Serial killers. Every true-crime buff knows all about them, and they often debate who the worst
of the worst actually is. Ted Bundy’s trial was probably the most highly publicized in history,
and Jeffrey Dahmer’s twisted appetites were tabloid fodder for years. Neither of them,
however, reached the shocking number of murders that one serial killer reached in the Pacific
Northwest. He stalked Washington state for decades, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.
The media called him the Green River Killer. And he almost got away with everything.
It was the early 1980s in King County, Washington, and horror was about to come to the winding Green
River. This long river snakes from the rural areas of Northwest Washington to the bustling
city of Seattle, and forms the approach to the former logging area of Stampede Pass.
But for a group of children playing along the river on July 15th, 1982, it would be the end
of innocence. They discovered the body of Wendy Coffield, a sixteen-year-old from nearby Puyallup,
floating in the river. An investigation quickly began, but no leads were found to her killer.
Wendy was likely the first to die, but she would be far from the last.
It was just over a month later when four more bodies of young women would be found in the Green
River, and it was clear the Pacific Northwest had a serial killer on its hands. A massive task force
was formed, the biggest since the hunt for Ted Bundy in the previous decade. Many more bodies
would follow - all of them young women, many of them runaways and sex workers. But it would be
a long time before the police had the answers - despite them intersecting with the killer many
times in the decades that followed. Who was this serial killer striking fear in the whole region?
His name was Gary Ridgway, and he was one of the most effective and
dangerous killers the country had ever seen.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1949, Gary Ridgway seemed like a normal boy - but under
the surface there were early signs that he was disturbed. He was a middle child with a strict,
domineering mother. He struggled in school, battling with dyslexia, and was held back a
year in high school. Evidence later showed his IQ was only in the 80s. But there were darker signs.
His father was an angry man, a bus driver who frequently complained about sex workers along
his route. Ridgway had a problem with bedwetting, and his mother humiliated him after every episode.
Gary Ridgway’s journey to becoming a killer would begin early - when he was still a teenager.
Ridgway liked hurting things from an early day, starting with shooting birds with a BB gun. But
he had a taste for bigger prey, and one day when he was still in high school he approached a random
six-year-old boy with a knife - and stabbed him, deep enough to injure the boy’s liver. The boy,
who asked to remain anonymous, remembers asking Ridgway “Why did you kill me?”. He survived,
but spent several weeks in the hospital. Ridgway was never caught for the attack, and the victim
realized years later that he had almost become the first murder victim of the Green River Killer.
What made Ridgway so dangerous? He knew how to bide his time.
After his first foray into attempted murder, Ridgway seemed to be slipping back into normal
life. He graduated high school, married his high school girlfriend Claudia Kraig,
and joined the Navy. It was 1969, and he was soon sent to Vietnam. But while wartime was a formative
experience for many young men, for Ridgway it would lead him further down the path to becoming
a serial killer. Like many young soldiers, he had frequent sex with local sex workers,
contracting Gonorrhea. This enraged him - but not enough to stop doing it. And when he returned from
Vietnam, he discovered his wife had been having an affair, leading to the end of the marriage.
The combination of Ridgway’s resentment towards his mother
and his wartime experiences were about to collide.
He soon married again, a woman named Marcia Winslow, and had a son. But she noticed
disturbing signs of the monster he would become. Sometimes he was pious, obsessively reading the
bible aloud and preaching to their neighbors. Other times he would become inexplicably
violent - even putting Marcia in a chokehold at one point. He would get randomly emotional,
crying during sex. And if there was one thing he loved talking about, it was sex. He would demand
it frequently, sometimes in a public place. And he was obsessed with the local sex workers. He seemed
to hate them and want them out of his neighborhood - but he couldn’t seem to stop patronizing them.
His anger and obsession built - until it exploded in a cocktail of violence.
No one knows why Gary Ridgway decided to start killing, but when he did, he acted like he had
been planning it all his life. He stalked Seattle and Tacoma, primarily among Pacific Highway South
where young sex workers and teen runaways could easily be found.
He had a manipulative go-to move - a picture of his son that he always kept on him. He would
introduce himself to the woman he had decided to target, showing them a picture of his son to get
them to trust him and let down their defenses. He would then invite them into his truck.
It would be the last decision they ever made.
Sometimes Ridgway would drive them home. Sometimes he would drive them to the woods.
Sometimes he would decide to do the deed right there. But what came next was always the
same. He and his chosen victim would have sex, and midway through, he would make his move. He wrapped
his forearm around their neck and pulled as hard as he could, killing them from strangulation. He
would then drive to a dumping ground and hide their bodies. He started in the Green River,
but eventually started dumping the bodies in more wooded areas and near the local airport.
When asked how many young women he had killed over
the years by investigators later, he would simply answer “I lost count”.
Despite his low IQ, Ridgway was a highly competent killer. He knew exactly how to hide his kills,
spreading out the bodies and transporting some across state lines. He would sometimes
contaminate the bodies with pieces of evidence he had taken off other people, like gum, cigarettes,
and even written notes. He would sometimes pose the bodies naked before burying them,
and he remembered where every body was - because sometimes he liked to return to them
and dig them up so he could engage in Necrophilia.
It seemed like the perfect crime wave - but
not quite. The police were on to Gary Ridgway surprisingly early.
It was April 30th, 1983, and Ridgway had just taken his latest victim, Marie Malvar.
But Malvar didn’t vanish unnoticed. Ridgway’s pickup truck had been sighted by her boyfriend,
and the man chased down Ridgway, reporting him to the police. The police interrogated him,
and Ridgway denied any involvement in Malvar’s disappearance. They let him go,
but it wouldn’t be the last time he had contact with the Green River Task Force.
But the next time, he would come looking for them.
It was May 1984, and the toll of victims kept on rising, with forty-two bodies being
found in the area. The task force received a call - from Gary Ridgway,
claiming to have information. He was still on the radar of the officers after their last encounter,
and they made him pass a polygraph test before they would work with him. He passed,
denying any involvement in the killings. This would make experts later think he was
a sociopath who could lie so convincingly he wouldn’t be flagged by a lie detector.
The task force would look at Ridgway again - but he would keep on slipping away.
As the bodies kept showing up near Green River, the task force became desperate.
Experts Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert, both of whom had been involved in previous
hunts for serial killers, even interviewed Ted Bundy on death row for his insight into
the Green River Killer’s psychology. He identified many of Ridgway’s patterns and
told them to stake out one of the graves to see if Ridgway returned.
But Ridgway was good at biding his time.
While many serial killers escalate until they get caught, Green River had a pattern and he
stuck to it. His third wife, Judith Mawson, who he married in 1985, realized years later
that he had been pulling off killings right under her nose. When the carpet disappeared, she didn’t
give it a second thought - until investigators told her he had likely removed it to wrap a body.
His irregular working hours were a cover for him leaving to hunt his victims and dispose of their
bodies. She was contacted by authorities in 1987 as they renewed their interest in Ridgway and
took DNA samples from him - but she had never even heard of the Green River Killer. This was also the
period when Ridgway killed the fewest women, and Mawson claimed he had never been violent with her.
Was he truly in love and able to suppress his
darkest instincts? Or was he just waiting to strike again?
Gary Ridgway’s reckoning would have to wait more than a decade, when the DNA samples collected in
1987 were finally analyzed by a state-of-the-art DNA lab. This time, they turned up a match,
and the task force had finally cornered the Green River Killer. Ridgway was keeping a low profile,
working at a truck factory - and his co-workers must have been very confused when their workplace
turned into the biggest police raid the county had seen in a long time. They swept in and arrested
Ridgway, charging him with four of the murders - only the first they had been able to link him to.
It was going to be the trial of the century - or would it?
When a prolific serial killer is arrested, most would expect them to be held in the
most high-security prison possible. That wasn’t the case here, as a little over a
year into his pre-trial detention, Ridgway was moved to a medium security prison.
Soon, it was announced that he had reached a plea deal with prosecutors.
In exchange for the death penalty being taken off the table, Ridgway would plead guilty,
receive life in prison - and name every single one of his victims to give closure to the families.
The true scale of the Green River Killer’s crimes were about to be revealed.
In total, Gary Ridgway pled guilty to the murders of forty-eight women,
making him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. He was sentenced
to forty-eight consecutive life sentences, plus ten years for evidence tampering for every victim.
He won’t be getting out of prison ever again, unless he somehow discovers the fountain of
youth in his prison toilet. With the new evidence he gave them in prison interviews,
police were able to track down the bodies of many of his carefully hidden victims around
Washington and near Portland, Oregon - giving closure to grieving families decades later.
So is Gary Ridgway the worst serial killer in American history? That depends on who you ask.
Ridgway’s confirmed 48 killings puts him at the top tier, and he’s confessed to killing
seventy-one women in total - although many of the others are unconfirmed. He continues
to cooperate with investigators as they look into missing-person cases from the time period he may
be linked to. But he’s not the only serial killer who claims to have a horrifyingly high death toll.
Samuel Little, another prolific serial killer doing life in prison in California,
traveled the country weaving a career of mayhem from 1970 to 2012.
Constantly in and out of prison for crimes ranging from drunk driving to armed robbery,
he was convicted of only four murders in California and Texas.
The FBI thinks differently.
The federal investigators have linked little to fifty murders around the country,
which would eclipse Ridgway’s mark - if proven accurate. But many of those killings
happened decades ago and don’t match a specific serial killer’s MO. Little also targeted women,
but didn’t have as uniform a technique as Ridgway. And if you ask Little, he’ll tell
you a different story - he boasts of killing over ninety people, but many can’t be confirmed.
So who is the worst serial killer in American history? Both men are doing life in prison,
both claim many more killings than they’ve been convicted of, both are in their senior years,
and the odds are the truth will go with both men to their graves. But if you ask
the people around the Green River in Washington,
they’ll tell you that Gary Ridgway’s reign of terror is something they’ll never forget.
Want to know more about one of the most dangerous serial killers in American history?
Check out “America’s Most Evil Serial Killer - Ted Bundy”. And for one that was never caught,
why not watch “The Most Infamous Serial Killer - Why Was He Never Found?”.