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Part 1: To Catch a Killer 1984 began with a reshuffling of the Green River Task Force. Captain Frank Adamson assumed command and implemented some drastic changes.
Firstly, he moved the task force headquarters to the Burien County Precinct, which was closer to the Strip and the SeaTac Airport. Next, Adamson changed how the task force would classify and rule out suspects. Instead of focusing on a suspect's possible guilt, Adamson wanted them to focus on their possible innocence. Since innocence was easier to prove, it would help eliminate suspects and narrow the list.
From there, any potentials were lumped into three categories. Those with close ties to the victims and who fit the FBI profile were put in Group A. Everyone else was put in Groups B or C, depending on how close they were with the victims. Ideally, B and C groups were easy to rule out, putting the focus on Group A. But for all their efforts, the bodies kept piling up. It's believed Ridgway only kidnapped and killed two women in 1984,
16-year-old Mary West and 17-year-old Cindy Smith. But it was all the disappearances from 1983 that police were finally stumbling upon.
The first was on Valentine's Day when they discovered the skeletal remains of Denise Plager, about 40 miles outside the city off I-90. It felt like the task force was always several steps behind the killer. As more bodies popped up in 1984, they learned their suspect was using several dumping grounds. He moved away from the Green River and focused on areas around SeaTac Airport and Star Lake.
By 1984, he was dumping bodies near the Mountain View Cemetery and North Bend, a city east of Seattle. Based on these dumping sites, the task determined that their killer must live or work close to these areas. When plotted on a map, the sites formed a triangular shape. There was a good chance their killer lived somewhere in that triangle.
It didn't help public opinion that random people were the ones finding these bodies. From kids on bikes and people walking their dogs to soldiers on training runs and people collecting mushrooms in the woods. When the cops arrived to investigate one body, they'd often find one or two more nearby. According to Reichert, "Every time you found a body, it was like being hit on the head with a baseball bat." To catch a killer, sometimes you need to think like a killer.
Reichert dove into several famous serial killers who had come before. People like John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown of Chicago, and Gerald Stana from Daytona, Florida, who murdered 41 young women. Reichert called every police department in the country that had dealt with serial killers, but maybe he should have looked internally. His research led him to one of Washington's most famous murderers, Ted Bundy, who was currently sitting on death row in Florida.
Reichert flew down to the Sunshine State in November of '84 to see if Bundy could offer any inside information. Reichert, Bundy, and Task Force Detective Robert Keppel met for two days in Florida, where Bundy spent most of the time playing his own mind games. He'd refer to himself in the third person when talking about his crimes, which threw Reichert and Keppel for a loop at first. But just when they thought it was pointless, Bundy gave the detective some helpful insight.
He said a killer doesn't wake up in the morning and feel compelled to kill. He'll do it when he feels safe, like he's in control. Bundy felt like the cops were giving the Green River Killer too much information about the investigation, which led to the oddly posed bodies and taunting. Bundy said, "There is an amount of competition between this individual and the police."
Bundy followed his own investigation very closely as reporters aired details on TV. It's how he avoided capture for so long. Part 2: Settling Down Judith Mawson was young and single when she met Gary Ridgway at a Seattle bar in 1985. To her, he seemed like the perfect man. He was handsome, polite, had a stable job, and treated her like a queen.
They were at a meetup called Parents Without Partners, a group Gary used to meet and date several women from before Judith. Gary only killed four more women between meeting Judith and his eventual arrest in 2001. Something about Judith calmed him down. In an interview, Judith said, "I feel I've saved lives," the interviewer asked. "By being his wife?" Judith responded, "By being his wife and making him happy."
She and Ridgway got married in 1988. While the newlywed Ridgways lived a happily married life, the Green River Task Force became the laughing stock of Seattle. Gary might've stopped killing, but the bodies kept coming. Newspapers ran cartoons mocking the task force. One depicted the cops surrounding a boy in a tree house. A sign on the door read, "No girls allowed." And a speech bubble above the cops read, "Freeze, dog breath! Green River Task Force!"
Morale was at an all-time low and the suspect pool was running dry. There was still one name that had been on the list for a while that police never fully cleared, Gary Ridgway. Remember, Gary was arrested in '82 for soliciting a John Patrol. In 1983, Bobby Woods and Marie Malvar's dad tracked Ridgway's truck back to his house.
In February of '84, a prostitute named Dawn White reported Ridgway after feeling threatened by how he approached her for sex. Police eventually interviewed him in connection with the Green River killings. They even administered a polygraph test, which Ridgway passed with flying colors. Finally, another woman named Rebecca Guay came forward with a chilling story from 1982. She claimed Ridgway stripped her half naked and strangled her in the woods.
He admitted to being with Gway that night, but denied choking her, instead claiming she bit him. But Gway's story was enough for police to dig deeper into Ridgeway's past. They found his arrest record from 1982 and contacted his ex-wives and girlfriends. They all told similar stories, how Gary was addicted to sex and enjoyed doing it outside. He'd take these love interests to many of the same spots he'd eventually use as dump sites.
While all the evidence was circumstantial, it was enough to convince a judge. In April of 1987, police obtained a search warrant to go through Ridgeway's house, hoping to find something, anything, to tie him to the murders. They came up empty-handed, only leaving with hair and saliva samples they would sit on for 14 more years. The Green River Task Force broke down in the late '80s.
Reichert was promoted to sergeant and reassigned to other cases. To him, it was the lowest point of his career. A single detective, Tom Jensen, was assigned to babysit the Green River case. The task force was dead and Gary Ridgway remained free. Part three, "The Long Road's End." The '90s were kind to Gary Ridgway. He and Judith were happily married and the Green River Task Force was a distant memory.
After 49 victims, nine years, and $15 million, Reichert's disbanded team let the Green River Killer slip through their fingers. It became the most famous unsolved murder case in the country and remained that way until 2001. In that time, Ridgway killed two more women, 36-year-old Marta Reeves and 38-year-old Patricia Yellow Robe. Life wasn't kind to Marta in the weeks before her disappearance.
According to the Seattle Times, she'd recently separated from her husband and left her four daughters and was selling herself on the street to pay for drugs. She was arrested twice in February of 1990 for prostitution, but avoided a 90-day prison sentence if she promised to stay away from the strip. The last time anybody heard from her was on March 5th, 1990.
Her body turned up in one of Gary's favorite dump sites, close to where three other victims were found. But because Marta disappeared in 1990 and the Green River File was collecting dust at headquarters, she wasn't considered among the official list of victims. The same was true for Patricia Yellow Robe, who disappeared in January 1998.
On August 6th, a local businessman arrived to open his doors when he saw a body lying in a gravel parking lot on the other side of his fence. Patricia was a member of the Chippewa Cree Nation and the eldest of 10 children. Like many of Ridgeway's other victims, Patricia's lifelong struggle with drugs and alcohol led her down all the wrong paths. Her autopsy states that she died of a drug overdose. Since she passed away in 1998,
They didn't consider her among the Green River victims. DNA evidence had come a long way by the late 90s. If you asked Gary, he probably didn't think those saliva swabs he gave back in '87 would come back to bite him. Thankfully, they did. Sergeant Reichert was Sheriff Reichert by 2001, when he decided to brush the dust off the Green River file. The cold case had eaten away at him all these years. He couldn't live with nearly 50 murders going unsolved.
In April, he gathered 30 detectives with prior experience on the case to re-examine all the evidence. The best DNA test at the time was called Short Tandem Repeat Testing or STR. It had been around since 1997 and was famous for its unprecedented accuracy, according to Time Magazine.
STR measures 13 small repeating sections of a DNA sample, essentially making a unique barcode representing that person's genome. We still use STR today as the primary workhorse in forensic DNA profiling. The Green River Task Force 2.0 had four crucial DNA samples: semen from three different victims and Ridgway's saliva. Jensen sent the samples to the crime lab, hoping they could finally put this case to bed.
On September 4th, he received a call saying they'd found a match. Six days later, Jensen walked into Reichert's office to show him the matching DNA charts. He held an envelope in his hand, an envelope containing the name of their new primary suspect. Reichert looked up at Jensen and said, it's Ridgeway, isn't it?
On November 30th, 2001, police swarmed and arrested Ridgeway at a truck factory in Kenworth, where he worked as a spray painter. They charged him with the murders of Marsha Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hines, and Carol Ann Christensen, since they were the only victims linked to him through DNA and circumstantial evidence.
Forensic scientists added two more victims, Wendy Caulfield and Deborah Estes, after discovering microscopic spray paint particles consistent with the brand used at the truck factory where Ridgway worked at the time of the murders. Given the evidence, police said it was obvious that whoever killed these women also killed Deborah Bonner, whose body was found in the Green River shortly after Wendy's and a few days before Marsha, Opal, and Cynthia's.
bringing the total murder charges to seven. Part four, Gary Ridgway's grand confession. Facing the death penalty, Ridgway entered a plea deal in 2003. The courts agreed to spare his life if he confessed to the other Green River killings.
Between June and September of 2003, Ridgeway sat down with different task force members. He claimed to have killed over 60 women in King County and led police to the various dump sites. When choosing his victims, Ridgeway claims he spent hours before and after work driving around areas known for prostitution.
Sometimes, he'd open the hood of his truck to make it look like he was working on his car. In reality, he was keeping an eye on traffic in and out of the area. When asked why he only killed sex workers, Ridgway said, "Prostitutes were the easiest. I went from having sex with them to just plain killing them." But there was some method to his madness. Ridgway rightfully assumed that prostitutes would be harder to track.
He also knew it would take a while for anyone to file a missing person report, making it hard to pinpoint when someone was last seen. Of all the women he picked up, Ridgway said at least 50 asked if he was the killer. He gave them the same answer every time. "Do I look like the Green River Killer?" The girls always assumed the killer was some six foot three inch, 200 pound brute. To them, Gary was an average looking guy
Some thought he looked more like an undercover cop and refused to get in his truck. Ridgeway told investigators that he killed most of the women in his home. He'd lure them back for sex and use his son's room to create a sense of safety. He painted the picture of a single dad who just needed to blow off some steam. Nothing bad was going to happen. Once inside his home, Ridgeway would ask his victims to use the bathroom before they had sex. Why? According to Gary,
I didn't want them to shit in the bed. He learned from experience what happens when people die. According to the Cleveland Clinic, your muscles loosen immediately after death, releasing any strain on your bowel and bladder. During sex, Ridgeway would get behind his victims, doggy style, and say something like, there's a car coming. When they looked up to see, he'd wrap his arm or something else around their necks and strangle them to death.
His victims pleaded for their lives, but nothing fazed him. When they asked why Ridgeway preferred to choke his victims instead of shooting them, he said strangulation was "more personal and more rewarding." He also denied ever torturing his victims or experimenting with other forms of murder. When asked why, he said, "Choking is what I did, and I was pretty good at it." Things got even darker when Ridgeway admitted to necrophilia.
He said he would return to the murder scenes to have sex with the bodies and kept coming back until the flies came. On one risky occasion, Ridgeway returned to a crime scene while his son was asleep in the truck. He had sex with the body some 30 feet away and came back without waking the boy. He told detectives that his son was a hard sleeper. Ridgeway was incredibly calculated in how he disposed of the bodies.
He told detectives that after killing someone in his house, he'd get rid of the body within 30 minutes. First, he'd wrap the body in plastic and drag his victim from the bedroom to the front door. From there, he'd back his truck up to the door, open the tailgate, and load the body. He also stripped them of their clothes and jewelry, though he never kept any of it. He said, "Those clothes are just rags to me."
As for the jewelry, he liked to leave items in the women's bathroom at work, hoping to see others walking around in his victim's precious jewels. From his house, Ridgeway would drive out to a secluded area at night and dump the body off the side of the road. He would then drive up the road and park far away. Gary would then walk back through the woods, grab the body, and drag it away from the road. According to a forensic psychologist present during the interviews,
Gary saw the bodies as his property. The doctor asked, "How did you feel back in the 80s when the bodies were found and taken away?" Gary answered, "It felt like they were taking something of mine that I put there." But perhaps the most eye-opening part of Ridgway's confession, even more revealing than his taste for necrophilia, was how painstakingly careful he was over his 20-year run.
Every step, from choosing his victims to disposing of their bodies, was highly calculated. Witnesses were probably his biggest concern. If there was another girl, a pimp, or anyone nearby, Ridgeway wouldn't go through with the murder. There's no telling how many girls escaped with their lives just because someone might have seen them get in Ridgeway's truck. Gary still used this to his advantage. He used not killing them as a means to build trust.
He'd become a regular customer, biding his time until the moment was perfect for a kill. He would rarely pick up women on the curb, instead flashing money out his window and pulling into a nearby parking lot. The goal was to isolate the girls. Ideally, they would approach him in a less crowded area. Ridgeway was only busted twice for soliciting prostitutes.
once in 1982 and again in 2001, three weeks before he was arrested for the Green River killings. On both occasions, Ridgway solicited an undercover officer posing as a sex worker. In the years between those arrests, he maintained a pretty solid strategy for detecting undercover cops. He'd watch women from a distance to see if other Johns approached them.
and he'd only agree to sex after they got in his truck. He'd also ask them to flash their breasts or vaginas, assuming an undercover officer would refuse. If a woman scratched him during the kill, he'd cut their fingernails before disposing of the body. If he was worried he left tire tracks behind, he'd just buy new tires for his truck. If he arranged a date over the phone, he'd call the girl's pimp and request another after killing her.
In his mind, if the cops found out Ridgeway was with a missing girl, he could argue that he thought they were still alive. Just look at the phone call. Police learned that Marie Malvar left deep scratch marks on his forearm to cover them up. Ridgeway burned the scars with battery acid. His burn marks are still visible today. Finally, his disguise as a married, hardworking dad who's just trying to get by helped him fly under the radar. He wasn't a loner.
He managed his anger issues and had no prior history of violence. Remember, they didn't know about the cowboy he stabbed as a teenager. Even after his 2001 arrest, longtime friends, coworkers, and ex-girlfriends doubted he was the Green River Killer. Judith was the most shocked, proclaiming that Ridgway was the perfect husband who treated her like a newlywed every day. But as the body count ticked up,
Gary shifted toward a more active approach to avoiding detection. He would leave cigarette butts and chewing gum behind at different dump sites. Gary neither smoked nor chewed gum. He scattered rental car and travel pamphlets near some bodies, hoping investigators would think the killer was a traveling salesman. To further sell that story, Ridgeway penned a poorly typed letter to a local newspaper, suggesting the killer was a trucker or traveling salesman.
The letter, titled "What You Need to Know About the Green River Man" also mentioned that tiny detail about the fingernails, something police didn't know until Ridgway's 2003 confession. An FBI expert determined the letter was not written by the killer and they cast it aside. They felt pretty stupid when Ridgway mentioned the letter during his confession. To make it look like the Green River Killer switched states,
Gary drove the remains of Denise Bush, Shirley Sherrill, and another unidentified victim to the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. His plan worked. The task force spread itself thin in 1985, believing their killer had moved south. Part 5: End of the River Before Gary's confession, King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Malang was stuck between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, he could take Ridgeway to trial for seven of the murders, knowing damn well he'd get a guilty verdict and a likely death penalty. On the other hand, Ridgeway's death would leave dozens of other murders unsolved. Their families would go without closure. They could assume that Ridgeway did it, but they'd never know for sure. Malang agreed to the plea deal. While explaining the decision, he said, "Gary Ridgeway 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. On December 18th, 2003, Judge Richard Jones sentenced Gary Ridgway to 48 life sentences. They tacked on another after finding the remains of his 49th victim. As of 2023, Gary Ridgway is alive and serving his time at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington.
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