The Green River Killer
Recently on the Lifetime Network they showed the true story of The Capture of the Green River Killer. It portrays one of the most famous serial killers in American History. The man that police would spend 20 years looking for turned out to be Gary Ridgway. According to the movie on Lifetime, police had questioned him many years earlier, but didn’t find sufficient evidence to charge him with anything. As the years passed by and no suspects emerged as a good lead, the police would go back through their list of suspects. It seemed one dedicated detective Dave Reichert had his eye on Gary Ridgway, but could never come up with enough evidence to prosecute him of any crimes.
Gary Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. He had been married 2 times, but still craved prostitutes while still being married. He would go find these women on the streets and in most cases would choke them to death. He left a long trail of bodies and even today it’s not clear on just how many young women might have had their life cut short by the hands of Gary Ridgway. Since most of the women were prostitutes, the families were not aware of their daughters being gone and this probably help Ridgway through the years, since a lot of families weren’t demanding justices. The biggest pressure back in those days for the King County Sheriff’s Department in Washington was from the media. They were the ones that held the police accountable for no arrests in all the bodies that were being found in the early to mid 1980’s.
Ted Bundy was a very famous serial killer from the Northwestern part of the Untied States and his reign of terror had apparently ended by the time Gary Ridgway started leaving his trail of destruction. Two detectives working on the Green River Killer case even flew down to Florida, where Ted Bundy was waiting for the electric chair and some credit has been given to Bundy for advice and tips he left with detectives that day. In the movie The Capture of the Green River Killer, they have a great scene that leads up to to where Ted Bundy enters the case. One detective is talking to another one and lets him know that someone might have some good tips on this case and the other detective questions him and asks why this might just be another false lead. The detective replies “because he is currently serving a life sentence in Florida and he is a serial killer too”. It’s not like Gary Ridgway needed any help with his serial killings gaining all the notariety like it has over the years, but when you add in the Ted Bundy factor, it does become one of the most interesting stories of all time, when your talking about all the famous American serial killers of all time.
The final list that is out now has Gary Ridgway with 44 murdered victims and some of those have still not been found. His first victim is said to be Wendy Lee Coffield and she was only 16 years old. She was murdered on July 8th of 1982 and her body was discovered on July 15, 1982. There is 3 of the women that are age 31 or older, but the majority of women were in their teens and twenties and some as young as 15 years old.
If you like true stories and long movies, I highly recommend watching The Capture of the Green River Killer. It has been shown on the Lifetime Network a few times already and if you look for it there, it should be coming on again in the near future. The movie is 4 hours long and it’s a great way to tell the story, as you will get to see the story unfolding from one of the victim’s eyes and it’s like what she would be thinking if she did have a voice from beyond the grave.
