Who killed Geoff?
In the early morning hours of May 29, 1999, Geoffrey Ramseth, a 33-year-old Caucasian / White male, was fatally shot in a senseless act of violence. After attending a going-away party for a soccer teammate at the Cucina Cucina restaurant in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, the dedicated pharmacist and father of three escorted a female coworker, who was seven months pregnant, to her car. As a gesture of kindness, he sat with her for a few minutes while her car warmed up, the two friends chatting in the quiet parking lot just after 2 a.m.
Their conversation was abruptly interrupted when they noticed a man in a small blue or green pickup truck parked beside them. The woman initially thought he might need directions and began to roll down her window. Geoffrey, however, noticed the ominous red dot of a laser sight and instantly realized the grave danger they were in. Without hesitation, he shoved his friend's head down, shielding her from the imminent gunfire. The assailant fired at least seven shots from a 9mm pistol into the car. While his heroic actions saved the life of his friend and her unborn child, who escaped with only a graze to her neck, Geoffrey sustained multiple gunshot wounds to his head and chest and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The initial investigation left police and Geoffrey's family grasping for answers. He was described by all who knew him as a "squeaky-clean," faithful family man with no known enemies, making the targeted nature of the attack all the more baffling. The surviving witness described the shooter as a white man in his 30s with shoulder-length blond hair, a mustache, and glasses. A police sketch was created and circulated, but for months, no solid leads emerged, and the case grew cold.
A break in the case came later when Spokane deputies arrested a man named William Bradley Jackson for the murder of his own nine-year-old daughter. Jackson was a former friend of Geoffrey's wife, Tammy, and had even stayed with the Ramseth family just weeks before the killing. Investigators noted a striking resemblance between Jackson and the police sketch. The prevailing theory among detectives is that Jackson harbored a romantic obsession with Tammy and, aware of the struggles in her marriage to Geoffrey, decided to eliminate him. Despite being a prime suspect and having been interviewed by Seattle detectives multiple times, Jackson, who is serving a 56-year sentence in Florida for his daughter's murder, has never confessed to the killing of Geoffrey Ramseth. No arrests have ever been made, and the case officially remains unsolved, leaving a family to forever wonder about the night that a selfless act of heroism ended in tragedy.
