From early age, killer was different, long talks indicate

By Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporter

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The differences between Gary L. Ridgway at 15 and most other high-school boys can be measured by the definitions of two words: stalking and walking.

For Ridgway, who went on to murder at least 48 women as the Green River killer, it seemed harmless to follow girls home from school and entertain violent fantasies about them later. After all, he explained to an FBI profiler during several long interviews last fall, they were going his way so he wasn't really stalking them.

It took some convincing for Ridgway to agree — although it's unclear if he ever actually grasped — that his behavior was abnormal. Eventually, FBI behavioral psychologist Mary Ellen O'Toole had to lay it out for him.

"Mr. Ridgway, I gotta stop ya here and say, 'Listen,' " O'Toole told Ridgway during a marathon interview Nov. 17. "The way that you were developing as a teenager, the things that were goin' through your mind, uh, all the behaviors that you were evidencing at that point in time, there is really no way, no way that you were behaving like 99 percent of the other boys you were with."

By this point in his life, Ridgway had stabbed a young boy he met on the street, possibly drowned another boy in Angle Lake, fantasized about killing his mother and was daydreaming about sex and murder. He was a bed-wetter and an arsonist and had hurt animals — all classic touchstones in the development of serial killers.

Despite being confronted with all this and more, he insisted his teen years were mostly "normal."

"I didn't notice anything different," he said. "It might come out as if, you know, 'Ridgway, were you stalking or were you just walkin' with her?' To me, it was just walking with 'em, and to me, following was just walking."

Ridgway said the fantasies didn't mean anything because he didn't act on them.

O'Toole, however, showed him that he did. He stabbed a young boy one day just for fun, laughing as he told the child he was going to die. The boy recovered.

In the same period, when Ridgway was 14, he recalled, he "dreamed" of drowning a young boy in Angle Lake.
 
Of all his possible crimes, those two — and the possible implication that Ridgway was sexually attracted to boys or children — bother him most.

"What is it that you don't want people to say about you?" O'Toole asked.

"Well, one is, ah, it'll come out the stabbin' of the boy, ah, possible drowning of a boy," he said. "Killing boys is not me. Killing young girls is not me."

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

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