2. A Macabre Killer Who Had His Way With Corpses
Gary Ridgway was a dyslexic child, with an IQ in the 80s. His violent criminality began in the 1960s, when at age sixteen, he led a six-year-old boy into the woods and stabbed him in the liver. The child survived, and stated that Ridgway had laughed as he walked away. After high school, Ridgway joined the Navy and was sent to Vietnam, where he served aboard a supply ship. Upon his discharge, he got a job painting trucks, and spent 30 years in that occupation. He was 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 ladies of the night, and long before he began to kill them, he was a frequent customer of these working women. His macabre career as a serial killer began in the early 1980s. He would pick up these women, 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 his macabre way with them.
