Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer

On November 5, 2003, an emotional trial was held against Gary Ridgway, in which the families of his victims were able to express what they felt and thought about the feared murderer. Until then Gary had not shown an iota of regret, serious and expressionless it seemed that neither the contempt, nor the insults, nor the suffering, nor the hatred expressed by the families could break him. Until a father took the stand.

“Mr. Ridgway, there are people who hate you, I don’t. He has made it difficult to live up to my beliefs; but God says we must forgive. He is forgiven“, he concluded. He was the father of Linda Jane Rule, murdered on September 26, 1983 by Gary Ridgway. That act of indulgence caused Gary, a Christian man, to cry, who immediately asked for forgiveness for all the acts he had committed.

Childhood and adolescence

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949 in Salt Lake City (Utah). He grew up in an authoritarian environment. His father, who worked as a bus driver, had no qualms about showing his contempt for women in prostitution; while his mother physically and psychologically abused little Gary and his two brothers.

For several years, he suffered from urinary incontinence. She expressed her anger and frustration in his behavior towards animalstorturing them in different ways.

If things weren’t going well at home, neither was it at school. With an IQ of 82, he was a terrible student and also had a bad relationship with his classmates. As he confessed to investigators, At fourteen he tried to stab a six-year-old boy.and I just wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.

Over the years, managed to graduate from high school. He enlisted in the Navy and headed to Vietnam. He married his high school sweetheart, but it would be a marriage that would not last even a year and was followed by two more.

He became obsessed with religious faith and he devoted himself to attending the Pentecostal church, reading the Bible continually, even in the job he had gotten as a body shop worker, painting vehicles in a truck factory. But this did not prevent strong sexual urgessince he often went to meet prostitutes to satisfy his sexual appetite.

Up to this point we have met a Gary with a complicated childhood, developing an unstable and strange personality and behavior that perhaps would have needed supervision, as it tells us the possible existence of a behavioral disorder in childhood. Everything we have read brings us closer to the Gary he became, the Green River serial killer, a psychopath.

The Green River killer

His first murders were committed between 1982 and 1983, dates in which the police began to find bodies of women in different places near the Green River, south of Seattle. He kidnapped women, mainly prostitutes., on Route 99 in King County (Washington), to later sexually assault them and end their lives by strangling them. Later, she piled up the corpses and practiced necrophilia.

He was nicknamed by the authorities as The Green River Killer, as he disposed of the bodies by throwing them into the Green River. His modus operandi did not vary and his victim profile was always very similar: young women whose ages were between 15 and 35 years old and who worked as prostitutes in the surrounding area.

Despite being detained in several times as a suspectno evidence could be provided as the author of any of the murders.

The DNA test

But in 2001, the sheriff who had been in charge of the case since 1982, decided to use a new technology: the dna test. Dave Reichert was convinced that by reexamining the evidence collected years ago, he would be able to find the serial killer. He wasn’t wrong.

Twenty years after the first crime, a fluid sample was decisive to prove that Gary Ridgway, a man with a calm and peaceful appearance, was the serial killer who had put North American authorities in check for two decades. A man who had also been interrogated and even had his home searched.

He left investigators petrified when he confessed that he did not remember the number of women he had murdered for almost twenty years. It can be assured that he certainly committed 49 murders in the period from 1982 to 2003, but the estimates are much higher.

Trial and conviction

After his arrest, several members of his family and friends were interrogated. The description they gave of Gary was that of an easy-going, but strange person.

In court in 2003, Gary Ridgway confessed to all the murders. He was sentenced to 48 consecutive life sentences without the right to access parole. Thus, He managed to avoid the death penalty by confessing to all the crimes who were accused of him, and collaborate in the search for the rest of the victims.

He confessed that “the plan was to murder all the women I considered prostitutes, because I knew I could kill as many as I wanted without getting caught.” The truth is that many of his victims did not even practice that profession. He is currently serving his sentence in the Washington State Penitentiary..