Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer
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FOR TWENTY YEARS HE KILLED AND AVOIDED CAPTURE…It began with the discovery of three women's bodies found near suburban Seattle's Green River in August, 1982. Soon more corpses and human remains would be found, some as far as Oregon. They were teenage runaways or other women whose anonymous lifestyles had made them easy, vulnerable targets—and they were all the victims of a faceless murderer whose rampage would span two decades and take as many as forty-nine lives. No other serial killer in the nation's history had killed so many people.BUT ONE COP REFUSED TO QUIT…For twenty long years, Sheriff David Reichert played a cat and mouse game with the Green River killer who managed to stay one step ahead of Reichert, the local authorities, and even the FBI. But Reichert had no doubt in his mind that he was going to find the Green River killer— no matter how long it took…UNTIL JUSTICE WAS SERVED…That day came in 2001 when DNA evidence linked fifty-two-year-old truck painter Gary Ridgway to three of the murder victims. The long nightmare was finally over for Reichert and the families of the murder victims. With startling insider disclosures and the fascinating forensic details of the relentless manhunt itself—Chasing the Devil exposes the heart of true evil and reveals the dauntless efforts behind one man's quest to chase it..."Front-and-center account...straightforward...ultimately, the epic turns into a nightmare of gnawing anxiety...as gruesome as guilty pleasures get for rabid crime readers."—Kirkus Reviews Kirkus Reviews Front-and-center account by the first detective assigned to Washington State's notorious serial murders, who later became King County sheriff and arrested the now-convicted killer. The most engaging feature of Reichert's mainly straightforward though sometimes awkwardly embellished narrative is that he lets his interior monologues bubble up; he needs you to know he's a straight-up guy who hopes, for instance, killers are headed for hell and who never once believed that prostitution was a victimless crime. He chronicles friction with associates, frustration with the system and his superiors, and petty jealousies that spilled over with the involvement of a big-time FBI "profiler," which was not even a recognized specialty when the first victims were discovered in 1982. (Robert Keppel weighed in with his own Green River book, The Riverman, in 1995.) With professional pride not quite suppressed by the modesty he knows he should project, Reichert writes at one point, "You would be surprised how many cases are cracked when we simply pick up the most likely suspect and take him in for a conversation . . . you say things like 'I can understand if things just got out of hand . . . just tell us what happened.' Eventually, one of these questions is like a pinprick on a balloon." It wasn't quite that way, of course, with Gary Ridgway, who finally confessed in 2001 to the murders of 48 women, almost all prostitutes, and who remains the prime suspect in perhaps dozens more cases as bodies still turn up. Reichert unflinchingly depicts the endless hours of interviews with pimps, whores, johns, and the taxi drivers often sought as objective chroniclers of doings on the street. Likewise, as Ridgway'sgrotesque compulsions play out, there seems no way to dance around necrophilia with euphemism. Ultimately, the epic hunt turns into a nightmare of gnawing anxiety relieved by the stupefying banality of yet another corpse. As gruesome as guilty pleasures get for rabid crime readers.
Prologue: The River31Somebody's Daughters142Stranger to Stranger263Saviors and Sinners464A Prime Suspect675A Circle of Evidence806Stalled897A One-Sided War1008Playing Catch-Up1179Somebody Knows Something13310Bad Behavior14711One of Ten Thousand16312Refocusing17713Media Blitz19614A Rocket Ride21115Unfinished Business23016One in Custody24417Defining Justice25818The Monster Speaks26819Families First, and Last294Epilogue: In God's Hands305Acknowledgments309
