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Truck Painter Gary Ridgway Arrested in Four Green River Murders After DNA Match

A saliva sample taken from Ridgway in 1987 was finally tested and linked him to three of the earliest victims. It was the first arrest in nearly two decades.

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Gary Ridgway in an orange jail jumpsuit and glasses, handcuffed, standing in a King County courtroom with deputies behind him

A swab of saliva kept for 14 years gave detectives their first arrest in the Green River murders. On November 30, 2001, they took Gary Ridgway into custody as he finished his shift.

Ridgway, 52, a painter who had worked at the same Seattle-area trucking company for 30 years, was arrested in Renton, south of Seattle, in four of the killings. DNA tied him to the deaths of Opal Mills, 16, Marcia Chapman, 31, and Cynthia Hinds, 17, whose bodies were found in and near the Green River in August 1982, among the first in the case. Police said other evidence, which they did not describe, linked him to the death of Carol Christensen, 21, whose body was found in woods near Maple Valley on May 8, 1983. The Green River killings, mostly of young women and girls between 15 and 25, had grown to a list of 49 victims, and many of the cases had gone unsolved for nearly twenty years.

Ridgway had been a suspect since the 1980s. In April 1983, Marie Malvar got into a man's pickup on Pacific Highway South and was never seen again. The next day her father and boyfriend went looking for the truck and found it parked outside Ridgway's house in Des Moines. Her father later said he went to the police, who did nothing; the tip alone was not enough for an arrest. In 1987, investigators searched Ridgway's home and had him chew on a piece of gauze to collect his saliva. They kept the sample rather than risk using up the small amount of evidence from the victims with the DNA tests of the day. In March 2001 the state crime lab began testing Green River evidence with a newer method, and the first results came back about two months before the arrest.

"I am not calling this guy the Green River Killer," King County Sheriff Dave Reichert said at a news conference that evening. He said the cases on the list were still considered linked, and that he expected charges the following week. Ridgway had been arrested twice before on prostitution-related charges, in May 1982 and two weeks before his arrest in the murders.

On December 5, 2001, King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng charged him with four counts of aggravated first-degree murder, for which he faced the death penalty or life in prison without release. Ridgway pleaded not guilty two weeks later.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the bodies of Mills, Chapman and Hinds were all found on August 15, 1982, while a Herald timeline dates their discovery to August 13 to 15.

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