LONE KILLER OR CULT MEMBER?
Gary Ridgway is considered to be the sole killer involved in the serial murder of at least 48 women. That may or may not be true. He is a serial killer; what is not certain is whether or not he acted alone.
Dale Wells is likely an accomplice of Gary Ridgway. Two men not one were seen by a raft rider on the Green River when he discovered three submerged bodies; Dale Wells was picked up along with Ridgway for questioning in the murder of Marie Malvar.
Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949), known as the Green River Killer, is one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. On November 30, 2001, as he was leaving a Renton, Washington factory where he worked, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose deaths were attributed to the "Green River Killer". Four murders were linked to him through DNA; three more could be traced through paint he used at his job. Two years later he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder, although he says he actually killed 71 people. Ridgway has been married three times and has one son. He carried his son's photo in his wallet to lure most of his victims into his pickup truck.
Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, to Mary Rita Steinman and Thomas Newton and was the middle child of three sons. He was raised in McMicken Heights, Washington. His mother reportedly dominated the household and was especially controlling towards her middle son. Relatives remember that she was never content with him and was constantly yelling at her husband.
As a child Ridgeway was tested with an IQ of 80, signifying a "Borderline mental deficiency". His classmates at Tyee High describe him as congenial but largely forgettable. His teenage years, however, were troubled: Ridgway was 16 when he stabbed his first victim, who was six.
Friends and family, questioned about Ridgway following his arrest, described him as friendly but strange. The same man who went door to door for his Pentecostal church was also obsessed with prostitutes and had dysfunctional relationships with women; his first two marriages were riddled with infidelities by both partners. Both a prostitute and his second wife testified that, in 1982, he had placed them in choke-holds.
Ridgway also talked to and tried to make his victims comfortable before he committed the murders, in his own words,
"I would talk to her … and get her mind off of the, sex, anything she was nervous about. And think, you know, she thinks, 'Oh, this guy cares,' and which I, I didn't. I just want to, uh, get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her."
Later in a statement Ridgway said that murdering young women was his "career."
During a two-and-a-half-year period in the early 1980s, the Green River Killer is believed to have murdered as many as 50 women near the cities of Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. Most of the victims were either prostitutes or teenage runaways picked up along Pacific Highway South (State Route 99) and strangled. Most of their bodies were dumped in and around the Green River in Washington, except for two victims in the Portland, Oregon area. The bodies were often left in clusters, sometimes posed, usually nude. As the bodies were often not discovered until skeletonized, four victims are still unidentified.
In the early 1980s, the King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force to investigate the murders. The most notable members of the task force were Robert Keppel and Dave Reichert, who periodically interviewed incarcerated serial killer Ted Bundy from 1984; their interviews with Bundy were of little help in the Green River investigations, but elicited confessions from Bundy on unsolved cases.
Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and 2001 for charges related to prostitution. He became a suspect in 1983 for the Green River killings. In 1984 Ridgway took and passed a polygraph test, and on April 7, 1987, police took hair and saliva samples. These were later subjected to a DNA analysis, providing the evidence for his arrest warrant.
On November 30, 2001, nearly 20 years after first being identified as a potential suspect, Ridgway was arrested on suspicion of murder for four deaths after DNA evidence conclusively linked semen left in the victims to the saliva swab taken by the police. The four victims named in the original indictment were Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds and Carol Ann Christensen.
Early in August 2003, Seattle television news reported that Ridgway had been moved from a maximum security cell at King County Jail to an undisclosed location. Other news reports stated that his lawyers, led by Brian Hochstetter, were closing a plea bargain that would spare him the death penalty in return for his confession to a number of the Green River murders.
On November 5, 2003, Ridgway entered a guilty plea to 48 charges of aggravated first degree murder as part of a plea bargain, agreed to in June, that would spare him execution in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of his victims and providing other details. In his statement accompanying his guilty plea, Ridgway explained all of his victims had been killed inside King County, Washington, and that he had transported and dumped the remains of the two women near Portland to confuse the police.
Public opinion remains divided on whether a confessed murderer of 48 people should be spared execution in a state that has the death penalty and imposes it on people who have killed far fewer victims. Deputy prosecutor Jeffrey Baird noted in court that the deal contained "the names of 41 victims who would not be the subject of State v. Ridgway if it were not for the plea agreement." King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng explained his decision to make the deal:
"We could have gone forward with seven counts, but that is all we could have ever hoped to solve. At the end of that trial, whatever the outcome, there would have been lingering doubts about the rest of these crimes. This agreement was the avenue to the truth. And in the end, the search for the truth is still why we have a criminal justice system … Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy. He does not deserve to live. The mercy provided by today's resolution is directed not at Ridgway, but toward the families who have suffered so much …"
It was a bad decision, and should never have happened. Forensic evidence would have established Ridgway as the likely killer and he should have been executed promptly. This type of mindless lazy hypocrisy from prosecutors makes a mockery of the existence of the death penalty.
On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole and one life sentence, to be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, adding 480 years to his 48 life sentences.
Ridgway led prosecutors to three bodies in 2003. On August 16 of that year, remains of a 16-year-old female found near Enumclaw, Washington, 40 feet from State Route 410, were pronounced as belonging to Pammy Annette Avent, who had been believed to be a victim of the Green River Killer. The remains of Marie Malvar and April Buttram were found in September. On November 23, 2005, The Associated Press reported that a weekend hiker found the skull of one of the 48 women Ridgway admitted murdering in his 2003 plea bargain with King County prosecutors. The skull of Tracy Winston, who was 19 when she disappeared from Northgate Mall on September 12, 1983, was found by a man hiking in a wooded area near Highway 18 near Issaquah, southeast of Seattle.
Ridgway confessed to more confirmed murders than any other American serial killer. Over a period of five months of police and prosecutor interviews, he confessed to 48 murders, 42 of which were on the police's list of probable Green River Killer victims, plus 6 more murders. On February 9, 2004, county prosecutors began to release the videotape records of Ridgway's confessions. In one taped interview, he told investigators initially that he was responsible for the deaths of 65 women, but in another taped interview with Reichert on December 31, 2003, Ridgway claimed to have murdered 71 victims and confessed to have had sex with them prior to killing them, a detail which he did not reveal until after his sentencing. He also confessed that he had sex with his victims' bodies after he murdered them, but claimed he began burying the later victims so that he would resist the urge to revisit them. These details again make a total mockery of ever doing a plea bargain with a serial killer; even a near-moron like Ridgway is able to run rings around the inherently corrupt process of plea bargaining.
Ridgway is incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington.
In 2008, the Lifetime Network aired The Capture of the Green River Killer, a TV movie loosely based on his crimes.
In a statement to the Court on November 5, 2003, Gary Ridgway said:
"I killed the forty-eight women listed in the State's second amended information.
In most cases, when I murdered these women, I did not know their names. Most of the time, I killed them the first time I met them and I do not have a good memory for their faces. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.
I killed them all in King County. I killed most of them in my house near Military Road, and I killed a lot of them in my truck, not far from where I picked them up. I killed some of them outside. I remember leaving each woman's body in the place where she was found.
I agree that each of the murders I committed was part of a "common scheme or plan." The plan was: I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could.
I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.
Another part of my plan was where I put the bodies of these women. Most of the time I took the women's jewelry and their clothes to get rid of any evidence and make them harder to identify. I placed most of the bodies in groups which I call "clusters." I did this because I wanted to keep track of all the women I killed. I liked to drive by the "clusters" around the county and think about the women I placed there. I usually used a landmark to remember a "cluster" and the women I placed there. Sometimes I killed and dumped a woman, intending to start a new "cluster," and never returned because I thought I might get caught putting more women there."
William Stevens - another suspect
"A Viable Suspect" In 1989
But what about today? Is he still considered a suspect by the police today?
I say yes to all of the above. You may disagree but I've never known where there will ever be a 100% agreement on an opinion by anyone, no matter how many facts, evidence or theories one person or many people have. With that in mind, I'm not going to give up at this point, now that Ridgway has pled guilty, to stop saying William was involved, because with all the research & investigation I have done I can not and will not stop my campaign till all the victims' killers have been caught & brought to justice. Unfortunately, William will never be brought to justice as he died Sept 30, 1991, but his many accomplices are still alive & many are still living in the Seattle area.
To the many families that William has caused so much pain & suffering, be satisfied that he at least suffered a very slow & long painful death from cancer. Though with his death he took the many secrets that will most likely keep this case from being fully solved till the Police are willing to fully understand the evil & complex mind William had.
