Serial Killer Investigations (38 page)

In his hometown of El Paso, on the Texas-Mexico border, acquaintances said Ramirez had become a Satanist in negative reaction to Bible-study classes, and that he had spent his teens as a loner, smoking marihuana and listening to heavy metal music.

In spite of his own desire to plead guilty, his lawyers entered a plea of not guilty. The defence strategy was to play for delays, and the case came to trial only after three and a half years, in October 1988. Ramirez was finally sentenced to death in November 1999, telling the court, ‘You maggots make me sick.’

At a second trial in San Francisco, he was besieged by enthusiastic female groupies who lined up to visit him in jail. He married one of his admirers in October 1996.

The kind of good fortune that identified Richard Ramirez from a single fingerprint failed to favour the police in the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, which illustrates the difficulty of capturing an elusive criminal in a crowded urban area. In a deal to save himself from the death penalty, he offered to give the details of 59 murders. In fact, he admitted that the actual number was closer to 90.

The first corpse was discovered in the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, on 15 July 1982, in Washington State, and was identified as a 16-year old prostitute, Wendy Coffield.

The second, 23-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as ‘Dub’, was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute. Her body was found on 12 August 1982, also in the Green River. Between then and 21 March 1984, 40 victims were found in the Seattle-Tacoma area, many from the strip round Sea-Tac airport, known as a haunt of prostitutes.

Within three days of the finding of Debra Bonner, Dave Reichert, the detective in charge of the case, heard that two more bodies had been found in the Green River. Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks. They were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub Bonner had been found, and had almost certainly been there at the time.

As Reichert walked along the bank towards the place where Dub had been found, he discovered another body. Like the other two, she was black, and was later identified as 16-year-old Opal Mills. The fact that rigor mortis had not yet disappeared meant that she had been left there in the past two days. Which in turn meant that if the police had kept watch on the river, the killer would have been caught.

It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history.

The next—and perhaps the worst—occurred two days later, when a local TV station announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, thus destroying all chance of catching the killer on a return visit.

No less than 26 women vanished in 1983, and the remains of eight of them were found near Sea-Tac airport or close by. In March, special investigator Bob Keppel, known for his brilliant work on the Ted Bundy case, was asked to write a report on the investigation. It was devastating, with hundreds of examples of incompetence and failure to follow up on leads. For example, when the driving licence of one victim, Marie Malvar, was found at the airport, and the police notified, they did not even bother to collect it—although it might well have contained the killer’s fingerprint.

In 1984, four victims were found together on Auburn West Hill, six more in wooded areas along State Route 410, and two near Tigard, Oregon, the latter giving rise to the speculation that the killer had moved. In January, a Green River Task Force of 36 investigators was formed, with a $2 million budget. (By 1988 the bill would have reached $13 million.)

Among the hundreds of suspects interviewed by the police was Gary Leon Ridgway, 35, a short, mild-looking man with fishlike lips, who worked for the Kenworth Truck Plant and was known to pick up hookers—he even admitted being obsessed by them. He also confessed to choking a prostitute in 1982, but claimed this was because she bit him.

By 1986, with the investigation stalled, Ridgway’s file was reopened, and his ex-wife interviewed about his preference for sex in the open, often near the Green River. Ridgway was placed under surveillance. And still women disappeared—although no longer with quite the same frequency.

And so throughout the 1990s, the case marked time, while Reichert, the chief investigator, admitted that his obsession with the killer had caused serious problems in his marriage.

Since genetic fingerprinting had first been used in 1988 to convict the South Side Rapist, Timothy Spencer, it had led to the solution of many murders. The main problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old. In 2001, a major breakthrough came when the Washington State crime lab acquired the equipment to extract usable DNA from old samples and multiply the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats. Now a major review of samples of semen evidence began. And by September 2001, it had paid off. Semen samples, taken from Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, and Carol Christensen, three of the earliest victims, proved to be from Gary Ridgway. Paint fragments and fibre evidence taken from the grave of Debra Estes in 1988 were also linked to Ridgway. When Ridgway was finally arrested on 30 November 2001, he was charged with four counts of murder.

At first pleading innocent, he later agreed to change his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty.

Ridgway’s account of how he became a serial killer occupies the most fascinating chapter of Reichert’s book
Chasing the Devil.
As with so many killers, the problems seem to have started with a domineering mother. Born in 1949, he was a chronic bed-wetter, and she would drag him out of bed and parade him in front of his brothers, and then make him stand naked in a tub of cold water. His father seems to have been a timid nonentity. But as an employee of a mortuary he strongly influenced his son’s fantasies by describing at length interrupting someone having sex with a corpse. Ridgway began to fantasise about this. When he saw his mother sunbathing he had imagined having sex with her, but now he dreamed of killing her and violating the body. All this seems to imply some inbuilt or genetic tendency to sexual violence.

Like so many serial killers he was sadistic to animals, and once killed a cat by locking it in a refrigerator. He also claimed that, as a teenager, he drowned a little boy by wrapping his legs around him and pulling him under the water. And later he would stab and injure another boy, because, he said, he ‘wanted to know what it was like to kill someone’, although he was never caught.

Sent to the Philippines as a sailor, he began to use prostitutes, and they quickly became a lifelong obsession.

He had discovered he enjoyed choking when he was quarrelling with his second wife, Marcia, and wrapped his arm round her neck from behind (a method also used by the Boston Strangler). In addition he enjoyed tying her up for sex. In 1975 they had a son, Matthew, whom he adored. A religious phase lasted until 1980, when they divorced. But during their marriage, he still used prostitutes.

He embarked on killing them after his divorce. Because he seemed a ‘milquetoast’ they felt no alarm about him, and allowed him to get behind them. He often took them back to his house, had sex, and then killed them. Later, he found he preferred to kill them first and have sex with the bodies. He also confessed to revisiting bodies several times for more sex.

On one occasion, he even took his son with him in his pickup truck when he went into the woods with a prostitute; when the boy asked what had happened to her, Ridgway told him she lived nearby and had decided to walk home.

He even admitted to a scheme—never carried out—to overpower a prostitute and then impale her with an upright pole in her vagina—a favourite practice of the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

And so this apparently harmless little man was able to carry on killing for many years. Reichert emphasises that Ridgway was full of self-pity, regarding himself as the helpless victim of these sinister urges.

On 5 November 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 murders, and received 48 life sentences.

Joel Rifkin bore a certain physical resemblance to Gary Ridgway and, like him, had a curious urge to kill the prostitutes that so fascinated him.

In late June 1993, soon after dawn, two New York state troopers patrolling Long Island’s Southern State Parkway noticed that a station wagon ahead of them lacked a license plate. When they signalled it to stop, it swerved off the freeway into the streets of Wantaugh, New York. The troopers pursued—reaching speeds of 90 miles an hour—with sirens wailing. Five additional police cars joined the chase before the station wagon veered out of control and hit a telephone pole. The driver proved to be bespectacled 34-year-old Joel Rifkin. He claimed to have no explanation for his wild flight, but when the troopers noticed a foul order emanating from the car, they checked the back of the wagon. There, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the naked, decomposing corpse of a woman. She was a 22-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani, who had vanished three days earlier. Rifkin confessed to strangling her as they had intercourse, and taking her back to the house in East Meadow, Long Island, where he lived with his mother and sister.

It was hot weather and the corpse began to decompose quickly, so he decided to dump it among some bushes on rough ground near the local airport. And he went on to admit that he had made a habit of picking up prostitutes and strangling them—17 in all. (The police decided the number was actually 18, and that Rifkin had simply lost count.)

Rifkin was an unemployed landscape gardener, and he had been picking up prostitutes on average three times a week since he was 18. In his bedroom, police found victims’ ID cards, driving licences, credit cards, and piles of women’s underwear: panties, bras, and stockings. In the garage, which smelt of decaying flesh, they found the panties of his last victim, Tiffany Bresciani.

As information about Rifkin began to emerge, it became clear that—once more—he was basically an inadequate. An illegitimate child, he had been adopted a few weeks after his birth in January 1959 by a Jewish couple, Ben and Jeanne Rifkin, who also adopted a girl.

The children seemed to have been well treated, but Joel was backward at school; he mumbled, walked with hunched shoulders, and was dyslexic. (As with Bundy, there was probably a lack of ‘bonding’ with his mother immediately after birth.) His schoolfellows called him ‘turtle’ and made fun of him. When he left home he tried various jobs, on one occasion working in a record store, but he was usually late, and would turn up with rumpled clothes and dirty fingernails.

Rifkin’s dream was to become a famous writer, and it could be argued that he had the right kind of preparation—a certain amount of childhood and adolescent frustration often seems to be good for writers. Rifkin spent hours writing poetry in his bedroom. But a few half-hearted attempts at further education fell through because he had no ability to concentrate. He began to work as a landscape gardener, but with such inefficiency that he usually lost his customers within days.

He was already in his late twenties when his stepfather was diagnosed as suffering from prostate cancer, and committed suicide because he could not bear the pain. Jeanne Rifkin was shattered and went into a depression.

Not long after, Rifkin met an attractive blonde in a coffee shop; he was scribbling, and they began a casual conversation; he was impressed when she told him she was writing a film script.

He told her—untruthfully—that he was also writing a film script, and that he was a university student. When she took a small apartment, she even invited him to move in, to help her with her script. Rifkin had hoped that this was the beginning of a love affair; but she refused even to let him kiss her. A few weeks later, she tired of his laziness and untidiness and threw him out. After Rifkin’s arrest it was reported that she had worked as a streetwalker, and was suffering from AIDS, although it is not clear whether he was aware of either of those facts.

What is certain is that he began to kill prostitutes in 1989, picking them up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many prostitutes turned him down because he looked and smelled peculiar. But one with whom he had sex on two occasions said he seemed perfectly ordinary and normal, and made no odd sexual demands. Another prostitute, however, refused when he asked for oral sex.

Rifkin continued to commit murder after murder for almost five years, killing 17 or 18 prostitutes, many of them drug addicts. He may well have had sex with the corpses since he often took them home and kept them for days before he disposed of them. One body that he tossed on waste ground near JFK Airport was still there, more than a year later, under a mattress, when he mentioned it after his arrest. Other bodies were placed in metal drums and thrown in the East River.

Rifkin’s motivation has never been adequately explained. What is clear is that he was, like so many serial killers, an inept underachiever, a person who found life too much for him. As one of his schoolmates told a reporter, he was a lifelong loser. We can only assume that he killed because violence satisfied some long-held fantasy, and because it gave him a bizarre sense of achievement, a feeling that, in spite of a habit of failure, he was a ‘somebody’, a multiple killer, a man to be reckoned with.

Yet soon after his arrest, one of the policemen involved in the chase commented that he had probably wanted to be caught, since driving with a corpse in a car without license plates seems to be asking for trouble.

On 9 May 1994, Rifkin was sentenced to 203 years in prison.

Probably the most widely publicised American case of the 1990s was that of Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual killer who murdered and cannibalised 17 young men.

Dahmer, born in 1960, was arrested on 22 July 1991. Late that evening, a slim black man ran out of the Oxford Apartments in a rundown area of Milwaukee, shouting for help, and waved a police car to a stop. He was wearing a handcuff on one wrist, and explained that a white youth was trying to kill him.