was beating faster and faster, throat dry as hot sand. I’m going to have a seizure! Her last seizure had been in the l960’s when she was only twenty-three years old. To Judith, that had been a lifetime ago, and she believed she was free and clear of seizures. Judith whimpered internally.
The detectives asked Judith about Gary and his relationship with his son. They asked about Gary’s family and what kind of people they were. They questioned her about Gary’s arrest a couple of weeks ago. Did she know about it? Judith pressed the palm of her right hand to her forehead and explained that Gary had told her about the arrest. He said it was a silly mistake. He was on his way to work, pulled his truck over to push up the tailgate he had left lowered, and waved at a woman as a friendly gesture. She explained how her husband was always smiling and saying hello to people when they were out in public. Police arrested him for solicitation of a prostitute. But he was released the same day, and he and Judith were relieved that it was some kind of a crazy mix up.
Judith fought for control over her body. She was racking her brain to figure out why the detectives were at her house, on this day, asking her so many questions. She tried desperately to hear what the detectives were saying and give them answers, but the buzzing in her ears was blocking out sound. At times she only saw the detectives’ faces, mouths opening and closing like fish, as they gestured their questions to her. The floor felt like it was tipping now.
After a few moments, she could hear the detectives again. They pressed on with questions. At times they were aggressive. Then they would back off. They asked Judith about her relationship with Gary. Had he ever been violent toward her? She protested vehemently with fists clenched and explained that her husband was funny and kind and always smiling. She could not understand why they were asking her these questions.
Judith told the detectives about the sad year they had been though with Gary’s mother dying of cancer. Gary’s father had passed away in 1998 from complications of Alzheimer’s, and they had always imagined his mother coming to live with them. It was a terrible shock when they found out she was dying of cancer.
The detectives asked Judith if she knew that her husband had been arrested back in May of l982 for offering to pay for a sex act with an undercover police officer. Anxiety had Judith in its full grip now. Her fingertips felt numb. Her lips began to tingle. She wondered if she would lose consciousness in front of the detectives. As she answered that she didn’t know anything about the arrest, and that she didn’t know Gary in 1982, her fingers violently wrestled with the fingers of the opposite hand, pinching and pulling flesh so that she could feel something real.
The female detective aggressively asked Judith questions about Judith and Gary’s sex life. Judith felt a brief surge of strength from anger. Judith stammered angrily at the detectives. She defended Gary, describing him as gentle, soft-spoken, always smiling and polite to her. Their sex life was beautiful. The best she had ever had.
Had they ever done anything kinky such as tying each other up or having sex in the outdoors? No, Judith protested. Why would they do that?
As the detectives pushed on with more questions about the Ridgway’s sex life, the doorbell rang, and then the telephone began ringing a few seconds later. Judith asked, “Should I answer it?” She motioned toward the telephone in the kitchen. The detectives nodded for her to go ahead.
The incoming caller was Judith’s sister-in-law. Judith quickly ended the call by saying, “I’m busy right now, goodbye.”
Judith then walked toward the front door, still feeling shaky and disoriented. As Judith opened the front door, Detective Peters quickly inserted her body between Judith and the front door, partially blocking Judith from the view of the news reporter who was ringing the doorbell. Apparently, word had gotten out about Gary’s arrest and the first reporter had arrived at the Ridgway home in Auburn. But Judith was still in the dark about why a reporter would be at her home. The detectives had not yet told Judith that Gary was under arrest and that the biggest story in two decades was about to break in Washington.
A cameraman taped a few moments of Judith’s pale face staring out, expressionless, just before the door was slammed shut by Detective Peters. The reporter failed to get any comment from Judith.
Ms. Peters guided Judith back to where they were before to resume questioning. But by now the telephone was ringing continuously. Judith pulled away, “I should answer that. It might be my mother calling.”
Detective Haney suggested they unplug the phone. They had something very, very important to tell Judith.
After the phone was disabled, the detectives told Judith that her husband, Gary Ridgway, had been arrested earlier that day because of some new evidence that linked him to the victims of the Green River Killer. In fact, they were certain now that he was the Green River Killer.
Judith felt her heart slide downward in her chest. She felt weaker. She broke down. Her composure dissolved away like sugar granules in warm water. The idea of her husband actually being the Green River Killer was completely overwhelming. Inside her head, she cried out for Gary. Gary, where have they taken you? I need you to hold me!
Haney and Peters explained that Gary had been a suspect for a long time—several years. Specimens of DNA collected from several victims of the Green River Killer matched Gary’s DNA. Three cases had already been confirmed as a match.
Judith shook her head side to side, openly crying. No, she didn’t know that Gary was a suspect. No, she didn’t know he was seeing prostitutes. No, she didn’t know anything. Her head motion finally stopped after several minutes, and she fell into still silence. She was unable to move or think.
As the detectives continued on, offering more details about how the task force had been following Gary and monitoring his activities, Judith felt like a giant wall was collapsing down on her, squeezing the air out of her lungs.
Judith heard a voice echoing toward her from the far end of a long tunnel. It was Sue Peters. “Judith, let’s get a bag packed for you now. We are going to take you to a hotel and check you in under a different name. The reporters will not know you’re there. You are going to stay there for a few days while we search your home.”
Judith compliantly followed Ms. Peters’ instructions as the support walls of her life cracked, tumbled, and buried her.
Chapter 2 - Beginnings
Judith Lorraine Mawson (Ridgway) was born on August 15, 1944. Her eighteen-year-old mother, Helen Downing, quietly delivered her at only seven months into the pregnancy, alone, at the St. Helens Hospital in Chehalis, Washington.
During the years flanking Judith’s birth, it seemed the world had gone mad. In 1939 the U.K. and France had declared war on Germany, pressing the start button for World War II. Canada followed suit in September of the same year. 1941 brought a shocking and deadly attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, December 7th. The United States officially declared war on the Empire of Japan December 8, 1941. Just two months prior to Judith’s birth, United States soldiers waded onto the beaches of Normandy, France, under devastating enemy fire. And, like the soldiers in Normandy, Judith’s father was far away from home, a nineteen-year-old soldier himself, battling for America in World War II. American soldiers and their anguished families had no means of predicting that World War II would end in 1945 after the U.S. bomber, Enola Gay, would drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. And they, in their wildest dreams, hadn’t foreseen that the United States would be back at war just five years later in Korea.
Helen did not know the location of Judith’s father when she gave birth to their baby. In fact, as she lay in the hospital bed with no smiling, well-wishing visitors, no flowers, and no gifts, she did not know if Wesley Mawson was living or dead and whether he would ever come home and meet his new daughter. Her chest ached with worry for her new baby and for the life of her lover. Of course she would write him a letter… tell him the good news…it would take weeks to reach him.
What the new, young mother acutely knew as fact was that she had just become the mother of a premature baby girl, that she was not married, and that she had only one living soul