Gary Leon Ridgeway: The Green River Killer

Gary Leon Ridgeway a 52 –year-old white male better known in history as the Green River Killer who preyed on runaways and prostitutes in the Seattle area from the years 1982 to 1998. Ridgway chose his victims because they were easy targets and he felt that he could get away theses murders for years and he did. Police records indicated that Ridgeway was responsible for murdering more than 48 eight women over a span of 20 years.

The green river runs south of the city of Seattle a place where the surrounding locals went fishing and enjoy recreational time with the family, but in the summer of 1982 two kids found a body floating in the river and the body was identified as Wendy Lee Coffield a 16- year-old runaway who was strangled
Gary Leon Ridgeway managed to allude detectives for nearly 20yrs his personality was one of the reasons because neighbors knew of him as being a family man and only had positive things to say about him. Ridgeway worked as a painter where he had been a reliable employee for 32yrs and attended church regularly with his family, he also enjoyed traveling with his third wife in their RV. Ridgeway was very careful about talking to others about his personal life so one could say his private life kept others from knowing about his hidden attraction to prostitutes. Ridgeway was a prime suspect in the 1980s but professed his innocence, passed a polygraph in 1985 and because of lack of evidence, he continued to murder defenseless women for at least 15 more years. Circumstantial evidence and inconclusive physical evidence stopped detectives from holding and taking Ridgeway to trial for fear of him being