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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 167. I am your Norwegian host, Samas Roseland Weyborg Thun.
Tonight, I present to you a reenactment of a typical Green River kill. Gary Ridgway killed so many women, it is difficult giving each of them a voice. As I have repeatedly stated on this show, it is too bad so little attention is given to the victims of serial killers, and so much given to the killers themselves. Therefore, I will try to present to you the full horror.
of Gary Ridgeway's acts, the sheer depravity and carelessness of it, the actions of a purebred psychopath against young women whose only crime was trying to survive in a dog-eat-dog world. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Nick Oakley, Operation Brownie Pockets, Reed, Richard, Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Shauna, Sputnik the Radio, Tim, Tony, Trent, Vanessa, and Val. You are the backbone of the Serial Killer Podcast, and without you there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine, if you will, the Alizunar, a man in a pickup truck. The man is, like his truck, nondescript. No one turns their heads as he walks or drives by.
His eyes are a bit too close together, and his teeth are a bit buck-toothed. These things give the man a rodent-like look about him, weaselly. His hair is dirty blonde, and his haircut is cheap. Sometimes he dons a moustache. This elevates his appearance somewhat, as it cloaks his buck-teeth.
The truck he is driving is a 1977 model GMC Sierra 2500 Classic Camper Edition. The color is maroon, but the paint is flaking off several places. You take the passenger's side as the man drives out of his driveway after dark. It's a clear night. The stars are out. The temperature is pleasant. It's only a few minutes' drive from the man's house to the Pacific Highway and the Sea-Tac Strip.
Once there, the man cruises up and down the strip several times. Sometimes he slows down when he sees a girl, but she turned out to be older than what she looked like from afar. So he speeds up and drives away. At one point he stops and parks in an alley. There he sits, quietly, watching the strip like a theater stage. The prostitutes
have a whole variety of costumes. Leather, lace, bra, no bra, high heels, leather boots that go all the way up to their thighs. No high heels. Some are even barefoot. It's impossible to make out their faces from the alley. Cars drive by constantly. Several stop and pick up girls. After maybe twenty minutes, the cars return and the girl gets out, her hair a bit messier than before.
He starts the car again and drives onto the road. His eyes are fixed on a girl. She is black, and her hair is kept long and straight. It has probably taken her a lot of time getting it like that. She is wearing a miniskirt and leather boots with high heels. She is wearing a denim jacket with only a lacy bra beneath it. Her lips are painted bright red.
He stops next to her, and she immediately approaches the passenger's side window and leans in. He gives her a weak smile. She asks how he's doing and if he's looking for company. He says he's just fine, and asks in return how much half and half is. She tells him, and he answers that that sounds a bit steep. She wrinkles her nose, sighs, and says that the BJ is without a condom if he wants.
He grins at that and tells her to get in. Once on the road, the girl tries to give the man directions to a place she knows. The man just shakes his head and says he wants to do it outside. It's such a pretty night and he doesn't want to mess up his car. Don't worry, he says. It's not far. You'll be back in no time.
She is still uncertain and looks as if she's getting cold feet. Hey, really, I'm safe, okay? Here, take a look at this, he says, as he produces his wallet with the photos of his kid and wife. My wife and I have been having trouble. I love her and all, but a man's got needs, you know. The girl relaxes at this. Sure, she understands.
She tells him he's not alone in feeling that way at all. Lots of men have it like that. She knows that for sure. She doesn't notice it, but the man's face hardens a bit as she says that. It's not more than five minutes' drive from the strip to the quiet wooded area next to the green river. He drives onto a small, dark road and parks. Trees and brush now hide any view from the main road, and the only light
is from the large moon casting everything in a silvery sheen the pair gets out he tells her to take off all her clothes not just her skirt and panties as she takes off her clothes he does too even his socks i like the feel of the grass underneath my soles he says as she looks questioningly at him
His large and by now very erect penis is illuminated by the moon, and she gets on her knees and puts it inside her mouth and starts to move back and forth. Secretly, she hopes that he will come prematurely in her mouth, so that she doesn't have to have sex with him. No such luck. After only a minute or so, he pulls her head back and tells her to put a condom on his penis.
They lie down on the ground. She can feel roots and pebbles scratching her back. At first, they are in the missionary position. Her eyes are on the stars above, not his concentrated by now very sweaty face. They are beautiful tonight, crystal clear and blinking. Suddenly, he stops thrusting. Snapping back to reality, she looks at him and asks if everything is okay. He looks apologetically at her and says that he can't finish like this.
"'Get on your knees. I want to finish doggy-style,' he says. Pleased that he seems to be nearing completion, she willingly turns around and offers her behind towards him. Only a second passes before she can feel him thrusting again, this time faster and faster. Eager to be done with him, and to get back to her corner, she gives the man the usual act. "'Come, baby, that's it. Yes, give it to me,' she says, moaning to add emphasis.'
He grunts in reply. Suddenly, he pulls out, and she can hear him tearing off the condom. Hey! She shouts as she lifts her head and starts to turn. He ignores her and slams into her bare back. At the same time as she starts to twist her upper torso and head towards him, he bends forward and grabs her neck in a chokehold with his right arm. As it happens, she can feel him ejaculating inside her.
She tries to scream, but nothing comes out. The arm is strong. She can feel hard muscle against her throat. Wriggling to get free, he only tightens his grip. They fall on the ground. Him on top, penis still inside of her. Now he wraps his legs underneath her as well, pinning her. Clowing at his arm, she manages to draw some blood, but he doesn't seem to notice. Her head feels like it's in a vice.
It's painful. So much pain. And she wishes she could only get one more breath. Nothing gives, and her eyes almost pop out from the pressure. Her lungs burn. The man, who introduced himself as Gary, doesn't say anything as the young woman slowly dies by his doing. After a couple of minutes, her body goes completely limp.
He is still hard and still inside her as he lets her head flop to the ground. He spits on her before pulling out. Looking around, he spots some high brushes only a few meters further towards the river. He drags her limp body along the ground. Then, when he reaches the high brushes, he picks her up and tosses her into them. Walking away, he checks to see if one can spot the body from a distance, which one cannot.
Satisfied, he meticulously picks up the used condom and puts it in his trouser pocket as he gets dressed before getting into his truck, revving it, and driving off back into the night. Sixteen kilometers south of Seattle's downtown, Pacific Highway South leaves the Flat River Valley on the city's southern edge to mount a long bumpy ridge.
The ridge, about 140 meters above sea level, runs for about 20 kilometers to the south and Tacoma. The Pacific Highway, before the construction of the Interstate 5 freeway, was the state's main road tying Seattle to Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, and points farther south. Throughout the first part of the century, the ridge, known to locals as the High Line,
for the roads connecting Tacoma to Seattle remained rural. Dense forests of Douglas fir were cut down, then regrown. Scattered farms were hidden in the trees, accessed by dark gravel roads. Orchards, subsistence farming, and livestock raising were the most common means of employment for most of the Ridge's population.
Small game hunting was common, as was trapping and fishing in and around the small streams, ponds, and hillocks that gave the ridge its features. Numerous two-lane blacktop roads ran east and west off the north-south highway, through tall firs, down narrow winding unpopulated canyons, to the Kent valley below, affording knowledgeable drivers quick access to both areas, much like secret passages between rooms of a house.
the domain of the king county sheriff throughout the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties the entire area was known as the lair of gamblers bootleggers cat-house operators and out-and-out thieves who often used the dark narrow side roads for their illicit commerce
Much of the rural character of the ridge began to change in 1942, when the Port of Seattle accepted a grant from the Civil Aeronautics Administration to build a new airport on top of the ridge. The Seattle area's existing airfield, in the valley below, had originally been built by the Boeing Company, which later turned the field over to the King County government to operate.
But Boeing Field, Boeing's field to Seattle's old-timers, was too low in elevation to handle the large volume of air traffic government visionaries imagined for the Seattle area for the rest of the century. Fog often lay along the Duwamish River, where the Green River met the Black River before emptying into the harbor.
The larger aircraft necessary for profitable commercial flight operations needed some new place to land, preferably above the weather. The ridge, with an average elevation of nearly 138 meters, was perfect. In 1942, earth-moving equipment began tearing out hundreds of acres of trees, shrubbery, and leveling the rolling hills for the new airport's runways.
Evicted in the name of this progress were two rabbit farms, a riding school, a frog ranch, a mushroom farm, a dog kennel, and perhaps 40 residents. By 1945, the airfield was finished. In 1948, construction began to widen Pacific Highway in the area of the airport.
Soon, most of the remaining trees and farms along the highway's route made way for highway-oriented businesses. By the mid-1950s,
Both sides of the road were crowded with gas stations, motels, diners, used car lots, honky-tonk saloons, truck garages, billboards, parking lots, junk stores, gem shops, real estate offices, and the like, all jammed elbow to elbow along the highway's edge in a mad scramble.
Whoa, easy there. Yeah.
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That's I-L-M-A-K-I-A-G-E dot com slash quiz. 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 Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. To skim some of the money of the increasing traffic generated by the larger highway roadway and the airport it served.
The hurdy-gurdy of the highway, its twenty-four-hour-a-day character, the elongated pattern of the virtually unregulated development, and the area's rollicking pasts, soon conspired to give the area atop the ridge the image of a frontier settlement, the natural habitat of hustlers, men on the make, and outright outlaws.
The Strip, with its connotation of Las Vegas-style action, was born. But the dark, narrow roads down to the valley remained essentially unchanged. As Seattle grew in the 1960s and 70s, so did the air traffic to and from the new airport.
At the end of the 1950s, air passengers arriving or departing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, SeaTac, to the locals, had reached 1.6 million. By the end of the 1960s, the annual passenger traffic was up to 4.5 million, and by the end of the 1970s to 9.8 million, or nearly 27,000 people every day.
As the air traffic jumped, so did the highway traffic. By the early 1980s, there were nearly 80,000 vehicles driving the Strip every 24 hours. With the growth of the airport and the expansion of the highway came large hotels. The first wave, represented by the Hyatt House, the Holiday Inn and the Hilton Hotel, arrived in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The 1970s brought the Red Line and the late 1970s the Marriott. Other hotels and scores of smaller motels took root as well.
Virtually all of these facilities catered to the ever-expanding air traffic generated by the airport, most of it composed of single businessmen, temporarily away from home, many on their way to Alaska, the Far East, or their way back from those destinations. Men away from home often do things they would not do otherwise. They drink, sometimes to excess.
Fueled by alcohol, sometimes they go looking for women. Sometimes women go looking for them. In the early 1970s, many Alaska pipeline workers flew into SeaTac for R&R with more spare cash available than they ever had had before, partly because of the strip's sheer volume of traffic, with tens of thousands of people on the move around the clock.
and because of the strip's wide-open reputation, it was perhaps inevitable that prostitution would begin to flourish in the area. By the late 1970s, street prostitutes began appearing on the strip. In contrast to prostitutes who frequented the area's hotels and concentrated on out-of-towners or women working in massage parlors, the streetwalkers worked the highway traffic.
Many were very young, often in their teens. Most were runaways with drug habits. Often they were accompanied by pimps, whom they called their boyfriends. The pimps provided the drugs, handled most of the money,
bought the women their working clothes, and ferried them from city to city on a sort of prostitution circuit that included Tacoma, Portland, Las Vegas, Hollywood, San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., and sometimes Minneapolis and Denver. The circuit meant the women were constantly changing, three weeks or so in one place, then on to the next town.
In the beginning, the business plan was simple. A streetwalker simply staked out a likely location on the side of the road and began hitchhiking or waving at the traffic. A driver would stop. The woman would lean through the window of the vehicle and ask if the driver wanted to go to a party. If the driver said yes, the woman would ask how much he might be willing to spend.
After a bargain was struck, the woman would get into the car, direct the driver to a private spot off the highway, collect the money, and then provide a sexual service, usually oral copulation. This was known as a quote-unquote trick. Then the driver would take the woman back to the highway and leave her to find a new customer, or quote-unquote john.
The price of oral sex varied, but averaged about $30. The best business hours were between 3 and 9 p.m., at the peak of the vehicular motion on the highway. In a profitable day, a streetwalker might earn as much as $300. Most of the money, however, went to pay for drugs provided by the pimps.
To keep the women working even when they were tired, the pimps kept them high on cocaine, amphetamines or heroin, and often a combination of those drugs. The drugs numbed the pain of standing and walking for so many hours on the highway and clouded the mind to any reluctance or anxiety that accompanied getting into strangers' cars. Not every streetwalker had a pimp, however.
Some, like Marcia Chapman, were independent. Often pimps would attempt to capture such women with blandishments or threats, and sometimes the women would succumb. The rape and beating of Chapman, only weeks before her disappearance, may have been one such instance. But Chapman did not give in.
She knew what a pimp was like, and she needed the money for her kids, not some low-life thug. In trying to convince a woman to work for him, a pimp might offer a woman protection, from other pimps, to be sure, but also from Johns bent on robbing or raping them. In actual practice, however, this protection was very limited. Often, when a woman ran into trouble during a trick,
The pimp was in a motel room, cutting drugs or socializing with other pimps. It was unusual for a pimp to keep watch over his quote-unquote hoe, short for whore, as the pimps called the girls they quote-unquote employed, unless the pimp was unsure of his working girl's loyalty. The main thing the pimps were interested in was the girl's income.
If she did not generate enough, or complained about the work, the pimp often terrorized her, sometimes beating her with wire coat hangers, burning her with cigarettes, or inflicting small cuts with a knife. Most women were so frightened of their pimps, they refused to testify against them, or otherwise provide any information about the pimps' activities to anyone.
If a woman reported that she had been beaten, raped or robbed during a trick, the pimp usually shrugged it off as one of the dangers being in the sex trade. While the original clientele of prostitutes on the strip was among traveling men, with the coming of the street workers, a market of local johns also developed.
The locals were usually men who lived in South King County, who worked in the area, down in the valley at Boeing or in Tacoma. After getting off work, such men would drive to the strip, cash their paychecks and start drinking in the taverns along the roadside. Between 5 and 7 p.m., many would start home, see a prostitute waving by the side of the road and pick her up.
By the early 1980s, the number of streetwalkers working the strip had exploded.
At a peak in 1982 and 1983, literally hundreds of women shouted, waved, gestured and pantomimed their wares on the stretch of highway that ran from the beginning of the strip at South 139th Street and extended south to about South 272nd Street, a distance of perhaps 16 kilometers.
The street prostitution problem was compounded enormously by a federally funded Port of Seattle program to acquire and remove thousands of houses under the airport's flight paths north and south of the airport.
Beginning in 1975, the Port of Seattle bought the houses, boarded them up and shut off all power, water and lighting to the old neighborhoods, pending the eventual removal of the houses.
The resulting clear zones of vacant residential lots, overgrown landscapes and boarded-up houses, all under the shrieking blanket of incoming and outgoing airliners, was a perfect place for prostitutes to take their tricks. As it turned out, it was also a perfect place to commit murder.
Combined with the explosive growth in street prostitution in the Sea-Tac area was a growth in narcotics-related crime. Hundreds of teenagers were reported missing by loved ones. Most of them had been swallowed up by drugs and the bad company drugs came with. The police had little chance in finding these kids, and at the time, not much effort was spent doing so either.
One man who did not take this sitting down was a taxi cab named James Michael Tyndall. He had filed a missing persons report for a 17-year-old girl named Giselle Lovorn. The police did little or nothing to find her, so much like in the fantastic film Taxi Driver, James took it upon himself to rescue her.
He had met Lovorn when she was fourteen, and the pair had fallen in love and moved in together in Seattle in the spring of 1982. Lovorn had left the apartment she and Tyndall shared with several others on Saturday afternoon, the 17th of July, two days after Cofield's body had been found in the Green River. To get around, Lovorn usually hitchhiked,
That day she had been headed out to the strip to turn, according to Tyndall's statement to police, three or four tricks. Afterward, she was to meet Tyndall at his airport cab stand. Instead, Lovorn had simply vanished, leaving behind her backpack, clothes, money and cigarettes. She had taken her small clutch purse, the one she used to carry her knife and her condoms, both tools of her trade.
Giselle was just under five feet five, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She weighed less than fifty-four kilos. When police asked for a picture of Giselle, Tyndall gave them a snapshot of a smiling animated Giselle that made her look like a junior high school student. The police had told Tyndall that Giselle probably wasn't missing at all. She was a prostitute, so she had probably simply left Tyndall for some other pimp.
They made it clear the case of her missing was not a priority, to say the least. Tyndall thought if the cops wouldn't do anything, he would. He spent the next two weeks cruising the strip, showing Loveworn's pictures to strangers, haunting cab stands and coffee shops where cabbies, pimps, hookers and cops hung out. Everyone just shook their heads. Tyndall offered a $500 reward to anyone who had information about Giselle.
He told people to, and I quote, just ask for catnip, end quote, using the nickname he used on the streets. By late July, Tyndall had twice heard rumors that Giselle had been kidnapped by two pimps nicknamed Peaches and Pretty Tony, once one of Giselle's johns had called asking for her.
The John said he had seen Giselle downtown that afternoon, sporting a black eye and looking dazed. She hadn't even recognized him, the John said. Then another man told Tyndall that he had seen Giselle in the coffee shop of a downtown hotel, sitting with a pimp. Giselle had dyed her hair black, Tyndall was told. That clinched it.
Tyndall was sure these dirty pimps were holding his Giselle prisoner, just like in the movie Taxi Driver. But when he reported this to police, they said they had no record of any pimps using those names. Then, in the first week of August, Tyndall picked up a pair of black prostitutes in his cab and took them to an address at the Puerto Villa Apartments, the same complex where Marcia Chapman had lived with her children.
On the way, Tyndall overheard the two women talking about Pretty Tony and heard them mention Peaches. He immediately pulled over to the side of the road and said, What do you know about Peaches and Pretty Tony? The women told him Pretty Tony was the top enforcer for the man known as Peaches. Tyndall showed his picture of Giselle to the women. They told him in turn they had not seen her around for a week or so.
In Tyndall's mind, this confirmed his conviction that Pretty Tony and Peaches had Giselle. This he also reported to police, who made it clear they did not really care.
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We'll be right back.
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And so it is that we end part five in the tale of the Green River Killer. Next episode, we'll continue our hunt for America's second most prolific serial killer. In particular, we will explore further the fate of young Giselle. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. Finally, I wish to thank you, dear listener, for listening to
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.
