Gary Leon Ridgway, is an American serial killer and sex offender. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing his total number of convictions to 49, making him the second most prolific serial killer in the United States history according to confirmed murders. The real number could be as high as 71. He killed many teenage girls and women in the U.S. state of Washington during the 1980s and 1990s.
Most of Ridgway’s victims were alleged to be sex workers and other women in vulnerable circumstances, including underage runaways. The press gave him his nickname after the first five victims were found in the Green River before his identity was known. He strangled his victims, usually by hand but sometimes using ropes or wires. After strangling them, he would dump their bodies in forested and overgrown areas in King County, often returning to the bodies to have sex with them.
He was arrested in November 30, 2001, as he was leaving the Kenworth truck factory where he was working in Renton, Washington. As part of a plea bargain he agreed to disclose the locations of still missing women, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Adult life
At age 18, while in high school, Ridgway joined the Navy. After graduation, he married his high school girlfriend, Claudia Barrows, and was sent to Vietnam, where he served on board a supply ship and saw combat. During his time in the military, Ridgway began spending a lot of time with prostitutes and contracted Gonorrhea for the second time. This angered him, but he continued to have unprotected sex with prostitutes. Meanwhile, his wife Claudia, alone and 19-years-old, began dating again, and the marriage quickly ended within a year.
Friends and family, questioned about Ridgway after his arrest, 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 choke hold. Ridgway had become fanatically religious during his second marriage, proselytizing door-to-door, reading the Bible aloud at work and at home, and insisting that Marcia follow the strict teachings of their church pastor. Ridgway would also frequently cry after sermons or reading the Bible; though Ridgway continued to solicit the services of prostitutes during this marriage and also wanted Marcia to participate in sex in public and inappropriate places, sometimes even in areas where his victims’ bodies had been discovered.
According to Time Magazine writer Terry McCarthy, Ridgway had an insatiable sexual appetite. His three ex-wives and several old girlfriends reported that Ridgway demanded sex from them several times a day. Often times, he would want to have sex in a public area or in the woods. Ridgeway himself admitted to having a fixation with prostitutes, 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. It’s possible that Ridgway was torn between his uncontrollable lusts and his staunch religious beliefs.
In 1975 his second wife gave birth to his son, Matthew.
Murders
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ridgway is believed to have murdered at least 71 women (according to Ridgway, in an interview with Sheriff Reichert 2001,) near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. His court statements later reported that he had killed so many, he lost count. A majority of the murders occurred between 1982 to 1984. The victims were believed to be either prostitutes or runaways picked up along Pacific Highway South (International Blvd. 99) whom he strangled. Most of their bodies were dumped in wooded areas around the Green River except for 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 also sometimes later would return to the victims’ bodies and have intercourse with them (an act of necrophilia). Because most of the bodies were not discovered until only the skeletons remained, four 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.
Ridgway began each murder by picking up a woman, usually a prostitute. He sometimes showed the woman a picture of his son, to help her trust him. After having sex with her, Ridgway strangled her from behind. He initially strangled them manually. However, many victims inflicted wounds and bruises on his arm while trying to defend themselves. Concerned these wounds and bruises would draw attention, Ridgway began using ligatures to strangle his victims. Most victims were killed in his home, his truck, or a secluded area.
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. Also, contributing was John E. Douglas, who has since written much on the subject of the Green River Killer.
Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and 2001, on charges related to prostitution. He became a suspect in 1983 in the Green River killings. In 1984, Ridgway took and passed a polygraph test, and on April 7, 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway.
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. 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 he was contacted by authorities in 1987, and in fact had not even heard of the Green River Killer before that time because she didn’t watch the news.
Author Pennie Morehead says that when she interviewed Ridgway in prison, he said his urge to kill was reduced while he was in a relationship with Mawson, causing him to commit fewer murders than he otherwise would have, and that he truly loved her. Mawson told a local television reporter, “I feel I have saved lives … by being his wife and making him happy.”
The samples collected in 1987 were later subjected to a DNA analysis, providing the evidence for his arrest warrant. 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 murder of four women nearly 20 years 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.
Where is he now
Ridgway is currently serving his sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington. He is in a high-security prison and is unlikely to be released. He is 73 years old and still alive as of 2023.