THE GREEN RIVER KILLER: GARY RIDGWAY

Article BY Nicholas Peacock - Art by sbsink

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The Green River Valley, a spectacular and stark mountain scape, both serene and threatening, alike the Donner Pass of those ill-fated pilgrims. Wilderness and madness. Here crashing through the undergrowth a dead girl is dragged in her tawdry attire, dumped for nature to attend to. Gary Ridgway is a threat as old as mankind, a predator of women with his libido unchained. Instinct should tell woman about this man, and smart ones know his hand and he knows they do and looks elsewhere. Some girls will wander by mistake into the ambit of such a Lothario of Death, and some strange creatures will do so as willing brides of their demise, their lives so ruinous. Some mothers anticipate the fateful day and wonder what God could provide such a loving niche for this monster amour to be summoned by the Devil to run amok in.

“The plan was…I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could. I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted, without getting caught” (Gary Ridgway)

On November 5 2003 Gary Leon Ridgway pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. He is incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary.

 

Seattle 1960

McMicken Heights is another dreary blue collar suburban commuter belt township, near the SeaTac airport, where many residents work. The forefathers came, wild and industrious in this wilderness, in thrall to it, but their descendants have different ideas. Things have changed a great deal, but vice endures. The Ridgways came from Utah, ended up here so Thomas could drive busses. Mother Mary and Gary, his older brother Gregory, younger Thomas Jnr. They are a seemingly unremarkable family. Thomas will drive busses, Mary will make the home.

Driving a bus isn’t a career choice, Thomas Ridgway knows it and he knows his lot in life - maybe he was proud to do his job. He drives the Pacific Highway South route into Seattle all hours and sees all sorts of people, which is interesting, as a bartender might attest. He sees people who are clearly doing better that the Ridgways, than they ever will. No one pays any mind to this man, he just takes the money and ferries them around. It is an antisocial job, sometimes things get nasty, but that is his lot. He sees a lot of pretty girls on his bus, girls of Nordic extraction - Skandi-Kandis. Their interests in each other are diametrically opposed. That is life’s lottery too; some people are so much better looking than others. He sees prostitutes in this city and his money is as good as anyone’s, and some of those prostitutes are just as pretty as those stuck up blondes he ferries around, and they also lost in life’s lottery.

Mary Ridgway is a slightly eccentric mum to say the least. Like musical chairs there is always an odd one out. She is a mum to shy from not than you can escape. She has some friends around here, fellow mums, and they know she’s a little odd, and despite their blue collar camaraderie, they must wonder what goes on, the way she dresses, so louche and inappropriate for her age. But they are sympathetic. She has quite a sexual appetite, team randy with lucky Thomas. There is a dynamic between her and Gary which Freud would have called Oedipal. Being sexually attracted to your son or mother may be normative according to certain schools of psychology, but it probably isn’t easy, not something you’d admit to your friends and expect to keep them. Gary’s world is getting very confusing already.

Gary is 11, too young, perhaps, to understand sex fully, but maybe he understands an urge and relief. Gary is quite a strange boy, as his classmates are wont to point out bullying him. He is slow – an I.Q. of 82 - and has slightly strange face, an expression that might be described as lewd wonderment, maybe he is a pervert already, a proto-pervert at least. The other children know there is something hinky about Gary, a dog could tell that, Gary knows this too. Wetting the bed isn’t normal for starters and it seems torturing small animals is considered weird and disturbing. He is beginning to think that the God he was told loved him, is in fact conspiring to ruin his life and that things aren’t going to get any better, ever.

 

The Ridgway Family Again

Thomas is frequenting prostitutes, he does this on the job sometimes. He sometimes wonders if his strange son is into girls because they don’t seem to like him much, except for his mother. Gary is 14 and sooner or later it will be crunch time. Maybe he could meet one of these nice women, a sort of sexual education the likes of which you don’t get at school. Thomas loves Gary and wants what is best for him including a healthy appetite for the opposite sex. Pornography would be a primer. Poor Gary is still wetting the bed. It is a vicious circle of anxiety, misery begetting further misery. To compound this misfortune, his mother washes his wetted body and she does something he knows is strange and wrong, she works her hands about his body in an intimate fashion. To complicate matters, he thinks he likes it even though he knows he shouldn’t. He is a doubly disgusting child. Gary thinks he is utterly unfit for society and thinks everyone else knows. His anger is released through killing birds with his BB gun, which, ironically is a pretty normal thing for boys to do, but not when you’re fantasising about sex with your mother. Sex and death, like birds of a feather.

Pubescent children elicit a sexual aura that their parents are keenly aware of. Gary is coming of age and Thomas knows it is time for that sex education, lest Gary become a queer, which Thomas would consider weird and disgusting.

Gary rides the bus with his father now and he is shown the prostitutes through the window. He doesn’t quite understand his father’s fixation with these lewd women whose lifestyle he already knows enough about. Thomas keeps pointing them out and uttering oaths, those ‘whores’, ‘hookers’, ‘sluts’, ‘hussies’ etc. Gary respects his father although he knows it is mostly because he doesn’t have a choice. There are nights when the bus is empty when Thomas becomes quite incensed about these prostitutes and then on one night Gary comes to understand why. One would imagine that employees of the bus company who take prostitute breaks on the job with their kid in the bus would be fired.

 

Gary

Gary is finding school increasingly difficult, life for that matter. The more different he becomes, the less he fits in, the less he fits in the more anxious he becomes, the more it shows, the more his peers tease him which makes him awkward and more anxious. It is another of those vicious circles that this loving God has thrown his way. What really gets him is that other people, pupils make fun of him incessantly and he never did anything wrong to them. What is so galling is that he doesn’t know what to say to them; he is tonguetied, because he is stupid he guesses. He is beginning to think about killing people, people who wantonly try to harm you. He wonders how that would feel.

Gary is 16, he knows his life is going to be a washout; a gruelling term in a world made for the benefit of the other people. He thinks he may become a killer of them and that this is his career path like it or not, or maybe come to like it. Now he has a knife, which is a start. One day he is out in neighbourhood, walking the road to some woods, woods he goes to to escape his deranged family. His mind is abuzz with ideas of prostitutes and killing them and that they aren’t people who anyone cares about anyhow. He masturbates a lot these days and that is better than bedwetting. He thinks about sex with his mum a lot and as though an infidelity, sex with other women and how one can achieve this; none of the girls at his school, not even the really unattractive ones would give him a second look, as though it is a conspiracy. He doesn’t have the nerve to ask any girls out, or perhaps he knows what will happen and would rather save himself the humiliation. He sees a 6yr old boy who is alone and looks frightened, but not of him. He approaches him and asks him gently if he wants to come with him into the forest, he will show him something really neat and they can walk home together. Gary stabs him non-fatally. He will never be charged for this crime.

He graduates from school aged 20, a two years’ torment extension. But something has changed and it is quite miraculous. He now feels more confident around women and women don’t seem so instantly repulsed by him. He is working casual labour in the neighbourhood and at night, although underage, frequenting bars where he sees young women and he seems to fit into this world after all, at least so far so good. He doesn’t feel an urge to kill people anymore; he is too distracted, as if by some instinctive force, by notions of insinuating himself in the company these lovely young women he sees. Thomas would be proud. This is what life is about, and he is now living it as a normal person. One woman he meets is Claudia Barrows, his own age. To begin with, he cannot begin to think about how to approach her and break the ice and he goofs is a little, but she doesn’t repudiate him; she is just a goofball like him. This girl actually likes him. Things go well; he doesn’t need to pay a woman for sex, nor threaten her. He feels like he is walking on air.

They marry within the year. The Vietnam War wants people Gary’s age and with no prospects of college, he is eligible for the draft. He enlists in the U.S. Navy and leaves his wife to whatever are her devices. His life has become quite ordinary, but the honeymoon of his first relationship has worn off and resurfacing are thoughts of women as whores. He can only guess what she will get up to with him out of the picture, but that’s fine, there’s nothing to stop him from sexual adventure.

Gary’s military service is aboard a supply ship and involves some combat action. But what he’s interested in is the real action of the prostitutes in this strange country. My, these girls are cheap and desperate; they make the ones back home seem like escort girls. He has many confederates in this recreation, not so strange or sordid is this behaviour then.

He had imagined that his wife had been up to no good while he was away; why shouldn’t she given that she is a whore. Whores are what Gary came to understand in this war. His mother was a whore. Whores have prices, not necessarily on a tariff, by the hour, for this act or that. When he returns after two years’ service he learns about her affairs and admits his own infidelity and they divorce. Gary cares no more about this woman who once brought a sense of normality to his life; he knows women are for sale.

There may be many work opportunities for a Vietnam vet that Gary thinks he is apt for, and joining the Police force is one he tries, but to no avail. His best bet is painting trucks, a lowlier role than his father’s, but his father introduced him to these diseased creatures, spoke ill of them then the words of encouragement and what else could happen?

Gary is looking for another wife and now he is confident that he has some attraction to available women. And he finds another one, Marcia Brown who he marries in 1973. He has a son by this woman, Matthew, who one can imagine would rather be left in peace. Gary’s libido grows in strength all the time as if by some metastatic process. A strong sex drive can be great for a relationship and maybe Marcia is thrilled, but something strange has happened that has made her think more deeply about Gary, something that smarter women would recoil from, flee: he has grabbed her by the throat during intercourse. Marcia makes it clear that this isn’t her bag, if that is what it is, a sex game. Gary isn’t quite sure himself. Thoughts of killing people are coming again and they look for answers. What bothers him about Marcia is that he doesn’t think he can kill her. It is because he thinks he loves her and would feel remorse, which is a bane for a killer. He doesn’t think he could get away with it anyhow. Prostitutes on other the hand! Prostitutes are not really citizens, not liked in the community, not missed.

Marcia and Gary have fallen in with the local church and both appear to be deeply religious, but that is improbable on Gary’s part. Gary is known to recite passages from the bible at work and to even proselytise door to door like a Mormon, a spectacle that would surely do harm to the cause. A slightly weird co-worker is he, but at least he believes in God. He may know that he will need God’s forgiveness by now. Factitious belief as an insurance.

 

Prostitutes

The prostitutes of Seattle. They can be found far and wide but of course they have their haunts and one place that was good for finding them is along the Pacific Highway, International Boulevard 99, that route Thomas often drove. A trip down memory lane. But there are also runaways many of whom are as good as prostitutes, maybe haven’t learnt the ropes, but some will have to. Gary has been thinking about visiting them for some time now and how to approach what is obviously a serious interest of his.

When Marcia and Matthew are asleep it is his time to head out. Those girls set something off in his mind that is primal, a predator/prey dynamic turbocharged with berserker sexual zeal, just kept in check by the fear of what he might do and apprehension. Painting panel trucks is a deadly boring job, dead end for sure; but given this is what he can do, all he cares to do he is a happy man, someone who might say they were content with their lot in life.

The girls out here are something to behold, a Hogarthian picture of broken homes, broken innocence, broken veins, broken faces. They are getting worse these whores, growing in number, growing in desperation as the drugs come into their lives. Hogarth may have pitied the state of the dejected society he portrayed, to Gary it is a sordid fantasia. If only hell could be so sweet.

His drives by a few times sussing out the cathouse, selecting candidates to narrow down in this grotesque beauty pageant of his. Some are young and inherently pretty, some old and hideous desperate creatures, aged by their debauchery. What he wants is a pretty, vulnerable naïve teenager who won’t have the nerve to reject him.

Here she is. A dyed blonde, skinny thing. How her parents would weep if they passed her by; their baby girl reduced to selling her thighs to creeps on the street, addicted to drugs, alcohol, her boss a sleazy, violent pimp. Even the police disrespect her.

She is only 18 and shy, looking over her shoulder to some shadowy alley space. This is her office and the boss is keeping an eye. She is dressed in an amateur notion of a whore’s outfit, something cobbled together from a charity shop perhaps. It is probably amusing to the older girls, but with her face, she doesn’t need to try, and with that face and figure, she probably has some enemies amongst the less desirables. She wears a black fake fur coat, black tights and a denim miniskirt, a low cut tank top, and trainers painted black. Gary pulls up, window already down, soon he can smell her cheap perfume. He think of lilies and death and sex.

Here is a john, not entirely creepy, nowhere near as creepy as some of them and her dad was creepy, her ‘boyfriend’ is the creepiest person she has ever met; but her alarms bells are tinkling a little.

“Sweetie, you want to go for a ride with me?” he says with his lascivious countenance and opens the passenger door.

She looks back over her shoulder and gaining some approbation nods and enters that loathsome world of her client.

Gary is quite nervous about this and she can tell, which is ironically reassuring. If she could only understand why, she would have walked away. In the end, he doesn’t want to kill her, not this one, not tonight; he isn’t quite into that yet.

Gary has opened the door into this backyard of vice and knows he will make this a regular playground, as Marcia and Matthew sleep. He will tell her that he is playing poker with his work friends and she will believe him for so long.

It is difficult to maintain a marriage dynamic while one party is fixated with prostitutes, but most wives, though they may suspect, don’t harbour ideas that their husband is a pathological prostitute user, that they may become a killer of them. Gary has learnt to be convincing in his excuses for his absences. He has to since he is addicted to seeing them and what might become thereafter in this fervid career.

Sex is for procreation, they have Mathew now, so his ministrations to Marcia are not entirely about his crazed libido, he tells himself. But things are getting out of hand in his mind. His mind is starting to spin those bad ideas faster and faster and something has to give. Marcia is getting more concerned about this increasingly strange man who she increasingly doesn’t understand and wishes she had thought better of marrying. She isn’t a clever woman that much she knows, but do other wives have such strange husbands? He keeps on wanting sex, keeps pestering her and he wants more things that are not normal as far as she knows. Bondage isn’t normal, as any woman could tell her.

Killing a person isn’t something most people know about, or want to, although they might be able to imagine that they are capable of it under certain circumstances. Some people imagine themselves killing but feel it is pure fantasy. Some people would like to kill and some would like to be able to go through with it, but the act is too much for the sanctity of the soul, let alone the consequences. A small section of society have no compunction about killing their enemies and screw the consequences; then there are those who are driven to kill for reasons incomprehensible to the vast majority of society if not themselves.

Gary’s routine is painting trucks and sex with prostitutes. He has a quasi-family-life and dotes on his son. Things are quite comfortable for him, in a screwed up way. But Marcia, as a mother has her increasing worries about this incessant libido, which she had hoped would have calmed down with age, but no way. By this time she dimly understands what Gary is doing, where all the household money is going. Perhaps she would consider the prostitutes as providing relief from Gary’s worst excesses. He is threatening her and those strange impromptu sex acts in strange places, in woodland, fields, are not to her liking, maybe the prostitutes will oblige. She had forgiven him his chokehold but he is trying to do it again. Bondage she now knows is what perverts do and it is deeply worrying.

Marcia has intimated that she isn’t too keen on this marriage, that maybe they should look at new avenues. Gary is ostensibly furious at this contumacious intimation, but really he thinks it would be for the best, get her out of his hair and take the kid too. He has much bigger plans. She doesn’t want to play ball in the sex department, but that’s o.k. Things are moving beyond sex now anyhow.

Gary is arrested for solicitation of prostitution, but this is just a speed bump. The cops don’t take this crime seriously anyhow.

As their marriage slowly unfolds, Gary is now out and about at night looking for prostitutes and he is working out plans for their murder. He needs to get a good feel for who are the most vulnerable and where to pick them up and where to dump them. He thinks that killing may have to take place in the vehicle if they scream and fight and that leaves an interesting question, what about having sex with their dead bodies. Strangling it will be and with ligatures.

He knows there are places around here so remote that no one is likely to find the bodies, at least not for some time. No one misses these wretched whores; some parents would rather they never saw or heard from them again; some parents would secretly thank Gary for what he will do to them. It will be a great sex safari, sex and death. He guesses that they will eventually find him and he will go to jail, to death row, but society had him headed on this path and no amount of resistance could help.

Gary loves his son and keeps a picture of him in his wallet and he will show it to the whores, that he is a family man, a better person than they. He is ready to kill now. The transition from theory to practice. He will kill them and dump them out by the Green River, and other similar places.

Marcia is gone now. Gary still likes to meet regular girls in bars. It convinces him that he is in fact quite normal really. It is also amusing to show a charming side to women when he is in the throes of a murder mania.

Exactly when Gary started killing is unknown, but 1982 is suggested. When he felt free to embark on this career he knew there was no stopping him and no going back.

Gary has been practising strangulation on unripe melons, squeezing them to pulp as he imagines the life leaving a girl. He masturbates thereafter. Now prepped for the act, it is time. He sets out at nine pm, on a rainy night, a 20cl of bourbon nestled in his lap. He cruises around Boulevard 99 and a particular street where they congregate. It is a good night for them, many familiar faces, and he and his car are a familiar sight. He is a regular and good customer. He already knows which prostitute he wants to take tonight if she is out, a wretched girl of about 24 who calls herself Lucia. Not even the other whores pay her any heed. She won’t be missed any more than a rabbit taken by a fox in a field is missed by the others.

There she is, dressed in a cheap, dirty pvc skirt, fishnet tights, red high heels, beige parka and that black bralet. Boy is she looking rough tonight, like a junkie in the worst state of need. Most johns avoid her. She looks diseased. She is diseased; she is a goddamn whore, but not for long. Gary is going to put this little harlot out of her misery, clean up the streets a little.

He pulls up by her and unwinds the window. She doesn’t bother with formalities, just gets right in and off they go. He drives her to a derelict carpark where he normally takes them and he’s not the only one who comes here for this, but tonight it raining heavily and is empty of other souls.

Gary offers her some bourbon which she greedily accepts and they both drink it, mostly her, until it is soon finished. She asks him what he wants. He isn’t about to tell her exactly, so he says felatio and she says $20, which is fine. It begins this way and then, as she lowers her head, he grabs her around the neck with all his might. She cannot scream. He is screaming for her, draining her life. It takes him four minutes before he is convinced that she is dead. The exhilaration from this is stupefying, but he is now terrified of what he has done. He drives off to the forest. He parks up takes out his flashlight and drags her quickly, moving like a wild man chasing prey. When sufficiently far from the road he dumps her and puts a few bits of foliage on top of her, not that it makes any real difference.

 

A Consummate Killer

That murder was seminal. He knew it would happen, but didn’t quite expect the result of crossing the Rubicon. He is a changed man, now self-thrust into the killing abyss. That he can hold his job down and still meet regular girls is quite a surprise, a bit like being promoted into a new position and finding your feet while thinking the carpet will be pulled from you anytime, and yet it isn’t. His stabilizers are off and he can ride freely.

He continues to go out and commit these acts, each one at least as thrilling as the first. He is racking up quite a toll, a pro at this; killing them before or after sex, dumping them, getting back to his madhouse and everything is fine. He has chosen a number of spots on the Green River. What his career in this is developing into is that he comes back to the corpses and molests the dead, in ways that probably disgust even him, but time’s arrow cannot be changed.

There have been some girlfriends but a new woman has come into his life who is marriageable and her name is Judith Lynch. She likes sex, but he doesn’t need to give her the Marcia treatment; his libido is mostly elsewhere, with the whores, alive or dead.

In the news, some bodies have been found, and he knows, at least suspects they are his work. But he also knows that whores have many enemies, and wonders who else might be out there, playing his game.

In 1983 he is under suspicion for what are dubbed the Green River Killings, and in 1984 he takes a polygraph test, but he is free to go.

The bodies keep stacking up. He has a dumping ground where they are clustered, arranged as though in a diorama, with the forest as a background. They are in various states of decay, gone from their cheap and nasty perfume employed to attract a man, to a stench that excites him the more. He doesn’t know how this will end, it will do badly for the whores and probably soon for him.

Sex with the dead may be the culmination of his pathology. Is this what God had in mind when he endured those gruelling early years, when society struck him out, ostracised him for no other reason that he wasn’t attractive enough, smart enough? The whores were on this course too. Birds of a feather, a boy rejected by society and God, the girls too.

He is arrested again in 2001 for soliciting prostitutes. The police take semen and saliva samples and compare those to ones taken from victims. Gary is finally caught. It is the end of his career, but he did have a good innings, even by Ted Bundy’s standards.