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Nicole French,
19 - As a girl she mastered horsemanship and was a frequent blue
ribbon winner.
She was
molested at an early age by a relative, and she began to withdraw
from her mother and sister, skipping school, drinking with friends
and using drugs.
She had
a daughter she left with her grandmother to raise.
"We tried
to help," her mother, Judith Mangan said. "But I guess what we gave
her just wasn't what she needed."
She got
counseling but it never seemed to take, her mother said.
She tried
to get away from drugs "but couldn't," said Kim Delaney, a friend.
Summer 1992,
Nicole left Sacramento for Seattle to straighten out her life and
get away from drugs. She found a job in Seattle and seemed to be
making progress. The family was considering giving her back her
daughter.
She lost
her job after returning to Sacramento to serve jail time for bounced
checks.
When she
returned she was kicked out of the home she was staying in with
another woman and moved into a hotel. She had been arrested by police
on prostitution and again questioned by the police but not arrested,
both times in the Pacific Highway South area.
12 hours
before her body was found, she was seen making a phone call from
Pacific Highway South. She disappeared from the same intersection
as two Green River Killer's victims 9 years earlier.
Her partially
clothed body was found found by a hunter Nov. 7, 1992, 10 miles
from North Bend, at the end of a Forest Service logging road, near
the middle fork of the Snoqualmie river. She was strangled with
her own sweat pants near an area Ridgway liked to go to.
Her body
was in the same area as her friend Sarah
Habakangas, 17, found. At the time, no connection was established
between the deaths, police claimed it was an "unusual" circumstance.
Mangan with
her husband, operates a Sacramento-area business.
She raised
the daughter Nicole had as a teenager. Granddaughter, Briteny French,
calls her grandparents "Mom and Dad."
"All I
ever wanted to do was find out why, why somebody does things like
that," she said. "I was searching for answers for why that happens.
You just want to know why, what gives (someone) the right? I'm glad
if he's the one. It's terrible to know they can be out there and
continue (to kill) and no one ever stops them. We just hope they've
got the right one."
She said,
if convicted, Ridgway should be executed or put in prison for life
without the possibility of parole.
To work
through her grief, Judy Mangan sought counseling and visited the
wooded area where the body of her daughter was found. She read books
about serial killers and, for several years, watched every movie
that came out about them. Mangan with her husband, operates a Sacramento-area
business.
Mangan said
when Briteny heard of Ridgway's arrest, "she said 'I hope they put
him in jail and they don't feed him."
Her grandparents
stress to her to not go out at night alone or walk on darkened streets.
Copyright Kari Sable Burns 1994-2006
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