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Gary Leon Ridgway was born on 18th February 1949, the middle child of three sons born to Tom and Mary Ridgway in Salt Lake City, Utah. They moved to Washington State, where he grew up in a working class neighbourhood south of Seattle. His father was employed as a bus driver, and Ridgway was closest to his domineering mother as a child.

Ridgway was an unexceptional student, graduating from Tyee High School in SeaTac, Washington, in 1969. He began to frequent prostitutes at an early age, and later claimed that he had targeted prostitutes in his attacks, as he disliked paying them.

He enlisted in the Navy, and was stationed in San Diego for a year, the only time he lived outside the Seattle area. He married his first wife, Claudia, on 15th August 1970, but the marriage was short-lived, due apparently to her infidelity while he was away at sea (she claims his domineering mother caused their split), and they were divorced in 1971. After leaving the Navy, he returned to Washington State, where he was employed as a truck painter at a firm called Kenworth Trucking Co., a job that he held for the next 32 years. Another constant in his life was his love of hunting and fishing, both of which activities he pursued in his leisure time.

He married second wife, Marcia Winslow, on 14th December 1973, and they had a son, Matthew, on 5th September 1975. Around the time of his son’s birth he developed a keen interest in religion, and co-workers remember him carrying a Bible and preaching at work. Conflicting with this religious conviction, Ridgway’ sexual appetite seemed to be becoming increasingly voracious, and he began to develop an interest in sex outdoors, as well as bondage and choking, both with his wife and other sexual partners. Marcia divorced him in 1980, the same year he was accused of choking a prostitute, although he was not prosecuted at the time.

Following the departure of his second wife, his religious fervour seemed to wane, but his brush with the law, in connection with the choking incident, far from dissuading him from his sexual proclivities, seems to have spurred him into an orgy of killing. Forty one women were brutally slain in the short time between July 1982 and March 1984. He then stopped killing until October 1986, and admitted killing a further seven between then and his arrest, in November 2001. Speculation remains rife that he may simply have hidden any victims, killed during this 2-year hiatus, a little more successfully.
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The Crimes
On 15th July 1982, two teenage boys discovered the body of Wendy Lee Coffield, aged 16, floating in the Green River between Kent and Tukwila. Within a month, five more bodies of young women had been discovered in and along the Green River: all known prostitutes, who had been raped and suffocated. The King County Police department launched the Green River Task Force to investigate the killings, which appeared to be the work of a serial killer.

The Task Force was deluged with information initially, but Gary Ridgway came to their notice fairly early on, as his frequent use of prostitutes brought him into regular contact with various local authorities. In 1982, he was flagged twice: once, whilst in a car with a prostitute, Keli McGinness, who disappeared without trace in June 1983, and he was also convicted on prostitution charges in April 1982. Police attention was focussed elsewhere, however, as information from local prostitutes, who had been attacked, led forces to first suspect a meat butcher called Clark, (who was later charged with rape, but dismissed as a potential Green River Killer candidate) then on an unemployed taxi-driver, who was also discounted as a suspect following months of wasted investigative time.

The body count continued to mount; 14 more victims were discovered between September 1982 and April 1983, the last of whom was prostitute Marie Malvar. Her boyfriend contacted the Task Force with information that, on 30th April 1983, she had been seen arguing with a man in a dark coloured truck immediately before her disappearance. Seeing the same truck a few days later, the boyfriend led the police directly to Ridgway, but he denied knowing Malvar and he was not pursued further. Similarly, a dark truck, which was flagged up in the April disappearance of another prostitute, Kimi Kai Pitsor, was not linked to Ridgway at the time.

The investigation made little headway, and the discovery of 11 more bodies over the spring and summer of 1983 placed enormous pressure on the investigative team, with the glare of publicity become increasingly brighter as each disappearance was reported, and each body was recovered. Nine more bodies followed over the winter, and the sheer volume of evidence prevented the team from gaining any traction. It was clear that the killer was dumping bodies close to each other, and perhaps even revisiting the sites to relive the killings, but as each newly discovered dump site unearthed bodies, fresher dump sites were found in other areas, and the killer remained comfortably ahead of his pursuers.
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In the final months of 1983 more than 18 bodies, definitely linked to the Green River Killer, had been recovered (and still others, which had been found, had been discounted as victims) and the Task Force was doubled in size, and given fresh impetus by the introduction of Captain Frank Adamson. New analyses were conducted, which refined information on dumping grounds, and attempted to narrow down the killer’s address by triangulating information from these dumping grounds. Investigators were certain that the killer was local, even seeking assistance from a local psychic in their desperation to break the case. Captain Adamson personally consulted extensively with convicted serial killer, Ted Bundy, seeking any insight into the killer’s character that might elicit progress. Significantly, Ridgway again appeared on the police radar, having been arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer posing as a prostitute. His workplace was searched and he was questioned extensively, but he successfully passed a lie detector test, and he was again discounted as a suspect. According to the testimony of work colleagues, he was jokingly referred to as the Green River Killer for months afterwards.

Although the frequency of attacks seemed to be diminishing, the body count continued to climb over the next two years, with dumping grounds being found further and further away, and the Task Force made little real progress, amidst increasingly critical media coverage. By the end of 1986, the team was scaled right down, and Adamson was assigned elsewhere.

The new chief, Captain James Pompey, oversaw the collation of the huge amounts of evidence that had been accumulated, and the number of times that Ridgway appeared in various respects brought him to the fore once again: from the 1980 choking incident, the 1982 interview with Keli McGinness, the 1983 connection with murdered prostitute, Marie Malvas, and the 1984 solicitation charge and lie detector test.

On 8th April 1987, a warrant was issued for a search of Ridgway’s home, which revealed no evidence to link him to the murders, but they did also take a saliva sample at the time, although the science of DNA profiling was in its infancy. With no concrete evidence to hold Ridgway, they were forced to release him, and the death of Captain Pompey, in an unrelated incident, proved the death knell for the investigative force. Bodies were unearthed sporadically, and tentatively linked to the Green River Killer, but the Task Force was a spent force.
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The case continued to languish for the better part of a decade, until April 2001, when the sheriff of King County, named Reichert, formed a new task force that was charged with revisiting all the old evidence. They used more sophisticated forensic and analytical techniques that had been developed since the case had gone stale. Semen samples, which had been preserved from a number of the 1982 and 1983 crime scenes, were compared to the saliva sample that Ridgway had provided under warrant in 1987, and provided a conclusive link to at least four of the murders.

Ridgway was arrested on 30th November 2001, and charged with four counts of murder. Two weeks earlier, on 16th November, he had again been arrested in an undercover prostitution sting, and escaped with a fine. Authorities, confident that they finally had the Green River Killer, were determined that this would never happen again.

The Aftermath
The sheer number of victims, and mountains of evidence amassed over 20 years, meant that the huge cost of the investigative operation would almost certainly be dwarfed by a long, expensive court case. Washington State has the death penalty, which would almost certainly be invoked in light of the murder toll.

Capitalising on these circumstances, Ridgway and his defence agreed that he would plead guilty to 48 murder charges, as stipulated by the prosecution, in exchange for 48 life sentences without the possibility of parole. He also led the police to four additional bodies that had not been discovered up to that point. This tactic would spare the State the huge expense of the trial, and Ridgway the death sentence.

Over the strident objections of victim’s families, who felt he deserved nothing less than the death penalty, this plea was entered on 5th November 2003. In his written statement of guilt, Ridgway notes that: “I killed so many women that I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

There remains intense speculation that Ridgway’s attacks may have begun as early as the 1970s, and continued up until his arrest in 2001, so despite admitting to 48 murders, it is likely that the real death toll might be much higher.

He was held in King County Jail until 8th January 2004, when he was moved to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, where he will likely remain as a close-custody inmate, away from the general prison population, for the rest of his natural life.
Gary Ridgway ( The Green River Killer) biography

Gary Ridgway ( The Green River Killer) biography

Gary Ridgway ( The Green River Killer) biography