later identified as Denise Bush, 23, and Shirley Sherrill, 19. Both girls were known prostitutes in Seattle.
The discovery of the two women confirmed the fact that the Green River killer's parameters had extended out of state. It seemed as if a new dumping ground had been revealed. Meanwhile, FBI profiler John Douglas re-evaluated the previous profile of the killer and came to a new conclusion-slash-hypothesis that there were two separate killers.
Douglas suggested that, although the profiles of both killers were similar in many ways, the way in which they disposed of the bodies slightly differed. To Douglas, it seemed as if one of the killers went to greater effort to conceal the bodies than the other. Whereas some of the bodies were partially covered or buried in isolated areas,
Other bodies lay openly exposed to detection, such as those found in the Green River. Although the theory seemed to be plausible, there were no suspects available that could support his theory. The case had run cold, and no likely suspects could be connected with any of the murders. Pressure mounted on the task force for its inability to capture the killer or killers after more than three years.
It was not until the winter that the skeletal remains of yet three more victims were found. The first remains were identified as those belonging to Mary West, which were found in a wooded area in Seward Park in Seattle. The other two remains were that of Kimi Kai Pitzer and another unidentified white female between 14 and 19 years old.
The unusual aspect of this more recent discovery was that Pitzer's remains had been located in two different locations. In December 1983, her skull was discovered in Mountain View Cemetery, and two years later, the remainder of her body was found a short distance away in a ravine.
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For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. It could have been possible that an animal dragged the skull from the body sometime after death.
However, there was no evidence that this occurred. The police believed it was the work of the killer. Investigators were uncertain as to the killer's motive for dividing the body between two different locations. They speculated that it was done to taunt the police or confuse the investigation. In February 1986, the Green River Task Force seemed to get the break it had been hoping for.
A man described by investigators as a person of interest was brought into the police station and searched. The event received a great deal of media attention. An FBI agent and Detective Jim Doyon of the task force extensively questioned the new suspect. However, before long they realized he was not the man they were looking for. Shortly thereafter, the man was released.
During this time, the public became increasingly aware of the task force's lack of results. Thus far, there had been several suspects taken into custody, and each and every one proved to have no connection with the murders. Public anger and fear reached a boiling point. The media referred to the Green River Task Force as a joke.
To make matters worse, that summer the skeletal remains of three more women were discovered off of I-90, east of Seattle. The remains were those of Maureen Feeney, 19, Kim Nelson, 26, and another unidentified young woman. Feeney was the only one of the three that investigators were able to link to a career in prostitution.
the number of victims was quickly climbing toward a staggering 40. By the end of 1986, the staff had been reduced by 40%, and Adamson was reassigned to another project. Captain James Pompey became the new leader of the Green River Task Force. Pompey immediately began to reorganize the team and the data related to the investigation.
Just as Pompeii was beginning to get started, two more bodies were discovered in December. This time, the bodies were found much further away than expected in an area north of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Yet again, the killer seemed to be taunting investigators.
Even more intriguing was that the partial remains of several other women had been scattered alongside the bodies of the two women. Even though the bodies were located a great distance from the others, there was no doubt in the investigators' minds that the work was that of the Green River Killer. In the beginning months of 1987,
Investigators had a new suspect in relation to the Green River murders. Previously known to police, the newest suspect had been picked up for attempting to solicit an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute in May 1984. However, the man was released after he successfully passed a lie detector test. When investigators looked deeper into the man's past,
They discovered that he had been accused of choking a prostitute in 1980 near the Sea-Tac International Airport. Yet, the man pleaded self-defense after claiming the woman bit him and he was soon after released from police custody. One of the task force detectives, Matt Haney, was highly suspicious of this suspect and decided to dive even further into the man's history.
He discovered that the police had at one time stopped and questioned the man back in 1982 while he was in his truck with a prostitute. The investigator learned that the prostitute he was with was one of the women on the Green River murder list, Kelly McGinnis.
Moreover, the police approached the man again in 1983 in connection with the kidnapping of murder victim Marie Malvar. A witness, Malvar's boyfriend, followed the truck to the suspect's house after recognizing it as the one he last saw his girlfriend in. Haney believed he might be on to the Green River Killer.
Haney learned from the man's ex-wife that he often frequented the dump sites, where many of the bodies had been discovered. Also, several prostitutes claimed to have seen a man matching the suspect's description regularly cruising the strip between 1982 and 1983. It turned out that the man passed the strip almost daily on his way to work.
Some of the most damaging evidence discovered was that the man, who worked as a truck painter, was found to have been absent or off duty on every occasion a victim disappeared. Finally, on the 8th of April, 1987, the police obtained a warrant and searched the man's house.
According to the Seattle Times, the police also took bodily samples of the suspect so that they could compare them with the evidence they had from the Green River victims. However, there was insufficient evidence to arrest him, and the man was released from police custody. The suspect was identified as none other than Gary Leon Ridgeway.
Several weeks following Ridgeway's release, Captain Pompey died from a massive heart attack related to a scuba diving accident. The unfortunate event was picked up by the media and sensationalized. It was suggested that the Green River Killer was actually a police officer that had murdered Pompey, regardless of the fact that there was absolutely no substantiating evidence to support this theory.
One newspaper even called for an official investigation into the death of Pompey. It seemed as if the public's nerves had become raw after so much death in the city. The task force, which was by now led by Captain Greg Boyle, was called once again in June. Three boys stumbled across the partially buried skeletal remains of a young woman while searching for aluminum cans.
The girl, who was identified as Cindy Ann Smith, 17 years old, was found in a ravine behind the Green River Community College. She had been missing for approximately three years before her discovery. More bodies of missing young women were discovered in the year that followed, some of which included that of missing runaway Debbie Gonzalez, 14, and Deborah Estes, 15, who disappeared six years earlier.
Their deaths were attributed to the Green River Killer as well. Although there were still bodies being discovered, there were no recent killings attributed to the Green River Killer in the Seattle region. In 1988, the discovery of more than 20 bodies of prostitutes in San Diego led to the belief that the Green River Killer moved and continued his murderous rampage in California.
Detective Reichert and the new task force commander, Bob Evans, temporarily joined forces with the San Diego Police Department in an effort to find the killer. In December 1988, investigators had a new suspect.
A man named William J. Stevens caught the attention of the police after several callers phoned him in as a potential suspect during the airing of the popular true crime detective show Crime Stoppers. Stevens was a prison escapee who was on the run for eight years after a two-year stint behind bars for burglary.
At the time he was rediscovered by police, he was enrolled at the University of Washington as a pharmacology student. As task force investigators delved into Stevens' past, they learned that he was already a suspect in the Green River killings. It was also learned that Stevens had a blatant contempt for prostitutes and was known to have on several occasions talked about murdering them.
When police searched his home, they found masses of firearms, several driver's licenses, credit cards in assumed names, and sexually explicit nude photos of prostitutes. Stevens was highly involved in robbery and credit card fraud, which he used to survive.
Task Force investigators exhaustively interviewed Stevens about the Green River murders and searched the premises of his home throughout the summer and fall of 1989. Investigators even searched Stevens' father's home for clues tying him to any of the murders. However, nothing was found linking him to the murders.
Moreover, credit card records and photographs produced by Stevens' brother provided a tight alibi against his involvement with the crimes. According to the numerous records and receipts, Stevens was traveling across the country during the summer months of 1982, when many of the murders occurred. Eventually, Stevens was cleared of all involvement in the Green River murders.
In October 1989, two more skeletal remains of young women were found. One of the victims, identified as Andrea Childers, was found in a vacant lot near Star Lake and 55th Avenue South. Like many of the young women found before her, the cause of death remained unclear due to the state of decomposition.
In early February 1990, the skull of Denise Bush was found in a wooded area in Southgate Park in Tukwila, Washington. The remainder of Bush's body was located in Oregon five years earlier. Once again, it seemed as if the killer was purposely moving the bones around in an effort to confuse investigators.
Task Force investigators were beginning to believe that the killer had defeated them. Morale among the officers was at an all-time low. According to the Seattle Times, in July 1991, the task force was reduced to just one investigator named Tom Jensen.
After nine years, roughly 49 victims and $15 million, the task force still had not caught the Green River Killer. The investigation became known as the country's largest unsolved murder case. The case remained dormant for 10 years. In April 2001, almost 20 years after the first known Green River Murder,
Detective Reichert, who had become the sheriff of King County, began renewed investigations into the murders. It was a case he refused to let go of, and he remained determined to find the killer. This time, the task force had technology on their side. Reichert formed a new task force team initially consisting of six members, including DNA and forensic experts and a couple of detectives.
It wasn't long before the forest grew to more than 30 people. All the evidence from the murder examination was re-examined and some of the forensic samples were sent to the labs. The first samples to be sent to the lab were found with three victims that were murdered between 1982 and 1983, Opal Mills, Marsha Chapman, and Carol Christensen.
The samples consisted of semen supposedly taken from the killer. The semen samples underwent a newly developed DNA testing method and were compared with samples taken from Ridgeway in April 1987. And so it was that on the 10th of September 2001, Reichert received news from the labs that reduced the hardened detective to tears.
There was a match found between the semen samples taken from the victims and Ridgway on the 30th of November. Ridgway was intercepted by investigators on his way home from work and arrested on four counts of aggravated murder.
The charges included that of the three girls and also Cynthia Hines, in which circumstantial evidence was also found connecting him with her death. The man the investigators had sought for twenty years was finally in police custody. This time they would not let him go.
Ridgeway worked for a computer company at the time of his arrest. During the time of the murders, he was employed as a truck painter for 30 years at the Kentworth Truck Factory in Renton, Washington. Ridgeway owned many trucks during that time. Several match descriptions given by streetwalkers at the time of the murders.
According to Time magazine's Terry McCarthy, Ridgway had an unusual sexual appetite. His three ex-wives and several old girlfriends told the reporters that he was sexually insatiable, demanding sex several times a day. Oftentimes, he would want to have sex in a public area or in the woods, even in the areas where some of the bodies had been discovered.
Ridgeway was also known to have been obsessed with prostitutes, a fixation that bordered on a love-hate relationship. Neighbors knew him to constantly complain about prostitutes conducting business in his neighborhood, but at the time he frequently took advantages of their favors.
It was possible that he was torn by his uncontrollable lusts and his staunch religious beliefs. McCarthy states that according to one of his wives, he became a religious fanatic, oftentimes crying following sermons and reading the Bible.
I don't know.
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And so it is that we end part eight in the tale of the Green River Killer.
Next episode will be the final episode in the Green River Killer saga. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you, good night, and good luck.
