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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and all. Episode 165. I am your Norwegian host, Tomas Roseland Weyborg Thun.
We left part two in this series with Detective Reichert for the second time being presented with a dead body in the Green River. Only this time, it was not just one body. Also, it was clear that the killer had weighted down at least one of the bodies with rocks.
Tonight, we continue on our dark road amidst carnage and depravity as we uncover more and more of what made Gary Leon Ridgeway one of America's absolutely most heinous serial killers in history. Enjoy. As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club.
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Imagine if you will, dear listener, the summer of 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson has been in office for less than a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy the year before. A war in a far-off place called Vietnam is featured more and more in the news. Apparently, the French has had trouble over there for decades, and now communists are trying to take over the country.
The president is saying that this is dangerous, as it might lead to what good old Ike Eisenhower called a domino effect in all of Southeast Asia. First it was the Chinese, now Vietnam. If the US doesn't do something soon, it will be all of Asia. On the radio, the Beatles are the biggest thing there is. In August, they are coming to the USA to tour the country.
The song Bad Boy is playing on repeat in teenage boys' and girls' rooms all over America. The weather is warm, but not scorching. The sky is blue, and summer, to the six-year-old boy out playing, seems to last forever.
He is wearing his favorite outfit, cowboy boots, cowboy hat, and has his trusted six-shooter toy revolvers. The woods behind his house, close to school, is, in his mind, not woods at all, but the prairie. Maple and birch trees are big cacti. Leaves blowing in the wind are not leaves at all, but dustballs. He is very happy, out of nowhere.
A large boy walks up to him. He looks to be maybe ten years older than the boy. The boy is shy. He's not used to big boys paying him any attention. The stranger smiles and asks if the boy wants to build a fort with him. They can defend against the Apaches together. Wow! The boy is amazed. He gladly follows the youth deeper into the woods. After walking a bit,
The bigger boy suddenly stops. He smirks and says to the kid, and I quote, You know, there's people around there that like to kill little boys like you. End quote. Then he produces a knife and without warning stabs it into the side of the boy. The blade enters between his ribs, ripping into his liver.
Adrenaline and shock temporarily dulls the pain, and the boy looks dumbfounded down his shirt as dark red blood pumps out of him. In a later testimony, the man who had been that young boy told the courtroom what happened. I quote, I asked him why he, why he killed me. I watched too many cowboy movies, you know.
And the, you know, and I saw the blood pumping out of me. It was, it was profusely. I mean, it was already running down my leg, into my boots. And with every heartbeat, it was just pumping out. It was the whole front of my shirt was soaked. And he started laughing. And he had a smile on his face. And he stood there for a minute. And he had his knife in his hand.
And I didn't want him to stab me again, but he reached towards me and he just wiped the knife off, both sides of the blade. So he wiped it once across my shoulder and twice across my shoulder on the other side of the blade, folded the knife back up, and he says, I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody.
Then he started walking away down that knoll, and he was laughing, you know, kind of putting his head in the air, you know, and laughing real loud, end quote. The boy is anonymous in the court transcript. Luckily, he managed to run off and get back to his parents' house. There, his parents quickly drove him down to the hospital. There, he remained for several weeks. He said the incision required to repair his liver was about a foot long. His assailant was never found.
and he never returned to the grade school. He was tutored at home for several months, and then the family moved to California. The teenager who had stabbed the little boy was of course none other than Gary Leon Ridgeway. Decades later, sitting in a police interview room, he told of the stabbing, and stated that he had at the time always wanted to feel what it was like to kill someone.
Ridgeway was born on the 18th of February, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of three boys. His father, Thomas Newton Ridgeway, was a bus driver. His mother, Mary Rita Ridgeway, was a sales clerk at J.C. Penney.
The family moved to Sea-Tac, Washington, in 1960, where Ridgeway attended Chinook Junior High School and Tai'i High School. Gary was not a bright kid. Back in the 1950s and 60s, it was normal procedure to test students' IQ. Gary's came up as 82. In other words, what was back then referred to as borderline retardation.
Ridgeway struggled academically. He was held back two grades in high school, but he was not a social outcast. Contemporary friends has told of how Ridgeway never had trouble getting dates, and he was generally well liked by girls. He was not a large boy, but not noticeably short either. To his classmates and friends, the one word that best described young Gary was nondescript.
A forgettable face, someone people simply didn't pay much attention to. However, underneath the bland exterior, there was a tempest of fury and hatred and depravity brewing. Gary's early childhood was to him, in many ways, defined by him waking up every night soaked in urine. He was a chronic bedwetter. Mary Rita was a clean freak.
Today she might have been diagnosed with severe OCD, with a maniacal focus on keeping everything around her clean. This did not correspond well with Gary pissing all over himself and his bed every night. She was enraged and would routinely punish Gary. This she did, as women abusers often do, psychologically more than physically.
When Gary wet himself, she would strip him naked and parade him in front of his brothers. As she did so, she would berate him and tell his brothers how pathetic and dirty their brother was. Then she would take him to the bath, where she would scrub and wash Gary's penis and testicles using her hands. This behavior would continue well into Gary's teens, which, of course, is wildly inappropriate behavior.
As she was scrubbing him, she would tell him how dirty he was, and that his genitals were dirty and something to be ashamed of. Gary's father would not interfere, even though he was well aware of what his wife was doing to their son. He was what we in Norway call a quote-unquote "tuffelhelt," which directly translates as a "slipper hero."
In other words, Thomas Newton was a meat man who did not dare stand up to his wife. Once, during family dinner, Mary Rita was, as usual, berating her husband for his, in her mind, many failings. Her ranting went on and on, and increased in strength, as she would wind herself up in a fury. Thomas Newton said nothing.
Finally, by now screaming at him, she smashed a dinner plate over her husband's head, drawing blood. He simply cowered, stood up, and left the table. Mary Rita screaming obscenities at him as he walked away. Their sons witnessed the whole scene. Later in life, Ridgway had little positive or negative things to say about his father. One thing that stood out in his recollection
was his father's fascination with dead people. He had worked as a young man for a time at a mortuary. There he had supposedly witnessed a man having sex with one of the female corpses. Thomas Newton had gone on at length to Gary in describing this. If the father had witnessed necrophilia or was himself a necrophiliac is not known.
What is known is that this father's tale of raping dead people struck a nerve with young Gary. It triggered a dark desire within that lingered throughout his life. It did not help that his mother, in addition to diddling with his genitals almost every night, dressed like a prostitute and applied her makeup copiously with a trowel.
She, too, would tell her son, in graphic detail, about sex. She liked to talk about measuring men who bought trousers at the department store she worked. She talked about how men got erections as she was kneeling in front of them, using her hands measuring trouser length from their crotch to their feet.
To Gary, she detailed the distinct scent of sex she would smell coming from the men's genital area as she was kneeling in front of them. Gary himself later explained that his mother's parenting style was a mix of titillation, humiliation, and threats. Her wildly inappropriate behavior caused him to develop unnatural feelings towards her.
Growing up, especially after entering puberty, he loved to watch his mother sunbathe. Mary Rita knew her son was peeping on her, and she loved it. She would egg him on by often sunbathing topless in the backyard, out of sight from the neighbors. Gary would watch from his room, masturbating furiously as he fantasized about having sex with his own mother. These fantasies would turn violent.
probably due to him both hating and desiring her. As he was masturbating, his thoughts would turn more and more depraved. Soon, he was fantasizing about raping his mother, then slowly slitting her throat with a kitchen. It's that time of the year. Your vacation is coming up. You can already hear the beach waves, feel the warm breeze, relax, and think about...
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This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. As a family man with three kids, I know firsthand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care. But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night.
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. While young Gary would live in the shadow of his domineering mother and far more intelligent brothers, he was boiling with rage.
He wanted and needed control and domination, the very things he completely lacked at home. Soon he would develop what is all too common among psychopaths: a taste for torturing and killing small animals. As thousands of other American boys at the time, he had a BB gun, and with it he would shoot small birds.
He loved to shoot the birds, then walk over to them and poke at them with a stick or a knife as they twitched and died. Once he seized a cat that was a family pet and shut it inside an old metal ice chest. Then he hid the cooler where no one would hear the animal's cries of agony and fear, except him, of course. The next day, he opened the lid to find the cat dead.
As he grew older, his violent fantasies only increased. He enjoyed starting fires and liked to watch from a distance as the fire brigade would show up and fight the mayhem he had ignited. No one knows for sure when Gary Ridgway killed for the first time,
According to himself, in a much later interview, he recalls that he might have killed a young boy while swimming in a lake near Seattle. He recalled having wrapped his legs around the young boy and pulling him underwater until he stopped struggling. He pulled the body under a dock and left it there like garbage.
However, if this actually happened, or if it was a fantasy of his, is uncertain. Ridgway himself says the following of the incident, and I quote, I don't remember if I did this, or if it's, like I said, a dream, end quote. According to him, if it did occur, it happened during his adolescent years in the early 1960s.
Public records show that in 1964, when Gary was 15, a toddler and a teenager both drowned in the very lake Gary mentioned to police. In June of 1969, when he was 20 years old, Gary Ridgeway finally graduated from Tai Yi High School. The school was located at the intersection of Military Road South and South 188th Street.
Two months later, he joined the United States Navy. While serving, Gary married his first wife, Claudia Craig, in Seattle in August of 1970. He was then assigned to Subic Bay in the Philippines.
While there, Gary discovered his ravenous hunger for sex with prostitutes. He was not very smart and often did not use protection. Soon he had developed a venereal disease, gonorrhea. When he returned home, he found out that his wife had gotten involved with another man. He berated her and called her a whore. The marriage soon fell apart after that.
In July of 1971, he was discharged from the Navy and he began to work the following month as a painter and masker at Kenworth, a Seattle-area truck manufacturer. It was a job Gary would hold for the next 30 years. At the end of 1973, he married again. This time, the union would last until July 1980.
During this period, Gary Ridgway fathered a son in 1975. Ridgway himself states that his first choking victim was this second wife, Marcia Winslow. The incident happened during a marital fight, when Marcia refused to talk to him. According to Gary,
He does not enjoy hitting women. So instead he got behind Marcia, wrapped his right arm around her neck and began squeezing. Marcia herself would in later years tell police that Ridgway's sexual appetites were extreme. He involved her in various bondage games and liked to take her to secluded places.
The banks of the Green River were a particular favorite location for outdoor sex. When they went outdoors for sex, Marcia remembers Gary telling her to walk slowly along the river. He would then skulk away behind her and lunge at her out from the trees, choking her. Then they would have intercourse.
The arrival of his son caused Gary to become obsessed with religion. Between 1975 and 1980, he joined one church after another and read the Bible obsessively every day. He would also walk door to door, proselytizing and demanding that his wife follow the strict moral edicts given to them by their pastor.
This interest dissolved like morning mist under the sun when his wife divorced him in 1980. He was enraged with her leaving him. Once again, he was emasculated by a woman, and to make matters worse, she demanded monthly alimony and child support payments from him. To him, she had become a whore, and he fantasized about brutally murdering her.
All through the 70s, and through both his marriages, he habitually spent much of his spare cash purchasing sex from prostitutes that worked the Sea-Tac Strip and in downtown Seattle. As with many aspects of Gary Ridgeway's life, it is difficult to know for certain the details of what happened. During interviews,
Gary Ridgway says he has a vague memory of murdering a prostitute as early as the early 1970s. But, as with the boy he says he dreamt having killed, he claims he is not sure if he actually did murder that prostitute or if he simply fantasized about it. Let us thus change focus for a while. Again, we stand with Detective Reichert.
He could see that the body almost on the riverbank in front of him was that of a black woman. It was obvious the woman had not been dead for very long. It dawned on Reichardt that the bodies now emerging, having been weighed down with rocks, might very well have been present the previous Thursday when Dub Bonner had been found. First Leanne Wilcox,
then Wendy Cofield, then Dub Bonner, and now these two unidentified bodies. If these two would also turn out to be prostitutes, Rackert realized he would have to seriously consider the possibility of an active serial killer. The man in charge of the King County Police Department's Criminal Investigations Division was Major Richard Kraske.
This Sunday he had just returned from his neighborhood supermarket with a few sacks of groceries when his pager went off. He soon learned that two new bodies had been discovered in the Green River, making three victims at nearly the exact same spot in less than a week, and four in less than a month. For Kraski, it was a nightmare out of the past.
Eight years earlier, Kraski had been the lieutenant in charge when a serial killer they only knew as Ted had kidnapped and killed at least eight young women in the Seattle area. Kraski and his detectives had never been able to solve the crimes.
Eventually, the handsome and extremely clever murderer, now known to the world as Ted Bundy, had made his way to Utah, then Colorado, and finally Florida, killing everywhere he went. Eventually, Ted's death toll had reached at least 33 before he was finally apprehended. Kraski was haunted by the Bundy case and dreaded what was now before him.
Most police officers never encounter a serial killer, and if they do, it happens once in their career. Kresge was facing the second serial killer case in less than a decade. Kresge wanted to make sure they did not miss any more bodies. He ordered divers to search the river both upstream and downstream of the location of the three bodies.
Before allowing these two new bodies to be moved, he called for a medical examiner. He was hell-bent on making sure that this time there would be no blunders as there had been in the Ted Bundy case. Back then, the medical examiner had been called in after the bodies had been moved, and journalists had snuck past police barriers and trampled the crime scenes.
As Kraski was delegating and organizing what was gearing up to be a major serial killer task force, Detective David Reichert was making his way downstream through the head-high grass. He was looking for some indication of the killer's route to and from the crime scene. About twenty or thirty feet, about ten meters, from the immersed victim's
He almost stepped on top of yet another body. He was startled, but kept his cool and shouted as loud as he could that he had found another one. As Kraski heard David shout, his gut fell. It was happening all over again. He quickly shouted back at David to not move and stay put until the medical examiner arrived.
He told all the officers present that no one, and he meant no one except Reichardt, was to approach this new body until the medical examiner was there. Then they all waited. A sort of eerie silence fell upon the riverbank. Reichardt used time to take a closer look at what he had found. This one had not been in the water. She looked like she had been killed recently, perhaps only a couple of days ago.
Also, unlike the other bodies, this one looked to be extremely young. The girl had a light coffee-colored complexion. The body was placed face down in the grass, with the head resting to one side. One arm was bent at the elbow, as if sleeping. A pair of blue trousers was wound tightly around her neck and knotted on the right side, exactly in the same manner as with Wendy Cofield.
The girl's bra had been pulled up to expose her breasts. There were numerous bruises and abrasions on her arms and legs. The girl's tongue extruded from her mouth, and Reichert could see numerous broken blood vessels beneath her skin that indicated death by strangulation. At about 6 p.m., Chief Medical Examiner Donald Rieh and two of his assistants arrived at the river.
The pathologist walked down to the riverside to look at the first two bodies. The corpses had remained in the water until the arrival of Rie. Now they were removed and the heavy rocks used to submerge them taken as evidence. As he examined the victims, Rie used a handheld tape recorder to dictate his findings. His initial recordings were as follows, and I quote:
The first body recovered is unclothed and appears to have been in the water three or four days.
The body is generally quite well preserved, although there are patches of skin slip. In addition, mud is diffusely adherent to the body's surface. The head hair is black and curly. The facial features those of a black. In addition, skin pigmentation indicates black race. The age of the victim is mid to late 20s.
No obvious injuries are present on the body. There is no jewellery on the body. The hands are quite well preserved. A bruise is noted over the middle aspect of the proximal left forearm. The hands show immersion changes, with no unusual features otherwise identified. The hands are bagged under my supervision. By Mr. Rowley.
The second body is estimated to have been in the water about a week, and shows moderate decomposition with gas distentation of all body tissues. Patches of black discoloration are present over the trunk and right leg, and these correlate with the placement of rocks over the body, as noted in the water.
The head shows decomposition, with the tongue protruding between the lips. Much of the skin has slipped, and there is diffuse mud deposition over the surface of the body. The hands, likewise, show the glove separation of the outer skin. In addition, the hair is starting to separate.
The hair is black, and multiple pigtails are present somewhat distributed uniformly over the head, including the right and left parietal region, occipital region, and a patch of hair which separates and is presumed to have come from the occipital region. The garment, which remains on the body, is a short-sleeved and at this time appears dark blue in color.
The brassiere is still on the body, but is such that the brassiere is lifted above the front of the body. The brassiere is of the type that fastens in the front. The front fastener is undone, and as a consequence the cups of the brassiere end up over the back. The hands are bagged. The body demonstrates no specific injuries at this time. There is heavy coating of mud as previously noted.
There is also skin separation in the glove-like fashion of the feet. The body is then prepared for removal. The third body lies in tall grass along the river bank. It is in north-south fashion. It is unclothed except for the upper portion of the body where a garment with a zipper is entwined. The exact character will be established as the body is examined.
The brassiere is rolled particularly over the back and anteriorly it is likewise up over the surface of the breasts. The body itself lies face down. Over the right buttock there is a patch of abrasion. The right hand lies open-faced with the arm slightly flexed while the upper left extremity lies in a flexed fashion above her head.
The head hair has a reddish tint, but appears to be artificial, with the main color of the hair light brown. In addition, this has a kinky type appearance. The body still shows some faint rigidity. Lividity is well developed over the anterior portion of the body.
The body as it lies shows a prominent degree of anterior lividity which is fixed. In addition, fly larvae deposition is present over the vulva recesses. Likewise, over the face some larvae is noted. About the neck, a pair of blue slacks are wound with an over- and under-type knot on the right side of the neck.
The knot is not examined any further and will be preserved at the time of the autopsy. The face shows extensive congestion and in the conjunctivae par teque are noted. The lips are somewhat contused and swollen, but a closer examination after cleansing during autopsy will be performed.
The brassiere is pulled up, exposing the breasts. The upper extremities, aside from scattered scratches, demonstrate no jewelry or other changes. The thighs are covered by loose adherent dirt. In addition, loose vegetation from the immediate scene is adherent to the body itself.
The lower extremities likewise show scattered scratches. Fly bites are likewise noted. The hands are bagged and the body is removed under my instruction. I depart the scene at 7.50 hours. End quote.
I don't know.
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And so it is that we end part three in the tale of the Green River Killer.
Next episode, we'll continue our hunt for America's second most prolific serial killer. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening.
If you like this podcast, you can support it by donating on patreon.com slash theserialkillarpodcast, by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, facebook.com slash theskpodcast, or by posting on the subreddit theskpodcast. Thank you. Good night and good luck.
