By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The man believed to have been the Northwest’s most prolific killer is reportedly nearing death, and one thing which sets him apart from most high-profile murderers is that he didn’t use as gun on any of his victims.
News of his approaching death appeared Monday at MyNorthwest.com.
He strangled them, either by hand or using ligatures, as noted in his biography at Wikipedia. He is believed to have killed dozens of women, although he was convicted of having murdered only 49 victims, for which he was sentenced to 49 life terms in prison, with no possibility of parole.
Much like another notorious killer from the Pacific Northwest—Ted Bundy, who was executed in Florida in January 1989—Ridgway typically discarded the bodies of his victims in wooded areas, except for the few he dumped in the Green River south of Seattle, hence the nickname “Green River Killer.”
The King County Sheriff’s Department keeps a website showing images of his victims.
Like Bundy, Ridgway also negotiated with investigators, using facts about his murders as bargaining chips. Unlike Bundy, however, Ridgway was able to deal his way out of a death penalty by leading authorities to his body dump sites and acknowledging at least 49 slayings. Bundy, on the other hand, found out the hard way that he couldn’t make a deal by playing games with Florida authorities. Once he was convicted and sentenced, the time clock just kept counting down until he was electrocuted.
What Ridgway’s story—and even Bundy’s story—reminds people is that it is the person, not an inanimate object, whether a firearm, knife, hammer or some other instrument or even a rock, is the killer. Ridgway’s brutal string of murders was all on him, not a gun. That reality gets lost in the debate over gun control, when the gun prohibition lobby exploits homicide to erode the rights of law-abiding citizens by deflecting blame from the criminal to the tool he or she uses. The strategy doesn’t work when a monster such as the Green River Killer uses his hands.
Anti-gunners prefer the public to forget people like Gary Ridgway, because the example his saga provides is not the one which advances their effort to be rid of guns and the right to own them.
