warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, avoided justice for almost 20 years. Meanwhile, he murdered dozens of women across Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. How did he actually fool everybody and stay under the radar for so long?
for almost two decades a madman assaults ,kills and then dumps the bodies of young women around seattle in its majestic green river. he targeted prostitutes and runaways and murdered them in the most barbaric of ways.he would pay them, he would have sex with them and then he woul kill them to get his money back.
the killer often revisits his undiscovered victims to have sex with their corpses.
he cast a shadow and that shadow lasted decades. he confesses to 71 murders …
but many believe there are dozens more….
he needed sex often and he got a lot of gratification from killing them.
Gary was married three times.
living a demonic double life.this wolf in sheep’s clothing is a devoted husband.father and church member.who easily lures vulnerable girls into his trap.
his very good at disarming and victims psychologically but when DNA technology finnaly catches up to him the world realizes the true extent of his horrific crimes.
he was your coworker,he was your neighbor and your friend but he was a boogeyman living underneath the radar.
how did he get away with it for so long. that’s what no one could understand.
meet gary ridgway aka the green river killer. a run-of-the -mill nobody.
until murder made him fameous.
the savage murders committed by gary ridgway in the 80s and 90s shocked authorities and the public. his infamous deeds have been chronicled in movies.books . and television shows.
gary ridgway’s name was even mentioned more than once on the CBS show criminal minds.
his legacy continues to terrify through urban legend and pop culture references.
the gary ridgway case ,green river case fueled our fascination with serial killers.but his atrocities traumatized an entire generation of women in the pacific northwest.
who wondered if they be his next victim.
though he’s become known as one of the most notorious serial killers in US history.
gary ridgway’s early life at least on the surface,appears to be normal. his the middle son of mary rita steinman and thomas newton.ridgway.
gary ridgway did not seem to have the kind of family that would produce a man with so much anger and so much hate and a drive to kill. it just didn’t seem to fit.
he came from a very middle class family. there was nothing really that remakable about him. from an early age gary finds himself sexually attracted to his mother.
ridgway’s father was an overworked bus driver.and his mother was pretty overbearing. so more than once he saw his parents arguing.
his father would say negative things about prostitutes and sex workers.
gary’s father was a rigid disciplinarian.his mother was a strong woman and described as being domineering at times.
one night a young ridgway awakens to find he has wet himself.he was a bed wetter and that he wet his bed into his early teens and that his mother would bathe him even when he was in that puberty age.
and he became aroused and then he would also become more aroused when her robe opened. he became confused with his mom.” i like her . i love her . i want to do certain things “.
and you’re not supposed to thing that way.
when ridgway is 11 his family moves from Utah to seattle ,washington.
a poor reader and slow learner ,ridgway struggles in school.he was dyslexic.and he had a low IQ and ultimately he was held back in school two times.
he always lived as if he had something to make up for. at school ridgway allegedly pays a girl to let him look at her genitals.
eventually ridgway reportedly begins to have violent fantasies about his mother.he began getting fantasies of hurting her. slashing her cutting her because he was confused.
so the bed wetting washing and then the criticism on hi side and then kids making fun of him because he was slow ,started to create this psychology of annihilated thinking.
hurting people ,wanting to hurt people, when they did it wrong. his anger is growing.evolving the dislike for women is starting to take shape.
at first , fantasy seemed the only way for him to deal with his feelings of lust and humiliation but then one day ,he acted on it.
gary had lured this little boy to a place to play and he lured him into the woods and then attackedhim with a knife.
pierced his liver,the boy almost died. since the boy doesn’t know ridgway he is unable to identify his assalant. the boy and his family ove out of state shortly afterwards.
gary ridgway has successfully avoided police detection.for the first of many times in his life…
1969 at the age of 20 ridgway graduates high school and joins the navy. in 1970 he marries his high shool girlfriend but they divorce after only a year.
she took up with another man and he was devastated and quite angry and she basically sent him a “dear john letter” saying it’s over.
while he’s in the navy,bridgway goes to vietnam where he briefly sees combat and he also starts visiting prostitutes and it wasn’t uncommon for these sailors to go and find prostitutes.
he has an insatiable sex drive and his acting out he contracts gonorrhea twice.
in 1971 ridgway is honorably discharged from the Navy. he returns to washington states and gets a painting job at the kenworth motor truck company.
not long after his divorce ridgway met marsha winslow and they got married and he introduced her to his love of the outdoors.
he had a very insatiable appetite for sex.his wife said that he would sometimes demand sex two and three times a day that wasn’t enough.he had some kinky ideas about being outside .he liked to have sex outside.
in 1975 ridgway’s wife , marsha give birth to a baby boy. over the next few years the relationship between gary and marsha turns rocky.
he was angry at her for betraying him, and he talked about feeling that she was one of those women who pushed him around and took advantage of him.
he had self- gratification sexual release.that was the moment that his hate became together with violence.
marsha leaves ridgway in 9181 and takes custody of their son.
soon after , ridgeway moves into a house near pacific highway south , which bisects seattle and begins frequenting prositutes. pacific highway was the primary coridoor for prostitution at that time in the 80s.gary went out often.he needed to have sex four or five times a week.so he was out there all the time.
one night in 1982 ridgway spots 16 year old wendy lee coffield.
wendy is reportedly a high school dropout and presumed runaway from pierce conty which is over 40 miles away.
prostitutes do not want to leave the strip,they didn’t want to go very far.they want to feel a little safe although it’s not safe.
he felt incredible sense of power and control over these women after he would pick them up, trick them into thinking he was safe and he was a good guy.
his contempt for women has been growing. and now no longer under the watchful eye of his wife he takes his dark desires to a terrifying level…
he was punishing every woman who he felt had ever betrayed him or had pushed him around or he hadfailed to stand up to.
on july 15th 1982 two boys bicycling along the bridge noticed something below them in the green river.the boys discovered the body of wendy lee coffield. she was naked,expet for her shoes and socks and the rest of her clothes were knotted around her neck.
she was only 16 year old.
in august 19982 marcia fay chapman ,mother of three ,crosses paths with gary ridgway.
he wouldpark his car,at a convenience store or in a parking lot and he would pop the hood up as if something was wrong and then he would stand outside the car ,kind of watching the various women.
they were living on the streets, they were selling their bodies for sex and gary ridgway knew that they could be taken advantage of.
marcia is an alleged prostitute who tells her kids that she’s going to the store.
he would show women pictures of his son that he kept in his wallet in order to just show that he was a normal non-threatening guy with a little kid.
three more seattle area women fall prey to ridgway…
and their disappearances get the attention of homicide detectives .during their investigation they searched the green river.
the green river is just one of these lazy river slow moving with very deep banks.
hidden in the foliage and under rocks police find the bodies of four ridgway victims:
deborah lynn bonner . cyntia jean hinds . opal charmaine mills and marcia fay chapman.
his m.o are what threw off the police as well because he didn’t always treat the victims the same way.occasionally he would pose a body or put rocks inside the body or do something odd.
so, they didn’t all look the same.
from 1982 to 1984 gary ridgway the green river killer continues his manic killing spree.he hunts,rapes ,and strangles his victims and then disposes of their bodies
15,16 year old, 17,18 we talking about a lot of teenagers, some had gone to puberty .
everybody was wondering is my daughter in danger ,my wife or who’s in danger ,who are the victims.
he kills these women ,sometimes in his truck , sometimes in his house.sometimes in the woods.
more bodies turned up in remote and forested areas around seattle.they are usually nuded or partial clthed and are all killed by strangulation.
from then on it was just a matter of trying to identify the rest of the victims.there had to have been an obvious connection .what was it.
they were white. black. hispanic. tall .short.the commonality was that they were street people.
street kids.
gary ridgway targeted people who lived in the shadows. these was runaways prostitutes. drug addicts.people who didn’t have the best judgement.
who came from dysfunctional families .who were working in many cases as prostitutes and they were people who wouldn’t be missed.
by the very nature of their jobs.prostitutes are easy prey for someone like gary ridgeway.
especially if he’s going to pay them money.
investigation is running against the clock.it’s only matter of time before another woman is picked up another woman is killed another woman is found as a result a lot of resources were immediately put inot the case.
detectives ,dave reichert and tom jensen are both members of the green river task force they have one goal in mind to catch the serial serial killer murderer dubbed the green river killer.
the police thought they had nothing to go on ,so what could they do? they turned to the women who might someday becomes his victims.
but who were they really looking for at that point ,everything about gary ridgway was unremarkable.
the profile that we’ve all heard of the serial killer he’s a loner, he’s usually unmarried,he’s not social, he comes from a broken home,he was killing animals,he was killing early.that wasn’t gary ridgway.
he didn’t have, the typical frothing at the mouse ,evil look about him .he looked like a regular guy.he didn’t lool powerful.he was polite,he had a son.he wasn’t what detective’s espected he would be.
Gisele Ann Lovvorn,is an alleged prostitute, who loves the band ,the greatful dead .
she’s only 17 years old when gary ridgway picks her up.he has brought his 7 years old son matthew along for the ride.he picked her up,told his son to stay in the car.said they were going for a walk.took her into the woods.
gary ridgway was like a serial killersavant. he stumbled onto a method that worked really well for him.he would ofthen convince them that if they did it doggy style, he would be faster .
so,he had them in a very vulnerable position.
what he told detectives he did ,was he would say “what’s that?”and the girl that she had her head down she would be looking up and he would be able to get her his arm around her neck.
then hewould attack the woman,typically from behind and he would choke her to death.
his son,didn’t know ,his son was a child .he just waited patiently for his father.matthew ridgway’s father return to the truck alone.
years later matthew ridgway will tell reporters that he had no idea that his father was anything other than a normal dad.
once details of the green river site go public,the murderer stgarts dumping bodies in other places, making investigators jobs even harder.
ridgeway disposes of his victims in the woods,sometimes he intentionally spreads debris, such a cigarette butts , receipts and airport pamphlets around the bodies.
he does so in the hopes that the police will think a traveling salesman could be the killer.
ridgways depraved deeds known no bounds.
Mary Bridget Meehan is just 19 year old and over b8 months pregnant.her remains are discovered approximately a year later.
not only were they found in more secluded areas,but they were even found further away from seattle area.as the body count climbs to over a dozen the green river task force receives thousands of phone calls from concerned citizens.
initally they thought possibly was a pimp, they thought maybe it was someone who was pretending to be a cop because how seemed like they were getting into a car so quickly.so easily.maybe that’s what it was.
investigators including FBI working on the case,because it was so many suspects ,there were so many missing people.
they spent so much time tecovering the remains and trying to identify them that there wasn’t really much time to work on the suspects that much anymore.
they were overwhelmed by the number of recoveries that they were making.
during their investigation into the murders ,the green river task force receives an offer of help from the unlikeliest of sources.
this unlikely source is someone whom Dave Reichert and fellow task force, agent Robert Keppel had previously investigated the infamous murderer ted bundy.
ted bundy was smart,he was social.
gary ridgway was 180 degrees the opposite.his IQ was low, he wasn’t attractive, he wasn’t charismatic. it’s hard to imagine how he convinced all of these women to get in the car with him and in the end ,he was just really good at one thing and that was killing people.
killing these women.
bundy suggests that when police find a fresh grave that they stake it out ,because if the killer is anything like ted bundy ,he’ll come back to have sex with the dead bodies.
he didn’t have money to go pick up another women and have sex with her.
gary ridgway will later reveal he has sex with corpses of his victims,because necrofilia is less risky than killing another woman.
this was another way for him to control women and to have sex whenever he wanted.
police take bundy’s advice, and stake out a fresh grave in the woods.but the killer never shows.
in november 1982 ridgway solicited 20 year old telemarketer and occasional prostitute rebecca G. rebecca and ridgway allegedly agreed to exhange $ 20 for a sexual act.
gary took her out into a wooded area, was in the process of getting oral sex and tried to strangle her.she managed to get awway from him and escape and run to a nearby house where they called the police.but he got away. years later ridgway admitted to shocking rebecca,but he said it was self-defense aftgr she bit him.
these are prostitutes who’s going to believe them?
in 1983, ridgway pulls over to solicit sex from 18 year old prostitute mary -jane malvar.mary’s boyfriend who’s also her pimp is watching nearby.
cause he didn’t look like a killer,it was easy for him to get young girls in his car.the problem was that young as they were, they thought they knew the streets.
they were little girls,lost ,some or many of them had been abused at home and so they were running away from violence. and so, they ran to the streets.
what drew him to these women was this desire to feel like he had beautiful women or attractive women who was sexually attracted to him.of course he found the women were easily available, and willing to engage in whatever acts he wanted.
ridgway has just finished having sex with prostitute marie -jane malvar at his home in seattle and as with all his previous victims, he strangles her.
during her struggled to break free malvar inflicts deeps scratches on ridgways arm.she fought back. when he tried to kill her. allthough she puts up a fight mary -jane malvar has no chance against ridgway.
and mary-jane’s boyfriend was suspicious of this particular guy and followed them to the house and alerted the authorities.
he talked his way out of it. and that’s a pivotal moment where many many lives could have been saved if there had been more followup.
it’s possible that gary ridgway would have been caught.
when police leave gary ridgway attempts to conceal the scratches inflicted on him by malvar. ridgway covered up the scratches with battery acid.
it was one of many close calls that he had with the cops.
on edge from his run- ins with the police,ridgway take his son camping in the neigboring state of oregon.it is there where he he deposits the remains of two bodies inside trash bags.
ridgway left body parts of his victims around oregon to throw cops off the scent from seattle and when police discovered the remains,they thought maybe the killer was moving south.
back in washington state a police officer spots gary ridgway emerging from the woods.he has just finished having sex with a cadaver…
he says ” well i’m just urinating “
despite another close call, the green river killer is undeterred.
in 1983,ridgway murders waitress and young mother carol ann christensen on mother’s day.her body is discovered propped against a tree.
he poses her with two trout on her torso, a sack on her head an empty bottle of wine across her stomack and a pile of sausages on her hands.
some speculate this bizarre scene is an attempt to throw off the task force.
carol’s death was nothing like the killer’s and it made cops wonder, wast the killer trying to send a message or he just tauntong them .?
so , it trhew police and everybody into this interpretive mode and the theories what it does it means .she was obviously staged.
gary ridgeway never explained anything this stuff other then he had it in his refrigerator.
in 1984, 2 years after escaping the clutches of gary ridgway ,rebecca.G .reprots her terrifying runin to police.
they had been a string of murders by this point. and the green river task force was on high alert. gary ridgeway was on their list , so they brought him in for a polygraph.
ridgway was reportedly calm and relaxed as he took his polygraph, so he passed it with flying colors. cops had no choice but to let him go again.that was a real missed opportunity ,because when he passed that lie detetctor test, they moved on .they set his name to the side.
in 1985,4 years after his divorce from his previous wife marsha.ridgway starts dating judith mawson.they met in of these social clubs for people who have lost spouses or suffered divorce and they connected immediately.
the comen that he met ,didn’t have great emotional needs,he did like to have sex alot. judith described their marriage as every day was a honeymoon.ridgway had held the same job for 15 years and he was close with his mother. so to someone like judith that signified stability and she liked him.
the tow of them came up with a hobby of salvaging old junk and selling it at garage sales.unbeknownst to judith, gary secretely schim scash from the garage sale earnings.
so the money that was coming from the garage sales ,he was able to use at his discretion without any visibility to judith.
with few leeds, the green river task force is still keeping a very close eye on gary ridgway.
gary ridgway was on the radar pretty early on, he was one of two main suspects, he had a history of arrests for soliciting prostitutes ,so he was someone they looked at.
though he’s previously passed a polygraph test ridgway remains a prime person of interest.
as a result,police get a warrant to search gary ridgway’s home. and his cars. they believe they’ll find the evidence they need to finally catch their killer.
they just collected a lot of evidence,one of the things that they did get was a swab ,that was generaly done just for a saliva test.
but he’s very good at what he did and he was able to evade police and they didn’t find the evidence that they were expecting. cops collected, carpet fibers.ropes and thay also collected hair and saliva.
police also collected paint samples from ridgway’s place of work where he is employed as an auto body painter.the prolbem was that DNA technology wasn’t fully developed yet . so they couldn’t really test it. so it just sat on a shelf somewhere.
ridgway convinces judith that the search is a missunderstanding.they marry in june of 1988 and his killing spree slows down.
the media was really focused on the case back in the 1980s
what seemed like every day, every week, and then for such a long period of time ,nobody was identified and the killings kind of went to the back burner so to speak.
people had kind of forgotten about the green river killer,it was assumed he’s either dead or he’s in jail because these murders have stopped.
well, when the case kind of went cold, so to speak by the early 1990s,the task force had really exhausted all of the leads that they had.
after a few yearsw without successs in catching the green river killer,the task force was reduced to one person,one detective tom jensen and that was it.
meanwhile just a few miles away gary ridgway was living his life just like he always had.he had a job,he had a son, he had a wife, he went to chuch, he was stable, he was everything a serial killer isnt…
during gary ridgway’s almost 10 year marriage, the rate of his murders slows down considerably.
but on november 16th , 2001, almost 20 years after his murder spree began, se succombs to an urge and solicits a prostitute.
but this prostitute was different from any of his other victims and she was about to give him the suprise of his life….
this prostitute is an undercover police officer,she doesn’t know it.but she has just caught the green river killer.
ridgway is arrested and jailed for solicitation.
when he was arrested, he asked cops not to call his wife. and then he said that they couldcontact the green river task force because they knew him really well.
apparently not well enoug because they let him go again…..
by this point ,ridgway has been terrorizing women for almost 20 years.
the last remaining member of the task force ,detective tom jensen follows the evidence.
he was always aware that they had these samples and he monitored the science of DNA .
nobody had an idea that science would evolve to the point that they would be able to make a positive connection between people based on minuscule amounts of degraded DNA.
as soon as DNA science has developed enough for an accurate result,tom jensen submit gary ridgway’s DNA for testing.
and tom’s timing was really impeccable in terms of making the mission at a point when the science had develpoped to the point where they’d be able to make a match.
this was their last chance.
one of the sample they got a pretty strong match and the other one they were developing a match on that one .
both of them matched gary rodgway.
the DNA match proved that he had sex with some of the victims but they didn’t prove that he had killed them, so, cops needed more.
gary ridgway has held a steady job as painte rfor decades at kenworth trucking.
detective tom jensen believes the paint can be a gold mine.
and when that paint was analyzed it was a very specific kind of paint that was only used at kenworth trucking.police finally have the evidence to arrest gary ridgway,they wait for him outside his place of work
2011, after almost two decades of murders the green river killer is finally in custody.meanwhile ,ridgway’s wife judith is visited by police and told that her husband is the green river killer.
but she initially refuses to believe it.
she was really devoted to him.she really believed that he was wrongly accused.
investigators can now connect ridgway to at least seven of the murdered women but they suspect he is responsible for dozens more.
prosecutors basically went back through histroy and looked at least 75 unsolved murder cases to see if they could tie any of them to ridgway.
the defense attorneys came up with a plan where ridgway would help the detectives solve the unsolved murders that were out there.
but they needed something in return.
basically they took the death penalty off the table,there would be no death penalty in exhange for his confessions.
certainly if anybody deserves to be sentenced to death.ridgway is that person.however the greater good was far more important.
the police have many unidentified bodies that they believe couldbe ridgway’s victims.police sety up a special room, so they can observe and question ridgway at will.
ridgway almost never showed any emotion,throughout the six months that he was interviewd.he confessed to two things,moving body parts to oregon to throw investigation off and also to necrophilia.
the team takes ridgway on field trips ,into the forest to locate the bodies of missing women.
Green River Killer Gary Leon Ridgway, center wearing tan jacket and cap, is shown searching an area of King County near Seattle with law enforcement officials in this undated photo provided by the King County Prosecutor’s Office.
he pointed those spots out .so now the detective s knew that some of the cases that they had suspected might be related but had never made a positive link were now part of his victims.
mary -jane malvar was a women who for many years was on the list. ridgway was able to take law enforcement to the location of where he said he had left her body.
and after much searching that area and clearing of the area by a large team of people ,they were able to find her remains.
on november 5th 2003 ridgway pleads guilty to 48 charges of aggravated first -degree murder.he also claims to have killed an additional 23 women.
the court room was filled with fathers, and brothers, and sisters ,and daughters and mothers of these young women who’s lives were just cut short.people was sobbing and crying and angry, some of his victims relatives stood up and said ” i hope he dies in prison “
On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard A. Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 life sentences without the possibility of parole to be served consecutively.
He was also sentenced to an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, adding 480 years to his 48 life sentences. Later he was given another life sentence after the remains of his 49th victim were found.
gary ridgway is an maxmum security prison, he is serving multiple life sentences,he’ll never get out of prison,but he’s alive and many of his families of his victims find that to be the hardest thing of all -that the green river killer didn’t get the death penalty.
never underestimate who you dealing with because the killer doesn’t look like you think he looks like…..