The first edition of this was published not long after Ted was finally sentenced to life in prison in Florida. The second edition was published at least partly in response to the below film entering production, which is allegedly based on this book but without Liz’s permission. This book is brave in it’s nakedly admitting how codependent Liz was with Ted, and by not retracting statements in the second edition like that Liz still loved Ted, despite his being convicted of horrible crimes. The book is significantly told through the lens of (and sometimes overshadowed by) Liz grappling with her own sense of morality after growing up in religious household and being a single parent in the early ‘70s, as well as working through her own substance abuse issues. There are a couple of specifically noteworthy things in this book that are not depicted in the film and that have not been widely documented elsewhere:

1. Liz and Ted go rafting, and he casually pushes her out of the boat and then dispassionately watches her as she struggles to get in without his help. This is one of a couple of occasions where she mentions him seeming to have “dead eyes” and look like a different person.
2. On a different occasion, while Liz sunbathes at Green Lake, Ted paddles in his raft while Liz’s daughter swims. The girl attempts to reach the raft to take a break, and Liz watches Ted paddle just out of the girl’s reach, over and over again, while the girl attempts to reach the raft. He later says he didn’t realize the girl needed help.
3. Most damning, Liz’s daughter wrote an afterword to the second edition of the book. She describes multiple occasions where Ted was sexually inappropriate with her. This seems to be a very recent revelation and is not documented anywhere else.

This film is noted as being based on the book by Liz Kendall, but according to her, the movie entered production without them even asking if she wanted to be involved. Kendall later agreed to consult on the movie and the film credits her book as being one source, but the movie depicts things she did not witness. Without being sympathetic to Ted, this does clearly demonstrate how he was so socially successful (although it avoids delving into his con man ways and petty theft, which the book does detail).

This book is a good resource in that it has a clearly reported chronology of events, which is lacking in many other books. However, its usefulness as a source is significantly marred by the occasional ghoulish glee or sneering tone on the part of the author, which is perhaps not shocking from someone who is both a retired minister and a former reporter for a true crime magazine called Snitch. He uses hyperbolic language such as calling Bundy “the northwest’s premiere killing machine.” The occasions where the writing is incisive and clear are frequently undermined by the occasions when the writer inserts himself along with his opinions and commentary; sometimes he is repetitive, and sometimes, seemingly arbitrarily, he is wildly speculative.

While you can get an updated edition of this book that has a small epilogue documenting Ridgway’s arrest and some events after, there is still a massive narrative hole regarding the decade plus between when this was first published and when Ridgway was taken into custody. However, the creeping dread of bodies turning up over and over again with little apparent pattern or motive is well-depicted, as is the degree to which the police were stumped and/or did not cooperate with each other. Given how dated the book is, the handling of the lives and deaths of sex workers is fairly sensitive for the time.

The script of this graphic novel was written by the son of one of the detectives who worked the Green River case and who worked with Ridgway after his arrest. It has a panel that depicts the fridge where they left Ridgway’s DNA sample, just waiting and waiting until they could do something with it. This book reinforces the notion that law enforcement at some point absolutely knew who the Green River killer was, they just couldn’t prove it. The bulk of this comic focuses on the few days when what remained of the Green River task force took Ridgway on a tour of his purported dump sites in the hopes of clearing dozens of cases. The reason Gary still sits in prison rather than facing the death penalty is because he cooperated and gave some bitter closure to dozens of haunted families.

This author made his reputation as someone who cops would talk honestly to, and it is hard to walk away from this book without the notion that some Seattle law enforcement were convinced they knew who the Green River Killer was long before he was arrested, but they couldn’t prove it. This would later prove to be true. This book diverges from what really happened in many ways, as it is a work of fiction, and it never purports to be the truth, but this is not just an interesting crime novel/procedural, it is an interesting depiction/analysis of serial killer psychopathology.

John Douglas is the basis of one of the two characters from the Netflix series of the same title, based more on his career and casework at large than on this book in particular, but more famously, Douglas became a bit of a media darling by being able to claim that the Scott Glenn character in Silence of the Lambs was based on him. To his credit, Douglas helped invent what would become considered profiling. He did not work on the Bundy case, and, while he was invited to work on the Green River case, the day he arrived in Seattle he collapsed from a case of meningitis which almost killed him. He returned home to recuperate and never substantially contributed to the Green River case. However, the impact of his work (for better and worse) on the approach of profiling, his analysis of the criminal mind and motivations, and his extended impact on how we perceive serial murderers in the public consciousness is difficult to overstate.

The book of the almost-same title focuses a bit more on what the FBI’s profiling lab was doing at the time it was written, rather than how the lab came to be, which is the focus of the show. Neither contradicts the other, but you shouldn’t look to one to inform the other the same way you might with the adaptation of a novel. This is impeccably made television, with each of the two seasons focusing on a specific serial murderer and using it as a way to inform the greater context of Douglas’ work in building the very notion of a criminal profile.

James Ellroy rose to fame almost a decade after this through his L.A. Quartet novels (most notably L.A. Confidential), and he consistently writes about the criminal mind with surprising, sometimes shocking insight. He writes about it here in the first person, and possibly more explicitly and bluntly than anywhere else in his career, which is saying something. Ellroy depicts a young man’s arrested development, his rampant twisted fantasy life that informs his Peeping Tom habits and vice versa, his petty criminal tendencies, and how all of this leads to greater acts of criminal daring including, but not limited to, murder. More than a decade later Ellroy would reveal in his first memoir, My Dark Places, how much of this was actually lifted from his own life and how Ellroy was distanced from this fictional counterpart by the thinnest “there but by the grace of God” margin. As in River, Killer on the Road depicts an ongoing, agitational, and inspirational relationship between two murderers, who drive each other to worse depravity than either one would accomplish individually.