Who was the Green River Killer? Gary Ridgway and the Forty-Nine Women

America’s most prolific convicted serial killer killed for nearly twenty years while living an ordinary suburban life, passing two polygraph tests, and evading a task force that had his name from the beginning

Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of three sons in a family that would eventually settle in the Seattle suburbs of Washington State. His childhood was, by most accounts, dysfunctional in the particular way of families where the dysfunction is never dramatic enough to generate official attention but is corrosive enough to do lasting damage.

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His mother, Mary, was domineering and controlling. His father, Tom, was passive. The marriage was turbulent and the household anxious. Gary wet the bed until he was thirteen years old an age at which the problem generates significant shame and his mother’s response, by his own account in later interviews, was to wash him herself in ways he experienced as both humiliating and confusingly intimate. He has described the relationship with his mother in terms that forensic psychologists who reviewed the case found consistent with the foundations of a deeply disordered attachment to women.

He was not academically gifted. He read at a third-grade level as an adult. He struggled throughout school. What he was, however, was persistent and patient and capable of maintaining a functional exterior across decades of hidden violence qualities that, in a different configuration, might have made him a remarkable employee. In this configuration, they made him one of the most difficult serial killers in American history to catch.

After high school he served in the Navy, seeing action off the coast of Vietnam. He married three times. His first two marriages ended in divorce. His third wife, Judith Lynch, whom he married in 1988, would describe herself after his arrest as completely unaware of anything wrong. He had a son from his first marriage. He carried a photograph of the boy in his wallet.

He used that photograph to lure victims.