Gary Ridgway

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of Mary and Thomas Ridgway's three sons. His home life was somewhat troubled; relatives have described his mother as domineering and have said that, while young, he witnessed more than one violent argument between his parents. His father was a bus driver who would often complain about the presence of sex workers.[5]

Ridgway had a bed-wetting problem until he was 13,[6] and his mother would wash his genitals after every episode.[7] He would later tell defense psychologists that, as an adolescent, he had conflicting feelings of anger and sexual attraction toward his mother, and fantasized about killing her.[6][7]

Ridgway is dyslexic, and was held back a year in high school.[5] When he was 16, he stabbed a six-year-old boy who survived the attack. Ridgway had led the boy into the woods and then stabbed him through the ribs into his liver.[8]

Ridgway's IQ was recorded as being in the "low eighties".[7]

Ridgway graduated from Tyee High School in 1969 and married his 19-year-old high school girlfriend, Claudia Kraig. He joined the United States Navy[8] and was sent to Vietnam, where he served on board a supply ship[9] and saw combat.[5] During his time in the military, Ridgway had frequent sexual intercourse with sex workers and contracted gonorrhea; although angered by this, he continued this activity without protection. The marriage ended within a year.[8]

When questioned about Ridgway after his arrest, friends and family described him as friendly but strange. His first two marriages resulted in divorce because of infidelities by both partners. His second wife, Marcia Winslow, claimed that he had placed her in a chokehold.[5] 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.[8] Ridgway would also frequently cry after sermons or reading the Bible.[5] Despite his beliefs, Ridgway continued to solicit the services of sex workers and wanted his wife to participate in sex in public and inappropriate places, sometimes even in areas where his victims' bodies were later discovered.[8]

According to women in his life, Ridgway had an insatiable sexual appetite. His three ex-wives and several ex-girlfriends reported that he demanded sex from them several times a day.[10] Often, he would want to have sex in a public area or in the woods.[8] Ridgway himself admitted to having a fixation with sex workers,[11] with whom he had a love/hate relationship. He frequently complained about their presence in his neighborhood, but he also took advantage of their services regularly. In a statement read at his plea hearing, Gary Ridgway said he hated prostitutes and didn't want to pay them for sex.[12] Some have speculated that Ridgway was torn between his lusts and his staunch religious beliefs.[5]

With his second wife Marcia, Ridgway had a son, Matthew (b. 1975).[1]

Ridgway after a 1982 booking

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ridgway is believed to have murdered at least 71 teenage girls and women near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. In court statements, Ridgway later reported that he had killed so many that he lost count. A majority of the murders occurred between 1982 and 1984. The victims were believed to be either sex workers or runaways, whom he picked up along Pacific Highway South.[13] Ridgway sometimes showed the women a picture of his son, to trick them into trusting him. They would engage in sexual activity, and after minutes of intercourse from behind, Ridgway would wrap his forearm around the front of their necks and use the other arm to pull back as tightly as he could, strangling them. He killed most victims in his home, his truck, or a secluded area.[4] Most of their bodies were dumped in wooded areas around the Green River, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, and other "dump sites" within South King County.[13]

There were also two confirmed and another two suspected victims found in the Portland, Oregon, area. The bodies were often left in clusters, sometimes posed, usually nude. He would sometimes return to the victims' bodies and have sexual intercourse with them. Ridgway later explained that he did not find necrophilia more sexually satisfying, but having sex with the deceased reduced his need to obtain a living victim and thus limited his exposure to being caught.[7] Because most of the bodies were not discovered until only the skeletons remained, two victims are still unidentified. Ridgway occasionally contaminated the dump sites with gum, cigarettes, and written materials belonging to others, and he even transported a few victims' remains across state lines into Oregon to confuse the police.[13]

In the early 1980s, the King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force to investigate the murders. Task force members included Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert, who periodically interviewed incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy in 1984. Bundy offered his opinions on the psychology, motivations, and behavior of the killer. He suggested that the killer was revisiting the dump sites to have sex with his victims, which turned out to be true, and if police found a fresh grave, they should stake it out and wait for him to come back.[14] Also contributing to the investigation was FBI Special Agent John E. Douglas, who developed a profile of the suspect.[15]

Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and 2001 on charges related to prostitution.[16] He became a suspect in the Green River killings in 1983.[17] In 1984, Ridgway passed a polygraph test.[7] On April 7, 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway.[18]

Around 1985, Ridgway began dating Judith Mawson, who became his third wife in 1988. Mawson claimed in a 2010 television interview that when she moved into his house while they were dating, there was no carpet. Detectives later told her he had probably wrapped a body in the carpet.[19] In the same interview, she described how he would leave for work early in the morning some days, ostensibly for the overtime pay. Mawson speculated that he must have committed some of the murders while supposedly working these early morning shifts. She claimed that she had not suspected Ridgway's crimes before she was contacted by authorities in 1987, and had not even heard of the Green River Killer before that time because she did not watch the news.[19]

Author Pennie Morehead interviewed Ridgway in prison, and he said while he was in the relationship with Mawson, his kill rate went down and that he truly loved her.[19] Of his 49 known victims, only three were killed after he married Mawson. Mawson told a local television reporter, "I feel I have saved lives ... by being his wife and making him happy."[12]

The samples collected in 1987 were later subjected to DNA profiling, providing the evidence for his arrest warrant.[20] On November 30, 2001, Ridgway was at the Kenworth truck factory, where he worked as a spray painter, when police arrived to arrest him. Ridgway was arrested on suspicion of murdering four women nearly 20 years earlier after first being identified as a potential suspect, when DNA evidence conclusively linked semen left in the victims to the saliva swab taken by the police. The four victims named in the original indictment were Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Three more victims—Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Debra Estes—were added to the indictment after a forensic scientist identified microscopic spray paint spheres as a specific brand and composition of paint used at the Kenworth factory during the specific time frame when these victims were killed.[19]

Early in August 2003, Seattle television news reported that Ridgway had been moved from a maximum security cell at King County Jail to an Airway Heights Minimum-Medium Security Level Tank. Other news reports stated that his lawyers, led by Anthony Savage, were closing a plea bargain that would spare him the death penalty in return for his confession to a number of the Green River murders.[21]

On November 5, 2003, Ridgway entered a guilty plea to 48 charges of aggravated first degree murder as part of a plea bargain, agreed to in June, that would spare him execution in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of his victims and providing other details. In his statement accompanying his guilty plea, Ridgway explained that he had killed all of his victims inside King County, Washington, and that he had transported and dumped the remains of the two women near Portland to confuse the police.[13]

Deputy prosecutor Jeffrey Baird noted in court that the deal contained "the names of 41 victims who would not be the subject of State v. Ridgway if it were not for the plea agreement." King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng explained his decision to make the deal:

We could have gone forward with seven counts, but that is all we could have ever hoped to solve. At the end of that trial, whatever the outcome, there would have been lingering doubts about the rest of these crimes. This agreement was the avenue to the truth. And in the end, the search for the truth is still why we have a criminal justice system ... Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy. He does not deserve to live. The mercy provided by today's resolution is directed not at Ridgway, but toward the families who have suffered so much ...[22]

On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard 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.[23]

Ridgway led prosecutors to three bodies in 2003. On August 16 of that year, the remains of a 16-year-old girl found near Enumclaw, Washington, 40 feet from State Route 410, were pronounced as belonging to Pammy Annette Avent, who had been believed to be a victim of the Green River Killer. The remains of Marie Malvar and April Buttram were found in September 2003.

On November 23, 2005, the Associated Press reported that a weekend hiker found the skull of one of the 48 women Ridgway admitted murdering in his 2003 plea bargain with King County prosecutors. The skull of another victim, Tracy Winston, who was 19 when she disappeared from Northgate Mall on September 12, 1983, was found on November 20, 2005, by a man hiking in a wooded area near Highway 18 near Issaquah, southeast of Seattle, this was the find which led to Ridgway's 49th life sentence.[24]

Ridgway confessed to more confirmed murders than any other American serial killer. Over a period of five months of police and prosecutor interviews, he confessed to 48 murders - 42 of which were on the police's list of probable Green River Killer victims.[25][26] On February 9, 2004, county prosecutors began to release the videotaped records of Ridgway's confessions. In one taped interview, he initially told investigators that he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women.[27] In another taped interview with Reichert on December 31, 2003, Ridgway claimed to have murdered 71 victims and confessed to having had sex with them before killing them, a detail which he did not reveal until after his sentencing.[27]

In his confession, he acknowledged that he targeted prostitutes because they were "easy to pick up" and that he "hated most of them."[28] He confessed that he had sex with his victims' bodies after he murdered them, but claimed he began burying the later victims so that he could resist the urge to commit necrophilia.[29]

Ridgway later said that murdering young women was his "career."[7]

Ridgway was placed in solitary confinement at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in January 2004.[30] On May 14, 2015, he was transferred to the USP Florence High, a high-security federal prison east of Cañon City, Colorado. In September 2015, after a public outcry and discussions with Governor Jay Inslee, Corrections Secretary Bernie Warner announced that Ridgway would be transferred back to Washington to be "easily accessible" for open murder investigations.[31] Ridgway was returned by chartered plane to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla from USP Florence High, on October 24, 2015.[32]

Before Ridgway's confession, authorities had attributed 49 murders to the Green River Killer.[33] Ridgway confessed to murdering at least 71 victims.[27] Ridgway's victims were not of any specific race or ethnicity; rather, they were all financially poor, and except for three of them, were all younger women and girls between the ages of 14 and 26 whom he found in vulnerable circumstances, often working as prostitutes or having run away from home.

Confirmed Killings

At the time of Ridgway's December 18, 2003, sentencing, authorities had been able to find at least 48 sets of remains, including victims not originally attributed to the Green River Killer. Ridgway was sentenced for the deaths of each of these 48 victims,[34] with a plea agreement that he would "plead guilty to any and all future cases (in King County) where his confession could be corroborated by reliable evidence."[35]

#	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	Gail Lynn Mathews	23	April 10, 1983	September 18, 1983
21	Andrea Marion Childers	19	April 14, 1983	October 11, 1989
22	Sandra Kay Gabbert	17	April 17, 1983	April 1, 1984
23	Kimi-Kai Pitsor	16	April 17, 1983	December 15, 1983
24	Marie M. Malvar	18	April 30, 1983	September 26, 2003
25	Carol Ann Christensen	21	May 3, 1983	May 8, 1983
26	Martina Theresa Authorlee	18	May 22, 1983	November 14, 1984
27	Cheryl Lee Wims	18	May 23, 1983	March 22, 1984
28	Yvonne "Shelly" Antosh	19	May 31, 1983	October 15, 1983
29	Carrie Ann Rois	15	May 31 – June 13, 1983	March 10, 1985
30	Constance Elizabeth Naon	19	June 8, 1983	October 27, 1983
31	Kelly Marie Ware	22	July 18, 1983	October 29, 1983
32	Tina Marie Thompson	21	July 25, 1983	April 20, 1984
33	April Dawn Buttram	16	August 18, 1983	August 30, 2003
34	Debbie May Abernathy	26	September 5, 1983	March 31, 1984
35	Tracy Ann Winston	19	September 12, 1983	March 27, 1986
36	Maureen Sue Feeney	19	September 28, 1983	May 2, 1986
37	Mary Sue Bello	25	October 11, 1983	October 12, 1984
38	Pammy Annette Avent	15	October 26, 1983	August 16, 2003
39	Delise Louise Plager	22	October 30, 1983	February 14, 1984
40	Kimberly L. Nelson	21	November 1, 1983	June 14, 1986
41	Lisa Yates	19	December 23, 1983	March 13, 1984
42	Mary Exzetta West	16	February 6, 1984	September 8, 1985
43	Cindy Anne Smith	17	March 21, 1984	June 27, 1987
44	Patricia Michelle Barczak	19	October 17, 1986	February 3, 1993
45	Roberta Joseph Hayes	21	February 7, 1987	September 11, 1991
46	Marta Reeves	36	March 5, 1990	September 20, 1990
47	Patricia Yellowrobe	38	January 1998	August 6, 1998
48	Unidentified White Female (Jane Doe B-17)	14–18	December 1980 – January 1984	January 2, 1986
49	Unidentified Female (Jane Doe B-20)	13–24	1973–1993	August 21, 2003

Facial approximation of Jane Doe B-17, one of the two remaining unidentified victims of Ridgway, discovered in January 1986.

• Before Ridgway's confession, authorities had not attributed to the Green River Killer the deaths of victims Rule, Barczak, Hayes, Reeves, Yellowrobe, and Jane Doe B-20.[33]
• Ridgway's confession and directions led police search crews to find the bodies of Avent, Buttram, and Malvar in August and September 2003.
• On Tuesday, December 21, 2010, hikers near the West Valley Highway in Auburn, Washington, found a skull in the vicinity of where Marie Malvar's remains had been found in 2003. The skull was identified as belonging to Rebecca "Becky" Marrero, who was last seen leaving the Western Six Motel at South 168th Street and Pacific Highway South on December 3, 1982. The King County Prosecutor confirmed that Ridgway would be formally charged with her murder on February 11, 2011.[35] On February 18, 2011, he entered a guilty plea in the murder of Rebecca Marrero, adding a 49th life sentence to his existing 48. Ridgway confessed to murdering Marrero in his original plea bargain, but due to insufficient evidence, the charges could not be filed. Therefore, there is no change in his current incarceration status.[37]
• The remains of Tracy Winston were found, without a skull, in Kent's Cottonwood Grove Park in March 1986. Winston's skull was found in November 2005 near Tiger Mountain, miles away from the discovery site of the rest of her body. Police assume someone carried it to the location.[38]
• Sandra Denise Major was not identified until June 2012. A family member asked the King County Sheriff to investigate after seeing a TV movie about Ridgway. DNA confirmed Major's identity.[39][40]
• Wendy Stephens, previously known as "Jane Doe B-10", was previously unidentified.[41] Ridgway claimed that she was a white female in her early 20s and possibly had brown hair. Examination of the remains suggested that she was actually between 12 and 18, most likely around 15.[42] She was later confirmed to be 14 years old. Analysis of the victim's skeleton indicated she was probably left-handed, and she had at one point in her life had skull fracture to the left temple that later healed.[43]
• Jane Doe B-17, a still-unidentified victim, was discovered on January 2, 1986; remains that had been found in another area February 18, 1984, were later matched to this victim. In 2003, Ridgway claimed responsibility for her death.[44]
• Jane Doe B-20, also unidentified, was discovered in August 2003. Because the remains were partial, her face could not be reconstructed and her race could not be determined, but she was estimated to have been between 13 and 24 years old at the time of her death. She was murdered between 1970 and 1993, but she is believed to have been murdered during the first decade of Ridgway's murder spree.[45][46]

• List of serial killers in the United States

• Keppel, Robert. The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. 2004, paperback (rev. ed.). 624 pages, ISBN 0-7434-6395-1, OCLC 55110199. Updated after the arrest and confession of Gary Ridgway.
• Rule, Ann. Green River, Running Red. Pocket, 2005, paperback. 704 pages, ISBN 0-7434-6050-2.
• Guillen, Tomas. Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007, paperback. 186 pages.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Gary Ridgway.

External video
"This Interview Strategy Led a Serial Killer to Confess". Smithsonian Channel. May 13, 2013. Archived from the original on December 12, 2021.

• A copy of Ridgway's infamous letter to the press (PDF)
• Jane Doe B-10 at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Jane Doe B-16 at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
• Jane Doe B-20 at NamUs