EVERETT — For 21 years the killer had an unholy connection to Robert and Linda Rule of Everett.
The man was never at the front of their minds. But in their quiet moments, he could easily sneak into their thoughts.
Who was he, this stranger, who snatched their 16-year-old daughter from a north Seattle street in September 1982? Why did he discard her body beneath a bush at a hospital construction site?
Above all, why did he pick her?
The Everett couple got answers to some of those questions last week in a King County courtroom as Gary Leon Ridgway, 54, pleaded guilty to killing the Rules’ daughter and 47 others.
Linda Jane Rule — Janey to her parents — is now officially a victim of the man who admits he is the Green River killer, a serial murderer now considered the most prolific in United States history.
Ridgway’s admissions to slaying Rule and the others came under a deal that spared him the death penalty. In about six months he’s expected to be in court again, where he will be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of release.
The girl’s parents have no plans to be there.
"I feel we don’t have to give him any more time," Robert Rule said.
Until last week, Janey Rule was never officially listed among the Green River killer’s victims.
Over the years, her photograph didn’t regularly appear among the ghastly lineups of the known dead, images that became all-too-familiar in Washington state as the hunt for the elusive killer, named for the south King County river where he dumped some of his victims in 1982, stretched out across months and years and, eventually, decades.
Robert Rule instead had another image of his daughter. Tucked carefully in his billfold was a yellowing, dog-eared Polaroid, snapped not long after Janey was born in 1966. The camera caught the little girl riding on Linda’s hip. Robert Rule had a protective arm wrapped around his young wife’s shoulder.
"We were together, and we were walking in downtown Seattle," he recalled. The couple only had enough money to window shop that day, but there was plenty of love to go around.
Within three years, however, the family in that photograph was no more. Linda Rule tossed her wedding ring at Robert in divorce court and they both entered into a series of unsuccessful marriages. Janey shuttled back and forth between her estranged parents, eventually settling into the West Seattle home of one of Robert Rule’s brothers.
The Rules said their daughter was one of those young people who seemed intent on putting her life on fast forward. By the time she reached her mid-teens, she’d become a young woman who looked and acted much older than her peers. In time, the street called to her, and despite the love people poured her way, she drifted into what newspapers at the time called a "high-risk lifestyle."
She was last seen alive at 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 26, 1982, on her way to the Kmart on Aurora Avenue in north Seattle. Her body wasn’t found until January 1983, in a construction area that is now a parking lot at Seattle’s Northwest Hospital.
Although there were suspicions that Janey Rule’s death was connected to the Green River murder series, investigators also had their doubts. The killing occurred during the Green River killer’s most active period, but it also happened well north of where he was believed to be stalking victims.
Confirmation of how the girl died didn’t come until June of this year, after Ridgway had cut his deal.
He agreed to talk with detectives from the Green River Task Force. "During the first day of interviews with the task force detectives in 2003 — and prior to any questioning about her case — Ridgway announced that he had killed a woman and dumped her body at Northwest Hospital," King County prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Ridgway claimed he’d picked up the young woman in his pickup truck, paid her to have sex, then strangled her.
Detectives said they knew Ridgway was telling at least most of the truth because he shared a detail likely known only to the killer, Robert Rule said.
Ridgway said he rifled the girl’s pockets and found matches. He then lit the back of her hair on fire, twice, eventually extinguishing the flames because he was afraid the smoke would attract attention, court papers show. Ridgway admitted he often molested his victims’ remains in worse ways, including necrophilia, according to court records.
Grief over Janey Rule’s death was something that her parents shared. So was their love. Both moved to Everett in the early 1980s. They kept in touch. In 1989, they remarried.
The couple now lives in a modest duplex in central Everett. Robert Rule, 63, is a soft-spoken bear of a man who cultivates a long, grizzled beard that comes in handy while working winters as a Santa Claus at the Everett Mall. Linda Rule, 59, barely comes up to her husband’s shoulder, but she is feisty, and prods him about with loving verbal barbs.
Their slain daughter’s picture hangs on the wall above the television. Linda Rule treasures a coupon booklet the girl fashioned from envelopes in 1980. "This is to the best mom!" it reads on the cover. Inside are carefully penned offers of kindness from a girl who wanted to do good.
"If you don’t feel like cooking dinner one night, just give this coupon to any Linda Jane Rule and you won’t have to," one reads.
The Rules first learned their daughter’s killer had been unmasked on the day before Halloween. A detective with the Green River Task Force called, summoning them to a private meeting in SeaTac. They were surprised because they’d long since thought their daughter’s murder had been forgotten.
The meeting occurred the day before Ridgway’s guilty pleas. The Rules said they were satisfied with what the detectives told them and the outcome.
A source of pain over the years has been that their daughter’s death certificate did not specify how and when she died. Medical examiners simply could not tell. Detectives told the couple that is something they can now set right.
"We are getting a brand-new death certificate," Linda Rule said, dabbing away tears.
The Rules said they support King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng’s decision to trade away the chance for a death sentence for Ridgway in exchange for the man’s dark secrets.
The Green River killer was like a hurricane, Robert Rule said, a storm of evil that ended the lives of at least 48 people and brought injury and misery to hundreds of others who loved them.
Now the storm is passed.
"The justice is he is off the street and can’t hurt anyone else, or their families," Robert Rule said.
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
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