KILLER PROFILES - Gary Ridgway "The Green River Killer"

“Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy. He does not deserve to live,” prosecuting attorney Norm Maleng said after making the plea deal with the killer.

Thirty-five years later, she finally has a face, but still not a name. The young woman with straight blond hair and green eyes had tragically crossed paths with Gary Ridgway, the factory worker who murdered as many as 71 teenage girls and young women in Washington state in the 1980s and 1990s.

Created using DNA analysis and other techniques, her composite sketch humanizes this most inhuman of crime sprees that still consumes the efforts of investigators. Ridgway was a thrice-married man who struggled to resolve his strict religious views with his overpowering lusts. He would proselytize door to door and read the Bible out loud during work, but would also demand sex from his wives and girlfriends multiple times a day, often in public places. He complained about the prostitutes in his hometown of Reston, Washington, but then repeatedly availed himself of their services.

Starting in the early 1980s, the female bodies began turning up in the forests around the Green River and near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. They were usually nude and posed in clusters. The Green River Task Force was formed to investigate the murders, and among those interviewed was serial killer Ted Bundy while he was in jail in 1984.

Ridgway’s arrest on prostitution charges in 1982 made him a suspect, but he passed a polygraph test and released. Then in 2001, DNA tests on samples Ridgway had provided in the 1980s linked him to four murders. Authorities charged him with killing three more victims when their remains turned microscopic remnants of the kind of paint Ridgway used at a truck factory he worked at. He had killed for 20 years without being caught.

In exchange for prosecutors dropping the death penalty, Ridgway pleaded guilty in 2003 to the murders of 48 women— a 49th was later added—though he said he could have killed as many as 71. He admitted to preying on prostitutes, hitchhikers and runaways, killing and dumping their bodies.

Ridgway’s Various Confirmed Victims

Although he agreed to help authorities locate and identify the rest of the victims, many were known only by numbers. DNA testing aided in the identification process and police now hope the composite sketch, which was released in April 2021, will provide one more clue.

Ridgway, 72, remains in solitary confinement in a Washington prison serving multiple life sentences.