A body left in the open fixes a date, a direction of travel and a stretch of ground that somebody had reason to know. Detectives in Washington, California, New York and Maine learned to read those places, sometimes within days and more often across decades. A river in Kent, Washington, gave one series its name before anyone knew who the killer was. The hillsides north of downtown Los Angeles forced three police agencies into a single task force. A strip of brush beside a Long Island beach road was searched for one missing woman and gave up four others. And in at least two cases, the ground the killer alone could find became the last thing he had to bargain with.
On July 15, 1982, two teenage boys from Kent, Washington, saw a body in the Green River, floating against the Meeker Street Bridge. It was Wendy Lee Coffield, 16, and she had been strangled. On August 12 a worker at a meat-packing plant beside the river found Debra Lynn Bonner, 23. Three days later searchers found three more, and by August 15 five girls and young women had been recovered from the water and the bank along one stretch of the river south of Seattle. King County police formed a task force, and the newspapers named the unknown killer for the river.
The river did not stay his ground. Over the next two years women vanished from the highway strip south of Seattle, and their remains turned up in deep woods, beside parking lots and near a playground across south King County. More than 40 deaths were eventually attributed to the same man. The grouping of the finds was itself evidence: it told investigators they were dealing with one killer working a familiar patch of country.
Help came from an unlikely place. In 1984 Ted Bundy, on death row in Florida, wrote offering to act as a consultant, and the letter reached Robert Keppel, the detective who had worked Bundy’s own Washington murders. In their interviews Bundy advised the police to watch the places where bodies had been left, because the killer might return to them "over and over," and suggested that he knew the highway strip well and lived near the places he used. Keppel later wrote that some of it confirmed what investigators were already doing and that Bundy was projecting much of himself onto the case. He told the story in The Riverman, the name Bundy gave the unknown man.
Gary Ridgway, a truck painter who picked up women on the strip, was questioned in 1984 and passed a polygraph. In 1987 detectives searched his home and vehicle and took a saliva sample. Nothing then available could do anything with it. Fourteen years later the Washington State Patrol crime laboratory matched DNA from that sample to evidence from early victims, and on November 30, 2001, Ridgway, then 52, was arrested and charged.
By the spring of 2003 Ridgway stood charged with seven killings. King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng then agreed to forgo the death penalty in exchange for a complete accounting of the murders and Ridgway’s help in leading investigators to the graves. Maleng, a lay Episcopal minister whose own daughter had died in a sledding accident in 1989, said he had weighed the decision "from all conceivable angles except" what it would save the county, and that he had come to see "the other faces involved," the families still waiting for answers. "When I made the decision, I felt at peace with it," he said that November.
The places became the substance of the deal. Detectives drove Ridgway back to the woods and ravines in a van, often before dawn and without warning, and watched him through a night scope. Detective Jon Mattsen said he "would come alive" on the trips. He led them to the remains of four more women. On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder and was sentenced to life without the possibility of release.
He had also moved remains to mislead the police. Tammie Liles, 16, of Everett, last seen in 1983, was found in Oregon and identified in 1988; Ridgway later admitted taking remains from King County to the Tigard area. In December 2010 Rebecca Marrero, 20, missing since December 1982, was found in a ravine in Auburn, close to where Marie Malvar had been recovered during the 2003 searches. On February 18, 2011, Ridgway pleaded guilty to a 49th count. The sheriff’s office announced in January 2024 that the last unidentified victim tied to the case had been identified.
Ridgway has claimed far more. In 2013 he told a Seattle radio host that he had killed 75 to 80 women and that many bodies were still undiscovered. Authorities said they had heard such claims before. In September 2024 detectives took him from prison to King County for several days to look for places he said held remains; KIRO Newsradio reported in December 2025 that court papers showed nothing had been found. That month the Department of Corrections called reports that he was dying "inaccurate rumors" and said he remained at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Between October 1977 and February 1978, ten women and girls, aged 12 to 28, were found dead on hillsides and roadsides in and around Los Angeles. Yolanda Washington, 19, was found near Griffith Park. Judith Miller, 15, was found on a quiet street in La Crescenta, in the foothills north of Glendale; Lissa Kastin, 21, a waitress who hoped to act, in the hills of Glendale. Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson, 14, schoolgirls who had ridden a bus home from a shopping center in Eagle Rock, were found on a hillside in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Kristina Weckler, 20, an art student, was found in Highland Park, and Lauren Wagner, 18, on Mount Washington. The last, Cindy Hudspeth, 20, was found in her own car off a mountain highway.
The press named the killer for the places. The places also divided the investigation: the Los Angeles Police Department, the county sheriff and the Glendale police each handled scenes, depending on where a body lay, until the agencies joined in the Hillside Strangler Task Force. Detectives concluded early that the bodies had been moved in a way that needed two men. The public phoned in about 10,000 tips, stored on a computer that could hold them but could not analyze them; one name was called in three separate times without the system connecting the calls.
That name was Kenneth Bianchi. He was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, in January 1979 after two college students were found dead there. In October 1979 he pleaded guilty to the Bellingham murders and to five of the Los Angeles killings, and named his cousin, Angelo Buono Jr., a Glendale auto upholsterer, as his partner. Buono was arrested within about half an hour of Bianchi’s plea. After a trial that ran from November 1981 to November 1983, a jury convicted Buono of nine of the ten murders and chose life without parole. He died in his cell at Calipatria State Prison in 2002.
Joel Rifkin, an unemployed landscaper from East Meadow on Long Island, did the opposite of returning. He picked up women in Manhattan and Brooklyn and left them far apart. Yun Lee, 31, was found in the water off Randalls Island in September 1991. Lorraine Orvieto, 28, Mary Ann Holloman and a woman who has never been identified were recovered in 1992 from Newtown Creek and Coney Island Creek on the Brooklyn waterfront. Anna Lopez, 33, was found upstate that May; Jenny Soto, 23, in the Bronx that November. Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez were left in remote parts of Suffolk County in 1993. The remains of Heidi Balch, found on a golf course in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, in March 1989, went unidentified until 2013, when DNA linked her to the killings he had described.
He explained the method to CBS New York from prison in 2011. "Water is harder to investigate than land because it washes everything," he said. The deaths sat in separate files in separate jurisdictions, with no thread running between them.
The thread was pulled by accident. At about 3:15 a.m. on June 28, 1993, two New York State troopers saw a pickup truck with no rear license plate on a Nassau County parkway and tried to stop it. The driver fled. The chase lasted 20 to 25 minutes and ended when the truck hit a light pole. In the back the troopers found the body of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, of Manhattan. Rifkin admitted killing her and 16 other women. Over the following months a State Police task force located and identified 15 of the women he described, and charges were filed or considered in ten jurisdictions.
In May 1994 a Nassau County jury rejected his insanity defense and convicted him of second-degree murder after two hours and ten minutes of deliberation. He pleaded guilty in Suffolk County in August 1995 to the murders of Leah Evens and Lauren Marquez, in Brooklyn that December to the murders of Lorraine Orvieto, Mary Ann Holloman and the unidentified woman, and in Queens in January 1996 to a further murder. News reports put his total at nine murder convictions and his combined sentences at 203 years to life. Newsweek reported in June 2024 that he was held at Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
In South Los Angeles the pattern was not distance but repetition. Between 1985 and 2007 nine women and a 15-year-old girl, Princess Berthomieux, were shot or strangled and left in the alleys and trash bins of the same neighborhoods, many of them around Manchester Square. Three men were killing women in South Los Angeles during the crack cocaine years, and the deaths were first grouped together as the Southside Slayer killings. In 2008 LA Weekly gave one of the series the name Grim Sleeper, for an apparent gap in the killings between 1988 and 2002.
The places offered geography but no name. That came in 2010 from a method California had adopted two years earlier: a familial search of the state DNA data bank, which compares crime-scene evidence with offenders' profiles in search of a close relative rather than an exact match. A relative of Lonnie Franklin Jr. had been added to the data bank after a felony weapons conviction. Detectives then followed Franklin, a retired city sanitation worker and former police garage attendant, to a birthday party at a pizza restaurant and collected the utensils and crusts he left behind. The DNA matched. He was arrested outside his home on July 7, 2010.
On May 5, 2016, a Los Angeles County jury found Franklin guilty of ten counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder, for a woman who survived being shot in 1988. He was sentenced to death that August. He was found unresponsive in his cell at San Quentin State Prison on March 28, 2020, and died at 67, with his automatic appeal to the California Supreme Court unresolved. At trial prosecutors had presented four more killings for which he was never charged, and police have said there may have been as many as 25 victims.
Sometimes the ground connected cases that the calendar did not. On July 6, 1984, the body of a young woman was found in Los Angeles County. She had been strangled, and with nothing to identify her she was recorded as Jane Doe No. 60. On July 12 Tracey Campbell, 15, who had moved from Montana that spring to live with her mother, disappeared. Her neighbor, a freelance photographer named William Bradford, had told her family that he took pictures. When he was arrested on July 31 on warrants in Tracey’s disappearance, officers found photographs of a young woman in his car. A detective saw the resemblance to Jane Doe No. 60, and fingerprints identified her as Shari Miller, 21.
Tracey Campbell was found in the desert of northern Los Angeles County on August 11, 1984, after a man who had camped there with Bradford the year before helped police search. One of Bradford’s photographs of Shari Miller, the California Supreme Court later noted, had been taken a short distance from the place where Tracey was found. A jury convicted him of both first-degree murders and returned a death verdict. Representing himself at the penalty phase, he offered no evidence and told the jurors, "Think of how many you don’t even know about." The court affirmed the judgment in 1997.
In July 2006 the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department posted pictures of about 50 women from his seized collection and asked the public to identify them, fearing some had been harmed between 1975 and 1984. On July 28 the department said 31 women had been tentatively identified and 28 of them were believed to be alive. By November 39 had been identified and dozens remained unknown. Bradford was on death row at San Quentin that year, maintaining his innocence through his lawyers.
Ocean Parkway runs along a narrow barrier island on Long Island’s South Shore. In December 2010 Suffolk County police were combing the brush beside it for Shannan Gilbert, a young woman who had gone missing in Oak Beach on May 1 of that year after calling 911 for help. On December 11 police found Melissa Barthelemy, 24, of the Bronx. Two days later police found Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, and Megan Waterman, 22, on the same quarter-mile stretch. All four had vanished between 2007 and 2010, and all four lay within about a quarter mile of one another, 22 to 33 feet from the road. They became known as the Gilgo Four.
The search widened through the spring of 2011, and by April police had found ten sets of human remains along the parkway. Some of them answered older questions. Partial remains found in the woods at Manorville in 2000 and 2003 proved to belong to Valerie Mack, 24, and Jessica Taylor, 20, whose other remains turned up beside the parkway about 50 miles to the west. Remains found on Fire Island in 1996 were matched to remains near Tobay Beach and identified as Karen Vergata, 34. A body found by hunters in a field in North Sea, near Southampton, in 1993 lay more than 60 miles from Gilgo Beach and was not connected to the series for three decades; it was Sandra Costilla, 28, a native of Trinidad and Tobago. Other remains from the parkway, among them those of an unidentified man, have never been tied to the same killer.
For a decade the case stalled. A new task force formed in early 2022, and on March 14 of that year a State Police investigator found in vehicle records that Rex Heuermann, a Manhattan architect living in Massapequa Park, across the bay from the parkway, had owned the kind of pickup truck a witness had seen at Amber Costello’s home on the last night anyone saw her. Phone records followed, and in January 2023 detectives retrieved a pizza box he threw away outside his Fifth Avenue office. DNA from the crusts was matched to a man’s hair recovered with Megan Waterman’s remains. Heuermann was arrested in Midtown on July 13, 2023.
On April 8, 2026, in Riverhead, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murders of Barthelemy, Waterman and Costello and the second-degree murders of Brainard-Barnes, Taylor, Costilla and Mack, and admitted killing Karen Vergata, for whom he had not been charged. On June 17, 2026, Judge Timothy Mazzei sentenced him to three consecutive terms of life without parole followed by four consecutive terms of 25 years to life. He waived his right to appeal. In August 2026 the state prison system confirmed that he was held at Clinton Correctional Facility.
Shannan Gilbert’s remains were found in a tidal marsh near Oak Beach on December 13, 2011. Police said she most likely drowned by accident. Her family has never accepted that finding, and their lawyer said an independent autopsy the family commissioned in 2016 found her death consistent with strangulation. Heuermann was never charged with her death and did not admit it; his lawyer said after the plea that he had nothing to do with her. The search for her led police to the others, and her name has stayed attached to the case.
James Hicks of Etna, Maine, showed how long a missing body can protect a man and what it is worth once he is cornered. His first wife, Jennie Cyr Hicks, 23, disappeared on July 19, 1977; the couple lived in a trailer in Carmel with their two young children. He said she had left him. In 1984 a jury convicted him of killing her without her body ever being found, a verdict the Bangor Daily News later called the first of its kind in Maine; the offense was reported as fourth-degree murder. He served six years of a ten-year sentence and was released in July 1990. By then he was also the main suspect in the disappearance of Jerilyn Towers, 34, of Newport, last seen leaving a lounge with him on October 16, 1982. Lynn Willette, 40, an Army veteran and former paramedic who had just ended their relationship, vanished after finishing a morning shift on May 25, 1996; her car was found a week later in Hermon. Without bodies, police said, there was not enough to charge him.
In April 2000 Hicks was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, for robbing at gunpoint the older woman he worked for as a handyman in Levelland. With his record he faced 55 years in a Texas prison. Maine detectives offered him a way out: he would confess and lead them to the three women, and in return he would serve his Maine sentence first, which in practice meant he would never serve the Texas term. His taped confession ran nine hours. On October 12, 2000, the remains of Jerilyn Towers were recovered in Etna. The next day Lynn Willette’s were recovered in Forkstown Township, in southern Aroostook County, and partial remains of Jennie Hicks were found in Etna the same month.
Hicks pleaded guilty in Bangor to the murders of Towers and Willette, and Justice Andrew Mead sentenced him to two concurrent life terms; Maine has no parole. The prosecutor, William Stokes, who had also tried the 1984 case, told the court he was "not very impressed" by the cooperation and believed Hicks had acted out of self-interest. Outside court, Jerilyn Towers’s daughter, who had been 13 when her mother vanished, said: "Now we have her back, and he’s lost all of his control." Jennie Hicks was buried beside her father in Auburn. Her mother had waited 23 years.
Adam Walsh, six years old, disappeared from a Sears store in a Hollywood, Florida, shopping mall on July 27, 1981. On August 10 two fishermen found his remains in a canal beside the Florida Turnpike, some 120 miles from Hollywood and about 50 miles south of Vero Beach. The FBI did not join the case until a week after he vanished.
Ottis Toole, a Jacksonville drifter later convicted of other killings, first confessed in October 1983 and directed investigators to the turnpike. A search there found nothing, and he recanted. ABC News later counted 24 documented confessions, most of them withdrawn. Evidence that might have tested his account was lost: the Hollywood police lost a bloodstained piece of carpet from his car, and the car itself, before DNA testing could be done. Toole died in prison in 1996, serving five life sentences for other crimes, and was never charged in Adam’s death. On December 16, 2008, the Hollywood police announced that they considered him the killer and closed the case. It was a police finding, not a verdict. "We needed to know," John Walsh said that day. "And today we know."
None of these places protected or exposed a killer on its own. The Green River gathered its dead in one stretch of water and produced a task force; Rifkin’s creeks and rivers kept his victims in separate files until a missing license plate ended it. The hillsides of Los Angeles told detectives they were hunting two men, and the alleys of South Los Angeles told them where one of them lived, without a name. On Ocean Parkway a search for one woman found four others, and the case still waited more than a decade for a discarded pizza box. In Washington and Maine the places became currency, paid out in exchange for a life spared or a prison chosen. And beside the Florida Turnpike a canal gave back a child but not the answer, because the evidence that might have supplied it had been lost.
• July 19, 1977: Jennie Cyr Hicks disappears in Maine.
• October 1977 to February 1978: Ten women and girls are found on hillsides and roadsides in Los Angeles County in the Hillside Strangler case.
• October 1979: Kenneth Bianchi pleads guilty in Washington and Los Angeles; Angelo Buono Jr. is arrested in Glendale.
• July 27, 1981: Adam Walsh disappears in Hollywood, Florida; his remains are found in a canal beside the Florida Turnpike on August 10.
• July 15, 1982: Wendy Lee Coffield is found in the Green River at Kent, Washington; by August 15 five victims have been recovered from the river and its bank.
• October 16, 1982: Jerilyn Towers is last seen in Newport, Maine.
• November 1983: A jury convicts Buono of nine of the ten Hillside Strangler murders.
• 1984: Ted Bundy advises Green River investigators to watch the places where bodies were left; Gary Ridgway passes a polygraph.
• 1984: A Maine jury convicts James Hicks of killing his first wife, whose body had not been found.
• July and August 1984: Shari Miller and Tracey Campbell are found in Los Angeles County; William Bradford is arrested.
• 1985 to 2007: Nine women and a 15-year-old girl are found in the alleys and trash bins of South Los Angeles.
• 1987: Detectives take a saliva sample from Ridgway.
• June 28, 1993: Troopers find Tiffany Bresciani’s body in Joel Rifkin’s pickup after a chase in Nassau County.
• November 20, 1993: Sandra Costilla is found in North Sea, near Southampton, New York.
• May 9, 1994: A Nassau County jury convicts Rifkin of second-degree murder.
• May 25, 1996: Lynn Willette is last heard from in Maine.
• July 14, 1997: The California Supreme Court affirms Bradford’s convictions.
• October 12 and 13, 2000: Hicks leads Maine investigators to the remains of Jerilyn Towers and Lynn Willette; he later pleads guilty to both murders.
• November 30, 2001: Ridgway is arrested after a DNA match.
• November 5, 2003: Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder under an agreement to help find remains.
• July 2006: The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department publishes photographs from Bradford’s collection.
• December 16, 2008: Hollywood police name Ottis Toole as Adam Walsh’s killer and close the case.
• July 7, 2010: Lonnie Franklin Jr. is arrested after a familial DNA search.
• December 11 to 13, 2010: The Gilgo Four are found along Ocean Parkway.
• February 18, 2011: Ridgway pleads guilty to a 49th murder.
• December 13, 2011: Shannan Gilbert’s remains are found near Oak Beach.
• May 5, 2016: A jury finds Franklin guilty of ten murders; he dies at San Quentin on March 28, 2020.
• July 13, 2023: Rex Heuermann is arrested in Manhattan.
• January 2024: The sheriff’s office announces that the last unidentified victim tied to the Green River case has been identified.
• April 8, 2026: Heuermann pleads guilty to seven murders and admits an eighth; he is sentenced on June 17, 2026.