Exorcising a house of bad vibes
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When the detectives came, warrant in hand, and explained that a serial-killer suspect had lived in the house and that it had to be searched, Jeannine Dorward just stood there.
"It was," she told me yesterday, "surreal."
Dorward, her husband, Dale, and their two kids gathered some clothes and stayed with family. It was an unexpected weekend getaway from a house with an unexpected history.
Gary Ridgway lived in the house on 253rd Street in Des Moines from 1988 to 1997.
It is a street of hard work and small splurges; simple houses with a boat or an RV tucked in a side yard or an old BMW parked out front.
One neighbor said she hardly saw Ridgway but remembered his wife as "nosy," that they worked on their yard and had a lot of garage sales.
"Seems like every other week," said Vicki Listenberger. "That's the thing I remember most. Them rolling out lots of clothes on big racks."
She shivered, from the cold or the memory or both.
"You just don't know people."
In that same garage yesterday, the Dorwards moved things back onto shelves and spoke in that flat tone married couples use when they are just a team of two with a task at hand. They took the day off from their jobs to clean up after the police, who believe they cleaned up what little Ridgway had left.
"They didn't find anything major," Dale Dorward said. "They took small swabs."
The Dorwards came home to find carpet lifted and cut and a deep gouge in the back yard.
Any DNA detectives find, Jeannine Dorward said, "is probably ours."
For all their trouble, though, the house feels cleaner, exorcised of suspicion.
"He was here with his wife and kid," Dale Dorward said of Ridgway. "Whatever he did, he did elsewhere."
The house is one of four searched, according to King County sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart: Ridgway's mother's former home in the McMicken Heights section of SeaTac, another former rental, this house and his current home in Auburn.
"We don't know what we're looking for," Urquhart said.
Maybe victims' driver's licenses, he said, or even a body, as in the case of convicted serial killer Robert Yates. Police found the remains of Melody Murfin in a shallow grave below the bedroom window of the Spokane house where Yates was living with his wife and five kids.
The Sheriff's Office knows it is inconvenient to displace a family and search every closet, every crawlspace.
"We don't do this lightly," Urquhart said. "But we will make them whole. We will fix their yard, pay for their motel."
The families know the brief disruption could help end years of wondering for those of the 49 women connected to the Green River killer, Urquhart said.
For the Dorwards, moving back in means the demons, if there were any, have been run out for good.
"It's not like we are sleeping in his bed," Jeannine Dorward said of Ridgway. "It's our home. It's our bed."
Maybe now more than ever.
Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or at nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists. She's partial to Fantastik.