Research Paper On Garry Ridgway

Introduction/Methodology This paper is a study of the infamous serial killer, Garry Ridgway, the Green River Killer. Garry Ridgway was a killer in the Seattle area who killed a confirmed forty-eight people and was sentenced to life in prison. His life was spared only because he accepted a plea bargain. Later after his sentencing, he actually admitted to killing more around seventy-one women. This paper will dive deep in an attempt to discover what motivated him to kill so many innocent women. Many factors could contribute to this, such as his childhood, how he was raised, his marriage, his school life, and more. This paper studies his younger years, up to his incarceration in order to better understand the subject, and why serial killers

They relocated to Seattle Washington when he was very young. His father was a metro bus driver, and the neighborhood was quite friendly with his mother because they often saw her tending to the yard and trees. Everything about them seemed to be normal. Early in in his childhood, Garry wet the bed very often. His mother would scold him and put him in the bathtub and wash his genitals. This made Ridgway feel angry, yet attracted to his mother. He would often have feelings of sexual attraction to her and would develop sexual fantasies in his head. When Ridgway was sixteen, he attacked and stabbed a young six-year-old boy and eventually told authorities that he simply, “…wanted to know what it would be like to kill someone (A&E Biography).” This seems to be the starting point of his urge to want to hurt innocent people, because this boy was his first victim but later on we will see that he aimed for, hunted, and killed all women. During his high school years, he did not make the best grades. He had a reported I.Q. of 82 (Murderpedia.org), a very low

Ridgway remarried, and often would take his wife to outdoor places to have public sex. He had sex in the some of the exact same spots he left dead bodies at in his later years. They eventually had a son, but Ridgway felt “angered because the son required constant attention that wife had to give him (A&E Biography). He grew angry because there were times that she could not have sex with him. Ridgway began showing signs of aggression, putting his wife in chokeholds during sex and treating it more like rape than love. He enjoyed the power it gave him, he enjoyed feeling in charge of her and her body. Eventually they too divorced, and this destroyed Ridgway. Little did she or anyone know, this would send Ridgway down a mad path that would leave many innocent people