Gary Leon Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City on February 18, 1949, and grew up in McMicken Heights, near what is now SeaTac airport, where his father drove buses on the Pacific Highway South route. He was a slow child, tested at an IQ of 82, held back at school, and bullied. He wet the bed into his teens. At sixteen he stabbed a six-year-old boy in the woods and was never charged. He graduated at twenty, joined the Navy, served on a supply ship off Vietnam, and came home to thirty years painting trucks at Kenworth. He married three times, to 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.
He began killing in 1982. The first bodies surfaced that summer in the Green River south of Seattle: Wendy Lee Coffield, sixteen, found on July 15, then Debra Bonner, and on August 15 Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds and Opal Mills, two of them weighted down in the water. Almost all of the victims were young women working the strip along Pacific Highway South, many of them runaways, many of them under twenty. He strangled them, usually from behind and often during sex, moved the bodies to clusters in the woods, and went back to some of them afterwards. He picked up victims with a photograph of his son in the car. The Seattle press called him the Green River Killer, after where the first bodies were found.
Those named in the record include Wendy Lee Coffield, sixteen; Gisele Ann Lovvorn, nineteen; Debra Lynn Bonner, twenty-three; Marcia Fay Chapman, thirty-one; Opal Charmaine Mills, sixteen; Terry Rene Milligan, sixteen; Mary Bridget Meehan, eighteen; Debra Lorraine Estes, fifteen; and Linda Jane Rule.
The Green River Task Force was formed in 1982 and became one of the largest homicide investigations in American history. Ridgway was in it almost from the start. He was named by a witness in 1983, interviewed, and in 1984 took a polygraph and passed. Detectives obtained a saliva sample from him in 1987 and filed it, because nothing then available could do anything with it. Ted Bundy, on death row in Florida, offered his reading of the killer to detective Bob Keppel in 1984, and told them he would be returning to the bodies.
In 2001 the King County laboratory ran the 1987 sample through STR DNA testing and matched it to three victims. He was arrested on November 30, 2001, as he left the Kenworth plant. Paint traces from the factory later tied him to several more.
On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first degree murder under an agreement that took execution off the table in exchange for full cooperation in finding remains. Prosecutor Norm Maleng defended the deal on the ground that the families' need to recover their daughters outweighed the state's interest in killing him. Ridgway spent months walking detectives through sites and gave a figure for himself of somewhere between sixty-five and eighty. He was sentenced on December 18, 2003, to forty-eight consecutive life terms without parole. In February 2011 he pleaded guilty to a forty-ninth, Rebecca Marrero, whose skull had been found the previous December. He is at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.