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Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. For nearly two decades, the serial killer known as the Green River Killer terrorized the state of Washington. Beginning his killing spree as early as 1982, the Green River Killer is thought to be responsible for at least 71 murders.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the Green River Killer targeted young women, often sex workers or runaways, throughout the greater Seattle area. He approached his victims along Pacific Highway South, sexually assaulted them, strangled them to death, and then dumped their bodies in the wooded areas around the Green River.
Somehow, the Green River Killer was able to remain out of police radar while living his life as a husband and father. Until the notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy himself, was able to help police catch him. This is Forensic Tales, episode number three, The Green River Killer. ♪♪
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell.
Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast that covers real, bone-chilling true crime stories with a forensic science twist. Some of the cases have been solved by the help of forensic science, while others have turned cold. The stories we cover each week send a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
If you're interested in supporting the show and getting early access to weekly episodes, bonus material, ad-free episodes, merchandise, and more, consider visiting our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Another great way you can help support the show is by leaving us a positive rating with a review. Now, let's jump right into this week's case.
Our story this week covers one of America's scariest and notorious serial killers, Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer. The Green River Killer has been convicted of killing 49 women and has confessed to killing 22 more for an astonishing total of 71 murder victims.
This almost unimaginable amount of victims has made Gary Ridgway the second most prolific serial killer in United States history. But somehow, he managed to remain free and below police radar for over 20 years. To understand how Gary Ridgway was able to become the second most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, we have to start from the very beginning.
Gary Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah. And right from the start, he had a troubled life. Stories about Gary's childhood suggest that his mother was incredibly intense and was often described as being domineering. And his father, who worked as a bus driver, would scream, fight, and even hit his mom right in front of Gary's eyes as a kid.
As a young child, even through his teenage years, Ridgway had a bedwetting problem. Now, this is something worth talking a little bit more about. So bedwetting has been recognized as a very common childhood experience in both serial killers and mass murderers. One of the research papers I wrote in grad school was on mass murderers and mass shooters.
And what I learned during the course of my research was that bedwetting was so common in these individuals that it's a part of what the field of criminology refers to as the McDonald triad. So the McDonald triad basically says that there are three factors that suggest that if all three or any combination of two of these factors are present together, then
that this is a predictor or is associated with violent tendencies in adulthood. Now, besides bedwetting, the other two factors are cruelty to animals and obsession with fire setting. So this theory suggests that when two or all three of these factors, persistent bedwetting, fire starting, and cruelty to animals are all present during childhood,
that these behaviors are known to be predictors to violent behavior once that individual becomes an adult. Of course, just because someone is a bedwetter into their teenage years or they were some sort of child pyromaniac, this doesn't mean that they're guaranteed to grow up to become a prolific serial killer.
What it means is that there's enough research and data points out there to establish correlations between certain childhood experiences and violent behavior as an adult. It's like smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes may and has been associated with causing lung cancer, but just because you smoke cigarettes doesn't mean you'll ever be diagnosed with lung cancer.
And in the case of the Green River Killer, he was wetting the bed up until right around 13 years old. Ridgway's bed wetting also contributed to some of the fantasies that he would experience as a child. For one, after wetting the bed, his mom would come into his bedroom and clean things up, wash the sheets. But then, something inside Ridgway's mind would switch.
As his mom was cleaning up the bed, that's when he would experience these fantasies, fantasies about killing his mom. And then it would switch to sexual fantasies about his mom, all occurring within moments of bedwetting incidents. Serial killers often display other characteristics during childhood other than bedwetting.
Something that's been backed by research is that many serial killers actually have a very high IQ. Serial killers are typically very smart individuals. This kind of makes sense when we think about the top list of, you know, maybe 10 top serial killers in our history. Most of them got away with their murders for years, for decades, they were able to elude police. So that in of itself requires a certain level of intelligence, right?
And it's safe to say that most serial killers aren't stupid. But just like wetting the bed doesn't always equal violence in adulthood, not all serial killers have a high IQ. In fact, in Ridgway's case, he struggled in school. He was even held back a year in high school because he was dyslexic.
So to give you an idea of Gary Ridgway's IQ, he reportedly had an IQ in the low 80s, which to provide some perspective here, the average IQ for an adult in the United States is right around 100. And besides his struggle to keep up with his schoolwork, something else notable happened during his high school years, and it involved a fight he had with another student.
When Ridgway was 16 years old and in high school, he led a classmate of his out into the woods, and when they got to the woods, that's where he stabbed him over and over again. He stabbed his classmate in the ribs, and one of the stab wounds even punctured his liver. Fortunately, this classmate was somehow able to survive this attack in the woods.
And although it's entirely unclear what exactly provoked such an attack, it's safe to say that this incident laid the foundation to the making of an American serial killer. After graduating from Thai high school in 1969, Ridgway married his high school sweetheart, a woman by the name of Claudia Craig. After high school is also when he joined the Navy.
And just like every other young man his age at the time, shortly after enlisting in the Navy, he was shipped off to fight in the Vietnam War. And his time in Vietnam was rough. While working on a supply ship, his marriage to Claudia back home started to fall apart. And things in the marriage really took a turn for the worse when Ridgway started paying for services from local sex workers.
And Claudia, well, Claudia started an affair with someone else back home. Now, even though Ridgway and Claudia had been together for years, they were high school sweethearts. They got married when they were just 19 years old. The distance, the affairs, the sex workers were just too much for the marriage. And the two of them ended up filing for divorce. Their marriage was over. After splitting from Claudia, Ridgway was determined to find another wife.
And following his marriage to Claudia, he went on and found two other women to marry, eventually getting divorced for the final time in 2002. Now that we have a better understanding of what took place during his childhood, up until his time in the Vietnam War, that's where the Green River Killer really emerged.
From the 1980s through the 1990s, the Green River Killer is believed to have murdered at least 71 teenage girls and women in the Seattle-Tacoma-Washington area. The signature to his M.O. was that he preyed on local sex workers or young runaways. He preyed on some of the most vulnerable people we have, and this is how he did it.
He would pick up these girls along Pacific Highway, strangle them, and then dump their bodies in the densely wooded areas around Green River, a location right near the busy Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Because he would dump his victims around the Green River, that's when he would earn his place in serial killer history and become known as the Green River Killer.
During Ridgeway's peak, during the 1980s and 90s, it was incredibly common for young girls and even boys to hitchhike or ask strangers for rides around town. And this didn't just apply to sex workers or young runaways who would become his prime victims. Hitchhiking was something done by practically anyone and everyone who didn't have a car and needed to find a way to get from point A to point B.
Of course, nowadays, right, we couldn't imagine even for a second hitchhiking. We wouldn't even dream about letting our children or even ourselves for that matter to hitchhike. I know a lot of parents out there that won't even let their kids take an Uber because we've gotten to a point where we just don't get into strangers' cars anymore.
And we've also gotten to a point where we've become less trusting of strangers. And essentially, we've become less naive. But times have really changed. And the change didn't happen overnight. From the 1980s through the 90s, hitchhiking was something that many young people did. Again, it was a way to get from one place to another. You didn't think twice before you did it. You just did.
Stood out there, flagged someone down, got into the car, and that was it. So during this time, Ridgeway was a person who caught on to this trend in hitchhiking. But for him, instead of thinking of it as a way for young people to get around town, he saw hitchhiking as an easy way to meet and select his victims. Targeting hitchhikers became Ridgeway's primary M.O.,
In many of the murders, he would show the woman a picture of his son, trick her into thinking he's a nice, normal guy in order to gain her trust. Once he gained her trust and she got inside the car with him, that's when the nightmare of his victims really began. In the early years of his murders, Ridgway was known to strangle his female victims manually using his own hands.
he started encountering a problem with manual strangulation. The problem was, was that many of his victims would fight back. They would leave bruises and scratches all up and down his arms, trying to break free from the strangling. And once he realized that many of these women were going to fight back and leave these marks on his arms, he knew he needed to change how he was murdering his victims.
He knew that he couldn't be seen with bruises and scratches on his arms day in and day out, with no explanation as to how they got there. So that's when Ridgway moved away from manually strangling his victims to then using ligatures. Ligatures allowed Ridgway to be physically a lot farther away from his victims, to a point where they wouldn't be able to reach his arms anymore.
He could also use a ligature and strangle them from behind, making it even more difficult for these girls to fight back. He was essentially doing what many other successful serial killers did. They learned from their craft. They learned how to get better and better at killing. Now, I mentioned earlier that Ridgway's MO was to target young girls, many of which who were working as sex workers.
Now, this isn't the first time, and it won't be the last, where we've heard stories about murderers and serial killers preying on sex workers. We know that some of the behavior as well as the lifestyle choices of sex workers can lead them to very dangerous situations. This includes higher risk for drug use, higher risk of disease, and
And at the darkest end of it all, the possibility of being beaten or even killed while working the streets. I think as a society, we sometimes forget that these women are people. They are mothers. They are daughters, sisters, friends, neighbors.
And I think when stories like the Green River killing came along, we tend to consider their victims, sex workers, as people labeled as less than. These cases just don't seem to get the same amount of attention or public reaction than cases that involve maybe the kidnapping of a middle-class white blonde female.
But what we can learn from these types of cases is that these people deserve to be looked for when they go missing. If they're murdered, their cases deserve to be investigated and investigated in the same way as anyone else. So during the 1980s and 90s, when Gary Ridgway was in his prime, we didn't pay enough attention to these types of cases.
The families of these girls were constantly banging down the doors at the police station, asking these officers to go find their missing loved ones. But unfortunately, many of them were turned away or ignored. These families of Ridgway's victims were being told by police that basically nobody cares about your daughter. No one cares about a young runaway or a sex worker going missing.
The police back then weren't afraid to say that it's common for sex workers to basically become transient and just wander off from time to time, or maybe they changed which circuit they work. What this essentially did and how police were responding to these cases created a pathway for Ridgeway to continue killing.
It allowed Ridgeway to go back to the same road and pick up victim after victim because no one was out there investigating. There weren't police officers patrolling the area. Nobody was out there looking for his victims. And this was going on for years. After Ridgeway selected his victims, sexually assaulted them, and then murdered them, he would dump their bodies. Now, sometimes...
After dumping the body, he would return to the site to have sexual intercourse with the dead bodies. By the time Ridgway went back to some of these locations and engaged sexually with the victims, many of their bodies had been exposed to the elements for weeks, sometimes months. Their bodies had been exposed to things like weather and animals.
But the condition of the bodies didn't seem to stop Ridgway's desire to go back and to continue to engage with them sexually. Ridgway's murders weren't just limited to sex workers and runaways along the Pacific Highway. He's also been linked to four additional victims, including two from Portland, Oregon. The bodies of these victims were left in clusters.
sometimes posed, and in almost every case they were naked. Almost a perfect match to what we've seen in almost every single one of Ridgway's victims. Even though investigators couldn't ignore the similarities, they didn't have enough evidence to link him to those four murders. And since then, Ridgway has completely denied committing them.
But keep in mind, Ridgway himself has even said he's not even exactly sure how many women he's killed. In response to the rising number of female bodies being found near Green River, the King County Sheriff's Office officially formed what was known as the Green River Killer Task Force. The task force was made up of several investigators who were working on the case full time.
And two of the task force members were Robert Capelle and David Reinkert, two investigators who also worked together on the Ted Bundy case. Both Capelle and Reinkert had sat down face to face and interviewed Ted Bundy after he was arrested. Now, the name Ted Bundy is, of course, a staple in the true crime world.
Bundy was an American serial killer who kidnapped and murdered young women throughout the 70s. He really became one of the first of these types of serial killers, at least in the United States. And in the end, Bundy confessed to 30 murders and was ultimately executed back in January 1989. Now, several years after Bundy was arrested,
These two investigators, Kappel and Reinkert, were assigned to work the Green River Killer Task Force. Now, what was incredibly helpful about having these two people on the task force was that they had inside knowledge about what it's like to think as a serial killer. They possessed knowledge about what really goes on in these serial killer minds.
They had sat down with Ted Bundy, who shared with them his own personal opinions about the psychology, the motivations and behavior of a serial killer, just like himself and just like who the Green River Killer would be. This is something that Ted Bundy was known for. He was incredibly smart. He was a lawyer and he wasn't afraid to tell police what he thought made him a serial killer.
which makes him the perfect person to be able to tell police who might be responsible for killing these women out on Green River. Ted Bundy himself was a serial killer and shared with investigators working the Green River case who this type of offender is. And he was able to basically help create this first criminal profile.
Now, consulting someone like Ted Bundy in order to catch the Green River Killer wasn't without controversy. There's a completely valid argument that police or society just shouldn't give killers like Ted Bundy the time of day, let alone the opportunity to sit down with police and actively assist them in an investigation.
But in the case of trying to find out who was killing these young women and dumping their bodies, police were desperate. Up until this point, they didn't have any leads. They didn't have any evidence or eyewitnesses to the abductions. So if Ted Bundy was able to at least provide a profile about who the Green River Killer might be,
well, then they were more than willing to at least listen. So Ted Bundy was the one who told investigators that the Green River Killer was most likely revisiting his dump sites. And Ted Bundy was the one to say that not only was he likely going back to where he dumped the bodies, but he also said that he was probably sexually motivated.
that he likely engaged in sexual intercourse with the bodies afterwards. He told investigators that if they wanted to catch this guy, then they needed to stake out these dump sites and simply wait for him to show up. While the task force staked out the dump sites that never seemed to pan out,
They had no idea that they were just seconds away from catching their killer. Not once, not twice, not even three times. That's because Ridgway, the man they were hunting, had been arrested in 1982 and once again in 2001, both times on prostitution charges.
Even at one point, Bridgeway had become an official suspect in the Green River killings in 1983. Police brought him in for questioning, and he was even given a polygraph test, which he passed. Now, anytime a case talks about polygraphs, I always have my reservations. I'm just not a fan of polygraphs. They aren't admitted into court as evidence for a reason. But regardless...
In 1983, Ridgway was given a polygraph regarding the Green River murders and passed. He even provided hair and saliva samples that, at the time, back in the early 80s, couldn't be matched to anything found in the Green River killings. So he was officially removed as a possible suspect, even though, all along, Ridgway was right under their noses.
Years went by in the hunt for the Green River Killer, and it seemed like investigators weren't getting any closer to making either an identification or an arrest. The case appeared to be cold. They weren't getting any solid tips or leads in the case, and it seemed to many like the Green River killings may never be solved. By 2001, it had been 14 years since the killings began.
And by the year 2001, there had been some pretty significant advancements in DNA testing. And one of these advancements was the creation of a new method that included the consolidation of DNA fingerprinting to help identify a possible suspect. When this method first came out, many forensic experts were skeptical. To be frank, they didn't really think that this would work in identifying suspects.
However, by 2001, forensic scientists and law enforcement felt much more confident and much more comfortable in DNA analysis. So the process involved is two important tests, and these tests are done in order to analyze DNA. They are known as the PCR and the short tandem repeat test, or STR.
Both of these tests allow forensic scientists to analyze even the tiniest samples of DNA. What happens in the STR test is that the short repeat units within the DNA are extracted, that a PCR test is done on the units that are extracted.
This basically amplifies the amount of DNA present by creating thousands to sometimes millions of copies of that single strand of DNA. Long story short, without getting too sciencey here, this method of DNA testing allows experts to compare repeated patterns between two or more samples of DNA.
The end result, using this method, we can take two samples of DNA, compare them underneath a microscope, look for repeated patterns, and then ultimately be able to determine if the samples match to each other. This is an incredible advancement in DNA testing because every person in the world has a unique DNA profile, with the exception of identical twins.
So when samples and patterns of DNA are compared underneath a microscope, this is how police can identify a suspect. This is how they can collect DNA from a crime scene and then compare it to the suspect's DNA. So in 2001, investigators working the Green River case, which by all definitions had become a cold case,
decided to go back and retest the DNA of everyone who was once considered a possible suspect. They knew they had this new STR and PCR DNA test, and they knew they had a list of possible suspects who had been previously interviewed and who had previously provided their DNA to police. And one of those previous suspects was Gary Ridgeway.
Ridgway provided police saliva and hair samples, both containing his DNA back in 1983. The problem was they couldn't test or match it back to any DNA obtained from the Green River killings. So when it came time to test Ridgway's DNA using this new method, they got a much different result than they did years before.
Using the STR and PCR tests, investigators submitted samples of DNA to the crime lab found on three murder victims between 1982 and 1983. And in these three murders, semen had been collected from all of the victims' bodies, which is a great source of DNA. The semen samples were compared using this brand new DNA testing method.
And within minutes, they got a match. The semen found on three of these victims was a perfect match to Ridgeway's unique DNA profile. After investigators were able to successfully match Ridgeway's DNA to the semen found on the first three victims, they used that same STR and PCR tests on a number of other Green River killings.
And the tests all came back with the same result. It was Ridgeway's DNA found at every crime scene. With the results of the DNA test in hand, police wasted no time in securing an arrest warrant for Ridgeway, the man they called the Green River Killer. And on November 30, 2001, almost 20 years after the first murders took place,
Police drove down to Kensworth Truck Factory, where Ridgway was employed, and placed him under arrest. He was arrested on suspicion of murdering four women, nearly 20 years earlier after being first identified as a possible suspect. The four victims originally named on the indictment were Marsha Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hines, and Carol Ann Christensen.
And once Ridgway was in police custody, forensic scientists continued to conduct further tests in order to link him to additional victims. In addition to the DNA evidence recovered from the victims' bodies, scientists found additional forensic evidence linking him to the murders. That's because they found microscopic spray paint particles on some of the victims' bodies.
And these microscopic spray paint particles were traced back to the same spray paint used at Ridgway's job. And through this process, investigators were able to add three additional victims to the indictment. Wendy Cofield, Deborah Bonner, and Deborah Estates. Not long after Gary Ridgway was arrested and charged with seven of the Green River killings,
He did something that surprised even the most seasoned detectives. He confessed. While in jail, Ridgway confessed to not only killing the seven women named in the original indictment, he admitted to killing 46 other women and young girls. Following his confession, Gary Ridgway agreed to a plea deal with the prosecution.
He agreed to plead guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, and in exchange for the plea deal, the prosecution wouldn't seek the death penalty against him. He basically pled guilty in order to avoid being sentenced to death, which in a case as heinous as this is, would likely be what would happen. On top of the plea agreement that took the death penalty off the table,
Ridgway also cooperated with police in order to locate some of the remains of his victims. And he also provided police with a signed statement saying that he did kill all his victims inside Kings County and that he did, in fact, transport and dump the remains of the two women found near Portland.
Now, once it became public that King County prosecutors basically cut a deal with the Green River Killer in order to avoid the death penalty, this struck a chord with many people. This created a lot of controversy. That's because this is a man responsible for killing 71 innocent women. If there is a case or a person deserving of the death penalty,
A person like Gary Ridgeway is that type of person. He committed those types of crimes that, at least in my opinion, the death penalty was created for. But as the people of King County spoke up about their frustration with the prosecution's decision, King County prosecutor at the time, Norm Melenge, came out and made a statement that, quote,
We could have gone forward with seven counts, but this 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 those 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.
On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones said,
sentenced Ridgway to 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole plus an additional life sentence, all of which to be conserved consecutively. This all meant that Gary Ridgway was going to spend the rest of his life behind bars for becoming the Green River Killer. Ridgway began serving his sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in January 2004.
Eleven years later, in 2015, he was transferred to the U.S. Penitentiary Florence, a Supermax facility that was designed to house the worst of the worst. Since Ridgway has been incarcerated in federal prison, police have been able to identify at least 48 sets of remains, including some victims that were not originally attributed to the Green River Killer.
I'm going to be putting up the names of each victim that police are aware of on my website, ForensicTales.com, because I think it's important that these names are not forgotten. We tell these stories of serial killers and often don't mention the names of the victims. And honestly, the victims are the ones that should be remembered, not their killers.
The Green River killings and the man behind the murders, Gary Ridgway, will go down in history as one of the most notorious serial killers our country has ever seen. And if it weren't for the help of someone like Ted Bundy himself and crucial advancements in DNA testing, this case could have remained unsolved.
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Thank you.