Gary Leon Ridgway: the green river killer. Born on February 18th of the year 1949 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He grew up in a small, deprived neighborhood near SeaTac airport. He had a mother, father and two brothers, one older, and one younger. Growing up, he had a complicated childhood. He admitted to fantasizing often about killing his mother, Mary Ridgway. Mary and Gary’s relationship was inappropriate. His mother was physically and verbally abusive to the family. Mary is believed to have shattered a plate over her husband's head. Thomas, Gary’s father, got up and left the table with no act of self-defense. His father's lack of reaction aggravated Gary. This is believed to have caused his hatred towards women. Ridgway made it his personal …show more content…
Ridgway's first murder occurred in July 1982. He discarded the body by the Green River. As his killing spree continued, he became named after his dump site, the Green River Killer. The ages of his victims were between fifteen and forty. He targeted prostitutes not based on their physical appearances, but their vulnerability. Gary Ridgway picks up his victims on the South Pacific High in Seattle, Washington. After sexually abusing the women, he would strangle them by hand. He later started using belts, ropes, and other objects to not inflict wounds on himself to lower suspicion. The bodies of his victims were often left in clusters for his convenience. Ridgway would return to the corpses to assault them once …show more content…
Due to his abnormal thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. He showed multiple signs of deviance and dangerous behavior throughout his childhood and adult years. Ridgeway was obsessed over his childhood trauma and how he was going to retaliate. He would fall into depressed and manic state. He experienced elation with hyperactivity, this being his killing spree. Periods of depression and excitement can last days, weeks, or months. Gary may also be diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. His unstable emotions, relationships, and self-image make him eligible for this diagnosis. BPD is often caused by childhood trauma or neglect, physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. All of which he experienced. These events impair the functioning of the frontal lobes and limbic system, causing a lifetime of complications, one of which being
On his 17th birthday, Cameron Griggs and his parents, drove to the office to pick up the papers that would change his life. Three months later he kissed his mum goodbye as mixed emotions of fear and excitement flooded his body.
Lawrence Willoughby, an African American male, was born in 1881 in Pitt County, North Carolina. He was the son of Lannie Anderson and X Willoughby. Lawrence married at 22,a woman by the name of Jennie Best on December 20, 1903. Records says that the two married in Pitt County, North Carolina. They had eight children in 13 years. He died on August 4, 1951, in Greenville, North Carolina, at the age of 70.
When the man pulled over, Lyga immediately drove off and called the police for help. The man chased Lyga until they both raised their weapons. Lyga shot and killed the man. Police investigated and discovered that the man shot by Lyga was Kevin Gaines, an undercover Los Angeles Rampart CRASH police office...
In 1982, police received a call about a body floating in the Green River in Salt Lake City, Utah (it was just one of many bodies that they were going to find). Police were stunned when they started receiving more calls about bodies found in parks, play grounds, and near highways. When police learned that all of the victims were prostitutes, they knew this was a key piece of evidence in their investigation. No one could have ever known that Gary Ridgway just started one of the largest killing sprees in American history. Ridgway grew up in a house where he was abused and harassed by his mother, Mary Ridgway. Ridgway soon began growing a strong hatred towards his abusive mother. Ridgway had begun thinking of some ways he could get back at her by hurting her, but he never did. According to American Murder, Ridgway went through numerous divorces and had a history of interacting with prostitutes (Mayo). ). Ridgway’s past with women soon made him develop a strong dislike for them and led to his killings.
What are the root causes of a person becoming a serial killer? There have been many different serial killers over the past years, but only one is the infamous “Green River Killer.” Gary Ridgway was dubbed the “Green River Killer” because many of his first victims were found near the Green River in Washington. There are many factors which contribute as to why a person turns and takes their anger out on other people. Some people have a normal childhood with a loving family, while some are not so lucky. A loving family is built around the parents, but if the parents choose violence over love, then that is what the child will grow up only knowing. Gary Ridgway is an American serial killer who killed over sixty women within a twenty year period.
Vronsky, Peter. "A "Typical" Serial Killer: Gary Leon Ridgway, "The Green River Killer"."Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2004. . Print.
The United States is responsible for 67.41% of the entire world’s serial killers on record, approximately 2,743 killers. One man who is a part of this statistic, named John Wayne Gacy, was born on March 17th, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois. Over a period of six years, Gacy murdered over thirty young men. For the first few years, police were not suspicious of Gacy, and he was only investigated for a few months before his capture. Due to the severity and nature of his crimes John Wayne Gacy was categorized as an organized, power-oriented serial killer.
This semester we talked about a variety of serial killers. The first one we discussed was John Wayne Gacy. Gacy was an American serial killer who was responsible for the killing of at least 33 men and boys. He lived in Cook County, Illinois, at the time of his killings. He buried his victims’ bodies under his home.
Gary Leon Ridgway, born February 18th in 1949, is the world’s most prolific serial killer. What makes him the world’s most prolific serial killer? Among being a murderer he was also a necrophiliac. The sheer number is a prime example of the psychotic things this man was capable of doing. He was convicted of forty-eight murders, but later confessed to as many as twice that number. It is also astonishing that this horror lasted more than a decade between the 1980s and 1990s.
John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer based in Chicago, Illinois in the 1960s and 1970s. To his neighbors he was know as a friendly man that would host parties at his house and dress up as “Pogo the Clown” to entertain children. In 1968 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a young, this was before the grizzly discoveries of his murders. Gacy killed at least 33 young males in the Chicago area, hiding most of the bodies under his home. He struggled with his sexuality and was abused from a young age, this could of played a part in the rapes and murders of these small children. Gacy was found guilty in 1980 and was sentenced to multiple death penalties and life sentences.
Another criminology theory that may apply to help explain the criminal behavior of Ted Bundy is the Psychodynamic theory. This theory is largely based on the findings of Sigmund Freud. The underpinnings of this of the approach are that the unconscious mind affects behavior and emotion. The theory advances the argument that no behavior is without cause and that childhood experiences affect emotions and behavior as adults. Serial killers like Ted Bundy therefore are particularly affected by their unconscious mind. Bundy did not receive proper care as a young boy and the negative impact of his sense of rejection and isolation negatively impacted his adulthood with aggressive tendencies. In short, Bundy’s adult actions under this theory can be viewed as manifesting his anger over his childhood oppression in the form of brutal rapes and
Ridgway, an extreme incarnation of a brutal misogynist, considered killing female prostitutes a “career.” He felt proud of what he did, and thought he was good at it. However, in Ridgway’s mind, he even believed that he was helping the police out, as he admitted in one interview with investigator (Silja J, 2003). It took almost eight minutes for the names of 48 women to read aloud. Each time, Gary Leon Ridgway calmly said “guilty,” admitting to being the nation’s most prolific serial killer as part of a plea deal that keep him off the states’ death row (Vries, 2003). However, deeply in his mind, he never felt guilty of what he had done. To date, the killings have been the subject of one A&E television documentary, “The Riverman,” a well-regarded made for TV 2004 film and an obscure 2005 film, Green River Killer (Mayo, 2008). Most of the people that have met him before, would never know he could be one of the most serial killer in the United States, everyone thought he was a nice person; but sometimes his behavior is a little bit weird. Family could be one of the biggest reason to make what kind of person we are, or who we want to
During the spring of 1979, a series of murders emerged in Southern California, which struck fear in many communities, primarily in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas. Many teenage male bodies were discovered on the side of various freeways throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties. In August 1979, the first victim that was discovered near a freeway in Los Angeles was a 17-year-old teenager who was brutally beaten, stabbed multiple times, and sodomized (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2024). Over the next 14 months, victims were discovered in areas that were located near freeways, which earned the perpetrator the famous nickname “The Freeway Killer,” also known as William Bonin. Bonin would pick up teenage boys and young men between the ages of 14 and 19 years old who were either hitch-hiking or prostituting and once
The Green River Killer aka Gary Ridgway was born in 1949 in Utah, (A&E Television, LLC, 2016). Like most serial killers Gary seemed to have been a normal guy who painted trucks and had been married three times until his secretly heinous acts begun in 1982, (A&E Television, LLC, 2016). Though Ridgway was very into religion
Guillen, Tomas. Serial Killers: Issues Explored Through the Green River Murders. New York: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Print.