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truepenny
The Search for the Green River Killer by Carlton SmithMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book about the Green River Killer is interesting precisely because it was written before Gary Ridgway was caught; Smith & Guillen don't have the benefit of hindsight in figuring out what's important and what isn't. There's no teleology available. This book gives an excellent sense of just how overwhelmed the Green River Task Force was: the dozens of victims, all of whom were living lives basically invisible to the authorities; all the other missing and/or murdered women in King County and environs; the hopeless task of narrowing down the suspect pool to a manageable size; the awful awful politics both within the police department and between the police department and the county government; the painful truth that they found Gary Ridgway in the 80s, they just didn't have enough evidence to arrest him.
Smith & Guillen tacked on an epilogue when Ridgway was convicted in 2003, in which they pose some excellent questions---questions that none of the other books I've read about the Green River Killer has asked (Rule cares about the victims enough, but is very much not a question-authority kind of author; Reichert is too busy polishing his ego; Prothero's book is really about Ridgway's plea deal)---questions like, how did this happen? Not the question of how Gary Ridgway came to be what he is, since that one there's no real answer to (nature? nurture? neither? both?), but the question of how he came to have such an abundance of prey. How could so many teenage girls fall through the cracks, that not only were they selling sex on the Sea-Tac Strip, but that nobody was even sure for a long time that they were MISSING. That part, Smith & Guillen point out, is not Gary Ridgway's fault. That part belongs to all the organizations and institutions and authorities that are supposed to protect children (and most of the Green River victims were still in their teens) and that, in these 48 cases and who knows how many more, failed.
This is not as compelling a book as Green River, Running Red, or as Defending Gary, but it is clearly written and non-partisan (Rule is always partisan, which I think is one of the reasons her books ARE compelling) and offers a reasonably objective view of the investigation.
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