World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 3 - Gary Ridgway - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Seattle, Washington, November 5, 2003, the King County Superior Court. In front of a packed room, 54-year-old killer Gary Ridgway
pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder. -Gary Ridgway is probably the most prolific serial killer
in America if not the world. -He was a killing machine. A man of extraordinary evil.
-When another body was found a few years later, the terrible death toll hit 49. -He's preying on sex workers or young women
who have run away from home. People who are vulnerable. He disposes of their bodies in the Green River.
-Among the many victims were young girls who'd run away from home. -She was a little girl when she was murdered by him.
-She deserved the best of everything. She deserved to have a very happy life. -Despite police suspicions,
it took nearly 20 painstaking years to gather enough evidence to convict Ridgway for the murders.
-I poked him with my finger in his chest. I says, "You S.O.B. I know you did it, and we're gonna get you.
-The man who became known as the Green River Killer murdered 49 young women and is suspected of killing many more.
All that makes Gary Ridgway one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ -Seattle, Washington, 1982.
It was here in the Pacific Northwest where, arguably the most prolific serial killer
of all time, Gary Ridgway, aka The Green River Killer, preyed on vulnerable young women, runaways,
and sex workers. -Gary Ridgway gets a special place in the role of serial killers,
because we're talking about a man who's responsible clearly for killing at least 49 women.
-After he's murdered his victims, he disposes of their bodies in the Green River.
Victims bodies are found in the river. They're found weighted down, and he hasn't just raped and killed these women,
he has extended his power and control over them. So some are found with objects inserted inside them.
Stones essentially. -This was a killing machine operating in plain sight. What could be more horrifying?
To walk out into the street and say, "Good morning, Gary." You would not say, for one second,
that Ridgway was a serial killer. -Elaine Porterfield was a young reporter with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer at the time.
-He was viewed as largely unremarkable and almost, kind of, uninteresting and maybe a little bit odd.
Gary was a truck painter for a famous truck-building company here in Seattle. -With his unassuming persona, Ridgway was able
to commit mass murder for nearly 20 years and get away with it. The fear across the Pacific Northwest was palpable.
-I think that this case really did have a significant impact on the community. The biggest serial killer on the loose for many, many years,
who was named the Green River Killer. And this person didn't have an identity. he was this faceless monster.
-Every time a body was found, it was thought that it could be attributed to the Green River Killer,
and that included some cases in Oregon and all the way up to British Columbia. And it was terrifying to women going out by themselves.
-Virginia Graham's sister Deborah Estes was one of Ridgway's victims. -You know, we're both small.
She's was about, you know, my same height, and she loved the color purple. That was her favorite color,
and she absolutely adored horses. She loved horses. -Deborah disappeared in September, 1982.
-You cannot begin to -- Unless you've live that, you can't begin to understand the specific Hell on Earth that that really is.
-Kandice Diskin's younger sister went missing in 1987. -My sister's name was Roberta Joseph Hayes.
Bobby-Jo, that was her nickname. I think of her often. Oh, she just had a big beautiful smile and big blue eyes,
and she was a funny kid. -Bobby-Jo's body was not found for four years. All the while, Kandice suspected the worst --
that her sister had been murdered by the Green River Killer. -It was a really tough time not knowing where
so many people's loved ones, their daughters, you know -- where they were, what was happening to them.
-Sergeant Frank Atchley and his partner Bob Lamoria served jointly as supervisors on the Green River Task Force.
They and their fellow detectives worked tirelessly to track down the man who was arguably
the most prolific mass murderer in US history. -We were finding victims two or three times a week
during certain periods of time during the investigation. -We had victims that were missing for over two years
that'd never been reported missing. So it made it easy for Mr. Ridgway to get away with it
as long as he did because we were sometimes two or three years behind him. -This killer's story begins nearly 70 years ago.
Gary Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1949. -The middle of three sons to a ferocious,
domineering mother and a bus driver father. His parents argued relentlessly, but he always took his mother's side.
The mother was to become the most signal figure in his life. -The other thing about his mother is this --
up till roughly age 13, he had a bed-wetting problem, and his mother would deal with his problem
by personally washing his genitalia. This kind of behavior is very unusual. It's going to inevitably lead to a confusion about sexuality.
And, indeed, Ridgway admitted to his psychiatrist that he had lustful, sexual feelings toward his mother.
-As a teenager, he was obsessed with sex. -By the time he reaches adolescence, Ridgway has got what could be only described
as a super-charged sex drive. He wants sex all the time, everywhere, regardless.
-Ridgway struggled in school and was held back two grades. -There's also problems with his peers.
He's always the slow one. He's always been a bit behind. So always being the odd one out,
not having that sense of belonging. And one the things that Gary Ridgway learned
to protect himself was to be violent, was to instill fear in other people because that was a kind of armor.
-Age 16, Ridgway viciously attacked a 6-year-old boy. -He actually stabs the boy seriously in the liver,
and the child survives. This episode hints that there is some completely psychotic
disorganized process going on just below the surface with him. -Ridgway was not identified
so was never charged with the assault. In 1969, he joined the US Navy. The following year, Ridgway married his first wife,
but his mother was ever-present in their relationship. -This is a woman who was so dominating
that even after he got married, his mother would decide what clothes to buy him,
and that he should wear. -Soon after getting married, Ridgway was deployed on a tour with the US Navy.
Unable to contain his sexual urges, he regularly visited prostitutes. -Where ever he was, he visited sex workers,
and in several cases, he contracted venereal diseases, which he was angry about,
and he held against the sex workers. And I think that just fed on itself, that anger, that hatred,
that depersonalization of these women. -When Ridgway returned the following year,
he found his wife had been dating another man. The couple divorced in January 1972.
A year later in 1973, he found a new wife. While he was married, Ridgway also found new outlet for his passions.
-Ridgway suddenly became something of a religious zealot, a Bible-thumper. He would proselytize.
He's kind of fervent, almost out of proportion -- his interest in religion. -Religion plays a very interesting role
for some subset of serial killers. The problem is that religion, psychology, medications,
none of them have proven more powerful than the urge to kill in a serial killer.
-Ridgway and his new wife had a son. On the surface, they seemed like an ordinary,
God-fearing, all-American family. -Part of him was still a sex maniac, and another part of him was very guilty about that.
So you have, what you might describe as, the Jekyll and Hyde character. Dr. Jekyll -- religious, caring, good husband,
and you have Mr. Hyde, of course, who is still going to prostitutes regularly. -Visiting prostitutes at night and with his mother
ever-present in his relationship, Ridgway's second marriage ended in divorce in 1981.
Soon after, he had his first run-in with the law when he was arrested in 1982 for soliciting a prostitute.
The minor charge would be an ominous sign of the women he would prey on and the monstrous murderers he was about to commit.
Driven by an insatiable sex drive, Ridgway had started to pick up street prostitutes
from the SeaTac strip -- the road that connects Seattle to the neighboring city of Tacoma.
-This is a highway that was frequented by sex workers at the time. -Ridgway's first victim was just 16 years old.
One night after work, he picked a sex worker up from the strip. Sergeant Frank Atchley supervised the task force
assigned to catch him. -These women were in the area of Pacific Highway South and that's where he would make contact with them
and abduct them. Okay? And usually these were after hours, during the hours of darkness.
How he would get them into his car is anybody's guess. -Ridgway took his first victim to a desolate location
along the banks of the Green River just outside Seattle city limits. The body of the 16-year-old
was found on July 15, 1982. Detectives later determined that she'd been murdered
about a week earlier. Sergeant Bob Lamoria supervised the search at the first crime scene.
-The first victim had apparently floated down the river and got tangled up in some brush in the rocks,
and her body was exposed and in plain view. -Her kidnap and killing in July 1982
would set a sinister pattern that would result in 49 confirmed murders. Ridgway typically targeted young women drawn to the peace
and promise of the America's Pacific Northwest. -He's preying on vulnerable women.
So women who are either sex workers or young women who have run away from home. -They were young women doing the best
they could in the way they knew how. They were 15, 16, 17 years old, 20 years old.
-After his first murder, Ridgway went on a frenzied killing spree. In just five weeks,
he picked up five more women from the SeaTac strip. By August 15, 1982, Ridgway had kidnapped,
raped, and callously killed all of them. He dumped one of the bodies near a creek
and four in the Green River. The defiled bodies were found in clusters along the banks.
-The homicides started in, you know, 1982, and the publicity that was being received or broadcasted
by the news media, every member of this county, the state of Washington, the United States,
were aware of these murders. -In August of 1982 a task force was formed to catch the so-called Green River Killer.
The teams scoured the area and made a series of grim discoveries. -This was the sight of three of the victims.
There were two upstream a ways pushed into the water and weighted down with rocks.
A third one was left on the bank in the tall grass. I assume that he thought he was gonna get caught.
He saw someone and dumped the body and ran because she didn't make in the water.
-When the call came out, we would've dispatched the task force. We would set up a perimeter.
-We'd line up and we would clip every blade of grass looking for any hairs, fibers,
anything else that might be of investigative value. -Analyzing the bodies, detectives quickly determined
a pattern in the killer's behavior. He would head to the SeaTac strip after work.
There he would pick up a sex worker from the side of the road. The women did not know it, but, then, their fate was sealed.
-His method of operation, his M.O., was taking these women to wooded, isolated areas,
sometimes along riverbanks, along stretches of road, so that he would see any approaching vehicles.
That would give him plenty of time to avoid being seen. -Ridgway would park and persuade the women
to get out of his truck. Then he would attack. -Each victim was manually strangulated,
and the fact that he admitted to the pleasure he got from watching the life seep out of the bodies,
I feel that it's horrific. -What is more, Ridgway's victims had no idea it was coming.
-Ridgway strangled many of his victims from behind. It gives him, first of all, the element of surprise.
It reduces the likelihood that they can effectively fight back against him. In those few seconds before his victims became unconscious,
they would be shocked, they would be struggling to breathe, they would be in pain.
They're maybe trying to fight back. In about 10 seconds somebody would be unconscious
and be unable to respond to you. -He'd start off strangling with his hands, but increasingly they put up a fight -- bruised his arms.
And he didn't want to have to explain that to his friends or to his son, and so he started using ligatures because it meant
he didn't have to put his hands on their throat. -By the end of the summer of 1982, Ridgway had kidnapped,
murdered, and then raped 9 young women. -He would pick up sex workers, murder them,
and then dispose of their bodies in clusters. So there would be dumpsites where there were several bodies of his victims.
-The next group that we found was on the Star Lake Road. He would park on a curve so that he could see in both directions,
and then he would carry the bodies out and deposit them. -Ridgway later confessed to having had sex
with the bodies after death. In some cases, long after. -The necrophilia, having sex with dead person
is extraordinarily rare, and it's one of the pieces of the puzzle to suggest true psychosis.
To engage in necrophilia you have to be completely out of touch with reality. -Ridgway would often revisit the bodies
of his victims multiple times. He would move them. he would have sexual relations with the bodies.
It's absolutely ghastly. -Debra Estes was one of the many runaways that Ridgway targeted.
Virginia Graham was 16. A year and a half older than her sister Debra when she disappeared in the summer of 1982.
-We were so close in age, but she had shorter blonde hair. -Like many who take to the streets,
Debra ran away from what was an abusive family situation. In Debra's case, her father was the alleged abuser.
-You're literally living with a rattlesnake. That rattlesnake can be calm one second
and can just absolutely -- If you are not hyper-vigilant around watching and you drop your guard for just one minute,
you can seriously get hurt or even die. -On one fateful night in July of 1982, home life became too much to bear for 14-year-old Debra.
-Probably 2:00, 3:00 maybe, somewhere around there, my mom woke up and noticed that my step dad,
Debbie's biological father, was coming out of my sister's bedroom and my mom asked him,
"Well, what are you doing?" And he said, "Well, I'm just checking on her like any good father would do."
So, and -- No, he wasn't. He was there for a totally different reason, and she left the next day.
Early. Very early. -For Virginia, it's a moment that she still struggles with. -I would've grabbed her and I would've held on to her.
And I don't know. I don't know what we could've done because she was 14 years old.
-Debra's mother reported her as missing to the Seattle police soon after. On September 20, 1982,
Debra was brought to a police station. She'd reported that she'd been raped by client a week earlier
and was there to see photos of the suspect. It turned out that the man who attacked Debra
was another serial rapist that was also active in the area. Just after she talked to law enforcement,
a detective dropped her off at the motel that she was living in. Debra was never seen again.
She was just 15 years old. -Well, the same day that she got dropped off by the detective,
investigating the serial rape cases was the same day the Gary Ridgway picker her up.
-Debra's desecrated body was found nearly six years later. She'd been dumped in the debris of a building site
just down the road from where she'd been abducted. -From where he picked her up to where he took her to kill her,
she maybe would've lived no more than an hour, hour and a half, from the time he picked her up.
By the time, you know, they drove and everything took place, and he buried her no more than an hour and a half.
So... Um... Boy, that's a sobering thought. -By the end of 1982, the death toll wrought
by the Green River Killer had reached 11. By dumping the bodies in the river and in the woods,
hard evidence was difficult to come by. -If a body is disposed in water, then quite clearly a few things will happen.
Evidence can be washed away. Trace evidence, DNA, bloodstains, and blood patterns will be washed away.
So it reduces the forensic opportunities. If the body is there for a long time, decomposition will hamper the examination.
-Even though they found many bodies during the summer of 1982, the Seattle-based task force
had no idea who the perpetrator might be. -Our suspect pool was basically every male
over 17 or 18 years old in the entire world, and we didn't know whether he was coming
from someplace else -- flying in or driving in or what. -With the news of 11 women now murdered,
and their mutilated bodies found by the banks of the Green River as well as in the local woods,
fear spread across America's Pacific Northwest. A mysterious mass murderer known as the Green River Killer
was still on the loose. A truck painter by day, and a serial killer by night, 34-year-old Gary Ridgway was hiding in plain sight
and living in a quiet Seattle neighborhood. ♪♪ -The police in the area were struggling
because who would suspect Gary Ridgway's inoffensive, talkative, plain, ordinary looking man.
There was no horn. No tails. He wasn't wearing a great black cloak. Gary Ridgway was the man next door.
You would not have noticed him. -He's your average Joe. He's somebody who fits in.
He's somebody who you wouldn't be scared of because he doesn't look like a monster.
-The killer was preying on young vulnerable runaways, who work the streets near the Sea-Tac Airport.
-He knows that he's got an easy target group here. So that's gonna allow him to get away with it
an awfully long time. -Ridgway would simply pick young women up on the side of the road as they solicited sexual services.
-I don't think any of them would've believed that somebody who looked as inoffensive and
as Joe-average as Gary Ridgway would be capable of murder. -After what seemed a lull over the winter
when no new bodies were found, in the spring of 1983, Seattle's serial killer struck again.
In the evening of April the 30th, Ridgway drove to the SeaTac strip where he picked up 18-year-old Marie.
Like so many of his victims, she sold sex to survive. She also had a boyfriend who acted as her pimp.
When he saw her get in Ridgway's truck, his gut feeling told something was not right.
So he decided to follow them. -The boyfriend saw her get into the car and he was trying to go to her rescue,
but he couldn't because he got stopped at an electrical signal light. -When she didn't return home a few days later,
Marie's anxious boyfriend and her father desperately searched the area. -The boyfriend and the girl's father drove around the area
trying to find it, and they were worried about the girl because they were also aware of the Green River murders.
-The two men made a remarkable discovery. -Well, patrolling, or, well, driving around checking the areas
for their girlfriend and daughter, they found this truck that matched the description
that the boyfriend had seen, and it turned out to be Gary Ridgway's. -Ridgway distinctive truck sat in the driveway as detectives
questioned the 34-year-old car painter at his house. With Marie nowhere to be seen,
the officer did not pursue the lead. Marie's badly decomposed body would be found 20 years later.
However, Ridgway would remain on the police's radar. But in the spring of 1983, the killer slipped through the net.
Just a few days later on May the 3rd, he killed again. This time, he radically changed his M.O.
He attacked 21-year-old Carol Ann, a local waitress and single mother. -Carol Ann was somebody who wasn't a sex worker.
She was somebody who knew Gary Ridgway. And the two of them had had sex, and afterwards, Gary Ridgway had strangled her.
But it wasn't enough for him to just kill her. He engaged in some rather bizarre behavior
with Carol Ann's body. So he put a grocery bag over her head. He left two gutted fish on her body.
He drapes an empty bottle of wine over her torso, and he left ground up sausage meats on her hands.
-Carol Ann's body was found some 20 miles east of the SeaTac strip in Maple Valley, Washington.
-This woman was different than the other victims. It was maybe the only time or the first time
that he killed a non-prostitute. And what do we know about Ridgway's response to doing this?
He did something that I've almost never heard of in a serial killer. He lays beside the body and he cried,
and crying is something serial killers don't do. And what I would like to suggest this tells us,
what it teaches us, is that even the Devil himself has a moment where he sees clearly enough,
what depravity and evil reeks in his soul, to be touched humanly. -By the end of the year, the desecrated bodies
of 24 women had been found by shocked passersby. Many more had been reported missing,
and the suspicion was that they too were the victims of the Green River Killer. Body part were scatted all of the Pacific Northwest.
-He's been dumping bodies up and down the Green River, taking some of them to the neighboring state of Oregon.
-The Green River Task Force spent countless hours and days carefully gathering all the fragments of evidence
they could from across the Northwest. -The task force investigators were spending a lot of time
on bone finds. We would launch the whole entire task force and spend a lot of investigative time
only to find out at the end that it was an animal bone. -All the while, the killing of young women continued.
By the end of 1984, the toll of victims had reached 42. Sadly, the police were nowhere
nearer to stopping the Green River Killer. -Believe me, all of the investigators wanted so much
to solve this case and prevent somebody else from being killed. -Frank Atchley was brought in to supervise
the Green River Task Force in May of 1984 in the hope of finally solving the case.
-These detectives, each and every one of them, put their heart and soul into solving this investigation.
For every victim that was found, it impacted the morale of the detectives who were hoping that there would be
no more victims of the Green River Killer. -The next year, 1985, Ridgway met the woman
who would become his third wife at a Parents Without Partners meeting. -They seem to have quite an idyllic relationship.
She thinks very highly of him. He's somebody who is a, kind of, pillar of the community.
His third wife provided quite a lot of assistance to Gary in terms of looking after his finances and that kind of thing
So things that he wasn't particularly capable of doing himself. -At the same time, the killing spree
seemed to slow. -His third wife was later to say, "I think I saved many lives because I loved him."
It's a most poignant remark. And one that strikes to the heart. You embrace a serial killer and you save lives.
I don't think for a moment she thought he was a serial killer when she married him,
but my goodness, I find it heartbreaking. -But Ridgway's urge to kill could not be stopped for long.
The man who had now killed 46 women, picked up 21-year-old Bobby-Jo Hayes in February 1987.
Her sister Kandice recalls those trying times. -In 1991, her remains were found.
So four year after she went missing, her remains were found on Highway 410 outside of Seattle in Auburn.
So that was terrible for the family, as you can imagine. -Like so many of the young women that Ridgway kidnapped
and killed, Bobby-Jo sold sex to survive. A single mother of 5, she was known to frequent
the SeaTac strip -- Ridgway's hunting ground. Bobby-Jo also worked the streets of Portland
two and half hours south of Seattle. -I would see her, you know, downtown. I would see her on Aurora Avenue near where we grew up.
-Though they shared the same mother, Kandice's sister Bobby-Jo lived with father and his new wife.
-She wasn't treated very well. There was a lot of drinking involved, so she pretty much ventured out on her own at about age 12.
Hit the streets. You know, I would see her with her johns. I would see -- and, you know, my heart just broke.
She deserved the best of everything. She deserved to have a very happy life. And that I'm sorry for not being able to help her more.
That's probably all. -When Bobby-Jo's remains were finally found, it ended years of torment for Kandice and her family.
-Not knowing can be just as hard as knowing. It's bittersweet. Nothing good about it, but I no longer
have to drive Aurora Avenue looking for my sister because that's what I did for years.
I'd be driving and I was just constantly aware of myself looking for her. Hoping to see her with a john,
or in somebody's car or something. -By the spring of 1987, the death toll wrought
by the Green River Killer had reached 46. When some green carpet fibers were found
among the remains of several of the victims, a warrant was issued to search the home
and workplace of Gary Ridgway, who was already on the police's radar. -The fibers, as it turned out,
showed that some of the victims had been in the same environment before or after they were killed.
-One month after Bobby-Jo disappeared, on April 8, 1987, the Green River Task Force
searched the home of Gary Ridgway. A young couple renting rooms above Ridgway's garage
helped with their inquiries. -They showed us photographs that they had taken inside the house
that showed it had green, credible type carpet in there. -Frank Atchley and a team
of detective entered Ridgway's home. -I saw Ridgway at the house, and he was smug.
And his mother was there, and she was screaming and hollering that we had the wrong guy and so on and so forth.
That's when I poked him with my finger in his chest. I says, "You S.O.B. I know you did it,
and we're gonna get you one of these days." -April 8, 1987, was not that day. -We found no remnant or anything of that carpet.
It had all been removed, replaced, and even the vacuum cleaner didn't reveal anything that helped us.
He had really cleaned up the place. -Detectives also search Ridgway's job site in Renton, Washington,
where he worked as a truck painter. -It was '87. We serviced search warrants on his place of employment.
When we got him back to the precinct, we took a swab of his -- had him chew on piece of gauze,
which was ultimately his coup de grâce. -It would take 14 more years and breakthrough in technology,
but the saliva soaked gauze with the killer's DNA sealed in promised to reveal the true identity
of the Green River Killer. Seattle, Washington state, 2001. Since 1982, the serial killer had taken at least
48 young lives with impunity. But thanks to groundbreaking advances in forensic technology
at the turn of the 21st century, the net was finally closing in on the man next door, 52-year-old Gary Ridgway.
-Arguably the most prolific serial killer the United States has ever seen. Outranking even Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer.
He looks inoffensive but is, in fact, dreadful. A man of extraordinary evil. -At the Washington State Crime Labs in 2001,
Dr. Beverly Himick took advantage of a new technique in forensic technology. -It takes a breakthrough in DNA technology
to finally trap Gary Ridgway. A man who's been getting away with murder for close to 20 years.
-Called short tandem repeat or STR DNA testing, the detectives re-examine the saliva that was in the gauze
they'd asked Ridgway to submit 14 years earlier. -When we started the investigation,
DNA was just coming on the scene in the United States and the thing that we finally got Ridgway on,
the DNA, had been submitted two, three, four times previous for processing, but it kept coming back inconclusive.
It wasn't until 2001 that we got a positive hit on him. -As they were gathering evidence in the autumn of 2001,
Gary Ridgway suddenly reemerged. -While Gary Ridgway might have stopped killing for period of time, he has not completely
turned around his behavior or his lifestyle. In 2001, he is picked by a police officer
as he is soliciting a sex worker. -He makes the mistake of picking up an undercover
whom he mistakes for a prostitute, and that lead to his arrest. -Alerted to the incident and concerned
that he might kill again, law enforcement decided to act. On November 30, 2001, they arrested Gary Ridgway.
-It was unbelievable. I think at that point, people didn't believe that he would ever be caught.
It was absolutely stunning and gratifying. There was a giant, collective sense of relief
that a monster was off the street. -The Green River Killer was suspected of killing
at least 48 women. The problem was that with the evidence they had, the police could only charge Ridgway with four murders,
and that was enough to warrant a death penalty. For the prosecution, it was a bargaining chip.
-Gary Ridgway's attorney contacted the prosecutor and agreed to waive the death penalty
in exchange for a complete confession on all the women that he killed in the King County jurisdiction.
-To try and help all the affected families find out what had happened to their loved ones,
the deal was made. In 2003, Gary Ridgway confessed to the dozens of murders he had committed.
The investigators then contacted the families of the deceased. That was a day -- You know what PTSD is?
That's a day that I could feel the emotion because I was at work and the phone rang
and my heart started beating, and they said, "You know we have this person in custody.
He has confessed to the murders of so many women." Honestly, I thought I was gonna faint.
It was shocking. I never thought in a million years that I would be getting a phone call like that.
-On November 5, 2003, Ridgway appeared in front of a packed King County courthouse in downtown Seattle
and made his plea. -The first time I saw him, it was disappointing. He was kind of a mouse of a man.
In the mind's of so many in the Pacific Northwest as some sort of superhuman, that it was just shocking to see
what a little worm of a man he actually was. He tried to apologize at one point,
but the father of one of the victims interrupted him with sort of a torrent of emotion,
and Ridgway was unable to speak. The father obviously just had to address him. Eventually, you know, he was gaveled to order by the judge,
but it was a very intense moment. -The only time Gary Ridgway was affected by any words
that anyone spoke were when he was forgiven. Interestingly enough, that made me more angry when I saw that.
It's like, "I just poured my heart out to you, what you've done to our family by taking my sister,
and nothing." He had no facial expression whatsoever. I didn't get it. The first time that they sentenced Gary Ridgway
in 2003, I couldn't cry. I was numb. There just was nothing there. -Virginia Graham went to the court
to try to understand why Ridgway had killed her sister Debra over 20 years earlier.
-I don't know how a human being could do to somebody else what he put these girls through.
Being in the court that day, there were no pictures of who these victims were. It was just names on a piece of paper,
so I wanted him to know that she wasn't just a thing -- that she was my sister and that she was loved.
So I had that picture that I showed to him. She was a little girl when she was murdered by him.
-In November 2003, Gary Ridgway was convicted of 48 counts of aggravated murder.
He was sentenced to 480 years in prison. When a 49th body was found in December 2010,
dumped in Washington, Ridgway was given an additional life sentence. -They found Becky's body.
Her remains were found by accident. That was my sister's best friend. -There are so many names, so many victims,
and I think it's important that we and try and remember all of those women. -In his final statement, an admission of guilt, he said,
"I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could."
If anyone truly deserves the title of an evil killer it is unquestionably Gary Ridgway.
-The Green River Killer murdered 49 young women. They my be gone, but for the loved ones left behind,
they will never be forgotten. -I can always see her face. She was very fun, very bright.
Big beautiful, you know, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, angelic, little girl. -Sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole, the Green River Killer will never be free again.
Arguably the most prolific serial killer in ever known. Gary Ridgway is without doubt
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, got away with mass murder across the Pacific Northwest for nearly twenty years. He was finally caught in 2001 and was convicted of 49 murders.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, confessed to 49 murders, targeting vulnerable women over two decades before his capture in 2001.

Key points

Gary Ridgway's Guilty Plea. Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts of aggravated murder, marking a significant moment in the case.
The Green River Killer's Victims. Ridgway targeted vulnerable young women, leading to a tragic death toll of 49 confirmed murders.
The Faceless Monster. The community lived in fear of a serial killer who was hiding in plain sight.
The Discovery of Victims. Detectives found bodies in clusters along the Green River, revealing Ridgway's horrific methods.
Debra's Disappearance. Debra Estes, a victim, was reported missing after a troubling home life led her to run away.
The Discovery of Carol Ann's Body. Carol Ann, a waitress and single mother, was brutally murdered by Gary Ridgway.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

What could be more horrifying?

Questioning the nature of Ridgway's crimes.

3:02WatchJul 29, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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