Gary Ridgway | Green River Killer | Mental Health & Personality

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel Lois's doctor grande today's question asks if I can analyze the mental health and personality characteristics of Gary Ridgway also known as the Green River Killer so the people I'm talking about in this video of course are real people so just a reminder I'm not diagnosing anybody only speculating about what could be happening in a situation like this now Gary Ridgway was one of most prolific serial killers in the United States history it's believed he killed at least 71 people although the actual number could be substantially more he was eventually convicted of 49 murders so first I'll go through the timeline then look at his background and then get into the mental health and personality characteristics so this case starts on July 15 1982 the body of 16 year old Wendy Lee Cofield was found in the Green River in King County Washington from August 13th to August 15th four more bodies of young women were found around the Green River all the victims were believed to be prostitutes the unknown perpetrator was referred to as the Green River Killer on August 16th the Green River task force was formed to try to apprehend the killer now the police made no progress until April 30 1983 this is the first time the police became aware of Gary Ridgway the boyfriend of a missing woman Marie Malvar watched her get into a dark-colored pickup truck as she was soliciting on the street he noticed that the driver of the truck and Marie seemed to be in an argument he followed the pickup but then lost it at a traffic light the boyfriend never saw Marie again less than a week after that incident the boyfriend was with Marie's father and brother and they spotted the same truck near where the boyfriend had lost contact with it before they followed the truck until they arrived at a house and then they called the police the police arrived and spoke with the owner of the house Gary Ridgway Ridgeway denied ever having seen Marie Malvar and satisfied with this the police left and never followed up and the boyfriends description of the vehicle and the driver was not very detailed now not long after this a witness described a similar truck that was used in an abduction of another prostitute the witness called the police but his information and the prior incident with the truck were never connected by the police now to put a little context around this at this time the police had another suspect he was a taxi driver he knew five of the victims so they were fairly confident they actually had the right person now eventually of course they couldn't make a case against this taxi driver and instead they arrested him for unpaid parking tickets the police actually had contact with Ridgeway several times the police reported that Ridgeway was generally cooperative he admitted to soliciting and assaulting prostitutes which actually made him seem more believable to them he admitted he had contact with one of the victims and eventually he passed a polygraph now this gets into kind of a pseudo-scientific nonsense around polygraph machines the police really believed that these machines were reliable and valid and of course many still believe us to this day it's unfortunate that this belief actually resulted in Ridgeway being dismissed as a suspect so just one of the many dangers of pseudoscience now we moved to November 20 1983 the victim count has increased to 11 and the police believed that all the people were killed by the same individual so they're making progress in terms of how they conceptualize this killer On January 16 1984 after several criticisms of the investigation the Green River task force was put under new leadership this brings us to December 1984 here we see the number of victims has gone up to 42 one victim escaped and provided valuable information to the police including the fact that the attacker had a Kenworth trucking company ID this of course led the police to Ridgeway again and he said the victim bit him first and the victim did not pursue charges so we see a missed opportunity here in terms of catching Ridgeway now moving to April 8 1987 the number of victims has gone up to 46 the police now strongly suspect that Ridgeway is the killer they search his house his locker at work and his vehicles they seize hundreds of items including ropes carpet fibers plastic tarps samples of paint and even his financial records nothing that they collect is tied to the crime other than the fact that Ridgeway was the last person who was seen with two of the victims it didn't seem important at the time but the police also collected a sample of saliva by the end of 1990 the Green River task force was essentially disbanded there was still one full-time and one part-time detective who were working on the case but other than that there weren't any more resources being dedicated by 1991 the task force had spent over 15 million dollars now he moved to March of 2001 the Washington State Crime Lab starts using a new method of DNA testing by September DNA matched the crime scenes was connected to the DNA and that saliva collected from Gary Ridgway now we moved to November 16 2001 Ridgeway is arrested for attempting to pick up an undercover officer who was posing as a prostitute he was released November 30 2001 Ridgeway is arrested and charged with four counts of aggravated murder in the first degree the DNA evidence links him to three of those four victims on March 27 2003 we see that Ridgeway is charged with three additional counts of murder so there are 42 cases that remain uncharged as there was little or no evidence connecting Ridgeway to those crimes this fact was an important motivator for what happened next we moved at June 13 2003 the King County prosecutor enters into a plea agreement with Gary Ridgway the prosecution will not seek the death penalty but Ridgeway will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and he will not be allowed to appeal his convictions Ridgeway would plead guilty to all the murders he committed he would be truthful and provide information about all his crimes including the locations of all undiscovered remains of victims he would answer any questions during interviews conducted by investigators and if he was found to be responsible for a crime that he failed to disclosed he could be executed the prosecution did not want to have 42 cases that remained unsolved even if they had a strong feeling that Ridgeway was responsible right they wanted a more definitive answer it was their belief that the families of the victims would like to see Ridgeway held accountable for all of the murders he committed not just a few where there was sufficient evidence to charge him now this has been a hotly debated decision it's worth noting that Ridgeway did identify several cases in which he was not a suspect so the family members of those victims did get some sort of closure and they never would have had that without the plea agreement November 5 2003 Ridgeway who was 54 at the time pleads guilty to 48 counts of first degree murder in December he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole moving to December 21 2010 another victim's skull was found in a ravine in Auburn Washington her name was Rebecca Marrero she was last seen December of 1982 but was not reported missing until July of 1984 Ridgeway had already confessed to her murder but the charges were not pursued because they could not find her body and they already had him on 48 counts of murder now it makes sense that the prosecution felt secure here because again with 48 convictions Ridgeway wasn't going to go anywhere so that last conviction was something that they didn't need to make sure that he was going to remain in prison moving to February 7 2011 Ridgeway is charged with Maria's murder and 11 days later he pleads guilty now of course this doesn't change anything in terms of the sentence but it does allow closure for this case now moving to Gary ridgway's background we see a lot of information in this background that connects to his behavior later on Ridgeway was born in February of 1949 his family moved to King County Washington when he was 11 ridgway's mother was dominant and aggressive and his father was submissive she reportedly broke plates over her husband's head and he didn't react to that ridgeway's father introduced Gary to the idea of philia his father worked in a mortuary when Ridgeway was young and he would talk about how his coworker would engage in that behavior this became one of ridgeway's fantasies as a teenager he liked the idea because there were no feelings involved and it was difficult to get caught Ridgeway was a chronic bed wetter when he was young his mother would be very offended by his behavior she would have a strong reaction to it she would scold him and she would give him a bath paying attention to what she referred to as the dirtiest parts evidently she was barely dressed during these baths of Ridgeway she maintained terrible boundaries with him often talking about her sexual behavior Ridgeway developed an attraction for her he fantasized about assaulting her and killing her Ridgeway did not do well in school he killed animals including a cat that he suffocated he set fires and he obsessed over true crime literature after he was arrested he confessed to drowning a boy a lake when he was young now this couldn't be confirmed but there is some evidence that this could have actually happened he also stabbed a boy in the woods one day after school interestingly he was never arrested for this crime police would later identify the victim and they contacted him the victim supported ridgeway's account of this crime he said he was taken to the hospital and recovered but no one ever caught Ridgeway which of course the police knew at that time despite being held back to grades Ridgeway did eventually graduate high school in 1969 his IQ was thought to be in the low 80s that same year he entered the Navy in 1970 he married his first wife he spent some time in the Philippines as part of his service in the Navy and he claims this is when he first dated prostitutes while Ridgeway was overseas his wife started having an affair upon his return to King County in July of 1971 his wife requested a divorce now some accounts actually report that Ridgeway requested the divorce but either way the couple divorced shortly after that in August 1971 Ridgeway started working as a truck painter at a Kenworth plant he would keep this job for 30 years Ridgeway married again in 1973 and had a son in 1975 his second wife reported that Ridgeway was interested in bondage and liked to have sex outdoors she noticed that he would often be out late into the evening and eventually he stopped trying to explain this behavior when they would walk together in the woods he would like to hide from her and then sneak up behind her and scare her he took pride in his ability to walk without making noise at one point he choked her using his forearm and upper arm they separated in 1980 and divorced about a year later she took custody of her son Ridgeway contemplated killing her because he had to pay child support Ridgeway bought a house in King County and other than the brief period when he had some renters he lived there alone until 1985 he would move twice more before his arrest in 2001 now during this period early to mid 80s he dated quite a bit and frequently so assited prostitutes he started developing a rage for them and reported being disgusted at them now he was engaged to one woman during that time period but she broke up with him after she met someone else in 1985 Ridgeway met the woman who had become his third wife she moved in a few months later after they met and they were married in 1988 they remained married until 2002 so now moving to the mental health and personality analysis I'll start with the five factor model also look at psychopathy and narcissism and then take a special look at conscientiousness after that I'll provide a few other points that really indicate how unusual this case was so looking at the five factor model I remember the five factors to the acronym ocean openness to experience conscientiousness extraversion agreeableness and neuroticism so with Ridgeway we see low-to-mid openness high conscientiousness mid-range extraversion low-to-mid agreeableness and low neuroticism so moving to psychopathy psychopathy has two different factors factor 1 and factor 2 sometimes called primary and secondary psychopathy so with primary psychopathy we see characteristics like being a pathological liar being manipulative having superficial charm being callous or unemotional so lacking empathy and lacking guilt or a more we also see grandiosity with this factor but that doesn't seem to be too strongly connected to Ridgeway moving to secondary psychopathy in terms of what's associated with Ridgeway we see sensation-seeking and committing crimes many of the other characteristics of this type of psychopathy don't seem to have a strong connection to Ridgeway especially to the way he was later in his career for example impulsivity irresponsibility no long term goals a parasitic lifestyle and failing to control behavior so again those don't seem strongly tied to his later behavior psychopathy has a substantial overlap with narcissism and we see many of these points really relate to both constructs now after his arrest Ridgeway admitted that he was a pathological liar he said he had difficulty telling the truth even under the threat of the death penalty he did not want to be truthful because he was so successful in deceiving people for so long so he took a great deal of pride in that he also knew that a popular true crime author would be writing a book about him soon and he wanted to be seen in the best possible light so there's many things that pop up here of course the psychopathy and also the narcissism I'll talk about later but we see that Ridgeway actually believed it was favourable to be a serial killer like he looked at that as positive and we see some indication of that later on as well at first he said he stopped killing in 1985 that changed to 1987 then 1991 1998 and eventually it became some indefinite time before his arrest in 2001 right so he was a killer from 82 probably right up to 2001 initially he did not admit to every killing that was attributed to the Green River Killer now one of the reasons for this is he didn't want to risk claiming to have killed a woman unless he actually did it because he said he took pride in what he did and did not want to take that pride from someone else so he seemed to have of course a tremendous disrespect for his victims but a respect for other serial killers he viewed himself as among a very elevated and Porton group Ridgeway had an excellent memory of most things that happened in his life but a poor memory of the women that he killed he said that they didn't mean anything to him once they were killed he didn't keep their memory he just knew where he left the bodies so the locations of the bodies those were important to him but who the victims were that had no meaning to him at all and of course this is connected with psychopathy Ridgeway demonstrated a superficial charm right he used a lot of different strategies based on this to attract victims so when he was trying to attract a victim he would offer to lend them a vehicle offer to find them a job give them food he would show them a picture of his son he would try to become a regular customer so that they would trust him and he would offer them more money he noted that it didn't matter how much money he offered he was never gonna lose anything because of course before he paid he was going to kill them actually he ended up stealing jewelry and cash off his victims so he actually made money after he committed a murder sometimes he would not be able to kill a victim that he selected and this would cause him to go into a rage he was upset that he wasted the time and energy and this would increase his desire to kill he would actually start shaking physically so if he was with somebody that he wanted to kill and he wasn't able to he would have to explain that shaking by saying that he was anxious ridgeway's method of killing was fairly consistent he would get behind a victim and strangle her by compressing her neck in the crook of his arm using his other arm to add force some of the struggles took as long as two minutes during this time when the victim was struggling Ridgeway said he felt no emotions sometimes before he actually attempted to commit a murder the victims would sense it and start pleading with him to spare their lives he was not moved to compassion in any of those cases Ridgeway indicated that he chose strangulation as a method because it was not messy and because it was more personal and rewarding than using a firearm now when he would dispose the bodies he took a sense of ownership over them so as I mentioned before he would remember where he put them he would actually fear forgetting location so originally thought of his victims as possessions now in the mental health evaluation that occurred after he was arrested he indicated that he'd never had empathy for anyone like ever in his life he also indicated he had a hatred of women he never gave a thought to how the victims felt and he had no care about them whatsoever the only carry had the only regret he had was he left too much evidence behind and was arrested so if we look at ridgway's behavior we can align some of these behaviors to these symptoms that we see with antisocial personality disorder this disorder has seven symptoms let's look at this and see if they align with what he did here we see repeated unlawful behaviors that seems fairly clear consistent deceitfulness that seems to be endorsed impulsivity and poor planning that's the third symptom I think earlier in his life but this isn't as clear later on the fourth symptom is aggressiveness and physical fights I think murder would qualify there to meet that symptom criterion we see a reckless disregard for safety that one seems fairly clear consistent irresponsibility again probably early in life but not as much later in his career and the last symptom is lack of remorse and again this one seems clear so it appears that he meets five of the seven symptom criteria but again only somebody who's actually treating Ridgeway could make that as a diagnosis I can only look at these behaviors and align them with symptoms now in terms of narcissism we see that I'm looking here at grandiose narcissism because we don't see much overlap with vulnerable narcissism we see a number of narcissistic characteristics overlapping with psychopathy but not many of the characteristics that are considered specific to narcissism and unrelated to psychopathy for example Ridgeway didn't seem to be socially dominant overconfident or extroverted some examples of narcissism above and beyond what I already covered looking at the psychopathy we see that Ridgeway indicated he was a victim of new technology and no detective ever caught him we see he blamed his second wife essentially for the murders because the way she treated him that led him to committing murder so no ownership he wasn't taking responsibility for his behavior he was blame-shifting and we see this interesting discussion between him and the people that interviewed him after he's arrested they asked him on a scale of one to five with five being the worst person where do you think that he would score he indicated a three three out of five this is actually fairly amazing it made me wonder what Ridgeway would think it would take to be a five he was convicted of murdering 49 people that seems like it's bad enough to be a five to me but again Ridgeway saw himself as relatively normal in terms of on a continuum from bad to good so now looking at narcissistic personality in a way similar to what I did with antisocial personality we see that NPD has nine symptoms and if we go through these we see some alignment with ridgway's behavior a grandiose sense of self-importance I think his behavior lines up with this grandiose fantasies this one's not as clear presumably he had fantasies of success in power but it's not really clear from what we see in the reports the third symptom criterion feeling special and high status I think this could have been happening the fourth symptom criterion requiring excessive admiration I think he liked admiration but it's not clear that he really required it as would be needed for this criterion we see a sense of entitlement this one's pretty clear being manipulative also clear lacking empathy for others perhaps the most clear out of all of these symptoms and then the last two we see being envious and having arrogant attitudes interestingly I don't think his behavior aligns up with those symptoms so an argument could be made that there's a pretty good alignment here with NPT but not as good in alignment so we see with antisocial so really he seems more psychopathic than narcissistic but both traits appear to be expressed and this leads me to talking about conscientiousness and I think this is really one most interesting angles in this particular case people who score high on the trait of conscientiousness tend to avoid mistakes they have self-discipline they work hard they like order and they follow the rules now through his career it's really amazing that rich way didn't leave enough evidence for the police to charge him much earlier especially considering how many crime scenes were involved Ridgway was extremely careful in his planning he selected victims after hours of surveillance if a potential victim was with another person when which way went in to pick them up he would not commit the crime he would still go on a date with them as he put it but again he wouldn't commit the murder he was worried about leaving witnesses he would flash money at his victims as he drove by and pull off the road into a parking lot instead of picking them up right where they were standing again out of a fear of witnesses he was careful about the police he would watch his victims for a while to see them engaging in other transactions so he could be more certain that they weren't a police officer now clearly we see he was arrested for soliciting an undercover police officer so he wasn't completely careful in this regard now he also used to cut the fingernails of victims if he had been scratched by them he used gloves he did not leave fingerprints and he did not leave clothes at the crime scenes this is interesting considering as I discussed before Ridgeway was conceptualized as having an IQ in the low 80s yet he seemed to be an expert on forensics or at least pretty good at it one time Ridgeway left tire tracks from his truck at a dump site and when he realized this he went and got four new tires he took the old four tires and dumped two in one place and drove for several miles and dumped another two in another place so those tires couldn't be connected to his truck he would call the business manager of his victims and arrange another date so he was trying to create this situation where they would believe that the victim was still alive because otherwise why would he call and want another date with that person we see that he was scratched once fairly badly on his arm and he used battery acid to cover up those scratches Ridgeway used to drop cigarette butts and gum at crime scenes he did not use either he also put Airport Motel pamphlets and car rental papers at crime scenes in February 1984 he wrote a letter to a newspaper to throw off the task force now an FBI expert looked at this letter and concluded definitively that whoever wrote it was not the Green River Killer right so just like the polygraphs I talked about before we see that the police used a lot of different methods of profiling and trying to identify the characteristics of killers that aren't necessarily connected to any evidence right now some of the techniques they use I think are pretty good they make a lot of sense but other techniques we see don't really work reliably for example from this letter that Ridgeway sent to the paper it would be very difficult to definitively say that the person was or was not the person who committed the crimes right that's stretching way beyond the capabilities of that type of profiling so once again we see a commitment to pseudoscience seems to lead to trouble here in terms of apprehending Ridgeway now obviously Ridgeway broke the rules of society which is inconsistent with conscientiousness but he seemed to follow his own set of rules and he adhered to them really fairly closely which of course helped him avoid arrest now even though he has that exception on all of the other aspects of conscientiousness Ridgeway scores fairly high conscientiousness is what made Ridgeway so dangerous typical serial killers are low in conscientiousness the impulsivity leads them to make a number of mistakes they can't resist the urge to kill they don't like waiting Ridgeway was careful he understood the consequences of being caught and worked meticulously to avoid apprehension now another aspect that really aligns with conscientiousness we see Ridgeway worked as a truck painter and tapir for 30 years and this is a job that requires a high level of attention to detail so again kind of supporting the idea that he was high in conscientiousness so really with Ridgeway we see a perfect storm of traits the factor one psychopathy with limited factor two psychopathy so not impulsive and irresponsible but he was still callous he lacked empathy and he was manipulative with narcissism we see he was narcissistic but not in an obvious way that would attract attention for example he didn't attract the attention of the police when they interviewed him he do not appear arrogant he cooperated with them he did not deny what they already knew and he did not ask for an attorney ridgway's conscientiousness not only amplified the destructive potential of his psychopathy it also helped him to hide from the police he did not look like a typical suspect he had a steady job for thirty years he actually won awards from his employer for perfect attendance he had a steady girlfriend or wife through the time period when he was an active killer and many people believed him to be normal he was not paranoid and he did not have a significant substance use problem now early in his criminal career he was impulsive but the police failed to catch him then he grew more conscientious and more sophisticated with his tactics those missed opportunities turned out to be very costly the fact that he wasn't caught or prosecuted for those early offences was used to dismiss him as a suspect later on so that takes care of conscientiousness but there was some other factors that may explain his behavior we see Ridgeway had a poor relationship with his mother this is fairly common with serial killers he was exposed to a number of destructive ideas when he was young his first wife had an affair and I think this really left an impression on him it contributed to his hatred of women on top of that he was engaged to that woman who left him for another man so some other interesting notes about this case we see that about 50 women ask Ridgeway if he was the Green River Killer including the woman that escaped from him in 1984 so an important note here asking somebody if they are a killer his the successful strategy before staying alive right so it's like they were carrying around this checklist hey are you the Green River Killer no good enough for me check right now we're all safe right this makes no sense that provides no safety benefit whatsoever we also see the statistics and probabilities of this case through the police off Ridgway killed so many people there was like an information overload from the point of view of the police the task force responded to 30,000 tips they started to see connections in this case that they would not normally see in other similar murder investigations that involved fewer victims for example that taxi driver that they focused on for so long which turned out to be a costly mistake he knew five of the victims that was unlikely to occur randomly but considering how many victims there were it's really not a smoking gun they should have been considering other suspects seriously at that same time they also failed to connect the two reports about the pickup truck they just couldn't handle the quantity of information my last thought is really about the enormity of this particular case this is really unlike any other case I've looked into the prosecution's summary of evidence which is just one of the many documents I read preparing for this was a hundred and thirty-eight pages and that was just a tip of the iceberg compared to the total amount of information generated in this case Gary ridgway's defense team was given four hundred thousand pages of documents 15 thousand photographs 500 audio tapes and a hundred and seventy video tapes so to sum all this up Ridgeway is considered the second most prolific serial killer in the United States history he's behind Samuel little he had what one could argue was the worst possible combination of personality traits and environmental stressors these traits and stressors combined and enabled him to kill without remorse to get away with it and left him with an insatiable desire to continue killing I know whenever I talk about topics like serial killers there will be a variety of opinions please put any opinions and thoughts in the comments they always generate an interesting dialogue as always I hope you found my analysis of this topic to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 482,452

Rating: 4.8832016 out of 5

Keywords: gary ridgway, green river killer, king county, Washington, five-factor model, antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, factor 1 psychopathy, factor 2 psychopathy, sociopathy, grandiose narcissism, mental health, counseling

Id: o4LRa5XQF6E

Length: 31min 13sec (1873 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020