Tim Meyer, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office. Stephens’ family requested privacy and declined to speak with reporters, said Sgt. The remains of another Ridgway victim, Cheryl Wims, were discovered at the same time. She had been killed a year or more earlier, investigators said, and she is believed to have been Ridgway’s youngest victim. Stephens’ remains were found in a wooded area next to a baseball field in what is now the suburb of SeaTac on March 21, 1984, after the groundskeeper’s dog came home with a leg bone. Researchers at theDNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization that uses publicly available DNA databases to find relatives of unidentified victims, helped make the identification.
“We are thankful that Wendy Stephens’ family will now have answers to their enormous loss suffered nearly 40 years ago.” “Ridgway’s murderous spree left a trail of profound grief for so many families of murdered and missing women,” King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a written statement. Four of the victims - including Stephens - had not been identified. Ridgway terrorized the Seattle area in the 1980s and has pleaded guilty to killing 49 women and girls since 2003. Wendy Stephens was 14 and had run away from her home in Denver before Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, strangled her in 1983, the King County Sheriff’s Office announced Monday. SEATTLE (AP) - Genetic genealogy helped identify the youngest known victim of one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers almost 37 years after her remains were discovered near a baseball field south of Seattle. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. He currently serves 49 counts of life without parole in Washington State Penitentiary spending up to 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Some estimate his total number of victims near 100. Two years after being arrested, Ridgway was convicted of 49 murders, though confessed to many more that have not or cannot be confirmed. From then on he killed at a relentless pace, averaging a murder every fortnight for 18 months.Īfter “passing” two lie detector tests and giving DNA samples, Gary Ridgway had gotten away with dozens of murders and it would not be until the turn of the millennium and advances in DNA technology that the Green River Killer would see justice for his atrocities. Having been twice married and twice divorced by his early thirties, he was already frequenting the services of local prostitutes and the Green River Killer would take his first known victim in 1982. His childhood home life helped create the monster he became.Īt age 16, Ridgway stabbed a 6 year old boy but went unpunished due to police negligence.
He would go on to become one of the most prolific and notorious serial killers the world has ever seen.Ī bed-wetter until his early teens and experienced a tumultuous relationship with his mother, later admitting to having sexual desires but also a hatred for her. Gary Leon Ridgway is better known by his nickname “Green River Killer” the press-dubbed alias the then unknown serial killer who began leaving his victim’s bodies in Green River (Duwamish River) in the state of Washington in the 1980’s.