Year of the Golden Pig Reading 17: "Green River, Running Red"

It has been a while since I read a crime book. I spotted this at a bookstore. It was by Ann Rule, the same woman who wrote a book about Ted Bundy. I read that about twenty years ago when I was in the Air Force. So I thought I would check out what other sicko has emerged from Washington state (besides all of my colleagues from there). The book intitially focuses on the lives of the women that were strangled by Gary Ridgeway, the so-called "Green River Killer." That part of the book was okay. But after a while I got tired of hearing about girls who dropped out of school, took drugs, tried to get better, didn't, and then were murder. Hey, for me that is family. I don't need to read about that 48 times (for the women he killed).

Then it got better, and focused more on police work. I always thought it would be interesting to become a police detective. I thought it would be nice to solve crimes. In the end I think the paperwork would have killed me. In this case the were tens of thousands of document pages. I am sure I would have misplaced some of that.


In the end, it was fascinating to look into the life of such a killer. He seemed like a pretty normal guy, to his colleagues anyway. He was also married three times, had a steady job and his own house. Where have I gone wrong? Even this bum can have a normal life.


But enough of that. I thought the Bundy book was better but I was in my 20's then, so maybe it wouldn't hold up now. It makes me want to go out and read some more crime books, though.