PFN Monaghan
The Real Housewives (and Children) of Serial Killers
What the Families Saw, What They Missed and Why.
JUNE 2026
We want serial killers to look monstrous. To be avoidable. But the worst killers, the most prolific, those who killed for years and sometimes for generations, were steady workers and good neighbours. They were family men. They built treehouses for their stepdaughters, painted trucks and led Boy Scout troops. These accounts show what it is like to live with, and to love, a person devoted to torture and death.
N
orwood Park was a peaceful neighbourhood at Chicago’s northwestern edge. Children rode bikes on weekends. Most residents were hardworking, blue-collar families of Eastern European ancestry. On the
20th of December 1978, the peace was shattered.
Police searched a tidy red-brick house. In the crawl space underneath, evidence technicians shone their torches over the muck. One stuck an entrenching tool into the wet dirt. He wrenched it out. Attached to the blade was a human forearm, badly decomposed.
The property - 8213 West Summerdale Drive - was owned by a chubby, pug-faced 36-year-old building contractor named John Wayne Gacy. By the time the excavation was over, authorities would pull 26 bodies from the crawl space, find three buried in the yard near the garage and drag four more from a nearby river.
The victims had been tortured. Some had been drowned, revived then strangled. Some had underwear stuffed in their mouths or throats. Others had been beaten and burned with cigarettes.
"The devil lives here," an investigator told a reporter on the pavement outside. Carole Hoff saw the remark on the news. She had lived in that house too. She’d slept there almost every night for four years. So had her two young daughters, April and Tammy, who knew Gacy as their stepfather.
When Gacy went to trial for murder, Carole took the stand to testify in his favour. In her mid-thirties, she was tender, intelligent and neatly dressed for court.
“John was gentle,” she said. He was a good provider. She blamed their divorce on his overwork, and his bisexuality. Even after their breakup, they’d dated platonically. As Carole told the court, “We were looking forward to the time we’d be together again.”
“Sitting here in this courtroom today,” said Gacy’s lead lawyer, “how do you feel about John?” Wiping her eyes, Carole looked at her ex-husband, who wept too. “My heart goes out to him.” The judge called a recess.
Three households. Three families. Three killers. They hid in suburban modesty. But since they had to conceal their crimes from their families, their opportunities to kill were limited by their domestic duties. FBI profiler John Douglas described the family obligations of serial killers as a paradox: the family is both alibi and frustration.
The families in this story lived inside that paradox. They missed, ignored or excused the warning signs. Only in retrospect did the outbursts and the secrets go from odd to sinister. Because when he's pouring coffee, giving his daughter a Christmas present or driving his wife to work, the monster doesn't look like a monster.
GACY
Newly married Carole (nee Hoff) and John Gacy, July 1972.
Source: Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
John Gacy was back in Chicago. Carole remembered him from high school. They’d been friends, and had even gone on a few dates before he’d moved away. When they were reintroduced in May 1971, more than a decade had passed since she’d last seen him.
He spoke with a matchless patter, a mixture of cheer and bluster. He told her he was head chef at Bruno’s, a late-night Chicago. He’d spent the past ten years, he said, doing all sorts of jobs. He’d managed Iowa’s most successful KFC restaurants. He’d sold shoes in Nevada and had become a company president there. He was still friends with the big casino bosses in Las Vegas. He was friends, too, with players from the Blackhawks, Chicago’s pro ice hockey team, who often ate at Bruno’s. He took Carole to their games, using tickets he said the players had given him.
He seemed smart and worldly.
Industrious, Gacy ran a contracting business called PDM: Painting, Decorating and Maintenance. He helped colleagues with small construction jobs, pouring concrete or painting their homes.
Carole lived in a small apartment with her two daughters. Welfare paid the rent but little else. When Gacy invited her to move in with him after two months of dating, she gladly accepted.
Bruno’s was a few blocks from the Chicago Loop, a gritty central district. The Loop’s trains, bus stations, arcades and diners made it a magnet for teenage runaways. Gacy derided them. Especially the effeminate ones. They were fairies, or queers. Fruits. Lowlifes.
He scorned only one other person with such intensity, and only once: his ex-wife. She’d divorced him, so he couldn’t visit the two children he’d had with her. They were dead to him.
But he wanted a big family. As New Year’s celebrations inaugurated 1972, Carole and John slept together, and she soon discovered she was pregnant. Gacy was overjoyed. When she miscarried that February, he became her anchor, driving her to the hospital and staying by her side. When Carole needed pillows, he brought them. When she needed painkillers, he harangued the nurses, then the doctors. He talked them into capitulation.
At home, he soothed her, admitting he’d been glum and worried but promising they’d have more children. His restless, playful audacity lifted her spirits.
They were married on the 1st of July 1972, receiving hundreds of guests at the house on West Summerdale. John worked the room, slapping backs, refilling drinks, dominating conversations and boasting about how he’d saved money by cooking the food himself.
As the newlyweds settled in, John redecorated the house, furnishing and painting a room for Carole’s two girls. Three-year-old April started calling him “Daddy” and Tammy, two years younger, showed the same fondness.
As summer turned to autumn, Carole noticed a foul smell, strongest in the girls’ room. April said she saw shadows moving there at night. They were ghosts, she whispered. Carole asked John about the smell. He said a sewage pipe had broken in the crawl space.
By early winter, the smell had spread through the house. While helping the girls pack for a trip to visit relatives, Carole saw tiny black insects flying around in their bedroom. She searched the room but found nothing. Worried, she went back to John.
“It’s just dead mice in the crawl space,” he said. “I’ll go down and set a few traps.” It was a strangely absent remark.
“John,” said Carole, “if the mice are already dead, how are they going to get into the traps? You have to go down there and get them out.”
He mumbled an excuse and went to the garage. Carole and the girls left for a week. When they came back, the bugs were gone.
John quit the restaurant to work full time as the head of PDM. Expanding the business, he stopped doing handywork for ex-colleagues and friends, and started larger renovations and structural work at drugstores and chain supermarkets.
He hired teenage boys. He’d demean them and scream at them. They’d show up, work for a few days and then vanish. For each disappearance, John had an explanation: one kid tried shaking him down. Another one went back to Texas. Another, he fired for piss poor work. Another quit. He always found more employees, and they were always teenage boys.
He’d always kept long hours, but PDM stretched them further. Soon, he was leaving the house at midnight, and coming home before sunrise. He’d sleep for an hour, shower, change and then head out again. Or he’d come back before dawn and hang around with his young workers in the garage. His schedule left Carole isolated and lonely. Their sex life dwindled. When she questioned his lack of interest, he’d tell her he was tired.
A clattering woke Carole at 5 am. She heard music playing from somewhere outside. The garage door rolled shut and then, silence. She got up and went into the living room, turned on the television and lowered the volume.
A moment later, someone opened the back door. Too tired to be startled, she turned her head.
There stood John, looking shocked. “What are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Carole. “It’s nice waiting in the dark, trying to figure out what the hell you’re doing down in the garage.”
He glared at her. “I forgot something in here,” he said. He paced between the kitchen and the same back door he'd come in from, then went outside again, taking nothing with him.
Carole jumped up, walked to the kitchen and pulled back the curtains. Through the window, she saw John and a slender teenaged boy with blonde hair hurrying from the garage to his car. Both got inside and John drove off into the pre-dawn darkness.
Twenty hours later he was back - without the boy.
He walked into the bedroom. Carole sat up in bed. “Normal people don’t do business this late,” she said.
John sighed. “I’m out looking for contracts. I’m trying to find people to work with. I’m running the business for you and the girls.”
“Why are you always hiring boys? Why don’t you hire any adults? What are you doing with them in the garage?”
“You dumb bitch! You’re not a fucking detective!” He grabbed a glass from the bedside table and smashed it against the floor. “If you don’t have proof, don’t plant seeds!”
He stormed out. Crying, Carole shrank back, pulling the blankets around herself.
Around Carole, John’s moods could change in minutes, swinging from calm to ferocious rage and back again. He’d call her dumb, dense, stupid. She was proud and when his words stung, she’d try to sting him back.
But he never shouted at April or Tammy. If they heard him yelling and he noticed, he’d pivot, making jokes and coo them into tranquillity.
When he decided to make them a treehouse, he drew meticulous sketches and wrote an inventory. “You’ll be able to play outside,” he said as he worked, the girls skipped and played behind him in the yard. He paused to catch Tammy by the waist, hoisting her onto his shoulder. He lifted April up too, and they squealed in giddy glee. To their delight, when he was done with the treehouse, he built them an above-ground swimming pool.
By 1975, the third year of their marriage, John rarely touched her anymore. So Carole was glad when, one weekend, he came home, kissed her neck, took her by the hand and guided her to the bedroom. They had sex, and he rubbed her back. She lay quiet, bathing in his tenderness.
He broke the silence. “Do you know something, Carole? I’m bisexual.”
She was confused. To her, the term had a scientific cadence. “What do you mean? What does bisexual mean?”
He gave a long explanation she didn’t understand. “To be a real man, you need to have sex with another man first.”
He kept talking, exhausting her, citing phrases from books she didn’t know, and quotes from people he claimed were experts. Then he punctuated the monologue: “I’m not a queer. I’m not gay. I’m bisexual.”
She sat up. “How can you just say that? How do you know?”
“Because I am,” he said. He looked sullen. The tenderness was gone.
She couldn’t tell if he was joking or faking. Trying to make sense of it just left her baffled.
The confusion followed her into the next week. While cleaning the house, she discovered a stack of magazines tucked behind one of the bins. She pulled them out. They had titles like ’Tight Teenagers’ and ‘Golden Boys’. Their covers showed taut, muscled, naked men.
Thinking of John’s earlier words - “don’t plant seeds” - she put them back.
But the house kept yielding secrets. In the bedroom, she tugged the corner of the sheets on the bed, and as she pulled them away, a small red cloth flipped onto the floor: a pair of women’s underpants. They weren’t hers, and were caked with a dry material. Disgusted, she tucked them into a drawer. She stayed awake until the early morning. When she heard John opening the front door, she grabbed the underwear and strode out to meet him.
She held them up. “Where do these come from?”
John swiped them from her hand. “They’re not mine. They were a gift.”
She laughed. “Bullshit.”
“Carole, I swear to you, I’m not having relations with other women.”
She thought of the young men on the magazine covers. “Then you’re having them with boys.”
Despite his bulk, he was fast. He darted forward, grabbed her arm and threw her against the wall. She hit it shoulder-first and collapsed to the floor, but scrambled straight back up. “I’ll burn the garage down!”
“Go ahead,” said John. “Fine. Real smart. Burn the fucking garage, you’ll fucking go to jail.”
He moved to leave, then turned back. He grabbed her arm again. Staring at her, he dropped his voice. “Don’t ever go down there again,” he said, then walked out. She heard his car start, and the tyres screeching. She ran into the bedroom and closed the door.
He'd never physically attacked her before. For the rest of the night, she wavered between fearing his return, and admonishing herself for confronting him.
He was gone for another day. When she next saw him, he was sitting on the sofa.
“John?” she said. He didn’t respond. She took a step closer. His eyes were half-open, locked on something she couldn’t see.
He slept on the sofa for months after the altercation. That was his choice, not Carole’s. But on Mother’s Day 1975, he fawned over her as he’d done early in their relationship. They got into bed together. When they were done, he said, “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Carole smiled. “Thanks John.”
He shifted, and put his feet on the floor. Then he said, “That’s the last time we’ll have sex.”
Carole rolled over, staring at him. Gone was the happy look he’d had all day. Gone too was the enthusiasm. He was, suddenly, joyless.
“How can you say that?” she said.
“Because I did."
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said.
“No,” said John. He got up and trundled to the shower. He looked heavier than he had when they’d met. He looked older.
Their intimacy had long been decaying but the declaration sounded, to Carole, like the definite end. She agonised about her husband’s life and her place within it. She’d once been central to that life. After Mother’s Day, she was almost a stranger.
She knew he was stressed. He was exhausting himself. She admired his efforts to turn PDM into a corporation. She admired his volunteer work - dressing as a clown to entertain children in hospital - and the political fundraisers and parades he helped organise. But domestic life couldn’t continue this way. If it could not be fully revived, he, at least, could stop his mood swings, his rages, his insults and his bizarre pronouncements. He had to stop working so often. She and the girls relied on John. But he had to change. If he didn’t, she’d leave.
"My heart goes out to him."
When she told him so, he suggested that they work together, as partners at PDM. He’d teach her to drive, she could collect supplies, and he could do the physical labour. Carole consented, on one condition: she wouldn’t be yelled at. She was sick of being called dumb.
Weeks into the arrangement, he started screaming about how she couldn’t balance the cheque book. She demanded a divorce.
To her surprise, he wasn’t bothered. He handed her his lawyers’ phone number and even helped box up her things. He drove them to her mother’s place, where she’d stay until she could find somewhere larger.
Post-marriage, the relationship was more relaxed. It felt like a reset, a return to four years earlier. Carole still worried about him. He looked as if he were aging a year every month. She pestered him about PDM. He said he was trying to slow down. He wanted her back, he said. Though hesitant, she agreed to date him as a friend.
Despite everything that had happened, Carole thought John was a good father. She kept seeing him on holidays and weekends.
She was gladdened when he called on a spring day in 1978, his mood, apparently, having lifted. He suggested a trip to Wisconsin to visit his relatives. Bring the kids, he urged.
An hour later, as the girls splashed around the shore of a lake, Carole and John picnicked in the sun.
They headed back into Chicago that evening. The light was waning, as Gacy pulled into the driveway at West Summerdale. April and Tammy were asleep on the back seat.
“I have to show you something,” said Gacy, looking cheerful. “I remodelled the kitchen.”
Carole followed him inside. He was jolly and animated as he pointed out the new fittings and the new floor. She looked around, approving with a smile. But it stank. It was the same smell that had plagued the house earlier. The smell that had advanced and retreated, that had brought with it bugs and April’s whispers of ghosts, and that still marked, in Carole’s mind, the beginning of their marriage’s descent.
John stood expectantly. “Well, what do you think?”
“It’s sure a nice kitchen,” Carole said, “but that odor, it seems like it’s coming from the sink now.”
Six months later Gacy was arrested.
The end of 8213 West Summerdale; police excavations continued through into January 1979, a month after Gacy's arrest.
Source: Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
He was charged with 33 murders - more, at that time, than any other person in American history. Gacy entered a not guilty plea. His lawyers argued he was not culpable because he was insane. The jury disagreed. He was convicted and sentenced to death. The house at 8213 West Summerdale was razed, and the land itself levelled to flat dirt.
Gacy was executed in 1994. Two years after his death, a grown Tammy Hoff appeared on a TV news show. She told the interviewer Gacy wasn’t the man the media had made him out to be. He’d been a wonderful father, she said, loving, giving and kind.
Carole remarried and lived in anonymity. In one of the few interviews she gave after Gacy’s death, she said he had always been good to the girls: “I can’t say enough about that. The girls still refer to him as their dad.”
But, she added, “He’ll be haunting me for the rest of my life.”
RIDGWAY
The monster doesn't look like a monster. Gary Ridgway and his third wife Judith (nee Mawson) posing in front of their motorhome, circa 1989.
Source: King County Sheriff’s Department / Investigation Discovery (ID)
T
he Green River Killer took John Wayne Gacy's place as America's most prolific serial killer. His victims were vulnerable women and girls, mostly runaways and sex workers whose circumstances had forced them to
the streets. There, he hunted them. He beat one woman with the butt of a rifle. Naked, she grasped for the mace spray in her bag. He took it, and laughed as he sprayed it into her face. By the 30th of November 2001, the killer had eluded police for two decades. He’d wrecked families, caused incalculable trauma and then disappeared. Or so most Seattleites believed. Judith Ridgway was one of them.
At three that morning, she woke as her husband did. It was still dark. Cool air seeped in through the window. He went downstairs. In her drowse, Judith listened as he poured his thermos full of coffee. A sequence of beeps told her he was setting the timer for 9 am, when she’d wake. He did it every weekday. She heard him open the fridge, and take out his lunchbox. He laughed. He’d found the little love note she’d pasted to the lid. She closed her eyes again. She felt him kiss her on the cheek. The familiar sounds of his departure - his footsteps moving down the stairs, the front door opening and closing - followed her into sleep.
That afternoon she was in the garage, sorting clothes and thinking about Gary. He’d soon stop working. They’d travel the country in their new campervan, the most recent in a series of home and vehicular upgrades they’d been making throughout their married life. Retirement would be an endless honeymoon.
A car stopped in the driveway outside. Doors clanged open and closed, interrupting her reverie. She went into the house, drew back a curtain and looked outside. A man and a woman climbed out of a bland late-model sedan and marched to the front door. Judith fumbled it open. The pair standing on her porch were detectives, they said, showing their badges. They wanted to speak with her.
She felt frail in the physical contrast: at five foot one, she was shorter than both. She wore her shabby work t-shirt. They wore khakis and dress shirts. They had neat haircuts. Her hair was long and messy. Sweat stuck the long blonde strands to her forehead.
She let them inside.Their first queries were banal, but soon came harsher ones, and with them, frightening words: “choked”, “testifying”, “court”, “warrants”. Judith told them Gary was understanding, gentle, soft-spoken, always smiling: “He makes me feel like a new woman every day.”
The phone rang. Judith looked at the detectives, who directed her to answer it. She did, said, “I’m busy”, and hung up. It rang again. The detective unplugged it. There was a knocking at the front door. Judith opened it. On the porch, a cameraman aimed a lens at her face, and a reporter yelled questions. One of the detectives bounded to the door, pushed the reporters back, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
“What’s going on?” Judith said. Her muscles twitched, and her mouth tasted like metal. She stumbled to the sofa and sat down. “Don’t I have a right to know?”
"Judith,” said the female detective, “are you familiar with the Green River killings?"
Judith was, and said so.
"I know this is probably shocking to you, but Gary's DNA was left inside victims." Meaning, added the detective, "Gary had sex with them."
“That’s not possible,” said Judith. The daylight felt too bright, another sensory alarm: she’d been seizure-free since she met Gary. She willed him to appear, but he didn’t, so she gripped her arms and dug her fingernails in, telling herself to hold on. To stay conscious.
“Gary,” she managed to say, “is the kindest man I’ve ever met.”
The detectives told her Gary had been arrested that morning. He was the Green River Killer. "Let's get a bag packed," they said. "We're going to take you to a hotel."
For most people in the Pacific Northwest, 20 years of terror was over. For Judith, it was starting.
Judith Mawson’s adult life had been a search for freedom and safety. It had yielded only fetters and cruelty.
Severe epilepsy interrupted her schooling. Throughout her adolescence and young adulthood, she was abused. Her first husband charmed her into marriage, exploiting her vulnerabilities. He was pompous, dramatic and domineering, a violent egomaniac. The marriage lasted 19 years, and Judith gave birth to two daughters. As teenagers they each bore two daughters of their own.
In 1984, she divorced and moved, trading the ostensible propriety of Seattle’s leafy northern neighbourhoods for SeaTac, a noisier working-class cluster of suburbs to the south. She found an apartment close to the SeaTac Strip, a ten-mile stretch of Pacific Highway South lined by motels, all-night eateries, car lots and gas stations. Wide parking spaces drew drivers in and out of the main flow. Cars idled beside sidewalks. On the Strip, the commercial and the criminal merged. Judith saw the hustle, but not the predation. She saw the drug dealers, the pimps and the prostitutes, but didn't recognise them as such.
As she was starting her new life on the Strip, women were disappearing from the area. Their remains surfaced in the Green River, its tributaries, and throughout Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. Police sometimes found five in a single week. Judith was only distantly aware of the headlines. Her immediate concerns were food, work and rent.
In 1985, Judith turned 40. Her roommate encouraged her to start dating: she’d been divorced for a year, after all. Together, they went to a country-western bar on the Strip, where Judith noticed a muscular man in his thirties.
He introduced himself as Gary Ridgway. He balanced playfulness, old-fashioned politeness, and stability. He owned his own house. He'd painted Kenworth trucks for 16 years. The night ended with them kissing. Cradling her head, he asked, "can I kiss you that way?". He asked if she was comfortable. “Is there anything I can get for you?” His courtesy delighted her.
They dated each weekend for the next month, then Gary invited her to his home. Judith walked to the address he’d given her, eyeing the flat ranch house in SeaTac, a quarter-mile from the Strip.
Walking inside, she saw underlay and subfloor. “Why is the carpet all ripped out?” Lodgers had urinated on it, he said, so he’d torn it out. “Maybe you can help me pick out a new one?”
“I’d love to,” she said.
He hugged her and guided her further inside. One room held a child's bed scattered with toys. It was for Matt, his young son, who stayed on weekends. Gary slept on a mattress in another room. Draped with a loose sheet and blankets, it exuded Gary’s smell - the cologne he wore, Old Spice. The smell evoked everything she loved about him. It reinforced her adoration.
On that mattress, two weeks later, they first had sex. It was serene. Gary was as attentive and polite in bed, as he was out of it. When finished, he turned onto his back. Judith noticed the scar on his left arm, a mesh of elevated, purple and white tissue.
“Is that why you always wear long sleeved shirts?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “One time I was working on a car, and it caught fire.”
She imagined a dreadful industrial conflagration, a terrified Gary trying to escape from the flames.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Gary, “I really don’t like to talk about it.”
She soon moved in, at his invitation. They chose a carpet together and installed it, then, they hauled her bed frame inside and laid his mattress on top.
Judith worked at a daycare centre. On a busy Wednesday afternoon in April 1987, three men entered. They were burly and wore suits, so drew immediate attention. They approached Judith and commanded her to a car outside. Judith wondered if they were kidnapping her, but was too petrified to resist.
As they guided Judith into the backseat, they told her they were plainclothes police. One of the men drove down the highway and parked in a vacant side street. He turned to look at Judith. She could see her pale reflection in his mirrored sunglasses. “We’re going to have your boyfriend in custody for a few days,” he said, “for questioning in relation to the Green River killings." They had warrants for the house, his vehicles, his Kenworth locker. They'd take hair and saliva samples. He asked some questions. Judith was too confused and too frightened to attempt any coherent answers. They drove her back to the daycare centre, where they let her out.
Cautioned by the men to stay away from the house for a while, Judith stayed with relatives for three days. She came home to an upheaval. Every drawer had been emptied, the contents heaped on the floors.
That night, Gary strolled in, as nonchalant as if he’d just run an errand. “Sometimes police make mistakes,” he said. He joked about detectives plucking hairs from near his crotch and pushing a cotton ball into his mouth. "But they sent me home, right? Obviously, I'm innocent if they let me go."
It had been a chaotic error. Together, they set about cleaning the mess.
"Gary is the kindest man I've ever met."
The new year marked three years of cohabitation. Judith suggested marriage. Gary liked the idea. At a ceremony on their neighbour's lawn, Judith Mawson became Judith Ridgway. Most guests didn't show, but she was too absorbed in love to really care.
During the reception, she walked over to Gary, who was joking with everyone. "I love you," she said.
Gary said, "I love you too.” To admit it, he always had to be prompted.
They honeymooned on the Oregon coast, stopping at RV parks and resorts. Impelled by wine and the warmth of a hot tub, Judith disclosed her secrets: her first husband's bisexuality; her failure to finish high school. Gary shrugged at both. He hadn't graduated until he was 20. That was in 1969. Shortly after, he was drafted. He talked about Vietnam, the Philippines and naval life. Judith suffered as she pictured it. Young Gary, slow to learn, a tranquil young man bullied by a world that wanted him to kill.
“Oh yeah,” said Gary, “and another thing. I have a kid over there.”
“What?” Judith said. “Another child?”
“Yep,” Gary said. A love child, in Gary’s words, years before Matt was born. “It was really common. Lots of guys have kids over there in Vietnam.”
“Do you know where your child is now?”
“No,” said Gary, “I never stayed in touch.”
He sank back into the water, looking down at his drink. Her astonishment shrank, outweighed by her adoration: here she was, with her new husband, her presence allowing him to confide what must have been painful truths. She thought it beautiful that he felt so safe with her - that she made him feel so safe. He asked her not to tell anyone else about the love child. She promised, and took his hand into hers.
Married life was placid, and Judith enjoyed its routine. At weekends the house filled. Her daughters brought the granddaughters to SeaTac, four girls in all. Gary's son Matt, from an earlier marriage and by then at elementary school, visited too.
Wearing Kenworth t-shirts and hats Gary got from work, the stepfamily went to the zoo, to the Museum of Flight, or on strolls through the wilderness parks alongside Seattle’s rivers.
“It’s great to see you so happy, Mom,” Judith’s daughters said, “Things are finally good for you.”
One Sunday, Gary was called in for overtime. Judith drove Matt to a park. They played chase and hide-and-seek until she was too tired to play anymore. She sat on a bench. Matt sat next to her.
He looked at the grass. "Do you know if Dad's friend came home?"
“Which friend?” Judith asked, combing his hair with her hand.
Matt said he’d been with his dad, as Gary drove along the Strip. Gary had pulled over, and spoken with a woman through the truck window. The woman climbed inside. Matt had fallen asleep. When he woke up, the truck was parked in the woods. He was alone inside it. He’d seen his dad walking back, brushing leaves from his clothes. Matt had asked about the woman. She’d walked home, Gary had supposedly said.
The story lacked details. Matt hadn’t explained when it had happened or even exactly where Gary had dropped the woman off.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” said Judith.
A thundercrack broke overhead. She looked up at the dark grey clouds. Rain started pouring, so she took Matt’s hand and they ran to the car. Driving home, she considered Matt’s tale. He was young. He might have confused events and people. Whatever had or hadn’t happened, Gary was protective. He was always helping people.
The SeaTac Strip, circa 1988.
Source: New Screen Concepts / LBS Communications Archive
Beyond the Kenworth clothing, Gary brought home industrial paraphernalia - earplugs, goggles, facemasks - which he and Judith sold at garage sales. Every transaction, he said, was a chance for a bargain. They agreed the frugality should serve a purpose: in the early 2000s, they'd retire. On anniversaries, they exchanged the same cards from years earlier.
Gary bought, upgraded and sold pickup trucks and RVs. When an ex-girlfriend called needing a mattress, he offered theirs. Judith agreed: they should give it away. It summoned fond memories, but could be replaced. Gary’s thrift was practical. His generosity was fundamental.
He loaded it onto his truck and drove it away.
A fall at the daycare centre injured Judith’s back and confined her to bed for months. She worried that her infirmity might stall their retirement plans, until Gary, caressing her hair, said, “Why don’t you just stay home from now? I can make enough money for both of us.” She called the daycare centre and quit.
In furtherance of their financial goals, they sold the SeaTac house, and bought a fixer-upper in Des Moines, a maritime area still close to Pacific Highway South. They intended to upgrade and sell it.
Gary found condoms on the ground outside.
“This is a family place,” he said, as he walked inside. “There are hookers around here, turning tricks.”
Judith turned away from the dinner she was cooking, and met him at the front door.
Gary scowled. “Someone should do something,” he said.
The smell of char diverted Judith’s attention. She ran back to the kitchen and turned down the stove, but the food was burnt.
“Let’s go out,” said Gary.
They drove to a fast-food outlet on the Strip.
On the way, Judith said, “Gary, what does a prostitute look like? Do I ever see one and not know it?"
“Let me find one for you,” said Gary.
Judith looked through the windows. “It’s that easy?”
“Yep.”
Within half a minute, he gestured over the wheel, toward a woman in high heels and fishnet stockings. "That's one."
"Oh my," said Judith. "Prostitutes are just walking around, dressed like that?"
"Yep.”
On the nights Gary came home early, they'd watch films together.
One scene showed a man brutalising a woman. She felt Gary squirm. He breathed heavily and tears formed in his eyes. "I need a drink," he said, and went to the kitchen; he returned dry-eyed, a glass of water in his hand.
He behaved the same way whenever they watched movies with violent scenes. She ascribed Gary’s reactions to his time in Vietnam. He must have seen similar horrors there.
In 1997, they moved from Des Moines to Auburn, a lush suburb outside of the bustle. The triple-story home was the best reward yet for their years of work and economic prudence. They wouldn’t move again. Auburn was as close to comfort as it was to convenience.
Judith decorated the house with plants, and tended the garden, basking in this wonderful stage of their marriage, surrounded everywhere by shades and tints of green.
On a Friday afternoon in mid-November 2001, Judith answered the phone. A police officer said he had Gary in custody. It had to be a mistake, like 1987.
Hours later, Gary called. "I didn't do nothing wrong”, he said. He asked her to pick him up from a Kmart several miles away. She rushed there.
“Judith, honey,” he said, “they took me in for questions. They thought I was someone else.” He’d been on the Strip, he said, when he’d noticed his truck’s tailgate was open. He’d stopped, and the police had arrested him.
“It’s crazy there, people always getting stopped.” He climbed in the car. His smile allayed her fears, and her questions. She was certain he was telling the truth.
“Let’s get home,” he said.
Her certainty lasted a fortnight. Then, the two detectives took her from her house.
They brought Judith to a hotel, a sprawling five-story building near the airport. They’d be back after they’d searched the house. In the meantime, she wasn’t to speak with reporters.
In her room, Judith turned on the television. She saw her own face in the reports, from the footage taken several hours before. She looked pallid. The same news dominated all channels: the Green River Killer had been caught. He was a truck painter from Auburn, Washington. His name was Gary Ridgway. She couldn’t watch any more.
After a week, the detectives returned her to Auburn. Investigators had cut pieces from every carpet, dismantled the furniture, and excavated holes throughout the backyard. News helicopters circled.
Gary called and denied the murders.
“I believe you, Gary,” she said.
He called again the next day. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “Something I should have told you a long time ago.” His voice was quieter. He sounded contrite. “I have a sex problem.” He compared it to alcoholism. "I did see prostitutes.” But, he said, “I didn't kill them women."
She hung up.
He was a cheater. A liar. She went into the garage, where she’d been when the detectives arrived on the 30th of November. Taking an axe from Gary’s workbench, she grabbed it, and smashed the workbench to pieces, screaming as she swung it.
“Wasn’t I good enough for you, Gary?” Splinters flew. “You bastard!”
His next call was just as depressing. He instructed her to divorce him.
As he told her on the phone, “I don’t want you to get hurt anymore because of this - this thing.”
She tried to sleep. Natural means didn’t work, so she took muscle relaxants and anti-anxiety pills, and swallowed them with wine. Her jangled mind sank into unrestful narcosis. She had nightmares. Gary was stalking her, his eyes lit green. She crept downstairs, opened a box full of clothes, and threw out all the green t-shirts. She abhorred the colour.
Gary pleaded guilty. There would be no trial. But he appeared in court at the end of 2003, two years after his final arrest. Prosecutors read from his confessions.
Judith watched the proceedings on television, comforted by a friend.
Lodgers hadn’t ruined Gary’s carpet at the SeaTac house. He’d thrown it away, because he was paranoid about the fabric linking him to the victims he’d killed on it. The same paranoia drove him to discard the mattress, which had given Judith such comfort, the mattress on which they’d first made love. He’d taken it to the same landfill where he’d earlier disposed of the carpet.
The scar on his left arm wasn’t from a fire. A woman had scratched him as she fought for her life. He'd poured battery acid on the scratches to conceal them.
He had never seen combat. Violent films excited him. The tears were a performance for Judith, and had produced sympathy, the response he wanted.
He'd brought Matt to the Strip as a prop: to allay the fears of the women he intended to murder. Those he killed at the SeaTac house, he first showed Matt’s room. He duped them like he duped Judith. As he knew, they’d think a father couldn’t be a serial killer.
In 1987, he’d given his saliva. It was a joke to him at the time. The sample, on file for fourteen years, matched DNA traces found in the victim’s bodies.
The mid-November arrest and his claims that he’d been mistaken for someone else, were lies. He’d been arrested for soliciting an undercover officer.
He’d killed women, and he’d killed girls. He had no more feeling for the pregnant 16-year-old he’d choked, than he did for the woman so desperate, she’d offered to have sex with him if he gave her food. He killed them both with a brutal vacuity. “I didn’t give a shit about any of them,” he’d said during his confessions.
He claimed to have killed 71 women but is suspected of killing more than 90. Police and prosecutors linked him evidentially with 49 murders. His guilty plea spared him the death penalty but consigned him to perpetual lockdown at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the state’s most secure prison.
For Judith, it was all poison, incomprehensible horror. He retroactively destroyed the happiest years of Judith’s life. He'd chosen her because she was mild, naïve, easy to con. Because she believed, and wanted to believe, that he was good.
After the admissions, Judith told her friend. “My brain can’t understand how the man I loved could be the same man who did those things.”
Gary Ridgway’s own self-insights, when asked what drove him to murder, were less reflective: “I just loved killing women,” he said.