Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
You are a loser, You're a coward, you are nobody,
You're an animal.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
These are relatives of victims of the Green River Killer.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
May God have mercy on your pathetic soul, because the
rest of us who know the truth about.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You won't the most prolific serial murderer America has ever known.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
The one thing that I want you to know, I
was that daughter at home waiting for my mom to
come home.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Whose nineteen year reign of terror left the area surrounding
Seattle littered with corpses.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
I don't wish for him to die. I wish for
him to have a long, suffering, cruel death.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
But who was the Green River Killer? And was he
born to kill?
Speaker 5 (00:51):
When he went through the door and left to go
to work. He wasn't the man that I knew.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
The Old Highway ninety nine, adjacent to Seattle's Sea Tech
Airport thirty years ago a notorious spot.
Speaker 6 (01:44):
This area back in the early eighties was very had
a very transient population. There were topless bars over here.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
There were a lot of.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
Hotels where you could rent rooms for an hour or two.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Faye Brooks, then a detective assigned to sex crime cases,
was regularly cooled to the streets known simply as the strip.
Speaker 6 (02:11):
There were a lot of young women who were work
in the street.
Speaker 8 (02:22):
All the girls were young, and you know, some of
them had troubled past, but all of them are somebody's
daughter and somebody's sister.
Speaker 6 (02:33):
A lot of the young girls had grown up in
abusive homes, and that was why they were running away.
And I could relate to that. I'm a survivor of
child sex abuse, and you know, there but for the
grace of God were I, and so I could certainly
empathize with them, and I also wanted to help them.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
One such woman was Marsha Chapman street worker who claimed
to have been.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
Raped and the apartment building where she lived was raped.
Speaker 9 (03:13):
Here for she was a beautiful, statuesque Black woman. She
was thirty one. Uh, she had three children. She couldn't
support them on the job she could get, and she
was working as a prostitute.
Speaker 6 (03:32):
She was living in a h an apartment that was
sparsely furnished, So I think she was like down on
her lot. She seemed to have a kind heart and
was a nice person. But you know, under the circumstances,
she did what she had to do.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
To make ends meet.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Marsha's alleged rape was typical of the hazards working girls
on the strip faced. At the time, best selling crime
writer and Rule lived just blocks from the area.
Speaker 9 (04:05):
I would sometimes stop and warn them and say, do
you know what I do for a living? I write
about murder, and you don't have a chance out of here?
How do you know who you're getting in with? And
usually they would just shrug and walk away.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
In nineteen eighty two, the dangers of working the strip
would be brought home by a discovery in the nearby
Green River.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
There was a man on the water in a boat
and he saw underneath the water what he thought was
a mannequin. It wasn't a manequin it was a human being,
and there were two of them there well. One of
the victims in the water. Her hand was just waving
with the current of the water, and it was like,
(05:02):
here I am, Please help me. But of course it
was too late.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
As police investigated the crime scene, they made another grim find.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
Processing the scene where the victims were in the water
was where we found the third victim on the banks.
Speaker 8 (05:23):
They were all within a few feet of each other,
and so clearly you know the same killer had put
all three of the bodies there.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
All three women had been picked up from around the
strip by what the FBI dubbed an organized serial killer.
Speaker 11 (05:39):
The organized defender was more planned, more pronaditated, was able
to conceptualize crimes and carry them out very efficiently, namely
because of the fact that they had very little feeling
for another human being. They looked at a victim as
an advoct for their excitement. Basically, you're talking about a
sexual psychopath.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
The victims were sixteen year old Opal Mills, seventeen year
old Cynthia Jane Hines, and thirty one year old Marsha Chapman.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
When I found out that it was Marsha, I was
I don't think I had any words that I could say.
It was like, oh my god, somebody killed her. It
was really sad.
Speaker 9 (06:33):
We did not know this was only the beginning of
a reign of cherub and we wouldn't know who was
doing this for a very long time.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
On Seattle's Strip, the Green River Killer had found a
rich hunting ground that would enable him to amass a
body count unrivaled by any serial killer in American history.
(07:05):
By autumn of nineteen eighty two, the bodies of five
young women had been discovered in or beside Seattle's Green River.
They had disappeared from a notorious highway known as the Strip,
an area where prostitution was ripe and the Green River
killer had only just begun. On the fifteenth of September
(07:32):
nineteen eighty two, eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mean Vanishes.
Speaker 9 (07:42):
Bridget was the much loved daughter of a Catholic family
in Bellevue, a very rich a suburb of Seattle. She
skipped school. She joined up with a boyfriend named Ray,
and they were living in a cheap motel on Highway
ninety nine. She left. I think she was still possibly
(08:09):
churning a few tricks, and she didn't come back. Her
family was so upset because she was eight and a
half months pregnant.
Speaker 12 (08:20):
To every serial killer, human beings or objects, there's no
emotional connection, there's nothing there.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
On the twentieth of September, another girl, fifteen year old
Deborah Lorrain Estes, disappeared, yet police was still unable to
identify a killer.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
This was the area that I was working in. This
is the area where the bulk of the Green River
victims were picked up. From and we would sit here
and look, you know, trying to identify who might be
the suspect. We had very dead, dedicated detectives who were
determined to solve this case.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
On the twenty sixth of September, sixteen year old Linda
Jane Rule vanishes.
Speaker 9 (09:15):
Linda Ruhle was a slender, blonde girl who lived up
in the North End. She had been working in the
streets and she had a boyfriend who kind of served
as a pimp. She disappeared from an area near the
Northgate Mall. Like all serial killers, he seemed to have
(09:39):
the ability to sense vulderability in potential victims. He didn't
take the street wise girls. He was looking for the
younger women.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
By the end of nineteen eighty two, fifteen girls would
be missing or found dead, and pressure was manting on
the Sheriff's task Force.
Speaker 10 (10:03):
People hoped that law enforce would be successful. There were
different rumors that were passing around of who the person
might be. There was rampant speculation that it might be
even a law enforcement officer because of the easy access
that the individual had to the number and variety of
women in the community.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
You know, The unfortunate thing is some of the women
of the street felt like the Sheriff's.
Speaker 13 (10:30):
Office wasn't.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
Investigating the case as hard as we could have because
they were street kids and runaways, and that's not true.
Everybody assigned to that investigation was committed to solving it,
committed to bringing this person to justice because these were,
you know, somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's mother, and we
(10:53):
cared about them. We cared about them like they were
our own kids or our own family members, and we
wanted to solve it.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Then, on the thirtieth of April nineteen eighty three, a
young girl was spotted being taken from the strip.
Speaker 9 (11:12):
Maria Melvar with her boyfriend at a restaurant on the highway.
Her boyfriend went to make a phone call. When he
came back, Maria wasn't in the restaurant, and he was
very concerned, and he thought, well, I'll go out in
the highway and see if I can find her. And
(11:33):
he realized that Maria was in the truck ahead of him.
There was a man driving, and then she was talking
to the man, and so he determined to follow the
truck cause he wasn't sure what was going on. He
worried about her, and they got up to the stoplight
at ninety nine and to sixteenth, but when he turned left,
(11:57):
he couldn't see the car.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Marie's boyfriend returned with her family to search the streets
for the pickup truck she'd left in, and in a
quiet cal Deesac just a few blocks from the strip,
they found it parked outside the modest home of a
local truck painter, and they.
Speaker 9 (12:18):
Asked local police pleased to go there because they believed
Maria was in the house. One of the sergeants did
go there, knocked in the door. A man answered, and
he said there's nobody here but me, and they didn't
press it.
Speaker 12 (12:38):
All serial killers have the ability to appear so normal
that they throw off even people who are considered experts.
The serial killer is the olympiad of the pathological liar.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
The man's details joined hundreds more in the Task forces files.
A saliva swab would later be added. Still, girls continued
to vanish.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
And the lists kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
By June nineteen eighty three, at least twenty six girls
had disappeared.
Speaker 11 (13:12):
They learned from their crimes as their murders grow in number,
their efficiency increases.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
The remains were being found in secluded, quiet, dark areas.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
That summer, five girls went missing.
Speaker 11 (13:29):
By the time they were up to five or six
or ten, homicides had become very difficult to catch.
Speaker 10 (13:34):
The fear was tremendous and deep throughout the entire community.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Autumn, five more vanished.
Speaker 9 (13:43):
Some of them were in the mountain foothills, some of
them were down in the Green River Valley.
Speaker 6 (13:50):
He was, you know, ahead of us. We wanted to
catch him. We wanted to stop him.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Winter and spring nineteen eighty four, four more girls gone.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
It would be three or four or maybe even five
in one spot.
Speaker 6 (14:07):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 7 (14:09):
He was outsmarting the homicide detectives. They were everybody was
looking for.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
He was dumping women like they were garbage. This was
a gun sight. Uh. It's not far from the airport.
It's not far from the strip where the young girls
were missing in the evenings.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
It was dark, very secluded. Very few people came down here.
You could come dump something and be gone. And that's
what happened in this location here. It i they were
just dumped.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Among the dozens of buddies. Found was the sixteen year
old Linda Jane Rule. A skeletal remains hidden under a
bush and in the scrubland south of the airport. The
fate of the pregnant eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mehan
was finally discovered.
Speaker 9 (15:11):
Someone Ripcher killed her and buried her and her banborn
baby in a shallow grave on the west side of
the highway.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
By spring nineteen eighty four, the killer had amassed more
than forty victims, but then something changed.
Speaker 7 (15:33):
The killings appeared to have stopped. Really thought that he
was gone.
Speaker 14 (15:42):
It's incredibly unusual for a serial killer simply to stop killing.
A serial killer will usually only cease murder when he's
apprehended or when he dies himself.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
In nineteen eighty five, the truck painter from the house
in the quiet cul de Sac began dating forty year
old divorced mother Judith.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
When I first met him, I thought he was quite
the gentleman, and sup polite and nice. He loved the
country music and the dancing, and he was always smiling.
He never got angry, and I just thought he was
the greatest. Is like love at first sight.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Within months the house became Judith's home.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
He offered to help me move in, that I can
move in with him if.
Speaker 13 (16:48):
I like.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
There was no carpet in his house, so he let
me pick out some carpet because he had previous renters
in there, and he had told me the little one
head wed on the carpet the house needed a woman's touch.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
After three years living together, the couple wed.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Who were married nineteen eighty eight. It seemed like the
perfect marriage. And so he was good to my daughters,
played with my grandchildren. My dreams are coming true.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Judith would enjoy thirteen happy years of marriage. While most
of the world forgot about the Green River Killer, most
that is, except the men and women of the Green
River Task Force, And in two thousand and one, advances
in DNA profiling enabled them to compare samples taken from
(17:54):
the early victims, including Marsha Chapman, with swabs that have
been taken from several men questioned during the investigation.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
This is the DNA from Marsha Chapman, and this is
the DNA from the Green River Killer. And we looked
at him and I We're like, they're the same, They're
the same. Scary Ridgeway, I just.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
I couldn't believe it. I was just devastated and in shock,
and I think I went into denial. I wasn't believing it.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Only now would the world discover the shocking truth about
Judith's husband, Gary Ridgeway, the most prolific serial killer in
US history. During the nineteen eighties, the mysterious Green River
(19:16):
Killer had prowled the red light district of Seattle's Strip unchecked,
amassing a terrifying body count. In two thousand and one,
a DNA match had connected fifty two year old truck
painter Gary Ridgeway with the first few victims.
Speaker 10 (19:35):
He'd been identified as the most prolific serial killer in
the history of the United States. Each of us recognized
that this would be the biggest criminal case in history
of the state of Washington.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
The prosecution and defense teams would now be able to
interview the man suspected of over four dozen homicides.
Speaker 13 (19:58):
I'm walking down a corridor.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
I'm going to open the door and be introduced to
the supposed Green River Killer. A hundred things are going
through your mind and wondering what is it going to
be mean?
Speaker 13 (20:11):
Is going to be crying? Is he going to be crazy?
Speaker 7 (20:15):
And I walked in and like, wow, this isn't what
I expected.
Speaker 13 (20:22):
All right, pretty good.
Speaker 8 (20:25):
All of us kind of looked at each other and said,
that's the guy that's been eluding everybody for twenty years.
Speaker 13 (20:30):
What was remarkable was that he was He was so normal.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Sleep okay, no, no, no, no, Well.
Speaker 13 (20:39):
That didn't look like the Hilton him there. I got
a glimpse of it.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Well, apostrophedic mattress in there, so.
Speaker 13 (20:46):
You know, it's a little bit hot in airbit.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
If you did not know what he had done, you
would like him.
Speaker 13 (20:55):
The monster within him was was well hidden.
Speaker 15 (21:00):
People want to ascribe extraordinary traits and qualities to these people.
These are, for the most part, very ordinary individuals, except
for the extraordinary crime that they get involved in.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So who was the suspected Green River killer? Gary Ridgeway
was born in nineteen forty nine, the middle of three boys.
He lived in a small house not far from the Strip.
Speaker 8 (21:35):
His mom was kind of stay at home and then
part time she worked at a department store. His dad
drove a bus for the county.
Speaker 7 (21:45):
Gary sometimes would ride with him on the bus and
his dad would say, you know, see her, she's a prostitute.
She's you know, the scum of the earth and would
be rate prostitutes and talk about how filthy and.
Speaker 13 (21:55):
Bad they were.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
And then there are a couple of episodes where Gary
calls him leaving him in the in the vehicle while
he while dad went and had sacks for the prostitute.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
School friend Terry Rochelle recalls that Gary Ridgeway was more
inward than his siblings.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
His brother was very outgoing and you know, a bright personality,
and Gary was more quiet and withdrawn, I would say,
is a good word. He was just a little pip
squeak guy, just you know, somebody's little brother. Basically, you know,
you didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him,
just kind of in the shadows, I would say.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Most of his life at school, the struggling Ridgeway failed
to make an impression. However, at parents' evenings his mother
Mary did, all the.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Women kind of sat back and looked at her strange
because she would wear a big boufont hairdow and lots
and lots of makeup, short skirts, which were not really
the style in those days, especially for a mom. She
just always seemed like she was trying to be very
glamorous and not like our moms at all.
Speaker 8 (23:11):
I always remember her wearing kind of the really tight
shorts and low cut tops.
Speaker 12 (23:18):
And longer hair.
Speaker 8 (23:19):
She was very, very attractive.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Lady Ridgeway admitted wetting the bed throughout his childhood and
well into his teens.
Speaker 7 (23:31):
When he would wet the bed, his mother would put
him in the kind of get in the bath up
and wash him and wash his genitals.
Speaker 9 (23:39):
During one bath, her robe fell open and she was
naked underneath, and he felt arousal at that, and at
the same time knew that it probably wasn't that wasn't
a good thing to feel, but he felt it.
Speaker 8 (23:55):
He talked about having some sexual feelings towards her. He
described in some detail watching her when she was in
a bathing suit and looking at her and thinking that
she dressed pretty provocatively.
Speaker 12 (24:09):
This overly sexualized person washing her son's genitals. And you
realize that most teenage boys are having an awful time
with dealing with their own emerging sexuality. Has to have
had an impact in some way.
Speaker 15 (24:27):
Boys need to see their mothers as a sexual It
is very, very destabilizing for an adolescent boy to see
his mother in a sexual manner. It's very hard for
an adolescent boy to imagine his mother having sex with anybody,
including his father, And so when a mother behaves in
a sexualized or hyper sexualized way, it's very unsettling for
(24:50):
an adolescent boy.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
As Ridgway got older, he started showing signs of destructive behavior,
starting fires, and as a teen, he took his first
step towards murder.
Speaker 8 (25:05):
He approached a first grader, a six year old boy
that he saw a plane in a lot near his house.
The boy was dressed up playing cowboys and indians, and
he kind of lured him into the bushes and completely unprovoked,
stabbed the little boy in the stomach and I nearly
killed him. He told the boy that he just wanted
(25:29):
to know what it felt like to kill somebody. And
after he stabbed him, he took the knife and kind
of wiped the blade off on the little boy's shoulder,
and you know, just walked away, and actually nobody ever
connected him to that.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
Serial killers need to have some concrete proof of what
they're doing. I mean, you can think about something, but
until you've done it, you don't know how it's going
to turn out. And so what the serial killer does
is experiment. Often they will commit an act like a
trial run.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Ridgeway eventually finished school two years late due to his
slow progress. The following year, age twenty one, he married
his steady girlfriend and joined the Navy.
Speaker 8 (26:19):
When he returned from his deployment to the Philippines, his
wife admitted that she had had an affair with a
friend of theirs. That was when he first started kind
of referring to her as a war and using other
derogatory terms, and that was kind of the beginning of
a series of relationships that never quite panned out for him.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
During the early nineteen seventies, Ridgway got a job spray
painting at the Kenworth truck manufacturers. He then met and
married his second wife.
Speaker 8 (26:51):
He was very much into having sex, often repeatedly throughout
the day as frequently pretty much as women would have.
Speaker 9 (27:00):
They would go out in the truck, and he loved
to have sex in public where they could be discovered
at any time.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
But after having a child, their relationship deteriorated.
Speaker 7 (27:15):
His wife left him when his son was about five,
and that really.
Speaker 13 (27:20):
Hurt him, and.
Speaker 7 (27:22):
That was when he started to go frequent prostitutes.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Ridgeway claimed he became addicted to prostitutes. He had in
fact been quizzed by police about his activities on the
strip several times during the eighties, even passing a line
detector test when grilled about the Green River murders.
Speaker 9 (27:45):
When you're subject to someone without a conscience, who has
no regrets and no remorse and no real concern, they
can pass them.
Speaker 13 (27:57):
He was a magnificent liar.
Speaker 7 (27:59):
He had an ability to just to go and talk,
and he would just talk and tell stories, and I,
you know, for a while, I assume they were true.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
And when I would go in to visit Gary at
the jail, he would tell me that everything's okay. He
didn't do it. He didn't hurt those women, he didn't
kill them. He didn't and I would believe him.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
As he was questioned in two thousand and one, Ridgeway
continued to protest his innocence.
Speaker 7 (28:38):
Up to this point, Gary had been maintaining that they
had the wrong person, that he had well had He
had had sex with many prostitutes, he hadn't killed any,
and that was essentially going to be the defense.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
But when forensic evidence surfaced tying him to three more victims,
Ridgeway's story changed.
Speaker 7 (28:58):
Myself and another attorney were in the meeting room waiting
for mister Ridgway. I don't recall what we were talking about,
but we both had smiles on our faces when he
walked in, and he said, Oh, you won't be smiling
when we're done.
Speaker 13 (29:12):
I've been lying to you all.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
I've been manipulating everyone for all these years. I killed
them all.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Only now would investigators discover the true shocking horror of
the Green River Killer's crimes. In two thousand and three,
fifty four year old truck painter Gary Ridgway admitted he
(29:44):
was the Green River Killer that had eluded capture for
almost two decades. A man responsible for the murder of
more than four dozen women. Faced with the death penalty,
Ridgeway offered to tell the truth about all his crimes
in return for his life. On behalf of the victims'
(30:07):
families who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones.
The prosecution agreed Ridgeway would now reveal the true horror
of his crimes. Investigators now learned how the Green River
Killer had so easily abducted and killed his victims, even
(30:29):
at the height of the public terror.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
He came across as being a very meek and mild
safe person. As a matter of fact, in one situation,
he had his child in the car with him, and
when he picked up a prostitute.
Speaker 9 (30:50):
He looks like a mousey little man. He doesn't look
like the kind of person that if you were a prostitute,
that you would be afraid of.
Speaker 6 (31:00):
They thought, well, he's a family man, he's safe, and
it turns out he wasn't.
Speaker 13 (31:10):
He preferred to take them to his house.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
Some said no to that, and they would drive to
a remote location and he had a pickup truck with
a canopy on the back, and he would convince him
to go into the back of the canopy so they
could have more room to have sex. But what he
would do is once he got them in the position,
either in his bed at home where he had pictures
(31:34):
of his son on the wall and.
Speaker 13 (31:36):
They felt a little more secure, or whether they.
Speaker 7 (31:38):
Were just hopping in the back of the truck, get naked,
begin with oral sex. A missionary at some point convinced
them that he would be able to finish sooner if
they would agree to the rear entry position.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
When I got through having a climax with her, I
jumped on her.
Speaker 13 (32:04):
He get his arm around the girl's neck.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
How woult you pulling on her neck?
Speaker 7 (32:09):
I'm pulling really hard on her neck, just like this.
Speaker 5 (32:13):
What are you saying to her?
Speaker 10 (32:14):
Don't don't, don't fight, don't fight and don't and I'll
let you go.
Speaker 7 (32:19):
And then choked them with his forearm.
Speaker 13 (32:23):
I'm feeling I got a killer.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
I got a killer.
Speaker 13 (32:26):
I got a killer.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
You'll need to go up to kind of like at
the top of the hill on this and pull in.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Rich Way guided the investigators to where he dumped dozens
of young women.
Speaker 9 (32:50):
I just drove, drove in my pickup and camper and parked.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
It, brought her body over and put it a little
bit over the hill.
Speaker 13 (33:00):
His method of recollection was where he had left their
bodies between this one and that one up there. You
think you put like five of them in there.
Speaker 8 (33:13):
He essentially said, the victims didn't mean anything. I have
no idea who they are. I don't know if they're black,
if they're white, if how old they are, how young
they are. I mean, they really meant nothing to me
as an individual.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
What you're getting is what you're going to get, and
that's all you can get because I don't remember.
Speaker 12 (33:29):
To every serial killer, human beings are objects in the
homicides that they commit. They're never going to remember the name.
They're never going to remember the face. They'll remember the
concrete action of where those bodies are.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One of the dump sides that Ridgeway identified was that
of Marie Malva, the eighteen year old whose boyfriend had
spotted Ridgeway abducting her. He admitted that when he strangled her,
she had fought back harder than any of his victims.
Speaker 7 (34:04):
I put battery as of myself right here there.
Speaker 9 (34:07):
Cover up scratches.
Speaker 10 (34:08):
There's a scratch here, scratches here from Millvar.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
It's just rich Way claimed he was filled with rage
and had wanted to hurt his victims even after their deaths.
He admitted he'd tried to set the lifeless sixteen year
old Linda Rule's hair on fire.
Speaker 8 (34:30):
You know, he seemed throughout the interviews to try to
blame a lot of what had happened on the women
in his life, that the women that he actually killed
were kind of an extension of all the women before
who had disappointed him in some way.
Speaker 9 (34:45):
All the pressure, just build and build and build and build,
my releasing pullet was kill him killing women.
Speaker 8 (34:57):
He did talk about a number of the victims that
he would go back and have sexual relations with them
for a number of days after he killed them.
Speaker 6 (35:08):
Gary, and did you revisit any of these?
Speaker 5 (35:11):
I revisited at least one of them. And when we
say revisit, what did you come back.
Speaker 13 (35:15):
To do I have sex with her?
Speaker 8 (35:17):
He's like, oh, yeah, you know, but then the flies
would come and the maggots, and then I'd be like, oh,
I don't you know, like he didn't want to do
it after that, you know, you were just I mean,
that's the thing. He said it in this like I'm
talking to you, but as if it's totally normal.
Speaker 15 (35:36):
Now, why do individuals do this? The standard explanation for
necrophilia had been sex with someone dead you can have total.
Speaker 13 (35:47):
Control over it. There's no resistance at all.
Speaker 15 (35:50):
And so you can live out those sorts of feelings
with a dead, lifeless body.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
He's not the one that you're going to turn to
and ask why did you do this and get the
deep psychological answer. But one of the things that frequently
came up was that he wouldn't have to pay for the.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Sex Ridgeway's murderous spree had continued unabated until he met
his third wife, Judith in the mid eighties.
Speaker 6 (36:23):
Gary was so.
Speaker 5 (36:26):
Straight, normal and loving and gentle. He was so kind
around me all the time. He didn't get mad or
upset about anything. It seemed like the perfect marriage.
Speaker 7 (36:45):
When he first met her, he stopped patronizing prostitutes and
stopped killing.
Speaker 13 (36:50):
And then, as he put it, he fell off the wagon.
Speaker 5 (36:55):
Gary would call home and say that, you know, he
he's going to be late coming home, so he's going
to grab a bike, grab a hamburger, and you know
he'll be late. When I think back now, that was
probably one time when he was out picking up someone
(37:16):
off of the off of the Highway ninety nine.
Speaker 13 (37:21):
Strip and then he killed again.
Speaker 9 (37:26):
I'm right in here's where I killed her, here.
Speaker 5 (37:32):
Twenty feet He would tell me. He'd call home and
say he's going to stop at the junkyard on my
home from work. And then when he got home he
didn't really have any parts from that, so that may
have been another occasion.
Speaker 7 (37:47):
And so after having killed maybe sixty girls from eighty
two to eighty five.
Speaker 13 (37:57):
From eighty five to.
Speaker 7 (38:00):
When he was caught in two thousand and one, the
number of victims was more like ten or eleven.
Speaker 10 (38:09):
Mister Ridgway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree as charge in count
one guilty?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
In two thousand and three mission, Gary Ridgway made his
plea to the forty eight charges of murder that investigators
could conclusively tie him to.
Speaker 10 (38:28):
How do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder
in the first degree as charge in count five guilty?
Speaker 5 (38:34):
When he confessed and I sat, When I sat and
listened to him say guilty.
Speaker 10 (38:42):
Mister Ridgway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree for the death of
Marcia Chapman guilty?
Speaker 5 (38:50):
After every one of the names that they had said.
Speaker 10 (38:52):
For the death of Mary B. Mehan guilty.
Speaker 5 (38:56):
I just sat there and cried. And that's when it,
upon my observation, finally sunk in that.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
This is real.
Speaker 5 (39:06):
He did it. There's someone else inside of him. When
he went through the door and left to go to work.
He wasn't the man that I know.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
Count nineteen for the death of Linda Rule guilty.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
I would think back and think about all those years
that I was with him, were they real or was
he just using me?
Speaker 10 (39:30):
How do you plead to the charge with aggravated murder
in the first degree as charge of count forty eight guilty?
Speaker 5 (39:37):
I lived with him all those years. He could have
killed me. He could have killed my daughters, He could
have killed my grandbabies.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
So what made the monster? Was it his unusual upbringing
or was Gary Ridgeway born to kill?
Speaker 9 (40:03):
I still don't believe that any child is born to kill,
But I think some children have a predisposition to violence.
If the child grows up in a safe place for them,
where they feel loved, where they attach, we're never going
to know that that predisposition for violence is there. But
(40:24):
if that child is born into a home where they're afraid,
where they're neglected, where they're abused, then you have the
perfect soil to grow a serial killer.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I think that a boy and his mother have a
certain relationship, and when that relationship is different, then I
think that's when we start seeing those kind of switches
turning on and off.
Speaker 15 (40:52):
This is one of my ominous signs. She was somewhat
seductive and so on, These sorts of unhealthy relationships with
a maternal figure.
Speaker 8 (41:03):
People that I've encountered that have prosecuted for murder, I
think that their circumstances have driven them to do what
they have done. In the maturity of cases that I
have handled, I would say I did not see that
in ridge way. I truly believed that he was worn
that way, hardwired that way. Whatever you want to say.
Speaker 12 (41:26):
The Green River killer was definitely born to kill. He
was an individual who has this changed gene and culminated
in a tremendous number and intensity of homicides.
Speaker 7 (41:43):
His brain is definitely wired differently.
Speaker 13 (41:46):
He's a psychopath.
Speaker 7 (41:48):
That has to be a brain miswiring from the beginning.
Speaker 6 (41:54):
I don't know about the nurture nature piece. I think
at some point is a decision. Let me think, we
all have some propensities for violence, but you can decide
you can control it, and he decided how he wanted
to control it.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Nineteen years after Marsha Chapman's body was discovered beneath the
surface of the Green River, Gary Ridgeway was sentenced to
serve forty eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 9 (42:29):
In the end, Marcia got her justice because it was
DNA found on her that they could match with Gary Ridgeway,
and Marcia got her day.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
That was a good day.
Speaker 13 (42:44):
It was a good day.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Before Ridgeway was led away, Judge Richard Jones instructed him
to face the victims' families.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
There's a tremendous amount of emotion that these family members
wanted to pour out for Gary Ridgeway to hear.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I can only hope someone gets the opportunity to choke
you unconscious so you can live through the horror that
you put our daughters, our sisters, our mothers through.
Speaker 10 (43:10):
The pain would not go away, but it brought them closure.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
The one thing that I want you, You're a Ridge
way to know. I was that daughter at home waiting
for my mom to come home.
Speaker 8 (43:27):
I think for all of us. As we brought the
families up and introduced them, it was really emotional.
Speaker 10 (43:36):
I recall Linda Rules father.
Speaker 13 (43:39):
There are people here that hate you. I'm not one
of them.
Speaker 10 (43:48):
It was very sympathetic, very compassionate individual.
Speaker 5 (43:51):
What God says to do, and that's to forgive all,
So you are forgiven, sir.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
On one hand, I'm sitting next to a person who's
done the most inhumane things to other human beings, and
then fifteen feet away is a person doing the most
humane and merciful thing.
Speaker 10 (44:14):
I wanted him to look out, see the pain, see
the anger, and see all the agony that he had
caused in his lifetime. I wanted him to take the
visual image with him back to prison, so for the
balance of his life, that would be the last public
image that he had.
Speaker 6 (44:31):
You took from me, my first born child. May her
soul and the soul of the other forty seven victims
rest in peace
Speaker 1 (45:02):
At
You are a loser, You're a coward, you are nobody,
You're an animal.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
These are relatives of victims of the Green River Killer.
Speaker 3 (00:16):
May God have mercy on your pathetic soul, because the
rest of us who know the truth about.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You won't the most prolific serial murderer America has ever known.
Speaker 4 (00:26):
The one thing that I want you to know, I
was that daughter at home waiting for my mom to
come home.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Whose nineteen year reign of terror left the area surrounding
Seattle littered with corpses.
Speaker 4 (00:39):
I don't wish for him to die. I wish for
him to have a long, suffering, cruel death.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
But who was the Green River Killer? And was he
born to kill?
Speaker 5 (00:51):
When he went through the door and left to go
to work. He wasn't the man that I knew.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
The Old Highway ninety nine, adjacent to Seattle's Sea Tech
Airport thirty years ago a notorious spot.
Speaker 6 (01:44):
This area back in the early eighties was very had
a very transient population. There were topless bars over here.
Speaker 7 (01:54):
There were a lot of.
Speaker 6 (01:55):
Hotels where you could rent rooms for an hour or two.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Faye Brooks, then a detective assigned to sex crime cases,
was regularly cooled to the streets known simply as the strip.
Speaker 6 (02:11):
There were a lot of young women who were work
in the street.
Speaker 8 (02:22):
All the girls were young, and you know, some of
them had troubled past, but all of them are somebody's
daughter and somebody's sister.
Speaker 6 (02:33):
A lot of the young girls had grown up in
abusive homes, and that was why they were running away.
And I could relate to that. I'm a survivor of
child sex abuse, and you know, there but for the
grace of God were I, and so I could certainly
empathize with them, and I also wanted to help them.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
One such woman was Marsha Chapman street worker who claimed
to have been.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
Raped and the apartment building where she lived was raped.
Speaker 9 (03:13):
Here for she was a beautiful, statuesque Black woman. She
was thirty one. Uh, she had three children. She couldn't
support them on the job she could get, and she
was working as a prostitute.
Speaker 6 (03:32):
She was living in a h an apartment that was
sparsely furnished, So I think she was like down on
her lot. She seemed to have a kind heart and
was a nice person. But you know, under the circumstances,
she did what she had to do.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
To make ends meet.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Marsha's alleged rape was typical of the hazards working girls
on the strip faced. At the time, best selling crime
writer and Rule lived just blocks from the area.
Speaker 9 (04:05):
I would sometimes stop and warn them and say, do
you know what I do for a living? I write
about murder, and you don't have a chance out of here?
How do you know who you're getting in with? And
usually they would just shrug and walk away.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
In nineteen eighty two, the dangers of working the strip
would be brought home by a discovery in the nearby
Green River.
Speaker 6 (04:38):
There was a man on the water in a boat
and he saw underneath the water what he thought was
a mannequin. It wasn't a manequin it was a human being,
and there were two of them there well. One of
the victims in the water. Her hand was just waving
with the current of the water, and it was like,
(05:02):
here I am, Please help me. But of course it
was too late.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
As police investigated the crime scene, they made another grim find.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
Processing the scene where the victims were in the water
was where we found the third victim on the banks.
Speaker 8 (05:23):
They were all within a few feet of each other,
and so clearly you know the same killer had put
all three of the bodies there.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
All three women had been picked up from around the
strip by what the FBI dubbed an organized serial killer.
Speaker 11 (05:39):
The organized defender was more planned, more pronaditated, was able
to conceptualize crimes and carry them out very efficiently, namely
because of the fact that they had very little feeling
for another human being. They looked at a victim as
an advoct for their excitement. Basically, you're talking about a
sexual psychopath.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
The victims were sixteen year old Opal Mills, seventeen year
old Cynthia Jane Hines, and thirty one year old Marsha Chapman.
Speaker 6 (06:15):
When I found out that it was Marsha, I was
I don't think I had any words that I could say.
It was like, oh my god, somebody killed her. It
was really sad.
Speaker 9 (06:33):
We did not know this was only the beginning of
a reign of cherub and we wouldn't know who was
doing this for a very long time.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
On Seattle's Strip, the Green River Killer had found a
rich hunting ground that would enable him to amass a
body count unrivaled by any serial killer in American history.
(07:05):
By autumn of nineteen eighty two, the bodies of five
young women had been discovered in or beside Seattle's Green River.
They had disappeared from a notorious highway known as the Strip,
an area where prostitution was ripe and the Green River
killer had only just begun. On the fifteenth of September
(07:32):
nineteen eighty two, eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mean Vanishes.
Speaker 9 (07:42):
Bridget was the much loved daughter of a Catholic family
in Bellevue, a very rich a suburb of Seattle. She
skipped school. She joined up with a boyfriend named Ray,
and they were living in a cheap motel on Highway
ninety nine. She left. I think she was still possibly
(08:09):
churning a few tricks, and she didn't come back. Her
family was so upset because she was eight and a
half months pregnant.
Speaker 12 (08:20):
To every serial killer, human beings or objects, there's no
emotional connection, there's nothing there.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
On the twentieth of September, another girl, fifteen year old
Deborah Lorrain Estes, disappeared, yet police was still unable to
identify a killer.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
This was the area that I was working in. This
is the area where the bulk of the Green River
victims were picked up. From and we would sit here
and look, you know, trying to identify who might be
the suspect. We had very dead, dedicated detectives who were
determined to solve this case.
Speaker 2 (09:07):
On the twenty sixth of September, sixteen year old Linda
Jane Rule vanishes.
Speaker 9 (09:15):
Linda Ruhle was a slender, blonde girl who lived up
in the North End. She had been working in the
streets and she had a boyfriend who kind of served
as a pimp. She disappeared from an area near the
Northgate Mall. Like all serial killers, he seemed to have
(09:39):
the ability to sense vulderability in potential victims. He didn't
take the street wise girls. He was looking for the
younger women.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
By the end of nineteen eighty two, fifteen girls would
be missing or found dead, and pressure was manting on
the Sheriff's task Force.
Speaker 10 (10:03):
People hoped that law enforce would be successful. There were
different rumors that were passing around of who the person
might be. There was rampant speculation that it might be
even a law enforcement officer because of the easy access
that the individual had to the number and variety of
women in the community.
Speaker 6 (10:23):
You know, The unfortunate thing is some of the women
of the street felt like the Sheriff's.
Speaker 13 (10:30):
Office wasn't.
Speaker 6 (10:32):
Investigating the case as hard as we could have because
they were street kids and runaways, and that's not true.
Everybody assigned to that investigation was committed to solving it,
committed to bringing this person to justice because these were,
you know, somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's mother, and we
(10:53):
cared about them. We cared about them like they were
our own kids or our own family members, and we
wanted to solve it.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Then, on the thirtieth of April nineteen eighty three, a
young girl was spotted being taken from the strip.
Speaker 9 (11:12):
Maria Melvar with her boyfriend at a restaurant on the highway.
Her boyfriend went to make a phone call. When he
came back, Maria wasn't in the restaurant, and he was
very concerned, and he thought, well, I'll go out in
the highway and see if I can find her. And
(11:33):
he realized that Maria was in the truck ahead of him.
There was a man driving, and then she was talking
to the man, and so he determined to follow the
truck cause he wasn't sure what was going on. He
worried about her, and they got up to the stoplight
at ninety nine and to sixteenth, but when he turned left,
(11:57):
he couldn't see the car.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Marie's boyfriend returned with her family to search the streets
for the pickup truck she'd left in, and in a
quiet cal Deesac just a few blocks from the strip,
they found it parked outside the modest home of a
local truck painter, and they.
Speaker 9 (12:18):
Asked local police pleased to go there because they believed
Maria was in the house. One of the sergeants did
go there, knocked in the door. A man answered, and
he said there's nobody here but me, and they didn't
press it.
Speaker 12 (12:38):
All serial killers have the ability to appear so normal
that they throw off even people who are considered experts.
The serial killer is the olympiad of the pathological liar.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
The man's details joined hundreds more in the Task forces files.
A saliva swab would later be added. Still, girls continued
to vanish.
Speaker 6 (13:03):
And the lists kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
By June nineteen eighty three, at least twenty six girls
had disappeared.
Speaker 11 (13:12):
They learned from their crimes as their murders grow in number,
their efficiency increases.
Speaker 6 (13:19):
The remains were being found in secluded, quiet, dark areas.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
That summer, five girls went missing.
Speaker 11 (13:29):
By the time they were up to five or six
or ten, homicides had become very difficult to catch.
Speaker 10 (13:34):
The fear was tremendous and deep throughout the entire community.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Autumn, five more vanished.
Speaker 9 (13:43):
Some of them were in the mountain foothills, some of
them were down in the Green River Valley.
Speaker 6 (13:50):
He was, you know, ahead of us. We wanted to
catch him. We wanted to stop him.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Winter and spring nineteen eighty four, four more girls gone.
Speaker 9 (14:01):
It would be three or four or maybe even five
in one spot.
Speaker 6 (14:07):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 7 (14:09):
He was outsmarting the homicide detectives. They were everybody was
looking for.
Speaker 6 (14:14):
He was dumping women like they were garbage. This was
a gun sight. Uh. It's not far from the airport.
It's not far from the strip where the young girls
were missing in the evenings.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Uh.
Speaker 6 (14:31):
It was dark, very secluded. Very few people came down here.
You could come dump something and be gone. And that's
what happened in this location here. It i they were
just dumped.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Among the dozens of buddies. Found was the sixteen year
old Linda Jane Rule. A skeletal remains hidden under a
bush and in the scrubland south of the airport. The
fate of the pregnant eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mehan
was finally discovered.
Speaker 9 (15:11):
Someone Ripcher killed her and buried her and her banborn
baby in a shallow grave on the west side of
the highway.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
By spring nineteen eighty four, the killer had amassed more
than forty victims, but then something changed.
Speaker 7 (15:33):
The killings appeared to have stopped. Really thought that he
was gone.
Speaker 14 (15:42):
It's incredibly unusual for a serial killer simply to stop killing.
A serial killer will usually only cease murder when he's
apprehended or when he dies himself.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
In nineteen eighty five, the truck painter from the house
in the quiet cul de Sac began dating forty year
old divorced mother Judith.
Speaker 5 (16:14):
When I first met him, I thought he was quite
the gentleman, and sup polite and nice. He loved the
country music and the dancing, and he was always smiling.
He never got angry, and I just thought he was
the greatest. Is like love at first sight.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Within months the house became Judith's home.
Speaker 5 (16:43):
He offered to help me move in, that I can
move in with him if.
Speaker 13 (16:48):
I like.
Speaker 5 (16:50):
There was no carpet in his house, so he let
me pick out some carpet because he had previous renters
in there, and he had told me the little one
head wed on the carpet the house needed a woman's touch.
Speaker 2 (17:10):
After three years living together, the couple wed.
Speaker 5 (17:15):
Who were married nineteen eighty eight. It seemed like the
perfect marriage. And so he was good to my daughters,
played with my grandchildren. My dreams are coming true.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Judith would enjoy thirteen happy years of marriage. While most
of the world forgot about the Green River Killer, most
that is, except the men and women of the Green
River Task Force, And in two thousand and one, advances
in DNA profiling enabled them to compare samples taken from
(17:54):
the early victims, including Marsha Chapman, with swabs that have
been taken from several men questioned during the investigation.
Speaker 6 (18:06):
This is the DNA from Marsha Chapman, and this is
the DNA from the Green River Killer. And we looked
at him and I We're like, they're the same, They're
the same. Scary Ridgeway, I just.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
I couldn't believe it. I was just devastated and in shock,
and I think I went into denial. I wasn't believing it.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Only now would the world discover the shocking truth about
Judith's husband, Gary Ridgeway, the most prolific serial killer in
US history. During the nineteen eighties, the mysterious Green River
(19:16):
Killer had prowled the red light district of Seattle's Strip unchecked,
amassing a terrifying body count. In two thousand and one,
a DNA match had connected fifty two year old truck
painter Gary Ridgeway with the first few victims.
Speaker 10 (19:35):
He'd been identified as the most prolific serial killer in
the history of the United States. Each of us recognized
that this would be the biggest criminal case in history
of the state of Washington.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
The prosecution and defense teams would now be able to
interview the man suspected of over four dozen homicides.
Speaker 13 (19:58):
I'm walking down a corridor.
Speaker 7 (20:00):
I'm going to open the door and be introduced to
the supposed Green River Killer. A hundred things are going
through your mind and wondering what is it going to
be mean?
Speaker 13 (20:11):
Is going to be crying? Is he going to be crazy?
Speaker 7 (20:15):
And I walked in and like, wow, this isn't what
I expected.
Speaker 13 (20:22):
All right, pretty good.
Speaker 8 (20:25):
All of us kind of looked at each other and said,
that's the guy that's been eluding everybody for twenty years.
Speaker 13 (20:30):
What was remarkable was that he was He was so normal.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Sleep okay, no, no, no, no, Well.
Speaker 13 (20:39):
That didn't look like the Hilton him there. I got
a glimpse of it.
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Well, apostrophedic mattress in there, so.
Speaker 13 (20:46):
You know, it's a little bit hot in airbit.
Speaker 7 (20:50):
If you did not know what he had done, you
would like him.
Speaker 13 (20:55):
The monster within him was was well hidden.
Speaker 15 (21:00):
People want to ascribe extraordinary traits and qualities to these people.
These are, for the most part, very ordinary individuals, except
for the extraordinary crime that they get involved in.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
So who was the suspected Green River killer? Gary Ridgeway
was born in nineteen forty nine, the middle of three boys.
He lived in a small house not far from the Strip.
Speaker 8 (21:35):
His mom was kind of stay at home and then
part time she worked at a department store. His dad
drove a bus for the county.
Speaker 7 (21:45):
Gary sometimes would ride with him on the bus and
his dad would say, you know, see her, she's a prostitute.
She's you know, the scum of the earth and would
be rate prostitutes and talk about how filthy and.
Speaker 13 (21:55):
Bad they were.
Speaker 7 (21:56):
And then there are a couple of episodes where Gary
calls him leaving him in the in the vehicle while
he while dad went and had sacks for the prostitute.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
School friend Terry Rochelle recalls that Gary Ridgeway was more
inward than his siblings.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
His brother was very outgoing and you know, a bright personality,
and Gary was more quiet and withdrawn, I would say,
is a good word. He was just a little pip
squeak guy, just you know, somebody's little brother. Basically, you know,
you didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him,
just kind of in the shadows, I would say.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Most of his life at school, the struggling Ridgeway failed
to make an impression. However, at parents' evenings his mother
Mary did, all the.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
Women kind of sat back and looked at her strange
because she would wear a big boufont hairdow and lots
and lots of makeup, short skirts, which were not really
the style in those days, especially for a mom. She
just always seemed like she was trying to be very
glamorous and not like our moms at all.
Speaker 8 (23:11):
I always remember her wearing kind of the really tight
shorts and low cut tops.
Speaker 12 (23:18):
And longer hair.
Speaker 8 (23:19):
She was very, very attractive.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Lady Ridgeway admitted wetting the bed throughout his childhood and
well into his teens.
Speaker 7 (23:31):
When he would wet the bed, his mother would put
him in the kind of get in the bath up
and wash him and wash his genitals.
Speaker 9 (23:39):
During one bath, her robe fell open and she was
naked underneath, and he felt arousal at that, and at
the same time knew that it probably wasn't that wasn't
a good thing to feel, but he felt it.
Speaker 8 (23:55):
He talked about having some sexual feelings towards her. He
described in some detail watching her when she was in
a bathing suit and looking at her and thinking that
she dressed pretty provocatively.
Speaker 12 (24:09):
This overly sexualized person washing her son's genitals. And you
realize that most teenage boys are having an awful time
with dealing with their own emerging sexuality. Has to have
had an impact in some way.
Speaker 15 (24:27):
Boys need to see their mothers as a sexual It
is very, very destabilizing for an adolescent boy to see
his mother in a sexual manner. It's very hard for
an adolescent boy to imagine his mother having sex with anybody,
including his father, And so when a mother behaves in
a sexualized or hyper sexualized way, it's very unsettling for
(24:50):
an adolescent boy.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
As Ridgway got older, he started showing signs of destructive behavior,
starting fires, and as a teen, he took his first
step towards murder.
Speaker 8 (25:05):
He approached a first grader, a six year old boy
that he saw a plane in a lot near his house.
The boy was dressed up playing cowboys and indians, and
he kind of lured him into the bushes and completely unprovoked,
stabbed the little boy in the stomach and I nearly
killed him. He told the boy that he just wanted
(25:29):
to know what it felt like to kill somebody. And
after he stabbed him, he took the knife and kind
of wiped the blade off on the little boy's shoulder,
and you know, just walked away, and actually nobody ever
connected him to that.
Speaker 12 (25:43):
Serial killers need to have some concrete proof of what
they're doing. I mean, you can think about something, but
until you've done it, you don't know how it's going
to turn out. And so what the serial killer does
is experiment. Often they will commit an act like a
trial run.
Speaker 2 (26:07):
Ridgeway eventually finished school two years late due to his
slow progress. The following year, age twenty one, he married
his steady girlfriend and joined the Navy.
Speaker 8 (26:19):
When he returned from his deployment to the Philippines, his
wife admitted that she had had an affair with a
friend of theirs. That was when he first started kind
of referring to her as a war and using other
derogatory terms, and that was kind of the beginning of
a series of relationships that never quite panned out for him.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
During the early nineteen seventies, Ridgway got a job spray
painting at the Kenworth truck manufacturers. He then met and
married his second wife.
Speaker 8 (26:51):
He was very much into having sex, often repeatedly throughout
the day as frequently pretty much as women would have.
Speaker 9 (27:00):
They would go out in the truck, and he loved
to have sex in public where they could be discovered
at any time.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
But after having a child, their relationship deteriorated.
Speaker 7 (27:15):
His wife left him when his son was about five,
and that really.
Speaker 13 (27:20):
Hurt him, and.
Speaker 7 (27:22):
That was when he started to go frequent prostitutes.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Ridgeway claimed he became addicted to prostitutes. He had in
fact been quizzed by police about his activities on the
strip several times during the eighties, even passing a line
detector test when grilled about the Green River murders.
Speaker 9 (27:45):
When you're subject to someone without a conscience, who has
no regrets and no remorse and no real concern, they
can pass them.
Speaker 13 (27:57):
He was a magnificent liar.
Speaker 7 (27:59):
He had an ability to just to go and talk,
and he would just talk and tell stories, and I,
you know, for a while, I assume they were true.
Speaker 5 (28:08):
And when I would go in to visit Gary at
the jail, he would tell me that everything's okay. He
didn't do it. He didn't hurt those women, he didn't
kill them. He didn't and I would believe him.
Speaker 2 (28:32):
As he was questioned in two thousand and one, Ridgeway
continued to protest his innocence.
Speaker 7 (28:38):
Up to this point, Gary had been maintaining that they
had the wrong person, that he had well had He
had had sex with many prostitutes, he hadn't killed any,
and that was essentially going to be the defense.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
But when forensic evidence surfaced tying him to three more victims,
Ridgeway's story changed.
Speaker 7 (28:58):
Myself and another attorney were in the meeting room waiting
for mister Ridgway. I don't recall what we were talking about,
but we both had smiles on our faces when he
walked in, and he said, Oh, you won't be smiling
when we're done.
Speaker 13 (29:12):
I've been lying to you all.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
I've been manipulating everyone for all these years. I killed
them all.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Only now would investigators discover the true shocking horror of
the Green River Killer's crimes. In two thousand and three,
fifty four year old truck painter Gary Ridgway admitted he
(29:44):
was the Green River Killer that had eluded capture for
almost two decades. A man responsible for the murder of
more than four dozen women. Faced with the death penalty,
Ridgeway offered to tell the truth about all his crimes
in return for his life. On behalf of the victims'
(30:07):
families who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones.
The prosecution agreed Ridgeway would now reveal the true horror
of his crimes. Investigators now learned how the Green River
Killer had so easily abducted and killed his victims, even
(30:29):
at the height of the public terror.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
He came across as being a very meek and mild
safe person. As a matter of fact, in one situation,
he had his child in the car with him, and
when he picked up a prostitute.
Speaker 9 (30:50):
He looks like a mousey little man. He doesn't look
like the kind of person that if you were a prostitute,
that you would be afraid of.
Speaker 6 (31:00):
They thought, well, he's a family man, he's safe, and
it turns out he wasn't.
Speaker 13 (31:10):
He preferred to take them to his house.
Speaker 7 (31:12):
Some said no to that, and they would drive to
a remote location and he had a pickup truck with
a canopy on the back, and he would convince him
to go into the back of the canopy so they
could have more room to have sex. But what he
would do is once he got them in the position,
either in his bed at home where he had pictures
(31:34):
of his son on the wall and.
Speaker 13 (31:36):
They felt a little more secure, or whether they.
Speaker 7 (31:38):
Were just hopping in the back of the truck, get naked,
begin with oral sex. A missionary at some point convinced
them that he would be able to finish sooner if
they would agree to the rear entry position.
Speaker 5 (31:57):
When I got through having a climax with her, I
jumped on her.
Speaker 13 (32:04):
He get his arm around the girl's neck.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
How woult you pulling on her neck?
Speaker 7 (32:09):
I'm pulling really hard on her neck, just like this.
Speaker 5 (32:13):
What are you saying to her?
Speaker 10 (32:14):
Don't don't, don't fight, don't fight and don't and I'll
let you go.
Speaker 7 (32:19):
And then choked them with his forearm.
Speaker 13 (32:23):
I'm feeling I got a killer.
Speaker 4 (32:26):
I got a killer.
Speaker 13 (32:26):
I got a killer.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
You'll need to go up to kind of like at
the top of the hill on this and pull in.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Rich Way guided the investigators to where he dumped dozens
of young women.
Speaker 9 (32:50):
I just drove, drove in my pickup and camper and parked.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
It, brought her body over and put it a little
bit over the hill.
Speaker 13 (33:00):
His method of recollection was where he had left their
bodies between this one and that one up there. You
think you put like five of them in there.
Speaker 8 (33:13):
He essentially said, the victims didn't mean anything. I have
no idea who they are. I don't know if they're black,
if they're white, if how old they are, how young
they are. I mean, they really meant nothing to me
as an individual.
Speaker 5 (33:25):
What you're getting is what you're going to get, and
that's all you can get because I don't remember.
Speaker 12 (33:29):
To every serial killer, human beings are objects in the
homicides that they commit. They're never going to remember the name.
They're never going to remember the face. They'll remember the
concrete action of where those bodies are.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One of the dump sides that Ridgeway identified was that
of Marie Malva, the eighteen year old whose boyfriend had
spotted Ridgeway abducting her. He admitted that when he strangled her,
she had fought back harder than any of his victims.
Speaker 7 (34:04):
I put battery as of myself right here there.
Speaker 9 (34:07):
Cover up scratches.
Speaker 10 (34:08):
There's a scratch here, scratches here from Millvar.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
It's just rich Way claimed he was filled with rage
and had wanted to hurt his victims even after their deaths.
He admitted he'd tried to set the lifeless sixteen year
old Linda Rule's hair on fire.
Speaker 8 (34:30):
You know, he seemed throughout the interviews to try to
blame a lot of what had happened on the women
in his life, that the women that he actually killed
were kind of an extension of all the women before
who had disappointed him in some way.
Speaker 9 (34:45):
All the pressure, just build and build and build and build,
my releasing pullet was kill him killing women.
Speaker 8 (34:57):
He did talk about a number of the victims that
he would go back and have sexual relations with them
for a number of days after he killed them.
Speaker 6 (35:08):
Gary, and did you revisit any of these?
Speaker 5 (35:11):
I revisited at least one of them. And when we
say revisit, what did you come back.
Speaker 13 (35:15):
To do I have sex with her?
Speaker 8 (35:17):
He's like, oh, yeah, you know, but then the flies
would come and the maggots, and then I'd be like, oh,
I don't you know, like he didn't want to do
it after that, you know, you were just I mean,
that's the thing. He said it in this like I'm
talking to you, but as if it's totally normal.
Speaker 15 (35:36):
Now, why do individuals do this? The standard explanation for
necrophilia had been sex with someone dead you can have total.
Speaker 13 (35:47):
Control over it. There's no resistance at all.
Speaker 15 (35:50):
And so you can live out those sorts of feelings
with a dead, lifeless body.
Speaker 7 (35:57):
He's not the one that you're going to turn to
and ask why did you do this and get the
deep psychological answer. But one of the things that frequently
came up was that he wouldn't have to pay for the.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Sex Ridgeway's murderous spree had continued unabated until he met
his third wife, Judith in the mid eighties.
Speaker 6 (36:23):
Gary was so.
Speaker 5 (36:26):
Straight, normal and loving and gentle. He was so kind
around me all the time. He didn't get mad or
upset about anything. It seemed like the perfect marriage.
Speaker 7 (36:45):
When he first met her, he stopped patronizing prostitutes and
stopped killing.
Speaker 13 (36:50):
And then, as he put it, he fell off the wagon.
Speaker 5 (36:55):
Gary would call home and say that, you know, he
he's going to be late coming home, so he's going
to grab a bike, grab a hamburger, and you know
he'll be late. When I think back now, that was
probably one time when he was out picking up someone
(37:16):
off of the off of the Highway ninety nine.
Speaker 13 (37:21):
Strip and then he killed again.
Speaker 9 (37:26):
I'm right in here's where I killed her, here.
Speaker 5 (37:32):
Twenty feet He would tell me. He'd call home and
say he's going to stop at the junkyard on my
home from work. And then when he got home he
didn't really have any parts from that, so that may
have been another occasion.
Speaker 7 (37:47):
And so after having killed maybe sixty girls from eighty
two to eighty five.
Speaker 13 (37:57):
From eighty five to.
Speaker 7 (38:00):
When he was caught in two thousand and one, the
number of victims was more like ten or eleven.
Speaker 10 (38:09):
Mister Ridgway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree as charge in count
one guilty?
Speaker 2 (38:19):
In two thousand and three mission, Gary Ridgway made his
plea to the forty eight charges of murder that investigators
could conclusively tie him to.
Speaker 10 (38:28):
How do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder
in the first degree as charge in count five guilty?
Speaker 5 (38:34):
When he confessed and I sat, When I sat and
listened to him say guilty.
Speaker 10 (38:42):
Mister Ridgway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree for the death of
Marcia Chapman guilty?
Speaker 5 (38:50):
After every one of the names that they had said.
Speaker 10 (38:52):
For the death of Mary B. Mehan guilty.
Speaker 5 (38:56):
I just sat there and cried. And that's when it,
upon my observation, finally sunk in that.
Speaker 6 (39:04):
This is real.
Speaker 5 (39:06):
He did it. There's someone else inside of him. When
he went through the door and left to go to work.
He wasn't the man that I know.
Speaker 10 (39:17):
Count nineteen for the death of Linda Rule guilty.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
I would think back and think about all those years
that I was with him, were they real or was
he just using me?
Speaker 10 (39:30):
How do you plead to the charge with aggravated murder
in the first degree as charge of count forty eight guilty?
Speaker 5 (39:37):
I lived with him all those years. He could have
killed me. He could have killed my daughters, He could
have killed my grandbabies.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
So what made the monster? Was it his unusual upbringing
or was Gary Ridgeway born to kill?
Speaker 9 (40:03):
I still don't believe that any child is born to kill,
But I think some children have a predisposition to violence.
If the child grows up in a safe place for them,
where they feel loved, where they attach, we're never going
to know that that predisposition for violence is there. But
(40:24):
if that child is born into a home where they're afraid,
where they're neglected, where they're abused, then you have the
perfect soil to grow a serial killer.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
I think that a boy and his mother have a
certain relationship, and when that relationship is different, then I
think that's when we start seeing those kind of switches
turning on and off.
Speaker 15 (40:52):
This is one of my ominous signs. She was somewhat
seductive and so on, These sorts of unhealthy relationships with
a maternal figure.
Speaker 8 (41:03):
People that I've encountered that have prosecuted for murder, I
think that their circumstances have driven them to do what
they have done. In the maturity of cases that I
have handled, I would say I did not see that
in ridge way. I truly believed that he was worn
that way, hardwired that way. Whatever you want to say.
Speaker 12 (41:26):
The Green River killer was definitely born to kill. He
was an individual who has this changed gene and culminated
in a tremendous number and intensity of homicides.
Speaker 7 (41:43):
His brain is definitely wired differently.
Speaker 13 (41:46):
He's a psychopath.
Speaker 7 (41:48):
That has to be a brain miswiring from the beginning.
Speaker 6 (41:54):
I don't know about the nurture nature piece. I think
at some point is a decision. Let me think, we
all have some propensities for violence, but you can decide
you can control it, and he decided how he wanted
to control it.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
Nineteen years after Marsha Chapman's body was discovered beneath the
surface of the Green River, Gary Ridgeway was sentenced to
serve forty eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Speaker 9 (42:29):
In the end, Marcia got her justice because it was
DNA found on her that they could match with Gary Ridgeway,
and Marcia got her day.
Speaker 6 (42:42):
That was a good day.
Speaker 13 (42:44):
It was a good day.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Before Ridgeway was led away, Judge Richard Jones instructed him
to face the victims' families.
Speaker 10 (42:52):
There's a tremendous amount of emotion that these family members
wanted to pour out for Gary Ridgeway to hear.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
I can only hope someone gets the opportunity to choke
you unconscious so you can live through the horror that
you put our daughters, our sisters, our mothers through.
Speaker 10 (43:10):
The pain would not go away, but it brought them closure.
Speaker 4 (43:17):
The one thing that I want you, You're a Ridge
way to know. I was that daughter at home waiting
for my mom to come home.
Speaker 8 (43:27):
I think for all of us. As we brought the
families up and introduced them, it was really emotional.
Speaker 10 (43:36):
I recall Linda Rules father.
Speaker 13 (43:39):
There are people here that hate you. I'm not one
of them.
Speaker 10 (43:48):
It was very sympathetic, very compassionate individual.
Speaker 5 (43:51):
What God says to do, and that's to forgive all,
So you are forgiven, sir.
Speaker 7 (44:00):
On one hand, I'm sitting next to a person who's
done the most inhumane things to other human beings, and
then fifteen feet away is a person doing the most
humane and merciful thing.
Speaker 10 (44:14):
I wanted him to look out, see the pain, see
the anger, and see all the agony that he had
caused in his lifetime. I wanted him to take the
visual image with him back to prison, so for the
balance of his life, that would be the last public
image that he had.
Speaker 6 (44:31):
You took from me, my first born child. May her
soul and the soul of the other forty seven victims
rest in peace
Speaker 1 (45:02):
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