Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer
By Mark Prothero,
with Carlton Smith
In Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer, Mark Prothero, a key member of Gary Ridgway's defense team, has taken on a daunting and ultimately impossible task. The title of Prothero's book promises that he will unravel the mind of this country's most prolific and perhaps most notorious serial killer, that we will at last see inside and discover the motivation that would compel a man to kill dozens of young women in a killing spree unmatched in the annals of American history.
In the end, however, the title becomes a misnomer as even Prothero, who probably spent more time with Ridgway than any other person during the two years between his arrest in November 2001 and his sentencing in December 2003, concedes defeat. With-in the deep, dark recesses of Ridgway's muddled psyche are more cobwebs than revelations. He proves confused, inscrutable and unfathomable. The reader is left still wondering what he was asking at the outset: "Why?"
This is unsatisfying - which even Prothero eventually admits - and a great disappointment. Like the greedy child at Christmas time who tears through his packages and asks, "Is this all?", after wading through 239 pages of Prothero's retelling of the discovery, budgetary and emotional battles involved in mounting a monumental defense effort to finally hear Ridgway admit to the murders, all we are left with is the torn and crumpled wrapping paper that is Gary Ridgway's addled mind.
Early on, with so many questions running through my head, I felt - and still do - that Prothero's book and his readers would have been better served with a summary chapter at the outset: one that opened with Ridgway's only quotable statement, "I killed 'em all," chronicled his predations and let us know that we would never know "why." This story would have been better told with the killer unveiled in the first act and chapters opening with new revelations so that we could more fully enjoy the search that brought us to those points.
The book does have its moments. The most intriguing and enjoyable aspect is Prothero's retelling of the ongoing battle of wits between the anonymous Green River Killer and then-detective Dave Reichert, and later between the imprisoned and shackled Gary Ridgway and then-Sheriff Reichert. Ridgway, despite his Forrest Gump-like 85 IQ, comes out on top both times.
There clearly is no love lost between Prothero and Reichert. Although the differences seem to be partly political, Prothero clearly believes that a tighter investigation might have nabbed Ridgway shortly after the first bodies were discovered in the Green River in 1982 and, surely, no later than 1987 when Ridgway was finally questioned and his house searched.
But Prothero, who along with the other members of the defense team and Norm Maleng's prosecution team, was one of KCBA's Attorneys of the Year for 2003, saves his most biting - and delightful - criticisms for the FBI and its serial killer "science." The mousy, often tearful, unassuming man, with the big glasses and the doughy face, befuddled and confounded an FBI profiler sent to interview him because he could not be made to fit the mold. The serial killer profile "is what it is," the FBI tells us, and cannot, will not be circumscribed by the protestations of a killer who, for example, insists that he did not collect "trophies" from his victims. Ridgway, who by all accounts actually told the truth about this, took jewelry from his victims, but often left it scattered around his workplace to be found by female employees. They often wore it - rather than turning it in - much to Ridgway's delight.
The one true insight comes very early on and that is into Prothero's motivation, not Ridgway's. In my days as a reporter on the crime and courthouse beat, I once asked a public defender how he could defend people who he knew were guilty of the crimes with which they were charged. His response was simple, yet profound: "Even the guilty have constitutional rights." Prothero follows the same credo and it is an admirable one.
By far, the largest portion of the book is given over to the six months Ridgway spent in the "bunker" at Boeing Field, being interrogated incessantly by members of the Green River Task Force after his defense team, faced with the mounting evidence against their client, decided to cut a controversial deal with Maleng to spare Ridgway's life. This section is titled "The Talk," where much is revealed, but also where Prothero's extensive use of verbatim transcripts is awkward. Fittingly, the next, much shorter concluding part is called "The Truth." The former section relates Ridgway's words; the latter, Prothero's.
"The Truth" is a fitting appellation for Prothero's sign-off because Ridgway, despite all the murders he confessed to, never really told the whole truth, which ultimately stymies Prothero's efforts to live up to the promise of his book's title. For example, the book's greatest revelations - that Ridgway likely killed at least one other woman before his "first" victim was found in the Green River in July 1982 and that Ridgway continued to kill until 1998 - are never fully explored, in part because Ridgway was not our could not be cajoled into coming forth with more information. Similarly, although Ridgway stated it once - and the investigators and profilers firmly believed prior to Ridgway's arrest - that he "hated" prostitutes, this is not borne out by the fact that he frequented prostitutes before he started killing and let many more go than he killed during his spree.
We don't get beyond the surface because Ridgway never revealed the details, despite several attempts by the investigators to get at them. Ridgway, who had spent so many years lying about, hiding from and mentally suppressing what he had done, simply professed that he did not remember. Prothero honestly presents this as the incredible assertion that it is. "The Truth," as Prothero tells us, is that the truth about Gary Ridgway is as elusive as the man himself.
If you think, as I do, of a large ball of string when you consider the term "unraveling," two images come to mind after reading Defending Gary. By the end of the book, either the ball is only half unwound and there is something yet to be revealed or it is completely unwound and, like a true ball of string, there is nothing inside. I sense the latter to be the true case here. Prothero, the prosecutors, the shrinks and the detectives questioned, probed, dug and ultimately found, inside the mind of the Green River Killer, that there was - in the immortal words of Gertrude Stein - no there there.
As Prothero writes:
Over the years before he went to prison, many people had offered theories as to why the Green River Killer had killed so many. It was abundantly clear that Gary himself did not really know. Whenever he was asked the "why" question, he could only focus on the slights and angers he had received in his life-at school, at work, from his wives-but nothing he'd endured really served to explain the origin of the murderous rage that had animated him.
Why? There is not and never can be a logical, satisfactory answer to why Gary murdered. There are clues that lead to theories and speculation, but no correct, definitive answer. Nothing where one would say, "Oh. Yes. I see. I understand now."
This may be the book's ultimate secret, its true revelation.
Ridgway's "reasons" for killing 50, 60, 70, 80 - who knows how many - prostitutes ring hollow. All we are told - all that was learned - was that Ridgway was "angry" at women, an emotion that was triggered by either:
(a) what may or may not have been a pseudo-Oedipal relationship with his mother; (b) a general feeling of inadequacy toward women; and/or (c) his divorce from his second wife. Killing, he said, gave him power and control that he did not have in his own life, and he liked it - it gave him a thrill. Prostitutes, whom he had long "dated," were easy prey, whose deaths or disappearances were less likely to be vigorously investigated.
As Ridgway said, "I liked to kill and could get away with it." Was there more to it than that? For some reason, we want there to be, we (almost) need there to be. But Gary Ridgway, a man of many complex layers, was down deep a simple man whose mental processing - much like a hungry animal's - was not complex. It seems that Ridgway, at least, did not need more reason than that. And that is, perhaps, the scariest thought of all.
Gene Barton is the editor of the Bar Bulletin. He is a shareholder at Karr Tuttle Campbell in Seattle whose practice emphasizes general litigation. He can be reached at 206-224-8030 or gbarton@karrtuttle.com.
