UBC: Prothero & Smith, Defending Gary

[truepenny]

Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer by Mark Prothero

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is an excellent book about the defense of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Prothero was one of Ridgway's lawyers, and he provides an in-depth, detailed account from the first time he saw Ridgway to the sentencing hearing.

It's a completely different viewpoint than the other books I've read about Ridgway, which have all been from the cops' point of view. (Ann Rule, though not a cop on the case herself, was friends with several of the cops and throughout her extensive body of work takes a consistently pro-cop stance.) One big difference is Prothero's assessment of David Reichert, as opposed to either Rule's or Reichert's own. Prothero doesn't think much better of Reichert than I do, and he and his co-author Carlton Smith, who wrote one of the first books on the Green River Killer, long before he was caught, are extremely and rightfully critical of Reichert's choices in conducting the investigation.

And Prothero sees Gary Ridgway in a way that neither Rule nor Reichert even try to, as a human being who has done monstrous things rather than simply as a monster. I was muttering about bleeding-heart liberals to begin with, but Prothero isn't sugarcoating Ridgway or exculpating him. He's very aware that Ridgway killed probably more than seventy women (Ridgway's memory is legitimately so bad that he himself doesn't know how many women he killed) and he finds him horrific. But Prothero believes, as Rule does not, that Ridgway's desire to help the families of the victims is genuine, that there IS a difference between the Gary Ridgway of 1982 and the Gary Ridgway of 2001. (You may or may not agree with him, but he presents good evidence.) He sees in Ridgway, as he says, a nasty, tricky little boy who grew up to be a nasty, tricky, messed-up man--a view in sharp opposition to Reichert's. Reichert, after all, titled his book Chasing the Devil. And of all the people who have written about the Green River Killer, Prothero is the one who has spent the most time with him, literally thousands of hours, and who had to go through the devastating stages from believing he was innocent to knowing he was guilty.

Prothero is also scrupulously aware of WHERE EVIDENCE COMES FROM, that several of the things the prosecution took as gospel, such as the "fact" that Ridgway's mother dressed provocatively, came only from the deposition of Ridgway's 2nd wife, and he's most severely critical not even of Reichert, but of Mary Ellen O'Toole, the FBI profiler who came in and, according to Prothero, TOLD Ridgway what he was and why, rather than listening to him to try to find out. (A lot of people spent a lot of time trying to get Ridgway to tell them where his "trophies" were hidden and not listening to Ridgway telling them HE DIDN'T KEEP TROPHIES. Because all serial killers keep trophies. We all know that. Right?) Reichert and O'Toole both used a lot of tricks to try to impress Ridgway with how important they were and how important he WASN'T. From Prothero's point of view (sitting there in the interrogation room with his client), this tricks look like shoddy gimcrack--and he doesn't think Ridgway was impressed, either.

(Ridgway won that stare-down with Reichert, if you know the scene in Rule.)

This book is not, and does not pretend to be, about the Green River murders. Prothero's scope is solely the desperate attempts of the defense team to keep Gary Ridgway from being executed. (And with that narrow scope, the book is still more than 500 pages long.) I still think Green River, Running Red is an excellent book, but Defending Gary provides a fascinating parallax view, and delves into a lot of holes that Rule simply steps over.



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