Serial Killer: Gary Leon Ridgway

For this assignment, I will profile a serial killer and give an explanation as to why the killer fits into a selected profile type. In addition, I will analyze and explain a theory of criminology that will best describe the conduct of the serial killer. Furthermore, I will analyze and describe the profile of the victim selected by the serial killer and the concept of victimization that best explains the selection of the victim. Lastly, I will describe the features of the victim that gave the killer the incentive to commit the crime. A serial killer can be described as an individual who kills three or more people, generally in service of irregular emotional fulfilment, with the killings taking place over more than a month and including a significant cooling off period between them (Ramsland, 2013). The serial killer that I have chosen is Gary Leon Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer. Ridgway was convicted in the State of Washington for killing 48 women and there is a strong possibility that there are more victims. Almost all of Ridgway’s victims died from strangulation; however,

According to the profile, even after some of the bodies were found Ridgway still had contact with prostitutes. The profile also proposes that Ridgway did not leave home with the mindset of killing someone, but that the violence likely resulted from some sort of private dealings that made him furious (Smith & Guillen, 2001). Personally, I think that psychological profiling is great but it did take law enforcement 20 years to capture Ridgway; however, humans are unpredictable by nature and his victims were of different races and different age groups ranging from 15 to 36 and they were all prostitutes. Law enforcement could have also used a probabilistic profile method, which removes a vast number of the general population, letting the investigators narrow their search (Sun,