“Technology got me”

“Technology got me” is Gary Ridgway’s terse admission that technology had finally exposed him after years of evading suspicion. In the book, the phrase marks a reversal: investigators had repeatedly underestimated a man whose unremarkable appearance seemed to contradict the evidence, but that judgment could not withstand the technological means that identified him.

Origin and Context

In November 2001, the media’s attention turned to the Green River Killer, a serial killer who had been dormant for nearly two decades and whom some believed dead. He was alive and living in suburban Seattle. The account gives marriage as the reason he had slowed his killings. The disclosure carried a pointed implication for Larry Pool, the Orange County investigator who had continued working the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker case despite colleagues’ insistence that the killer was dead. Pool’s persistence had been vindicated: apparent inactivity did not prove that a serial killer was dead or gone.

Meaning of the Admission

Ridgway told police, “Technology got me.” The words acknowledge a limit to the disguise that had protected him. He had fooled investigators for years by slackening his face and dimming his eyes; they took that unthreatening appearance as evidence that he could not be a serial killer, even as evidence accumulated. The book presents the contrast between that human misjudgment and technology’s capacity to make a hidden identity legible. It does not specify in this passage which particular technology led to his capture, so the phrase is best read as Ridgway’s own broad explanation rather than as a technical account of the investigation.

Place in the Book’s Larger Argument

The admission resonates with the book’s account of how difficult it was to recognize patterns before cases could be connected by DNA. In April 2001, news linking the East Area Rapist and the Original Night Stalker had enlarged the apparent scope of that investigation, while Pool continued to face skepticism from colleagues who assumed the offender was dead. Ridgway’s later exposure offers a parallel, not an identification of the two killers: in both accounts, investigators’ assumptions about an offender’s status or appearance could obscure what the evidence warranted.

The book also contrasts recognition after the fact with the signs that could be missed in real time. Reports on the East Area Rapist documented neighborhood reconnaissance, suspicious entries, and other repeated patterns; in one case, the offender arrived while a family was preparing to move, and investigators could not determine how he had learned details about the household. Against that record of concealed preparation and uncertain observation, Ridgway’s short admission concentrates the broader reversal: technology could overcome what ordinary impressions and prolonged suspicion had failed to resolve.