Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, was arrested on November 30th, 2001, while working as a spray painter at the Kenworth truck factory near Seattle. Police had collected his DNA nearly 15 years earlier, as far back as 1987, but it was only after forensic technology advanced that the evidence conclusively linked him to the murders of teenage girls and women whose bodies had been found dumped in wooded areas around Washington state. The breakthrough came when DNA from saliva swabs Ridgway gave police in 1987 matched semen left on four victims: Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Those four were named in the original indictment.
Three more victims, Wendy Caulfield, Deborah Bonner, and Debra Estes, were added after a forensic scientist identified microscopic spray paint spheres found on their remains as a specific brand and composition of paint used at the Kenworth factory. Ridgway was born on February 18th, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of three sons born to Mary and Thomas Ridgway. He was raised in a household marked by conflict, with relatives describing his mother as domineering. His parents had violent arguments, and his father, a bus driver, frequently complained about the presence of sex workers.
Ridgway struggled with bed-wetting until age 13, and later told defense psychologists that he developed conflicting feelings of rage and sexual attraction toward his mother, at times fantasizing about killing her. At age 16, Ridgway led a six-year-old boy into the woods and stabbed him through the ribs into the liver. The boy survived. Ridgway graduated from Tyee High School in 1969 and married his high school girlfriend, Claudia Craig.
He joined the Navy and served on a supply ship in Vietnam, where he saw combat. While in the military, he had frequent sexual encounters with sex workers and contracted gonorrhea, yet continued the behavior without protection. That marriage lasted only a year. His second wife, Marcia Winslow, said he once put her in a chokehold.
By that point, Ridgway had become deeply religious, going door-to-door, reading the Bible aloud at work and at home, and insisting that she follow the strict teachings of their pastor. He often cried after sermons or Bible readings. Despite these religious commitments, he continued hiring sex workers and pressured his wife into having sex in public and inappropriate places, including areas where his victims’ bodies were later found. Ridgway is believed to have murdered at least 71 teenage girls and women throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the majority of those killings occurring between 1982 and 1984.
The victims were typically sex workers or runaways picked up along Pacific Highway South near Seattle and Tacoma. He later told the court that he killed so many women that he lost count. His method was consistent. After sexual activity from behind, Ridgway would wrap his forearm around the victim’s neck and pull back with the other arm as tightly as he could, strangling them.
He killed most of his victims in his home, his truck, or a remote location. Their bodies were frequently discovered in wooded areas near the Green River, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and other dumping grounds in South King County. Two confirmed and two suspected victims were also found in the Portland, Oregon, area. He would return to the bodies after death, sometimes posing them, and admitted that while sex with the deceased was not more satisfying, it reduced his need to take a living victim and, in his mind, reduced his risk of being caught.
He took other steps to confuse investigators, contaminating dump sites with other people’s gum, cigarettes, and written materials, and even transporting some remains across state lines into Oregon. During the early 1980s, the King County Sheriff’s Office formed the Green River Task Force to investigate the murders. Task force members Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert interviewed imprisoned serial killer Ted Bundy in 1984. Bundy speculated that the killer was returning to the dump sites to have sex with the victims, which later proved to be true, and suggested that police should stake out newly discovered graves and wait for him to return.
Ridgway first came to police attention in 1982, when he was arrested on prostitution charges. He became a suspect in the Green River killings in 1983 and passed a polygraph test in 1984. On April 7th, 1987, police collected samples of his hair and saliva. The same year, authorities contacted Judith Marrison, who had begun dating Ridgway around 1985 and married him in 1988.
Judith later said she had no suspicions about her husband’s crimes before authorities contacted her, adding that she had never heard of the Green River Killer because she did not watch the news. Nearly two decades passed before the DNA evidence from those 1987 samples led to his arrest. The heat was finally closing in. On November 30th, 2001, Ridgway was taken into custody.
On November 5th, 2003, Ridgway entered a guilty plea to 48 charges of aggravated first-degree murder as part of a plea bargain reached the previous June. The deal spared him execution in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of his victims and providing other details. It took nearly an hour to read all the charges. One at a time, Ridgway admitted killing the women.
When asked directly about one victim, Cynthia Hinds, the exchange was brief. “I strangled Cynthia Hinds to death. ” “Is that your statement, Mr. Ridgway?
” “Yes, it is. ” “Is it true? ” “Yes. ” He typically dumped their bodies in the Green River near Seattle, confessing to more confirmed murders than any other serial killer in U.
S. history at the time. Ridgway initially told investigators in one taped interview that he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women. Later, in another taped interview with investigator Ruckert on December 31st, 2003, a detail he did not reveal until after his sentencing, he claimed to have murdered 71 victims and confessed to having sex with them before killing them.
On December 18th, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He also received an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, bringing his total sentence to 480 years. After the remains of a 49th victim were discovered, he was handed down another life sentence. Ridgway kept his part of the plea deal, leading prosecutors to several bodies.
In August 2003, the remains of a 16-year-old girl found near Enumclaw, Washington, about 40 feet from State Route 410, were identified as Pammy Annette Avent, one of Ridgway’s victims. In September 2003, the remains of Marie Malvar and April Buttram were also discovered. On November 20th, 2005, a weekend hiker found a skull in a wooded area near Highway 18 near Issaquah, southeast of Seattle. The Associated Press reported on November 23rd that the skull was identified as Tracy Winston’s, one of the 48 women Ridgway had admitted to murdering in his plea bargain.
Two of Ridgway’s victims remain unidentified, because most of the bodies were not discovered until only skeletons remained. Ridgway later offered a glimpse into the mind that had haunted the region for decades. “I got nightmares in my head. I feel that the thoughts build up until I can’t hear that my mind fills up into a creature, and it haunts me somewhere much deeper.
Exactly. “