Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer [Hardcover]

Ann Rule (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2004

In the most extraordinary book Ann Rule has ever undertaken, America's master of true crime has spent more than two decades researching the story of the Green River Killer, who murdered more than forty-nine young women. The quest to discover the most prolific serial killer in American history has been an intimate part of Ann Rule's life, with some of the corpses found only a mile or so from where she lived and raised her own daughters. She did not know the killer, but he apparently knew her and attended many of her book signings.

For twenty-one years, the killer carried out his self-described "career" as a killing machine, ridding the world of women he considered evil. His eerie ability to lure his victims to their deaths and hide their bodies made him far more dangerous than any infamous multiple murderer in the annals of crime.

A few men -- including a law student, a truck painter, and a taxi driver -- eventually emerged as the prime suspects among an unprecedented forty thousand scrutinized by the Green River Task Force. Still, there was no physical evidence linking any of them to the murders until 2001, when investigators used a new DNA process on a saliva sample they had preserved since 1987, with stunning results.

Ann Rule has followed the case since July 1982, when the first body -- that of teenager Wendy Lee Coffield -- was found in the Green River, snagged on pilings under a bridge. Rule has compiled voluminous files, working through an incredible 95,000 pages of official police records, transcripts, photographs, and maps, winnowing out the chaff and identifying what is truly important. Over the years, she gained unparalleled access to all the key players -- from King County Sheriff Dave Reichert to those close to the killer and his victims.

When finally apprehended and convicted, the killer made a detailed confession -- of his twisted sexual obsessions -- that will shock even the most jaded reader. Green River, Running Red is a harrowing account of a modern monster, a killer who walked among us undetected. It is also the story of his quarry -- of who these young girls were, and who they might have become. A chilling look at the darkest side of human nature, this is the most important and most personal book of Ann Rule's long career.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Veteran crime writer Ann Rule is uniquely qualified to chronicle the grisly career of Gary Ridgeway, the man convicted of being the "Green River Killer," the most prolific serial killer in American history. Not only is she one of the more successful true-crime authors, but for nearly 20 years, Rule was exceptionally close to the case, reporting on it for a Seattle newspaper, preparing a long-delayed book on the subject, and living within a few blocks of the strip of highway where most of Ridgeway's victims were abducted. In Green River, Running Red, Rule lends unique humanity to the string of murders that haunted the Seattle area throughout the '80s and '90s by exploring the lives of the dozens of young women who fell into prostitution and were ultimately murdered. Similarly, she catalogues Ridgeway's troubled and bizarre life in such a way that the reader becomes uncomfortably familiar with Ridgeway, although it's never truly clear what drove him to commit such heinous crimes. Along the way, she traces the decades-long struggle of the law enforcement officials assigned to the case as they tracked down countless leads, questioned innumerable suspects, and explored multiple theories that came up empty before finally cracking the case through a series of technological advancements and a little luck. But the most disturbing aspect of the Green River killings (named for where the first victims were found) is how they occurred in relatively plain sight, with Ridgeway, seemingly living an unremarkable life, dwelling and working within a few miles of where his lengthy killing spree took place and evading capture for years. Rule skillfully weaves herself into her account, relating the psychic and cultural impact of the case as it evolved, but she never takes the spotlight off Ridgeway, his eventual captors, and the women who died at his hands.--John Moe

From Booklist

When best-selling true-crime author Rule began tracking a series of murders taking place, by morbid coincidence, in her own southwest Seattle neighborhood, she said she caught herself referring to the female victims as numbers, based on the sequence of their disappearances. "I was horrified when that dawned on me," she admitted. "I never wanted to do that again." And so in detailing the grim story of Seattle's Green River killings--from the discovery of the body of Wendy Lee Coffield in July 1982 to the sentencing of truck painter Gary Ridgway last November on 48 counts of murder--Rule devotes most of her book neither to Ridgway nor to the noble efforts of law-enforcement officials to catch him, but focuses, instead, on the victims themselves. These women, most of them prostitutes, were victims even before their deaths--of disconnected home lives, of misplaced trust in boyfriends (who often pimped them on Seattle's notorious Pac HiWay), of their own need to rebel against their pain. Interweaving her individual profiles of the murdered women with the story of Ridgway and the officials who caught him (presciently swabbing his mouth years before DNA testing would finally give him away), Rule gives full, heartbreaking emotional weight to what America's most notorious serial killer truly wrought. A must for the author's legions of fans. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 436 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (September 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743238516
• ISBN-13: 978-0743238519
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (124 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #616,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am an author of true-crime books, and I'm now working on my 25th and 26th: NO REGRETS and TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE. I have lived in the Seattle Area for many years. Before that, I grew up in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and lived in Texas, Oregon, and near Niagara Falls, N.Y. I always wanted to be a police officer--because my grandfather was a sheriff in Michigan. I joined the Seattle Police Department when I was 21, worked a year and a half, but then I couldn't pass the eye test. After five years of rejection slips, I finally sold my first article for $35! Soon, I found my niche when I began writing for the fact-detective magazines like TRUE DETECTIVE in 1970, and I wrote more than a thousand homicide cases, and went to hundreds of trials. My first book, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, was about Ted Bundy, but, amazingly, I had the book contract to write about an unknown killer six months before Bundy was identified as the "Ted Killer." And I had known him all along, and didn't realize it; he was my partner in the all-night shift at Seattle's Crisis Clinic! Oddly, I started out writing humor, but unless you are Erma Bombeck, Garrison Keillor, or Fanny Flagg or Dave Barry, it's hard to make a living. Now I write humor for fun and for my friends.

I graduated in Creative Writing from the U of Washington, with minors in criminology and psychology. I also have an AA degree in law enforcement, taking classes in crime scene investigation, arrest, search and seizure, crime scene photography and forensic science. I've lectured in seminars all across America to detectives, prosecutors, and even at the FBI Academy. My subjects have been serial murder, high profile offenders, and women who kill. I write two books every year--one hardcover single-case book, and one Ann Rule's True Crime Files original paperback. Although people tend to think I write only about the Northwest, I go wherever the cases are most interesting. I've written about murder cases in Florida, Georgia, New York, Kansas, Texas, Hawaii, and California, too.

I raised five children on my own--starting out with articles for baby care magazines, Sunday features, true confessions, and then "slicks" like Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Reader's Digest. Now, my children are grown.

I like to keep in very close touch with my readers, and I'm able to do that with a weblog and a guestbook on my website pages at www.annrules.com This also gives readers a chance to talk with each other, and its' a pretty lively spot--as I'm sure this page will be.

To choose a book subject, I weed through about 3,000 suggestions from readers. I'm looking for an "anti-hero" whose eventual arrest shocks those who knew him (or her): attractive, brilliant, charming, popular, wealthy, talented, and much admired in their communities--but really hiding behind masks.

I'm a reader myself, and I always have several books going at once--one upstairs, downstairs, near the bathtub, in my car, and beside my hammock (in the summer, of course!)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkably sensitive, very well-written, November 27, 2004

By 

Bucky (Haunted Mansion, The Magic Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer (Hardcover)

Ann Rule waited 20 years to write this book, until the GRK was caught, and it was well worth the wait. The first half of the book is devoted to the victims: desperate women, many of them drug addicts and/or emotionally fragile, most of them uneducated and living on the fringes of society. She draws sensitive, compelling portraits of these young women, too many of them still in their teens, living a hard existance. They had families, children in some cases, and friends who loved and cared for them. They weren't just faceless nobodies, walking the streets, not caring about themselves and their families. Many of them wanted to escape the life they were living, but could see no way out. These poor, victimized women are worthy of the reader's attention not just as some kind of object lesson, but as human beings engaged in a very real tragic struggle.

The victims also offer some insight into the nature of their killer: a marginalized, banal little man who got his kicks murdering defenseless women desperate enough to get into a vehicle with a total stranger on the mere promise of 30 or 40 dollars. Ann Rule introduces us to him slowly at first with brief snapshot-like depictions of his childhood and early adult years. Then in the second half of the book, readers come face to face with this meaningless individual whose primary interest in life (aside from murder) was collecting and hoarding other people's junk. He is, it turns out, no fiendish genius, no Hannibal Lecter, just an inconsequential man who hates women and can only feel important when he is taking someone's life. I cannot even imagine how the law enforcement officers charged with interrogating him could stand to be in the same room with him.

The contrasts between the two halves of this book are illuminating and remarkable. It is well worth reading as a study of a killer and his victims. It is also quite well written and readers will have no trouble becoming absorbed in Ann Rule's fluid and evocative prose. Readers looking for a sensationalized account of lurid murders and street life will be disappointed, I'm afraid. Readers looking for a more in-depth examination of this series of murders, the victims involved, and how the tenor of the times enabled the killer to carry out his crimes for so long without being caught, will find this book well worth the time and money.

45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good Writer, Mediocre Book, December 7, 2006

By 

J. Martin "Jeff Punk Rock Martin" (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer (Paperback)

Having written such true crime standards as "The Stranger Beside Me" and "Small Sacrifices," Ann Rule long ago established herself as one of the brightest stars of her genre. Her best work shines in its detail, moves along quickly, and reads almost like fiction rather than cold fact.

In "Green River Running Red," though, Rule takes her eye off the ball and spends less time (a LOT less time) telling us about Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway than about his dozens of victims. Yes, it's a noble cause to give these young women an identity beyond 'known prostitute' or 'Jane Doe #4.' But in spending literally hundreds of pages on mini biographies, Rule can't help but make them seem, well, boring. As reported in `Green River Running Red,' there's a downbeat, dreary sameness to the lives of the killer's victims. They have, for the most part, unhappy childhoods and incapable parents. They become estranged from their families. They drop out of school. They get into drugs. They hang out with losers and, eventually, fall into prostitution. They're busted a few times. They live in motels. Finally, they meet Gary Ridgeway, and their sad lives come to an abrupt, violent end. Wading through hundreds of pages of "She was a beautiful, intelligent, well-liked girl," you get the feeling that Rule isn't giving you much credit. After all, these women don't HAVE to have been beautiful or well-liked for their lives to have had value. If we have any humanity at all, we're already on their side, and we're horrified by Gary Ridgeway. In spending SO much time telling the victims' stories, Rule simultaneously sugarcoats their lives and underestimates her readers.
There are other flaws with Green River Running Red, too, most of which spring from the author's coziness with the Seattle locale and the cops investigating the murders. Not only does Ann Rule insert herself rather inappropriately into the story (telling us, among other things, of tips that come her way from the public and of her own speaking engagements that have nothing to do with the case), but, in detailing her relationships with the police, she obliterates any sense of objectivity toward their work in catching the killer. At times, Rule comes off as more cheerleader than reporter.

Keep in mind, this book is not about Ann Rule and her friends' involvement with the case of Gary Ridgeway. It's a story in which she shouldn't be a character at all, but occasionally sees fit to say, "By the way, I know this guy! We're pals!" The problem with this sort of lapse of detachment, of course, is that we don't get a sense of truth and accuracy. As heroic as the officers on the Green River Task Force may have been - and they truly were - Rule can't portray them as anything less than perfect.

This is never more clear than in Rule's retelling of the Task Force's early interest in Ridgeway. When traces of a rare auto paint found on three of the victims point the police to the truck painting shop where Ridgeway works (the only shop within thousands of miles to use this paint), he becomes a `favorite' suspect among some in the task force. This occurs in the 80s - years before Ridgeway's eventual arrest - and a few years AFTER he first pops up as a suspect. So, did the police drop the ball at this point? Or did they feel that they had their man but couldn't quite prove it? Well, Rule isn't saying. Leaving such a question dangling in the minds of her readers does leave the impression that she didn't want to go there.

To be sure, there will be other books written on the Green River Killer. As with books inspired by other sensational crimes, most will invariably be shoddy, poorly written and barely researched. This book will outshine those, and will probably prove to be the definitive report on this particular case. But, given her back catalog and her familiarity with this turf, it's a wonder indeed that Ann Rule couldn't come up with something better than it is.

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Emphasis on Victims, October 31, 2004

By 

Carrie (Toledo, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer (Hardcover)

As a person who has read all of Ann's books, I didn't find this one of her best. Satisfaction in this book is largely dependent on what draws a reader to true crime. I for one am interested in the killers and what makes them tick. This book gave a tremendous amount of attention to the victims and their background stories. I mean no disrespect to the victims, and I certainly empathize with them and their families, it's just that the detailed aspects of the victim's lives felt over-done for my taste. I realize that Ann was trying not to glamorize Ridgeway at the expense of his victims, however I feel she went a little overboard. Ann is a true crime writer not a victims right's advocate. She should therefore write her books accordingly.

On the other hand the second part of her book that focused more on Ridgeway, the people in his life and the investigation of the killings was excellent. The latter half of the book was more in keeping with the Ann Rule style I have come to know and love over the years.