# The Serial Killer That Hid For 20 Years | Guiltology | @RealCrime
This is the most unusual case I think in the history of this country. Having been a police officer for 33 years and being the lead detective on that case, that’s the experience that I speak from. This case took 20 years.
Not one, not five, not 10, not 15. It took 20.
Kent is south of Seattle about 30 miles or so, and the Green River is just kind of a slow, meandering river that goes through the South Seattle Valley. In 1982 when I started this case, it was a pretty peaceful kind of out-of-the-way place.
On August 15th, I got a phone call. I was called to go to the Green River. A rafter had seen what he first thought were mannequins pushed up along the riverbank.
We began to interview the rafter, and he told us that he saw a white male who waved at him, then he quickly got in a pickup truck and drove off. Then he said as he got closer, he recognized that these weren’t mannequins. They were dead bodies.
I remember this victim. One of her hands and arms were free, and as the water gently flowed down the river, her hand was waving in the current, sort of like, you know, here I am, help. Next, I had to figure out how did the suspect get the bodies to that point.
Did he carry them? Were they still alive when he took them down to the riverbank? Were they already dead?
Then I discovered another body. She was a young African-American female and was partially 𝓷𝓾𝓭𝓮.
The next step in trying to solve a case like this is through the autopsy. There were two victims that contained bodily fluids left behind by someone who had a sexual encounter with them. Those samples today would be immediately tested for DNA, but back in 1982, DNA was an unknown technology.
The samples collected were frozen, and the best that we could hope for was a blood type.
But the victims could be identified through fingerprints and dental records. One on the bank was Opal Mills, and the two in the river were Cynthia Hines and Marcia Chapman.
I was one of the women that was assigned to working in 𝒔𝒆𝒙 crimes. When we identified Marcia Chapman as being one of the women in the river, that struck me hard because I had probably within the few months prior to her death met her, and she had been a victim of an assault. It was hard to know that someone I had tried to help ended up running across somebody that killed her.
So I had a personal connection with that particular case, and so I was asked to join the team that was going to be looking at the initial victims who were found on the Green River.
When I started this case on that August 15th, I was already working a case from January of 1982. A 16-year-old girl, Leanne Wilcox, who had been working the street, had been killed. And in July of 1982, Wendy Coffield was found in the Green River.
Then on August 12th, Debbie Boner had been discovered. With the victims found in the Green River, that was six dead bodies.
As we looked into who the victims were, it became clear that the connection was prostitution. Very often we’re talking about a 15-year-old little girl, a 16-year-old little girl coming from dysfunctional homes, domestic violence, and they end up on the street working on what we called the Strip back then. There was a lot of prostitution activity, a lot of 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 activity, and a lot of crime.
On a Friday night, you could count hundreds of young women standing on the street corner.
We also discovered the victims were all strangled. The reality that hit us was that all of these young girls could have been killed by the same person, and we need to have a task force. So we started out with about 20 or 25 detectives because we were very certain that we had a serial murder on our hands.
Most serial murder cases are stranger homicides. There is no connection that you can investigate in the victim’s background that’s going to bring you to the suspect. They come together for the first time, and that’s usually the last time for the victim.
That makes it difficult to solve a serial murder case.
When you know you’re working a serial killer, a lot of things start running through your mind. The thought was anything is possible with this guy. We don’t know if he’s a resident here.
We don’t know if he’s a transient. And it’s always at the forefront of your mind that the next day you could find another victim.
I think history has shown us that unless they’re in jail or in prison or dead, they don’t stop. Serial killers don’t stop. They have to keep doing it.
The news that we were investigating a serial murder case spread rather rapidly, and sometimes that brings certain people out of the woodwork that want to be involved in investigations like this. I had already called the FBI Behavioral Science Center, and they said one of the things that a killer might do is to call and say I want to help, I want to be involved. And what that does, of course, is gives them the opportunity to know what’s going on if they get close enough.
A guy named Melvin Foster called and offered his help and said, I think I may have known some of these victims. Thanks for your call. We discovered he was a cab driver.
He was out and about in the areas where the young women were engaged in their activities and or missing. So that certainly set up red flags for us. So we brought him in.
He was one of those characters that you couldn’t ignore.
We interviewed him. We discovered he had warrants out for his arrest. We asked him to take a polygraph test.
The polygraph is a device that’s designed to measure your heart rate, your blood pressure, your skin conductance, and your respiration rate. It’s based on the idea that by measuring those, it can capture when a person is lying.
He said he knows some of the victims. Then he says he doesn’t know some of the victims. Then he says he does know.
As his stories changed, Melvin Foster failed the polygraph test. So we put him under surveillance. We spent a lot of time on him.
We got a search warrant for his house, and we found some photographs of naked women, but we found no physical evidence that connected him directly to any of the bodies that we found. And all we had was a failed polygraph. This was not enough to make any sort of case and arrest him.
After not making any progress with Melvin Foster, there was a decision made in late ’82 that the task force would be cut back. For the most part, 1983 we weren’t finding any more victims, and I think at that point it may have been just Rard and I who were left to follow up on this case.
We had victims’ families who were angry. They were disappointed in us. They were critical of us.
They felt that we didn’t care. They were calling attention to the fact that these women are being killed, and anything is better than nothing. It hurt for people to feel that way.
I mean, we were from sun up to sun down, weekends, driving around, following leads, following tips. We were committed to solving the case.
While victims’ families accused us of not caring, I think that with prostitutes on the street, the other part of the community didn’t really care. You know, when I used to work late at night on this case, I’d park and watch people coming and going to whatever in their busy lives. They didn’t see me, but they also sadly didn’t see the young girls who were standing right there on the street corner right in front of them.
I left home when I was in high school because of domestic violence, and I think that helped me understand why these young kids would leave their homes.
Then other bodies started to be found in Seattle. Another grim discovery today that could be connected to the string of Green River murders which have shaken that West Coast city. Late into 1983, we had 13 victims.
This investigation ebbed and flowed. In ’84, all of a sudden it ramped up again.
In Seattle this morning, police are hunting a mass murderer believed to have killed as many as 21 prostitutes in the last 22 months. It’s been called the Green River Killer ever since the first bodies, five of them, were pulled from this river. Since then, seven more bodies have been discovered nearby, all those of young prostitutes, according to police.
And the number of missing increases steadily. Two were added to the list this week.
Every month we were finding two or three more bodies. We spent so much time recovering remains that there wasn’t that much time to actually investigate the murders. You can’t be a robot in this job.
There is no way in the world that you can’t get emotionally involved. When you collect bodies day after day, week after week, the visions of those bodies stay. They stay in your memory forever.
About 1985, we got a computer, and the computer allowed us to organize the evidence that we had gathered. A recurring thing that we found was a greenish-colored pickup that was seen in the area or possibly with the victim. One of them was the woman identified as Kim Nelson.
We learned that Kim Nelson and this other girl, Paige Miley, were standing by the side of the road, and Paige got picked up, leaving Kim Nelson there by herself. And then when Paige came back, Kim was gone, and she never returned.
A few days later, Paige was back on the street out there, and she was approached by this man in the pickup truck asking her where her tall friend was. She thought it suspicious, and Paige later identified this man from a group of six photographs. He was called Gary Ridgway.
We discovered that Ridgway lived in the neighborhood just off this strip. He came across as this very meek, mild-mannered person who gave people the impression that he couldn’t hurt a fly. But he had a prior arrest for patronizing a prostitute.
He worked at Kenworth Trucking as a painter in Renton, which was maybe 40 minutes from his home.
We found that there was a definite spike in the number of cases when there was a strike at Kenworth, and Gary was off work for a lot of that time. So he was available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As we looked at Ridgway, he just got more and more interesting, and we eventually got to a place where we had probable cause to search his home.
In forensic science, we’re trying to place people at a scene or we’re trying to place people together. So we work off the principle of exchange, and that means that when people come into contact with each other, there’s very likely some exchange of some fiber, a hair, or body fluid. And our job as forensic scientists is to make sure we collect any of those fibers or hairs or fluids that have been exchanged.
We were looking for anything that is connecting any of the victims together with Ridgway. Any stray hairs, any fibers on the carpet, paint samples from his coveralls, anything that could match the clothing items that we found on our early victims to build a case and arrest him.
In ’87, ’88, ’89, we kept finding bodies. Police in Washington state believe they found the remains of another victim of the so-called Green River Killer. 17-year-old Cindy Anne Smith was last seen in March of 1984.
Police believe that Smith is the killer’s 37th known victim. All of them women ranging from 16 to 36 years of age.
There were so many missing young girls now who have been known to work on the street. You’re talking about 60, 70, possibly 80 victims on a list. The missing person count is going up, and the number of victims has gone up.
And our main focus was Gary Ridgway. As we investigated him, he just got more and more interesting. Say on the way to work and on the way from work, he would stop and pick up a prostitute.
He became a prime suspect.
So we said, okay, let’s give Ridgway a polygraph test. Although the polygraph is very popular with law enforcement agencies, it is not foolproof at all. On the polygraph, if a person is very nervous, they will look like a liar.
For people who are maybe comfortable, the polygraph will not detect any anxiety as measured by changes in heart rate, skin conductance, some blood pressure, and they will look calm and relaxed and truthful.
Well, Ridgway passed the polygraph test. We’re going, okay.
One of the things that we did in ’87 was ask him to chew on a gauze, and that gauze collected saliva, and that gauze was put in a test tube and frozen. If we were to take a swab from someone today, we’d be able to determine without a doubt their DNA. But in the ’80s, what you could learn from a saliva test was the person’s blood type.
That’s all we could determine.
There was a lot of evidence gathered from Gary Ridgway’s house. It took years for the crime lab to thoroughly analyze all of it, but in the end, nothing matched up well enough with anything that we had forensically to give us what we needed to put us over the top and charge him.
With the investigation not making any progress, there was a decision finally made in the late ’80s to begin to downsize the task force. I took a sergeant’s test. I got promoted, but the Green River case was not far away.
I was working in an area that was right on the Strip. It never left my heart. It never left my mind.
So yeah, that was tough. 1990 was a tough time.
A lot of the women who get involved in prostitution have had some sort of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 in their history. But for the grace of God, it could have been me. And I say that because I was also abused when I was a child growing up.
For me, it gave me a special passion to work on this case. But around January 1989, I moved on from the investigation. It was pulling on my heart too much.
I just needed to go.
Time marched on. The voters of King County decided to go back to an elected sheriff. It was in March of ’97, and I ran for election that year and won, and I’m sworn in as the sheriff.
I was thinking all this time after I left in 1990, maybe the case could be reopened. Well, now I’m the sheriff, so that’s what I did. In 1997, I reopened the case.
I said, look, I want all the evidence in this case thoroughly reviewed. We learned of two labs on the East Coast that were involved and engaged in a new science called DNA. The job of a forensic scientist is to provide support to investigators that are trying to solve these very difficult crimes, and that’s why the evolution of DNA has been so amazing.
We knew we had the saliva samples, and we knew we had the spermatozoa samples, and we sent them to one of the labs. They took a look at them and tried a comparison, but they couldn’t come up with any definitive answers for us. They said, look, the science is progressing.
Wait a little longer because your samples are so fragile and so minute that we could destroy them if we did anything further.
In 2001, the Washington State Patrol crime lab came on board with the STR PCR technologies that can analyze really minimal samples. It was a real breakthrough in forensic DNA analysis. Before we started using PCR, we had to have a stain that was relatively large.
PCR allows us to take small amounts of DNA and copy regions of it over and over and over again until we have more copies of that particular area of the DNA that we’re interested in.
In early 2001, I sent the samples to the lab and asked them to analyze the material. We felt this could be the last chance we got with this evidence. We started with the girls found in the Green River.
On some of the autopsy evidence, the swabs were completely taken off of the sticks and used in past technologies. We had limited sperm come off those sticks, but enough to generate a male profile from two of the victims. We had the same male profile from another victim in a separate crime scene, but we didn’t know who it was.
We had reference samples collected from potential suspects in the past. Those reference samples were run. One of them matched that of the evidence from the Green River victims.
I got a call from the state crime lab. They asked me to come down. They had something they needed to tell me.
I was away for four or five days, and Tom waited till I came back. All I knew is that he wanted to sit down and talk to me. So he had three sheets of paper, and he flipped over the first sheet, and Tom had drawn the charts out so they were easy to understand.
And they explained to him, this is the DNA profile that was found with Opal Mills. Then he flipped over a second piece of paper. This is the DNA profile that was lifted from Marcia Chapman.
Then I said, and then this is the DNA profile of the Green River Killer. And he said, look, you’ll notice that the DNA chart is the same.
I said, Tom, are you trying to tell me that we know who this guy is? And he goes, yeah. And he pulls out an envelope.
Gary Ridgway.
Pretty emotional moment, as you might guess, for all of us. I remember that. What a sense of relief.
Almost to tears. You know, he’s like, finally, finally we know who it is. Finally.
So we called the team together, and we started to decide, okay, now what’s our next move? Gary Ridgway had been our prime suspect since 1987. We just didn’t have the evidence.
So we put him under surveillance, and as we do that, we learn that yes, he’s still contacting young women, prostitutes on the street. And at the same time, we’re working with the prosecutor’s office and building that case to arrest him.
When we finally arrested Ridgway in 2001, it was like the world’s weight has been lifted from my shoulders. They brought him to the Regional Justice Center where the command post had been set up, and then I looked at him and I said, got you.
Today at approximately 3:00 p. m. , detectives from the King County Sheriff’s Office arrested a 52-year-old man for investigation of homicide.
The man arrested is Gary Leon Ridgway.
Once he’s taken to jail and he’s got attorneys, they can start to build their defense. Mr. Ridgway’s plea is not guilty to all charges.
And their defense was, we recognize after talking to our client that he frequented prostitutes, and if his DNA happened to be in the bodies of three of the victims, that doesn’t mean that he killed those victims. It means he was a customer sometime before their death.
There’s always a chance that a defense like that could stand up in court if that’s all the evidence we had. I can remember saying, look, if we can get three or four more victims with some other forensic evidence tied to Gary Ridgway, we’ve got him.
Some of the investigators and the prosecutors working on the case learned of this new process that was being used by a microscopic analysis lab. We were asked if we would get involved in looking at the evidence and sort of acting as general consultants in trace evidence. For six months of pretty intensive work, picking through tiny particles, preparing them for analysis, analyzing them, we had no associations that we could draw.
However, as microscopists, we couldn’t help looking at the fine dust in the victims’ clothing. So we vacuumed some of the clothing, which was in pretty bad shape. Then we started picking through the dust.
And that’s one of those eureka moments you have when you’re looking at trace evidence. You find sort of the particle, there’s something odd. We start seeing these colored spheres of spray paint.
But why is it that half a dozen prostitutes have spray paint on their clothing?
We have this time the ability to do high-quality infrared microspectrophotometry. It’s a way of obtaining chemical signature of a compound. We’re able to identify this as Imron paint.
This is a very unusual paint based on its infrared spectrum, which was being used at the Kenworth truck factory while Ridgway was working there.
In the Green River murders, one of the reasons we were brought in is because Ridgway said, I frequented prostitutes, of course my DNA is in a lot of prostitutes. But now we have something completely independent of that. Spray paint.
By finding the spray paint on the clothing of the victims, what I believe the best interpretation is, is that they were in contact with Ridgway himself or his environment shortly before they died.
With this evidence in the spring of 2003, Gary Ridgway was charged with four new counts of murder, making it seven at that point. Within about a month, we started hearing rumors that the defense was considering the possibility of having Gary Ridgway confess in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.
Discussions began on Ridgway coming forward, admitting guilt, and telling us about 65 murders and showing us where other bodies were. I thought that was a good thing because there were many victims who were still missing, and the families needed to have some resolution.
After that, we took him to our task force headquarters, and discussions began about where the bodies were, what he did to the bodies, why he killed them, all those questions that everybody wanted to have answered. We used to take what we called road trips with Ridgway, showing us where other bodies were.
And we were focusing on the Mary West case. In the ’80s, Mary West was found in Seward Park in Seattle, just off of Rainer Avenue. Take a ride on Henderson.
He directed the driver exactly down the right roads. At this light, take a right. There were no wrong turns anywhere.
The park is straight ahead. We get into the park, he goes right to a spot that I was at years earlier, and he said, right in here is where I killed her.
But after you killed her, then what’d you do? I dragged her in further on a trail that was back there. You know, to be there years later and with him, it’s a feeling you can’t describe.
And so we’re trying to take you back to that first one and figure out every day for hours on end. He was interviewed by a team of four detectives.
Why did you like killing people? Just hated women. And that they’re the vulnerable people to do it to.
I mean, it’s just so hard to describe. Surreal. It felt good to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 a woman.
Felt good to take their life. And it was like looking into the eyes of pure evil.
What got Gary Ridgway to the point where he put his hands on somebody and he took their life that day? What was different that day? That was the day of creating a new me, a new killer.
Yeah, had done feeling. No soul. Kind of a look to him.
We compared his statement with his description of the sites. Okay, right about in here, I just drove in my pickup and camper and parked it. Brought her body over and put it a little bit over the hill.
Enough to the point where we felt comfortable that we could charge him with 48 murders. And so he’s scheduled to go to court, face the judge, and the judge asks him the question. So this hearing, Mr.
Ridgway, is your last chance to say that you did not commit these 48 counts of aggravated murder. You understand that? Yes, I do.
And Mr. Ridgway, the state has charged you with 48 counts of aggravated murder in the first degree. How do you plead?
Guilty.
I think he picked on the people he picked on ’cause they were easy, vulnerable. They freely would give their bodies without thinking about how valuable they are.
And it was the most heart-wrenching, the most challenging case I’d ever worked on. I was sitting in the front row of a jam-packed courthouse. I mean, it was really emotional because the families can get up and say their peace.
She was just an immature teenager trying to find her way in life before it was snuffed out by Gary Ridgway.
Some had the courage to say, I forgive you, Mr. Ridgway. My daughter, she was 16 at the time you killed her.
You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do, and that’s to forgive. And he doesn’t say to forgive just certain people. He says to forgive all.
So you are forgiven, sir. I forgive you. I forgive you for killing my daughter.
I mean, boy, that’s quite a faith to have.
I felt a sense of relief when he was sentenced. A sense of satisfaction that he was going to be held accountable for doing what he did. The most important thing to remember, though, is that families, because their loved one was taken in such a tragic, violent way, remembering that they will never, ever forget.
The pain will never go away.
This poor man suffered a pretty gruesome death. His remains fit in a little bag. A number of people affiliated with organized crime might have been involved.
There was just something wrong with that picture. This case became driven by the forensic evidence. There were bits of brain matter left on the ceiling.
I looked at the bullets and considered that maybe they had been used in a silencer. Many murder cases are simple, but this case was very different. He wasn’t the nicest person in the world, but he didn’t deserve to get murdered like that.
I spent 33 years as an officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. My last 12 years were as a homicide investigator. I got into law enforcement because my father was a police officer.
I remember him coming home with his uniform on and his brass buttons shining, and he’s got a gun on his side, and he puts bad guys in jail. And I thought, man, that’s what I want to do.
As an investigator, I’m often asked what does a murderer look like. I tell people, look in the mirror.
When my partner Jimmy and I was assigned to this case, it was the first big, major, high-profile investigation that we had received in homicide. Detective Ramos. Guns and drugs and 𝒔𝒆𝒙 and everything that people really want to sink their teeth into, like some Hollywood movie.
This case had it all.
We received a call. Some fishermen were out at the lake, and they found something that scared them. It was a very typical desert scene outside of Las Vegas, and there was this charred area where someone had built a campfire.
What it appeared were the outlines in the remains of a humpback trunk, an antique type trunk. And then as we look closer into this pit of burnt debris, we also saw small human remains. Bones, foot bones, finger bones.
And 15 feet away was a perfectly intact human skull. And in fact, we could see bullet holes on the skull. Next to the skull was a gold bracelet that was encrusted in diamonds, and in those diamonds it spelled out the name Ron.
R-O-N.
Ron Ruden was a mysterious missing person’s case four weeks earlier. This well-known man had just vanished. One of his wives had given him a gold bracelet, and his name was spelled out in diamonds.
We said, look, here’s the bracelet. It’s got to be Ron Ruden’s skull.
Someone did as much as they could to conceal the remains, but the skull didn’t burn all the way to disintegration. A forensic anthropologist was able to look at the back of the skull where the vertebrae came in contact with the skull, and he said, I think I see some knife marks on these vertebrae. It’s possible that the head had been removed from the body itself prior to the fire starting.
Decapitation occurs usually with some type of sharp instrument. The vertebrae are interlocked, and so there’s really no way to take someone’s head off of their body without chipping the bone. And that would let us know that it wasn’t the fire that decapitated an individual, but a tool was used.
The skull had rolled away because it had been separated from the body. Somebody cut the poor man’s head off and stuffed it in the trunk with him before they set it on fire.
The body was completely charred. The humpback trunk had been charred as well, leaving the clasps and some of the metal brackets behind. But there was a couple pieces of wood that survived the fire that gave us an indication of what color the trunk was.
We knew that it was blue on the outside and it had wallpaper on the inside. But there was still enough left where we could lay out the metal straps and we could get the overall dimensions of the trunk. This trunk had to be used to dispose of the body.
The remains were taken to the medical examiner’s office. During the examination of the skull, the medical examiner told us that there were five bullet holes, indicating that he had been shot five times. And in fact, I believe there were three bullet fragments that were still intact.
We knew that it was a small caliber weapon, which was very fortunate because that was physical evidence of what was used to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.
The only identifying item of evidence that was there was a gold bracelet. But the bracelet itself being there wasn’t scientific proof that those remains belonged to Ron Ruden. So we had to get some scientific proof.
We had dental records, and his teeth were still in place. Had it not been for that, I don’t think we ever would have been able to scientifically identify those remains.
Fire has the ability to cover up a lot of crimes, but what it can’t do is burn teeth. Teeth require 1500 degrees Fahrenheit or more to burn. Our teeth are pretty much protected from high temperatures.
Each one of us have a unique set of teeth and a unique way our teeth have been restored. Those records that one gets when they go to the dentist gives us a really good tool in the identification of individuals.
The medical examiner was able to say, yeah, this is what’s left of Ron Ruden. And now you have a murder case.
We had to speak with the man’s wife, the next of kin, the one who had to make the missing person’s report. I called her up and I said, Margaret, there’s been a development. And she said, oh, he’s been found, hasn’t he?
We started to establish what we call a victimology. You try and find out everything you can about your victim. Who he visited every day, what his habits were, what he would do before work, after work.
We learned so many things about the private Ron Ruden versus the public Ron Ruden.
In public, he was well known, well respected in the business community. A real estate developer who had millions. A workaholic like no one can describe.
But he had a dark side. He was a playboy, and he was unfaithful to every wife that he had. Ron would frequent topless bars, gentleman’s clubs.
We had to listen to different stories about Ron and his background and the people that he associated with and the activities that he was involved in. Ron was a colorful character. And so there were some allegations that he had been involved with gun dealers, some unsavory gun dealers.
He had a very large gun collection, and there was the belief that he always carried a gun in his boot.
He also had a lot of enemies because of the way he conducted his real estate business. If you bought a home from Ron Ruden, he would finance it himself. But if you were one day late on your payment, he would foreclose, and boom, you were out.
And he made a lot of enemies that way.
Ron Ruden suffered a pretty gruesome death. Some people said that was poetic justice for a man who lived a terrible lifestyle. A deceptive man, a very untrustworthy man.
But he didn’t deserve to get murdered like that.
We started looking into what the circumstances were of his disappearance. His black Cadillac was found not far from the Crazy Horse topless bar. Of course, the first thought was that somehow he had been apprehended there at the Crazy Horse.
The club was mob-associated and owned by the mob. So there was a connection there for someone to say, well, the mob killed him, and there’s proof of it.
Back in the ’50s and ’60s, the mob had a pretty big influence here in Las Vegas. They had quite a bit of ownership in a lot of the hotels. They skimmed a lot of money.
And along with them running the hotels in Las Vegas came all the crime that was associated with the mob. 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 dealers, 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 users, gamblers, prostitutes. And all of it.
It’s called Sin City for a reason.
One of the things about the car being found at the topless club was that the car had been parked in the back alley of the club, where most patrons don’t go. It’s where the employees go, the dancers go, and that’s where they park to get into the back door of the club.
One of the bartenders was a former detective with our department. He had been convicted of going over to the dark side, joining the mob, and was part of their criminal activity in Las Vegas. A former police detective seduced by the mob.
However, one of the things that we determined quickly was that there was no mob association between Ron Ruden and his activities. He wasn’t involved in any competing business with the mob. And if the mob would have had anything to do with his disappearance, they’re not going to put a key piece of evidence in one of their clubs.
That’s silly to think that. Somebody wanted us to believe the mob had something to do with his disappearance because his car is in the parking lot of a mob-owned topless club. It was a poor attempt to throw us off.
There was just a lot of leads, a lot of looking around. I mean, had he been at the Crazy Horse that night? Had he not?
What was his car doing there? There was an effort made to try to associate the vehicle with the crime scene and so forth. So we looked at soil samples taken from the crime scene where the body had burned, looking for something to link that with debris from the floorboards of the car.
Despite all my efforts, it just sort of went nowhere.
Inside the car were little specks of blood, but this blood was in such small amounts it had no scientific value for us. All we could say is that it was human blood, but we couldn’t type it. We couldn’t get a DNA profile from it.
The car didn’t help us find out what happened to Ron Ruden.
We got to find out all the other who, what, when, where, why questions. So we started talking to the people who reported him missing. And that’s when we found out that his wife Margaret refused to report him missing for several days.
She was telling all her family, he’s just gone somewhere. He does this all the time.
99% of murder investigations, the person that you’ve had to focus on first is the one who was closest to the victim. Spouse, living boyfriend, girlfriend, something like that. We wanted to move past Margaret if she had nothing to do with it.
Margaret was a very attractive woman. Always very gracious, very gentle and kind in the way she presented herself. Margaret’s hobby was collecting antiques, and she had opened an antique store in Ron’s strip mall that he owned and attached to his home.
They were an attractive couple. He was an attractive man, and she was an attractive female. And people tend to take notice of attractive people.
In that regard, two socialites getting together and both being very connected here in town.
We called up and said, Margaret, can we come and speak to you right now? And she said, sure, come on up. So we go to the house, and I said, well, Margaret, we need to sit down and we need to go over everything you can remember about the last time you spoke to him.
What happened? What did you guys talk about? Where were you?
And she says, oh, okay, yeah, but I’m just so upset right now. Can you give me a minute? And we said, yeah, of course.
And she goes over to the desk that had been left open, and she starts going through all these papers. And I said, Margaret, is there anything we can help you with? She goes, well, no, I’m just looking for his insurance policy.
And I thought, okay. Well, what about what happened to my husband? How did he die?
Where did you find him? Your husband’s been murdered. We need to talk about what happened.
I’m watching her, and I said again, we need to talk. Refresh your memory. The last time you saw him, what were you doing?
And she starts going like this. She’s digging her first knuckle into her eye. I could understand it to myself.
I’m thinking, what are you doing? She’s going to hurt yourself. You okay, ma’am?
And it occurred to me she was trying to make herself cry. She was trying to injure her eye so that tears would come out.
Is there a friend nearby that we can call? No, no, she said. I’m just too upset to talk anymore.
Can you just come back at another time? And I said, sure, of course, we understand.
So Jimmy and I looked at each other, and we kind of shook our heads. And the reaction was just not what we had expected. I had never seen a reaction like that in the 300-plus murders that I’ve investigated.
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t upset. She was just like we’re having an everyday conversation.
In the meantime, in the back of our minds, we’re saying this lady had something to do with her husband’s disappearance.
We get to the office, and Jimmy and I are just looking at each other and saying, what in the world is this woman up to? And then as we walked in the door, Jimmy’s phone is ringing on his desk. Hello, Detective Aaro.
It was an attorney, and he said, I’ve been retained by Margaret Ruden. If you want to talk to her, you have to talk to me first.
We didn’t even get a chance to get back to the office before she lawyered up, as we call it. So we thought, okay, here we go. The game’s on.
We could not focus on anybody else until we eliminated her as a suspect. We thought, have we covered every base? Is there any possibility that there was someone other than Margaret responsible for Ron’s murder?
Every single lead that came in, we followed up on it. Every single one. We didn’t discard any lead that we had.
One of the theories that Margaret had proposed was that Ron had been abducted by Colombian 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 lords. Vegas was a hub for gang activity, and Las Vegas did play a role in the distribution of cocaine that was coming in from South America. Margaret would say, well, he’s been running guns to Colombian 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 lords for years.
He was licensed by the government to sell firearms. He had an amazing collection of guns. He converted his walk-in closet into a huge gun safe.
There had to be 500 guns in this closet.
Margaret tried to expand on that and try and make it a plausible theory. But while we were able to document that he was going to South America with guns, he wasn’t running guns for the Colombian 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 cartel. They were for hunting expeditions.
He would only take one shotgun with him. This story was another red herring.
Remember the date, and from that point on we really started digging. And we found a lot of bizarre things about Margaret. She, like Ronald, had been married many times.
Her marriage to Ron was her fifth marriage. Each ex-husband was very wealthy.
Ron had substantial wealth. Some estimates were upwards of $13 million. She married into money, hoping that she would live a lifestyle of the rich and famous.
But from day one, this marriage was tumultuous. The relationship became very turbulent. It was clear to me that trust had been lost in that relationship.
They fought all the time. There was a domestic violence incident where it was actually shots fired in the house.
In fact, not long after Ron had married Margaret, he discovered that one of his weapons was missing. He had indicated that he believed she might have taken the gun.
Ron’s will spelled out, if I die under mysterious circumstances or have a violent death, he wanted an extraordinary investigation done. And that if anybody was going to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him for his money, he didn’t want them to get his money.
Ron’s closest friends told us Margaret wiretapped his office and put listening devices on his phones. She ultimately had the ability to intercept and listen to each one of his phone calls. She could hear his phone conversations with one or two of these women that he was having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with.
She not only learned of his infidelity, but by intercepting his phone calls, what Margaret was learning is that Ron was actively changing his will. Her amount that she’d receive under the will was getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Her antique store was doing terrible, failing, costing Ron a lot of money. He had given her thousands of dollars to get this off the ground. He told her on the night before he disappeared that he was cutting off her allowance for the store.
He was turning off her cell phone, and he was turning in her Lincoln Continental that she was leasing. And so Margaret’s cash cow was drying up.
We believed that there was an awful lot of financial motive in having him killed. However, we had no direct physical evidence linking Margaret to the crime.
We prepared a press release. It was a murder investigation now. And then we received a call from a young man who identified himself as Augustine Lovato, and he had a very interesting story to tell us.
Detective Ramos, and that just turned everything upside down.
Augustine Lovato says, I have information about that Ron Ruden case. He begins to tell us that the lady whose husband was killed hired me to clean up their bedroom. And we said, what?
She said that her husband had a bloody nose and he got blood on the mattress, and there was blood on the carpet. So she wanted me to clean it up.
He said there was a pool of blood on the entire top half of the mattress, and it was just stinky and nasty. I said, you’re sure it’s blood? He goes, I’m positive it’s blood.
And he said, and right below the bed on the carpet, it was soaked with blood. Said, and then I looked on the wall above the headboard, and there was one of those glamour shots of the lady, and there were little droplets of blood on the picture. And as I’m looking at it, I’m thinking, oh my gosh, how did the blood from a bloody nose get up on this picture?
And he said, it just gave me the creeps. But she was paying me to get rid of it, so I did what the lady told me to do.
He told us where he had taken the mattress, and we drove there, and there it was, sitting right there. In blood. Boom.
We were on the right track with Margaret.
We were able to get a search warrant based on the evidence that we collected from Augustine Lovato’s statement. So we served the search warrant on the house. We had to find conclusive evidence that a crime had occurred in that specific location.
One of the techniques that we used was spraying a chemical agent called luminol in the bedroom where we theorized that Ron had been killed. Luminol is a chemical that is used to help detect trace amounts of blood that may be found at a crime scene. So luminol is typically sprayed on an area that you think has blood, and the luminol actually interacts with the iron found in hemoglobin to create a blue light that you see for a quick moment.
We sprayed the luminol, and this wall lit up like the Milky Way. It was just glowing with blood. Blood that was not visible to the naked eye because whoever, and we believe it was Margaret, had tried to clean the blood off of the wall.
Removing blood is almost impossible. As much as you try and scrub and clean, there will still be the smallest amount that’s left.
There’s a phenomenon in criminalistics called high velocity mist. We believed that when the first bullet entered his skull, it created a hole. And when the subsequent bullets entered the skull, the pressure that was inflicted on the inside of the skull caused a mist of blood to come out in the existing holes.
High velocity mist has a very unique spray or aerosol-like pattern that’s very distinguishable from something like a passive drop. Say if you cut your hand or if you were to be hit with a bat, it wouldn’t create the same pattern.
There were actual bits of brain matter and skull matter that was still left on the ceiling.
But then another bizarre twist in this case happened. We found out that one of Ron’s wives, I believe it was his third wife, this lady had committed suicide on that bed. Shot herself in the head.
And the blood spray from that incident was still present on the wall with blood.
The amazing thing is if something happened 20 years ago, there’s very much a high likelihood that that blood would still be there. And we had to research that and find out, well, this blood pattern here belonged to Ron Ruden when he was killed. This blood pattern here belonged to his wife when she committed suicide.
If you suspect that there’s multiple blood profiles that are in a room, you could use a lot of things to actually separate them out. So one may be the actual blood spatter analysis where you’re looking at the direction, the size, the shape of the spots. But then furthermore, you may do some DNA testing.
We had no base DNA identity for Ron. Ron did not have any children. You know, if you have offspring, you can get a DNA profile from your offspring, but he didn’t have any.
We found a handkerchief on Ron’s side of the sink that had little droplets of blood on it. And we learned from his maid that Ron would dab himself with that handkerchief when he cut himself shaving. That was the only reference that we had to Ron’s DNA profile.
We needed to match the DNA profile from the droplets of blood on the handkerchief with all the other blood that we believed was Ron’s because of the circumstances. But there was still that little 1% chance of, well, how do you know this is Ron Ruden’s DNA? Couldn’t it have been a stranger?
I suppose it could have. That just caused us to dig our heels in more and just focus on what we had and go out and find more evidence.
It was believed that his body was placed in a humpback trunk. The trunk was believed to have been an antique piece. We knew that it was blue on the outside and it had wallpaper on the inside from what was left at the crime scene.
I found a receipt in Margaret’s files that described the purchase of a humpback trunk with interior with wallpaper, and it spelled it out, and the dimensions matched the dimensions of the framework. And I thought, found it.
So I called the dealer, gave him the receipt number and described the trunk, and he says, yeah, I remember selling that trunk to that really nice lady from Las Vegas. He described it perfectly.
The evidence that we had all pointed to Margaret to this point. It’s all circumstantial, but we were hoping that we would get more evidence to follow up on. So we took the case to a grand jury.
When we began to present this case to the grand jury, we were presenting it more to gather up evidence, to find out just what the state of the evidence was. Margaret was not cooperating with us, wasn’t telling us anything. We were not permitted to speak to Margaret without a lawyer present.
But when you’re the focus of an investigation by a law enforcement agency and evidence is being presented to a grand jury, the target of that investigation has the opportunity to go in front of the grand jury and defend themselves. But they don’t have the right to have an attorney present during that examination.
We were hoping that Margaret would avail herself to defend her actions, but she never did. She never did take that opportunity.
In our minds, the evidence was all there, but we were looking at it from our point of view, from a cop’s point of view. And they say we just don’t have enough. And as an investigator, it’s very frustrating.
I thought this case was stalled. I thought it’s going to be a cold case.
After the initial thrust of the investigation calmed down, we still had other cases to work. But in our downtime, we were always focusing on, what are we missing on the Ruden case? What else can we do on the Ruden case?
Stubel was the elected DA at the time, and he had come down and seen me and indicated that this case was growing old, and he wanted to do something about it. And so Stubel gave me the assignment of presenting it to a second grand jury.
The forensic evidence, the blood evidence in the room, all over the ceiling, on the floor, on the carpets, became a very important part of this case. We needed conclusive scientific proof that yes, indeed, that blood belonged to Ron Ruden. A handkerchief was the only reference that we had to Ron’s DNA profile.
Now one could argue that, well, how do you know that was Ron’s blood that was on that handkerchief? A good defense attorney is going to work on that and beat it to death.
At that time, DNA profiling was in its infancy, and Ron’s living relatives weren’t close enough that we could have gotten a DNA profile from them.
On most murder scenes, you have a body bag and you have a full-sized body that you take to the medical examiner. Poor Ron in this case, you know, his remains fit in a little bag. It was just a skull and burnt bones.
However, during the grand jury presentation, we were able to extract DNA from the teeth that were in the skull. If a body is completely burned and there’s no tissue, teeth are going to hold up. And in the tooth is the nutrient center called the pulp, and that pulp has a location where there is a rich source of DNA.
That pulp can be used to compare against the blood from the victim.
We removed the pulp from the tooth in Ron Ruden’s skull and said, yep, the blood on the mattress, the blood on the ceiling, the blood on the wall, all have the same DNA profile as the tooth that was in the skull found out at the lake. It was one of the very first times that the pulp in the tooth was used to identify a DNA profile. In fact, it was one of the first times here in Las Vegas that it was admitted as evidence in court.
We’ve got a pretty good case on Margaret. We just need that one little bit more to tip the scales in our favor.
The grand jury had been convened, and having looked at the trace evidence, I was part of that. I was called to testify. And during one of the breaks, I heard the deputy district attorney talking to one of the crime scene analysts saying, well, next week bring in the bullets.
We’ll get those entered into evidence.
And I went on alert, and I said, you know, immediately I said, bullets? What bullets? We’ve not examined any bullets.
The bullets and the bullet fragments that were found within the skull were deformed to the point that they were still identifiable, but just barely identifiable. The forensic pathologist had looked at them and said they were too damaged, they were of no value. And so the detectives just never submitted a request on those.
In this case, the bullets did look very damaged, but turned out that a lot of the marks on them, which were very, very coarse marks, were actually gun marks. I kept thinking, what could cause this kind of coarse character to the marks? And one of the possibilities that came to mind was that maybe a suppressor or a silencer had been used.
And so in my efforts to evaluate that, I thought, you know, where can I get some samples of bullets from a silencer for comparison? And I remembered a gun recovered under unusual circumstances in the summer of 1996 out at Lake Mead. There was an area that was reserved for scuba diving.
This one diver saw a white plastic bag on the bottom of the lake. They opened it up and, wow, there was a . 22 semi-automatic pistol with a silencer.
The park ranger called the police department. He called us, homicide section. But that information hadn’t been passed on to Jimmy and I, so we weren’t aware of it.
The gun had been wrapped in countless plastic baggies. Baggie after baggie after baggie. Certainly it was hoped that the gun would never be found again.
They said it was a bull barrel Ruger, which is a term for a target barrel gun. And as soon as I looked at it, I realized it was not a bull barrel. It was a suppressor, a silencer.
When a gun is fired, the bullet exits the barrel, and behind it is a wave of high-pressure gas, and that is what you perceive as sound. A suppressor delays that wave exiting, makes it take a little longer to get out, and so the sound is reduced. It’s more of a poof.
Because it was a little unusual, we proceeded to clean it and put it back together and test fire. Okay, we got a . 22 short here.
Chambers loaded. We looked at the bullets, but we couldn’t link it to anything. So the gun went to the evidence vault where it was stored, and the test fires went into our evidence storage in the laboratory.
Later on, when the grand jury had been convened, I remembered the test fires from the gun from the lake. And so I pulled those out of evidence to see if the marks from a silencer were similar to the marks I was seeing on the bullets that killed Ron Ruden. As I put those test fires from the suppressed weapon on my scope and compared them to the bullets removed from Ron Ruden’s head, I started seeing what appeared to be the marks lining up.
And of course, I’m thinking, this is just a random gun found in the lake. This can’t be. But the more I looked, it became clear to me that there was a relationship between those bullets and the gun from Lake Mead.
So I made some inquiries with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and found that there was a record of this gun. It had belonged to Ron Ruden.
I called the DA and I said, you are not going to believe this, but I’ve got the gun that killed Ron Ruden. And his response was, what?
The eureka moment was the gun. The gun being identified as number one, the murder weapon. Number two, that it had belonged to Ron.
And number three, that it disappeared shortly after Margaret came into the picture. That was the eureka moment.
Who else is going to be in the man’s bedroom with that gun at 2:00 in the morning when he’s asleep, to be in a position to shoot him in the head five times?
The grand jury began deliberations around 1:00 in the afternoon, and by 3:00 they had given us a true bill, or an indictment, and said, yep, there’s enough evidence here to hold her for trial. Go get her, boys.
Margaret knew that we were coming after her, but Margaret Ruden had disappeared off the face of the earth.
Once the grand jury indictment was handed over, we realized Margaret Ruden was gone. She took off and was in the wind. Both Jim and I looked at each other and said, here we go.
The hunt is on.
We had no idea where to start looking. So we just entered her into a national database, listed all of her aliases.
While she was on the run, Margaret kept two or three different wigs, a couple bottles of hair dye. She went to great lengths to conceal her identity, and she was successful at it for a while. For almost 2 years.
Phoenix Police Department received a tip. The caller said this woman that’s wanted is my neighbor. A Phoenix police officer responded to that call, but we weren’t able to get a photograph to him in time.
This officer actually spoke to Margaret. He said, do you know who Margaret Ruden is? Oh, no, sir.
I have no idea who she is. Well, she’s wanted for murder. No, that couldn’t possibly be me.
Later on, he went back to find her. She had gone. At a moment’s notice, she just took off from Arizona.
She ended up in Mexico.
We had gotten another series of tips, and they said, yeah, she’s in Mexico. I know that because friends are speaking to her and they know where she is. Margaret had a series of friends, a little communication network that she would use.
And that’s how she was able to contact her family, and they were able to contact her.
Ultimately, one of her friends said, enough is enough. I’m not going to be part of this, helping a fugitive. And called the FBI and said, I know how to get a hold of where Margaret’s at.
She’s no longer in Mexico. She’s in a little town named Revere. It was a suburb of Boston.
That was one of the best takedowns that I can remember. It was a classic piece of stick and whistle 101. The cops in Revere saw a pizza delivery guy go to the apartment.
So the cops stopped the pizza delivery kid as he walked away. The cops put on the pizza delivery uniform, a little hat and a jacket, and they went back and knocked on the door.
And they said, Margaret, do you know why we’re here? And she said, yeah, it’s about that Vegas thing.
She fought extradition. We had to wait for a governor’s warrant. And once she got back to Vegas, she had three attorneys defending her.
I don’t mean to say that many murder cases are simple, but many murder cases are simple. There’s eyewitnesses that are left. There’s a smoking gun.
The murderer is standing over the body. Many times. This case was very different in that regard.
We had to be able to prove this case beyond reasonable doubt, and that’s why each and every piece of evidence became so important to us.
It was hours and hours and hours of good old-fashioned police work, bolstered by a new science that was just being brought into police work. The finding of the gun in the lake and the ballistics matching the projectiles that were found in Ronald Ruden’s skull and his remains became overwhelmingly powerful, at least in the eyes of the state.
Between the ballistics and the DNA, they both came together and gave us that final piece of evidence. Irrefutable evidence that she was responsible for this poor man’s death. And a gruesome death at that.
It’s sad to think that this poor guy was killed by one of his own guns. I guess that old adage, live by the sword, die by the sword, sure turned out to be the case here.
Of course, the jury had the last say in this matter. After about a month-long trial, she was convicted and received a sentence of 20 to life for her part in Ron’s murder. And she’s still in jail today.
It’s a classic story of greed, power, money, revenge. I can tell you, just about everybody’s capable of becoming a murderer at some point. If you piss somebody off enough, they’re going to take their revenge on you.
