Gary Ridgway was the most prolific serial in the history of the United States. His 19-year reign of terror left the area surrounding Seattle littered with corpses. All the girls were young. A lot of them grew up in abusive homes and they were running away, as a result of that, they were prostitutes. In 1982 the dangers of working the Strip, an area where prostitution was rife, would be brought home by a discovery in the nearby Green River. There was a man in boat and he saw underneath the water what he thought was a mannequin. Two mannequins. As police investigated the crime scene they made another grim find. Processing the scene there was the third victim on the banks. By autumn of 1982 the bodies of five young women had been discovered in or beside Seattle’s Green River. They had disappeared from a notorious highway known as The Strip. By the end of 1982 15 girls would be missing or found dead.
On the 30th of April 1983, a young girl was spotted being taken from The Strip. She was in restaurant on the highway. Her boyfriend went to make a phone. When he came back, she wasn’t there. He was very concerned and tried to find her. He saw her in a truck ahead of him. He followed the truck unsuccessfully. He returned with his girlfriend’s family and they found the car. The truck was park outside the modest home of a local truck painter and they call the local police. One of the sergeants went there, knocked on the door and a man answered and he said there’s nobody in his house and he believed him. All serial murderers have the ability to appear normal. They are pathological liars. They manipulate. Gary Ridgway details joined hundreds more. in the task Force’s files. A saliva swab would later be added. By June 1983 at least 26 girls had disappeared. That summer five girls went missing. In autumn five more girls vanished. In winter and spring 1984, four more girls gone. By spring 1984, the killer had amassed more than 40 victims.
Detectives Keppel and Reichert decided they had nothing to lose and flew out to visit Bundy in person.
In their initial meeting, and in future correspondences with the investigators, the killer analyzed the case in forensic detail and provided Keppel and Reichert with several accurate insights. For example, he was skeptical that one of the women found, Amina Agisheff, was a Green River Killer victim since she didn’t fit the killer’s usual target profile. This later proved to be correct.
Bundy rightly surmised that the killer was inoffensive and mild-mannered compared to many other men who’d mingle in the seedy environment of the Sea-Tac strip. Bundy also believed the killer weaponized his mild demeanor to lull the sex workers into a false sense of security. Bundy himself wore an arm cast or used crutches to make targets think he wasn’t a threat.
Bundy also suggested that the Green River Killer would be drawn back to the places where he dumped the bodies. Despite the killer’s nickname, these were often dry locations like scrublands and foothills, allowing him to retain access to his grisly handiwork. ‘In my opinion,’ Bundy said, ‘the best chance you have of catching this guy red-handed is to get a site with a fresh body and stake it out.’
Bundy was going by his own habit of returning to where he’d buried his victims, to bask in his past glories and commit necrophilia. The Green River Killer later confessed to doing the same thing.
But then he stopped. In 1985 Gary Ridgway, the truck painter, began dating 40-year-old divorced mother, Judith Lorraine Lynch. She said that he had been a gentleman, very polite and nice. He loved the country music and the dancing. He was always smiling, never got angry. Within months she moved in with him.
In 2001 advances in DNA profiling enabled them to compare samples taken from the early victims. With swabs that had been taken from several men questioned during the investigation, they found the match. The Green River killer was identified. Gary Ridgway, then 52-year-old truck painter was a serial murderer.
The prosecution and defense teams were able to interview the man suspected of over four dozen homicides.
Defense attorney Mark Prothero: “What was remarkable was that he was so normal. If you did not know what he had done, you would like him. The monster within him was well hidden.” Serial murderers are for the most part very ordinary individual, except for the extraordinary crimes they get involved in.
Gary Ridgway was born in 1949. He was the middle of three boys. He lived in a small house, not far from The Strip. His mother was stay-at-home and then worked part-time at a department store. His father drove a bus for the county. Gary sometimes would ride with him on the bus and his dad would say: “You see her? She’s a prostitute. She’s the scum of the earth…” and would berate prostitutes, and talk about how filthy and bad they were. And there were a couple of episodes where Gary recalled him leaving him in the while father went and had sex with prostitutes. Gary Ridgway was more inward than his siblings. He failed to make an impression at school. He was angry with his mother, because she forced him to study. According to his words, she was pressuring him and he couldn’t learn. At parents’ evenings his mother Mary made an impression. All the women sat back and looked at her strange, because she would wear a big bouffant hair, lots of makeup, short skirts, tight shorts, low cut tops which were not the style in those days, especially for a mother. She was very attractive at the time.
Ridgway admitted wetting the bed throughout his childhood and well into his teens. When he would wet the bed, his mother would put him in the bathtub and wash him, and wash his genitals during one bath. Her robe fell open and she was naked underneath, and he felt arousal. At the same time, he knew that it wasn’t a normal thing to feel, but he felt it. He talked about having sexual feelings towards her. He described in detail watching her when she was in a bathing suit, sometimes topless, and thinking that she dressed pretty provocatively. Her mother was overly sexualized who was washing her son’s genitals and most teenage boys are having an awful time with dealing with their own emerging sexuality, has to have had an impact on some way. Boys need to see their mothers as asexual. It is very destabilizing for an adolescent boy to see his mother in a sexual manner. It’s very hard for an adolescent boy to imagine his mother having sex with anybody, including his father. When a mother behaves in a sexualized or hyper sexualized way, it’s very unsettling for an adolescent boy.
As Ridgway got older, he started showing signs of destructive behavior. Starting fires and as a teenager he took his first step towards murder. He approached a first grader, a six-year-old boy that he saw playing in a lot, near his house. The boy was dressed up playing Cowboys and Indians and he lured him into the bushes and completely unprovoked stabbed the little boy in the stomach and nearly killed him. He told the boy that he just wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody. After he stabbed him, he took the knife and wiped it the blade off on the little boy’s shoulder and just walked away. Nobody ever connected him to that. Ridgway eventually finished school two years late due to his slow progress. Gary Ridgway scored 82 with IQ well below that of the average Joe.
The following year, age 21, he married his steady girlfriend, Claudia Kraig, and joined the Navy. When he returned from his deployment to the Philippines, his wife admitted that she had had an affair with a friend of theirs. During his time in the military, Ridgway had frequent sexual intercourse with sex workers and contracted gonorrhea. During the early 1970s Ridgway got a job spray painting. He met and married his second wife, Marcia Winslow. He became religious during his second marriage, proselytizing door-to-door, reading the Bible aloud at work and at home, and insisting that his wife follow the strict teachings of their pastor. He was very much into having sex often, repeatedly throughout the day. As frequently pretty much as women would agree. They would go out in the truck and he loved to have sex in public where they could be discovered at any time, but after having a child their relationship deteriorated and his wife left him when his son was about five. That was when he started to go frequent prostitutes. Ridgway claimed he became addicted to prostitutes. He had in fact been quizzed by police about his activities on the Strip several times during the 80s, even passing a lie detector test when questioned about the Green River Murders. He was questioned in 2001 and Ridgway continued to protest his innocence. Up to this point Gary Ridgway had been maintaining that they had the wrong person, that he had sex with many prostitutes, but he hadn’t killed anyone. When forensic evidence surfaced tying him to three more victims, Ridgway’s story changed. Defense attorney Mark Prothero and another attorney were in the meeting room waiting for Ridgway. They were talking and smiling. Ridgway walked in and said: “Oh you won’t be smiling when and we’re done. I’ve been lying to you all. I’ve been manipulating everyone for all these years. I killed them all.”
In 2003, 54-year-old truck painter, Gary Ridgway admitted he was The Green River Killer that had eluded capture for almost two decades. Faced with the death penalty, Ridgway offered to tell the truth about all his crimes in return for his life. On behalf of the victims’ families who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones, prosecution agreed.
In one situation he had his child in the car when he picked up a prostitute, or showing his son’s picture, or he used to have his child’s toys in the car. He preferred to take them to his house. If they didn’t want to go to his house, he would drive to a remote location. He had a pickup truck with a canopy on the back. He would convince them to go into the back, so they could have more room to have sex. Once he got them in the rear position. Then he would choke them with his forearm. Ridgway guided the investigators to where he dumped dozens of young women. He said the victims didn’t mean anything. To every serial murderer human being is object in the homicide, and they’re never going to remember the name, they’re never going to remember the face, they’ll remember the concrete action of where those bodies are. He was filled with rage and had wanted to hurt his victims even after their deaths he admitted he tried to set one of his victims’ hair on fire. He seemed throughout the interviews to try to blame a lot of what had happened on the women in his life, that the women that he actually killed were kind of an extension of all the women before who had disappointed him. He talked about a number of the victims that he would go back and have sexual relations with them for a number of days after he killed them. It is necrophilia. The standard explanation for necrophilia had been sex with someone dead – you can have total control over it. There’s no resistance at all. When he met his third wife, he stopped for a while, but again started killing. During his third marriage of 13 years, he murdered around 10 women.
In 2003, Gary Ridgway made his plea to the 48 charges of murder that investigators could conclusively tie him. He was sentenced to serve 48 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
| # | Name | Age | Disappeared | Body found |
| 1 | Wendy Lee Coffield | 16 | July 8, 1982 | July 15, 1982 |
| 2 | Gisele Ann Lovvorn | 17 | July 17, 1982 | September 25, 1982 |
| 3 | Debra Lynn Bonner | 23 | July 25, 1982 | August 12, 1982 |
| 4 | Marcia Fay Chapman | 31 | August 1, 1982 | August 15, 1982 |
| 5 | Cynthia Jean Hinds | 17 | August 11, 1982 | August 15, 1982 |
| 6 | Opal Charmaine Mills | 16 | August 12, 1982 | August 15, 1982 |
| 7 | Terry Rene Milligan | 16 | August 29, 1982 | April 1, 1984 |
| 8 | Mary Bridget Meehan | 18 | September 15, 1982 | November 13, 1983 |
| 9 | Debra Lorraine Estes | 15 | September 20, 1982 | May 30, 1988 |
| 10 | Linda Jane Rule | 16 | September 26, 1982 | January 31, 1983 |
| 11 | Denise Darcel Bush | 23 | October 8, 1982 | June 12, 1985 |
| 12 | Shawnda Leea Summers | 16 | October 9, 1982 | August 11, 1983 |
| 13 | Shirley Marie Sherrill | 18 | October 20–22, 1982 | June 14, 1985 |
| 14 | Rebecca “Becky” Marrero | 20 | December 3, 1982 | December 21, 2010 |
| 15 | Colleen Renee Brockman | 15 | December 24, 1982 | May 26, 1984 |
| 16 | Sandra Denise Major | 20 | December 24, 1982 | December 30, 1985 |
| 17 | Wendy Stephens | 14 | Died circa spring 1983[n 2] | March 21, 1984 |
| 18 | Alma Ann Smith | 18 | March 3, 1983 | April 2, 1984 |
| 19 | Delores LaVerne Williams | 17 | March 8–14, 1983 | March 31, 1984 |
| 20 | Lori Anne Razpotnik | 15–16 | Died spring or summer 1983 | December 1985 |
| 21 | Gail Lynn Mathews | 23 | April 10, 1983 | September 18, 1983 |
| 22 | Andrea Marion Childers | 19 | April 14, 1983 | October 11, 1989 |
| 23 | Sandra Kay Gabbert | 17 | April 17, 1983 | April 1, 1984 |
| 24 | Kimi-Kai Ryks Pitsor | 16 | April 17, 1983 | December 15, 1983 |
| 25 | Mary-Jane “Marie” Malvar | 18 | April 30, 1983 | September 26, 2003 |
| 26 | Carol Ann Christensen | 21 | May 3, 1983 | May 8, 1983 |
| 27 | Martina Theresa Authorlee | 18 | May 22, 1983 | November 14, 1984 |
| 28 | Cheryl Lee Wims | 18 | May 23, 1983 | March 22, 1984 |
| 29 | Yvonne “Shelly” Antosh | 19 | May 31, 1983 | October 15, 1983 |
| 30 | Carrie Ann Rois | 15 | May 31 – June 13, 1983 | March 10, 1985 |
| 31 | Constance Elizabeth Naon | 19 | June 8, 1983 | October 27, 1983 |
| 32 | Tammie Charlene Liles | 16 | June 9, 1983 | April 23, 1985 |
| 33 | Kelly Marie Ware | 22 | July 18, 1983 | October 29, 1983 |
| 34 | Tina Marie Thompson | 21 | July 25, 1983 | April 20, 1984 |
| 35 | April Dawn Buttram | 16 | August 18, 1983 | August 30, 2003 |
| 36 | Debbie May Abernathy | 26 | September 5, 1983 | March 31, 1984 |
| 37 | Tracy Ann Winston | 19 | September 12, 1983 | March 27, 1986 |
| 38 | Maureen Sue Feeney | 19 | September 28, 1983 | May 2, 1986 |
| 39 | Mary Sue Bello | 25 | October 11, 1983 | October 12, 1984 |
| 40 | Pammy Annette Avent | 15 | October 26, 1983 | August 16, 2003 |
| 41 | Delise Louise Plager | 22 | October 30, 1983 | February 14, 1984 |
| 42 | Kimberly L. Nelson | 21 | November 1, 1983 | June 14, 1986 |
| 43 | Lisa Lorraine Yates | 19 | December 23, 1983 | March 13, 1984 |
| 44 | Mary Exzetta West | 16 | February 6, 1984 | September 8, 1985 |
| 45 | Cindy Anne Smith | 17 | March 21, 1984 | June 27, 1987 |
| 46 | Patricia Michelle Barczak | 19 | October 17, 1986 | February 3, 1993 |
| 47 | Roberta Joseph Hayes | 21 | February 7, 1987 | September 11, 1991 |
| 48 | Marta Reeves | 36 | March 5, 1990 | September 20, 1990 |
| 49 | Patricia Ann Yellowrobe | 38 | January 1998 | August 6, 1998 |
