Gary Ridgway

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 30th of November 2001, police arrived at the Kenworth truck factory in Renton, Washington, to arrest a spray painter as he was leaving work. The man was Gary Leon Ridgway, born on the 18th of February 1949. For years the press had called him the Green River Killer, or the Green River Strangler, without knowing his name. He would be convicted of murdering forty-nine women between 1982 and 1998 in the northwestern United States. At the time of his arrest, no one in the country was believed to have been confirmed as responsible for more killings.

  Yet Ridgway had come to the attention of investigators long before that day. He had been questioned and had passed a polygraph test. How did a man so close to the case stay free for close to two decades after the first victim was found? What shaped him, and what did the people who lived with him notice? And why did the state of Washington choose to spare his life in exchange for his words? The answers begin with a boy in Salt Lake City.

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• 2. A Troubled Boyhood

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  Gary Ridgway was the second of three sons born to Thomas and Mary Ridgway in Salt Lake City, Utah. His childhood was troubled. Relatives later described his mother as domineering and said she physically punished her sons for minor offenses. His parents' marriage was volatile. His father drove a bus and often complained about the prostitutes he saw along his route.

  Ridgway told defense psychologists, years later, about his feelings toward his mother as a teenager. He felt anger and sexual attraction at the same moment, and he fantasized about killing her.

  Ridgway is dyslexic, and he was held back a year in high school. His IQ was recorded as being in the "low eighties." At 16, he lured a six-year-old boy into woodland and stabbed him through the ribs into the liver. The boy survived. Ridgway finished at Tyee High School in 1969.

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• 3. Marriages and Contradictions

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  Claudia Kraig was 19 when she married Ridgway, her high school sweetheart. He joined the United States Navy and was deployed to Vietnam, where he served aboard a supply ship and saw combat. He frequently had sex with prostitutes during his service and contracted gonorrhea. Kraig was angry about it, but he kept going without protection. The marriage ended within a year.

  Marcia Winslow, his second wife, later claimed that he had once placed her in a chokehold. During that marriage Ridgway became deeply religious. He went door-to-door to proselytize, read the Bible aloud at work and at home, and insisted that his wife follow the strict teachings of their pastor. He often cried after reading scripture or hearing sermons. Yet he kept paying prostitutes for sex. He also asked his wife to have sex in public or in inappropriate places, sometimes in spots where his victims' bodies were later found. Winslow and Ridgway had a son. Both of his first two marriages ended in divorce because of infidelity on both sides.

  Three ex-wives and several ex-girlfriends told investigators that he demanded sex several times a day, often outdoors or in the woods. Ridgway admitted to a fixation on prostitutes, with whom he had love-hate relationships. He complained about them in his neighborhood while using their services regularly. In a statement read at his plea hearing, he said he hated prostitutes and did not want to pay them for sex. Some observers have speculated that he was torn between his lusts and his strict religious beliefs. Friends and family, questioned after his arrest, called him friendly but strange.

  Around 1985, Ridgway began dating Judith Mawson, who became his third wife in 1988. In a 2010 television interview, Mawson recalled that his house had no carpet when she moved in. Detectives later told her he had probably wrapped a body in it. She also remembered him leaving for work very early some mornings, supposedly for overtime pay, and she suspected that some murders happened during those hours. She said she had no suspicion of his crimes until authorities contacted her in 1987. She had never even heard of the Green River Killer because she did not watch the news.

  Ridgway claimed that his rate of killing dropped while he was with Mawson and that he truly loved her. Of his 49 known victims, only three were killed after he married her. Mawson told a local television reporter, "I feel I have saved lives... by being his wife and making him happy."

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• 4. The Pattern of Killing

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  Pacific Highway South was where Ridgway picked up most of the women he killed, in the area around Seattle and Tacoma. Most of his victims were alleged prostitutes or other women in vulnerable circumstances, including underage runaways. A majority of the murders took place between 1982 and 1984. In court statements, he later said he had killed so many women that he lost count.

  Sometimes Ridgway showed a woman a picture of his son, a ploy to earn her trust. He then strangled her, usually by hand but occasionally with a ligature. He killed most of his victims in his home, his truck, or a secluded area. The bodies were dumped in forested and overgrown places around the Green River, near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and at other dump sites in South King County. They were often left in clusters, usually nude and sometimes posed.

  Ridgway would sometimes return to the bodies and commit necrophilia. He later explained that he did not find it more satisfying. In his account, the acts reduced his need to find a living victim, which limited his chances of being caught.

  He also worked to mislead the police. At some dump sites he left gum, cigarettes, and written materials belonging to other people. He even carried a few victims' remains across state lines into Oregon. Two confirmed victims, and two more suspected ones, were later found in the Portland area.

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• 5. The Task Force

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  In July 1982, searchers found the body of Ridgway's first known victim. Clothing wrapped around her neck carried a distinctive kind of spray paint. Nobody tested the paint for 20 years. Had it been tested at the time, the murder would have been much easier to tie to Ridgway.

  After four more victims were found, the King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force. The first five victims had all turned up at the Green River, which gave the killer his nickname. Task force members included Robert D. Keppel and Dave Reichert. In 1984 they periodically interviewed Ted Bundy, a serial killer already in prison, for his views on the psychology and behavior of the man they hunted. Bundy suggested that the killer was returning to the dump sites to have sex with his victims, which proved accurate. He also advised police that if they found a fresh grave, they should stake it out and wait. FBI Special Agent John E. Douglas contributed a profile of the suspect.

  Ridgway had been arrested on prostitution-related charges in 1982, and he would be arrested on such charges again in 2001. His name surfaced in the murder investigation in 1983, when 18-year-old Marie Malvar disappeared. Her boyfriend and her pimp later found a truck parked in front of Ridgway's house that they believed was the one she had boarded. Police interviewed him about her disappearance and received several other tips that mentioned him. In 1984, he passed a polygraph test.

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• 6. Paint and DNA

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  In April 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway. Those samples sat until DNA profiling had advanced enough to be used on them. When it was applied, the results provided the evidence for his arrest warrant and definitively linked him to the murders.

  The original indictment named four victims: Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Three more were added later, after a forensic scientist examined microscopic spheres of spray paint. The scientist identified them as a specific brand and composition that had been used at the Kenworth factory during the period when Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Debra Estes were killed. The same tiny particles that once clung to a man's clothes now placed him at a workplace and a timeline.

  The case now rested on seven counts. That number would shape the courtroom decision that came next.

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• 7. The Plea Bargain

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  Early in August 2003, Seattle television news reported that Ridgway had been moved from a maximum security cell at King County Jail to a minimum-medium security tank at Airway Heights. Other reports said his lawyers, led by Anthony Savage, were closing a plea bargain that would spare him the death penalty in return for a confession to many of the murders.

  On the 5th of November 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 charges of aggravated first degree murder. In exchange for avoiding execution, he agreed to help locate his victims' remains and to provide other details. In his statement, he said he had killed all of his victims inside King County. Deputy prosecutor Jeffrey Baird noted in court that the agreement included "the names of 41 victims who would not be the subject of State v. Ridgway if it were not for the plea agreement."

  King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng explained why he accepted the deal. "We could have gone forward with seven counts, but that is all we could have ever hoped to solve. At the end of that trial, whatever the outcome, there would have been lingering doubts about the rest of these crimes. This agreement was the avenue to the truth." He added: "Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy. He does not deserve to live. The mercy provided by today's resolution is directed not at Ridgway, but toward the families who have suffered so much..."

  On the 18th of December 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard A. Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He added 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, which came to 480 years. Ridgway later received a further life sentence once the remains of a 49th victim were found.

  The bargain began to deliver in 2003, when Ridgway led prosecutors to three bodies. On the 16th of August, remains of a 16-year-old girl were found near Enumclaw, 40 feet from State Route 410. They were pronounced to be those of Pammy Annette Avent, who had been believed to be a victim. The remains of Marie Malvar and April Buttram were found in September 2003.

  On the 20th of November 2005, a man hiking in a wooded area near Highway 18, close to Issaquah, found a skull. It belonged to Tracy Winston, who was 19 when she disappeared from Northgate Mall on the 12th of September 1983. That discovery led to the 49th life sentence. The work of naming victims has not stopped. In 2023, remains found in 1985 and long known as Bones 17 were identified as those of 15-year-old Lori Anne Razpotnik, last seen by her family in Lewis County, Washington, in November 1982.

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• 8. Confession and Confinement

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  On the 9th of February 2004, county prosecutors began releasing videotaped records of Ridgway's confession. Over five months of interviews with police and prosecutors, he confessed to 48 murders, 42 of which were on the police list of probable Green River Killer victims. No other American serial killer has confessed to more confirmed murders. Before the confession, authorities had attributed 49 murders to the Green River Killer. Ridgway said he had killed at least 71 people.

  The numbers shifted from tape to tape. In one interview he initially told investigators he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women. In another, on the 31st of December 2003, he claimed 71 victims. He also confessed to having had sex with the women before killing them, a detail he had kept to himself until after his sentencing. He said he targeted prostitutes because they were "easy to pick up" and that he "hated most of them." He also claimed that he began burying later victims so that he could resist the urge to commit necrophilia.

  In January 2004, Ridgway was placed in solitary confinement at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. On the 14th of May 2015, he was transferred to USP Florence High, a high-security federal prison east of Cañon City, Colorado. In September 2015, after public outcry and discussions with Governor Jay Inslee, Corrections Secretary Bernie Warner announced that Ridgway would return to Washington. The stated reason was to keep him "easily accessible" for open murder investigations. A chartered plane brought him back to Walla Walla on the 24th of October 2015.

  In September 2024, Ridgway was briefly moved from the penitentiary to the King County jail for a few days and then returned. Authorities refused to explain. When the transport order was unsealed in March 2025, it showed that he had been moved temporarily to help locate more victim remains.

  In December 2025, Tacoma radio station KIRO-FM reported, citing five anonymous sources, that Ridgway was receiving end-of-life care in prison. A director of the Department of Corrections told Fox 13 Seattle that the claims were inaccurate and that nothing had changed in his existing health conditions. Another official told Us Weekly that despite his health issues he was not under hospice care. Former King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said the speculation probably grew from a 2024 photograph of Ridgway in a wheelchair. Reichert called Ridgway a "pathological liar who at times didn't know truth from lie." He confirmed that King County continues to work missing person and cold cases presumably linked to Ridgway.

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