Original subtitles

I'm surrounded by live TV cameras.

Live radio mics are set right in front of me.

Everybody's rushing around.

Good evening, Seattle.

An international manhunt for the so-called Green River Killer.

Not just America's most wanted,

but perhaps the most dangerous single killer in the world.

The mood on the set

and throughout the phone bank area was great excitement.

We might possibly be able to connect with a killer.

Dave, I know you have something that,

if this Green River Killer is watching, you'd like to say.

You know, I've worked this case for over six years now...

...and I feel very confident

that someone will soon be leading us to you.

"We're not giving up, and because we are going to catch you,

you better turn yourself in."

This nightmare will not end.

It still haunts you during every waking hour.

"If you have the guts and you have the courage,

call me."

It's time for us to talk.

We're running on all the cameras, so everyone's ready whenever you are.

My name is Dave Reichert, and I'm the former lead detective

of the Green River Task Force, uh, in King County, Washington.

I was encouraged by my wife, Julie, to become a police officer.

The kids were proud of it.

They could go to school and say, "My dad's a police officer."

And everybody goes, "Wow."

I was recruited in 1972.

In 1979,

I was asked to come and work in the Homicide and Robbery Unit.

I was really excited about having that opportunity

because that's one of the goals that I had set for myself.

On August 15th,

we received a call.

Two bodies had been found in the Green River.

When I arrived,

I worked my way down to the river

through the tall grass on the bank.

The body lying closest to me was in the water three feet down,

and she was naked.

As I was walking down,

I found a third body.

You could feel the tension in the air and the shock

of that announcement.

Before finding the three bodies today,

there were two bodies found previously...

...within the last month,

just downriver.

So, we had five young girls,

all strangled.

There was this realization that we could have a serial killer...

...and we've gotta start

organizing ourselves for a very major investigation.

By the time I got home, it was pretty late.

The kids were already in bed.

I had dinner with Julie.

I never really talked about my job at home.

If Julie asked me how it went,

I would usually say, you know, "It went fine."

As cops, we were the line

between all the evil that happens in the world,

and protecting people from even seeing that evil,

because it... it's ugly.

The shock in this neighborhood continues.

The three latest victims were found yesterday.

Police have been combing the banks of the Green River looking for any clues

as to who may have killed five women in the last month.

When I arrived at the sheriff's office,

it's all now on the news.

Our modern-day paradise has a serpent.

A serpent in human form,

the Green River Killer.

The sheriff announced that he was creating a Green River Task Force.

I was asked to be the lead detective.

I've been on tough cases before,

but I've never been on a serial murder case.

So, we had to put these 25 detectives together.

One of those was Detective Fae Brooks.

Hold on a second.

- I'll be right back. - Okay.

I thought I turned it off.

Okay.

Sorry.

I had been working with the King County Sheriff's Office

about four years.

I wasn't in Homicide then, I was in Sex Crimes.

If there was a major case,

then Sex Crimes detectives assisted the Homicide detectives.

I'm a survivor of sex abuse.

When I became a Sex Crimes detective,

it was sort of like therapy,

because I was able to arrest people

who were misusing, abusing, uh, people.

So, that drove me to want to catch the killer.

During the autopsies, the medical examiners were able to confirm

they had found sperm in two of the victims

that they thought might be from the killer.

This was our first tangible physical forensic evidence.

But DNA was not advanced enough yet to develop a DNA profile of the killer.

So, we were focusing on who the women are,

and maybe that'll help us, uh, narrow things down

to identify who's responsible for this.

We were able to identify a couple of the bodies

through dental records, missing persons reports,

and fingerprints.

We discovered that they were working as prostitutes.

One of them was called Marcia Chapman.

I said immediately, "Marcia Chapman? I've met her."

I could feel my heart drop.

I had been assigned to investigate a case

in which she, uh, reported being assaulted.

She was a 31-year-old mother of three.

And Marcia had been working as a prostitute,

using the money to care for her children.

Yeah, it was very sad. Very sad.

Most of the prostitution activity occurred in an area that we called The Strip.

And that was the focal point of our investigation.

I was assigned to go out to The Strip

and contact young girls asking them for suspect information,

trying to identify the potential killer.

The Strip, as it's called,

is a highway that goes between Seattle and Tacoma

along Pacific Highway South.

It was a road for picking up prostitutes.

Most of the street workers were young,

teens to early twenties,

trying to make money to survive.

I would talk to a number of girls while they were out on the street.

I said, "I want you to be careful."

"If you hear anything, please let us know."

"There's a guy out here killing prostitutes."

And they would typically say, "Oh, I'll be able to recognize him."

They didn't think it'd happen to them.

Somewhere in our midst is a cold-blooded killer.

The case began to grow, and it had a larger and larger impact

on the community as a whole.

It created an atmosphere of... of fear.

King County police, Green River Task Force.

We had a lot of people calling in

about people that they thought were suspicious.

I received a phone call.

I said, "Yeah, this is Detective Reichert, who's speaking?"

And he said his name was Melvyn Foster.

He reported that someone he knew by the name of Dan Smith

would be a good suspect in this case.

He said that Dan Smith knows the victims,

knows all the prostitutes on the street,

is known to be a, kind of, violent guy.

So, we did bring Dan Smith in for a... an interview.

We didn't find, uh, anything

that would lead us to believe that he was the killer.

But the FBI had shared with us

that the suspect may call us

and inject himself into the investigation

to lead you down a path to look for someone else as a suspect.

So, we decided to look at Melvyn Foster a little bit more closely.

Melvyn Foster was a cab driver.

He was in his mid-forties.

He lived near the state capital,

near Olympia, Washington,

which is at least an hour and a half south of Seattle.

He would come to Seattle to drive his cab on The Strip,

which we found a little bit odd

because you can be a cab driver in Olympia.

We discovered that he did have some warrants out for his arrest

for traffic violations.

He'd been in jail previously for an auto theft.

The red flags go up.

So, we decided to bring in Melvyn Foster for an interview.

We showed him photographs of the victims that we had identified.

He said, "No, I don't know her, I don't know Marcia Chapman."

And so on.

At the end of the interview, we said, "Oh, by the way,

we discovered you have some warrants out for your arrest...

...so we're gonna put you in jail."

We figured that would raise his stress level.

Maybe get more information out of him.

The next day,

we asked him again about the victims.

Now, all of a sudden, he knows the victims.

He said he had them in his taxi cab.

That was a big change from the day before.

I think to myself, "You know what? This guy could be our suspect."

We decided to give him a polygraph test.

Melvyn Foster was asked whether or not he knew who the Green River Killer was.

And he said, "No."

He was also asked

whether or not he had anything to do with the Green River murders,

and he said, "No."

At the end of the questions...

...the test showed that he had failed the polygraph.

A polygraph test is not always accurate.

But it was another piece of the puzzle that made us believe

that it was worthwhile continuing to investigate.

So, we decided to put him under surveillance.

Our hope was he would slip,

that he would do something that might incriminate him.

If he was the killer,

we wanted to make sure that we had him, uh, within our sights.

We were at the task force office,

and all of a sudden,

Melvyn Foster was all over the news.

For nearly a month now,

undercover officers have been stationed in this area

keeping a 24-hour watch on Melvyn Foster,

who lives just up the road from here.

Are you scared at all?

Scared? No.

Fright is for the guilty.

Foster wanted to call attention to the fact

that the police were following him,

and so he called the news media himself.

What's the bottom line here? Did you kill all those women or what?

No, but I wish I did. I wish I did know who did.

Because, uh...

I'd put a stop to him.

He just... He loved the attention.

This is another thing that the FBI profilers said.

A person who may be a good suspect,

that's how they behave.

But each investigator had a stack

of 20 different suspects that they were looking at.

The command staff felt like it was costing a lot of money.

So, I stopped the surveillance of Melvyn Foster.

We're gonna put him on the back burner, but he's always there.

There's a possibility that he could make a mistake.

That's what we were all hoping for.

It's been over one year since investigators found

the first skeletal remains of the Green River murders.

Last night, an elderly man picking apples in this field

found bones scattered over a 20-foot area.

I'm thinking, "Not another one. Not another one."

Three skeletons have been found on port property.

Possible victims of the Green River Killer.

We were responding to so many by then.

The Green River Task Force now includes another possible murder victim,

discovered near 54th Avenue and Star Lake Road.

Now, I had a total of 13 bodies over the last year and a half.

Emotionally, it was difficult.

The Green River Task Force will be expanded next month.

Fifteen officers and ten detectives will join the case,

more determined than ever to catch the killer.

All right, lights, camera, action.

When I got out of the Navy, I came back to Seattle and, uh...

I think I was just interested in doing something different

that wasn't, you know, putting a bolt in an airplane or something like that.

Tom and I got hired the same year, in 1972.

However, I think he went to the academy before I did

because he scored higher on the... On the, uh... on the test.

Tom was known to be very thorough, had a great memory...

...just a very talented investigator.

I had been in Burglary-Larceny for about six years.

It was exciting to do something different and work on a high-profile case

like the Green River.

We had lots of suspect tip sheets to follow up on,

but we had no other suspects that really reached the level,

uh, that Melvyn Foster had.

Because Tom was so good at keeping track of all the minutiae,

we asked him to specifically take a look at Melvyn Foster.

Normally, you have a suspect, and you'd work to prove he did it.

In this case, we spent most of our time trying to prove that he didn't do it...

...so we could move on to the next guy.

We had to determine if he was available

for all of the murders that we were aware of.

We knew for a fact, during a period of time,

Melvyn Foster was under surveillance

24 hours a day.

He could not have gone anywhere without anybody knowing.

As we identified more victims

and determined where they were and when they disappeared,

there was a number that disappeared during that time frame.

It's frustrating.

But it turned out

that Melvyn Foster had nothing to do with the Green River murders.

People are frightened, and we open the paper,

and all we see are bodies and bones being found.

Once again, there is speculation

that investigators on the Green River case are back to square one.

Each day,

there were requests from news media

to provide information about the investigation.

How close are you to catching this killer?

Um, that's kind of a hard question to answer right now.

Um, we're still working on it,

and until we catch him, we really won't know how close we are.

Is there any reason to believe that this person may kill again?

Um, in serial investigation,

we find that the serial killer continues until he's caught.

- ♪ We got light ♪ - Over there, come on!

♪ Take back the night We got light ♪

There was a protest about the investigation.

A coalition of prostitutes and women's rights organizations claim

the search for the killer wasn't given immediate attention

because the victims were prostitutes.

That hurt the detectives,

because... we were committed to solving this investigation.

We didn't place a label on these little girls.

These were daughters, granddaughters, sisters.

They were human beings. I mean, that's the bottom line.

And when you collect a human body...

...especially somebody so young...

Oh, shoot, I wasn't...

Ahem. I wasn't gonna do this.

Uh...

Yeah, when... when you... when you...

When your job is... is to collect... human remains...

uh...

you... you can't help but place such a high value on every life.

In Seattle, another grim discovery today

that could be connected to the string of Green River murders,

which have shaken that west coast city.

We're in the office, and we got a call

that the manager of the baseball field

had reported his dog came home with a bone,

and it looked like it might be human.

The manager pointed out the area the dog had come from,

and we went into the woods

and eventually located the remains.

The victim was in the bottom of a boggy, wet area.

Totally skeletal.

She looked to me to be in kind of a fetal position.

The, uh, medical examiner gave us an age range of 12 to 18 years old.

That was just based on the bones.

When we don't identify a victim right away,

they're just assigned a number.

In this particular case, she was "Bones Ten."

That was my first homicide crime scene.

I... I... I don't know how I felt.

I'm not gonna get through this.

The following day, the bloodhound tracked the scent of...

death and located another body over under this pine tree.

The second victim was identified almost immediately

from her dental records,

and we knew that she was involved in prostitution.

Which was consistent with Green River.

It began a series of finds that pretty much swamped us

for the rest of 1984.

Explore, Search and Rescue members

joined detectives with the Green River Task Force

to search the densely-wooded area near Star Lake.

One skeleton was found here on Saturday,

two more on Sunday.

And this morning, it happened again.

There was a flurry of activity,

and that same sickening feeling pervaded the area.

The Green River Killer has taken at least 20 lives in 21 months.

That gruesome total,

putting it among the largest mass murders in American history.

I... Uh... The pressure, um, during this time came from all...

All sides.

I think we felt

the need to be able to solve the case as quickly as possible.

We continued to bounce ideas off of each other.

Try and keep ourselves motivated.

Not get too despondent

that the Green River Killer was so far ahead of us.

How would we ever catch up?

In 1984,

we took part in a public service announcement

called "Someone Out There Knows Something."

It was an opportunity for people to call in

if they knew something about the Green River Killer.

We thought, you know, anything at this point will help.

The Green River Task Force believe

the new reward may bring them the tip they need.

$100,000 was offered

to end the nation's worst unsolved serial killings.

Someone out there knows something.

Being able to get some money

may overcome their fears about coming to the police.

We got an overflow of tips as a result of that.

We got thousands that we handled.

Whether it was about a missing person, or a suspect, or possible victim.

A young girl named Rebecca comes into the task force

and wants to report an assault.

She says this assault happened two years earlier,

in 1982.

Rebecca was picked up by a John.

To show he wasn't a police officer, he shows her some ID,

his employment card from Kenworth Trucking.

She gets into his truck, and she drives to a very secluded wooded area.

During oral sex, he starts to get violent.

And he starts to choke her.

That's when he starts to really take her life.

She fights her way out of it.

And she's able to escape.

She felt compelled to come in...

...just in case she had encountered the Green River Killer.

Just happened that one of the detectives

was examining records of males

that were arrested for frequenting prostitutes,

and he came across this one individual

who listed his employment as Kenworth Trucking.

The detectives show Rebecca a photo lineup

including his mug shot.

She looked the, uh... the six photos over.

She picks one photo out of the six

and says, "That's the guy who tried to kill me."

She identifies the person from Kenworth Trucking,

a man by the name of Gary Ridgway.

Ridgway was 35,

he'd been married and had a son.

We discovered that he was arrested

in early 1982 for patronizing a prostitute.

Actually went to jail.

Immediately after that, Ridgway is interviewed.

In November of 1982...

were you driving on Pacific Highway?

And did you pick up a young lady?

Yes, I did.

What happens when you got down to the area of 22nd South

and South 24th?

She gave me head.

She bit me, and I, uh, choked her.

It was just sort of a calm

matter-of-fact kind of attitude that he...

Uh, that he has.

How long did you choke her?

Ten, 15 seconds or so.

And that's when the investigation of Ridgway ramped up.

Then we find out that in 1983,

the Port of Seattle Police had actually made a traffic stop on Ridgway.

A young girl by the name of Kelly McGinnis

was in the pickup truck with him.

She was working on the street.

Kelly McGinnis was now missing.

Is she a potential Green River victim?

Now Ridgway was a top-priority suspect.

We got a search warrant not only for Ridgway's house,

but for his person, so we could collect bodily samples.

I'm hoping to find that one piece of evidence

that would all of a sudden break this case open.

A team of detectives went and picked up Ridgway from work.

I led the team that searched his home.

We were all hoping to find some blood,

some jewelry or clothing that belonged to one of the victims.

Something that might incriminate him to the point where we knew we had our guy.

According to neighbors,

police went over every inch of the house inside and out.

All afternoon, police hauled out carefully-wrapped items

from inside the home.

But after searching his house,

there was great disappointment...

...when we couldn't find something to connect him to any of the crimes.

The other team had Ridgway chew on a gauze,

uh, collected his saliva.

The best that we could hope for from those samples

was to match the blood type to the killer.

We were all excited.

Anticipating that,

okay, maybe this will be the break that we need,

because we need a break.

But the lab said,

"We couldn't get the blood type from his saliva

to compare it against the sperm samples from the bodies."

It was a big letdown.

So, the saliva that was collected was frozen.

We still didn't have that one piece of physical evidence

that would absolutely link him to any of the cases.

The constant thought is, "What are we missing?"

"What aren't we doing?"

And always hoping that no one else gets killed.

In the midst of a brand-new apartment complex,

construction workers unearth the skeletal remains

of the Green River Killer's latest victim.

Despite 60 detectives assigned to the murders

and the expenditure of $15 million,

there's no arrest.

A few months later, the sheriff began to talk

about the amount of money being spent on the investigation.

There was this belief that we weren't going to catch the killer,

and there was a decision made to start cutting the task force.

I was angry.

During this whole case, I had been at every scene,

collected every one of the remains.

How can we stop investigating a case with so many... dead girls?

I was just so devastated.

I didn't wanna leave the department, no way, shape or form,

because I knew the guy wouldn't stop killing.

Eventually,

Tom's the only one left there full-time

to really manage the massive amount of information.

I needed to bring it to a conclusion for the families of the victims,

the victims themselves.

Now, the trail is cold, and hope is all but gone.

Detective Thomas Jensen won't give up.

I believe we'll catch him. I wouldn't be here if I didn't.

I did help out on other cases from time to time,

but I refused to be taken away

from my primary job being Green River.

Operation Desert Storm.

...office of President of the United States.

Terror rocks Oklahoma City.

O.J. Simpson not guilty of the crime of murder.

People mourn the death of the Princess of Wales

on the streets of Paris.

Over that period from 1990,

I was thinking about the Green River case all the time.

I never gave up hope.

At the end of 1997,

I was elected to sheriff.

His wife, Julie, pinned on the badge,

and Dave Reichert became the new King County Sheriff.

Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. This is wonderful.

I was able now to make decisions on this case.

I immediately called the group of detectives together,

and the question I asked them was, "What should we do?"

"I wanna get this thing solved."

I told Dave science had evolved considerably

since 1988 or '89.

A revolution of technology has changed DNA testing.

Just a spot of blood or a dab of semen can nail the criminal

beyond a reasonable doubt.

Maybe the time was right to

tackle the samples again.

There were item of evidence in the freezer

that were highly important,

and that was the sperm samples taken

from the River victims back in 1982.

Tom gets a call from the lab that says, "Hey, we can do this now."

"Submit your samples."

I was chief of the criminal investigations division then.

I remember Tom saying,

"I need to have a meeting with you and the sheriff today."

And I'm trying to figure out, "Okay,

what is it Tom wants to talk about?"

Fae and Tom sat down,

and I could tell Tom had something very important to share.

I couldn't speak.

So I said, "Tom, what's... You know, what's going on?"

And he said, "We have a DNA match."

I looked at him, I said, "Are you trying to tell me

that we know who the Green River Killer is?"

Tom puts his hand inside his, uh, suit coat jacket,

he pulls out this envelope, and he says, "His name is in here."

Before he opened it, he said, "It's Gary Ridgway, isn't it?"

Opened it up, and there's the mug shot of Gary Ridgway.

I mean, phew. Man.

I can't...

That was quite a moment.

Investigators connected to the Green River murder case

believe it may finally be solved.

During the course of the Green River investigation,

police found some 10,000 pieces of evidence.

The culmination of two decades of work.

Nineteen years.

You know, what else can you say?

Ridgway would have gotten the death penalty,

but he accepted a deal.

The deal was he told the truth

and gave us all the bodies and all the locations,

so that we could give those answers to the families.

Do you care if we call you Gary or...

- Gary's fine. - Fine?

Yeah.

Why did I hate them? Because I...

They, uh... Women had control of me, and I don't like being controlled.

I always thought I was doing you guys a favor.

Killing prostitutes here. You guys can't control them, but I can.

Yeah, slow down here.

He took us to a lot of sites where he dumped the bodies.

Could we walk down there? That tree looked familiar.

We filed an additional 40-some odd counts of murder.

State of Washington versus Gary Leon Ridgway.

The courtroom was just packed with this emotion and electricity

that you could just feel in the air.

A sense of somberness, too,

because of the number of cases

and the lives that he was pleading guilty to.

How do you plead to the charges?

He stood and the judge began to read each name of the young girls.

For the death of Marcia Chapman?

Guilty.

Just name after name after name.

Guilty.

Guilty. Guilty.

Guilty.

- ...for the death of Cynthia Hines? - Guilty.

- Terry Milligan? - Guilty.

- Debra Estes? - Guilty.

- Giselle Lavorn? - Guilty.

I still get chills just thinking about it.

That, finally, we were able to solve the case.

I remember he walked by me,

he looked at me.

And I said, "Got you, asshole."

Kind of a stupid thing to say, but,

uh, it felt good.

At the end of 2012,

I retired for good.

They couldn't live without me.

And so I ended up assuming the role of volunteer

at the King County's Sheriff's Office.

We got grant from the federal government

to try and identify three unidentified bodies

from Gary Ridgway's 49 victims.

We turn now to breaking news

in the Green River Killer serial murder investigation.

Tonight, we've learned that the youngest victim

has finally been identified,

decades after her murder.

In late 2020,

I got an email telling me that the remains that we found

at the baseball field back in March of 1984

had been identified as a girl named Wendy Stevens,

out of Denver, Colorado.

Her mother reported her missing when she ran away

when she was about 14 years old.

Been working on trying to get a name for her for,

almost 30 years.

And I was there and helped pick up her bones.

The investigation keeps going because we have unidentified victims.

As long as we have unidentified victims, we're not done.