Makes you wonder why these men resort to sex and violence as a tool over women, robbing them of their lives. And how degradingly society looks at prostitution and need for sex in general. 100 young women dead over 30 years. By one man. ( )

Almost 5 months after starting this VERY long Audible, I am done!!

While I really enjoyed certain parts, others were lamely put, over kill. The ending was awesome though! ( )

This was a really good true crime book, the main reason why I didn't give it five stars is that there was too much filler in here for me towards the end. A good 20 percent of this book could have deleted (after we get into the 1990s) since we all should know at this point that Ridgway (the Green River Killer) didn't get arrested until 2001 and was not convicted until 2003. Depending on the book I don't mind when Rule segues into the lives of the police officers who are responsible for apprehending these killers, this time though there was a lot of repetitiveness that ended up boring me to tears.

"Green River, Running Red" is a look at the Green River Killer who murdered 71 women in Washington State in the 1980s and 1990s. Rule gives us an intimate look at these women and in some cases teens. We find out what drove many of them to the streets and how they got involved with prostitution. I find it appalling how little people seemed to care that prostitutes were being murdered. Ridgway purposely chose women in this profession since besides hating them, he thought no one would notice them going missing and if they did, would not care. Rule manages to have you feel nothing but sympathy for these women and their family who would not know for years or decades in some cases about what happened to their daughters/mothers/sisters. I loved that Rule added in pictures before she got into the history of each woman. I also found myself hoping for a different outcome once I got caught up in all of their lives.

Rule smartly does not make Ridgway the focus of this book. Every couple of chapters or so we peek back in at Ridgway to see where he is in his life, but he is depicted as a malevolent ghost for most of the story before Rule goes into how he was finally apprehended.

I do think in this case going into the Green River Task Force could have been cut way down in this final book. They really didn't find anything to go on with Ridgway for a long time, so reading about other suspects wasn't interesting. I also thought Rule carried the water for the police a bit too much in this book. She also weirdly takes potshots at Robert Keppel who enlisted Ted Bundy who provided some insights into the Green River Killer before his death. Keppel even wrote a book about it entitled "The Riverman".

The ending of the book goes into Ridgway going out with law enforcement and finding the locations of other victims and him recounting how he murdered them. ( )

In the early 1980s, the Seattle area had a serial killer running around, mostly killing prostitutes. True crime author Ann Rule, by then having published her book on Ted Bundy, lived in the area, and followed very closely what was happening. The killer wasn’t caught for almost 20 years, but when DNA testing came available, he was not only caught, but he admitted to many more murders than they would have been able to link to him via DNA.

Unfortunately, I (once again) ended up with an abridged audio. I was only a kid in the early 80s, and not in the area, so it was more recently that I heard of the Green River killer. The book was interesting, but I would have liked to have listened to the entire book. It did seem to jump abruptly from talking about the victims to following the killer’s life. Not sure if the book actually felt that way or if it felt such because it was abridged. ( )

There is a reason Ann Rule is so famous - this book is just plain excellent. The author explains intricate crime clearly and relatively cleanly. I was hesitant to read this book because I thought I'd get weary of reading gory details but Ann Rule is able to include death descriptions that don't overly disgust. ( )