Gary Ridgway

Gary Ridgway
Mugshot of Gary Ridgway from his arrest in 2001.
Background information
Birth name:	Gary Leon Ridgway
Alias(es):	Green River Killer
Born:	February 18, 1949 (1949-02-18) (age 60) Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Penalty:	Life imprisonment
Killings
Number of victims:	Convicted of 48, confessed to 71, presumed to be 150
Span of killings:	1982–1998
Country:	United States
State(s):	Washington
Date apprehended:	November 30, 2001

Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949), known as the Green River Killer, is an American serial killer. Ridgway murdered numerous women in Washington during the 1980s and 1990s. He strangled them with rope, fishing line and anything else he could find. He also engaged in forms of torture, rape, and necrophilia.

On November 30, 2001, as he was leaving a Renton, Washington factory where he worked, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence.^[1] In November of 2003 he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder, although he says he actually killed 90 women or more, almost all prostitutes. The murders occurred in the early 1980s. As part of a plea bargain, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

Early life

Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to Mary Rita Steinman and Thomas Newton Ridgway. He has two brothers – George Leon and Thomas Edward. He was raised in the McMicken Heights neighborhood of SeaTac, Washington. His mother was a violent and domineering woman, and was especially controlling towards Ridgway. She dominated the household, and discouraged her sons from forming relationships with others. Relatives remember that she was never content with him and was constantly yelling at her husband. At the age of 13, Gary Ridgway was still a bed-wetter and also developed sexual feelings toward his mother, complicating the rage he felt toward her. This unsavory relationship would also have an impact on Ridgway's development.

As a child, Ridgway was tested with an I.Q. of 82, signifying low intelligence, and his academic performance in school was so poor that at one point in high school he had to repeat a single school year twice in order to attain grades decent enough to pass. His classmates at Tyee High School described him as congenial but largely forgettable. His teenage years were troubled: Ridgway was 16 when he stabbed his first victim. The young 6-year-old boy, who was lured into the woods, survived the attack. According to the victim and Ridgway himself, Ridgway walked away laughing and saying, "I always wondered what it would be like to kill someone." He also engaged in other troubling activities including arson and torturing animals.

After graduating from Tyee High School in 1969, Ridgway enlisted in the U.S. Navy and soon after married his first wife, Claudia Kraig. While stationed in the Philippines, he frequented prostitutes and contracted gonorrhea. After returning home, he discovered Claudia had an affair with another man and the two divorced. A little more than a year after the divorce, he married his second wife, Martha Winslow. After an honorable discharge from the Navy, he got a job at Kenworth. In 1975, he and Winslow had a son named Matthew. Ridgway was not fond of having a child and their marriage began to strain when he began sexually abusing her. Martha eventually left him and got a divorce.

The murders

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Green River Killer is believed to have murdered 48 (or more) women near the cities of Seattle and Tacoma in Washington State. Most of the murders took place during a two-and-a-half-year period in the early 1980s. Most of the victims were either prostitutes or teenage runaways picked up along Pacific Highway South (State Route 99) and strangled. Most of their bodies were dumped in and around the Green River in Washington, except for two victims found in the Portland, Oregon area. The bodies were often left in clusters, sometimes posed, usually nude. As the bodies were often not discovered until skeletonized, four victims are still unidentified. Ridgway would occasionally contaminate the dump sites with gum, cigarettes, and written materials that belonged to others to confuse the police.

Ridgway often carried his son's photo in his wallet to show to victims to put them at ease. He also carried some of his son's toys in his pickup truck for the same reason. He took some victims to his house and often showed them his son's room to demonstrate they had nothing to fear.

In the early 1980s, the King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force to investigate the murders. The most notable members of the task force were Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert, who periodically interviewed incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy from 1984; their interviews with Bundy were of little help in the Green River investigations, but elicited confessions from Bundy on unsolved cases. While being interviewed in the Florida State Penitentiary regarding his thoughts on how to catch the Green River Killer, Bundy stated that he would “try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie that’s out there in a can which has never been broadcast or shown in the Pacific Northwest…then for a period of a couple of weeks I would photograph everybody that came in and out of those theaters.” Keppel, 2005, p. 229. Also contributing was John E. Douglas, who nearly died as he worked the case when his stressed and overworked body was unable to fight off viral encephalitis. He has since written much on the subject of the Green River Killer.

Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and 2001 for charges related to prostitution. He became a suspect in 1983 for the Green River killings. In 1984 Ridgway took and passed a polygraph test, and on April 7, 1987, police took hair and saliva samples. These were later subjected to a DNA analysis, providing the evidence for his arrest warrant.

On November 30, 2001, Ridgway was at Kenworth when police arrived to arrest him. Ridgway was arrested on suspicion of murder for four deaths, nearly 20 years after first being identified as a potential suspect. 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 forensics laboratories detected microscopic paint particles similar to those used at Ridgway's place of work at Kenworth.

Friends and family, questioned about Ridgway following his arrest, described him as friendly but strange. He was obsessed with pornography and had dysfunctional relationships with women, his first two marriages being riddled with infidelities by both partners. Both a prostitute and his second wife testified that, in 1991, he had placed them in choke-holds.

Plea bargain, confessions, sentencing

Early in August 2003, Seattle television news reported that Ridgway had been moved from a maximum security cell at King County Jail to an undisclosed location. Other news reports stated that his lawyers, led by Brian Hochstetter, 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.

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 all of his victims had been killed inside King County, Washington, and that he had transported and dumped the remains of the two women near Portland to confuse the police.

Public opinion remains divided on whether a confessed murderer of 48 people should be spared execution in a state that has the death penalty and imposes it on people who have killed far fewer victims. 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."^{[citation needed]} 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 ..."^[2]

On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole and one life sentence, 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.

Ridgway led prosecutors to three bodies in 2003. On August 16 of that year, remains of a 16-year-old female 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. 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 Tracy Winston, who was 19 when she disappeared from Northgate Mall on September 12, 1983, was found by a man hiking in a wooded area near Highway 18 near Issaquah, southeast of Seattle.

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, plus 6 more murders.^[3] On February 9, 2004, county prosecutors began to release the videotape records of Ridgway's confessions. In one taped interview, he told investigators initially that he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women, but in another taped interview with Reichert on December 31, 2003, Ridgway claimed to have murdered 71 victims and confessed to have had sex with them prior to killing them, a detail which he did not reveal until after his sentencing.^[4] He also confessed that he had sex with his victims' bodies after he murdered them, but claimed he began burying the later victims so that he would resist the urge to revisit them.^[5]

Ridgway talked to and tried to make his victims comfortable before he committed the murders. In his own words, "I would talk to her... and get her mind off of the, sex, anything she was nervous about. And think, you know, she thinks, 'Oh, this guy cares,' and which I, I didn't. I just want to, uh, get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her."^{[citation needed]}

Later in a statement Ridgway said that murdering young women was his "career".^[6]

Ridgway is incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington.

In 2008, the Lifetime Network aired The Capture of the Green River Killer, a TV movie loosely based on his crimes. John Pielmeier portrayed Ridgway.

Victims

Ridgway has also been considered a suspect in the following disappearances, although no bodies have been recovered and no charges have been filed:

• There is very strong evidence to suggest that Keli Kay McGinness was murdered by Gary Ridgway. Shortly before her disappearance, McGinness was questioned by a Port of Seattle police officer while "dating" Ridgway near the Sea-Tac Strip. Furthermore, during the summer of 2003, Ridgway led authorities to the bodies of several of his victims. One of those bodies (which later turned out to be April Buttram) was initially identified by Ridgway as being that of Keli Kay McGinness. According to Ridgway, he often confused McGinness with Buttram because their physiques were similar. (Prothero, M. and Smith, C. Defending Gary: Unraveling the Mind of the Green River Killer. Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass, 2006. Page 376).

• While he has never been charged with her murder, Gary Ridgway did confess to killing Kase Ann Lee. During police interrogations in 2003, Ridgway stated that he strangled Lee in 1982 and left her body near a drive-in theatre off the Sea-Tac Strip. As of October 2008, law enforcement officials have been unable to locate Lee's remains at the dump site Ridgway indicated. (Guillen, T. Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2007. Page 145).

Notes

1. ^ Mary Bridget Meehan was over eight months pregnant at the time of her murder. Although often overlooked by the media, her unborn infant could be considered another victim of Ridgway (Keppel, 2004. p 170–1).

References

• Keppel, Robert. The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. 2004, paperback. 624 pages, ISBN 0743463951. Updated after the arrest and confession of Gary Ridgway.
• Rule, Ann. Green River, Running Red. Pocket, 2005, paperback. 704 pages, ISBN 0743460502.

External links

• A Profile of Gary Leon Ridgway
• Seattle Times documentation of the Green River killings
• Prosecutor's Summary of the Evidence (PDF)
• Statement on the Ridgway Plea by King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng
• A copy of Ridgway's infamous letter to the press (PDF)
• Crime Library article on Green River Killer
• Ridgway Reveals Gruesome Details in Chilling Confession (video)
• Capture of The Green River Killer Mini-Series