Warning: The text ahead contains written accounts of scenes of violent and sexual nature. Proceed at your own discretion.
Gary Leon Ridgway is a very troubled man. He was also a very troubled boy. Bathed by his mother, he would fantasise as she scrubbed his scrotum; as he aged, he would know that this was considered wrong but he just couldn’t help himself as the touch gave him pleasure. What was a natural human feeling developed into shame and he hated her for it. He wanted to kill her for it.
While many will experience issues in childhood, not all develop the mental problems Ridgway harboured. He was corrupted by the way he responded to the social conditioning around him. As far as he was concerned, men were sexual, women were bad and he should be able to get sex on his own terms, whenever he wanted it. As serial killer expert Jack Levin has commented, the problem with serial killers is not their childhood, but how they transition into adulthood when the real world doesn’t reflect their expectations.
Gary’s beginnings
Ridgway was born in 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah, as the second of three sons. According to some accounts, he was a popular boy and would become a popular man, described as “a wonderful person” by neighbours like Brenda Robinson wherever he went. He had an easygoing manner and was often be found hanging out at the local disco. One former school friend giggles girlishly in documentaries to this day about how she used to have a crush on him because of the way his dimples popped and his eyes sparkled when he laughed. She remembers the cute boy rather than the serial killer, to the extent that an early incident of him urinating on her brother’s leg in a fit of pique is recounted with a ‘boys will be boys’ shoulder shrug rather with discomfort at the socially unacceptable behaviour of a future murderer. Being a little bit cheeky and a little bit naughty was seen as being part of Gary’s mystery, intrigue and charm. It wasn’t then known that he had also, far less charmingly, committed arson, stabbed a boy and strangled a cat.
The problem was that Gary’s norms and expectations of women did not align with what was expected from him. Still smarting from his inappropriate feelings towards his mother, he was given a double whammy by his father, a bus driver whose route took him up the infamous area known as The Strip, which would later become Gary’s own killing ground. Each day, his dad drove the area and navigated around the sex workers who made their living there by servicing the men who wanted sex and having their own reputations tarnished in the process. Dad would fill Gary’s ears with his beliefs and opinions until, to Gary, for a woman to be sexual in her own right was wrong – all the more so if it put men out in any way as a result of their own desires.
Cheeky Gary did not want for a woman himself, however, and after leaving school he was quickly married to Claudia Kraig at a cute little ‘apple pie’ church with a white steeple. Before long he had upped and left to join the Navy. Long and tiresome nights away from home led Gary to engage the services of sex workers he met on tour, from whom he contracted the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea in the process. He blamed these women for the worn penis of his wandering appetites and then divorced his wife when he returned from duty to find that she, too, had sought physical contact outside of the marriage. He began to see all women as nothing but whores, echoing the perspectives of his busdriving old man. As far as Gary was concerned, women were there to be enjoyed and common sense didn’t come into it – his innate sense of his own masculinity was so utterly corrupted that he seemed to feel that he could only be a man if the person he was with was willing to be nothing other than the self he projected onto them.
This became very clear when the not-so-heartbroken Ridgway met and married his second wife, Marcia, shortly after his divorce. To put it bluntly, he married the women who would become ‘a maid in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom’, training her to do so by doing just exactly what he wanted, when he wanted it. As Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Patricia Eakes commented, “[Marcia] met his needs. She was initially very subservient. She cooked for him. She provided sexual activity whenever he wanted it”. These sexual shenanigans included outdoor excursions surrounded by the life of nature’s wild scenery. The rosy sun would peek at their play over the blushed mountains and whispering rivers in a game of hide and seek that would fulfil needs he would later satisfy through sadism.
Baby Blues/Sexual Sadism
The problem for Gary was that people aren’t ‘nothings’ to be played with. Placing his hands over his eyes and pretending otherwise wouldn’t make his own feelings of inadequacy go away. He was then outclassed by his own baby.
In 1975, Marcia produced an infant who needed the succour of her body rather more than his brutish father did. Gary’s sex time with his formerly ‘whenever, wherever’ woman was reduced. He responded in a typically childish fashion, with ‘foreplay’ being replaced by him passiveaggressively creeping up behind her and choking her. Such sexual submissiveness might be acceptable if both playmates are in on the gag, but Marcia recognised this behaviour as masochistic abuse and split, divorcing him. Gary duly spat out his dummy and sought his revenge through murder, maintaining ever after that his subsequent actions were merely the realisation of his need to get back at his ex over and over and over again.
He started to cruise The Strip to look for sex workers. He would encourage them into his car, take them to secluded areas and then kill them, often by strangulation from behind. He would then dump their bodies, before attacking again.
Gary had chosen to see himself as so utterly weak that the only way he could improve his own self worth was to periodically return to have sex with the corpses. Only by putting his penis in the increasingly maggot-infested, popping, oozing, rancid, rotting shells did he feel like he could really be a man. As Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Patricia Eakes has commented that he saw this as somehow romantic: “It was a date, a sexual act that he did not have to pay for”, a rendezvous with what he simply saw as “garbage” – his word for his victims.
Victims of Society
Gary was right about one thing: they were victims. The women he picked up were the sex workers of The Strip. Rather than working in the sex industry as escorts or entertainers for enjoyment or fame, the women were working for money. They were often runaways or had fallen on hard times due to misfortune or addiction. They were trying to provide for themselves and, sometimes, for families. Many felt there were no other options left for them.
Gary, like many other serial killers, knew they would be the simplest targets to catch because there would be fewer friends and family members to fuel a media storm. Public servants, such as the police, have historically avoided dealing with the policing of problems as losing control can create public relations nightmares between themselves and the electing public. It was therefore harder for law enforcement to trace the women because, as the sex workers were law breakers themselves, they had avoided notice until it was too late. The women would actively hide from the police who were trying to catch the killer simply to ensure that they could earn the money necessary to live. To them, abject poverty seemed on balance a more likely (and indeed statesanctioned) outcome than meeting their end with one elusive guy out of the thousands of men who passed through the city streets each night.
With the increasing death toll, the police swung into action. They established the Green River Task Force, a 50-strong unit of officers complete with a tip-off hotline to field calls from members of the public. According to task force member Dave Reichert, they had between 12-15,000 suspects and at one point actually interviewed Ridgway after a sex worker was seen getting into his truck before vanishing. As George Johnston of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab reported, investigators were also combing the crime scenes looking for “hair transfers, paint chips, glass, clothing damage”, anything that might lead them to the perpetrator. But all they had to go on were semen swabs from some of the bodies and the knowledge that the culprit was abnormal; who would leave rocks inside their victims’ sexual organs, like storing marbles in a bag after play?
The problem was that the person who was committing the crimes was – is – Mr Nondescript. Ridgeway is utterly unremarkable to look at and exploited this through the methods he used to evade capture. He would use different vans to swamp the city streets and would happily chatter about his little son to the women to convince them that they were safe. Gary even passed a polygraph test on the basis that the machine picks up on physical indicators of emotional discomfort and, quite simply, he displayed none. He relished his hollow victories.
Media Manhunt
Unlike Ridgway, the police were real men and women, they struggled to comprehend Gary’s excuse but knew to take an investigative opportunity that would help them to catch the killer. They acted when the arrogant, vain and unrepentant serial killer, Ted Bundy, came calling, slinking back into the limelight, clutching on Ridgway’s coat tails.
Part of the problem the police faced was that it didn’t take a genius to outwit an American media and public who were panicked and hungry for news of the killings in their home town. Every new corpse’s location was reported by the press and, as Gary was known as a regular John on The Strip, he was repeatedly pulled in for questioning. He knew he was being watched. The police knew from his truck’s fuel tickets that he was travelling far further than it was logical for him to go but they could prove nothing. He got picked out of photograph line ups but it only proved his presence in the area. His property was searched but all it provided was evidence of the average existence of a working parent. All of their information on him was circumstantial and failed to tie him directly to any crimes besides paying for sex. All it did was force him to change his modus operandi. He started taking his pickups home, where he would kill them in the secluded environment of his bedroom, before stripping and washing the bed sheets and dumping the laundry to dispose of the evidence. He would then take the corpses further and further afield so that he could return to them for longer. He even moved a number of them simply to make sure this remained possible.
Despite being able to retain a largely normal life and indeed getting married for a third time to Judith Lynch in 1988, people were suspicious. He had, by this time, been discharged from the Navy and had worked as a painter and display officer at the Kenworth truck plant for years. Co-workers such as Art Murphy remembered that Ridgway had been questioned for the crimes in the 1980s. What’s more, Ridgway had not done enough to allay those fears and became known as “Green River Gary”. Some people continued to regard him as the popular character of his youth, while others, such as Art Murphy, stated that he was simply “a different type of a person” and someone to be avoided.
The latter were right – even those he had no intention of harming were touched by his sickness as he would take his victims’ jewellery into work for people to find. He would also stage massive yard sales hawking the women’s things to the folks on his street when curiosity took them beyond the confines of their picket fences. This was despite the unusual quantity of girlish accessories this middle-aged family man had in his possession. Over time, Gary Ridgway’s killings became less frequent and, with the lack of new leads, the Green River Task Force was disbanded. By the end, only Tom Jensen was left.
Capture at the hands of DNA
The Green River Killer was eventually caught by miniscule, multi-colored strands of biology using tools developed by some of the most dedicated minds in the world. Scientists had been working quietly in the service of justice for years. In 2001, 19 years after the first murder, Marcia Chapman’s remains provided fluids that were examined and matched to Ridgway’s own. Carol Christensen’s remaining evidence was then tested. They had got him. Gary Ridgway’s biodata chained him to his past. The game was up and Gary was arrested on the 30 November 2001.
At first he denied everything, and while neighbours were shocked, his family stood by him. They assumed it was a mistake and that their yard-sale throwing, hard-working dad would be proved innocent. The real Ridgway, however, remained a coward to the end and cut a deal with the custodial services. He pleaded guilty to 48 counts of murder and agreed to lead law officers to where he had disposed of the bodies so that they could be buried. This was on the condition that his own life would be spared. He then stood in court, staring straight ahead and answering unwaveringly his plea of guilt to each of the charges as they were read aloud. He was sentenced on 18 December 2003.
That date, just before Christmas, is important. It is the festive time of which he had deprived both the victims and their families of togetherness. It is also a time of forgiveness. It was at that time that an old man with a long, white beard and brightly coloured braces stood up in court to address the overgrown boy who had killed his daughter, Linda. His name was Robert Rule and this is what he said: “Mr Ridgeway: there are people here that hate you. I – I’m not one of them. You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe – that is – what God says to do. That’s to forgive. You are forgiven, Sir.”
While Mr Rule spoke of his faith in God, he spoke from the heart and, in doing so, if only for a short while, he slipped the shard from the heart of Gary Ridgway: “I’m sorry for killing these ladies. They had their whole lives ahead of them. I’m sorry for causing so much pain to so many families.”
By acknowledging the women as “ladies” and recognising the importance of their lives to their families, for those few delicate moments of his life he became a man. He took some responsibility for the despicable crimes he had committed and provided a glimmer of hope that redemption is possible even for the hardest heart.
Gary Ridgway has now been convicted of murdering 49 women. They are not mentioned in detail here as no one victim is more deserving of attention than another. Ridgway continues to participate in investigations to close other cases. His actions were not the result of outrageously bad luck in childhood or his much reported low-level of intelligence, but because of the choices he made. He chose to accept the conditioning that men such as himself had rights but that women did not, not because of politics but because he couldn’t bring himself to grow up and accept that that’s simply not the case. Gary’s version of being sleepless in Seattle was a corruption of the promise of love in the movies, as are the stories of other killers in other cities across the world. It is a repetition that must be stopped.
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