A Look Inside Gary Leon Ridgway's Unimaginable Crime

Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, is an American serial killer and registered sex offender, responsible for the murders of numerous teenage girls and women in the state of Washington during the 1980s and 1990s. He was found guilty of 49 separate murders, he is considered the second most prolific serial killer in United States history.

Ridgway's victims were primarily women who were allegedly sex workers or in other vulnerable situations, including underage runaways. The media dubbed him the "Green River Killer" after the first five victims were discovered in the Green River before his true identity was revealed.

The Background of the Killer

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah. His childhood was marked by family troubles, with his mother being described as domineering, and he witnessed violent quarrels between his parents. His father, a bus driver, often spoke ill of sex workers.

Ridgway had a bed-wetting problem until he was 13 years old, he is also dyslexic, and suffered in high school.

At the age of 16, he stabbed a six-year-old boy, who fortunately survived the attack. Ridgway had lured the boy into the woods and then stabbed him through the ribs into his liver.

After graduating from Tyee High School in 1969, Ridgway married his 19-year-old high school girlfriend, Claudia Kraig, the marriage lasted for only one year.

He then joined the United States Navy and was deployed to Vietnam during his military service, Ridgway had frequent sexual encounters with sex workers, which led to him contracting gonorrhea. Despite being angered by the disease, he continued to engage in unprotected sex with sex workers.

Gary remarried twice, became religious, but still patronized sex workers.

With his insatiable sexual appetite, he needed the service of the sex workers, but he hated them, because they made him go against his religious beliefs.

The Unforgivable Crimes of the Green River Killer

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ridgway is suspected of having killed a minimum of 71 teenage girls and women in the vicinity of Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.

Ridgway confessed to more confirmed murders than any other American serial killer.

Ridgway would occasionally return to the locations where he had left his victims' bodies to have sexual intercourse with them. He claimed that this was not more sexually satisfying than having sex with living victims, but it reduced his need to seek out a new victim, limiting his risk of getting caught.

Due to the advanced state of decomposition of most of the bodies, two of the victims remain unidentified. To further confuse the authorities, Ridgway sometimes contaminated the dump sites with gum, cigarettes, and personal belongings of others. He even transported a few of the victims' remains across state lines into Oregon.

How The Green River Killer was Captured

Ridgway had been arrested twice, in 1982 and 2001, on charges related to prostitution. He had also been considered a suspect in the Green River killings since 1983. In 1984, Ridgway passed a polygraph test. On April 7, 1987, police obtained hair and saliva samples from him.

The hair and saliva samples obtained from Ridgway in 1987 were subjected to DNA profiling, which provided the evidence for his arrest warrant. On November 30, 2001, police arrived at the Kenworth truck factory where Ridgway worked as a spray painter to arrest him.

He was suspected of murdering four women almost two decades prior, but had only become a primary suspect after DNA evidence conclusively linked semen found on the victims to the saliva swab taken by the police.

On November 5, 2003, Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder. In exchange for his cooperation in disclosing the locations of his victims' remains and providing details of his crimes, he was spared the death penalty.

In his statement during the guilty plea, Ridgway admitted to murdering all of his victims in King County, Washington, and revealed that he had transported and dumped the remains of two of the women near Portland, Oregon, in an attempt to mislead the authorities.

Sentencing

On December 18, 2003, Gary Ridgway was sentenced by King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones to 48 life sentences without the possibility of parole, to be served consecutively.

Additionally, he was sentenced to 10 years for each of the 48 victims for tampering with evidence, adding a total of 480 years to his life sentence. After the discovery of his 49th victim, he was given another life sentence.

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