In January 2024 the King County Sheriff's Office put a name to the last set of unidentified remains it attributes to Gary Ridgway: Tammie Liles, sixteen. A month earlier, in December 2023, another set had become Lori Anne Razpotnik, forty-one years after she ran away from her family's house in Lewis County at fifteen, and in 2012 a third had become Sandra Majors. Razpotnik's remains had been found on the last day of 1985, at the bottom of an embankment in Auburn where city employees had gone to look at a car that had left the road; it took a forensic genetic genealogy firm to build a new profile from them, a saliva sample from her mother, and a comparison run at the University of North Texas. With Liles named, the sheriff's office said no other unidentified remains are believed to be connected to him. What is still missing is women. Kassee Ann Lee, Kelly Kay McGinnis and Patricia Ann Osborn disappeared in the 1980s; their cases are linked to Ridgway, he has never been charged with them, and their remains have never been found.
He was convicted of forty-nine murders, which is more murder convictions than any other serial killer in American history has recorded. He told detectives the real figure was somewhere between sixty-five and eighty, and has at other times given higher numbers. Investigators have long worked on the assumption of at least sixty-five. Neither he nor they can close the gap, because the evidence for the additional killings is mostly his own memory, and his memory is poor, self-serving and forty years old.
The first body was found on July 15, 1982, in the Green River south of Seattle: Wendy Lee Coffield, sixteen. Debra Bonner followed, and on August 15 three more in the same stretch of water: Marcia Fay Chapman, thirty-one, Cynthia Hinds, seventeen, and Opal Charmaine Mills, sixteen, two of them weighted down. Five bodies in a month in one river is what named the case and built the task force.
Almost all the women and girls he killed were working the strip along Pacific Highway South, and a great many of them were runaways. The ages in the record run young. Wendy Stephens was fourteen, identified by DNA and announced in January 2021 after decades as an unknown, a Denver runaway whose remains were found in 1984 in a swamp behind a baseball field near the airport. Debra Lorraine Estes was fifteen. Lori Anne Razpotnik was fifteen. Kimi-Kai Pitsor was sixteen, and her skull was found in 1983 a few hundred yards from where Razpotnik would be found two years later.
His method barely varied. He strangled them, usually from behind and often during sex, because shooting was loud and a knife left him covered in blood; he explained this to detectives as a practical matter. He drove the bodies out to clusters in the woods and returned to some of them afterward. He kept a photograph of his son in the car and showed it to women as reassurance. He chose sex workers, he said later, because he could kill as many as he wanted without getting caught, and because he did not expect them to be reported.
The Green River Task Force became one of the largest homicide investigations ever mounted in the United States, and Ridgway was inside it from nearly the beginning. A witness named him in 1983. He was interviewed. In 1984 he took a polygraph and passed it. In 1987 detectives obtained a saliva sample from him and filed it away, because nothing available in 1987 could do anything useful with saliva. Dave Reichert, the King County detective handed the Debra Bonner case and later a congressman, worked it for nearly twenty years. Bob Keppel went to Florida in 1984 to hear Ted Bundy's assessment of the killer from death row; Bundy told him the man would be returning to the bodies, which was correct.
The 1987 sample is what convicted him. In 2001 the King County laboratory ran it through STR testing, a technique that did not exist when it was collected, and matched it to three of the victims. He was arrested on November 30, 2001, as he came off shift at the Kenworth truck plant where he had painted trucks for thirty years. Paint traces unique to that factory were later found on several more of the dead, which is how the count grew.
The plea agreement is still argued over. On November 5, 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated murder in the first degree under a deal that took execution off the table in exchange for complete cooperation in locating remains. King County prosecutor Norm Maleng, who had sought the death penalty in other cases and believed in it, defended the bargain on a single ground: the families' need to recover their daughters outweighed the state's interest in killing him. Ridgway then spent months in a room with detectives and out in the woods with them, walking through sites. Bodies were found that would not otherwise have been found.
He was sentenced on December 18, 2003, to forty-eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. The families spoke first. In February 2011 he pleaded guilty to a forty-ninth murder, that of Rebecca Marrero, whose skull had been located the previous December, and received another life term.
He was born in Salt Lake City on February 18, 1949 and grew up at McMicken Heights, near what is now Sea-Tac airport, on the same highway he would later hunt along; his father drove buses on the Pacific Highway South route. He tested at an IQ of 82, was held back at school, and wet the bed into his teens. At sixteen he led a six-year-old boy into the woods and stabbed him through the ribs, and was never charged for it. He finished high school at twenty, joined the Navy, served aboard a supply ship off Vietnam, and came home to Kenworth. He married three times: Claudia Kraig in 1970, Marcia Winslow in 1973, with whom he had a son, and Judith Mawson in 1988, who has said she never suspected anything at all and has since said she believes she is the reason he stopped.
He is seventy-seven and back at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, but he did not spend all of the last two years there. On September 9, 2024, he was quietly booked into the King County Jail, and on September 13 he was sent back to Walla Walla; for six months nobody would say why. Court documents unsealed in March 2025 supplied the answer. A motion by Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Mary H. Barbosa said he had agreed to take detectives to places where he claimed he had left remains that had never been recovered: "Previous efforts to find these locations based on the verbal descriptions given by the defendant have not been successful," it said. "The defendant has indicated that he believes he can find those locations in person." The trips were spread over several days because of his age and health. A sheriff's spokesperson would not say whether anything was recovered, and would only confirm that the cases involved remain open. In December 2025, when reports circulated that he was dying, the Department of Corrections called them inaccurate rumors and said his medical condition had not changed.
So the bargain Norm Maleng struck in 2003 is still running. It was justified on the basis that a living Ridgway could give families their daughters back, and twenty-three years later a living Ridgway is still being driven to locations in King County because he says he remembers where he put someone. Whether he does, or whether this is one more performance by a man who has always understood that his usefulness is the only reason he is alive, is not something the record settles.
What the record does settle is the arithmetic of the naming. Forty-nine convictions. Sandra Majors named in 2012, Wendy Stephens in 2021, Lori Anne Razpotnik in 2023, Tammie Liles in 2024. Kassee Ann Lee, Kelly Kay McGinnis and Patricia Ann Osborn, still missing.