Gary Ridgway

What the record shows

Gary Leon Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer, is an American serial killer who murdered women and teenage girls in King County, Washington, between 1982 and 1998. He pleaded guilty in King County Superior Court on November 5, 2003, to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, and on February 18, 2011, to a 49th. He is serving 49 consecutive life sentences without parole at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. In taped interviews he claimed as many as 71 victims, and investigators continue to examine other cases as possibly connected.

The killings began in the summer of 1982. According to the victim list published by The Seattle Times when Ridgway entered his pleas, the first, Wendy Lee Coffield, 16, disappeared on July 8, 1982; her body was found in the Green River near Kent on July 15. Most of the 48 women and girls he admitted killing disappeared in 1982 and 1983 from the Pacific Highway South corridor between Seattle and Tacoma, where many were working as prostitutes or living as runaways. Ridgway strangled his victims, by hand or with a ligature, and left their bodies in wooded areas south and east of Seattle. Later admitted killings were sporadic: Patricia Barczak in 1986, Roberta Hayes in 1987, Marta Reeves in 1990 and Patricia Yellow Robe in 1998.

The King County Sheriff's Office formed the Green River Task Force in 1982, and Ridgway came to its attention early. The Associated Press reported that in 1983 the boyfriend of victim Marie Malvar told police he had seen her get into Ridgway's pickup; Ridgway denied knowing her and was cleared. In 1984 he contacted the task force himself, passed a polygraph examination and was cleared again. Police collected hair and saliva samples from him in April 1987, but DNA technology of the time could not produce a match.

The break came nearly two decades later. According to The Associated Press, advances in DNA analysis allowed the 1987 saliva sample to be matched to DNA recovered from the bodies of three of the earliest victims. Ridgway, then 52, was arrested on November 30, 2001, as he left his longtime job as a painter at the Kenworth truck plant in Renton.

Facing the death penalty, Ridgway signed a plea agreement with King County prosecutors on June 13, 2003. In exchange for his life, he agreed to confess, to help investigators find victims whose remains had never been located and to plead guilty to any future King County charge corroborated by reliable evidence. He led investigators to the remains of Pammy Avent, Marie Malvar and April Buttram. On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, four of them for victims known only as Jane Doe. On December 18, 2003, Judge Richard A. Jones sentenced him to 48 consecutive life terms without parole; The Seattle Times reported a $480,000 fine, $10,000 per victim, and 48 seconds of courtroom silence.

The agreement was invoked again in 2011. On December 21, 2010, teenagers found a skull in a ravine near Auburn that was identified as Rebecca Marrero, 20, last seen leaving a motel in 1982. Ridgway had confessed to killing her in 2003 but was not charged for lack of conclusive evidence. On February 18, 2011, he pleaded guilty to her murder in Kent, and Judge Mary E. Roberts imposed a 49th consecutive life sentence. In September 2024 Ridgway was briefly booked into the King County jail on an investigative hold; KOMO News reported the sheriff's office was still examining potentially related cases. In December 2025 the Department of Corrections denied reports that he was receiving end-of-life care.

Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 18, 1949, grew up in the SeaTac area and graduated from Tyee High School in 1969. He served in the U.S. Navy, including a deployment to Vietnam, was married three times, and worked for about three decades as a spray painter at the Kenworth plant before his arrest.