On the morning of September 11, 2001, Detective Tom Jensen sat in a conference room in Seattle with a group of FBI agents and fellow police officers trying very hard to protect a very important secret. For the previous seventeen years, Jensen had played a key role in one of the biggest manhunts ever undertaken in US history: The search for the so-called Green River Killer, responsible for the strangulation murders of at least forty-eight women—some of them just teenagers, all of them prostitutes—during the 1980s. One week earlier, Jensen, the only cop still working the case full time, had finally put a proper name to this monster and determined his whereabouts. He had to sit on the info for a week, as the department’s top man was on vacation. On Monday, September 10, after Jensen finally shared the news of the Green River Killer’s identity with Sheriff Dave Reichert, they resolved to spend the next forty-eight hours quietly assembling a small team of trusted colleagues to prepare for the arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway, a seemingly unremarkable middle-aged painter of commercial vehicles who lived a seemingly unremarkable life with his third wife on the outskirts of Seattle. One complication: A Tuesday morning meeting with representatives of various law-enforcement agencies to discuss new ways they could all work together to push the investigation forward. The orders Jensen received were clear: Say nothing. And so it went that Jensen spent the morning of 9/11 brainstorming ways to catch a serial killer he had already caught. But he didn’t have to try very hard. Throughout the meeting, the FBI agents were continuously distracted with texts and phone calls about a developing situation in New York City that had ramifications for every community in the nation. Unable to concentrate, the agents gave up and brought the meeting to an early close. Jensen might have felt more relieved if he didn’t recognize that something profoundly wrong was going down at that very moment. He left the room, and joined the rest of the country in playing eyewitness to an act of terror on a mind-boggling scale that would mark all of us for the rest of our lives.
You won’t find this anecdote in Green River Killer: A True Detective Story, the graphic novel I have written about Tom Jensen, my father, and his pursuit of America’s most prolific serial killer. With just 240 pages to tell the story, I had to pick just the right ones that served the mission of illuminating the one moment I most wanted to understand and share with readers—a moment that occurred about twenty-two months after 9/11, on the morning of July 17, 2003, during the strange and unlikely final act of the Green River Killer drama.
In the spring of 2003, Ridgway—who had only been charged with seven of the forty-eight murders—authorized his attorneys to present the prosecution with an offer: He would plead guilty to all the killings, plus lead detectives to the bodies of many more victims that had never been found, in exchange for a sentence of life in prison instead of the death penalty. The prosecution accepted the deal, on the condition that Ridgway could corroborate his claims by supplying proof to the people who knew the case the best: My father and his colleagues. On the fifth day of this unprecedented and bizarre experience—bizarre, because Ridgway actually lived in the offices of the Green River Task Force, in a small office just yards away from my father’s cubicle, for the entire duration of the 188-day corroboration process—my father got to look the Green River Killer in the eye and ask him the question he wanted to ask him the most: Why? Why did he do this? Why destroy all those lives? Why inflict all that horror on the city? The simple, chilling answer that Ridgway supplied brought my father to tears. My father is not a man who is comfortable with emotion. He also rarely talked about the case with my mother and brother and me. His work was just a job, nothing special, nothing personal. Or so he had us believe. When Dad finally told me the story of “The Quest”—his term for his pursuit of the Green River Killer, a term full of personal significance to both of us—and when he told me about his “breakdown” (again, his term) on the morning of July 17, 2003, I realized that his work was more than a job, that it was, in fact, deeply personal. I also realized he had an important, meaningful story to share with the culture, if he’d be willing to do so.
Green River Killer: A True Detective Story—drawn with great care and storytelling confidence by Jonathan Case (please check out his graphic novel Dear Creature, in stores this fall)—is the result of my attempt to better understand my father’s encounter with real-life evil and how he was shaped by the seemingly unending, decades-long engagement with the horror and human wreckage produced by the Green River Killer. This is a story about something that happened somewhere else, to someone else, most likely far away from where you live. But it’s also a story that everyone, everywhere, can relate to, because it’s suffused with the defining themes of our times. How do we respond to grand injustice? What do we do with the indelible, terrible images and furious, inconsolable feelings produced by that evil? How do we recover from catastrophe and begin moving toward something that might be called “closure,” if such a thing is even possible? Back in 2004, when I began brainstorming how I would tell the story to an audience that may know nothing about the Green River Killer, the aftermath of 9/11 and our country’s often difficult pursuit of avenging that crime was very much on my mind. Since then, we have borne witness to more disasters—in Indonesia, Haiti, Japan, and of course, here in the United States. We needn’t be so global about this. As I wrote the book, my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer. At one point, she was given a prognosis of twenty-seven months. I wrote Green River Killer: A True Detective Story for anyone and everyone who has been touched by tragedy, rocked by unexpected turmoil, or torn up by the terror of our times, in hopes of producing a story full of empathy and grace, that could provide an opportunity for reflection and catharsis, yet without peddling easy answers or cheap closure. I hope we’ve succeeded. More than anything, I wrote the book for my father, so I could tell him how much I love him and how proud I am of him. I am grateful to have had the chance to share his story—a hard yet timely and hopefully inspiring story—with the world.
-Jeff Jensen