Episode 671: Gary Ridgway : Redux Part I - Wrong Way Gary

This week, the boys reopen the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, tracing the childhood abuse, early warning signs, religious hypocrisy, and mounting rage that shaped one of America’s most prolific serial killers before his reign of terror across the Pacific Northwest.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:08Speaker 02

  There's no place to escape to.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  This is the last. On the left.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  That's when the cannibalism started.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Hey, where we going? I'm trying to get into Gary Ridgway headspace. I put a plastic bag over my head for a while this morning to kill off some of those extra pesky brain cells, you know? I was just trying to get, I'm gonna get, I'm gonna kill the bitch. I'm just like, that's the way to get into Gary Ridgway. I'm gonna kill the bitch, I'm gonna kill the bitch. Just because that's one of his favorite saying.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, it's catchphrase.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 05

  I didn't want to get too crazy and violent with it, so I just did a really bad job of painting a truck.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Welcome to the last podcast on love, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with method actor, Henry Zebrowski.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Because he reminds me a little bit of the, uh, what's his name from South Park?

• 2:15Speaker 04

  Oh, Timmy. No, not Timmy. Jimmy.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Jimmy.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  He's got those little eyes, too. He's got those little blinky, little rat eyes.

• 2:27Speaker 04

  The beadyest eyes in serial killing.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  He has that. He has the Arthur Shaw cross tell.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Where when they're, when they're saying, when they're talking about things that particularly make them horny, they get real blinky.

• 2:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's indeed. And we have the man who doesn't get blinky at all when he gets horny, as far as I know, it's Ed Larson.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, I don't think, I think I just shut him and go to sleep.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  See, my eyes are wide open. It's one long blink. I wanna see.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Today, we have a redo. We have a second pass. It's yet another look at a serial killer that we covered long ago. Today, we start our journey on Gary Ridgway.

• 3:07Speaker 05

  I've brought this up before, and I once did one of those like horrible tests, like which serial killer are you? And I got Green River Killer.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Ugh.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what? I can see it.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  Ah, okay, yeah, you're, you're blue collar.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, what I'd like me to do is go, I gotta kill a bitch.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  I, I, she's a bitch.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  I gotta kill this bitch.

• 3:27Speaker 05

  I like the woods.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  He does love the woods.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  He does. He does. Amongst many other things, he does love the woods.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  I was just in Renton, which is next to Sea, uh, SeaTac.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  I was just there and we had a nice, uh, place on the, right on the, right on the Lake Washington there. And I walked through the woods and it's nice.

• 3:48Speaker 04

  It is.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I can see why it would get you horny. It's real quiet and private, too, right?

• 3:53Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely. I'm smoking all kinds of weed. No, it's nothing.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  It's great.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  But the reason why we're doing this redux is because, you know, when we were, when, when we did this series back in the day, we had kinda like, it was, we're still in the research, figuring out what we're doing for the show.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Very, I mean, this is back when it's like, I, at that point, I was still on like six podcasts a week.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  And also editing all of them and producing all of them. So like, I was basically like looking at Wikipedia pages and like checking out like a couple of like murderpedia pages and trying to put shit together, not sleeping much and working like 90 hours a week. It was insane. So it was a, let's say, a bad job.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  But it was fun to do, but at the same time, we did not, because normally, it's like the opposite. Normally, when we do the old episodes, we got into the really graphic shit and we didn't get to all the other like context and stuff, where this time, it's so wonderful to know that when we got back into it, the information's actually way more fucked up than we even ever thought in the beginning, and that's great for us.

• 4:59Speaker 05

  Now, he, from my, I watched the documentary on HBO Max yesterday, and I, obviously, I read the script of prep today. He seems like he might be the worst.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  He's up there. Like, he's definitely, as far as a body count goes, he's one of the most prolific in American history. Samuel Little beat him, though. By a lot. So he is, but he is definitely in that area of like amongst the worst.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  And you know how I described him? He does it the Kirby Puckett style. He's simple.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Right, you know what I mean? He's the bunter.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Bad average.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  That's what this is all about. This is about moving guys around bases, moving sex workers to various shallow graves.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  He's an RBI guy, not a homerun guy.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Exactly. He's a clutch player.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  So as we said, many years ago, we attempted an episode on Gary Ridgway. And while we did the best we could with the resources we had at the time, we realized after looking at this story again, that we didn't really capture the full picture, especially considering how new information has come to light that might actually explain the mystery of Gary Ridgway. See, last time, we described Gary Ridgway as a man who was really only Only good at one thing. He was a dullard, but he also managed to evade police for decades as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, despite the efforts of a massive task force. In fact, before the advent of DNA testing, the so-called Green River Killer case, as Gary Ridgway's murders are known,

• 6:38Speaker 04

  was shaping up to be yet another unsolved serial killer mystery, like the Zodiac or Jack the Ripper. But the biggest difference between those cases and Green River is the sheer volume of victims. While Jack and the Zodiac only got five each, Gary Ridgway murdered at least 45 women between 1982 and 1984 alone. Two fucking years. And that doesn't even count the women he murdered afterward and the women he possibly murdered before.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And we've talked about this before with these types of serial killers. There's always the ones in which they killed way less than they said that they did, and they're doing it for attention. And then there's the ones that might have killed way more. And Gary Ridgway is firmly in the camp of might have killed way more.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Because he even, he said, "I don't remember. I don't remember a heck of a lot. I kind of go in a different direction of my mind." And then he's just like, starts thinking about it in a way where he, like, he goes off into a fantasy world, and he doesn't even remember. And then he's like, "I don't know whether that was a dream or that was a fantasy." And he's just like, he was thinking about killing for so long that he also doesn't remember what was the ones he actually did and what were just a walking fugue state fantasy he was in.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  You know what's interesting is like, sometimes like, I bet when I was younger.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  It's catching. It's really catching.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  When I was younger, I remember I used to get in a lot of fights. And I remember one fight, my biggest fight, I don't remember it.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  Like, I went into like a fugue state. And so like, it kind of makes sense. I feel like violence, extreme violence, can bring on just you not knowing what's going on.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  It's not violence, it's anger. Because I bet that during that fight, you were probably the angriest you have ever been in your entire life.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  I guess. I don't even remember.

• 8:27Speaker 05

  I was perfectly fine afterwards, I'll tell you that much. And it's the power of man.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  So Gary Ridgway would pick up sex workers from the areas around the Sea-Tac International Airport and the Interstate 5 corridor, pretend as if it was gonna be a normal transaction, then he would strangle women to death before dumping the bodies in isolated wooded areas around the Seattle Tacoma region. Gary was able to do this dozens of times because the area in which Gary obtained and disposed of victims was almost tailor-made for a serial killer.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Thanks, God. And God did that.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  God and man. God and man working together.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a reason I think Bigfoot's in those fucking hills.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, during the years Ridgway was active, the corridor where you'd find Sea-Tac Airport between Seattle and Tacoma was known as the Strip. The Strip was essentially a sex buffet of lost women plying their trade on two-lane highways and logging roads, which was all prior to Sea-Tac's incorporation as the city, surrounded by wilderness. So, all Ridgway had to do was find a place where he could murder someone out of sight, and once the deed was done, he was spoiled for choice as to where he wanted to dump the body. Now, had Ridgway buried his victims instead of just rolling them into ditches or leaving them out in the open, the Pacific Northwest likely wouldn't have even known there was a serial killer on the loose, because his victims were all sex workers whose disappearances

• 9:52Speaker 04

  likely wouldn't have been investigated. Well, they would have known there was a serial killer on the loose, because as we'll get into in the next episode, there are about four to six serial killers operating at the same time as Gary Ridgway in this area.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Really? I also truly think the key to Gary's successes was simplicity. I think if we're adding-

• 10:10Speaker 04

  He didn't get all fancy with it.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I think we're adding steps-

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Hold like trophies or anything like that, right?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  No, no. Well, he did it in wor- he did bad horrific things, but he did it in the old-fashioned way by letting it just sit out. You know, like, he was not digging holes. If he was digging holes, he might have actually created a lot more evidence than he wanted to because he's a fucking moron.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  He might have, yeah. But after looking at Ridgway again, there really is so much more to his- than just a guy with an ag cue of 82, a grudge against women, and a bible to clutch whenever he needed justification for his actions. Because that was last time when we did it, like, we went really hard on the missionary killer angle. That, you know, he, he did it because he believed that the sex workers deserved it, that he was getting them, that he was wiping the earth clean of these sinful ladies. It's a lot more complicated than that. That's, that's way too simplistic.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Oh, it's way more complicated than that because he has this push and pull with them. You even hear now, now that I've watched chunks of the confessions, can see it, he had that sort of like, the only ones to get me, but also they must be killed. They must have got to kill the bitches. Because he's like, he can't handle the fact that they're the only ones giving him any form of affection at the time.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And then he got married, three times.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Three times.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  And it's like, it's easy, guys.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  I would push back on him not getting any affection.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Gary Ridgway was never, ever, ever without a girlfriend or a wife.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Ladies, love Gary.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  He was fine for a trailer park. He looked all right.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 05

  What?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  He looked fine. He looked like a shop teacher. So, stories, L P O T L at gmail dot com. Please answer, Eddie.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  I said, fine.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I even say to get chest. I think that's passed. Even if that's passed.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  What we missed last time was that Ridgway exhibited a wide range of serial killer behaviors that we saw in many of the most infamous mass murderers of the late 20th century. He somewhat attempted to be a kind of BTK or a Zodiac by writing near unintelligible letters to the press and police, and he committed necrophilia multiple times throughout his most active period. In other words, he exhibited far more complicated behavior than what we had originally covered.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  People said, what I do, I don't get it, since I see it.

• 12:26Speaker 05

  Earlier, you shortened Jack the Ripper to Jack, and I never heard anyone do that before.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  I mean, you can call him saucy Jack.

• 12:37Speaker 05

  But I think Zodiac killer, I will, Zodi.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Zodi, it's Zodi.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Old Zodi.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  It's Zodi.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Zodi.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  That's how you call him.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And he'd be like, hey, hey, hey, shh, shh, shh, shut the fuck up. You got your mask, Zodi. Yeah, stop it. Zodi, you got the gun and the knife today, Zodi.

• 12:51Speaker 04

  But the question people always have about these guys is why they did what they did. And while the easy answer is, they do it because it makes them feel good. The real question is, how does a mind that gets pleasure from murder develop? And why the fuck were there so many of them during the 70s, 80s, and 90s? Where did they all go? Well, now that we're decades past these crimes and we can take a larger view of the 20th century. I mean, the 20th century is 26 years ago at this point.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Shut up.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  We might finally have an answer here. Something far more definitive and provable beyond the soul theory that leaded gasoline ruined the brains of the boomer generation. But it is going to take us three full episodes to explain it. And now that we got a whole team working on this weekly grind of ours, we can finally tell the story of the Green River Killer the way it was meant to be told.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  Through pantomime.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  You can't hear it. You can't hear it. It's hard. Just imagine.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Describe it, Eddie, if you could.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. Henry is choking his hands. Now he's crying while he does it. And, hey, that's it. Yeah, no stabs or nothing.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  No, no, he didn't.

• 14:13Speaker 05

  Just all chokes.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Now, I think that there has been a major calm down in this type of stuff because of DNA testing. I think that people just get caught way earlier.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  It's part. That is part of it. It is definitely a part of it, but it's not all of it.

• 14:29Speaker 05

  People are just as evil now as they were back then.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  But the phenomenon might have changed to more effective attention-seeking. Because I think a lot of serial killing does also involve attention-seeking. And now it's much easier because you could just get all you need to get a military-grade rifle and bring it to a public square and squeeze off a bunch of shots. And then you immediately get all the attention you crave.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, now you just do it all at once.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. And there, I mean, there are other things besides DNA testing. There's also social media. People are, it's noticed when people go missing. Lot faster. Yeah, like, things like that. So, yeah, people do get caught, uh, earlier, but the

• 15:08Speaker 01

  And kids don't run away anymore. They need to stay in their homes now.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, because kids are, they don't have any functioning skills.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  So they don't go hang out by the train yards anymore.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  Sure. Now they're all just playing video games.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  Like, you miss the days when kids ran away.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Now the scariest place to be is on roadblocks.

• 15:24Speaker 04

  But the other thing is, is that the seventies, eighties, and nineties, like, the, the, the one-on-one crime, like, just general, all-around crime, that is way, way, way down.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  It's still, I mean, there's still just as many lost people around that you can prey on today as there were back then. In fact, there are more. There are far more people in this country now than there were back then. Uh, but there are reasons why, uh, things have, uh, calmed down so much and why crime is at its lowest point ever.

• 15:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Also, like, I feel like back in the day, you would get into a fistfight, a cop would catch you, be like, "All right, boys, break it up. Go home, walk it off."

• 15:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:00Speaker 05

  Now you're like, everyone just goes to jail.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was also back in the day, not, the children weren't armed. And I think they used to just fight each other and then they wouldn't go back and get guns and then come back and finish the jobs.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, maybe some, maybe no.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  We'll see.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  We'll see.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  I mean, but that's the thing, we're gonna get more into that in the coming episodes.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  But before we get into the story of Gary Ridgway, let's acknowledge our sources. First, we've got the classic, Green River Runnin' Red by Anne Ruhl.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  It is thick.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Eight hundred pages.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  It's a big one. Yeah, Anne Ruhl, she's the same one who, you know, wrote the definitive book on Ted Bundy, famous true crime author. Then we've got the source for the juicy stuff, which was found in Gary Ridgway, The Green River Killer by James Richmond. And finally, we've got the new kid on the block, Murder Land by Caroline Frazier. This book was released just last year, and for me, it really is the final word on why and how the seventies, eighties, and nineties will forever be known in the annals of true crime history as the era of the serial killer. And so, without further ado, let's get into the story of Gary Ridgway, AKA The Green River Killer.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Gary Leon Ridgway.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  Cool name.

• 17:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, Gary Leon.

• 17:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is cool.

• 17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was born in February of 1949 in Salt Lake City to Mary Rita and Thomas Ridgway. These two people hold the distinction of being one of those rare double shots of horrible serial killer parents because both of them absolutely contributed to the horrific mindset that enabled Gary to do what he eventually did. Usually it's just one, but this time, boom, two barrels.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  And that's how we get the number one killer in America next to Samuel Little, who, you know, again, I feel like he didn't count enough because he didn't really, he wasn't proud.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Gary was proud.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now Gary grew up as the middle child in a struggling family that grew their own food and searched junkyards for useful scrap that could be fixed up and sold. It was a family trait that Gary would carry throughout the rest of his life as a free man. It was a practice he called "found in treasures."

• 18:08Speaker 01

  It's good, but he because get all this new stuff, it's crazy. Get old stuff, it's covered in rusty, peed, good pooping, that's great, treasure to me. You do like this, you do this. Are there scrap families?

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Scrap family, absolutely.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  They're very popular still to this day.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, my family was, we were like firmly middle class. We still love going to the dump.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  That's great, wow.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, they still cut the copper wiring. You know who's got a lot of copper wiring?

• 18:37Speaker 05

  What?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Data centers.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Let's go! Neruda, run!

• 18:44Speaker 04

  So after a short-lived and failed attempt at running a bar together, Mary Rita Ridgway settled temporarily into the role of a housewife while Gary's father, Thomas, worked construction and a few stints as a truck driver. One job had late hours while the other required Thomas to be gone for days at a time. Once, when Mary Rita was home alone, Gary's little brother Eddie got sick. The Ridgways had no money, so Mary Rita took little Eddie out into the snowbank to bring his fever down.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  The kid did survive, but little Eddie came away with permanent brain damage owing to Mary Rita's attempts at a folk remedy.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Like he was Conan's sword. Just held him by his ankles and dipped him into the snow.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  The tang holds.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Little Eddie, however, was not the only person with developmental problems in the family. Gary Ridgway himself was always described as slow. Besides being dyslexic, it took him a long time to memorize anything. And when he did, his recall was still full of gaps. Gary couldn't remember the names of his own pets, couldn't remember the names of his fellow children.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Give you socks, scraps, dusty spookers. Cat, get out of here. I'm trying to go to the bathroom.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  He was considered such a lost cause from a young age that teachers would routinely sit him in the back of the class just so he wouldn't bother the other children and so they wouldn't have to pay atten- they could just forget about him.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  Shut up, Gary.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  The kids with a future are trying to learn, Gary.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  I'm going to school, dad.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  A slow intellect, however, wasn't Gary's only childhood problem. Oh, no. Gary Ridgway was a bed wetter, which only added to the annoyance that his mother, Mary Rita, felt towards him for being slow.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Can we change the distinction here? Because some people bed wet.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Gary Ridgway was a bed soaker.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, he was.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  There's like a different, there's a distinct difference in bed pee pee. He's the Michael Phelps.

• 20:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Of bed pee pee.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, he was a water bed filler upper.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Some people are 70% liquid. Gary Ridgway, as a child, was like 83% liquid.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's like in that first X-Men movie where the guy, the senator turns into water, it's like that.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  That's him.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  Well, Gary also had severe allergies and a constant runny nose, which he always wiped with his shirt sleeve. His eyes would swell and tears would constantly run down his face, which earned him the nickname Cry Baby amongst his fellow children. That, of course, was in addition to the bullying he got just for being slow. By the age of eight, Gary remembered being always sad, always angry, because there was just so many things wrong with him. Little things, but they added up. Out of the three Ridgway boys, Gary had two brothers. Gary became the primary target for his parents' anger and punishment.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  It's like the Goldilocks scenario.

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  But for punishing.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  Your child.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Gary's younger brother Eddie, he had the brain damage. So he got pity from Gary's mother and her own guilt about the fever often got little Eddie a pass. But Gary's older brother Greg was intelligent and handsome. So his parents were constantly asking, why can't you be more like your brother Greg Gary? Why can't you be more like Greg?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  I ask myself every day, mommy. I ask myself every day, I wish I could be more like Greg. And honestly, it'd be kinda nice if you could maybe put my head on ice a little bit. Maybe you sent me and made me a show and like you made Eddie because he, everybody likes him more.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  Oh, there's a Greg Ridgway who's a professor of criminology. It's not the same guy, but I find it interesting.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  That is interesting. Wow. It's like a guy who runs a hamburger joint named Burger.

• 22:37Speaker 04

  Hey, my name's Mr. Cheeseburger. I like this whole name. That's my wife Buns.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  And to make matters even worse, Gary's family moved frequently. So Gary never had time to make friends. Wherever the Ridgway family went, the bullies found Gary. But Gary had no refuge at home either. His father would actually get angry at Gary instead of the bullies every time Gary got the shit beat out of him. Now, because he was slow and because the family moved around so much, Gary got held back a grade in elementary school. And it wasn't the last time that this would happen to Gary. But when Gary learned that he was gonna have to repeat a grade, something snapped. Because the kids had nothing but hatred for him and his parents had nothing but disappointment. In fact, Mary Rita came to believe that Gary was just lying about not being able to read.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I wish I honestly could be, this would be truly be the funniest prank of all time. But it's not, you know, I can't read. I don't know how to read.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  And so Gary's legendary anger, the anger that would be unleashed upon the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s, began to manifest itself physically. After learning that he was gonna be held back, Gary walked to his school and smashed out several windows by throwing rocks.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Tell me I'm a, okay, I can't go back to eighth grade. I'm gonna go through a rock, pile of rocks here and throw these rocks in there.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  This is like second grade, second, third grade, so it's around there. And I, you know, I went to a school where our classes were, you know, between 10 and 15 kids, really small. And man, at the start of every school year, it was always the kids who got held back. Cause every year you'd get a kid added to your class and you'd lose a kid.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Um, and those were always the bullies. They were always the angriest kids.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Well, cause they were also older and bigger than everybody.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Far older, far bigger. Oh yeah. The kid who broke my collarbone. He was the one who spiked me. He'd been held back twice, I think, by that point.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  I made him very strong.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  He was very strong. He was incredibly strong. I think he's dead now.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. There was a guy who, um, straight up like shot someone in the head in his front yard and he was like 20 in my high school.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's just like, he's smoking with the security officer.

• 24:57Speaker 01

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• 29:21Speaker 04

  Now, around the same time that Gary was being held back, Gary also started experimenting with fire. In second grade, he started playing with matches and eventually set his own garage ablaze. He became terrified and ran away while a neighbor called 911. And even though he assumes his parents beat him for starting the fire, he said he doesn't remember, his experimentation with fire didn't stop. He just learned to do it elsewhere so he wouldn't get caught. So, starting in the second grade, Gary started setting fires in garages around his neighborhood before running away when he heard sirens to hide until it got dark enough to safely sneak back home. Fucking crazy. No, there's this demented second grader, seven-year-old, running around your neighborhood.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Any open garage, running inside, setting on fire.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, I feel like that's how you-

• 30:09Speaker 04

  It's a goblin loose.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  It is a goblin loose. And that's why, but I think you have full immunity to clonk a little child in the head that's doing that. If your setting's on fire, setting structures on fire, I think you can get one clonk-

• 30:22Speaker 05

  From a stick. His dad tried.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  I know.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  You know what I'd say? I wouldn't say a clunk in the head because that can cause permanent damage. Kick him in the stomach.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go kick in the ass.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  You can tie him up, throw him in the swimming pool.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'd be fun as hell. God, these are all great to do to an arsonous child.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Now, besides the bed wetting and the arson.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Besides that.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Gary also had a streak of animal cruelty. When he got older, he found that he enjoyed hurting things, starting with the birds that he would shoot with his BB gun. Gary found that when the birds hit the ground dead, it made him laugh. Another time, in a moment of frustration, Gary took one of his own pet cats and suffocated it by throwing it in the cooler and shutting the lid. And so, that brings us back to the infamous McDonald Triad, which for years was used to identify serial killers. See, it was widely believed, specifically after true crime got so popular in the 2010s, that if someone wet the bed beyond the age of five, started fires, and engaged in animal cruelty as a child, it was a good indicator that they would become a serial killer as an adult. But while the McDonald Triad has since been discredited, or at least criticized,

• 31:31Speaker 04

  I got curious about the Triad's origins when it all came back with Gary Ridgway. And I got curious as to why people no longer use it as an indicator that someone might be a serial killer.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  It's because lots of people do it. It's not that uncommon.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  It's really not.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm glad it's not that common.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  But it's not uncommon enough that it's just tied to serial killers.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know, but you're a boy. Fire's cool. Stepping on a lizard's cool.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get over it pretty fast. I know that I, anytime I was curious about doing something weird to an animal and stuff, like the second anything felt like bad, I was like, ah, you know, like my brain would be like, no, I wasn't into it.

• 32:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I always saw, I always saw that as a, once you made the jump from like, cold-blooded to warm-blooded, that's when you like really, that's when the evil really starts.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  Actually, that is the, that is the line, strangely enough. I never crossed that line myself, but.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Frogs beware.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  I mean, frogs are different. A frog is different than like a.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  Corgi.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's a big difference.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Well, the McDonald Triad came from a six-page paper called Threat to Kill by a forensic psychiatrist named John McDonald, published in 1963. McDonald was studying violent psychiatric patients and noticed that bedwetting beyond the age of five, compulsive fire-starting, and animal cruelty appeared in many of the children on these psychiatric wards. McDonald, however, never explicitly said that his triad of bedwetting, fire-starting, and animal cruelty in children led them to become serial killers as adults. It actually didn't even lead them necessarily to become violent as adults. In fact, McDonald only used a sample of 100 patients, and none of the people he studied for the paper had actually committed violence. They'd only threatened it, hence his title, Threat to Kill.

• 33:23Speaker 04

  But the pioneers of behavioral science, the FBI, profilers Robert Ressler, Anne Burgess, and John Douglas, whose story was loosely adapted for the Netflix show Mindhunter, they combined Threat to Kill with a book McDonald had written in 1960 called The Murderer and His Victims. They then ran with the so-called McDonald Triad in a direction that even McDonald himself didn't expect, all in an attempt to try and solve the why of serial killers.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  When serial killers began to be a, well, they were starting to acknowledge it, then what the main issue is, as always, we see, is that they want a structural fix that works every time.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  So they'll give you money, right? Because even the guys in within these, like the FBI and all this stuff, they have to like pitch their own inner projects up the channel. So it's like stuff like this, they put together this like McDonald Triad, like fix-all, like, look, this is how we'll find serial killers and stop them.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Well, it was just, it was a part of a, you know, a massive thing.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  And then all, everybody jumped on it because like, oh, good, then we can fix serial killers. And it's just like, oh, well, let's hold on a second.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. After the McDonald Triad was introduced into the cultural zeitgeist by the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, it became almost a comfort to a lot of laypeople. It was a path towards maybe explaining the act of serial killing, which to most people is something that seems utterly unexplainable. But in 2018, authors Charlotte Parfit and Emma Aline, they looked at the McDonald Triad with fresh eyes and found that while the triad is not necessarily a predictor for future serial killing or even violent behavior, it is most definitely a sign of childhood abuse. And as we know, while not all serial killers have childhood abuse, the vast majority do have absolutely horrendous childhoods. So, we can forgive the BSU for jumping the gun

• 35:17Speaker 04

  a bit on the McDonald Triad. This revelation was actually a fucking, it was a great relief to me personally, because I absolutely hit every single point of the McDonald Triad as a child. I wet the bed beyond the age of five, I can admit it now, as a 43-year-old man.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Wow!

• 35:33Speaker 04

  I was absolutely obsessed with fire, and although I'm not proud of it, I dabbled in animal cruelty with various local amphibians, in very cruel and increasingly bizarre ways.

• 35:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  Like shit that disturbed, memories that disturbed me today.

• 35:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, but it's good that they disturb you.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  Me too, you know, I, you know, tie a lizard to a bottle rocket, you know, I used, you know, shit like that, you know, as boys having fun.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  See, I was, I was always with the girls.

• 35:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, you never did that?

• 35:57Speaker 01

  We played animals.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Where we'd act like different animals.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's fun. I did that game, but it was always in a pool. I was always a dolphin and I lost. You know, I didn't wet the bed as much, but like I sleptwalked and peed in cabinets.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, wow.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  That's cool.

• 36:16Speaker 04

  I sleptwalked a ton too.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. I had none of these. Really? Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Good boy.

• 36:22Speaker 04

  You are, you are such a good boy.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was. I was, but I-

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I didn't sleep until I was like eight.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And there's no extra lizards and fucking queens. Yeah, no, no. I wasn't like that. I wasn't surrounded by nature.

• 36:35Speaker 04

  Well, it turns out the McDonald Triad is not an indicator that we had the seed of a serial killer or the seed of a violent person laying dormant somewhere inside of us. It is, however, an indicator that my personal childhood environment created conditions where I have to do a shitload of therapy to untangle all the shit that happened to me and around me when I was a kid if I ever want to live a happy and healthy life. It wasn't my fault that I was raised in a West Texas nightmare factory seemingly designed to traumatize people like myself, but it is my responsibility to deal with that shit so it doesn't continue to fuck up my life. Gary Ridgway, needless to say, never dealt with anything. And the anger he felt as a result of his childhood traumas, which are about to get a lot worse,

• 37:19Speaker 04

  it was so intense that it contributed to the violent deaths of dozens of people. And of course, the childhood trauma is only one of many factors that led to the creation of Gary Ridgway.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  I also think it's Gary's attitude. I think Gary's attitude's got a little bit to do with it.

• 37:34Speaker 05

  Wow, Henry thinks Gary Ridgway has a bad attitude.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  I think that he needs a...

• 37:43Speaker 01

  People come here for intense hot takes.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  They really do. They really do. I mean, fuck it, I hope Netflix keeps us after that one.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I for one think he's a real jerk.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Norm.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Now, when Gary was 11 years old, his family finally moved to the Seattle Tacoma area, where Gary would live until he was finally arrested decades later. The Pacific Northwest is also where Gary Ridgway's behavior would greatly escalate in a number of ways for reasons that we will discuss in depth on episode two. So Gary's dad got a job driving Metro buses in the Seattle area, while his mother got a part-time gig as a salesperson at a local JCPenney.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  That's what my mom did.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  Really?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  She worked at JCPenney's.

• 38:27Speaker 04

  Really?

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Penny's.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Are you lying about anything in your childhood about the things that you did or didn't do?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Mom didn't wash me till I was erect. That was dad's job.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  I spent a lot of time in JCPenney's, but it was just my mom, you know, that was the card, the place that would give her credit.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, but that's, you know, we all of our, all of our families did credit card fraud at JCPenney's.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  That's also where the Ticketmaster was.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  Oh, that's nice, yeah. Wait in line. So, the family bought their first house in an area that is now known as the city of Sea-Tac. But with yet another move, Gary's bedwetting returned with a vengeance.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  Starting when Gary was around the age of 12, Mary Rita Ridgway began angrily yanking him from bed when he would wake up and announce that he had wet himself. She'd drag him to the bathroom and throw him into a tub of ice cold water, screaming that, quote, "Only babies wet the bed, Gary. Only babies. Are you a baby, Gary?" It's a direct quote.

• 39:38Speaker 05

  "I wet the bed. Okay, you're coming in like being 12. Like, hey, just so you know, wet the bed."

• 39:44Speaker 04

  "Oh, man. My bed's all wet, mom." Well, this would be yelled repeatedly while Mary Rita dragged Gary through the house, which, of course, woke everyone up, and it was meant to add to Gary's humiliation. This would happen at least three times a week during this time period. Sometimes, it would happen every single night. And this happened up until Gary was about 15 or 16 years old. From 12 to 15 or 16. Years of this.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  Let's just say, I don't know if it was just about the pee beamer.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Well, we're gonna get into that right now.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  I don't know if it was, and that's the problem, is that sometimes mommies can be a little naughty too. And that's what you gotta be careful of, because sometimes mommies, if you're too naughty, you make the baby naughty.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  Hope all of our mothers out there really paid attention to that.

• 40:35Speaker 05

  Just know that, right?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  No, you naughty mom.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  It's a good advice. Naughty mommy makes naughty baby.

• 40:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Write that down.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Wink, and that makes angry daddy.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  But because the return to bedwetting coincided with Gary Ridgway reaching puberty, the mommy wires got apollyly crossed. Mary Rita would often leave her bathrobe open, especially when she was dragging Gary to the bathtub in the middle of the night. And Gary would become aroused at the sight of his mother's big hooters.

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Because, you know, moms, I always think, you always love

• 41:09Speaker 01

  When my mom slept in the nude. You know, like, you know how fucking awesome that was when your mom got done with the penny? She got done with all the pennies, kicked off those heels, stripped down to her bush, and just fucking relaxed.

• 41:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's crazy. I grew up in South Florida, one of the hottest places in the world, and I don't think my mom could have worn more clothes.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  My mom was so sheathed. She was so clothed. Thank Christ.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  Well, once Marita got Gary to the bath, she would furiously scrub his genitals until they were raw.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Baby's penis is covered in urine. Baby's penis needs to be cleaned by mommy.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's crazy we got all these quotes.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  That was a direct recording.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Where she would overly focus on cleaning his privates while barely dressed herself.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Bobby, I think you missed somewhere around the top.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Then she'd vigorously dry him off when she was finished. And Gary remembered many an erection during this whole process. Gary, in fact, said that his so-called sexual awakening came while his mother was scrubbing his junk with a grimace on her face.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Ah, look at what you done, you pig. Hell, look at this. Oh, look what you... Oh, you disgusting urine-covered dick. Oh, I hate how covered in piss and shit you are.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  The pig, you got that from your mother.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  Getting called a, getting called a pig.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  My mommy. They gave him old Henry's mommy. Treated like a bad dog.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And later Gary said that he was both angered and incredibly horny every time his mother scrubbed the urine from his genitals, which of course fused anger, hatred, and sex in Gary's developing mind. And keep in mind that this is not something that happened once, twice, five times, 10 times, three times a week for years, if not every night for years.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Can I ask you both, like, let's say- You were fathers and you were like, let's say, let's put yourselves in this kind of scenario.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  Mr. Ridgway?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  I'm Mr. Ridgway.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and you like noticed every single time, you know, they're bringing him in there. They're washing all the people off of his penis and he's getting super hard, right? And the boy keeps getting older, right? At some point, when he gets hard, like, do you think that, like, there's no, like, putting some brakes on the process here?

• 43:34Speaker 04

  You're assuming that the father ever got out of bed. Thomas, like, that was the thing.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  He's lucky.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  He is, Thomas Ridgway would just stay in bed. It's not like he would come in and supervise.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  But what if you saw your son getting hard every time his mom was why your teenage son? Every time she washes genitals.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Covered in urine, he got hard for me.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  Conversation's gonna be had.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Would you, yeah, would you be like, this should probably, I think we should let his coach do this. Like, this maybe is a teacher's job.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  They should be doing this at school.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  I just think he was just not present, you know? It's probably just hammered and smoking cigarettes in the other room and not giving a fuck about his family.

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Being a real dad.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  He was also, he was terrified of Mary Rita. Like, Mary Rita was an incredibly domineering woman. But don't worry, I mean, he's, his contributions to Gary Ridgway's pathology is gonna be coming up soon.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  It's just because of Mary Rita's got those big old stinky bags.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  That's right. She's big stinky bag.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Big old stinky floppy bags. How I wish I was baby Gary.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Since the area where the Ridgway family had moved to was not yet a city, their home was surrounded by woods where the Ridgway boys would explore and play. Gary, therefore, became very familiar with the forests of the Pacific Northwest. And that familiarity would later be used to find all the right spots to hide bodies. Partly, though, Gary was going out into the woods to avoid the constant conflicts between his parents. Mary Rita had become more dominant over the years, ordering Thomas to beat their children when she thought they deserved it. Gary, therefore, began to view his father as weak and soft, while women in general became monsters. Mary Rita also got far more serious about religion. The Ridgway boys were brought to Mary Rita's Catholic church every Sunday. But their father was barred from coming because the local priest

• 45:23Speaker 04

  had a problem with the divorce Thomas had before his marriage to Mary Rita. This, of course, caused even more rifts.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Let's go, Gary, we're going to church where your father's not alive. Let's go Gary. Oh, you got urine all over you. Let me just, let me really watch him. Let's go. Your father's not loud as God's house. Let's go Gary.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  Your impression is scaring Marcus.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Oh, let me pack my tits. I forgot to pack my tits that loose.

• 45:57Speaker 04

  And stinky.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and big, yeah. Yes, before they made tit deodorant.

• 46:03Speaker 05

  Big stinky bags.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Big stinky flopping bags.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Even though Mary Rita was obviously noticing her son's bath time boners.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Did I see you at JCPenney's earlier today?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  Sexual pleasure was something that was discussed with scorn in the Ridgway home. Mary Rita herself taught her boys that masturbation was one of the worst sins of all. That she actually told them that it was better to rape a woman than it was to masturbate.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  This is so much changes.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  This is what Gary was being told right as he entered puberty. And the shit that Gary was hearing from his mother resulted in a myriad of abnormal sexual habits. He became a neighborhood window peeper, spying on girls in his neighborhood before being chased off by a parade of angry fathers. In one instance, Gary believed when an older girl came over to his house with friends to watch TV, that all he had to do to have sex with her was to surreptitiously put his erection in her field of vision by pulling his shorts to the side and showing off his erect penis.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  It seems that the, uh, the, uh, the elevator has to reach its floor. Ding dong.

• 47:11Speaker 05

  Over here, over here.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I actually just watched a body cam where a guy, um, would hang out at a gas station with his penis in a penis pump. And he'd like get it all engorged and open the window and he would do this thing where a woman would go by. He'd go, "Excuse me, miss. May I interest you in this?"

• 47:32Speaker 04

  It's awful.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  I hate when they're nice.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  It's like almost worse.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  Grey Poupon commercial?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well supposedly Gary watched TV with his neighbor and a whole group of his older brother's friends and he tried this bizarre little game over and over again for months. The girl never once reacted.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Great.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  At the very least never acknowledged it. She did the right thing. Well, she should just should have stopped going over there.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, she slugged him in the fucking mouth.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  And so should have some of those boys.

• 48:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Well, you know what it is.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  But I think no one noticed. That's what he said. He said, he always said that no one noticed. No one said anything. And I think if he was bullied as much as he was, because this is like his older brother's friends.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  And like, I know neither of y'all got older brothers. I got two older brothers. When your older brother's friends see anything to make fun of you for, they go for it. Like they go for it fucking hard.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  But what an ultimate example of what Gary's sort of talking about, right? He can't even pull his dick out and get a reaction. He's in this area of all these kids and he's going like, anybody see what Gary's doing? Anybody see what Gary's doing? And he's in the corner and there're nobody, everybody's just going, he's like, nobody cares. Nobody cares if Gary puts his penis.

• 48:48Speaker 05

  And that's exactly how he got away with it for so long.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it is. Now Gary was a loner both before and after puberty. And since he believed masturbation was a sin that was worse than rape, he got his jimmies out by becoming a frotur. How do you, actually, how do you, is it frot- frotur?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Honestly, let's not put the French fucking spin on it.

• 49:06Speaker 05

  I never heard the word before my whole life.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  It's a frodder.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Frodder.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  You can call him just a frodder.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Fraudage.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one of the, that's the terms. It's when you rub up or brush up against somebody for sexual pleasure.

• 49:18Speaker 05

  Ah, yeah, of course the French thought of that.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  But you know, it's like they do it on the train, like it's, it happens a lot in New York City. It's a thing of where you could just kinda like, the guy just sort of lets the tip of his penis touch ya.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  Or it's also trying to rub up against a woman's breasts, you know, just like that. And you're always making it look like an accident, like, oh, sorry, but very much doing it on purpose.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Walk around with the palms of their hands facing out and stuff like that.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Are you a froater?

• 49:47Speaker 05

  No, I got grabbed.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, men, uh, see, I've been fraudish several times.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  I've been frauded myself a few times. But it was also around this time that Gary found that killing living creatures made him feel better about his anger. After suffocating the aforementioned cat at the age of 14 and throwing the corpse amongst the local roadkill, Gary found that killing something, killing anything, it made him feel strong and important. While Gary was discovering this disturbing quirk to his personality, his father took a second job at a mortuary and quite unwisely decided to be open and honest with his son about everything he heard while working with the dead. Thomas Ridgway would tell the teenaged Gary stories about a coworker who would commit necrophilia with the female corpses.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  He would go into grotesque and unnecessary detail with his young son about his coworker's necrophilia.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  Son, this is a funny story. I don't know why you're not laughing. Son, this is a funny story about the time I saw Carlos and we Eiffel Towered that old blind woman. Stop taking notes, I'm telling a story.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  He's so interesting.

• 50:56Speaker 05

  God damn it, every fucking time you say that, we don't spend any time together. And the moment that we find something that I think that we're gonna connect on, you just blow me off.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  What's he like?

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Well, this caused necrophilia to become central to Gary's sexual fantasies, because he began to believe that when you were having sex with a corpse, there were no feelings involved one way or the other.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  For casual.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  And Thomas would also be quite vocal about his personal hatred towards sex workers. He thought they were subhuman. And even though Gary would become a frequent customer on the block, both with sex workers he did and did not murder, he would hold the same opinions as his father throughout his life. Now, as far as his mother went, she also overshared with Gary when it came to the sexual escapades that came as a result of her work at JCPenney. Henry, did your mom ever talk about her sexual escapades at JCPenney, the way the sexy, how sexy things got?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  The worst part is when I learned how she knew the term bukkake. And at first I thought it was because she went by the sushi area by in the food court. Um, and it turns out, no, no, no, no, she met, uh, Mr. Yakimoto. No, no, she never had sex there.

• 52:08Speaker 04

  No.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I don't think so, cause when we went to JCPenney's, you gotta remember, that was a classy place for us.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 52:13Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  That was the classy place. That's where I got my communion suit.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Well, JCPenney, I mean, really, I mean, Dillard's was always considered to be a bar.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  You guys had, we, we dreamt of Dillard's.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, really?

• 52:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, occasionally we'd go to a Bloomingdale's.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Or a Birdhines. Who are you? What are you? Oh, Mr. Vanderbilt?

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Don't even get me started on service merchandise.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  No, my mom never fucked or got sucked or fucked or got fucking gaped in a JCPenney's.

• 52:42Speaker 04

  At least that she told you about.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll call her.

• 52:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, honestly.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  I'll call her and ask.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  Just keep it. She told me and she wouldn't tell you.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  I'm trying to personally, I'm trying to separate the art from the artist, the art being her motherhood of me.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  Understandable. Well, Mary Rita would tell Gary how much she enjoyed measuring men who needed to be fit for pants. Some men, she said, would get involuntary erections from her touch.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Like you, Gary. Usually when I'm drying them off.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Others would emit a certain scent that Mary Rita would inhale while she knelt in front of their crotch.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  That's not real.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  No, it's like a musk.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, people shoot scent out of their cocks? No, she's smelling a guy's dirty ass balls.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  And she's turned, she's turned on by, by smelly balls.

• 53:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, she's turned on by smelly balls and she told her son about this.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Which is like the most, like truly one of the, yeah, sure, you could be into dirty smelly balls, God bless you. But I'm just saying that, you know, you just save that for the quilting room.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  But think about this, he's got, his mother is talking about how much she gets turned on by smelly balls. Her, his father is talking about like, "Yeah, you can fuck a dead girl. It's fine. It's okay." And this is what Gary Ridgeway's fucking growing up with.

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Is it bad that I just got deja vu?

• 54:03Speaker 04

  It's interesting. It's certainly interesting.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  But Mary Rita also continued pushing her son around to the point of depression and deep embarrassment, even beyond the bedwetting incidents. So Gary began fantasizing about murdering his own mother in great detail. He thought about stabbing her in the heart, choking her to death, and setting the house on fire with her still inside.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Still house on fire.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  Gary even-

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Set the building on fire. Set the building on fire.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  Gary even fantasized about torturing his mother, thinking often about what it would be like to sew up her vagina with a needle and a thread.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  It'd be, it'd be kind of, it'd be difficult, but also I'd be proud if I could do it. Just because I finally finished something I wanted.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  I mean, it's the first time he showed creativity.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 05

  Just trying to stay positive.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  Because it does show vague creativity.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  I bet you he just watched his mom preparing the turkey one year for Thanksgiving. He was like, "That's a good idea."

• 55:06Speaker 04

  From fantasizing about killing his mother, Gary moved on to fantasizing about raping and killing his classmates. He began following them home with a massive erection while thinking about all the horrible things he wanted to do. Gary privately referred to this as "patrolling", because these serial killers do love their little terms for their little games.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  It's all validating. It's all the shit in their head that makes it a structure.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Eventually, Gary's constant rage translated itself into property damage, breaking and entering, excessive drinking, and theft. But Gary found that the only thing that really released the pressure valve all the way was violence. And Gary's first violent act towards another human came in 1965, when he was just 16 years old.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  This is like out of a Stephen King novel.

• 55:49Speaker 04

  It really is. In a wooded area beside Gary's high school, Gary stumbled upon a six-year-old kid dressed as a cowboy, innocently just playing. For some reason, seeing this child enjoying an afternoon playing cowboy has filled Gary with uncontrollable rage.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  Was he an Indian?

• 56:07Speaker 04

  I don't think he had any jerky. Nope. So he approached the boy with a plan. He asked the kid if he wanted to go into the woods with Gary where they'd build a fort together. Because, Gary said, there were a lot of people around, quote,

• 56:19Speaker 01

  would like to kill little boys like you.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  So, when Gary got the kid out to the woods and the kid picked up a stick, Gary pulled out his knife and stabbed the child in the torso, hitting his liver. Gary watched and laughed as the blood flowed out of the wound and filled up the child's cowboy boots. But instead of finishing the act, Gary simply walked away. The boy made his way to the road and was found bleeding out by a teacher. He survived. But Gary Ridgway would not be named as the perpetrator of this crime for another 36 years. This, of course, was after he was arrested as the Green River Killer, and he began listing his crimes throughout his life. The cops looked back at the records, looked and found, when Gary said it happened, that there was a kid who was stabbed, dressed as a little cowboy.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  It all happened.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Gary Ridgway could not remember the names of his childhood pets, but he had a near photographic memory of every single crime he ever committed.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  That's not true.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  He would, well, it depends on what he'd like, because of the, you could tell that he fantasized and thought about the stuff that was important to him.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of, there are things that were photographic. There were some things that were hazy. Let's just say he was all fucked up.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  He was all fucked up, but I mean, it just turns out for somebody who couldn't remember his pets, it was shocking how many different shallow graves he could remember, and the different places he could go.

• 57:41Speaker 05

  I just can't believe he was dressing up like a cowboy at 16.

• 57:44Speaker 04

  No!

• 57:45Speaker 05

  I was getting high and shit.

• 57:46Speaker 04

  No, no, no, the little boy was. The little boy was dressed as a cowboy.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 57:51Speaker 04

  No, Gary, Gary Ridgway was always like, pew, pew, I'm a cowboy today.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Howdy, partner, I hope you ready to saddle, we're gonna saddle up and go down to the ranch.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  Oh, so the kid was much younger, okay.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, the kid was six years old.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  Oh, I see, it all makes sense now, I'm sorry.

• 58:09Speaker 04

  It's all right. But while the incident with the little cowboy was Gary's first act of serious violence against another human, he also very likely committed his First murder around this time. Later, Gary would say that he was unsure if his first murder was a hallucination or a dream, which, as you're about to find out, is a common theme amongst Gary's confessions. There is, however, usually evidence linking Gary's hazy recollections to real-life events, so they are worth taking seriously. In 1964, Gary said that he and a younger boy were swimming in a lake near Seattle when Gary suddenly wrapped his legs around his swimmate's neck and dragged the kid into the water below. Gary said that the kid did fight back, but Gary held the kid underwater until he stopped

• 58:54Speaker 04

  moving. And once the kid was dead, Gary said he pulled the body under a nearby dock and left it floating there. Now, while that might have been a hallucination or a dream, public records show that two boys did indeed drown in that same lake during the same year Gary recalled drowning this boy. So it is possible that Gary was responsible for at least one of them. And it's not uncommon for serial killers at this age, when they're teenagers, especially even if they end up killing women later on, to kill little boys, and to just kill anyone.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Well, they're around a little boy.

• 59:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  And that's, but it sounds a lot like Ted Bundy. It sounds a lot like, there's that story, you know, with Ted Bundy with the little girl when he was a little girl, and it matches all his MOs later on.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Actually, and we'll find that Gary Ridgway and Ted Bundy share a lot in common. But even though Gary's life was becoming increasingly dark, both within and without, he actually evened out once he got to high school when it came to social interaction. He actually began dating and eventually got a pretty girl named Claudia Craig to go steady after the two of them met at the supermarket where they both worked. Interestingly, Claudia's mother later said that when Gary came over to their house, when, you know, he was 16, 17, he'd just sit there and never say a word. One day, she said that he came over and just sat in a chair for a full eight hours, didn't say a word to anyone.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  That's fascinating.

• 1:00:28Speaker 04

  Just stared at the wall.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  He's just weirdo, dude. He's just always been like, he doesn't know how to human, like, he's like, he doesn't know how to be a human being.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  That's better than jammering on for a fucking eight hours.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  That is true.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  It's all fine if it wasn't. Gary Ridgway.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  I'd far rather forget that he was there than to get to the end of the eight hours. Look, if you bring that kid over here one more time, I'm gonna fucking murder him.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  I hate Gary. Gary smells like pee.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. But by the end of it, Gary Ridgway came out of high school in 1970 with the reputation of a normal, if dim-witted, individual. He'd been held back twice by the end of it, and therefore graduated at the age of 20, barely able to read or write.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  But since this was 1970 and the draft of the Vietnam War was in full effect, Gary was actually smart enough to join the Navy to avoid the Army. Because in 1970, guys like Gary Ridgway, i.e. guys that were poor and not too bright, they were amongst the first to be handed a rifle before being sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  God, he would have been a great Vietnamese corpse.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  God, he would have been great over there.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  So after going through basic training in San Diego, Gary was assigned to the USS Vancouver in the Philippines, making him yet another serial killer who served in the Vietnam War but came nowhere near combat.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  So interesting.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  Seven or eight.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  That we know of. And that's just that we know of.

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  Who were some of the popular ones? I don't know.

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  David Berkowitz, Leonard Lake.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Leonard Lake was a good... He definitely... Yeah, he was a big liar.

• 1:01:59Speaker 04

  I think Arthur Shawcross, maybe?

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm pretty certain Arthur Shawcross.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  Henry's dad?

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  My daddy... My daddy only could kill my dreams.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  Well, like so many other serial killers in Vietnam, Gary Ridgway discovered the wide world of sex workers overseas. David Berkowitz was another who got very involved with sex workers over there.

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  You can barely tell.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't know, right?

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  Apparently, though, something happened to Gary that he would never actually discuss, which is surprising considering how Gary would talk about pretty much anything once investigators got him going. Gary said that something happened with sex workers in the Philippines that he never got out of his system, something that was so bad that he said he probably should have gone to counseling for it. But Gary refused to elaborate any further on what actually happened.

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Probably got the shit kicked out of him by a pimp.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Maybe.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:02:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, one thing that Gary definitely talked about was how the Philippines kick-started his lifelong fetish for inserting foreign objects into vaginas.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:03:04Speaker 04

  He said this developed from experiences with local Filipino sex workers, who would walk up to sailors, reach under their skirts, and... Pull out pre-inserted beer bottles, straight from the vagina.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Wow, were they cold?

• 1:03:19Speaker 04

  They were very warm. These beer bottles would then be handed over to a potential customer, I suppose, as a way to impress or titillate the American sailors.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  What did we just learn from the Anton LaVey series? What have we learned about old men recently? I... they were disgusting.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Older men and what they liked was actually way grosser than even what we like now.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  You mean men that...

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  From the time period.

• 1:03:42Speaker 04

  From that time period.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's something about like, like that being like my, my, the stories I heard from my dad when he used to go to Hogs and Heifers. It was a lot of girls peeing and things.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  Hogs and Heifers?

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  That's the original Coyote Ugly.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what it's all based off of.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  It's just a lot of old play that we weren't, you know, there was like panty raids.

• 1:04:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. But they put up with a lot more.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  They did.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  They stopped putting up with stuff.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  I think that's, I think that's what changed.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  He said, "Stop."

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Stop.

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• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  Like a lot of Navy men at the time, Gary caught gonorrhea twice during his time in the service, but he surprisingly didn't place the blame for that on the sex workers. He said they actually treated him well and they introduced him to the more erotic sexual practices beyond the vanilla missionary position.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  He means doggy style. That's what he became obsessed with.

• 1:08:59Speaker 04

  Gary would however, also later tell his second wife that he developed a hatred for these same Filipino sex workers. So Gary had developed a relationship with sex workers that was, to say the least, messy. He both loved them for giving him pleasure and he hated them for what that sin represented. But even though Gary was having sex with women in the Philippines who both were and were not sex workers, he had shipped off to the Navy as a married man. His high school girlfriend, Claudia Craig, had actually agreed to marry Gary before he went off to the Philippines.

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  Mary and P pants Gary, man.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  It's fucking men or dogs.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. You fucking take on that piss soaked gentleman? And then he's gonna go and get covered in fucking gonorrhea and the war?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  By the time they got together, he cleared up the pee pee. The bedwetting stopped when he was about 15.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  I don't know if it ever leaves your spirit. You know what I mean?

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  In the doc, it said that he got gonorrhea and chlamydia. And that he resented the sex workers for it. And that's kinda like why he started killing people down the road.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  The doc simplifies it.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  Huge simplification. Yeah. That's a massive, massive simplification.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Doesn't chlamydia untreated make you crazy?

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  He was treated.

• 1:10:15Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz he got treated at the military hospital. He went and got, uh...

• 1:10:20Speaker 05

  VA.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  If you catch it, go something, get for it.

• 1:10:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, yeah, and really, all of these details in true crime. It's really hard to pin down what's real and what's not. Did he get gonorrhea twice? Did he get gonorrhea once and chlamydia once?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  It's from, it's his story, yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cuz he lies, too.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now Claudia was left back in San Diego. But she was just as unfaithful as Gary. And because both of them were unfaithful, the marriage fell apart less than a year after they got married. Gary branded his wife a whore, even though he had also stepped out dozens of times. And Gary's hatred towards women grew even more. Now, he had tried a few relationships after returning from the Philippines to Washington State. But after he found that he couldn't make anything last more than a few months, he returned to sex workers, all while his rage towards women continued bubbling in his belly. Now, after Gary received an honorable discharge after 23 months in the Navy, he got a job at a plant called Kenworth Trucking that specialized in the production of medium and heavy duty commercial trucks, 18-wheelers and such.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  And there, it was discovered that Gary had an affinity for detailing vehicles, which involved painting the lettering, logos, and stripes that indicate which truck belongs to which company or which trucker. Cuz this is the age of the trucker.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 05

  Convoy!

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  It's when truckers, they were the ones killing sex workers with impunity. And we should have, you know, like, we would celebrate them by saying, "Here you go, here's some PTSD."

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  Kings of the road, they were.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Speaker 04

  But Gary did not start off as a master detailer. And whatever Gary did, he always started off making mistakes. But once he got it, he could nail it. The only thing that would trip Gary up is if some part of the process changed. And Gary fucked up so often that he got the long-lasting nickname Wrong Way. Because of how many times he would have to repaint an entire truck after using the wrong color or the wrong kind of paint. Wrong Way, Ridgeway.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  And he did not like the nickname.

• 1:12:21Speaker 04

  He did not like being called that because they would call him Wrong Way Gary.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Wrong Way Gary. Wrong Way, which is replaced, replaced Fist Pants Gary. And he's just been like, I'm gonna build a building now.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  As far as his reputation at work went, Gary was known as friendly if overbearing. Because what gave people pause was Gary's behavior towards female employees. On many occasions, Gary would approach a female coworker and massage their shoulders without asking them. And since this was 1972, his behavior was shrugged off as, oh, Gary, he's friendly. He's just a little too friendly, but essentially harmless.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  All, I think all the sex workering kind of made him weird with ladies.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  He might have.

• 1:13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  Man, but even though Gary was a creep, he never had trouble getting wives, much less girlfriends. And he met his next wife, Marsha Winslow, using a tactic that would probably get him pepper sprayed in this day and age.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  It's just hard out there for women, okay? And the bar is extremely low and it is only just raised about three inches, maybe.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, in 1972, Marsha Winslow was driving a scenic loop that circled Lake Washington. And a car very suddenly pulled up quickly and closely behind her own. Marsha pulled over, assuming it was a cop that was trying and somehow failing to give her a ticket. Because for being honest, it's not like Gary Ridgeway, he did not. The women that he was with were also, they were about as smart as he was.

• 1:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get it. It kind of, it comes up over and over again.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  You have to be.

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:55Speaker 01

  Because this.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  Exactly, because any intelligent woman would just shit him out.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yes, this woman was pulled over by him in a way that is very frightening.

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  Very frightening.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  And the fact that she's just like, no.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  Ay, ay.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  I guess I'll see what he wants.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, ay.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  But instead, it was Gary Ridgway, who introduced himself as an interested romantic party.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Uh, uh, just would it say you were speeding back there? Into my romantic inclination.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Incredibly, Marcia was charmed by his clean-cut appearance and his military manners. And even though he accidentally called Marcia by his first wife's name the first time they had sex. Classic. Marcia and Gary quickly moved in together and were married by 1973. Now, while Gary's first wife said that his sexual habits weren't anything special, Gary insisted on anal sex with his second wife, Marcia, and sometimes tied her hands and feet with belts from bathrobes. He started getting into bondage.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Suddenly doing it upside down, Indonesia.

• 1:14:55Speaker 04

  Gary also began exploring his fetish for having sex outdoors, usually off hiking trails or campsites. Incidentally, he and Marcia would have sex in many of the same places that Gary would later hide the bodies of his murder victims.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Cute.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Eventually, Gary became so fond of having sex outdoors that he installed silk-screened wallpaper featuring forest scenes on the headboard of his bed, so he could still, quote, "enjoy the view" while having sex indoors.

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  If I could just, well, I'm going, if you could just stop moving your head around, because I got all these pine cones. I'm putting these pine cones next to your head.

• 1:15:33Speaker 04

  On these trips, though, Gary's behavior was also becoming more sinister. He would suddenly disappear into the woods during hikes, so he could practice being completely silent, to the point where his wife was worried that he wasn't coming back. And then, at the height of her fear, as she's wandering around saying, "Gary, Gary, where are you", he'd either jump out from behind a bush and go, "Ha!", or he'd grab her arm from behind. Later, Marcia would say, quote,

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  "He liked to see how softly he could walk, so that he could be just totally niceless. And he could do it, too."

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  There's an exclamation point on that.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  He could do it, too.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  It's like, because I can, because that's the thing, is like, that's not, the voice that I hear is just like, it's a...

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he liked to, he liked to see how softly. Ay, ay, ay. And he could do it, too.

• 1:16:18Speaker 05

  You know, he sound, he sound as a snooker. A lot of people say I sound like a man.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I, I, I agree.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  Now, Marcia lasted far longer than Gary's first wife. And by 1975, Marcia had given birth to Gary's first son, Matthew.

• 1:16:38Speaker 05

  Where's he at?

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  You know what? Give him his privacy.

• 1:16:41Speaker 05

  Side stories, L P O T L at gmail dot com. Love to hear from you.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  I'm guessing wherever he is, he's got a different last name.

• 1:16:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  After Matthew's birth.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Bidge way.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  Sorry, continue.

• 1:16:56Speaker 05

  I know we're supposed to give these people their privacy because it is only right. But I'm always so curious where the fuck they're off hiding.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:17:04Speaker 05

  You know, it's like you, because I mean, it's gotta just destroy you.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  Most of them are just off trying to live their lives. Every once in a while, you get somebody who wants to come forward and make it their entire identity, like Dennis Rader's daughter. Yeah, like some, but that's, that's very rare. Most of the time, these people change their names, like a lot of serial, a lot of them in the past, like as soon as the guy, the husband gets arrested, the mother will move, change their name and never speak to them again.

• 1:17:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would just, if that was my dad, I would just make sure, I mean, I'm already not having kids, but like I would just make sure I don't have kids.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they just snip it off.

• 1:17:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, or just do the inside cut.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, kill the butt line.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry, God, I know. We don't deserve it anymore.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  I'm actually, there is an interview with Matthew Ridgway in the News Tribune from 2000 fucking, from, it was updated in 2021.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  And it's him being like, it's just weird because like my dad never used racial slurs. He never yelled and he never talked about prostitutes. It was just, I mean, I don't know, he just, he was just trying to be a father, like you see in the TV show.

• 1:18:17Speaker 04

  Father knows best. Gary knows best.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Gary knows best.

• 1:18:20Speaker 05

  That's how bored we all were during covid. Matthew Ridgeway came out of hiding, talking about his father.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  I give you some attention. I didn't you guys notice I've been, I've been twitching.

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  Well, after Matthew's birth, Gary got far more religious. But rather than following in his mother's Catholic footsteps, Gary joined several Protestant churches, as if one church wasn't enough. Marcia described Gary as being almost fanatical about religion after the birth of their son. He would read the Bible both at home and at work. She said that tears would fall from Gary's eyes during church services, and he'd spend his nights watching TV while clutching his Bible. Gary even started walking door to door in his neighborhood, trying to convert his neighbors. But he would get furious when those neighbors inevitably slammed their doors in his face again and again.

• 1:19:13Speaker 05

  Is that common? Like, people being really religious and also being serial killers?

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  No, not really.

• 1:19:19Speaker 05

  They're usually atheists?

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  It depends, because there's also, there's a whole subset. There's the missionary killer. There is a, there's a subset of, of killer that is entirely religiosity, like, based. It's all like their own fantasy world. So, it really depends, like largely you, it would turn, it would turn into a new category. He is a good guy that would use the Bible for my, what I'm gonna, my, my call, my fucking Sunday morning psychiatrist call, is the fact that he used it as like a lot of people use it, which is the possible Hail Mary pass at the end of life. And that he was constantly trying to validate the feelings that he was feeling, because weirdly, it all came from this like emotional place.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's very easy with Christianity to come to the conclusion that women are evil, uh, because there are many churches that preach that specific thing.

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  And many verses in the Bible that talk about it. And the whole story of Adam and Eve, and every single woman that is ever around Jesus Christ is always just tempting him and doing it. It's almost like they, they've been putting that idea that women- Evil expendable whores in our brains ever since we started this whole process.

• 1:20:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's the Catholic Church still won't let women be priests and whenever they want to get more involved, they put them in a habit and stick them in a building.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  You want to know why? You want to know why? It's because I'm starting to think it's because women hold people accountable.

• 1:20:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  I think that might be a part of the function.

• 1:20:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, also, I remember him saying in the doc that he that he thought that he would be forgiven if he asked for it.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  Sure, that's the Hail Mary that Henry was talking about. It's there's always that back pocket.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  They always got it. Look at David Berkowitz. That's all it is. He's Mr. Jesus now.

• 1:21:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, when David Berkowitz and Gary Ridgway die, by by the rules of Christianity, both of them are going to heaven.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Them, it's gonna be them, Charlie Kirk, Michael Jackson, all of our favorites. Connor McGregor.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  Gary's main church was Pentecostal and his pastor and steel.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  Which is bad. Yeah, bad idea for him.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  And his pastor instilled even more archaic views about women beyond the horrible shit his parents had already taught him. The Pentecostals taught that wives and daughters wouldn't make it to heaven if they didn't obey their husbands. And even something as small as having short hair or wearing the color red, both of those things, massive sins for women.

• 1:21:47Speaker 05

  What if it's our hair? Even worse.

• 1:21:51Speaker 00

  Crows out of her.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Cut her head. Cut her fucking head off. Cut her sucking head off.

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Save it.

• 1:21:59Speaker 04

  This, of course, caused a rift in Gary's marriage, just like it had in his parents' marriage, although the male and female roles in Gary's marriage were reversed. But speaking of Gary's mother, Mary Rita soon became the main pressure point in Gary and Marcia's marriage. For some reason, Mary Rita had access to Gary's bank accounts, and she made her opinions known concerning how Gary and Marcia spent their money.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  People are weird with that shit.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Really weird about it. On weekends, Gary would spend his free time with his mother instead of his wife. But Marcia soon discovered that it was probably for the best if Gary went on these visits alone. One night when Marcia came along, Thomas and Mary Rita got into a fight and Mary Rita got so worked up that she smashed a plate over her husband's head. Now, Thomas left the room without saying a word, which had become a pretty common reaction from Gary's father throughout Gary's life when his mother got abusive. But by the early to mid 70s, Gary's head was filled with a bunch of Pentecostal bullshit about how women were supposed to act. And Mary Rita had only become more domineering after she'd been promoted to a manager position at JCPenney.

• 1:23:05Speaker 05

  You can't fuck with that shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it wrong that I'm like, rightfully so? Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Working nine to five. So, the idea of how a woman was supposed to act, as it was presented in Gary's Pentecostal church, that became mixed with Gary's hatred towards the fair sex, which edged him closer and closer towards serial murder. Now, after Gary got switched to night shifts detailing trucks and Marcia started taking classes during the day, the relationship began to dissolve. Marcia then got gastric bypass surgery and lost a lot of weight.

• 1:23:41Speaker 05

  It's always a warning sign, fellas.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  And she used her newfound confidence to start a career as a professional singer, entertaining locals at nearby bars.

• 1:23:50Speaker 05

  I just love her life.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  I love it.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  Her life is insane.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  She's fucking on the great trajectory.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  I don't like this family, Gary. I'm getting a bypass and I'm becoming a singer. I'm mad at things about it, Kenny. Gary always making a big deal about the Bible, but my Bible's the Songbook of Liza Minnelli.

• 1:24:15Speaker 04

  Gary, of course, hated his wife's new lease on life. And he started accusing her of sleeping with other men during her late nights entertaining. This was, of course, projection, because Gary had never stopped seeing sex workers throughout his two marriages, despite what the church might have to say about it. Because remember, he still thinks that masturbation is one of the worst sins in the world. Things between Marcia and Gary came to a head one night when they returned home from a party where they'd both been drinking. They argued all the way home, but when they pulled into the driveway and Marcia got out of the car... Gary hung back. He then snuck up behind her using his silent technique and he began choking her so she couldn't see who was doing it. Marcia actually thought for a second that some stranger

• 1:24:57Speaker 04

  was indeed attacking her, but she soon realized what was really happening. See, after Gary let go, he tried dodging around the other side of the car like a fucking little kid trying to get away with something. Then he emerged pretending to be shocked that, "Oh my god, some guy just tried choking you. That's crazy."

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  He wouldn't believe you. I saw him. He had big dumb eyes and he had a big dumb mouth and he had some ringo hair.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  Moustache.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  Moustache.

• 1:25:24Speaker 04

  Marcia, of course, knew that Gary was the perpetrator. But for Gary's part, he said that this was the moment when something vicious and evil had been unleashed. He later admitted that choking her had majorly turned him on. He said, quote,

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  "Well, after that, I wanted to have sex with a prostitute and kill her doing that."

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  Direct quote. And one of the many things, it's hard to pin down concerning Gary-

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  This is what I like. You know what I mean? It's so hard. We go through everybody's, it's like, oh, do what you love and then you never have to work a day in your life. And actually, what Gary shows is an exact example. When your passion becomes your work, you actually never stop working.

• 1:26:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:26:02Speaker 05

  Epiphanies aren't always good.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's been a couple of like eureka moments that have been pretty bad for us.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, really bad. Yeah, the same guy who created leaded gasoline also created CFCs. We could have used two less euricas from that guy.

• 1:26:21Speaker 01

  You could just see the guy pouring COVID-17 and pouring 18 together into one vial.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  Now, one of the many things that's hard to pin down concerning Gary Ridgway is exactly when he began murdering women. He told investigators that it was, quote, "Very possible that he'd killed several women during the 1970s, but his memories were hazy. The best he could offer was a vague memory of killing a sex worker while he was living with Marcia, but he could only remember that something went wrong on a so-called date and that he'd probably killed a sex worker during that date."

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Just saying, this is just how many he killed.

• 1:26:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's weird to kind of believe him.

• 1:27:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh, a hundred percent. I absolutely believe him. He's not smart enough to lie.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  And he's, he's not a Henry Lee Lucas. There is, he brought, he corroborated quite a bit of what he was talking about. Later on, it's just, you know, it's just hard when you look at him and you're like, you can't believe how much devastation this little fucking idiot did.

• 1:27:19Speaker 04

  But you can also tell that he, he's also trying to figure out like, what happened? Like, he's, he's trying to figure out like, that's why he's talk, he talks so much and he's just like, he even, it's a, he's a mystery even to himself.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  And when they do those, right, we'll get into it later on, when they do the thing where they drive him around and stuff and he's just been like, thank you, Mr. Grayson. Thank you so much. And he's just like this nice little man and he's like whistling and stuff.

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Now, according to Marcia, Gary kept coming home later and later throughout the mid to late seventies. And he'd often walk through the door, wet and covered in dirt, with no other explanation other that his car had broken down again and again and again. She also noted that Gary always kept several rolls of a protective plastic covering called Visqueen in the bed of his truck. And several of his later victims would of course be found covered in the same variety of plastic wrap.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  And you know, he got that from his detailing job?

• 1:28:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course. So no, um, fingerprints on that?

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  Um, no, actually.

• 1:28:25Speaker 05

  So he must have used gloves?

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Well, this is, it really depends, dude, because it's like, in terms of the technology, fingerprint technology is really nowhere near anything that they show on movies and television. It is so, it's such an inexact science and it's so not dependable that like, it's so hard to do. Because you have to, you have to, you have to make sure nobody fucks up the, the scene. It has to be pristine.

• 1:28:52Speaker 05

  I guess it's all covered in dirt, too.

• 1:28:53Speaker 04

  Well, also remember like, his victims were usually found two, three days later, sometimes weeks, some weeks later, years later. This is the Pacific Northwest. It's fucking raining all the time. You know, so that that makes forensic evidence like fingerprints really difficult to lift. Now investigators tried their damnedest to pin down Gary's first kill, but the best Gary could do was vaguely recall two or three times in which he thought he'd killed a woman. In these incidents in the late 70s, Gary said that he might have strangled women, then left their bodies in the middle of the street, against the fence in a popular park, or lying against a newsstand where they would definitely have been found. But Ridgeway said that he'd never heard any reports in the media about these women,

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  so he concluded again and again that he had only choked these women until they'd lost consciousness. And after Gary left them, he thought that they'd just woken up and walked away, saying, quote,

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  "You'd figure that she'd wake up if she wasn't dead."

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  You'd figure.

• 1:29:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, you would.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  If I was a betting man, which I am, I'd put $10,000, then I'd kill those women.

• 1:30:02Speaker 04

  And by 1980, Marcia had finally had enough of Gary Ridgeway. That summer, she told Gary to go out and treat himself to a nice breakfast, alone. And while he thought it was a strange request, he still did what he was told.

• 1:30:15Speaker 05

  Simple guy, simple little guy.

• 1:30:17Speaker 04

  Well, simple guy, simple gal.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Go get some breakfast.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  Can you imagine that? Can you imagine you come home, you know you're in trouble? You know how much trouble you're in if your if your wife goes, "Hey, go get some fucking breakfast."

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  Go out, get breakfast.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  Go get breakfast.

• 1:30:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. Honestly, that'd be a great way to deal with fights.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  I just keep driving.

• 1:30:37Speaker 04

  But when Gary came back home, he found a moving van in the driveway, and a very surprised Marcia, who she had expected to have all of her shit and all of her son's shit packed up and gone by the time he returned.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  Didn't you go to the goddamn Shoney's? I thought you were going to the buffet. No, as a matter of fact, I actually stopped by the, I stopped by the Burger King. And it gets pretty close, so it was actually pretty fast for me, pretty quick.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  Because, you know, Marcia thought that she could get all of her stuff moved out in the time it takes a man to eat a stack of pancakes. Like I said, not, not the brightest bulb either.

• 1:31:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  But regardless of Marcia's cognitive abilities, Gary was extremely upset that Marcia had left. He'd wanted to be a normal family man, and now he'd had his second marriage fail after seven years, and they've also got a five-year-old son together. Gary's anger only grew when he found out he had to pay child support, but the new expense certainly didn't stop him from doling out 20 bucks a blowjob to the sex workers he continued picking up around the Sea Tax Strip. Later, a forensic psychiatrist asked Gary why he wanted to hurt sex workers in the first place, and Gary lamely offered that it was because women had hurt him, specifically his first two wives had hurt him. Gary, in fact, said that he had thought about killing Marcia because he didn't want to be seen as a loser with two failed marriages.

• 1:31:58Speaker 04

  Gary even speculated that if he had just killed Marcia back in 1980, he would only have the murder of one woman on his conscience instead of 50-plus. And he actually used that number. He said 50-plus, because by the end of it, Gary himself only had a vague idea of how many women he'd killed. But, he said, the only reason why he didn't kill Marcia is because he knew he would be the prime suspect, which proved that for Gary Ridgway, killing was absolutely a choice.

• 1:32:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's weird. He's stupid, but he knows that.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  You see, well, that's because this is what being stupid, that's like one of the biggest injustices about being stupid, is that you can be stupid and know you're stupid. And no, he know, he's just smart enough to know how stupid he is, and he can't see, it is like a fog, like he can't see all of the reasons for the decisions that he makes because he works really instinctually and he doesn't have, which shows again, he should, he would have killed Marcia. If he was gonna kill her, he would have killed her. And I actually partially think it's the other, it's the, I kind of thought in my head, get, this sex should have been free, we should be doing this, she should be loving me, this is like a thing, and when I kill her, it wipes out the whole incident.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  I feel like there's some of that, too. And then we'll also find out later on, he killed them to freeze them in place.

• 1:33:19Speaker 04

  Possibly, yeah.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  To free, to, so then he could do whatever he want.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Not all the time.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  But, enough.

• 1:33:25Speaker 04

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Enough.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think with Marcia, the only reason why he would kill is like he would kill her. So no one would find out about the divorce.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Speaker 04

  Because if he killed her, then he's a grieving widower with a young son. And he gets a lot of sympathy from his church, from his peers, from his parents, from everybody. But he knew, he was smart enough to know, like, the husband's always the first person. So, yeah, always a choice for him. Now, not too long after Marcia filed for divorce, Gary was arrested for the first, but certainly not the last time in relation to prostitution. After cruising for a lady of the night, Gary picked one up and began choking her the same way he choked Marcia. This woman survived and did report the assault to the police. But guess what happened? The police absolutely questioned Gary, but Gary calmly explained that the choking was a justified act of self-defense

• 1:34:19Speaker 04

  because the woman had bitten his penis during oral sex. The charge got dropped.

• 1:34:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we all know that fucking story. Yeah, buddy, get out of here.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  Get out of here. And the cops had no further questions for Gary Ridgway.

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  Cops are great. Damn, that's fucking horrifying.

• 1:34:35Speaker 04

  Very bleak.

• 1:34:37Speaker 05

  Because like, even if his case is true, it's still choking a woman.

• 1:34:44Speaker 04

  Very bleak. Yeah, still choking a woman.

• 1:34:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just, and it's.

• 1:34:48Speaker 05

  But you forget, Eddie, it's not a woman to them, it's a sex worker, so she's expendable.

• 1:34:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  Did he still get arrested for the sex work thing?

• 1:34:58Speaker 04

  No, not worth it.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  That's what guys do.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  Well, they can't really prove that. Uh, they have to catch you in the act.

• 1:35:04Speaker 05

  He said she bit his dick.

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 05

  That's what guys do, buddy.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  You know how many whores you choke, right? You know how much you love doing that? My insides just vomited when you said that. You know how much you love doing it?

• 1:35:20Speaker 04

  Some really foul shit, Henry.

• 1:35:21Speaker 05

  You don't like that? No, I know what he likes.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  After his divorce, Gary discovered a support group called Parents Without Partners. And he began meeting women that he didn't have to pay to be in his presence.

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:35:34Speaker 04

  After his divorce was finalized in May of 1981, Gary began dating a woman who is known only as Darla.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Darla sounds like she'd be for Gary.

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, well, Darla's for, I would say, um, Darla's for Gary, but Gary's not for Darla.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  And just like he done with Marcia, Gary quickly moved in with Darla in her West Seattle home, although she had no idea what kind of person she was. Darla wasn't really a think ahead type of gal.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Nah, man, she's a fun, fun lady.

• 1:36:03Speaker 04

  She really is. She quickly discovered that Gary was the type who liked sex, wanted it up to three times a day. And according to Darla, sex was basically Gary's hobby, and Darla liked sex too, so that was alright. As far as personality went, Darla described Gary as gentle, if a bit dim and detached. But Darla pretty much saw Gary as just a fun fling. He liked having sex outdoors. Darla was an exhibitionist, and since Gary was clean, considerate, and didn't drink much, he was surprisingly safe.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Such a barst, just so low. I like Gary because he likes to fuck outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate wolves. Alright, that's what I like. I like getting leaves in my clothes.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, hell yeah. I saw branch snapping, oh, I just squirted.

• 1:36:50Speaker 04

  Things used to be simpler.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  But Darla and Gary therefore began exploring their sexuality even more. And Gary reawakened his insertion fetish by shoving fruit up Darla's vagina while she was tied up. She did say he never hurt her, and the weirdness of it all was actually quite exciting. From my reading, Gary and Darla seem like the type of couple who would send nude Polaroids to men's magazines like Gallery for their Girl Next Door spreads. Today, they're the type who'd probably upload videos to Pornhub under the amateur heading.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Nobody knows what Gallery is. Nobody does. It's only Marcus who collects hundreds of them.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  You know, you know how, you know your favorite magazine.

• 1:37:32Speaker 04

  Okay, Gary, it's better than Hustler, but not as good as Wee. I'll say that. As far as information goes and as far as, you know. You ever, you don't love, you don't have a subscription to slit magazine?

• 1:37:47Speaker 04

  Dead Girls, Dead Girl Month. Hey, you took it to that place. These are classy magazines. Yeah, Dead Girl Month. It's all girls that were alive last month.

• 1:37:59Speaker 04

  But while they were all having a fun, sexy time.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  Ooh, yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  Gary decided in 1981 that he wanted full custody of his son.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, he needs to be a dad.

• 1:38:08Speaker 04

  Darla.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  That's my first thought. Darla, however, already had four kids that were all in the custody of their respective fathers. Ooh, Darla.

• 1:38:18Speaker 05

  She fucks in the woods.

• 1:38:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, so father of my first son was the god Pam. Yeah, the green man of, of folklore.

• 1:38:30Speaker 04

  Like I said, you look at these, like, you know, the pictures that they send in these old magazines, like, what kind of person, what kind of people are these? It's Darla. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Darla, waitress, Pacific Northwest. But she didn't really want to even raise her own kids. Nope. So she certainly didn't want a hand in raising anyone else's. So Darla broke up with Gary and Gary got another woman to hate. Soon after, though, Gary bought a house on the aforementioned strip in what is now the city of Sea-Tac between Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. This was the Pacific Highway South, Highway 99 corridor, south of Seattle, around Sea-Tac Airport, which was quite the popular spot for sex workers.

• 1:39:10Speaker 04

  And so Gary now had a house that was right next to a location where the sex workers were available in numerous. And if we go by what another of his girlfriends said, the one after Darla, this easy access was marching Gary closer to murder. This former girlfriend, whom Gary had also met through the Parents Without Partners support group, said that on fucking Christmas Eve, 1981, Gary broke down and told her that he had nearly killed a woman recently.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Let's just say, Gary, these confessions are more of a February thing.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Because really, honestly, I just want to watch White Christmas.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  I don't wanna do this right now.

• 1:39:53Speaker 04

  Mid-January at the earliest.

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  Also, parents without partners is like a good idea, but it should clearly be single moms and single dads in separate meetings.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it should just be. Alright guys, you're sad, let's fuck. Yeah, that's all it is. Welcome to Mistakes Weekly.

• 1:40:13Speaker 04

  Two months later, in February of 1982, Gary told another girlfriend that he'd done something. And while he didn't say what that something was, he did tell his girlfriend to pay close attention to the news in the coming days. Now, no sex worker murders showed up in the news, but Gary later said that he vaguely remembered murdering a woman at his house around this time and dropping her body off somewhere on Highway 18. The identity of this woman, if she does indeed exist, remains unknown. But Gary was just two months away from his first official victim, whose murder would kick off a vicious, two-year-long murder spree and a decades-long investigation.

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  That, of course, is where we'll pick back up next time for Gary's legendary rampage and a full exploration of the how when it comes to the age of the serial killer.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  God, it feels so good to be back in the blood.

• 1:41:08Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  Like doing true crime, and it's true crime, honestly.

• 1:41:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  So fuck it, good work, Marcus.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Good work, everybody. Good work, Eddie.

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  I didn't do much but watch a documentary.

• 1:41:19Speaker 01

  Patreon.com/LastPodcastOnTheLeft. You can listen to these episodes ad-free. You can also see Last's stream on The Left Live every Tuesday, 5pm PST. Also, go to LP on The Left for all of your social media needs. I am going to stress, you need to go to LPN TV on YouTube. Watch our new HGX 2.

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  If I have to hear one more person says, "You know, why don't they promo these on the show?" This is the only... I know it's at the end. We do it at the end because in the beginning, it's annoying.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:41:48Speaker 05

  It's a way to respect for you.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  We do it at the end, but that's the thing, is that you don't listen to the end. But for those of you listening, I love you.

• 1:41:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Check out HGX 2, it's fucking great.

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  It really is unbelievable. Everyone fucking put their best foot forward on that one.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  And we have an announcement coming very, very soon about Bloodbath 77.

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:07Speaker 01

  That will be coming out very, very soon. And then we will also be, uh, go check out, we got new things from No Dogs coming out. We got new things from The Pride Decide coming out. We got new things from Spun, new things from Romanticy. Go check out all of our various YouTube channels.

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  Nerd of Mouth 2 is on YouTube now.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. We are, we got them on camera.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  They are on camera now. It's a wide lens. And you can really soak it in, soak in them nerd.

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  So can our boys.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  So can man. I wish you could be in that room.

• 1:42:39Speaker 05

  Oh, man, we got two JK ultras left. And most importantly, if you're sad that you missed the frickin' tour, we are putting what our last show in Oklahoma City is gonna livestream out.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:50Speaker 05

  So you guys can get tickets to that. Stay tuned for exact instructions on that. But that is gonna be shit next week. It's gonna happen. I can't wait for everyone to see this show.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:43:01Speaker 05

  We've refined it over two years.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  We've been working on this thing and we're gonna put it to bed. And I really want whoever hasn't seen it to see it, cuz it is fucking amazing.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:43:12Speaker 05

  So we're gonna be in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 17th. And then we're gonna be in Oklahoma City on July 18th. And then I'm solo running over to Plano, Texas, right after that on July 19th. So come hang out with me.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  That's where you're gonna meet like, what's his name from No Country of Old Men?

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  Chigar.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Speaker 04

  Nah, you gotta go over to San Angelo for that.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Speaker 04

  You're not, you're, you're, Plano, you're just basic.

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  I'm too close to Texas.

• 1:43:36Speaker 04

  You're in Dallas.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:37Speaker 04

  Plano is Dallas.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  I know. I keep saying Plano, but it is Dallas.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're, you're, you're in Dallas and you gotta travel quite far to get to the Psychopaths.

• 1:43:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:45Speaker 04

  In San Angelo, one of those days.

• 1:43:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  We'll get you out there.

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  Thank you. I appreciate it. Also, this, um, next weekend, July 10th, 12th, and 13th, I'm in the tri-state area. Come find me. I'm gonna be in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for Salute to Bethlehem. Newark, New Jersey on the 12th, and City Winery in New York City with a bunch of, uh, I, I booked, uh, some friends of the Roundtable. I have a little surprise for you guys.

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  Oh, fun.

• 1:44:08Speaker 05

  So that's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  That's really nice.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Fuck, yeah.

• 1:44:11Speaker 05

  Bringing them chuckle hunters out of retirement.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love to hear. Dust them off.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Bring them up.

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  We'll be back. We'll see you next week. Hail, sweet Satan.

• 1:44:19Speaker 04

  Nugging.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Pee pants Gary.

• 1:44:23Speaker 05

  I'm gonna hail my new cousin, Melody, and Mitchell, who got married right next to the forest where Gary Ridgeway was murdering these people.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yay. May your union be blessed. Yay, it's another wonderful connection.

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  Welcome to the family, Melody.

• 1:44:49Speaker 06

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