Gary Ridgway Had One of the Worst Possible Obsessions With Prostitutes
Few people were ever as obsessed with prostitutes as was Gary Ridgway (1949 – ). Unfortunately for the prostitutes he came in contact with, his obsession was of the worst possible kind: that of a prolific serial killer with his target population. Ridgway, also known as “The Green River Killer”, was convicted of killing 49 women, most of them prostitutes. He would eventually confess to killing 71.
Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he grew up in a poor neighborhood, raised by parents who often engaged in violent arguments. He had a bed wetting problem until he was 13, and whenever he wet the sheets, Ridgway’s mother would wash his genitals. He informed psychologists that in his teens, he had been attracted to his mother, even as he fantasized about killing her. His father, a bus driver, was given to complaining about the proliferation of prostitutes in and around the neighborhood.
He was a dyslexic child, with an IQ in the 80s. Ridgway’s violent criminality began in the 1960s, when at age 16, he led a 6 year old boy into the woods and stabbed him in the liver. The child survived, and described Ridgway walking away laughing. After high school, Ridgway was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Upon his discharge, he got a job painting trucks, and spent 30 years in that occupation. A family man, although one who had trouble keeping a marriage going, he was married three times. He was also a regular churchgoer, who was described by many who knew him as a religious fanatic.
Ridgway was into hookers, and long before he started killing them, he was a frequent customer of prostitutes. His career as a serial killer began in the early 1980s. Ridgway would pick up prostitutes, runaway teenagers, or other vulnerable women, along Route 99 in King County, Washington. He took them to his home, where he usually choked them to death with his bare hands, although he sometimes garroted them with a cord or wire. He dumped the bodies in remote forested areas in King County, and often returned to the corpses to have physical contact with them.
The first hint authorities had that a serial killer was on the loose was when working girls and teenage runaways started disappearing along Route 99. After the first five bodies surfaced in the Green River, the press dubbed the unknown culprit “The Green River Killer”. In 1987, suspicion fell upon Ridgway, when many prostitutes working Route 99 – which he drove to and from work – gave descriptions of a suspect who resembled him. When investigators scrutinized Ridgway’s work record, they discovered that the disappearance of many victims coincided with his days off. He was taken into police custody, but passed a polygraph test, and allowed investigators to take hair and saliva samples. He was released for lack of evidence, and was soon back on the prowl.
Finally, in 2001, a new generation of detectives, who had been children when Ridgway first began murdering prostitutes, began making effective use of computers in investigating the Green River Killer. They also had access to modern DNA techniques that had not existed in the 1980s. When Ridgway’s hair and saliva samples, carefully preserved since 1987, were sent for DNA analysis, they returned a match tying him to 4 victims. He was arrested, and entered a plea bargain in which he disclosed the locations of dozens of still-missing women. In exchange, he was spared the death penalty, and was sentenced instead to life in prison without the possibility of parole.