Press Release
Acclaimed entertainment writer Jeff Jensen presents the ultimate insider’s account of America’s most prolific serial killer in Green River Killer: A Detective Story. Jensen’s own father led the twenty-year investigation into the murders of over forty women at the hands of Gary Leon Ridgway.
In the summer of 1982, the bodies of five dead prostitutes were found on the marshy banks of Seattle’s Green River. One year later, the remains of six more women were discovered, prompting local law enforcement to officially declare that a serial killer was at work. Over the next several years more bodies were found, cleverly hidden and most of them long dead, and by 1988, the death toll reached forty-eight suspected victims. Yet despite the efforts of sixty detectives, the Green River Killer could not be found. In 1990, the Green River Task Force disbanded and the case was all but forgotten, to be left in the hands of one detective.
It was Tom Jensen who, in 2001, used DNA technology to finally link these atrocities back to one man: Gary Leon Ridgway. Jensen’s story should have ended there. But after Ridgway cut a plea deal with prosecutors in 2003 to spare his life, Jensen led a small team of detectives in interviewing the killer, in secret, for one hundred and eighty days—a journey as strange and disturbing as the twenty years that preceded it.
Informed by in-depth interviews with Jeff Jensen’s father and his colleagues, Green River Killer: A Detective Story is a true-crime comic unlike any other, a deeply personal behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most notorious serial-killer cases in American history.
Jeff Jensen says, “My father, in his wry, self-deprecating fashion, always joked that if anyone ever told his story, it would be in a comic book. Well, now that’s come true, but in the best way possible. I’m excited to be telling his story, and thrilled that we’re doing it as a graphic novel with Dark Horse. My father taught me to read with comics. As a teenager, I became a fan of the medium for life thanks to Alan Moore, Frank Miller, the Hernandez brothers, Neil Gaiman, Howard Chaykin, Harvey Pekar, and Daniel Clowes–artists who opened my eyes to how comics can tackle mature material in a sophisticated fashion. Ramón and I and everyone here want to do justice to my father’s story in a smart, compelling, sensitive way, and we hope that the result is worthy of the comics that have inspired us.”
Green River Killer: A Detective Story is written by Jeff Jensen, with art by Ramón K. Pérez. This groundbreaking and historic graphic novel will arrive on shelves in 2010 from Dark Horse Comics.
