Reading Doomed sparked a push for more true crime reading and I hit up my TBR and put in a slew of library requests. First in was another Read Harder choice, Green River Killer: A True Detective Story by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case. Before this year I was unfamiliar with the existence of this book, or the decades long investigation it chronicles. But such is the reward of hitting up library lists for challenges, particularly banned books. (The challenge task was specifically banned comics and I chose from a list on BiblioCommons which has a pretty extensive one.)
This one jumped onto my personal reading list because I recognized and trusted the author. “Doc” Jeff Jensen wrote for Entertainment Weekly for years and years and made his name covering Lost. He has gone on to do work in movies and television, but I had not realized he was also a published author. This Eisner-winning 2011 work tells the story of the Green River Killer case in King County, Washington from the perspective of his father, the only detective who was assigned to the case from the time the task force was created in 1984 until the arrest of Gary Ridgway in 2001 and the nearly 200 days of interrogation that went into unraveling the mystery of what happened to the 49 women he eventually pled guilty to murdering.
I was pulled in from the moment go with this one, which is in part due to the way Jensen structured the narrative, jumping between important moments in his father’s history and the case, but also in the stark art of Jonathan Case. It is a real achievement to capture the atrocities of the crimes while also achieving the stylized format of pen and ink work. Beyond the subject matter, my gut instinct is that it is the unflinching art that caused this book to be banned in some locations. As is the case with banned books I was curious as to where the banning had occurred. In the case of Green River Killer, it was banned in Missouri and in Orange County, FL schools.
I’m glad to have read this book, and glad for the closure the process of hunting and interrogating Ridgway gave to the victim’s families. When I’m consuming True Crime content, I am very aware that I am, as Michelle McNamara put it, “choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy” and that requires that I be conscious of that choice, and only suggest to others works that I feel treat the topics covered humanely and center the victims. While the perspective of this story is centered on the investigators, it is clear from the choices made in the case and the narrative that pursuing a proposed deal was only accepted to provide as much closure as humanly possible, even though it remains imperfect. There are still missing women associated with the case and King County Sherriff’s Office has more information about them on their website.
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