Gary Ridgway

Lore & Background

Gary Leon Ridgway, born February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, was the second of three sons. His childhood was troubled; his mother was described as domineering and physically punitive, and his father, a bus driver, frequently complained about prostitutes on his route. Ridgway, who is dyslexic, had an IQ recorded in the low eighties and was held back a year in high school. At age sixteen, he lured a six-year-old boy into woodland and stabbed him, though the boy survived. After graduating high school in 1969, he married his teenage sweetheart, joined the Navy, and served in Vietnam on a supply ship, where he contracted gonorrhea from prostitutes. That marriage ended within a year. Friends and family later described him as friendly but strange. His second wife reported he placed her in a chokehold. He became religious, reading the Bible aloud and proselytizing, yet continued to solicit prostitutes and demanded sex from his wives several times a day, often in public or wooded areas where victims’ bodies were later found. He admitted to a love/hate fixation with prostitutes, hating them but regularly using their services. Most victims were prostitutes or vulnerable runaways, whom he picked up along Pacific Highway South. He strangled them by hand or with ligatures, usually during sex from behind, then dumped their bodies in forested or overgrown areas, often returning to engage in necrophilia. He sometimes posed the bodies nude in clusters. Ridgway was a suspect since 1982 but was only linked by DNA advances and arrested in 2001 leaving his job at a Kenworth truck factory in Renton, Washington.

Reader's Guide

Gary Ridgway’s significance stems from his status, at the time of his 2001 arrest, as the most prolific serial killer in United States history based on confirmed murders. His criminal behavior was defined by the targeted selection of vulnerable women—primarily prostitutes and underage runaways—whom he would strangle, usually by hand or with ligatures, before dumping their bodies in forested or overgrown areas. A distinctive and gruesome aspect of his modus operandi was his frequent return to the corpses to engage in acts of necrophilia, which he later explained was not more sexually satisfying but reduced his need to seek living victims, thereby limiting his risk of capture. Ecologically, his dumping sites were clustered in wooded zones around the Green River, Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, and other South King County locations, with bodies often left nude and sometimes posed. His capture was made possible by advances in DNA profiling, which finally linked him to the murders after he had been a suspect since 1982. In the field of criminal psychology, Ridgway’s case illustrates the intersection of religious hypocrisy and compulsive sexual violence: he proselytized door-to-door and read the Bible aloud, yet continued soliciting prostitutes and demanded sex multiple times daily from partners, sometimes in public or in areas where he later left bodies. His plea bargain—sparing him the death penalty in exchange for disclosing missing women’s locations—resulted in a life sentence without parole, cementing his legacy as a cautionary example of forensic investigative evolution and the depths of predatory serial murder.

Did You Know?

• Gary Ridgway is the second most prolific serial killer in terms of confirmed murders.
• Ridgway is among the notorious serial killers known for killing or operating in Oregon.

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