The Truth About the Green River Killer
文章来源: 文章作者: 发布时间:2007-04-09 01:43 字体: [ ]  进入论坛
(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Gary Ridgway should have been caught a long time ago. His choice of victims had everything to do with why he wasn't.

  In a calm voice and with an expressionless gaze, a bespectacled 54-year-old Washington State resident by the name of Gary Ridgway confessed to killing1 48 women.

  To be accurate, Ridgway raped2, choked, killed and discarded 48 women, including many teenagers as young as 15 years of age.

  Ridgway was a married man and a father, a white guy from Auburn, Washington who held the same job for 30 years——and who got away with killing one female after another for over 20 years.

  When the nation's worst captured serial3 killer4 finally began cooperating with authorities to reveal the locations of his victims, people in the Pacific Northwest breathed a collective sigh of relief. Finally, the notorious Green River Killer had been caught. And finally, the family members of the deceased could have some peace of mind, knowing that the nightmare, at least in one sense, was over.

  Detective work, diligence, and a decision on the part of the King County Prosecutor5 to spare Ridgway the death sentence in exchange for information are all being hailed as a job well done. Ridgway will never kill again.

  But the question remains6: Why was he allowed to kill, again and again, when so much evidence had already pointed7 in his direction two decades ago?

  The answer, in great part, lies in Ridgway's own admission of who he preyed9 upon.

  "I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex," Ridgway said in his confessional statement. "I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."

  At least one-third of Ridgway's female victims were girls and women of color, and the vast majority were under the age of 22. Ridgway, an extreme incarnation of a brutal10 misogynist11, considered killing female prostitutes a "career." He felt proud of what he did, and thought he was damn good at it.

  In Ridgway's mind, he even believed that he was helping12 the police out, as he admitted in one interview with investigators13.

  "I thought I was doing you guys a favor, killing prostitutes," he said. "Here you guys can't control them, but I can."

  Prostitutes were an infestation14, a sickly disease to which Ridgway thought he had the cure. So he "cured" young women of what he saw as their pathetic and undeserving lives. Not everyone he killed was a prostitute, but in his mind, they all deserved what they got.

  But like most street prostitutes, these were girls and young women with families. Some had drug and alcohol problems and yet stayed close to their parents, who tried to help them through. Some had boyfriends or even husbands who knew what they did for a living because of the dire8 economic circumstances of their lives.

  Street prostitution is one of the most dangerous ways for a woman to make a living, and it is also the method of making income that is the most judged and moralized against. Nevada's legalized brothels and emerging progressive feminist15 attitudes toward sex work aside, prostitutes continue be reviled16.

  Attitudes toward prostitutes —— their very dehumanization —— underlies17 the Green River Killer case, and yet prostitutes are the aspect of this story that has been least discussed.

  Would Ridgway have been stopped in his tracks 20 or fifteen years ago if his female victims had had different class backgrounds, had not participated in the street economy, been more "innocent" in the eyes of the law?

  In April 1983, the boyfriend of 16-year-old Kimi-Kai Pitsor told police that she had gotten into an older green Ford18 pickup19 truck, and he described the driver. Ridgway's girlfriend at the time owned an older, light-green Ford. (Four years later, Pitsor's boyfriend picked Ridgway's photo out of a montage.)

  Then, in May 1983, Marie Malvar, 18, disappeared after getting in Ridgway's truck. Malvar's boyfriend actually took police to Ridgway's house four days later, and then identified the pickup he saw Malvar get into. When two detectives questioned Ridgway, he actually admitted to picking up prostitutes, but denied any contact with Malvar. Despite the eyewitness20 identification, the neighborly, upstanding Ridgway was left alone.

  Ridgway continued to have many close calls with police, evading21 and fooling officers and detectives all the while. Would Ridgway have been let go, time after time, had he been anything other than an "ordinary" looking middle-class white man who preyed on the vulnerable, the poor, and the powerless?

  In 1984, Rebecca Garde Guay actually came forward to police to say that she had been assaulted two years prior by a man who tried to kill her with a chokehold. Not only did Guay know Ridgway's place of employment (he had shown her an identification card), but she also picked him out of a book of photos. What's worse, Ridgway had the sheer gall22 to admit having "dated" Guay and even choking her.

  But by then, Guay no longer wanted to pursue charges. She became the only known survivor23 of the Green River Killer. Perhaps she was afraid of being hunted down, or perhaps she just knew that she wouldn't be believed. And in this way, Ridgway was allowed to return to his life, killing many dozens more young women along the way.

  Although Ridgway copped to 48 murders, he says it's possible he killed as many as 60 women and girls.

  "In most cases when I killed these women I did not know their names," Ridgway stated. "Most of the time I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory of their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight."

  To Ridgway, they were faceless, nameless females who wouldn't be missed.

  And in some ways, he was right. The victimization of prostitutes——a rampant24 phenomenon across the nation——occurs as frequently as it does because so few people do care, and because prostitutes themselves are so afraid to report the abuse.

  A 2001 report by the Coalition25 Against Trafficking in Women found that nearly 90 percent of prostitutes in the U.S. reported being physically26 abused by pimps and traffickers. And one-half of women in this study described frequent, sometimes daily assaults.

  To progressives, prostitutes are alternately viewed as victims in need of rescue and rehabilitation27, or else as sex workers who have the right to decide their form of livelihood28. The truth, it seems, lies somewhere in the middle——in allowing women to pursue their occupation of choice but recognizing that many prostitutes (especially street workers) have faced terrible abuse as children and teens, and need a hand to help them out of a life they've become trapped in.

  The decriminalization of prostitution would go a long way toward giving women more incentive29 to report suspicious behavior and violence by lessening30 their fear of arrest or poor treatment by police.

  But in our perversely31 moralistic nation——where skin and sexuality sell product, but skin and sex themselves cannot be for sale——prostitution is still the dark secret in our midst.

  And prostitution, in turn, has become a lightning rod for society's collective hatred32 of women who "abandon" their families and their children; who fall from grace and descend33 into "degrading" behavior. Women who consciously choose to sell sex —— to get by, to get a fix, to pay rent, to feed a kid, or to even to go to school——are human beings whose existences we'd rather not deal with or see walking down our streets.

  As a society, we still see prostitution as an infestation to be kept under control. Words like "eradication34" used in tandem35 with street prostitution are not uncommon36 in law enforcement lingo37, as if the women selling their bodies are no better than vermin.

  Ridgway saw these women and wanted them dead.

  If we are not willing to consider how and why a man like Ridgway can come to exist and commit his crimes for years on end, we haven't even begun to dig deeply enough into the dark core at the root of this kind of hatred.

  Perhaps Nancy Gabbert, the mother of 17-year-old Ridgway victim Sandra, said it best.

  "Fifty years ago, Gary Ridgway was a little baby," Gabbert told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer while explaining her opposition38 to the death penalty for her daughter's killer. "He's not some monster who was dropped down from another planet. He was created right here in our society."

  "How did we do this?" she asked.

  She deserves a real answer



点击收听单词发音收听单词发音  

1 killing kpBziQ     
n.巨额利润;突然赚大钱,发大财
参考例句:
  • Investors are set to make a killing from the sell-off.投资者准备清仓以便大赚一笔。
  • Last week my brother made a killing on Wall Street.上个周我兄弟在华尔街赚了一大笔。
2 raped 7a6e3e7dd30eb1e3b61716af0e54d4a2     
v.以暴力夺取,强夺( rape的过去式和过去分词 );强奸
参考例句:
  • A young woman was brutally raped in her own home. 一名年轻女子在自己家中惨遭强暴。 来自辞典例句
  • We got stick together, or we will be having our women raped. 我们得团结一致,不然我们的妻女就会遭到蹂躏。 来自辞典例句
3 serial 0zuw2     
n.连本影片,连本电视节目;adj.连续的
参考例句:
  • A new serial is starting on television tonight.今晚电视开播一部新的电视连续剧。
  • Can you account for the serial failures in our experiment?你能解释我们实验屡屡失败的原因吗?
4 killer rpLziK     
n.杀人者,杀人犯,杀手,屠杀者
参考例句:
  • Heart attacks have become Britain's No.1 killer disease.心脏病已成为英国的头号致命疾病。
  • The bulk of the evidence points to him as her killer.大量证据证明是他杀死她的。
5 prosecutor 6RXx1     
n.起诉人;检察官,公诉人
参考例句:
  • The defender argued down the prosecutor at the court.辩护人在法庭上驳倒了起诉人。
  • The prosecutor would tear your testimony to pieces.检查官会把你的证言驳得体无完肤。
6 remains 1kMzTy     
n.剩余物,残留物;遗体,遗迹
参考例句:
  • He ate the remains of food hungrily.他狼吞虎咽地吃剩余的食物。
  • The remains of the meal were fed to the dog.残羹剩饭喂狗了。
7 pointed Il8zB4     
adj.尖的,直截了当的
参考例句:
  • He gave me a very sharp pointed pencil.他给我一支削得非常尖的铅笔。
  • She wished to show Mrs.John Dashwood by this pointed invitation to her brother.她想通过对达茨伍德夫人提出直截了当的邀请向她的哥哥表示出来。
8 dire llUz9     
adj.可怕的,悲惨的,阴惨的,极端的
参考例句:
  • There were dire warnings about the dangers of watching too much TV.曾经有人就看电视太多的危害性提出严重警告。
  • We were indeed in dire straits.But we pulled through.那时我们的困难真是大极了,但是我们渡过了困难。
9 preyed 30b08738b4df0c75cb8e123ab0b15c0f     
v.掠食( prey的过去式和过去分词 );掠食;折磨;(人)靠欺诈为生
参考例句:
  • Remorse preyed upon his mind. 悔恨使他内心痛苦。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
  • He had been unwise and it preyed on his conscience. 他做得不太明智,这一直让他良心不安。 来自辞典例句
10 brutal bSFyb     
adj.残忍的,野蛮的,不讲理的
参考例句:
  • She has to face the brutal reality.她不得不去面对冷酷的现实。
  • They're brutal people behind their civilised veneer.他们表面上温文有礼,骨子里却是野蛮残忍。
11 misogynist uwvyE     
n.厌恶女人的人
参考例句:
  • He quickly gained the reputation of being a misogynist.他很快地赢得了“厌恶女性者”的这一名声。
  • Nice try,but you're a misanthrope,not a misogynist.不错了,你讨厌的是世界,不是女人。
12 helping 2rGzDc     
n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的,辅助的
参考例句:
  • The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
  • By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。
13 investigators e970f9140785518a87fc81641b7c89f7     
n.调查者,审查者( investigator的名词复数 )
参考例句:
  • This memo could be the smoking gun that investigators have been looking for. 这份备忘录可能是调查人员一直在寻找的证据。
  • The team consisted of six investigators and two secretaries. 这个团队由六个调查人员和两个秘书组成。 来自《简明英汉词典》
14 infestation infestation     
n.侵扰,蔓延
参考例句:
  • The premises were treated for cockroach infestation.因蟑螂成灾,这些房屋集中进行了灭蟑活动。
  • Parts of California are suffering from an infestation of oriental fruit flies.加利福尼亚的部分地区正遭受东方果蝇的大肆侵袭。
15 feminist mliyh     
adj.主张男女平等的,女权主义的
参考例句:
  • She followed the feminist movement.她支持女权运动。
  • From then on,feminist studies on literature boomed.从那时起,男女平等受教育的现象开始迅速兴起。
16 reviled b65337c26ca96545bc83e2c51be568cb     
v.辱骂,痛斥( revile的过去式和过去分词 )
参考例句:
  • The tramp reviled the man who drove him off. 流浪汉辱骂那位赶他走开的人。 来自《现代英汉综合大词典》
  • The old man reviled against corruption. 那老人痛斥了贪污舞弊。 来自《简明英汉词典》
17 underlies d9c77c83f8c2ab289262fec743f08dd0     
v.位于或存在于(某物)之下( underlie的第三人称单数 );构成…的基础(或起因),引起
参考例句:
  • I think a lack of confidence underlies his manner. 我认为他表现出的态度是因为他缺乏信心。 来自《简明英汉词典》
  • Try to figure out what feeling underlies your anger. 努力找出你的愤怒之下潜藏的情感。 来自辞典例句
18 Ford KiIxx     
n.浅滩,水浅可涉处;v.涉水,涉过
参考例句:
  • They were guarding the bridge,so we forded the river.他们驻守在那座桥上,所以我们只能涉水过河。
  • If you decide to ford a stream,be extremely careful.如果已决定要涉过小溪,必须极度小心。
19 pickup ANkxA     
n.拾起,获得
参考例句:
  • I would love to trade this car for a pickup truck.我愿意用这辆汽车换一辆小型轻便卡车。||The luck guy is a choice pickup for the girls.那位幸运的男孩是女孩子们想勾搭上的人。
20 eyewitness VlVxj     
n.目击者,见证人
参考例句:
  • The police questioned several eyewitness to the murder.警察询问了谋杀案的几位目击者。
  • He was the only eyewitness of the robbery.他是那起抢劫案的唯一目击者。
21 evading 6af7bd759f5505efaee3e9c7803918e5     
逃避( evade的现在分词 ); 避开; 回避; 想不出
参考例句:
  • Segmentation of a project is one means of evading NEPA. 把某一工程进行分割,是回避《国家环境政策法》的一种手段。 来自英汉非文学 - 环境法 - 环境法
  • Too many companies, she says, are evading the issue. 她说太多公司都在回避这个问题。
22 gall jhXxC     
v.使烦恼,使焦躁,难堪;n.磨难
参考例句:
  • It galled him to have to ask for a loan.必须向人借钱使他感到难堪。
  • No gall,no glory.没有磨难,何来荣耀。
23 survivor hrIw8     
n.生存者,残存者,幸存者
参考例句:
  • The sole survivor of the crash was an infant.这次撞车的惟一幸存者是一个婴儿。
  • There was only one survivor of the plane crash.这次飞机失事中只有一名幸存者。
24 rampant LAuzm     
adj.(植物)蔓生的;狂暴的,无约束的
参考例句:
  • Sickness was rampant in the area.该地区疾病蔓延。
  • You cannot allow children to rampant through the museum.你不能任由小孩子在博物馆里乱跑。
25 coalition pWlyi     
n.结合体,同盟,结合,联合
参考例句:
  • The several parties formed a coalition.这几个政党组成了政治联盟。
  • Coalition forces take great care to avoid civilian casualties.联盟军队竭尽全力避免造成平民伤亡。
26 physically iNix5     
adj.物质上,体格上,身体上,按自然规律
参考例句:
  • He was out of sorts physically,as well as disordered mentally.他浑身不舒服,心绪也很乱。
  • Every time I think about it I feel physically sick.一想起那件事我就感到极恶心。
27 rehabilitation 8Vcxv     
n.康复,悔过自新,修复,复兴,复职,复位
参考例句:
  • He's booked himself into a rehabilitation clinic.他自己联系了一家康复诊所。
  • No one can really make me rehabilitation of injuries.已经没有人可以真正令我的伤康复了。
28 livelihood sppzWF     
n.生计,谋生之道
参考例句:
  • Appropriate arrangements will be made for their work and livelihood.他们的工作和生活会得到妥善安排。
  • My father gained a bare livelihood of family by his own hands.父亲靠自己的双手勉强维持家计。
29 incentive j4zy9     
n.刺激;动力;鼓励;诱因;动机
参考例句:
  • Money is still a major incentive in most occupations.在许多职业中,钱仍是主要的鼓励因素。
  • He hasn't much incentive to work hard.他没有努力工作的动机。
30 lessening 7da1cd48564f42a12c5309c3711a7945     
减轻,减少,变小
参考例句:
  • So however much he earned, she spent it, her demands growing and lessening with his income. 祥子挣多少,她花多少,她的要求随着他的钱涨落。 来自汉英文学 - 骆驼祥子
  • The talks have resulted in a lessening of suspicion. 谈话消减了彼此的怀疑。
31 perversely 8be945d3748a381de483d070ad2ad78a     
adv. 倔强地
参考例句:
  • Intelligence in the mode of passion is always perversely. 受激情属性控制的智力,总是逆着活动的正确方向行事。
  • She continue, perversely, to wear shoes that damaged her feet. 她偏偏穿那双挤脚的鞋。
32 hatred T5Gyg     
n.憎恶,憎恨,仇恨
参考例句:
  • He looked at me with hatred in his eyes.他以憎恨的眼光望着我。
  • The old man was seized with burning hatred for the fascists.老人对法西斯主义者充满了仇恨。
33 descend descend     
vt./vi.传下来,下来,下降
参考例句:
  • I hope the grace of God would descend on me.我期望上帝的恩惠。
  • We're not going to descend to such methods.我们不会沦落到使用这种手段。
34 eradication otUzfH     
n.根除
参考例句:
  • The eradication of an established infestation is not easy. 根除昆虫蔓延是不容易的。
  • This is often required for intelligent control and eradication. 这经常需要灵巧的控制与消除。
35 tandem 6Ibzp     
n.同时发生;配合;adv.一个跟着一个地;纵排地;adj.(两匹马)前后纵列的
参考例句:
  • Malcolm's contract will run in tandem with his existing one.马尔科姆的合同将与他手头的合同同时生效。
  • He is working in tandem with officials of the Serious Fraud Office.他正配合欺诈重案办公室的官员工作。
36 uncommon AlPwO     
adj.罕见的,非凡的,不平常的
参考例句:
  • Such attitudes were not at all uncommon thirty years ago.这些看法在30年前很常见。
  • Phil has uncommon intelligence.菲尔智力超群。
37 lingo S0exp     
n.语言不知所云,外国话,隐语
参考例句:
  • If you live abroad it helps to know the local lingo.住在国外,学一点当地的语言自有好处。
  • Don't use all that technical lingo try and explain in plain English.别尽用那种专门术语,用普通的词语解释吧。
38 opposition eIUxU     
n.反对,敌对
参考例句:
  • The party leader is facing opposition in his own backyard.该党领袖在自己的党內遇到了反对。
  • The police tried to break down the prisoner's opposition.警察设法制住了那个囚犯的反抗。
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