Letter from a serial killer: 19 years ago, Ridgway offered clues

[Barrett808]

Letter from a serial killer
19 years ago, Ridgway offered tantalizing clues
By MIKE BARBER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Nineteen years ago the Green River Killer mailed me a road map of his murders.

I still have a copy of it close at hand in a tattered file at my desk. It's a two-page letter Gary Ridgway sent, unsigned, to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in February 1984. From his confessions released on Wednesday, it is now clear that the letter was Ridgway's brazen attempt to throw off investigators. It was the only known time he surfaced to communicate through the news media.

As Ridgway bloodlessly admitted guilt to his horrors in open court Wednesday, I opened my aging manila "Green River working file" for the umpteenth time in two decades to retrieve the cryptic, poorly typed letter.

Its tantalizing title leaped from the summary of evidence against Ridgway presented in a court this week. Prosecutors called it "highly incriminating evidence" of the horrors to which Ridgway confessed.

"What you need to know about the green river man," the letter reads. I received it two months after the launching of an enhanced Green River Task Force that the new King County sheriff, Vern Thomas, had set up. The official body count then was 21. But it was actually 47, as remains that were discovered over the next three years would show.

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http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/147324_ridgewaypenpal07.html

[flamingyouth]

1. It's not uncommon for serial killers to contact the media

But I wonder how this FBI profiler feels now about dismissing this letter outright at the time?