„I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”
Gary Leon Ridgway (Born 18/02/1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah)
Biography
Born as the second of three brothers, Ridgway’s childhood was marked by strife between his dominant mother and his father, whom he couldn’t see a lot and with whom he also had a bad relationship. His parents often argued violently, but Ridgway always remained loyal to his mother. He wet his bed well up to his teens, but even then his mother cleaned him up. This vaguely incestuous relationship probably caused his first homocidal ideations, while he struggled with his perverse affections for his mother at the same time.
Sometimes, his father took him on his bus tours, where he drove through the red light district. There, he complained aggressively about prostitutes, calling them society’s trash despite his sleeping with them. He also grew up in a notoriously bad area – due to the cheap rent, Seattle’s suburbs were popular amongst criminals, protitutes and runaways, and the streets were full of casinos and brothels.
At the age of 16, he stabbed a 6-year-old boy just for fun. He ran away when he thought the boy was dying, and all he did was laugh. He was never punished for that crime. During his teenage years, Ridgway was athletic and even served as a member of the football team. He was popular at school, organized parties in youth clubs and was the object of many girls’ affections. Even though he was described as being a little dumb (he had to repeat several classes), he was also known as being friendly and nice, as someone who always gave you a smile.
After high school, he joined the US Navy in 1969, where he served as a soldier. One year later, he got married for the first time. The couple moved to San Diego, where Ridgway had been stationed, but both parties started having affairs when he left for the South Pacific for six months. When he found out that his wife had cheated, the marriage broke apart. He soon remarried, and his second wife said that she was nothing more but a cleaning lady and a sex object to him. Violence also reared its ugly head. In 1975, she gave birth to a son, and that marked the beginning of Ridgway’s religiousness. He became a Baptist, and began to read the Bibel. Violence soon began to dominate, and so his wife filed for divorce in 1981. However, he was still allowed to see his son.
His crimes
„If I would have killed her, then I might have only one instead of 50 plus.“
After the divorce, he turned to murder. Ridgway drove along the red-light districts, looking for women he thought would be prostitutes. There was no group he targeted especially: tall or short, thick or thin, black or white – he didn’t care, as long as she was a prositute. According to him, streetwalkers embodied the dregs of society. His youngest victim was only 15, his oldest 38. He took them into his pick-up truck, sometimes his bedroom, had sex with them and then strangled them. Afterwards, he threw all the evidence into the Green River, a place where he had spent a great deal of time with his second wife. After having murdered the women, he sexually abused their corpses and dismembered them.
Ridgway kept their jewelry, later selling them at garden markets. He even took his son with him on his “haunts”, driving them into the forest together. His son would wait in the truck until he returned without the women, and when asked, he’d tell his son that the women had gone home.
He killed so many women that even he couldn’t remember how many times he did it, but he places the number at around 90. In the summer of 1982, children discovered the corpses in the Green River. But it took years before investigators could nail him for it – he had been very careful, always switching from vehicle to vehicle. Nobody could prove anything, even though he’d been placed under suspicion. Even during this time, he continued his crimes.
In 2001, he was finally convicted thanks to a DNA-sample. During this time, 15,000 suspicions were investigated and millions of clues found. It remains, to this date, one of the biggest criminal investigations in the US. Ridgway initially denied his actions, but confessed on 5 November 2003 in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Walla Walla (Washington), without the possibility of amnesty.
Copyright and source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Ridgway
