Green River Killer Victims

Case background and investigation

Beginning in the summer of 1982, the bodies of young women and girls started appearing in and around the Green River in King County, Washington. The first confirmed victim, 16-year-old Wendy Lee Coffield, was discovered in the river on July 15, 1982. Within about a month, four more bodies were found along the riverbank, including Debra Lynn Bonner, Marcia Faye Chapman, Opal Charmaine Mills, and Cynthia Jean Hinds. Many of the victims were vulnerable women, including runaways and those involved in sex work, whom the killer targeted before disposing of their remains in wooded and rural sites across the region. The cluster of killings prompted the King County Sheriff's Office to form the Green River Task Force in 1982, launching one of the longest and most resource-intensive serial-murder investigations in U.S. history.

The killings continued through the 1980s and, by some accounts, into the 1990s, while the task force struggled to identify a suspect despite thousands of tips. Gary Leon Ridgway, a truck painter at the Kenworth plant in Renton, first drew investigators' attention in 1983 after the disappearance of Marie Malvar, whose companions reported seeing his truck. Ridgway was questioned and, in 1984, passed a polygraph examination, and for years there was insufficient evidence to charge him. The case remained largely stalled until advances in forensic DNA analysis allowed investigators to re-examine biological evidence preserved from the crime scenes and from samples taken from Ridgway years earlier.

In 2001, DNA testing linked Ridgway to several of the victims, and he was arrested on November 30, 2001, at the Kenworth factory. Prosecutors reached a plea agreement that spared Ridgway the death penalty in exchange for his full cooperation in locating victims' remains and detailing his crimes. On November 5, 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, and on December 18, 2003, he was sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, plus additional time for evidence tampering. At the time he was the most prolific convicted serial killer in American history. He later pleaded guilty to a 49th murder after the remains of Rebecca Marrero were identified.

Even after Ridgway's convictions, the case has never fully closed. He admitted to killing far more women than he was charged with, at times claiming a total that authorities could not fully corroborate, and some presumed victims have never been recovered. According to the King County Sheriff's Office, several women linked to the case remain missing and some recovered remains long went unidentified. Modern genetic testing has since produced new identifications: investigators identified Lori Anne Razpotnik, previously known only as 'Bones 17,' in December 2023, and remains cataloged as 'Bones 20' were identified as Tammie Liles.

As of 2026, Ridgway remains incarcerated in the Washington state prison system, serving his life sentences, and investigators continue to work the case. In September 2024, court records show Ridgway was briefly returned from prison to King County, where he was booked into the county jail from September 9 to September 13 and taken to sites where he believed additional remains might be found, after earlier attempts based on his verbal descriptions had failed. The King County Sheriff's Office states that the investigation continues in order to identify unnamed victims, locate other missing women, and confirm additional potential victims, and it continues to seek information from the public.