Politics shadowed Green River task force
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With a suspect now charged for the first time, support for the investigation is at an all-time high.
The arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway has re-energized both the investigators and official support for the effort, said Fabienne Brooks, commander of the county's Criminal Investigation Division.
The expansion — from a current staffing level of one sergeant and five detectives, plus Bainbridge Island Lt. Matt Haney — to two sergeants, 10 detectives, an evidence technician, a computer specialist and possibly a separate media spokesperson — marks the third time in two decades that a group called the Green River task force would exist.
Both of the previous task forces conducted intensive efforts to identify the person or persons responsible for the deaths of 49 young women between 1982 and 1984, but both groups ran into bureaucratic or political opposition as the investigation appeared to fall into a morass of too many leads and not enough hard information.
The first task force, formed in 1982 by Major Richard Kraske, then head of the Criminal Investigation Division, had 25 officers mostly from King County, but also from Kent and Pierce County.
That group was dismantled in November 1982 after investigators concluded that the most likely suspect for the crimes was a Lacey cabdriver, who was then placed under periodic surveillance as detectives worked to assemble evidence against him.
While officials have never officially cleared the cabdriver, it soon became apparent that he could not have committed the crimes — especially since a number of eventual Green River victims disappeared while the cabdriver was under surveillance.
Throughout much of 1983 — the year in which most of the Green River victims were last seen — most of the responsibility for solving the case fell on then-Detective Dave Reichert, now sheriff, and Brooks, who at the time was a member of the department's sex-crimes detail.
Brooks was assigned to work on the case because she had investigated a rape case involving Green River victim Marcia Chapman in the months before Chapman's murder.
By October 1983, the skeletal remains of four new victims had been discovered. Added to five found in or near the Green River in the summer of 1982, and one other found in September 1982, the total attributed to the killer by police was 10. Pressure began to mount on the department to build a stronger effort to find the killer.
In December 1983, the head of the department's major-crimes section was replaced by Capt. Frank Adamson, who had previously headed the department's internal-investigations unit.
A month later, in January 1984, Adamson and then-Sheriff Vern Thomas announced the formation of the second Green River task force, 43 officers including detectives, plainclothes patrol officers and support staff such as crime analysts and forensic experts. Meanwhile, by the end of the same month, the victim total stood at 14.
But the worst was still to come. By the spring, as the rains abated and the weather warmed, remains began to be found in rural areas of South King County, principally in the Star Lake area, near Mt. View Cemetery south of Kent, and east of Enumclaw.
By the end of 1984, police had recovered the mostly-skeletonized remains of a then-staggering total of 28 women, and they had a list of another dozen women who were missing and possibly victims of the killer.
Adamson later noted that the task force had been so busy throughout most of 1985 processing crime scenes where skeletons were found, and then laboring to identify them through hard-to-find dental records, that comparatively little effort was being invested in finding the murderer.
By 1986, however, enough information on possible suspects had been assembled to permit the task force to focus on one man, a Riverton Heights fur trapper. After a search of the man's house generated an enormous amount of news-media attention, the task force released the man and admitted he was not the killer.
That misfire did much to undercut political enthusiasm for the task force. By the time of the search, at least $10 million had been expended on the effort, including federal grant money.
Newly elected County Executive Tim Hill, feeling pressure from constituents who wanted improved police services in the unincorporated areas of the county, openly questioned whether the use of so many police for a case that might never be solved was the best use of scarce resources.
Aides to Hill later acknowledged that the miss on the fur trapper gave them the political maneuvering room to begin cutbacks in the task force effort.
In September 1986, a dozen positions were slashed from the task force by Sheriff Thomas, and commander Adamson, who had objected to the cuts, had been replaced by Capt. James Pompey. Organizationally, the task force returned to the authority of the existing police structure instead of operating independently, as it had under Adamson.
Over the next three years, the number of officers continued to dwindle, even as the task force focused on a number of potentially viable suspects, including Ridgway.
By late 1990 only two investigators were assigned to the case, primarily to take tips from the public. Still later, that number was reduced to one — Detective Tom Jensen, the man who eventually submitted the DNA that led to Ridgway's arrest.
Throughout the later 1980s and all through the 1990s, officials continued to believe that the Green River slayings had stopped in March 1984. Although more than 60 similar murders were committed in the ensuing years, officials steadfastly refused to link them to the Green River series — until this week.
And while it may have taken almost 20 years for the task force to finally yield dividends, its existence nevertheless transformed what had been essentially a rural police force into a modern, technically sophisticated agency.
The department's outdoor crime-processing capability, so rudimentary in the summer of 1982, is now regarded as perhaps the nation's finest, thanks to the grim lessons taught by so many victims' remains. Data processing and retrieval, from dental records to fingerprints, missing-persons records and crime-analysis techniques, all are vastly superior today to the largely nonexistent resources of the 1980s.
Further, a new generation of leadership, steeped in the challenges presented by the Green River case, has taken over the department, bringing a willingness to work cooperatively with other law-enforcement agencies, a vital requirement for effective policing in an age when offenders can move across the country in a matter of hours.
These changes weren't the only effects of the Green River murders. The south county area's political map was virtually redrawn, largely as a result of public frustration with crime and the want of better police protection — a frustration that the Green River murders both symbolized and contributed to.
The city of SeaTac, for example — whose Pacific Highway South was the scene of so many of the killer's earliest abductions of women — came into existence primarily because of public frustration over the hunt for the killer.