Leon Ridgway: The Green River Killer

Leon Ridgway aka the Green River killer was born on February 18, 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He married 3 times and had 1 son with his second wife. He started killing not long after he divorced his second wife. During 1980s to 1990s for about 20 years he is believed to at least kill 71 women in Washington. His victims were all prostitutes or runaways that he picked up along the Pacific Highway South (Montaldo, C. (n.d.).). He would have sex with the prostitutes and runways then he would strangle them usually from the back with his arm and sometimes used ligatures. After they were dead, most of the bodies were dumped near the green river. The bodies were clustered, sometimes posed and often nude. (Gary Ridgway – The Green River Killer. (2011,

On 2003 November 2nd he pled guilty to 48 of the murders and confessed of having sexual intercourse with 6 of the dead bodies (necrophilia). By 2003 December 18th Ridgway was sentenced 480 years with no parole. (Gary Ridgway – The Green River Killer. (2011, May 2). Ridgway is a psychopath, which are people who suffer from psychopathy which is a mental disorder in which people display symptoms such as lack of remorse, poor behavioral controls, manipulative, impulsive and etc. Psychopathy is measured with a tool called PCL-R which has 4 dimensions: affective, antisocial, lifestyle and interpersonal (Mulcahy M., Cutinelli P., Warner J. and Woodruff T. (April 01, 2011). As a result you can see that Gary Ridgway is a serial killer and is a psychopath to a large extent because his psychopathy is evident in all areas of the PCL-R.

Antisocial behavior is when the person had childhood behavior problems, poor behavior controls and has committed some kind of crime at a young age (Mulcahy M., Cutinelli P., Warner J. and Woodruff T. (April 01, 2011). Ridgway’s childhood life was very difficult because of his environment. His parents fought all the time and the stress at home caused him to wet his bed until he was 13 years old. His mother was controlling and very strict, so when his mother found out about it she would make fun of him in front of his family. He always felt like his mother doesn’t love him so he just wanted to be loved by his mother. (Gary Ridgway – The Green River Killer. (2011, May 2).) Ridgway even suffered from dyslexia which caused him to be a poor student and he need it to repeat grades in order to pass. (Montaldo, C. (n.d.).) This made him feel like it was harder to make his mother ever love him because all she did was control him. Ridgway hated his mother but at the same time he was sexually attracted to her. (Gary Ridgway – The Green River Killer. (2011, May 2).) This shows how his environment caused him stress which led to poor controls over his behavior and lead him suffer from a dimension of psychopathy. When Ridgway was 16 years old he led a 6 year old boy into the woods and stabbed the boy through the ribs then walked away laughing. (Montaldo, C. (n.d.).) Ridgway committed arson, paid a child to