On November 5, 2003, one of America’s worst serial killers, Gary Ridgway, confessed to murdering 48 women. Investigators presume that the death toll is higher and Ridgway has confessed that the number of women he killed is closer to 80. Ridgway is an infamous psychopathic killer not only because of the number of murders he committed, but also because of how he killed the women. All of the women were prostitutes and died of strangulation. Ridgway also raped most of the women and authorities were able to connect Ridgway’s DNA to semen recovered from the bodies around 2001. Ridgway would dispose of the bodies by placing them in the Green River, located in Washington, or by concealing them in the surrounding woods, hence the famous byname, Green River Killer.
On a side note, I heard about the story of the Green River Killer after watching a YouTube video. I decided to write a blog post about it because I have one huge question: What is Gary Ridgway like and why did he do this? Let’s delve into the psychological analysis of the Green River Killer.
Be prepared, the mind of this serial killer is mind-boggling.
According to investigators and criminal psychologists, Gary Ridgway had been able to mask his career by living a normal life. Psychopathic killers tend to be associated with evil appearances, but Gary Ridgway seemed like any other guy. One of Ridgway’s brothers claimed that he had “never behaved abnormally” and many other people who were associated with Ridgway attested to similar statements. However, Ridgway is indeed an atypical individual with an amazing ability to present himself to others as charming, lovable, and normal. Let’s go back to when I mentioned Gary Ridgway’s career. An odd word used to describe a person’s way of committing murders, right? Well, I referred to Ridgway’s killing spree as a career because the Green River Killer himself claimed that “strangling young women was his ‘career.'” In fact, Ridgway boasted of what he was capable of and told authorities that he was basically a professional in strangulation. On another important note, Ridgway tended to kill prostitutes because he viewed such women as “easy to pick up” and were “slow to be reported missing.” All of this information accurately paints a picture of Gary Ridgway, but it fails to reveal his motives. Understanding the motives of Ridgway perplexed authorities for a while because he is not like other stereotypical psychopathic killers, but one major piece of information was eventually uncovered that explains Ridgway’s murderous tendencies.
Ridgway is not quite like a stereotypical psychopath because he surprisingly has no mental illnesses. So what would drive someone to kill a staggering number of women? Well, authorities were able to uncover a clue in regard to the relationship between Ridgway and his mother. According to Ridgway, he enjoyed imagining what it would feel like to kill his mother and was sexually attracted to her. During an interview, Ridgway also happened to tell authorities that he is obsessed with memories of his mother washing his private area as a child as a result of bed wetting incidents. This information is uncomfortable to hear, but it is also the type of information the authorities were looking for. The fantasies Ridgway has of his mother clearly drove his desire to murder and criminal psychologists believe that strangling women gave Ridgway the opportunity to unconsciously ‘kill his mother.’
Despite the lack of mental illness and a motive to kill dissimilar to other psychopathic killers, Ridgway was highly methodical and conducted all of his murders with extreme care. During interviews, Ridgway also displayed no sympathy towards his victims and no emotion over the crimes. On the flip side, one of Ridgway’s lawyers disagrees with the idea of Ridgway being unemotional because once she began conversing with Ridgway about his family, he burst into tears periodically. Nonetheless, the Green River Killer is undoubtedly one of America’s worst offenders and has one of the most disturbing outlooks on the concept of murder that can give any person chills.
Gary Ridgway is serving “48 consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole” at a maximum-security prison in Colorado.
When I read who his victims were I wasn’t surprised. One thing I have heard about serial killers is that they tend to go for marginalized people in society, meaning if these people were to go missing no one would care or would be quick to look for them. Like homeless people, racial minorities, people in the LGBTQ+ community, prostitutes and just women in general. Unfortunately, this just speaks to a problem that society as a whole has. Ridgway even said it himself. It is really sick and sad how serial killers know and purposefully hunt marginalized people because they know society, and specifically the police, won’t care to save them.
Okay, I’ve always been kind of confused by this. How come when we’re talking about people like him, serial killers, if they don’t have a mental illness that we are familiar with, we say that they were ‘mental sound?’ Like, in your post you say that he didn’t have any mental illnesses, but, I don’t know, killing 80 people doesn’t exactly seem like a thing that mentally healthy people would do. I was reading an article in PsychologyToday (a quick google search to answer my own question) and the article said that serial killers are not insane by the legal definition, but “have an overwhelming desire and compulsion to kill that causes them to ignore the criminal law with impunity” which to me sounds like it should be a symptom of some sort of mental illness.
Since Gary Ridgway’s lawyer claimed that he broke down multiple times during a conversation about his family, would that mean she was arguing that he was more of a sociopath instead of a full-blown psychopath? In what I’ve learned on my own from binge-watching documentaries on YouTube and Criminal Minds, psychopaths have no remorse or emotion, while sociopaths can feel little emotion that is either shallow or can be repressed. Maybe he is a hybrid of both categories if the lawyer was telling the truth. What I also find interesting is the true reason for his inclination towards these murderous tendencies. I wonder what caused his strange sexual attraction to his mother: was it due to environmental factors or an abnormal genetic flaw affecting normal behavior? Usually they say psychopaths have a genetic predisposition, and sociopaths have environmental influences and experiences that affect their reasoning and actions instead.
Wow, these posts just keep getting more and more twisted! This man’s acts are so sick, I’m glad he’ll be locked up for the rest of his life! Interesting that he appeared to be a normal guy, I feel like usually people that commit these acts seem at least a little bit off to others. It’s crazy how something like an obsession with your own mother can be the catalyst for committing such atrocities. I think this post might make me a little more wary about boys with mommy issues!