The murders
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ridgway is believed to have
murdered at least 48 women near Seattle and Tacoma,
Washington. Most of the murders occurred between 1982 to
1984. Most victims were either prostitutes or runaways picked up
along Pacific Highway South (State
Route 99) whom he strangled. Most of their bodies were
dumped in wooded areas around the Green
River in Washington, 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. 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 several 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, Ridgeway began using ligatures to strangle his victims.
Most victims were killed in his home, his truck, or a secluded
area.[2]
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. These
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 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 forensics laboratories
detected microscopic paint particles similar to
those used at Ridgway's job at Kenworth.
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
Anthony Savage, 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.
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." 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
...[7]
”
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
six more murders.[8]
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 having had sex with them prior to killing them, a
detail which he did not reveal until after his
sentencing.[9]
In his confession, he acknowledged that he targeted prostitutes
because they were "easy to pick up and that he hated most of
them".[10]
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 could resist the urge to commit necrophilia.[11]
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'...
which I didn't. I just want to, uh, get her in the vehicle and
eventually kill her".[12]
Later in a statement Ridgway said that murdering young women was
his "career".[13]
Ridgway is incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in
Walla
Walla, Washington.
