PROFILE: Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer Part 1

Gary Ridgway confessed to 71 murders and Ted Bundy is still the household name. Why does almost nobody know the Green River Killer?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussions of murder, child sexual abuse and violence against a child. Listener discretion is advised.

Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer, hunted the Seattle area of Washington State for nearly two decades and was convicted of 49 murders, more than Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer. He was a husband, a father, a churchgoer and a dependable employee, and that is exactly why police questioned him and let him go.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy take Part 1 as the psychological build: where the sexual sadism came from, and why the most ordinary life in the catalogue was the thing that hid it.

In this episode:

- Why the most prolific serial killer in American history is the least discussed, and what the victim pool had to do with it

- Sex workers and runaways, and who gets looked for when they disappear

- Convicted of 49, confessed to 71. Bundy around 30, John Wayne Gacy around 33, Jeffrey Dahmer around 17

- Ridgway against Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, cool and calm against anxious and histrionic

- Born February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of three sons

- His parents Thomas Ridgway, a bus driver, and Mary Rita Steinman, described as domineering and volatile

- The family's 1960 move to SeaTac, Washington, and two grades held back

- Bedwetting into his early teens as a trauma symptom, and what he alleged his mother did

- The six-year-old boy he stabbed in the mid 1960s, who survived

- Three marriages: Claudia Kraig Barrows, 1970 to 1972; Marcia Lorene Brown, 1973 to 1981; Judith Lorraine Lynch from 1988 until his 2001 arrest

- The 1980 arrest for choking a woman that produced no charges, and the 1982 solicitation arrest

- Wendy Lee Coffield, 16, last seen July 8, 1982, found in the Green River at the Meeker Street Bridge in Kent, Washington

- Strangulation with the victim's own clothing as a signature

- The dump sites: woods near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, shallow stretches of the Green River, empty lots, construction zones, and why he returned to them

- Bodies in clusters, ligatures and knots, and objects left at the scenes

- Seattle, the war on drugs, Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted

- Fragmented jurisdictions that would not share evidence, the same obstacle as the Richard Ramirez case

- How he passed a polygraph, and 2001, when STR DNA testing finally matched him

- King County detective Dave Reichert, and FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole

Clinical terms: sexual sadism, paired association, psychosexual development, psychopathy versus sociopathy, characterological versus mental illness, shame and humiliation as offender triggers, risk assessment, masking, compartmentalization, narcissism.

This is a two-part series:

Part 1, PROFILE: Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer Part 1, is the psychology and the early years, through to the DNA match.

Part 2 goes into his pathology, the investigation and the confessions, including FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who got him to admit to 49 murders.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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