Case File: Gary Ridgway

Born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Gary Ridgway was a troubled youth and a poor student with dyslexia who was held back repeatedly. His parents were believed to be a primary cause of Ridgway’s dysfunction: His father Thomas worked for a time in a mortuary and regaled his three sons with tales of a coworker who allegedly engaged in necrophilia with cadavers.

His mother, too, contributed to Ridgway’s problems. A harsh, domineering woman who firmly believed in corporal punishment, Mary Ridgway would regularly humiliate her son for being a bedwetter and then stand him up in the shower as she washed his genitals after each bedwetting episode. Ridgway later confessed to having conflicting feelings about his mother that alternated between lust and murderous rage.

As a teenager, Ridgway once lured a 6-year-old boy into a wooded area and stabbed him through the ribs. The boy survived and later recalled that Ridgway laughed as he walked away from his stabbing victim.

Ridgway’s unhappy upbringing gave way to an equally troubled adulthood: His first marriage to a high school girlfriend lasted just one year. After joining the U.S. Navy in 1969, Ridgway deployed to Vietnam, where he frequently visited prostitutes, even after contracting gonorrhea.

After returning to the United States, Ridgway became a religious fanatic, crying during church sermons and reading the Bible out loud at the Kenworth Motor Truck plant in Renton, Wash., where he painted trucks for over 30 years. His second wife, Marcia Brown, complained that he was sexually compulsive, demanding sex several times a day, often in public places or isolated wooded areas; he also choked her during an argument on at least one occasion. The couple had a son, Matthew, before divorcing in 1981.

At that low point in his life, Ridgway turned to the prostitutes and runaways he encountered along Pacific Highway 99—aka the Sea-Tac Strip, or “SeaTacky”—a seedy stretch of roadway near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that was notorious for its drug dealers, massage parlors, cheap motels and topless bars.

On July 15, 1982, the body of 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield was found floating in the Green River by some teenagers playing nearby. She had been strangled to death with her own panties.

Within a few weeks, the bodies of four more young women were discovered in or near the Green River. All the victims were believed to be sex workers from the Sea-Tac Strip area; most had been sexually abused and all appeared to die by strangulation.

The investigation was hampered by the meticulous sense of craftsmanship Ridgway brought to his victims’ disposals: He would place cigarette butts and gum wrappers around his dump sites. Ridgway didn’t smoke or chew gum, he just wanted to confuse the investigators. If his victims had scratched him, Ridgway was careful to trim their fingernails to avoid leaving any trace of his skin or clothes behind.

When choosing his victims, he typically found women who were alone so no eyewitnesses could identify him to police. He preferred killing prostitutes, he later said, because they were less likely to be reported missing, and if they had money on them, he could turn a small profit off their deaths.

He also duped women into thinking he was a nice, harmless person by showing them a photo of his son. Ridgway wanted to convince his victims he was a “normal person,” he later told officials. “In my mind I’m saying, ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ I’m going to sweet-talk her so I can kill the bitch,” he once confessed.

By 1990, Ridgway is believed to have killed at least 48 women, all while maintaining a veneer of working-class respectability. His son Matthew remembers a doting father who played catch, took him camping and showed up for his son’s soccer games.

In 1982, the King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force to investigate the ever-increasing body count. The following year, Ridgway came to their attention after he was identified by his green pickup truck. Despite coming under investigation several times, there was never enough evidence to arrest him. In 1987, he provided a hair and saliva sample for DNA testing.

DNA testing was still in its infancy during the 1980s, but would soon become more sophisticated in the years to follow. The samples Ridgway provided in 1987 would eventually bring his murder spree to a halt.

"I look like an ordinary person," Ridgway later told investigators. "Here's a guy, he's not really muscle-bound. He's not, ah, look like a fighter. Just an ordinary john and that was their [the prostitutes'] downfall. My appearance was different from what I really was."

Frustrated police investigators even interviewed serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy, who had terrorized Seattle and other cities during the 1970s before his execution in 1989. Bundy theorized that the Green River Killer would return to his victims’ bodies to have sex with them, which turned out to be accurate.

Finally, in 2001, investigators took a second look at the DNA samples Ridgway had provided 14 years earlier and found matches to samples taken from three of the killer’s victims. He was arrested in November 2001 at the same Kenworth plant where he worked for most of his adult life.

After lengthy legal wrangling, Ridgway agreed to a plea bargain through which he would be spared the death penalty if he pleaded guilty to 48 murders. The plea bargain also required Ridgway to cooperate with officials who were trying to find and identify the remains of other missing or dead women.

Prosecutors stated, “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 and to the larger community.”

Ridgway was sentenced in 2003 to 48 lifetime sentences without the possibility of parole. After a 49th victim was found, another life sentence was added to his punishment.

In the years after his sentencing and incarceration, Ridgway provided some assistance to the ongoing investigations, but officials believe there were many more victims, and Ridgway’s post-sentencing confessions contained some inconsistencies: In 2004, he confessed to killing a total of 65 women, for example, but later said the real figure was 71 murders. Investigators believe the actual number of murders may be 80 or more.

Ridgway remains in prison at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, and the Green River homicides investigation continues. There are at least three remains of unidentified victims, and three identified women who are missing and possibly killed. 

Despite the efforts of the Green River Task Force, it took decades to stop Ridgway’s serial killings. The mood in the Seattle-Tacoma area had darkened with the growing public awareness of the murder spree, especially among the sex workers and other marginalized women who were Ridgway’s primary targets.

Concern about the welfare of vulnerable women led to the development of the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders, which protested what they saw as an inadequate police response. Police officials were also portrayed in news reports as bunglers who weren’t up to the challenges posed by a serial killer.

Since Ridgway’s 2001 arrest—and as recently as 2023—the remains of women have continued to be identified or discovered in the Seattle area, grim reminders of the Green River Killer’s murderous legacy.