On July 15th 1982, two boys riding their bicycles around Kent, Washington peered into the waters of the picturesque Green River. There, caught on a snag, was the body of a woman, naked but for a pair of jeans wrapped tightly around her neck. It was the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, the first official victim of a terrifying sexual predator who became known as the Green River Killer.
Gary Ridgway was born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The middle child in a family of three boys, he struggled at school and his childhood was marked by his domineering and violent mother. At the age of 13, he was still a bed-wetter. His father drove a city bus and regularly voiced his vehement disapproval of the prostitutes who worked along his route – an attitude his son Gary was also to adopt.
By 1980, Ridgway had already clocked up two failed marriages and had begun to frequent prostitutes along the very strip his father used to drive. He was arrested on soliciting charges on a number of occasions, and was once accused of having tried to choke a prostitute.
In July and August 1982, five females aged between 16 and 31 were found in or near the mouth of the Green River. Most were prostitutes; all had been raped and strangled to death. The police wasted no time in
inking the deaths and pronouncing them the work of a serial killer. By April 1983, the body count had risen to 20.
That summer, a dozen or so more women disappeared. Under mounting pressure, and inundated with tips, the police team solicited advice from all quarters, including serial killer Ted Bundy, who from his prison cell helped to form a profile of the Green River Killer.
It was all to no avail. Months, then years, passed, with more women meeting brutal deaths. Ridgway, one of numerous individuals of interest to the police, was twice given polygraph tests, in 1984 and 1986. He passed both. In 1987, his house was searched and a DNA sample taken. After police searched his locker at work, co-workers joked that he was ‘Green River Gary’. No one gave any serious thought to the notion that he might be the serial killer.
By 1986, the killing seemed to have stopped. Bodies were still being found, but the victims had died several years earlier. By 1991, the police unit investigating the case had been reduced to a single person. The case was all but dormant. But new DNA testing methods led to a breakthrough in 2001. A connection was made between semen found on the bodies of several of the victims, and the DNA taken from Ridgway in 1987. He was arrested and charged with the murders of Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, Opal Mills and Carol Ann Christensen, four of the women whose bodies had been found with his DNA.
On 5th November 2003, Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to the aggravated first-degree murder of 48 women. His plea was part of a bargain to spare him the death penalty. He also agreed to cooperate in locating the remains of his victims.
Ridgway claimed that all of his victims had been killed in and around the Seattle area, though he disposed of some of them elsewhere in an attempt to confuse police. He also admitted to occasionally contaminating the dump sites with gum, cigarettes and written materials that belonged to others, to throw investigators off the scent. He confessed to killing 44 women between 1982 and 1984, but claimed to have killed only four thereafter – in 1986, 1987, 1990 and 1998.
Ridgway was given 48 life sentences. Since sentencing, he has confessed to yet more murders – a total of 71, although some speculate the true figure is closer to 150. It was a price, he claimed, worth paying for the betterment of society:
‘I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight. I wanted to kill as many women that I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.’
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