The Secret Sits

The Green River Killer

November 11, 2021 John W. Dodson Season 1 Episode 41
The Secret Sits
The Green River Killer
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Show Notes Transcript

Today we are going to talk about the most prolific serial killer ever in the United States of America.  Some of this story will be explicit, so listener discretion is advised.  We are taught to read clues all around us, to keep ourselves safe from people who would do us harm.  Well, what happens when the person who wants to kill you, removes those clues and lulls you into a false sense of security?  This is exactly what happened to almost 6 dozen women, when they met The Green River Killer.  I’m John Dodson, this is The Secret Sits.

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#GaryRidgway #TheGreenRiverKiller #GreenRiverKiller #SerialKiller #JCPenney #PacificHighwaySouth #GreenRiver #Seattle #Necrophilia #TedBundy #JohnEDouglas #FBI #JudithMawson #Podcast #TrueCrimePodcast



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Today we are going to talk about the most prolific serial killer ever in the United States of America.  Some of this story will be explicit, so listener discretion is advised.  We are taught to read clues all around us, to keep ourselves safe from people who would do us harm.  Well, what happens when the person who wants to kill you, removes those clues and lulls you into a false sense of security?  This is exactly what happened to almost 6 dozen women, when they met The Green River Killer.  I’m John Dodson, this is The Secret Sits.

 Our story today begins on February 18, 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah, when Mary Rita Ridgway gives birth to the second of their three boys. Her husband was Thomas Newton Ridgway, who was a bus driver, while Mary worked as a sales clerk at the local J.C. Penney.  The couple would name this new baby, Gary Leon Ridgway.

The family moved to SeaTac, Washington in 1960, and young Gary began attending the Chinook Junior High School and then moved on to Tyee High School. Gary was not great in school; in fact, he had been held back in two different years.  But Gary exceeded in being socially stimulating. 

“He never had any trouble getting a girlfriend or getting a date,” community college classmate Allan Sample told the Tacoma News Tribune.

“A somewhat smallish kid,” is how David Alfred, his high school football coach, described him to that paper. “Wispy hair. Nondescript.”

Gary had never gotten in any type of trouble as a youth.  But slowly some signs of what we now know as the triad of sociopathy, began to emerge.  Gary continued to wet his bed until the age of 13, he played around with arson and he tortured animals, in this particular act, he murdered a cat by shutting it in a freezer.

Many now believe that Gary Ridgway’s evil had always been there, he was just so damn good at hiding it, that no one ever had any suspicions.  

Gary was the middle child and he definitely was not the favorite child either.  The favorite child was Gregory, his older brother by one year.  Gregory was the most accomplished of the brothers, he went to college for physics at a pretty nice school.  And I guess we have to compare that to Gary, who was said to have an IQ in the low 80s which would put him in the bottom of the “low normal” portion of the human population.

One thing that always got Gary upset is when he thought they might make him ride the short bus to school.  And just to explain to anyone who does not get this statement, the Short Bus, is actually that, a shorter version of the Big Yellow School Bus, but its purpose was typically to pick up very specific children, those with special needs, and some with mental deficiencies. So, to say, you ride the short bus, to a person is a read on their intelligence. 

While how Gary got along with his siblings was one thing, his mother Mary Rita, was a whole other thing.  Because Rita stirred in Gary, one of the most focused Oedipus Complex’s I have ever seen.

You see Gary was sexually attracted to his mother and because of this arousal, it made him feel distain for her as well.  So, lets go back to what I mentioned earlier about Gary wetting his bed until he was 13.  Every time that Gary would wet his bed, Rita would pull him out of the bed and drag him to the bathroom, there, sometimes only in her bra and panties, she would scrub Gary’s genital area with her own hands.  This extremely inappropriate intimacy between Gary and his mother at the age of 13, led to some of Gary’s feelings toward his mother.

Rita would have the most bizarre conversations with her son when he was just a small boy, remember I said she was a sales clerk at J.C. Penney? Well she would work in the Men’s clothing section and she would come home and tell Gary about men she had done suit fittings for, while measuring their in-seam, down on her knees, in front of these men, they would get erections, and Rita would describe them to Gary, in explicit details, even down to what the man’s crotch smelled like.

Rita also delt out forms of corporeal punishment to her son Gary, hitting him with belts and sticks, even for the most minor things.  And she didn’t reserve this behavior just for Gary, oh no, Rita also constantly yelled and berated her husband as well.  It was around this age, when Gary was around 13, that he also began fantasizing about murdering his mother.  Gary’s father just took all of the abuse, his wife could dole out.  She would scream at Thomas at the dinner table and then just pick up a plate and smash it over his head.  Gary’s dad would not even react, he would just stand up and walk away.  I’m not sure if this was because of how scared he was of Rita, or if he just didn’t give a crap about her, or their marriage.  But seeing these types of interactions between his parents also changed and warped Gary’s views on people in society.

The family’s home was close to the Pacific Highway South, a street in town which was well known for having many sex workers on the street.  Gary’s father hated this about where they lived and quite often would make loud proclamations about how much he hated the sex workers everywhere.

Thomas finally gets another job at a mortuary and he would come home from work and tell Gary stories about how one of his co-workers would have sex with the dead bodies.  I think it is obvious that these were not the parents of the year.

Now, 1965 and Gary is 16 years old.  He sees a kid, just about the age of a kindergartener, he is dressed up like a cowboy and he is close to some woods behind his home, playing with a stick.  Gary walks up to the boy, “Hey, you wanna go help me build a fort in the woods?” Gary asks the small boy.  And of course, he does, he is dressed up like a cowboy, this kid is up for some adventure.  So Gary and the kid make their way into the woods.  The next thing the kid says is, “Why did you kill me?”.  Blood now flowed out of the child’s midsection, down his leg and into his small cowboy boots.  The knife Gary had used was unfolded from the sheath that was his pocket.  The one stab had punctured the boy’s liver.

“Why did you kill me?” he asked and Gary simply laughed, turned to walk away and said, “I always wanted to know what it felt like to kill someone.”  The boy survived this attack, but this was the breaking point, when Gary Ridgway was no longer a victim and instead became the predator and monster he is to this very day. 

Because Gary was not familiar to this boy, the boy could never identify his attacker, and Gary never got in trouble for this attack, while still in his youth, but this story is confirmed by Gary himself.

When Gary graduated from high school in 1969, he was already 20 years old.  He married his 19-year-old girlfriend, Claudia Kraig.  He enlisted in the United States Navy and was deployed to serve in the Vietnam war working on a supply ship which engaged in combat.  Gary, while in Vietnam began to frequent sex workers to get some relief, because his wife was on the other side of the world.  While engaging in these actions, Gary contracted gonorrhea and this made him mad, especially at the sex workers who he felt were to blame.  But he continued to frequent the sex workers even after this and also continued to have unprotected sex with them.  

About a year after being married and shipped off to war, Gary returns home and discovers that his wife has also been unfaithful while he was away.  So Gary gets really mad because she cheated and calls her a whore and gets a divorce.

In 1972 Gary is back in Washington and gets a job painting vehicles.  He also gets married again.  This time to Marcia Winslow.  Now his first wife spent almost no time around Gary while they were actually married, because he was deployed most of the time.  But Marcia was not so lucky.  Things started off with small strange requests, like Gary liked to have sex in strange places; in the woods, by the green river, all places he would later use as dump sites for his victims.

It was at this time that Gary’s appetite for sex really took off.  Marcia says that he wanted it, or needed it all of the time from her.  They had sex three or four times per day.  Because of all of the sex guess what happened, Marcia got pregnant.  And after baby Matthew was born, for the shortest amount of time, the couple could not have sexual intercourse.  And this made Gary’s blood boil.  He just could not handle not being able to have sex at any moment.  

And because Gary always needs someone to blame for his anger, he focused that anger directly at his new born son, after all it was Matthew’s fault that his wife was out of commission.  After the couple could commence having coitus, Gary would do strange things to become aroused, he would jump out and scare Marcia, or say disturbing things to her while they were in action.  He also started to choke Marcia during sex, which also started to scare her.

Because of the mounting trouble in their home and marriage, Marcia divorces Gary and runs for the hills.  Gary will blame most of his rage in his future life on the way this marriage ended and blaming Marcia for a lot of his own shortcomings.  In fact, Gary even says that he thinks, if he had simply killed Marcia, that, that would have been cathartic enough that he would not have even had to kill the other women.  They were all substitutes for her.

Gary had become religious during his second marriage, proselytizing door-to-door, reading the Bible aloud at work and at home. He would also frequently cry after sermons or reading the Bible.  Some have speculated that Gary Ridgway was torn between his lusts and his staunch religious beliefs. But whatever

 was happening between his head and his heart, this is the time in Gary Ridgway’s life when he starts his murderous spree that will make him one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.

 

It is believed that throughout the 1980s and 90s, Gary Ridgway may have murdered a minimum of 71 young women near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington.  Gary is not sure, because as he has stated, he simply lost count.  A vast majority of the murders took place from 1982 through 1984. Most of his victims are believed to be either sex workers or runaways, whom he picked up along the Pacific Highway South.  The same road his dad use to complain about, because of all of the sex workers everywhere.

 

Gary’s typical modus operandi was to pick up the girls on the road, he would show the girls his ID, with his thumb strategically placed over his name so they could not identify him by name.   He would also have a picture of his baby son Matthew in his wallet, placed purposely so the girls could see the photo and add to his trust factor.  And just to be over the top, he would leave a couple of Matthew’s Star Wars toys scattered on the backseat, look at this sweet dad, he must be a safe guy to get in the car with.

 

And then Gary would bring the girls home with him, where the charade continued.  He would show the girls, Matthew’s bedroom and this would just make the girls relax.  This divorced man with this sweet kid, can’t be bad, he could not possibly be this serial killer who’s been on the news.  Gary even said that he was asked over 50 times by girls he picked up, if he was The Green River Killer.  

Gary would have sex with these girls and his last move would always be to take them from behind and while back there, Gary would wrap his forearm around a girl’s neck and then pull back with his other arm as hard as he could until they died from asphyxiation.

On July 18th, the same day as one of Gary’s brother’s birthdays, Gary goes out and picks up a girl, with Matthew in the car with him.  He took her out to the south airport area and took her into the woods and murdered her.  Gary says, he doesn’t think his son could see when he murdered the girl, but that only ever happened one time.
 

Almost all of his victims were killed either in his home, his truck or in a secluded area.  The bodies would be dumped in wooded areas around the Green River, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, and other dump sites within South King County.  The bodies would be left nude, sometimes they would be posed and they were left in clusters.  The bodies would not be left in easily discovered areas, not only because Gary did not want to get caught, but because Gary also discovered that he enjoyed necrophilia.  

Gary would return to his prized bodies over and over again to have sexual intercourse with them.  Gary would later say that he did not find necrophilia more satisfying than normal sex, but having sex with the deceased reduced his need to kill new victims, how considerate Gary.

 

Because of Gary’s practice of using his tried-and-true dump sites most of the bodies were not discovered until only skeletons remained.  

 

In early 1984, the King County Sheriff’s Office formed the Green River Task Force to begin investigating the murders.  So far, they had found 13 victims, all either sex workers or runaways.  And within the area being searched by the task force, there was another 24 women who had gone missing. The task force included Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert, who would sometimes interview incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy in 1984.  Bundy would offer his opinions on the psychology, motivations and behavior of the killer they were looking for, it was all very Silence of the Lambs feeling, in my head at least.  Bundy even suggested that the killer would revisit his dump sites to have sex with his victims, which turns out to be true.  He also suggests that if they find a fresh victim in a fresh grave site, they should do a stake out and wait for him to return.

Also involved with this case was John E Douglas, who is famous for being an FBI special agent and unit chief.  He was one of the original FBI criminal profilers, and on the Netflix series Mindhunter, actor Jonathan Groff, portrays John E Douglas. He developed a criminal profile used in the Green River Task Force.

Five of the first victims were found by the Green River, which gave the killer the moniker, The Green River Killer.  He then started using his other favorite areas.  By the end of 1984, the killer has murdered over 40 women.  Then the numbers slowed down dramatically.

 

Gary Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and again in 2001 on charges related to prostitution.  And in 1984, he became a suspect in the Green River killings.  Gary was given the always reliable polygraph test, which he passes with flying colors.  On April 7th, 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Gary.  But it was 1987 and DNA was not a thing.  

The task force keeps looking into Gary for this case, but they can’t really find anything.  Then they start to notice his gas receipts and they figure out that he is buying way more gas than he should need if he was only driving back and forth to work, something Gary had told the task force when he was interviewed.  Along with this, Gary had no reliable alibi for any of the murders they had talk to him about.  Next, the task force puts Gary’s picture into a photo line up to witnesses who had been interviewed and several identify him as a person they had seen around the time some of the girls had gone missing.

Based on this evidence and everything from 1984 and 1987 the task force is given a search warrant for Gary’s house, but they end up with nothing.  

And Gary Ridgway may have had a low IQ, but he had no intentions of getting caught.  He actively tried to prevent himself from becoming a suspect.  He drove two of his victims all the way to Portland, Oregon.  He would purposely contaminate his dump sites with other people’s used gum and cigarette butts.  He would place materials with other people’s handwriting on it and would even include travel maps or brochures to make it appear that maybe this was just someone passing through town.

Gary was a very cautious killer.  He chose people who would not be missed, or if they were missed, they were disregarded sex workers, who police wouldn’t spend their time looking for.  But beyond that, he would take precautions like, if a girl scratched him, he would cut off all of her fingernails. And he did not keep trophies from his victims like we see in so many serial killer cases.  What he did instead was, he would take a piece of jewelry from a victim and then he would just leave it on the sink at work in the women’s bathroom.  The goal was that someone where he worked would take the jewelry and keep it.  Then whenever he would see a woman at work wearing one of his victim’s items, it would get him aroused. 

Sometime around 1985, Gary met Judith Mawson, who became his third wife in 1988.  Judith later said that when she moved into Gary’s house, while they were still dating, there was no carpeting.  Detectives told her that there had been no carpeting because Gary had used it to move a dead body.  Judith said Gary would start leaving for work early, telling her that he had overtime to work, she now realizes that this was most likely a ruse and that he was actually committing some of his murders during this time.  Judith had not suspected Gary of any crimes until she was contacted by the police in 1987, additionally, she had never even heard the term Green River Killer, because she did not watch the news.

Author Pennie Morehead interviewed Gary Ridgway in prison, and he said while he was in the relationship with Judith Mawson, his kill rate went down and that he truly loved her. Of his 49 known victims, only three were killed after he married Judith. Judith told a local television reporter, "I feel I have saved lives ... by being his wife and making him happy." 

 

The samples which had been collected in 1987 were later tested and subjected to DNA profiling.  This provided the task force with the evidence for an arrest warrant for Gary Leon Ridgway.  On November 30th, 2001, the task force executed the warrant while Gary was at work at the Kenworth truck factory, where he worked as a painter.  He was arrested on suspicion of the murder of four women nearly 20 years earlier.  The DNA evidence conclusively linked semen left in the victims to the saliva swab police had taken in 1987.

The four victims named in the original indictment were Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Ann Christensen. Three more victims—Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Debra Estes—were added to the indictment after a forensic scientist identified microscopic spray paint spheres as a specific brand and composition of paint used at the Kenworth factory during the specific time frame when these victims were killed.

 

Early in August 2003, Seattle television news reported that Gary had been moved from a maximum security cell at King County Jail to an Airway Heights Minimum-Medium Security Level Tank. Other news reports stated that his lawyers, led by Anthony Savage, were closing a plea bargain that would spare him the death penalty in return for his confession to a number of the Green River murders. 

On November 5, 2003, Gary Ridgway entered a guilty plea to 48 charges of aggravated first degree murder as part of a plea bargain, that would spare him execution in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of his victims and providing other details. In his statement accompanying his guilty plea, Gary explained that he had killed all of his victims inside King County, Washington, and that he had transported and dumped the remains of the two women near Portland to confuse the police. 

Deputy prosecutor Jeffrey Baird noted in court that the deal contained "the names of 41 victims who would not be the subject of State v. Ridgway if it were not for the plea agreement." King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng explained his decision to make the deal:

We could have gone forward with seven counts, but that is all we could have ever hoped to solve. At the end of that trial, whatever the outcome, there would have been lingering doubts about the rest of these crimes. This agreement was the avenue to the truth. And in the end, the search for the truth is still why we have a criminal justice system ... Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy. He does not deserve to live. The mercy provided by today's resolution is directed not at Ridgway, but toward the families who have suffered so much ... 

On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones sentenced Gary Ridgway to 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole and one life sentence, to be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, adding 480 years to his 48 life sentences. 

Gary led prosecutors to three bodies in 2003. On August 16 of that year, the remains of a 16-year-old girl found near Enumclaw, Washington, 40 feet from State Route 410, were pronounced as belonging to Pammy Annette Avent, who had been believed to be a victim of the Green River Killer. The remains of Marie Malvar and April Buttram were found in September 2003.

On November 23, 2005, the Associated Press reported that a weekend hiker found the skull of one of the 48 women Ridgway admitted murdering in his 2003 plea bargain with King County prosecutors. The skull of another victim, Tracy Winston, who was 19 when she disappeared from Northgate Mall on September 12, 1983, was found on November 20, 2005, by a man hiking in a wooded area near Highway 18 near Issaquah, southeast of Seattle. 

Gary Ridgway has confessed to more confirmed murders than any other American serial killer. Over a period of five months of police and prosecutor interviews, he confessed to 48 murders—42 of which were on the police's list of probable Green River Killer victims. On February 9, 2004, 

county prosecutors began to release the videotape records of Gary's confessions. In one taped interview, he initially told investigators that he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women. In another taped interview with Reichert on December 31, 2003, Ridgway claimed to have murdered 71 victims and confessed to having had sex with them before killing them, a detail which he did not reveal until after his sentencing. 

In his confession, he acknowledged that he targeted sex workers because they were "easy to pick up" and that he "hated most of them." He confessed that he had sex with his victims' bodies after he murdered them, but claimed he began burying the later victims so that he could resist the urge to commit necrophilia. 

Gary Ridgway later said that murdering young women was his "career."

He was placed in solitary confinement at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in January 2004. On May 14, 2015, he was transferred to the USP Florence High, a high-security federal prison east of Cañon City, Colorado. In September 2015, after a public outcry and discussions with Governor Jay Inslee, Corrections Secretary Bernie Warner announced that Ridgway would be transferred back to Washington to be "easily accessible" for open murder investigations. Ridgway was returned by chartered plane to Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla from USP Florence High, on October 24, 2015.

Was Judith Mawson, right?  Did her marring Gary Ridgeway save countless lives?  We may never know, because as much as Gary loves to talk, I, for one, am sure he is still living in the middle of the circle, where The Secret Sits.  I’m John Dodson, and please take a moment of your time and share this show with your friends and family, we would truly appreciate it.  Audio Eng. by Gabriel Dodson.  Org Artwork, provided by Tony Ley.