29. From Hooker Addict to Hooker-Killing Addict
Gary Ridgway was seriously into hookers. Long before he became a killer, 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. For variety, he sometimes garroted them with a cord or wire.
Ridgway dumped the bodies in remote forested areas in King County, and often returned to the corpses to defile them. The first hint authorities had that a serial killer was on the loose was when prostitutes 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”.