Gary Leon Ridgeway: the Green River Killer

Steven Crook’s, the husband of the victim returned home that same day in the afternoon. Mr. Crook contacted the police after not being able to find his wife and noticing that his home had been ransacked. A fisherman discovered Mrs. Crook’s body in the river that same afternoon.

Beth Wilmot also fell victim to Randall Woodfield’s sadistic ways in January. Her body was discovered in Salem, Oregon after being sexaully assaulted and shot in the back of her head with a .32-caliber gun. At this time the police in the states the crimes were being committed were realizing there was a serial killer on the loose and they need to catch him promptly. However, Woodfield would prove it was going to be difficult to catch him after going under the radar for an additional five months (nydailynews.com, 2014).

On the 2nd of March 1998, a 10 year-old boy, LMW, was charged with the manslaughter of Corey Davis, a 6 year-old boy. Corey Davis was drowned in the Georges River when the defendant, LMW, dropped him in with what was thought to be the complete knowledge that the victim was unable to swim.

This can cause a lot of psychological damage knowing that this isn’t common and is highly frown upon in society to have sexual feelings towards someone in your family especially towards your mother. As a teenager he tried to commit murder, there was a 6 year old boy playing outside and he lured him into some bushes where no one could see him and without a cause he stabbed the boy in the stomach and wiped the blood of the blade of the knife on the little boys shirt. (Montaldo 2011) This must have been a trial run and an early indicator that this boy was disturbed and in need of some immediate help. Especially since he had no probable cause to stab the little boy knowing that he is vulnerable and can’t fight back. Ridgway’s childhood is far from ordinary he had a lot of psychological damage and if only his parents would have known they could have brought him to a psychiatrist to try and prevent what we all now him now as the green river killer.

In the video “The Confessions” presented by Frontline, a murder of a women that was committed by one man, quickly resulted into a false gang murder-rape scene committed by eight men. The victim, Michelle Bosko, was seen to be raped and killed in her apartment in Norfolk, Virginia. From the video, it has been proven that seven out of the eight men that confessed were innocent, but somehow they all received an unequal punishment. Because the innocent men admitted to a murder that they didn’t commit out of fear, they were all sentenced to some time in prison. The head detective, Glenn Ford, intimidated the men so much that they either were convinced that they were at the crime scene or they told him every detail that he wanted to hear.

When this Central park case was made public, the New York Police Department and District Attorney office’s main focus was to solve the case as quickly as possible. When the five teenagers were found “wilding” in the park the night of the women’s death, the police believed they had found the suspects. The police were so confident of the teenager’s guiltiness, the five boys were interrogated of their involvement in the crime. The police used their authority and persuasion to get the boys to confess and promise them that they would go home if they talked. Through strenuous and intense interrogation, the five boys confessed to the killing and rape of the young women on videotape. These confessions were given even though

When looking into Prostitution women are usually thought to be the lowest form a part of the human species, people make assumptions as to why a women would even bother with the idea of subjecting herself to harsh treatment by others, people often correlate the idea of prostitution with human trafficking. That each of these categories are of association, prostitution is “the practice or occupation of engaging in sexual activity with someone for payment.” While human trafficking is “the illegal movement of people, typically for the purposes of forced labor or commercial sexual exploitation.” Each of these subjects demonstrates different meanings but express the same sense of ideas, which will be looked into too.

In this article, “Who Killed the Jeff Davis 8”, Ethan Brown, the author, attempted to solve the murder case and prove the police authorities to being wrong and being responsible for the murders of the town. The main problem of this article is determining who is responsible for the murders of those eight women everyone’s contradicting stories. In an attempt to figure out what really happened Brown includes factual evidence from interviews and shocking statistics to inform the reader of what’s going on in the article. By providing such information, Brown indulges the audience into the full experience of solving the murder case.

"Responsible people have to be careful about making wild pronouncements about possible serial killers," Leyton says. "And when we are not sure if it is true, then it is inappropriate to throw people into a state of panic. Prostitution is a very dangerous profession and many of the people in it are wanderers and not well-connected to any conventional system of government controls or social services. So they can drift away from the system without being noticed for a very long time, even when nothing may have actually happened to them."

1). Ms. Greenlee is one of the most identifiable survivors of this type of tragedy. Greenlee told Ms. Martin (2013), “ she was forced to go through anywhere from 25 to 50 men a day or she would receive unimaginable punishments,” (para. 3). Greenlee told Martin (2013), “punishments were beyond severe, if she was not able to go through the number of customers they told her to she would pay with beatings, multiple rapes by multiple men, or even worse they would force her to watch as they tortured one of the other women they had kidnapped as her punishment,” (para. 6). Martin (2013) reports that, “Greenlee, who was kidnapped at age 12, was part of about eight girls who were kidnapped by a group of men who injected them with heroin and sometimes handcuffed them to the bed,” (para. 4). The tortures that Ms. Greenlee faced are unimaginable. She is one of the few women who have been able to escape from that world and talk about it openly.

Gary Ridgway grew up like any other ordinary suburban kid. He had a problem of wetting the bed which his mother would make fun of him and embarrass him in front of family and friends. As a young teen, he was always getting into trouble such as stabbing a six year-old boy in the ribs when he was a young teen. In high school Gary continued to go down hill and get bad grades. Gary graduated high school and joined the Navy. While he was in Vietnam, he discovered prostitutes and ended up getting sexually transmitted diseases. Soon after being home from Vietnam, Gary was killing and raping prostitutes on the streets of Seattle, Washington. Gary would go on to murder about 71 young women who he targeted because they were either prostitutes or runaways.

The first real evidence came in February 1984. Mike Barber, a reporter for the Post-Intelligencer, received a letter that contained information about the Green River murders that was not released to the public. (Rule, 2004) The letter was written with no spaces between the words and was intended to help the investigators learn who the killer was. (Rule, 2004) The letter never did lead investigators in the right direction, but it did give them insight into how he thought. The investigators also spoke with Ted Bundy. (Rule, 2004) Though, the information given by Bundy did not help, nor did it have any real impact on the investigation at all.

The police were very consumed by the Green River Case however, Ridgway was very cautious about getting caught. He would go to extreme lengths to cover up any detail that might be left behind. He made sure there was no one around when he approached the women. He would not pick up the prostitutes where they would work, rather he would drive by and “make eye contact with them and flash money at them.” They would follow, and he would pull off in an empty parking lot to get them alone. If Ridgeway saw any people, he would not go through with it, even when he needed to kill, the risk of getting caught was too high and he wouldn't take a chance. Most serial killers want the publics attention but Ridgeway was different. He even admitted he was angry

Like all good horror stories, the legend of Jack the Ripper is founded in some aspects of truth. In 1888, five female prostitutes were murdered over a span of four months in Whitechapel, a poverty-stricken and crime-ridden district on the East End of London. These women are generally known as the “canonical five victims,” but there are many disputes on how many victims there actually were. According to one Jack the Ripper website, the Whitechapel Murders file lists as many as eleven victims, but not all of these were the murderer’s true victims (Jones). Another certain truth is that the majority of the women

“A study of San Francisco prostitutes found that 82% had been assaulted and 68% had been raped while working as prostitutes. Another study of prostitutes in Colorado Springs found they were 18 times more likely to be murdered than non-prostitutes their age and race.”