New team of 11 to focus only on Green River case

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King County Sheriff Dave Reichert has assembled a team of 11 investigators to work full time on building evidence against Green River killing suspect Gary Leon Ridgway and examining other slayings attributed to the Green River killer.

But don't call it the New Green River Task Force. Not yet, anyway.

"Our main goal at the moment is investigating the Ridgway cases," sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart said yesterday. "We've got a lot of work to do on that."

Capt. Bruce Kalin, a 24-year sheriff's department veteran and a former Green River detective, has been reassigned to head the new squad. Most recently, he was in charge of the sheriff's contracting unit, which oversees policing agreements with suburban cities. He served on the Green River Task Force from 1984 to '87.

Several team members have Green River experience, and most have a lot of homicide experience.

Sgts. D.B. Gates and Jim Graddon will lead the team under Kalin. Both come from the department's Major Crimes Unit, whose duties include homicide cases. Gates has been with the department since 1978. Graddon joined the force in 1985.

Ridgway is charged with aggravated murder in the deaths of four women attributed to the Green River killer. Investigators say they will focus on filtering through evidence already collected on Ridgway, and looking for new clues in the items and samples recently seized from his current home, former homes and vehicles.

Secondarily, the team will look into the other 45 Green River killings and dozens of other deaths in and around King County in the past 20 years. More detectives may be added to the team, Urquhart said.

Other detectives on the team are:

• Jim Doyon, a 30-year sheriff's veteran and 19-year homicide detective who was a lead investigator on the Green River case in the 1980s.

Recent homicide cases Doyon has handled include those of Dayva Cross, who was given a death sentence earlier this year for murdering his wife and two stepdaughters near Snohomish, and Gary Ackley, who was given a life sentence in 1998 for killing his girlfriend's mother and then killing a woman who knew he did it.

• Matt Haney, a lieutenant in the Bainbridge Island Police Department who was on the Green River Task Force when he was a King County police detective in the 1980s. Haney did much of the investigation on Ridgway in 1986 and '87, when police searched his home and took a saliva sample that provided DNA police say now ties Ridgway to the four slayings.

• Tom Jensen, a 30-year veteran who was on the Green River Task Force and remained as the lone Green River investigator from the dissolution of the task force in 1990 until Ridgway's arrest. Jensen submitted the DNA samples to the state crime lab and delivered the results to Reichert when the tests matched Ridgway to the four slayings.

• Kevin O'Keefe, a longtime Seattle police homicide detective and 27-year police veteran who also was part of the original Green River Task Force.

• Graydon Matheson, a seven-year sheriff's deputy who has no homicide experience but has experience in the sheriff's crime-analysis unit.

• Jon Mattsen, a 12-year sheriff's veteran most recently assigned to the major-crimes unit.

In 1994, Mattsen, then a patrolman, was given a medal for courage for helping catch a group of teens that shot and killed another teen at SeaTac Mall in Federal Way.

• Randy Mullinax, a 23-year sheriff's veteran and longtime detective most recently assigned to the criminal-intelligence unit. He has handled many homicide cases, most prominently that of Randy Roth, who was convicted in 1992 of killing his fourth wife by drowning her in Lake Sammamish.

• Sue Peters, a 19-year sheriff's veteran and experienced homicide investigator who also was a chief sleuth in the Roth case.

In 1993, with Mullinax, Peters closed the case of Mark Bender, who received an 80-year prison sentence for killing his wife and two children in 1980 and keeping their bodies in a Federal Way storage locker until they were found 12 years later.