Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode and you know what happy holidays we really are getting into the season of just cheer and fun and I'm really excited. A reminder if you're watching on YouTube please give this video a thumbs up and also subscribe it just really helps with the algorithm and if you are listening on podcast hi I'm so happy to have you if you can leave me a five-star review that would be great either
Either way, honestly, I'm just happy you're here. So let's get into it. For this week's episode and next week's, I'm taking a look at some of America's most destructive serial killers. We live in a world today where people have many things about themselves that define who they are. Mom, artist, dancer, wife, whatever.
In 1982, a young woman named Wendy Lee Cofield was, like so many vulnerable women, forever robbed of the chance to build an identity beyond sex worker and beyond the first known victim of the Green River Killer. The world has forgotten that Wendy Cofield was a teenager, only 16 years old, literally a child,
And she hadn't lived enough years to overcome and develop beyond her limitations. And what some people, like her own mother, described as her choices.
But that Wendy had become a sex worker wasn't a choice in the way we typically think about choices. You may see it differently when you learn that growing up, Wendy and her destitute single mother had so little money that they sometimes had to live in tents, picking blackberries so they could sell them and use that money to buy food. When that's your life, you have zero safety net.
So you go to school without having a secure, loving home to return to. And your performance in school probably isn't going to be the same as your classmate who lives in a two-story suburban home. Your academic performance is going to suffer because of the stress and anxiety and lack of stability, the lack of foundation. And
And if you're in a public school classroom with 30 or more other students, your problems may not matter to overworked teachers and overworked faculty. So you'll get Fs on your tests. You'll get bullied by the kids who see your weakness. And sometime, even by teachers and faculty, you'll be made to feel like a misfit.
And suddenly your broken, unstable home life becomes the lesser of two evils because it's the devil you know. And eventually you look to break free, just as our young 16-year-old Wendy did when she dropped out of junior high school and ran away from home. Of course, without money, Wendy didn't get very far and ended up returning home and then running away again, getting from point A to point C by hitchhiking and then returning home again.
One day, she returned to her mother looking like she'd been in an accident. She looked, as her mother described it, disheveled and upset. That's when Wendy revealed to her mom that one of the men she hitched a ride with had raped her. Wendy was learning what a dangerous and merciless world it could be out there if you were a vulnerable young woman alone and on the skids.
She enrolled in a continuation school so she could get back on track toward her high school diploma after this. But that derailed quickly when Wendy was arrested for stealing a neighbor's food stamps, which just shows how dire her situation was. Before long, Wendy ran away once again and began turning tricks to generate enough income to get by and feed herself. And then, as before, she returned back to her mother, her mother, her name's Virginia, who'd had Wendy when she was barely out of her teens herself.
She had grown up in a similar set of circumstances. Virginia came from a family of alcoholics for whom her welfare and her very existence were like an afterthought. She had done time in juvenile hall and now Wendy was doing time in juvenile hall. Wendy was just trying to do her best with the hands she was dealt. But once she was in the juvenile system, it was only a short step from there to being placed in a foster home.
By this point, Wendy, who was a teenager, just had a lot of trouble dealing with any kind of structured environment. When she was granted a 24-hour pass to visit her grandfather on July 8th, 1982, she did not return to the foster home. It looked like she had, once again, run away. But this time, Wendy would never return home. A week later, it was July 15th, a bright summer day in King County, Washington.
Two young boys on summer break were riding their bikes across Peck Bridge over the Green River, about 25 miles outside of Seattle, when they stopped midway and looked over the railing down into the water. And what they saw was something they would never forget for the rest of their lives. It was the dead, nude body of a woman, snagged on a rock in the river, directly beneath them.
She had a pair of jeans, underpants, and a shirt knotted tightly around her neck. Officers from the nearby town of Kent were called out to the scene, along with the coroner, to retrieve the body. The young woman's fingerprints were run through the database, and they came back to Wendy Lee Caulfield. She had been strangled to death before being dumped in the river at just 16 years old. She was someone who would later be described in news reports as a known prostitute.
And perhaps this is why her murder initially received no coverage. But little could anyone have predicted at the time, Wendy's murder would be the first among dozens and dozens of murders committed by the same man. A dangerous man with a broken brain. A man who preyed on society's most vulnerable and who assumed that no one would notice or care if these women disappeared.
It was exactly one month later, on August 15, 1981, that authorities in King County, Washington, first realized they had a major problem on their hands. That afternoon, a 41-year-old recreational rafter named Robert Ainsworth climbed into his inflatable rubber raft and began drifting down the Green River.
this sounds familiar it's because it's the same river wendy had been found in robert had been on this river many times before his hobby was collecting discarded junk he believed in the old expression one man's trash is another man's treasure so for him that's what he was looking for treasure he liked to drift on the water and scan the riverbed below for old bottles
and midway downstream, Robert was peering down into the water when his eyes were met with a startling surprise. It was the expressionless face of a woman, seemingly staring back up at him through the surface of the river.
His first thought was, that's definitely a mannequin. That was the most logical explanation. But as he tried to dislodge this mannequin from whatever it was snagged on, his raft overturned and he slid into the river. And that's when he realized that what he thought was a mannequin was in fact a dead woman.
And as he recoiled in horror and turned to swim away from it, he saw yet another dead body bobbing up to the surface. It was like a nightmare or a scene from a horror movie. I mean, imagine this. The kind of experience most of us will luckily never have in our lifetimes. In a panic, Robert paddled to the bank of the river and sat on the edge, trying to collect his thoughts and figure out what to do next.
He was all alone. His raft was in the river with two dead women, and he was shell-shocked. Before long, a man and his two kids were bicycling into the area, so he flagged them down and urged them to summon the police. By mid-afternoon, King County Sheriff's deputies were on the scene, blocking off part of the road and sealing the area to process it for evidence and recover the bodies. Homicide detectives arrived a short time later, and as one of them was combing the grassy strip above the river's embankment,
he stumbled upon, or I guess tripped over, more than he bargained for. It was the body of a third woman, partially nude with a pair of blue pants wrapped tightly around her neck. Detective Dave Reichardt got the call at his home and as he made his way down to the Green River, a feeling of dread seized up his insides because Wendy Caulfield's wasn't the only murder on his mind as he drove down to the scene.
Only three days earlier, on August 12th, the body of a 23-year-old sex worker named Deborah Lynn Bonner had been found stretched across a sandbar in that same area. If you're keeping track, that is now five women in this area. Deborah had last been seen on the evening of Sunday, July 25th, leaving a motel on Pacific Highway South to catch some dates, as she put it.
By the time she was found, she had likely been in the water for nearly three weeks, making it hard to determine exactly how she had died. But because of the absence of water in her lungs, it narrowed the possibilities down to either suffocation or strangulation. Authorities were able to identify Deborah easily because, like Wendy, she had been previously arrested for prostitution.
In fact, twice in the month leading up to her death. And now here were three more women, all known sex workers, who had all been strangled and dumped in the same area. They were soon identified as 31-year-old Marcia Chapman, a mother of three, 17-year-old Cynthia Hines, and 16-year-old Opal Mills.
Chapman and Hines had both been weighted down by rocks, and they also both had small pyramid-shaped rocks with sharp pointed edges lodged inside of them, wedged so deeply and firmly, in fact, that they required surgical removal by the pathologist at autopsy. Why had they been put there? It was such an odd quirk, something that criminal profilers like to consider a signature.
and King County detectives had little doubt that all five women were probably murdered by the same man. And although Wendy Caulfield's and Deborah Bonner's deaths had not been reported on, with the body count having quickly risen to five, Monday, August 16th, 1982 would be the first day newspapers covered what was now being called the Green River Killings.
Now, the Seattle-Tacoma area was no stranger to serial murder, an age-old phenomenon that had only just been given that name in 1982, prior to which the term serial killer had yet to be coined. But Seattle-Tacoma had dealt with, less than a decade earlier, what the news media and authorities at the time were calling the Ted murders, because the perpetrator was a reportedly handsome, charming young man who was overheard introducing himself to some of his victims as Ted.
And that Ted turned out to be Ted Bundy, the poster child for serial murder. And some of the investigators who hunted Bundy several years earlier now found themselves on the trail of a new serial killer, the Green River Killer, one who might even be more difficult to catch because of the kind of victims he was targeting and how hard it is to get sex workers to talk to police.
Which, by the way, this killer, by the end of 1982, would kill at least nine more women.
Only with the word now out that a serial killer was preying upon the sex workers who worked the Sea-Tac Strip just south of Seattle, the killer was getting better at hiding the bodies of the women he killed. Women whose disappearances were flying under the radar because of their lifestyles. So between the discovery of the three women on August 15th and New Year's, only one additional body would be found. That of 17-year-old Giselle Laverne.
whose remains were found on September 25th, 1982, in a wooded area where she was known to take her dates, or her johns. Giselle had last been seen on July 17th, a week after Wendy Cofield disappeared, leaving her apartment to turn some tricks, as she told her roommate. And there she was, two months later, decomposing beneath an apple tree with a pair of men's socks wrapped tightly around her neck with a stick.
Giselle had been safety conscious and hated working the highway and getting picked up by strange men. At the time she disappeared, she had been building a list of regular clients she hoped she could just live off of so she wouldn't have to keep getting into the vehicle of strangers. By the time her remains were found, the media was using the term Green River Killer to describe the unknown man responsible for the increasing number of deaths and disappearances of sex workers along the Sea-Tac Strip.
The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, the one that was featured in the Netflix series "Mine Hunter" and inspired "Silence of the Lambs," was the originator of the term "serial killer" and also, I mean, "criminal minds." They popularized the technique of criminal profiling to help identify this kind of offender.
so in september of 82 they were consulted to drop a profile of the kind of man the green river killer would most likely be because at this time authorities had zero suspects the man behind the murders was a total blank a silhouette shrouded in mystery and there was a fear that he would keep on killing so there was an urgent need to figure out who this man was and catch him
Detectives in King County formed a task force, which included young detective Dave Reichart and Bob Keppel, who was instrumental in the Ted Bundy case and knew his way around a serial murder investigation. The men on the task force agreed that whoever the killer was, he would likely return to the area where he dumped the first five victims that were found, either to dump more bodies or just to relive the experience.
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In the meantime, investigators began working the social networks of the victims, and it quickly became apparent that these victims likely knew one another. Wendy Caulfield was friends with Opal Mills, and Deborah Bonner was friends with Marcia Chapman, and Cynthia Hines was friends with both Mills and Chapman. And if you listened to this week's episode over on my other show, Murder With My Husband, these cases are verily similar, so make sure to go check that one out.
But for investigators, this meant that whoever killed these women was probably a regular customer on the Sea-Tac Strip and had probably had prior contact with these women. Investigators also learned that about a month before her murder, Deborah Lynn Bonner approached a friend in tears, terrified of a man named Larry Matthews, whom she claimed had threatened her and was following her.
So they tracked him down to a restaurant where he lunged at one of the detectives with a knitting needle before being subdued and hauled in for questioning. But he had nothing to share, nothing to offer. He didn't know nothing and he didn't kill nobody. Deborah Bonner never heard of her. A search warrant was executed on his house and hours of painstakingly going through every item in the home yielded nothing until they reached the basement.
That's where they found a pair of handcuffs suspended from the ceiling as though for binding and torturing someone. Traces of what appeared to be dried blood were found on them. The substance that looked like blood was swabbed and bagged so it could be sent to the crime lab and analyzed. One thing that authorities in cases like the Green River investigation keep their radar out for is any individual who might seem over eager to help or offer their assistance.
It's happened often enough that the killer will present themselves as a helpful citizen, joining in search parties or offering up their theories as a way to divert any potential suspicion away from them or to insert themselves into the investigation so they can stay on top of it. And one such individual who had already reached out to the Green River Task Force multiple times was a 44-year-old taxi driver named Melvin Foster.
He told police that he had worked the SeaTac strip for years and had become friends with many of the sex workers who also worked the strip. In fact, he even knew most of the victims. This is what he revealed to police. Detective Reichart polled Melvin's background and found that he'd served time in prison on two separate occasions. This was back in his youth. One day, Melvin called the King County Sheriff's Department and suggested that investigators may want to be looking at taxi cab drivers as potential suspects.
Which is interesting because Melvin himself was a taxi cab driver. And considering that he openly admitted to knowing multiple Green River victims, that made him the most likely suspect among taxi drivers. And detectives immediately turned their focus onto him. This is while also still looking into our man with the handcuffs in his basement.
So when they interviewed some of the teenagers who were known to hang around the Sea-Tac Strip and who were acquainted with Melvin, they described Melvin as a guy who liked to help out and look after street kids by giving them money. And sometimes he'd give them money in exchange for sex. But when he was interviewed by detectives, Melvin denied this and argued that anyone who would have sex with street kids was, in his words, a pervert. He only hung out with the street kids, he said, because he wanted to help them.
Earlier in the year, however, he had been engaged to marry a 17-year-old runaway, and now he was pursuing a 23-year-old barmaid. So he seemed to like him really young. And about his own criminal record, Melvin was quick to point out that he hadn't had any trouble with the law in over 15 years.
Detectives weren't convinced Melvin was telling the truth, though, and he had fit the FBI's behavioral profile very closely. He had a criminal history. He had a history of troubled relationships with women. He was known to present a tough guy persona. He was a Seattle resident who had familiarity with some of the areas where victims were found. He knew a lot of sex workers, including some that had been found murdered.
He had aspirations to work with or alongside law enforcement, as he'd claimed to have been an unpaid intelligence operative in the past, and he inserted himself into the Green River investigation. And in the coming weeks, as three more sex workers were reported missing, focus on Melvin Foster intensified.
He was brought in for a follow-up interview in which he was questioned for several hours. Eventually, he became contentious and accused the detectives of harassing him and making him a suspect when all he was trying to do was help out.
He volunteered to take a polygraph test, and when one was administered, the analysis of the results showed that he had lied on four separate occasions. Melvin volunteered to allow his home and vehicles to be searched, and during the search, authorities found some lingerie, which Melvin claimed belonged to his ex-wife, but nothing else that was incriminating.
Still, Detective Reichart told Melvin that he believed he was responsible for the Green River murders. At this point, Melvin demanded an attorney, but Reichart told him it was too late in the evening to call one. He would have to wait until morning. But in the meantime, he was placing Melvin Foster under arrest. Not for murder, but for unpaid parking tickets. So Melvin spent the night in jail, and after he was released, he was taken back to the interrogation room and voluntarily submitted hair and blood samples.
And I have to say, although he may have looked like a pretty good suspect at the time, Melvin Foster didn't appear to be hiding anything. He seemed eager to clear his name, welcoming a polygraph test, searches of his home and vehicles. He surrendered biological samples. If he was, in fact, the Green River Killer, he must have been pretty confident that nothing he was providing would link him to any of the crimes.
But then at least one of those gestures of cooperation had backfired because he failed the polygraph test. So I don't know. But his willingness to cooperate, you could interpret that in multiple ways. But it seems to me like he was being transparent and maybe had nothing to do with the murders. But the King County Sheriff's Department weren't so sure. And so they put him under surveillance immediately after releasing him.
And this did not go unnoticed by Melvin, who had become fed up by this point and decided to go to the media and declare himself the main suspect in the Green River killings, inviting reporters to follow the cops who were following him. In his mind, this must have seemed like a clever way to turn the tables on the police. But what it did instead was tarnish his reputation, which was now soiled by the stigma of being a serial murder suspect.
Police executed an additional and more comprehensive search of Melvin's property, all but tearing down his house. By this point, Melvin had stopped cooperating with police, refusing to answer any further questions without his attorney present. And the surveillance and searches had cost the department in excess of $100,000. So the sheriff's department began to scale back their focus on Melvin to pursue other avenues with nothing coming up.
Melvin's hair and fiber samples from his home and vehicles matched nothing for many of the victims, even though he remained their prime suspect. All the while, women continued to disappear from the Sea-Tac Strip.
From September 15th through the end of October, seven more women went missing. 18-year-old Mary Bridget Meehan, 15-year-old Deborah Lorraine Estes, 16-year-old Linda Jane Rule, 23-year-old Denise Bush, 16-year-old Shonda Summers, 18-year-old Shirley Marie Sherrill, and 13-year-old Christy Lynn Vorak. And you may notice that more than half of these women were in fact minors, children.
Again, this fact tends to get lost amid descriptions of them as, quote, prostitutes, as they were in the media at the time, or sex workers, as we call them now. And 13-year-old Christy Vorak was not even known to have exchanged sex for money, though she was a runaway and known to live on the streets. She was last seen at a bus depot in Seattle on Halloween night, and she remains missing to this day. The remaining six of those missing women would turn up sooner or later.
Meanwhile, sex workers in the Seattle-Tacoma area kept disappearing, and April 1983 was a record month for the Green River Killer. Between April 10th and April 30th, five women went missing over a three-week period.
Gail Lynn Matthews, 23, went missing on April 10th. 19-year-old Andrea Childers on the 14th and 17-year-old Sandra K. Gabbert and 16-year-old Kimmy K. Pitzer both went missing the same day on April 17th.
By this point, sex workers throughout the region had the Green River killings on their minds and they were all scared. They were working in teams and taking whatever precautions they could think to take. And one of these women were 18-year-old Marie Malver, whose story was going to be important in unfolding this case. She was a sex worker who felt safe and secure because her boyfriend, Robert Woods, had been accompanying her whenever she went out.
making sure to follow whatever vehicles she entered to make sure nothing seemed amiss. Basically a bodyguard. And then he would wait for her to make sure she returned safely. On April 30th of 1983, he was out on the Pacific Highway South with Marie near the Three Bears Motel when a dark colored pickup truck pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.
Robert watched as Marie walked up to it and began chatting with the driver, an average-looking white guy in his 30s. Marie nodded and got into the vehicle, which then began driving away. Robert got into his car and followed his girlfriend and the truck a short distance. The truck then turned east onto South 216th Street, and Robert lost track of it. Marie never returned and never contacted him or any of her family again.
Several days passed and Robert went to the police and reported Marie missing. He told police that he'd last seen her getting into a dark colored pickup truck with a light colored primer spot on the passenger door and a camper shell. And Robert left feeling less than optimistic that any vigorous effort would be made to find his girlfriend.
So he went to Marie's father, Jose, and the two men got into the car and began scouring the neighborhood going street to street, looking for that pickup that Robert had seen Marie get into before she disappeared. And remarkably, after about an hour, they found it parked in front of a single story home on 32nd place in SeaTac, just east of Des Moines, Washington, where Marie lived.
and just half a mile away from the intersection where Marie was last seen. Robert wrote down the license number and address, and a short time later, he contacted police detectives in Des Moines and gave them this information. The next day, a detective with the Des Moines Police Department visited the home and found a man standing in the front yard. The man identified himself as the owner of the house, and his name was Gary Leon Ridgeway.
During their brief conversation, Gary stood against the fence of his yard and told the detectives he worked as a truck painter at the Kenworth Truck Factory. And when asked about the missing woman, Ridgway said he had no idea who Marie Malver was. He never met her, he never heard of her, and he was sorry he couldn't be of more assistance. And with that, the police detective went about his way and Gary Ridgway went about his business.
the business of choking to death Seattle's vulnerable sex workers. Because that's right, Gary Ridgway was the murderer. He was the Green River Killer.
What the detective had failed to notice during his conversation with Ridgway was that Ridgway's arm was marked up and down with scratches. Scratches that Marie Malver had inflicted as she fought for her life while Ridgway held her in a chokehold until she died. Ridgway had leaned up against his fence and concealed those scratches behind one of the slats.
Had the detectives asked Ridgeway to step inside the house or step outside the yard, maybe he'd have noticed the scratches and Ridgeway would have immediately become suspect number one. Especially if they'd probed Ridgeway's background then and found that he'd been arrested in May of 1982 for soliciting an undercover vice cop posing as a sex worker. Or that back in 1980, he had been accused of choking a sex worker while having sex with her in his truck.
in an area where years later the Green River Killer's victims would be found. Needless to say, his brush with the detective questioning him about Marie was a close call and Ridgeway realized that. It spooked him. So much so that after the detective left, he went into his garage, got some battery acid, and poured it onto his arm to conceal the scratches, literally burning away the evidence. Then he went into the woods where he had dumped Marie's body, dug a shallow grave, and buried her.
and after that he went right on killing at the same clip the day before he was questioned he had already killed again mere days after marie he'd picked up a 21 year old woman named carol ann christiansen had sex with her strangled her and left her in a wooded area when she was found a week later it was evident that her killer had washed her and redressed her her clothing was on backward and her only remaining shoe was on the wrong foot
And then after dumping her, he placed two dead trout on her upper torso, an empty wine bottle across her stomach, and a raw sausage on her hands. When Ridgeway was finally apprehended, spoiler alert, he admitted that he did this simply because he had these items in his kitchen and he wanted to throw off investigators. He would go on to kill four more women throughout May 1983. It was a busy month for Ridgeway as he was on strike from work and had a lot of time to kill and women.
He killed three in June, one in August, three in September, three in October, one in November, one in December, and then one in February of 1984, and one in March. And that's when the Green River Killer Task Force became aware of Gary. Learning about Ridgeway, the task force decided he was someone they should talk to. In 1984, they interviewed Ridgeway and he agreed to take a polygraph test.
Unlike Melvin Foster, the taxi cab driver who had been the prime suspect two years earlier, Ridgeway passed the polygraph. He claimed he had never killed anyone. Investigators spoke to Ridgeway's ex-wife, who revealed that Ridgeway used to like scavenging for spare auto parts at illegal dump sites. And when asked to show the investigators what area Ridgeway liked to scavenge, it turned out that many of them were near where Green River victims had been dumped.
Ridgeway's photo was also shown to various sex workers who worked the strip, and many recognized him as a regular customer who cruised the street quite frequently. So the task force was not ready to abandon their interest in Ridgeway just because he passed a polygraph.
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Let's get back into the episode. It's at this point that his killing began to slow down. And around the same time, Ridgway typed up a letter anonymously and weirdly without a single use of the space bar and mailed it to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which had covered the Green River killing extensively.
In the letter, whose header read, What You Don't Know About the Green River Man, Don't Throw Away, and was signed, Call Me Fred, Ridgway offered his theories and his own psychological and behavioral profile on the killer. It was largely designed to mislead, obviously, because it contained theories like the killer smoked cigarettes, which Ridgway didn't. But what Ridgway did do was he planted cigarette butts at the body dump sites to make it seem like the killer smoked.
And although Ridgeway himself was not a very smart man in the traditional sense, he had a low IQ. He was very shrewd at being a killer. So before anyone had any idea who the Green River Killer was, it was easy for some to mistake him for some kind of genius, simply because he was good at evading capture. And I want to mention, the 1982 profile from the FBI did not, in fact, perfectly fit Ridgeway to a tee.
And one of the country's most respected profilers analyzed the call me Fred letter that Ridgeway had sent to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and concluded that it had not been sent by the killer. Meanwhile, some of the brightest minds in behavioral science were at the time turning to Ted Bundy himself as a consultant on the Green River investigation. At this point, Gary Ridgeway was at the top of the task force suspect list, which
But none of this was sufficient to arrest him. It was all purely circumstantial. And the murders had also seemingly stopped, although the skeletal remains of suspected victims were continuing to turn up. Over a dozen set of remains were found in 1984 alone and five sets of remains in 1985.
Also in 1985, Gary Ridgway, who was twice divorced with one young son, met a woman named Judith Mawson and in 1988 they married. Despite the fact that he was a number one suspect in a serial murder investigation, Judith loved him and saw Gary as a kind, gentle man. And it...
I have to mention that like at this point, everyone knew he was a suspect in his immediate life and they kind of just joked about it. Like no one was taking it seriously. So it seemed like the murders had stopped. And then on November 30th, 2001, exactly 22 years ago tomorrow, in fact, Ridgeway's coworkers and his wife, Judith, and his then 26 year old son, Matthew, were in for a shock when police showed up at Ridgeway's workplace and arrested him.
charging him with four of the 49 women that the Green River Task Force believed were all killed by the same man. When Ridgeway's manager first pulled him away from the planting line, his coworkers joked among themselves, "It must be that Green River killer thing again." One even joked that maybe his DNA finally matched. Little did they know in that moment, their joke was pretty on point.
DNA that had been recovered from the bodies of Marcia, Cynthia, Opal, and Carol had been sent to the crime lab earlier that year, and that DNA profile was matched to the saliva samples Ridgeway had given to investigators in 1987. And I think it's interesting to point out that no one who personally knew Ridgeway could reconcile him with the notorious Green River Killer. He wasn't known to have a temper or even mood swings. He didn't talk about sex. He didn't speak ill of women.
one woman who lived in the neighborhood found him so endearing she always wanted to hug him when she saw him he was good to his son he read religious books he was forgetful according to his son and often had to write down reminders that he had to pay a bill on a certain day or needed to run an errand he was a frugal guy who drank boxed wine shopped for bargains at swap meets and went dumpster diving so gary never gave a single hint to anyone that he was the green river killer
Ridgway at first denied responsibility and pleaded not guilty on all four counts of murder that he had been charged with.
As his trial date drew closer, three new murder charges were made in March of 2003, connected to the murders of Wendy Caulfield, Deborah Bonner, and Deborah Estes. Microscopic paint spheres that had been found on these three victims were matched to spray paint that had been used at the Kenworth Trucking Company in the early 1980s. This was paint that Ridgway would have used daily. As it became a
increasingly unlikely that Ridgeway would be acquitted and that he would probably be given the death penalty, he and his attorneys were approached by King County prosecutors and offered a plea deal. The district attorney was offering to take the death penalty off the table in exchange for a life sentence under the condition that Ridgeway not just plead guilty in the murders of all 49 women, but
but also confess to any murders not previously linked to him and provide as comprehensive and factual account of each crime as his memory allowed. And most importantly, lead investigators to the bodies of the 10 or so women whose remains were never found.
Ridgway and his attorneys considered the deal and accepted it. From August through September of 2003, Ridgway was able to lead police to the final resting places of Pammy Avent, who disappeared from Rainier Valley, Washington on October 26, 1983, when she was 15, April Dawn Buttram, who disappeared on April 18, 1983, at the age of 16, and Mary Malver.
He also led police to the remains of a young victim whose name and the circumstances of her murder he could not recall. That victim remains unidentified to date. In his interviews with detectives and the psychologist, Ridgway admitted to having had violent fantasies and thoughts since childhood. Like many serial killers, he was a bedwetter in his teens and he had memories of his mother bathing him and washing his genitals.
Ridgway's mother was known as a domineering brash woman who once cracked a dinner plate over her husband's head as they sat at the dinner table. Ridgway revealed that he used to have sexual fantasies about his mother and he would also fantasize about stabbing her.
He admitted that when he was 16 years old, he had approached a six-year-old boy who was playing alone and proceeded to stab that kid for no reason whatsoever other than to just see how it would feel to stab someone. Ridgway also admitted to once having brought his seven-year-old son along with him when he picked up Giselle Lovern in 1982, brought her into a wooded area, and left his son behind in the pickup truck while he led Giselle into the woods and
and then choked her to death. Ridgeway admitted that he took the victim's jewelry and would often leave the jewelry inside the ladies' bathrooms at the Kenworth Trucking Plant where he worked
and he'd get a kick out of thinking about female co-workers finding the jewelry and then wearing it around the office. And Ridgeway also admitted to having sex with many of his victims after they were dead, even returning to where he had dumped their bodies, sometimes a day or longer after, to have sex with their bodies. In November of 2003, Ridgeway formally entered a guilty plea to 48 counts of aggravated murder.
and the following month he was sentenced to spend the remainder of his life in prison. Gary Ridgway was 52 years old when he was arrested in 2001, nearly 20 years after his first known slaying. He's currently 74 years old, serving out his sentence in Walla Walla.
In 2010, the skull of Rebecca Marrero, Ridgway's fourth known victim, who disappeared in December of 1982, was found by hikers in Auburn, Washington. This was because Ridgway couldn't remember where he had left all of his victims. Of the nearly 50 women that Ridgway was charged with killing, two remain unidentified to date.
And that, while three confirmed and four suspected, Green River victims remain missing. And the true number of women Ridgeway killed is believed to be higher than 48. The Green River investigation was one of the largest and costliest serial murder investigations in U.S. history. And by sparing Ridgeway the death penalty, the state of Washington avoided the additional massive expenses of mounting a trial. If you're interested in serial murder cases and want to continue seeing them covered on Binge, let me know.
And next week, continuing our theme, we'll be looking at another highly destructive serial killer from the extreme opposite end of the country, South Florida. And not that there should be any such competition, but this was a guy who was far darker, scarier, and more evil than Ridgeway. We'll talk about that next week. So until then, happy binging.