Detective was 'overcome by the emotion'

Detective Tom Jensen waited 20 years to get at the man who had eluded him so long, the man who until recently was known only as the Green River killer.

But when the day finally came to sit down across the table from Gary L. Ridgway, Jensen couldn't bring himself to do it at first.

Since 1984, Jensen has devoted virtually his entire career with the King County Sheriff's Office to the quest for the killer. Throughout the 1990s, Jensen was the only detective left on the case full time. In the end, no other detective deserves more credit for catching and convicting Ridgway than Jensen, his colleagues and bosses agree.

But deep inside, the soft-spoken detective, the endearingly crabby and private guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of the case, cared too deeply about the slain women and their families to look Ridgway in the eye.

"I found myself overcome by the emotion," Jensen wrote yesterday. "I had to excuse myself from the interviews that day and reassess my thinking."

In the end, he forced himself to quit thinking of the women he had been thinking about for years. "I was going to have to consider them as mere objects, just as Ridgway did," Jensen wrote.

This week, when Ridgway finally pleaded guilty to 48 murders, Jensen allowed the women's names and faces to come back. "The emotion for these victims that had been suppressed for five months returned in a rush."

Even yesterday, when Sheriff Dave Reichert triumphantly threw open Green River Task Force headquarters to the media, Jensen balked at talking about his feelings about the case. Instead, he wrote them down, because he knew it would be too hard to talk about them.

"Tom is a person who has always been a strong, silent, steady, dedicated public servant," Reichert said yesterday. "But he and I have shared tears together. This case has really touched him."

If he has to give interviews, like the ones Reichert strongly urged him to do yesterday, he'd rather talk about evidence and the science that brought Ridgway to justice.

Jensen, 55, joined the King County Police, as it was then known, in 1972. He was first enlisted by the task force in 1984, when the case was running hot and detectives were drowning in false leads and dead-end tips.

Immediately, Jensen led the way to computerize, and he became a steward of the case.

"His talent was immediately recognized, because he was a very organized thinker," said Reichert, who was the lead investigator then. "In any group, there's always one strong, steady persona, and that's him."

By 1991, though, the case had gone cold. Jensen was left alone to pick through the stacks of old reports looking for leads that may have somehow been missed.

He took the occasional tip from the public.

"There wasn't much solid that came in," he said yesterday. "I mean, there were things that looked promising for the moment, but they quickly faded."

Instead, Jensen devoted himself to the several victims who had never been identified. One of his biggest successes came in 1999, when a new DNA technology identified one set of remains as Tracy Ann Winston, 19, who disappeared in 1983.

Even now, it's clear the emotions of that identification are too much to share.

"I'll just say that I always felt like if I never accomplished anything else, I would like to have at least given names to those girls," he said.

It was Jensen who in early 2001 submitted small samples of 19-year-old evidence to the state crime lab for DNA testing.

Jensen rejects critics who say the sheriff's office should have gotten DNA ties to Ridgway sooner, perhaps catching him before he killed his last victims.

The task force had tested the tiny sample for DNA in 1987, and not only did the technology of the time fail, but it seriously reduced their sample.

It wasn't until March 2001 that officials were sure enough about recent improvements in DNA testing to try again.

"We knew we would have one shot at whatever material we had left," Jensen said. "If we sent it off too soon, and they didn't get anything with it, we would have lost it forever. It worked out. It was worth the wait."

Now, after 30 years of police work and the Green River case coming to a close, the world will soon be open to Tom Jensen to do anything he likes.

He could retire. He could write books and sell a lot of copies. He could become a professional expert, the kind who get quoted so often about other big murder cases.

But, in his trademark way, Jensen leans back in his chair, takes a deep breath and smiles. "I'm going to Disneyland," he jokes, and then turns for the next dreaded interview of the day.

Ian Ith: 206-464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com