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What the Confession Revealed: Forty-Nine Women and the Gaps Left Behind
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Gary Ridgway sat with detectives for forty-eight hours and described forty-eight murders in precise, unsettling detail — yet dozens of victims remain missing. This chapter traces the 1982 investigation, the DNA breakthrough, and the plea deal that traded execution for answers.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The confession changed everything. Not because it confirmed what investigators already suspected.
Go back to July of nineteen eighty-two. A sixteen-year-old girl named Wendy Lee Coffield is pulled from the Green River in south King County, Washington.
By nineteen eighty-three, Gary Ridgway was already on the radar. A woman named Marie Malvar disappeared in April of that year.
By two thousand and one, forensic DNA technology had advanced far enough to do what nineteen eighty-seven couldn't. Investigators ran Ridgway's preserved saliva sample against biological evidence from three victims.
On June thirteenth, two thousand and three, a deal was reached. The death penalty was taken off the table.
The majority of Ridgway's confirmed victims were women who worked in street-level prostitution, or were teenagers who'd run away from home. Several were very young.
There's a question that comes up when you lay out these facts, and it's a fair one. Gary Ridgway murdered at least forty-nine people.
The sentence handed down in December of two thousand and three was life without the possibility of parole, forty-eight consecutive life terms. Ridgway is currently held at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
The record that Ridgway holds, the most murder convictions of any individual in American history, tends to get noted as a statistical fact and then moved past. That's a mistake.
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