11:19 AM PST on Friday, November 7, 2003

Associated Press

SEATTLE — More than 19 years ago, a recently hired Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter received a nearly unintelligible letter purporting to be from the Green River killer.

Unsigned, poorly typed and almost entirely without spaces between the words, it began, “whatyou eedtonoaboutthegreenriverman.”

The next line read, “dontthrowaway.” Typed at the bottom was “callmefred.”

KING Admitted serial killer Gary Ridgway appears in court, Nov. 5, 2003.

“From his confessions released on Wednesday, it is now clear that the letter was Ridgway’s brazen attempt to throw off investigators. It was the only known time he surfaced to communicate through the news media,” Barber wrote.

Investigators were, in fact, misled. Based on an errant FBI evaluation, they didn’t think it was authentic.

Partly for that reason, the PI, as the paper is widely known, never reported on the letter, Barber wrote.

Still, he kept a copy of the letter in a tattered manilla file at his desk, even when the paper moved from grimy digs in the Denny Regrade to shiny new quarters above a park on Elliott Bay.

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1984 Ridgway letter sent to Seattle P-I

When Ridgway pleaded guilty Wednesday to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, avoiding the death penalty while becoming the serial killer with the most convictions in U.S. history, Barber reopened the file “for the umpteenth time in two decades.”

He was 32 and had been hired about a year earlier from a newspaper in Ohio when the letter landed on his desk in February 1984, two months after the King County sheriff’s office formed the Green River Task Force.

His first assignment in Seattle was working on the Green River story with police reporter George Foster.

The letter already had been opened, paper-clipped to an envelope and handled by several copy aides. The writer claimed to have found it in a police officer’s notebook that had been left at a Denny’s restaurant.

Concerned about preserving potential evidence, Barber made a photocopy, slipped the original into a plastic sandwich bag and conferred with Art Gorlick, assistant managing editor at the time, and other newsroom superiors.

To decipher the letter, he drew lines between words on the photocopy, which was displayed on the P-I’s Web site.

The P-I ran a classified ad asking “callmefred” to contact the paper, but nobody did.

Barber wrote that task force commander Frank Adamson “was appreciative but poker-faced” when he and Gorlick brought him the letter.

“He seemed to downplay the significance, though I saw him and Maj. Greg Boyle shoot little glances at each other out of the corner of their eyes,” Barber recalled.

An FBI evaluation was a bust. The letter had been handled by too many people, and forensic examiners figured the typist probably had used gloves.

“Adamson said the letter might be what the writer had said it was — notes from a detective’s notebook found left at a Denny’s, perhaps jottings from an orientation briefing or conjecture about the case,” Barber wrote.

Barber later replaced Foster as police reporter and continued to pursue the Green River case for 10 years.

Court documents now show an FBI psychological profiler who examined the letter advised the task force it was not from the killer and was more likely the work of “someone inside the task force seeking undue attention.”

“Even so, the task force kept the letter on file,” Barber wrote. “So did I. Its detail seemed to contain possible slivers of truth. It was precious evidence known only to police, the killer and to me.”

The letter mentioned real evidence, such as necrophilia and fingernails cut off some victims, as well as some red herrings.

“hesmokes/hechewsgum,” the letter reads. Ridgway did neither but planted cigarette butts and gum at places where his victims’ bodies were found.

Ridgway remembered the letter as “a kind of road map to his crimes” when he began confessing this summer, Barber wrote.

“He brought up the letter during interviews,” Sheriff David G. Reichert told Barber on Wednesday. “He first mentioned it. He took credit for writing it and sending it. He went through and explained what each comment meant.”

Near the bottom of the letter is the line, “Oehatkindofmanisthis,” apparently “What kind of man is this?”

Barber concluded, “If he wants to explain it, he knows where to find me.”