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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

29. From Hooker Addict to Hooker-Killing Addict

Some of Gary Ridgway’s victims. Canal Ciencias Criminais

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”.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.