The Green River Killer
Gary Ridgway’s violent criminality began in the 1960s. At age sixteen, he led a six-year old boy into the woods, and stabbed him in the liver. The child survived, and recounted that Ridgway had laughed as he walked away. After high school, Ridgway joined the Navy and was sent to Vietnam. Upon his discharge, he got a job as a truck painter, which became his career or the next thirty years. Ridgway was a family man, but one who could not maintain a marriage: he tied the knot three times. He was also a regular churchgoer, and many who knew him described him as a religious fanatic. He as also seriously into hookers. Long before he turned murderous stalker and began to kill them, he was a frequent customer of prostitutes. His career as a serial killer began in the early 1980s.
Ridgway picked up prostitutes, runaway teenagers, or other vulnerable women, along Route 99 in King County, Washington. He took them to his home, where he usually strangled them with his bare hands. For variety, 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 defile them. The first hint authorities had that a serial killer and stalker of ladies of the night was on the loose was when sex workers and teenage runaways began to disappear along Route 99. After the first five bodies surfaced in the Green River, the press dubbed the unknown culprit “The Green River Killer”.
