How The Green River Killer Evaded Police For 19 Years | Gary Ridgway: Born To Kill? | Absolute Crime

you're a loser you're a coward you're a nobody you're an animal these are relatives of victims of the green river killer may god have mercy on your pathetic soul because the rest of us who know the truth about you won't the most prolific serial murderer america has ever known the one thing that i want you to know i was that daughter at home waiting for my mom to come home whose 19-year reign of terror left the area surrounding seattle littered with corpses i don't wish for him to die i wish for him to have a long suffering cruel death but who was the green river killer and was he born to kill when he went through the door and left to go to work he wasn't the man that i knew [Music] oh [Music] the old highway 99 adjacent to seattle's seatac airport [Music] 30 years ago a notorious spot this area back in the early 80s was very had very transient population there were topless bars over here there were a lot of hotels where you could rent rooms for an hour or two faye brooks then a detective assigned to sex crime cases was regularly called to the street known simply as the strip there were a lot of young women who were working the streets all the girls were were young and you know some of them had troubled past but all of them are somebody's daughter and somebody sister a lot of the young girls had grown up in abusive homes and that was why they were running away and i could relate to that i'm a survivor of child sex abuse and you know there but for the grace of god were i and so i could certainly empathize with them and i also wanted to help them one such woman was marcia chapman a street worker who claimed to have been raped and the apartment building where she lived was right here marsha was a beautiful statuesque black woman she was 31 she had three children she couldn't support them on the job she could get and she was working as a prostitute she was living um in a an apartment that was sparsely furnished so i think she was like down on her luck she seemed to have a kind heart and was a nice person but you know under the circumstances she did what she had to do to make ends meet marsha's alleged rape was typical of the hazards working girls on the strip faced at the time best-selling crime writer anne rule lived just blocks from the area i would sometimes stop and warn them and say you know what i do for a living i write about murder and and you don't have a chance out here how do you know who you're getting in with and usually they would just shrug and walk away [Music] in 1982 the dangers of working the strip would be brought home by a discovery in the nearby green river [Music] there was a man on the water in a boat and he saw in underneath the water what he thought was a mannequin it wasn't a mannequin it was a human being and there were two of them there well one of the um the victims in the water her hand was just waving with the current of the water and it was like here i am please help me but it of course it was too late as police investigated the crime scene they made another grim find processing the scene where the victims were in the water was where we found the third victim on the banks they were all within a few feet of each other and so clearly you know the same killer had put all three of the bodies there all three women had been picked up from around the strip by what the fbi dubbed an organized serial killer the organized offender was more planned more premeditated was able to conceptualize crimes and carry them out very efficiently mainly because of the fact that they had very little feeling for another human being they looked at a victim as an object for their excitement basically you're talking about a sexual psychopath the victims were 16 year old opel mills cynthia gene heinz and thirty-one-year-old marsha chapman [Music] when i found out that it was marcia i was i don't think i had any words that i could say um it was like oh my god somebody killed her it was really sad we did not know this was only the beginning of a reign of terror and we wouldn't know who was doing this for a very long time [Music] on seattle's strip the green river killer had found a rich hunting ground that would enable him to amass a body count unrivaled by any serial killer in american history by autumn of 1982 the bodies of five young women had been discovered in or beside seattle's green river they had disappeared from a notorious highway known as the strip an area where prostitution was rife and the green river killer had only just begun [Music] on the 15th of september 1982 [Music] eighteen-year-old mary bridget meehan vanishes [Music] bridget was the much-loved daughter of a catholic family in bellevue a very rich suburb of seattle she skipped school a lot she joined up with a boyfriend named ray and they were living in a cheap motel on highway 99. she left i think she was still possibly turning a few tricks and she didn't come back her family was so upset because she was eight and a half months pregnant [Music] to every serial killer human beings are objects there's no emotional connection there's nothing there [Music] on the 20th of september another girl fifteen-year-old deborah lorraine estes disappeared yet police were still unable to identify a killer this was the area that i was working and this is the area where the bulk of the green river victims were picked up from and we would sit here and and look you know trying to identify who might be the suspect we had very dedicated detectives who were determined to solve this case on the 26th of september 16 year old linda jane rule vanishes linda rule was a slender blonde girl who lived up in the north end she had been working the streets and she had a boyfriend who kind of served as a pimp she disappeared from an area near the northgate mall [Music] like all serial killers he seemed to have this the ability to sense vulnerability in in potential victims uh he didn't take the street wise girls he was looking for the younger women by the end of 1982 15 girls would be missing or found dead and pressure was mounting on the sheriff's task force people hoped that law enforcement would be successful there were different rumors that were passing around of who the person might be [Music] there was rampant speculation that it might be even a law enforcement officer because of the easy access that the individual had to the number and variety of women in the community [Music] you know the unfortunate thing is some of the the women of the street felt like the sheriff's office wasn't investigating the case as hard as we could have because they were street kids and runaways and that's not true everybody assigned to that investigation was committed to solving it committed to bringing this person to justice because these were you know somebody's daughter somebody's sister somebody's mother and we cared about them we cared about them like they were our own kids or our own family members and we we wanted to solve it then on the 30th of april 1983 a young girl was spotted being taken from the strip maria malvar with her boyfriend um were at a restaurant on the highway her boyfriend went to make a phone call when he came back he maria wasn't in the restaurant and he was very concerned and he thought well i'll i'll go on the highway and see if i can find her and he realized that maria was in the truck ahead of him there was a man driving and then she was talking to the man and so he determined to follow the truck because he wasn't sure what was going on he worried about her and they got up to the stop light at highway 99 and 216 but when he turned left he couldn't see the car [Music] marie's boyfriend returned with her family to search the streets for the pickup truck she'd left in and in a quiet cul-de-sac just a few blocks from the strip they found it parked outside the modest home of a local truck painter and they asked local police please to go there because they believed maria was in that house one of the sergeants did go there knocked in the door a man answered and he said there's nobody here but me and they didn't press it all serial killers have the ability to appear so normal that they throw off even people who are considered experts the serial killer is the olympiad of the pathological liar the man's details joined hundreds more in the task force's files a saliva swab would later be added still girls continued to vanish and the list kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger by june 1983 at least 26 girls had disappeared they learn from their crimes as their murders grow in number their efficiency increases the remains were being found in secluded quiet dark areas that summer five girls went missing by the time they're up to five or six or ten homicides they become very difficult to catch the fear was tremendous and deep throughout the entire community autumn five more vanished some of them were in the mountain foothills some of them were down in the green river valley he was you know ahead of us we wanted to catch him we wanted to stop him winter and spring 1984 four more girls gone it would be three or four or maybe even five in one spot unbelievable he was outsmarting the homicide detectives they were everybody was looking for he was dumping women like they were garbage this was a gun sight it's not far from the airport it's not far from the strip where the young girls were missing in the evenings it was dark very secluded very few people came down here you could come dump something and be gone and that's what happened in this location here they were just dumped among the dozens of bodies found was the 16 year old linda jane rule her skeletal remains hidden under a bush [Music] and in the scrub land south of the airport the fate of the pregnant 18 year old mary bridget meehan was finally discovered someone raped her killed her and buried her and her unborn baby in a shallow grave on the west side of the highway [Music] by spring 1984 the killer had amassed more than 40 victims but then something changed the killings appeared to have stopped many thought that he was gone it's incredibly unusual for a serial killer simply to stop killing a serial killer will usually only cease murder when he's apprehended or when he dies himself [Music] in 1985 the truck painter from the house in the quiet cul-de-sac began dating 40 year old divorced mother judas when i first met him i thought he was quite the gentleman and so polite and nice he loved the country music and the dancing and he was always smiling he never got angry and i just thought he was the greatest it was like love at first sight within months the house became judith's home he offered to help me move and that i can move in with him if he if i like there was no carpet in his house so he let me pick out some carpet because he had previous renters in there he had told me that the little one had wet on the carpet the house needed a woman's touch after three years living together the couple wed we were married in 1988 it seemed like the perfect marriage and so he was good to my daughters played with my grandchildren my dreams are coming true [Music] judith would enjoy 13 happy years of marriage while most of the world forgot about the green river killer most that is except the men and women of the green river task force and in 2001 advances in dna profiling enabled them to compare samples taken from the early victims including marsha chapman with swabs that had been taken from several men questioned during the investigation this is the dna from marcia chapman and this is the dna from the green river killer and we looked at them and were like they're the same they're the same scary which way [Music] i just i couldn't believe it [Music] i was just devastated and in shock and i think i went into um denial i wasn't believing it only now would the world discover the shocking truth about judith's husband gary ridgway the most prolific serial killer in u.s history during the 1980s the mysterious green river killer had prowled the red light district of seattle's strip unchecked amassing a terrifying body count in 2001 a dna match had connected 52 year old truck painter gary ridgway with the first few victims he had been identified as the most prolific serial killer in history of the united states each of us recognized that this would be the biggest criminal case in history of the state of washington the prosecution and defense teams would now be able to interview the man suspected of over four dozen homicides i'm walking down a corridor and i'm going to open the door and be introduced to the supposed green river killer a hundred things are going through your mind and wondering what is it going to be mean he's going to be crying is he going to be crazy and walked in and and like wow this isn't what i expected how are you pretty good all of us kind of looked at each other and said that's the guy that's been eluding everybody for 20 years what was remarkable was that he was he was so normal sleep okay no no no well that didn't look like the hilton in there i got a glimpse of it well it had a posturepedic mattress in there so sears and that was good you know a little bit hot in there but if you did not know what he had done you would like him the monster within him was was well hidden people want to ascribe extraordinary traits and qualities to these people these are for the most part very ordinary individuals except for the extraordinary crime that they get involved in so who was the suspected green river killer gary ridgway was born in 1949 the middle of three boys [Music] he lived in a small house not far from the strip his mom was kind of stay at home and then part-time she worked at a department store his dad drove a bus for the county gary sometimes would ride with him on the bus and his dad would say you know see her she's a prostitute she's you know the scum of the earth and would berate prostitutes and talk about how filthy and bad they were and then there are a couple of episodes where gary recalls him leaving him in the in the vehicle while he while dad went and had sex with a prostitute school friend terry rochelle recalls that gary ridgway was more inward than his siblings [Music] his brother was very outgoing and you know a bright personality and gary was more quiet and withdrawn i would say is a good word he was just a little pipsqueak guy just you know somebody's little brother basically you know you didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him just kind of in the shadows i would say most of his life at school the struggling ridgeway failed to make an impression however at parents evenings his mother mary did all the women kind of sat back and looked at her strange because she would wear a big bouffant hairdo and lots and lots of makeup short skirts which were not really the style in those days especially for a mom she just always seemed like she was trying to be very glamorous and not like our moms at all i always remember her wearing kind of the really tight tight shorts and low-cut low-cut tops and longer hair she was very very attractive lady ridgeway admitted wetting the bed throughout his childhood and well into his teens when he would wet the bed his mother would put him in the he had him get in the bathtub and wash him and wash his genitals during one bath um her robe fell open and she was naked underneath and he felt arousal at that and at the same time knew that it probably wasn't that wasn't a good thing to feel but he felt it he talked about having some sexual feelings towards her he described in some detail watching her when she was in a bathing suit and looking at her and thinking that she dressed pretty provocatively this overly sexualized person washing her son's genitals and you realize that most teenage boys are having an awful time with dealing with their own emerging sexuality has to have had an impact on some way boys need to see their mothers as asexual it is very very destabilizing for an adolescent boy to see his mother in a sexual manner it's very hard for an adolescent boy to imagine his mother having sex with anybody including his father and so when a mother behaves in a sexualized or hyper sexualized way it's very unsettling for an adolescent boy as ridgeway got older he started showing signs of destructive behavior starting fires and as a teenager he took his first step towards murder [Music] he approached a first grader a six-year-old boy that he saw a plane in a lot near his house the boy was dressed up playing cowboys and indians and he kind of lured him into the bushes and completely unprovoked stabbed the little boy in the stomach and nearly killed him he told the boy that he just wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody and after he stabbed him he took the knife and kind of wiped it wiped the blade off on the little boy's shoulder and you know just walked away actually nobody ever connected him to that serial killers need to have some concrete proof of what they're doing i mean you can think about something but until you've done it you don't know how it's going to turn out and so what the serial killer does is experiment often they will commit an act like a trial run ridgeway eventually finished school two years late due to his slow progress the following year age 21 he married his steady girlfriend and joined the navy when he returned from his deployment to the philippines his wife admitted that she had had an affair with a friend of theirs that was when he first started kind of referring to her as a [ __ ] and using other derogatory terms and that was kind of the beginning of a series of relationships that never quite panned out for him during the early 1970s ridgeway got a job spray painting at the kenworth truck manufacturers he then met and married his second wife he was very much into having sex often repeatedly throughout the day as frequently pretty much as women would agree they would go out in the truck and he'd love to have sex in public where they could be discovered at any time but after having a child their relationship deteriorated his wife left him when his son was about five and that that really hurt him and and and that was when he started to go frequent prostitutes ridgeway claimed he became addicted to prostitutes he had in fact been quizzed by police about his activities on the strip several times during the eighties even passing a lie detector test when grilled about the green river murders when your subject is someone without a conscience who has no regrets and no remorse and no real concern they can pass them he was a magnificent liar he had an ability just to go and talk and he would just talk and tell stories and i you know for a while i i assumed they were true and when i would go in to visit gary at the jail he he would tell me that everything's okay he didn't do it he didn't hurt those women he didn't kill him he didn't [Music] and i would believe him as he was questioned in 2001 ridgeway continued to protest his innocence up to this point gary had been maintaining that uh they had the wrong person that he while had he had had sex with many prostitutes he hadn't killed any and that was essentially going to be the the defense but when forensic evidence surfaced tying him to three more victims ridgeway's story changed myself and another attorney were in the meeting room waiting for mr ridgway i don't recall what we were talking about but we both had smiles on our faces when he walked in and he said oh you won't be smiling when we're done i've been lying to you all i've been manipulating everyone for all these years i killed them all only now would investigators discover the true shocking horror of the green river killers crimes [Music] in 2003 54 year old truck painter gary ridgway admitted he was the green river killer that had eluded capture for almost two decades a man responsible for the murder of more than four dozen women faced with the death penalty ridgeway offered to tell the truth about all his crimes in return for his life [Music] on behalf of the victims families who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones the prosecution agreed ridgeway would now reveal the true horror of his crimes [Music] investigators now learned how the green river killer had so easily abducted and killed his victims even at the height of the public terror he came across as being a very meek and mild safe person as a matter of fact in one situation he had his child in the car with him when he picked up a prostitute he looks like a mousy little man he doesn't look like the kind of person that if you were a prostitute that you would be afraid of they thought well he's a family man he's you know he's safe and turns out he wasn't he preferred to take them to his house some said no to that and they would drive to a remote location and he had a truck a pickup truck with a canopy on the back and he would convince him that to go into the back of the canopy so they could have more room to have sex but what he would do is once he got them in the position either in his bed at home where he had pictures of his son on the wall and they felt a little more secure or whether they were just hopping in the back of the truck get naked begin with oral sex a missionary at some point convinced them that he would be able to finish sooner if they would agree to the rear entry position when i got through having a climax with her i jumped on her you get his arm around the girl's neck how much are you pulling on her neck i'm pulling really hard on her neck cow just like this what are you saying to her don't don't don't fight don't fight don't and i'll let you go and and then choke them with his forearm i'm feeling i gotta kill her i gotta kill her i gotta kill her you'll need to go up to kind of like in the top of the hill on this and pull in ridgeway guided the investigators to where he dumped dozens of young women [Applause] i just drove drove in my my pickup and camper and parked it brought her body over and put it a little bit over the hill his method of recollection was uh where he had left their bodies between this one and that one up there you think you put like five five of them in there okay he essentially said the victims didn't mean anything i have no idea who they are i don't know if they're black if they're white if how old they are how young they are i mean they really meant nothing to me as an individual what you're getting is what you're gonna get and it's all you can get because i don't i don't remember to every serial killer human beings are objects in the homicides and that they commit they're never going to remember the name they're never going to remember the face they'll remember the concrete action of where those bodies are one of the dump sites that ridgeway identified was that of marie malvar the 18 year old whose boyfriend had spotted ridgeway abducting her he admitted that when he strangled her she had fought back harder than any of his victims i put battery i said myself right here there cover-up scratches there's a scratch here scratches here from uh milbar ridgway claimed he was filled with rage and had wanted to hurt his victims even after their deaths he admitted he tried to set the lifeless sixteen-year-old linda rule's hair on fire you know he seemed throughout the interviews to try to blame a lot of what had happened on the women in his life that the the women that he actually killed were kind of an extension of all the women before who had disappointed him in some way all the pressure just built and built and built and built my releasing was killing killing women [Music] he did talk about a number of the victims that he would go back and have sexual relations with them for a number of days after he killed them gary and did you revisit any of these i revisited at least one of them and when we say revisit what did you come back to do have sex with her he's like oh yeah you know but then the flies would come and the maggots and then i'd be like oh i don't you know like he didn't want to do it after that you know you were just i mean that's the thing he said it in this like i'm talking to you but as if it's totally normal now why do individuals do this the standard explanation for for necrophilia had been uh sex with someone dead you can have total control over it there's no resistance at all and so you can live out those sorts of um feelings uh with a dead lifeless body he's not the one that you're going to turn to and ask why did you do this and get the deep psychological answer but one of the things that frequently came up was that he wouldn't have to pay for the sex [Music] ridgeway's murderous spree had continued unabated until he met his third wife judith in the mid-80s gary was so straight normal and loving and gentle he was so kind around me all the time he didn't get mad or [Music] upset about anything seemed like the perfect marriage when he first met her he stopped patronizing prostitutes and stopped killing and then as he put it he fell off the wagon gary would call home and say that you know he he he's going to be late coming home so he's going to grab a bite grab a hamburger and you know he'll be late when i think back now that was probably one time when he was out picking up someone off of the um off of the highway 99 strip and then he killed again right in here's where i killed her 20 feet he would tell me he'd call home and say he's going to stop at the junkyard on my home from work and then when he got home he didn't really have any parts from her so that may have been another occasion and so after having killed maybe 60 girls from 82 to 85 from 85 to when he was caught in 2001 the number of victims was more like 10 or 11. mr ridgway how do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder in the first degree as charged in count one guilty in 2003 gary ridgway made his plea to the 48 charges of murder that investigators could conclusively tie him to how do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder in the first degree as charged in count five guilty when he confessed and i sent when i sat and listened to him say guilty mr ridgway how do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder in the first degree for the death of marsha chapman guilty after every one of the names that they had said for the death of mary b meehan guilty i just sat there and cried and that's when it upon my observation finally sunk in that this is real he did it there's someone else inside of him when he went through the door and left to go to work he wasn't the man that i knew count 19 for the death of linda rule guilty i would think back and think about all those years that i was with him were they real or was he just using me how do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder in the first degree as charged in count 48 guilty i lived with him all those years [Music] he could have killed me he could have killed my daughter he could have killed my grandbabies [Music] so what made the monster was it his unusual upbringing or was gary ridgeway born to kill i still don't believe that any child is born to kill but i think some children have a predisposition to violence if the child grows up in a safe place for them where they feel loved where they attach we're never going to know that that predisposition for violence is there but if that child is born into a home where they're afraid where they're neglected where they're abused then you have the perfect soil to grow a serial killer i think that a boy and his mother have a certain relationship and when that relationship is different then i think that's when we start seeing those kind of switches turning on and off this is one of my ominous signs she was somewhat seductive and so on these sorts of unhealthy uh relationships with the maternal figure people that i've encountered that have prosecuted for murder i think that their circumstances have driven them to do what they have done in the majority of cases that i have handled i would say i did not see that in ridgeway i truly believed that he was born that way hardwired that way whatever you want to say the green river killer was definitely born to kill he was an individual who [Music] has this changed gene and culminated in a tremendous number and intensity of homicides his brain is definitely wired differently he's a psychopath that has to be a brain miswiring from the beginning i don't i don't know about the nurture nature piece i i think at some point is a decision and let me think we all have some propensities for violence but you can decide you can control it and he decided how we wanted to control it 19 years after marsha chapman's body was discovered beneath the surface of the green river gary ridgway was sentenced to serve 48 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole [Music] in the end marcia got her justice because it was dna found on her that they could match with gary ridgway and marsha got her day that was a good day it was a good day before ridgway was led away judge richard jones instructed him to face the victims families there's a tremendous amount of emotion that these family members wanted to pour out for gary ridgeway to hear i can only hope someone gets the opportunity to choke you unconscious so you can live through the horror that you put our daughters our sisters our mothers through the pain would not go away but it brought them closure the one thing that i want you gary ridgeway to know i was that daughter at home [Music] waiting for my mom to come home i think for all of us as we brought the families up and introduced them it was really emotional i recall linda rule's father there are people here that hate you i'm not one of them we're very sympathetic very compassionate individual what god says to do and that's to forgive all so you are forgiven sir [Music] on one hand i i'm sitting next to a person who's done the most inhumane things to other human beings and then 15 feet away is a person doing the most humane and merciful thing i wanted him to look out see the pain see the anger and see all the agony that he had caused in his lifetime i wanted him to take the visual image with him back to prison so for the balance of his life that would be the last public image that he had you took from me my firstborn child may her soul in the soul of the other 47 victims rest in peace [Music] you

Channel: Absolute Crime

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Keywords: Absolute Crime, Crime Documentaries, True Crime, True Crime Documentaries, Murder documentaries, True Crime Stories, True Crime Youtube Channel, True Crime Documentary, full length documentary 2022, the green river killer, serial killer documentary, green river, green river gary, gary ridgway, interview, documentary, full episode, born to kill, series 3, crime, serial killers, murder documentary, ted bundy, worst serial killers of all time, serial killer interviews

Id: cR4tf1oxvXY

Length: 44min 56sec (2696 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022