Gary Ridgway: The Most Prolific American Serial Killer
Photo by Josh Trujillo-Pool/Getty ImagesRidgway prepares to leave the courtroom where he was sentenced on Dec. 18, 2003 in Seattle, Washington.
Gary Ridgway, known as the “Green River Killer” after the river where he dumped his victims’ bodies, is one of the deadliest American serial killers of all time.
Between 1982 and 1988, Ridgway murdered a staggering 71 women. While he was only convicted of 49 of those killings, he freely admits that the number could have been closer to 90.
Not much is known about Ridgway’s life before he became the most prolific of all American serial killers. Born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah, and raised in Seattle, Wash., Ridgway was a poor student. Shortly after high school, he was sent to fight in the Vietnam War.
When he returned, Ridgway took a position as a truck painter. He kept the job for nearly 30 years — but according to Ridgway, killing young women was his “career.”
Most of Ridgway’s victims were prostitutes that he would pick up at truck stops and bars along Highway 99 outside of Seattle. Ridgway would rape and strangle his victims, then dump their bodies in the area around the Green River.
Ridgway often returned to the disposal sites to have sex with the rotting corpses of the women he murdered. In an effort to confuse police, he sometimes dumped bodies in locations farther away from the Green River, or he left false clues to contaminate the crime scene.
These tactics succeeded in thwarting the police, and law enforcement eventually had to turn to an unlikely source for help catching their killer: Ted Bundy.
At the time, Bundy had been imprisoned for six years and was awaiting his appointment with the electric chair. Reasoning that other American serial killers might be able to shed light on the Green River Killer’s behavior patterns, detectives interviewed Bundy, and he provided valuable information.
One particularly helpful tip Bundy gave the authorities was that the killer was probably returning to the dumping sites to have sex with the corpses — something Bundy had also done. He suggested that they stake out a fresh gravesite and wait for the killer to return.
Ridgway eventually did return to one of his corpses, and the police were able to gather samples to use as evidence for an arrest warrant.
Authorities finally arrested Ridgway in 2001, nearly 20 years after his killing spree began.
Initially, Ridgway was convicted of 48 murders and sentenced to 48 life sentences. He was given ten additional years on each sentence for tampering with evidence, making his total 48 life sentences and 480 years. But in 2011, an additional body was found, causing him to receive another life sentence.
At the end of his trial, Ridgway stood alone among American serial killers; no other had confessed to so many murders in the United States.
