truepenny | UBC: Jensen, Green River Killer (Reply)

Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jeff Jensen's father is Tom Jensen, the detective who kept the Green River case alive between 1990 when the task force was shut down & 2001 when advances in DNA testing meant they could actually match Gary Ridgway's DNA to DNA found in the bodies of Opal Mills and Carol Ann Christensen. Jensen's the guy who did the thankless soul-destroying data entry on the thousands and thousands of tips the task force received. Ann Rule calls him the keeper of the flame, and that's not wrong. This graphic novel is his side of the story.

I like collecting parallax views of serial killers & infamous murderers, so I found it particularly interesting to match Jensen's narrative up against Rule & Keppel. Things do look different from where he stands, while still clearly being the same story. Jensen isn't exaggerating his father's contributions (WHICH WERE ENORMOUS) or trying to skew the facts to create a different interpretation. But he's looking at the investigation from the inside out, instead of, like Rule, from the outside in, and it does make a difference in what kind of story you end up telling. Jensen's story is about heroism of a weird and private kind that almost no one is going to recognize as heroism: the dogged persistence with which Tom Jensen preserved the Green River case, the decade-long waiting game he played without any guarantee that the case would EVER be solved. Also, the dogged persistence with which he interrogated Gary Ridgway, trying in this situation to work from the outside in, trying to figure out how to COMMUNICATE with Ridgway, who is portrayed as someone who is incomprehensible, to himself as much as to anyone else, who simply doesn't have the intellectual equipment to explain what he is. (And who may also be lying his ass off at any given moment.) And, maybe most importantly, the kindness Jensen gives the families of the victims. Jeff Jensen changes all the names, so I don't know for sure which families are shown, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he's made up a composite to stand in for all the victims and all their families. The important part is the kindness. The compassion and respect. The refusal to dismiss the victims as unimportant just because they had been driven to prostitution.

(That was another thing I yelled at the audiobook of The Serial Killer Whisperer: How One Man's Tragedy Helped Unlock the Deadliest Secrets of the World's Most Terrifying Killers about: Earley asserts that women came to Anchorage in the '80s because of the "easy money" to be made in prostitution. That's not easy money, dickface. That's desperate money.)

This is a graphic novel, and not a massive one like From Hell or a multivolume extravaganza like Sandman. It's giving a very partial view of the Green River case, and that is okay. It's preserving an important viewpoint. We need this kind of dog's-eye view just as much as we need the bird's eyes of Rule & Keppel.

I was not super keen on the art, which owes a lot to Scott McCloud and is clearly heavily influenced by Watchmen (I recognize the structural tricks in the composition of panels and the segues). It wasn't bad or obtrusive, but it did not rock my world, and I'm not entirely sure it brought more to the story than Jensen would have had with a straight text narrative. But I'm willing to believe that's just me.

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