Serial killers. Every true-crime buff knows all
about them, and they often debate who the worst of the worst actually is. Ted Bundy’s trial was
probably the most highly publicized in history, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s twisted appetites were
tabloid fodder for years. Neither of them, however, reached the shocking number of murders
that one serial killer reached in the Pacific Northwest. He stalked Washington state for
decades, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake. The media called him the Green River Killer.
And he almost got away with everything. It was the early 1980s in King County, Washington,
and horror was about to come to the winding Green River. This long river snakes from the rural
areas of Northwest Washington to the bustling city of Seattle, and forms the approach to
the former logging area of Stampede Pass. But for a group of children playing along the
river on July 15th, 1982, it would be the end of innocence. They discovered the body of Wendy
Coffield, a sixteen-year-old from nearby Puyallup, floating in the river. An investigation quickly
began, but no leads were found to her killer. Wendy was likely the first to die,
but she would be far from the last. It was just over a month later when four more
bodies of young women would be found in the Green River, and it was clear the Pacific Northwest had
a serial killer on its hands. A massive task force was formed, the biggest since the hunt for Ted
Bundy in the previous decade. Many more bodies would follow - all of them young women, many of
them runaways and sex workers. But it would be a long time before the police had the answers -
despite them intersecting with the killer many times in the decades that followed. Who was this
serial killer striking fear in the whole region? His name was Gary Ridgway, and he
was one of the most effective and dangerous killers the country had ever seen. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1949, Gary
Ridgway seemed like a normal boy - but under the surface there were early signs that he was
disturbed. He was a middle child with a strict, domineering mother. He struggled in school,
battling with dyslexia, and was held back a year in high school. Evidence later showed his IQ
was only in the 80s. But there were darker signs. His father was an angry man, a bus driver who
frequently complained about sex workers along his route. Ridgway had a problem with bedwetting,
and his mother humiliated him after every episode. Gary Ridgway’s journey to becoming a killer
would begin early - when he was still a teenager. Ridgway liked hurting things from an early day,
starting with shooting birds with a BB gun. But he had a taste for bigger prey, and one day when
he was still in high school he approached a random six-year-old boy with a knife - and stabbed him,
deep enough to injure the boy’s liver. The boy, who asked to remain anonymous, remembers asking
Ridgway “Why did you kill me?”. He survived, but spent several weeks in the hospital. Ridgway
was never caught for the attack, and the victim realized years later that he had almost become
the first murder victim of the Green River Killer. What made Ridgway so dangerous?
He knew how to bide his time. After his first foray into attempted murder,
Ridgway seemed to be slipping back into normal life. He graduated high school, married
his high school girlfriend Claudia Kraig, and joined the Navy. It was 1969, and he was soon
sent to Vietnam. But while wartime was a formative experience for many young men, for Ridgway it
would lead him further down the path to becoming a serial killer. Like many young soldiers,
he had frequent sex with local sex workers, contracting Gonorrhea. This enraged him - but not
enough to stop doing it. And when he returned from Vietnam, he discovered his wife had been having
an affair, leading to the end of the marriage. The combination of Ridgway’s
resentment towards his mother and his wartime experiences were about to collide. He soon married again, a woman named Marcia
Winslow, and had a son. But she noticed disturbing signs of the monster he would become.
Sometimes he was pious, obsessively reading the bible aloud and preaching to their neighbors.
Other times he would become inexplicably violent - even putting Marcia in a chokehold
at one point. He would get randomly emotional, crying during sex. And if there was one thing he
loved talking about, it was sex. He would demand it frequently, sometimes in a public place. And he
was obsessed with the local sex workers. He seemed to hate them and want them out of his neighborhood
- but he couldn’t seem to stop patronizing them. His anger and obsession built - until
it exploded in a cocktail of violence. No one knows why Gary Ridgway decided to start
killing, but when he did, he acted like he had been planning it all his life. He stalked Seattle
and Tacoma, primarily among Pacific Highway South where young sex workers and teen
runaways could easily be found. He had a manipulative go-to move - a picture
of his son that he always kept on him. He would introduce himself to the woman he had decided to
target, showing them a picture of his son to get them to trust him and let down their defenses.
He would then invite them into his truck. It would be the last decision they ever made. Sometimes Ridgway would drive them home.
Sometimes he would drive them to the woods. Sometimes he would decide to do the deed
right there. But what came next was always the same. He and his chosen victim would have sex, and
midway through, he would make his move. He wrapped his forearm around their neck and pulled as hard
as he could, killing them from strangulation. He would then drive to a dumping ground and hide
their bodies. He started in the Green River, but eventually started dumping the bodies in
more wooded areas and near the local airport. When asked how many young women he had killed over the years by investigators later, he
would simply answer “I lost count”. Despite his low IQ, Ridgway was a highly competent
killer. He knew exactly how to hide his kills, spreading out the bodies and transporting
some across state lines. He would sometimes contaminate the bodies with pieces of evidence he
had taken off other people, like gum, cigarettes, and even written notes. He would sometimes
pose the bodies naked before burying them, and he remembered where every body was -
because sometimes he liked to return to them and dig them up so he could engage in Necrophilia. It seemed like the perfect crime wave - but not quite. The police were on to
Gary Ridgway surprisingly early. It was April 30th, 1983, and Ridgway had
just taken his latest victim, Marie Malvar. But Malvar didn’t vanish unnoticed. Ridgway’s
pickup truck had been sighted by her boyfriend, and the man chased down Ridgway, reporting him
to the police. The police interrogated him, and Ridgway denied any involvement in
Malvar’s disappearance. They let him go, but it wouldn’t be the last time he had
contact with the Green River Task Force. But the next time, he would come looking for them. It was May 1984, and the toll of victims
kept on rising, with forty-two bodies being found in the area. The task force
received a call - from Gary Ridgway, claiming to have information. He was still on the
radar of the officers after their last encounter, and they made him pass a polygraph test
before they would work with him. He passed, denying any involvement in the killings.
This would make experts later think he was a sociopath who could lie so convincingly
he wouldn’t be flagged by a lie detector. The task force would look at Ridgway again
- but he would keep on slipping away. As the bodies kept showing up near Green
River, the task force became desperate. Experts Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert,
both of whom had been involved in previous hunts for serial killers, even interviewed
Ted Bundy on death row for his insight into the Green River Killer’s psychology. He
identified many of Ridgway’s patterns and told them to stake out one of the
graves to see if Ridgway returned. But Ridgway was good at biding his time. While many serial killers escalate until they
get caught, Green River had a pattern and he stuck to it. His third wife, Judith Mawson,
who he married in 1985, realized years later that he had been pulling off killings right under
her nose. When the carpet disappeared, she didn’t give it a second thought - until investigators
told her he had likely removed it to wrap a body. His irregular working hours were a cover for him
leaving to hunt his victims and dispose of their bodies. She was contacted by authorities in 1987
as they renewed their interest in Ridgway and took DNA samples from him - but she had never even
heard of the Green River Killer. This was also the period when Ridgway killed the fewest women, and
Mawson claimed he had never been violent with her. Was he truly in love and able to suppress his darkest instincts? Or was he
just waiting to strike again? Gary Ridgway’s reckoning would have to wait more
than a decade, when the DNA samples collected in 1987 were finally analyzed by a state-of-the-art
DNA lab. This time, they turned up a match, and the task force had finally cornered the Green
River Killer. Ridgway was keeping a low profile, working at a truck factory - and his co-workers
must have been very confused when their workplace turned into the biggest police raid the county had
seen in a long time. They swept in and arrested Ridgway, charging him with four of the murders -
only the first they had been able to link him to. It was going to be the trial
of the century - or would it? When a prolific serial killer is arrested,
most would expect them to be held in the most high-security prison possible. That
wasn’t the case here, as a little over a year into his pre-trial detention, Ridgway
was moved to a medium security prison. Soon, it was announced that he had
reached a plea deal with prosecutors. In exchange for the death penalty being taken
off the table, Ridgway would plead guilty, receive life in prison - and name every single one
of his victims to give closure to the families. The true scale of the Green River
Killer’s crimes were about to be revealed. In total, Gary Ridgway pled guilty
to the murders of forty-eight women, making him one of the most prolific serial
killers in American history. He was sentenced to forty-eight consecutive life sentences, plus
ten years for evidence tampering for every victim. He won’t be getting out of prison ever again,
unless he somehow discovers the fountain of youth in his prison toilet. With the new
evidence he gave them in prison interviews, police were able to track down the bodies of
many of his carefully hidden victims around Washington and near Portland, Oregon - giving
closure to grieving families decades later. So is Gary Ridgway the worst serial killer in
American history? That depends on who you ask. Ridgway’s confirmed 48 killings puts him at
the top tier, and he’s confessed to killing seventy-one women in total - although many
of the others are unconfirmed. He continues to cooperate with investigators as they look into
missing-person cases from the time period he may be linked to. But he’s not the only serial killer
who claims to have a horrifyingly high death toll. Samuel Little, another prolific serial
killer doing life in prison in California, traveled the country weaving a
career of mayhem from 1970 to 2012. Constantly in and out of prison for crimes
ranging from drunk driving to armed robbery, he was convicted of only four
murders in California and Texas. The FBI thinks differently. The federal investigators have linked
little to fifty murders around the country, which would eclipse Ridgway’s mark - if
proven accurate. But many of those killings happened decades ago and don’t match a specific
serial killer’s MO. Little also targeted women, but didn’t have as uniform a technique as
Ridgway. And if you ask Little, he’ll tell you a different story - he boasts of killing
over ninety people, but many can’t be confirmed. So who is the worst serial killer in American
history? Both men are doing life in prison, both claim many more killings than they’ve been
convicted of, both are in their senior years, and the odds are the truth will go with
both men to their graves. But if you ask the people around the Green River in Washington, they’ll tell you that Gary Ridgway’s reign
of terror is something they’ll never forget. Want to know more about one of the most
dangerous serial killers in American history? Check out “America’s Most Evil Serial Killer -
Ted Bundy”. And for one that was never caught, why not watch “The Most Infamous Serial
Killer - Why Was He Never Found?”.
