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The Sample That Waited Fourteen Years: How DNA Closed the Case
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Gary Ridgway murdered at least forty-nine women while passing polygraphs, slipping past detectives, and showing up to work every Monday — until a saliva sample stored for fourteen years finally matched. This is how the Green River Killer was caught, and why it took so long.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
For nearly two decades, a serial killer operated in plain sight outside Seattle. He had a steady job, a house, a wife.
On November thirtieth, two thousand and one, Gary Ridgway was arrested in the parking lot of the Kenworth Truck Company in Renton, Washington. He'd worked there as a truck painter for more than thirty years.
The case opened in the summer of nineteen eighty-two. Wendy Lee Coffield, sixteen years old, was found in the Green River on July fifteenth.
By nineteen eighty-four, Ridgway was a prime suspect. The task force had enough to look hard at him.
By the mid-nineteen eighties, the rate of disappearances along the Pacific Highway South slowed. The task force shrank.
In two thousand and one, a forensic lab applied advances in DNA testing that hadn't existed in nineteen eighty-seven. They went back to the stored saliva sample.
On June thirteenth, two thousand and three, prosecutors and defense attorneys reached an agreement. Ridgway would plead guilty to forty-eight counts of murder.
Ridgway was deliberate about his targets. He chose women who were sex workers, runaways, and young women with unstable home situations.
Despite his cooperation, Ridgway couldn't account for everyone. Some victims he described with enough detail to locate.
Gary Ridgway killed more people than Ted Bundy. He operated for longer.
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