Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 672: Gary Ridgway : Redux Part II - The Aroma of Tacoma

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

This week, the boys return to Gary Ridgway as the Green River Killer begins his reign of terror along the SeaTac Strip. As bodies start washing up in and around the Green River, police miss lead after lead while Ridgway hides in plain sight. Along the way, we take a detour into Murderland to ask whether America’s most polluted places helped create America’s most terrifying murderers. For Live Shows, Merch, and More Visit: www.LastPodcastOnTheLeft.comKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Last Podcast on the Left ad-free, plus get Friday episodes a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There's no place to escape to this is the last talk on the left That's when the cannibalism started You know, like getting back into Gary's, like it's a simple place to be at Getting back into Gary. Because your old Gary was different than your new Gary, right? Very much so, yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. Because he always like, yeah, we, right?

Gary, well, people coming at Gary We were doing that going, Gary we, peepant, Gary. Yeah. And now it's nice because really is the Stephen Rood of it all really comes around when you watch him. Yeah. Because he's got little, truly, the way I would describe him is it, remember that little cute bunny puppet from Muppets? The one that was in the Muppet, the Christmas Tale, Vision 3D, he's in that. That little cute bunny.

It's like he, Bean Bunny. He's got Bean Bunny's face surrounded by a rapist. It is the weirdest thing to see. how the longer he talks, he's like, yep, yeah, I had a kill him. We haven't seen Bean Bunny in quite some time. We don't know what Bean Bunny's up to.

Was Jim Henson, inspired by the crimes of Gary Ridgeway to create Bean Bunny? Was Bean Bunny a thief of clitoris? Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was. I saw his belt. He was just Bunny.

Cut them clits. Good name clits. Welcome to the last podcast. the left, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Clit Cutter Henry Zabrowski. Hey, my goal is to live them mostly whole. I'm just taking off the

top. I'm a clit shiner. The shoe polish boy of Clitoris is everywhere. It's Ed Larson. All right, let me get in there. I leave him alone. I don't come anywhere near him.

It's called a Clint Walker. But I see a Glad I start walking. Where's the goddamn door? And we're here at Gary Ridgeway, part two. So when we last left, the man who would become one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, I don't know why I got into the...

I think, because I was thinking, like, hey, this is a KPFX FM, wait. We're getting to Gary here today. Getting back to Gary. We're going to listen to Gary Newman. This one goes out to all you Green River killers out there. Call the Tenth Collar, They're talking to me, whoever's coming and say that they're me.

Is that me? I'm the one. I'm the criminal killer. It's me. Hall of notes are coming to town next week. Call. Tenth call, it gets tickets. Make sure you use that lotion, y'all.

I'd like you. My name's Gary. I request the man to the mani. To hardly a nothing. Well, when we last left, the man who would become one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, Gary Ridgeway had just bought a house near Cetack Airport in an area called the Strip. Located between Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, the strip had become the most likely place for a man to find the Pacific Northwest, most vulnerable and desperate sex workers. Giving Gary Ridgeway a house in the middle of this area was, to turn a phrase, putting the cat amongst the pigeons.

Now, the year was 1982, and by Gary's 33rd birthday, he had not only married and divorced twice, but it also obtained numerous girlfriends in the times in between. He definitely has a Rick Moranis-like charm about it. Leave Rick out of it. If there was a celebrity I would directly compare Gary Ridgewood to, it is Rick Moranus. Well, the guy who quit because his wife died? Well, actually, that's checking out. Physically. Gary had pulled all this off despite his below-average intelligence

and his increasing addiction to sex workers. But with each failed relationship, Gary's hatred towards women had only been added to the animosity he'd felt. as a result of his absolutely horrendous mother, who had spent Gary's teenage years scrubbing his genitals and screaming insults every time Gary had wet the bed. Of course, it made him think that all women were monsters. And while Gary was entirely unsure

as to whether he began strangling sex workers prior to 1982 because of how fuzzy his memory could be, it is generally accepted that 1982 is when Gary's reign of terror as the Green River Killer would truly begin. Within just two short years, almost full. 50 women would be dead by Gary Ridgeway's hand. I remember I just was watching a chunk of his confessions.

I was like trying to find as much of his confessions as I could. And one section, he talks about how his dad and his mom used to openly argue in front of him about what level of mentally handicapped he was. And they would be there and they would sit there and be like, he's not too I wanted to go to school. And then his father would be like, honestly, what if he is? and they were both like talking like that in front of him and him just being like, I know, I know, I know what I am, I know, I know what level, I know what level, you don't know, you don't know, you don't know what I am.

And he's just building it all up, just being like, everybody's because he can't keep up. Yeah, yeah. And that's where he fucked up. He almost got out of having to go to school. Yeah. Dude, choose it. Every time, man. So yeah, I'm, uh, too stupid for it.

Yeah, dude. I'll go be the fucking Einstein or the short bus, dude. I'm going to get on that fucking crush it and fucking mental handicapped school. I mean, I was thinking about this after you mentioned it last week. And, you know, the way he is so baffled by life, by everything, it's sort of how a regular person is baffled, like, how I'm baffled by, like, quantum mechanics. Sure. Like, I'm fascinated by it, and I would love to understand it, but I can't.

I'm just not smart enough for it. Yeah, he's that with reading and writing and driving and everything but killing prostitutes and detail in a car when he specifically told what to do. Yes, yes. Now, Gary had gotten a taste for sex workers while he was stationed in the Philippines with the Navy during the Vietnam War years. His great apple sour taste. And Gary only continued his addiction since his return to the states by picking up sex workers off the streets of the Seattle-Tacoma area. Gary's usual routine was to pick up a girl after getting off work at Kimworth Trucking.

His preferred schedule was the early morning shift, 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. Same. But Gary Wrongway, as his co-workers often called him, he often had to work. over time because he had a habit of using the wrong kind of paint, which often required him to redo the entire job. But even though Gary was bad at instructions, he was fantastic at auto detailing just so long as he knew the exact specifications. So because Gary was already involved in the seedier side of CTAC due to his sex worker addiction, he began doing paint jobs for bikers on the side of a party house belonging to a biker named R.J. Wilson during the spring

summer of 1982. How did nobody call him Blinkers? He would be such a good blinkers. Like, God damn it, Blinkers! Blinkers is way too cute for the people he was hanging out with. Yeah. I think that with these, we don't know what they called them. You know they had several horrible names for them.

Well, wrong way Gary is the one we can talk about in the show. Employees. Yeah, that's at work. The bikers. We don't know what the bikers called them. I got a couple of options. Peeper John. Didn't even know his real name.

None. The bikers and the sex workers with CTAC were all a part of the same world. And during these parties where Gary would paint trucks and bikes, the bikers would disappear into the bedrooms of RJ's house or into the old abandoned barn on RJ's property to ply the sex workers' trades. This was fine with RJ, because in true scummy biker form, RJ would allegedly follow these drunken couples wherever they might have their sexual rendezvous and he would take photos or filmed their escapades with what

I assume was an old Super 8 camera. I looked it up. The VHS camcorder didn't come on the market until 84. Oh, okay. Yeah, and the VHS can't quite get the sounds of a dry prostitutes vagina getting stabbed with a knife. The way

that a Super 8 can. Yeah, they didn't have a boom, boom mic. No, not anymore. Yeah, that's back in the days of, turn off! Turn off! Turn off! Turn off! Point the camera over here! That was all of my family videos.

Goddammy, Kathy, what do you doing? Yeah, you're screaming at your mother. Don't you know how to before. Now, this is obviously already a chaotic and dangerous environment for a woman to navigate. But on July 8, 1982, Gary Ridgeway decided to increase the danger after meeting a sex worker named Wendy Cofield. After meeting Wendy, Gary said that he immediately planned to murder her, partly because he was already upset that day. because his wallet had recently been stolen and he just couldn't get that

80 bucks that he'd lost out of his head. $20 I could take. 30 maybe, but 80. That's four blowjobs I'm not going to receive. Yeah, that's the hardest part is the blow jobs you know aren't coming now. I could see Gary like thinking of things in terms of CDs. Like how many CDs could I buy it with that?

Like three CDs. And there actually is president to that because he does talk about it in terms of sex jobs. There's very often where he was just like, in the actual confessions, he would be like, and that was four bulljubs.

Yeah. It was four bulljubs. Wow. Yeah. So I nailed it. Yep. Congrats. You really get him.

Yeah, you really got in his head. Oh, God. Now, while it's never been confirmed, Gary claims that he was not the only man involved in this first murder, or this first confirmed murder, at least. According to what Gary said later, the biker who owned the party house,

R.J. Wilson, he was also present at the moment that Gary took his first confirmed victim. By Gary's recollection, R.J. was standing nearby, and he was taking pictures of Gary and Wendy while they were having sex. But at some point, Gary began strangling Wendy with such rage that he ended up breaking her arm. R.J., I suppose, just stood by and watched, possibly just walking away after Gary was done. RJ's existence has actually never been confirmed, because by the time Gary was finally caught decades later, no one named R.J. Wilson lived in the

Seattle-Tacoma area. He was either dead, run off, or he was a figment of Gary's imagination. Or, Gary got the name wrong. It's very possible. His name was J.R. Bilsson. I mean, he can't figure it out. I mean, he's probably a biker who was killed

eventually. If I were to guess, you know, it seems like that. And he might have been the guy who, like, because he helped him dispose of the body, right? No, he didn't. People told him what to do, maybe. Maybe. You know, this is a guy who knows how to dispose of a body. He might be the one who really trained him.

Let's just say a guy who spends most of his free time taking Super 8 film of his buddies having sex with various sex workers. Let's just say that's not the first time he's seen one get strangled to death on camera. And I also think that that's when he's doing that, it's just been like, well, I'm going to have to put this in the other drawer. And like, as he's filming it, but I can definitely see that guy just dying super anonymously. Oh, yeah, just booze and running off the highway. Has anybody who's ever done, because there's many of those guys. You have many, it's like a whole genre of old film is just stag films and stuff of your, like two grandparents cornhole and each other and all this kind of shit.

So it's like there's been lots of RJs. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he saw that one. He's like, oh, we got to tape over this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, they taped over with, which was nice, unfortunately, the Challenger launch. Which was like, unfortunately. I don't know which is worth.

Now, whether RJ was real or not, it was up to Gary to get rid of the body. So Gary traveled to a point on the nearby Green River. The Green River had a current that was too strong for swimming. But the same thing that made it dangerous for recreation also made it perfect for taking away a body. I guess it's time for me to paint with the colors of the wind. So Gary took Wendy Cofield's corpse down to the river. And Gary remembered crying as he knelt on the riverbank with the body across his lap. He said that he was so angry and upset at what he'd done.

And some part of him was hoping that he would be found and caught right there on the riverbank. There he go. There he goes, slash. That part, however, was apparently quite small and weak because the murder of Wendy Coffield marked the beginning of a two-year-long murder spree that seemingly had no bottom. Just like Gary Ridgeway. I could see him having no ass. I could see that.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's the board of a man. I mean, Rick Moranis. Cross the board. The same body ship. Oh, Rick Maranis don't got a juicer on him? No. Have you seen him?

Can't even, fucking barely nut. And while Gary claimed that he was incredibly upset about the murder of Wendy Cofield, that tinge of remorse went away quite quickly because Gary murdered his next victim less than two weeks later. On July 17th, Gary picked up a 17-year-old girl named Giselle Lovehorn, who was being pimped out by her older boyfriend. That boyfriend's name was Jake Baker, but he went by the absolutely terrible Star Wars reject

street name of Jackback. Meisa, get my money! Or me's to slap you big time! You sure it wasn't Jake Bake? Jake Bake sounds a little better. Jake Bake sounds much better, but it was spelled Jackback. Yeah, it might be Jake bake, but still.

If it was Jake Bake, they would have spelled it Jakeback, but they spelled it Jackback. Okay. Both are equally stupid. Me's to give you my backhand. Me said drop you up by the highway where me found you. Gary later boasted after his arrest that while he was murdering Giselle Loveorn with his own socks, which he tied together to use as a ligature,

Gary's young son Matthew was actually in the car. But Gary had committed the murder outside beyond the sight of the year. young boy. Love those walkmen. Love those. I mean, honestly, this was before the switch. I've seen the effect it just has on Holden. You could fucking drive a truck

through his house. He's playing the switch. God, he's been like that for years. I mean, you remember him sitting there playing the 3DS, playing fucking Phoenix Wright Attorney at Law and him just going objection. Objection.

You already now. Yeah, I've already answered. Now, since the second victim came so soon after the first, and the third came with an even shorter interval, less than a week between those two, it was obvious that Gary Ridgeway had found his thing, but the police had not yet noticed. Gary's second victim had been dumped near the airport

and wouldn't be found until September, while his third victim, Deborah Bonner, would likewise rot in the Green River for weeks before her body was found on August 12th. See, after Gary picked up Deborah from the Three Bears Motel, just south of Cetac Airport, He strangled her and sent her body away the same way he'd sent Wendy Caulfield. Weeks later, Bonner's corpse was spotted by a guy who worked at a nearby meat company.

I guess he was on a break wandering the banks, and he saw the naked body caught by the tree branches in the river's flow. I didn't do that one. Say mine. Actually, meat company would be a good name for a strip club, or a brothel. The meat company. See, meat company, it's men. That's a male dance. That's a male company.

Oh, yeah, yeah, the meat company. Big swinging them back into the big ones when they got so big that they can swing. I find it gratuitous. Classless and gratuitous. Now, Wendy Cofield's corpse have been found the same way, but after Deborah Bonner, three more bodies would be found either in or near the Green River over the following days, and they'd all been put there by Gary Ridgeway. Two bodies in the water have been discovered by a man rubber rafting down the Green River.

He'd spotted the murky vision of two bodies pinned to the riverbed by 40-pound rocks. This had been Gary's attempt to hide the bodies underwater after the last two had been, of course, caught on debris, spotted, and found. Because Gary did not want people to find these bodies. But after a detective came out to the scene and was taking photos of the bodies, the detective accidentally tripped over a third. What the living got sick! I got to be sick of this. Stop it on.

Got the goddamn son of my bitch. Just stomping on it. What the fucking sick that earth this? Uh-oh. This is the one we're looking for. See, Gary had decided that this spot was a good dumping

ground because all three of these women have been picked up and strangled to death within a period of roughly two weeks. While Gary had put in the effort to weigh down the first two bodies with rocks, the third had been simply left in the tall grass next to the riverbank, where the corpse was found only after Detective Dave Reichert tripped and fell over it.

This, of course, would not be the last whoopsie-doodle of Dave Rikert's career when it came to the Green River killer. I don't think it's fair for you all to count how many whoopsie-doodles and how many dipsy-dottles and how many whoopsie-wopsies I did in this case. I did everything by the book, and by that book, it was the book of offensive jokes that my father left in the bathroom. And has 99 shazams and one whoopsie doodle And all they remember is the whoopsie doodle They tell they care about when I did 95 gram slams 74 touchdowns

85 hat tricks I'm the man you're looking for And these whoopsie doodles Yeah sure they come back and forth There's been lots of whoopsie doodles The Challenger explosion as we went over before The Holocaust There's lots of whoopsie doodles

All right, Detective Buckner Now concerning Gary and Rock Walks. Gary Ridgway experimented with rocks in those early days in a way that he had never done before and never really did afterward. For reasons that are even unclear to Gary himself, he inserted triangular rocks into the vaginas of some of his early victims, wedging the men so tightly that they could only be removed with post-mortem surgery. Now, that information was kept out of the press, so the cops would know if they had their man if anyone tried to confess. But when Gary was later asked

Why he put the rocks in the vaginas He couldn't give a clear answer Other than it was his biker buddy RJ's idea Yeah, he told them to go kick rocks Fortunately, they were close to their vaginas It looked like I made a par three When Gary was asked a second time though

Because the RJ thing didn't really wash He tried using his pea brain To figure out the psychology Saying that it was maybe symbolic To keep the woman from having sex with anyone else even though he inserted the rocks only after the women were already dead. But when a detective pressed and asked if Gary had thought of doing this before he actually did it, Gary had to admit that it was just an idiotic, childish impulse, saying, quote,

Yeah, I thought of it just when I got there, had six. There's a rock. I'll put it in her vagina. Direct quote. He, everything, he's, he's truly soul. puzzled by what he does. Yeah. And this is,

it's all sexual play. Because he talks about before, he was talking about his sexual impulses for his mother, right? And what he wanted her to do. And the thing he wanted her to do the most was in she was laying there, sunbathing with her titty's hanging out of the side of her fucking dress. So he could watch, right?

Because they were super close. He had this fantasy about being able, that she would be asleep, laying there, and he would be able to do whatever he wants. Because, like, the therapist was actually. asking him, like, what would you want to do to your mother?

Like, what do you want to do? And he said, explore, explore the parts of her, make her a woman. Explore a woman that parts, explore her breasts, explore her, her legs, vagina. And it's like the way he's just talking about it, it's like the same thing. He just wanted to get, because these are what he calls even himself, his starter murders. Yeah. This whole, this first pack of like a dozen were a part of him figuring out his own ways. of why he's doing this and it's him just playing out

the wonderful sexual fantasies he has about his mother which is what we just do but you just kind of put it towards some of the girls you date me we're doing. Why are you gesturing towards me? All these guys do you know?

Do you think he was just playing with all the bodies after he killed them? We know for a fact he fucked some of them after they were dead Yeah, he would come back And I can almost guarantee

that the reason why Carried tea. Thank you Thank you. I could, is that the reason why two of them were weighed down and one wasn't, because he was revisiting the third one that wasn't weighed down. I don't know. I wouldn't guarantee that.

I think it might have been laziness. Who knows? But we know he liked a fiddle and fiddle. We do. We do. But those two that were in the water, those were the last two that Gary ever really tried to, like, hide in such a way and put any real effort into it other than, you know, shoving them off a hill. Right from your grave.

Now the difficult task of catching a serial killer only gets harder when the victims are sex workers. Besides just the general lack of urgency police have when it comes to solving sex worker murders, there's also the issue of identifying the bodies. See, this was the early 80s when people could still disappear into this country if they really wanted to. And the warm water of the Green River had caused a lot of skin slippage on the victims, which made identification even more dangerous. difficult. The hand and finger skin on the victims had loosened so much during decomposition that it slipped off the corpses like a glove, and the pathologists had to remove the skin

and put their own hands into the human husks to take fingerprints. Whoa, that's both horrible and you could see the right guy just being like, this is fucking awesome. Look what I get to do. Like, you know, like, because that's the pro-social Gary Riddle. They hired a Gary Ridgeway who then works for science. That's what you call it is a man with patience. Yeah. You wait for it to come to you.

Yeah. And when the body like sits in the water for that long in the summer, like, I don't know what happens with the skin, but I know that the muscle and the fat like starts to like become squishy and stuff like that. And the only reason I know this is because my uncle, he collected bodies and NAM. And then we were watching when we were soldiers one day, you know, the Mel Gibson NOM movie. And you know the scene where they tried to get the guy out of the river, but he was Napalm.

and they take all the skin off his legs. He was like, one time I found a man in the river and I went to go grab him by his legs and I put my hands around his legs and then it just went straight to the bone. And you're just like, why don't we turn on baby's kids? You know, maybe we'll watch another movie.

I was just happy he wasn't making fun of me. Yeah. It does seem like that that conversation was bereft of the F word that I was imagine was probably a part his regular conversations. Ferely littered reaction. Well, I think that

the muscles softening. I think that's why the skin kind of loosens up a little bit, you know, because everything underneath gets, you know, it loses form. Guys, I'm hungry. Don't do this, all right?

I'm just thinking about, all I'm thinking about is delicious, delicious, stewed beef, like slow-cooked, yum, yum, at the Delta lounge. You got to eat before the show. I know.

Got to. But even though the press had picked up a story and it officially named these women as victims of the newly dubbed Green River Killer, the police were not putting their best foot forward when it came to the overall investigation. According to a chief investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's

office, guy named Robert Keppel, the police work was woefully lacking when it came to the follow-ups that usually resulted in arrests, even though the manpower was available. See, after the first four bodies were found and the story made it to the press in August of 1982, Keppel was one of 25 men who were brought in as a part of the official Green River Task Force. But despite the number of officers working the case, they would still spin their wheels for decades before finally finding Gary Ridgeway. Now, Keppel discovered after he was brought in to consult on this case that while there were hundreds of possible suspects, only a quarter had been eliminated despite the existence of real leads. Today, we know that one lead pointed directly to Gary Ridgeway.

And had that lead been pursued back then, Gary would have been caught after just five murders, as opposed to the 50-plus he ended up with in the end. See, even though the bodies had been found in the water, the clothing of the ones who were still partially clothed, they were covered in microscopic dots of industrial paint that had coincidentally been manufactured by, you know, our old friends, the DuPont Company. I'm probably happy about it. Oh, yeah, they're like, yes.

We made the news again? Yeah, you could. You could put this paint on you. Kill a woman. Put her in the river. It will stay on her for a year. I try not to be insensitive here, but this is just a testimony to the paint. It's a DuPont guarantee.

You can't buy this kind of press. But the mere fact that we know that it was DuPont paint, that points towards the fact that this stuff was extremely traceable. The paint had been transferred from Gary's work clothes because Gary often picked up women right after he, clocked out. And the only company in the entirety of Washington State that used this variety of DuPont paint was Gary's company, Kenworth Trucking. Had the police followed up on the paint lead, they would have discovered Gary's affinity for sex workers. They would have found out about his past arrest for assaulting a sex worker in 1980. They would have known that his co-workers were already jokingly calling him GR. Because coincidentally, same initials in Gary Ridgeway,

and Green River. Let's also just say, Gary Wrongway, and you guys are all calling him the Green River killer, that makes a lot of sense. It's like funny off of stuff. It's like funny job stuff. Yeah, I mean, you could definitely be him going like,

yeah, I'll do that for you. I paint him the orange. And they're like, yeah, I bet he's killing a lot of brats. You know, they're all. No, it started as them just calling them GR. Eventually they would call. It's like, here comes Green River Gary. Yeah.

And I did appreciate that. Nick, baby, you don't know, you understand. You just kind of putting them. I'm just saying that. You take those words out of your mouth. Maybe he's just misunderstood. Maybe he's just kind of guy needs some kind of reach out.

Maybe you need somebody to see how valuable it is. You know when your friends make funnier, but you know it's true what they're saying? But you still, but it still makes you mad. It's like, shut up. I'm not gay. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

But the paint evidence would sit on the back burner for years for reasons that are still murky. laziness and hatred of sex workers. Sure. And I bet there's a little bit of stupidity in there. Just a little bit. This is all while police spent most of their resources in those early days, half-heartedly interviewing every pimp and John in the C-Tac region, everyone, of course, besides Gary Ridgeway.

Meza no do it by force. Meza have my main girls at their voluntary. See, meesa knows I give them enough leash because I snap that bitch, back whenever Mesa needs to. You know what I'm saying, police officer? Listen, I'm a casting director, and I think you got something. Can you do more Jamaican?

You know, Mika. Now, after it was reported in the press that Gary's first body farm on the Green River had been found, Gary was smart enough to know that it would probably be a good idea to dump his further corpses anywhere besides the Green River. Using his knowledge of the woods at the Pacific Northwest, Gary moved towards roadside rural dump sites, places close to highways and interstates.

Mostly, Gary looked for steep wooded inclines so he could shove the bodies off the edge and out of sight as quickly as he could. As far as how Gary chose his victims, Gary developed a sort of pattern. After driving up to a woman on the street to ask her if she was dating, Gary would name a sex act and wave a bunch of cash. Flash and a Watt, however, never worried Gary because he knew that he would always get the money back in the end. Because he'd be so good at fucking?

I gotta pay you! That's what every sex worker is like. Always. But after the Green River killer story hit the press, Gary found that most women would straight up ask him if he was the Green River killer. Like they'd ask John, hey, you a cop?

You got to tell me if you're the Green River killer. It's a trapman. Gary would almost always respond with, quote, Do I look like I would be the Green River Killer? Well, when you put it like that? Genius. Well, usually the woman would just shrug and respond by saying, I guess not.

Well, he had a very specific mechanism. So there actually was a couple of truly specifics that were interesting in the confession. That was he would specifically look for younger girls. Yes. Like, he would look for girls that were a little greener. Not seasoned. Not seasoned. He would look for greener girls, girls that were set up in the scene.

girls that wouldn't already know he would also physically weaker too yes yes he would also sometimes visit the same girl a couple of times and then she'd become a victim so she'd get used to him another thing he would do much like having a son in the car is that he would leave his son's toys in the front seat and he'd leave him around and he'd when they'd come into the car

so one thing you'd do he show them his license and he would cover his name with a license and then right next to the license this is how interestingly savvy he was he was thinking about it all the time. Why show the license? Because what he would do is he'd have a picture of his son in the wallet when he'd open it. So you'd see him in his son and you'd see him with a license and they'd immediately think, oh, he's a dad. Yeah. You know, and so that is one of those things that Mary Allen O'Toole that would eventually get the confessions out of Gary Ridgeway. She wrote an

interesting book that's all about how your instincts are wrong. And it's very interesting. It's like stuff like that. Like just because he portrays himself in one way doesn't mean he can't be other ways. And going on on the other side, if they didn't respond with, you know, the Cutsy family man stuff, he always had beer in his truck, and he always had a carton of cigarettes. And he'd give

a pack of cigarettes to every sex worker. And other girls would give him pass. So girls that he would sleep with that he didn't kill, they'd be like, oh, that's Gary. We know Gary. We know Gary. Yeah. Now, while some women were strangled inside Gary's truck, others were killed outside on a blanket

Gary always carried with him. Other times, though, Gary would take advantage of his home's proximity to the strip. He said that he always had his victims wash their genitals in the shower while he watched prior to sexual Congress if he took him home, which was, I suppose, some sort of weird mirror to what Gary's mother did with him when he wet the bed. Speaking of wet in the bed, Gary would also ask the women to urinate before sex, specifically so they wouldn't be as likely to wet the bed themselves upon the moment of their untimely and violent death. Yes. It's crazy because they searched his house at one point, didn't they?

And then still let him go? He was actually very good at getting rid of evidence. Yeah. He was very... It's the only thing he was entirely unsentimental about everything. And that's, you know, that's usually what gets guys caught. They keep the trophies. They keep the little things here and there.

Gary wanted it all gone always, because it was all about the process for him. That was the only thing that mattered. As far as how he killed them, Gary insisted on sex from behind if they were outside. This was so he could easily grab the woman's hair with one hand and put his other arm around her neck in a chokehold. But strangling humans is an arduous task that always takes far longer than you'd think. So when one of Gary's arms got tired from strangling, he'd sometimes have to switch while wrapping his legs around his victim's bodies so they couldn't escape. As far as why Gary choked every single victim, he said he never used a gun or a knife, because it was more personal and rewarding to strangle them with his hands or a ligature.

He used that word, rewarding. And less mess. Yeah, he would, it probably kept him from getting caught. Yeah. Now, the ligatures were simply a matter of expediency. Sometimes he used articles of clothing belonging to the victims, but he also used towels, belts, extension cords, ropes, socks, jumper cables, and sometimes his own t-shirt.

But once Gary was done, specifically with the victims, he killed in his own home, and this also helped a lot with getting rid of the evidence, he had a method for cleanup. He covered his bed in the aforementioned Viscqueen plastic sheeting. And after the murder, Gary would simply drag the bodies, along with all the evidence, out to the truck on the plastic sheet, before loading them up and immediately taking the body to the dump site. So wetting the bed taught him how to get rid of a body.

It's not dirty his bed. Hey, welcome. That's crazy. That is the way, man. You never know where knowledge comes from. I use things on this show that, man, you wouldn't believe where I got it from. Yeah, dude, I wear pants. I wear my fucking shirts with my dick and balls hanging out on my pants, my neck hole,

or refer me to easily pissing shit when I'm driving in the car. Yeah, yeah. We know those are sweaters you're wearing upside down. You're welcome. Yeah, yeah, and he learned that which. Yorkshire Ripper. Peter Suckcliffe. Fun guy.

Yeah. Now, part of what made Gary so hard to come. catch, police laziness notwithstanding, was the fact that he didn't care about the age, race, or appearance of his victims. While most zero killers have a type, Gary Ridgeway only cared that his victim was a woman and she had been found walking outside.

No inside ladies. No. He was hated inside ladies. As Gary Ridgeway once put it, he compared the streetwalkers of the strip to quote, candy in a dish. As such, between August 29th and December 3rd, 1982, Gary Ridgway would kill another eight women before dumping the bodies all over the Seattle Tacoma area. By September, though, police thought that they had found the Green River killer.

But Detective Dave Reichert, the who who had tripped over the body earlier in the story, he had all the wrong instincts at just about every turn for years. This man's got to be at least seven feet, though. Three arms. Yeah. I know for a fact that he must work within a cabal of sex workers trying to eliminate the competition. Tell me what you know about alien grace. When Detective Riker became convinced that the

killer was a former ambulance and taxi driver named Melvin someone bring me goddamn Melvin. Now he spells it with a Y. I mean, goddamn Melvin. I hate I hate you, Melvin. I'm going to get you, Melvin. I don't know why I'm the one you want to blame.

I know why his feet, you know I lost my penis to a disease. Well, Melvin had approached the Green River Task Force with psychological theories on the Green River Killers' motives. When the task force asked Melvin where he'd gained such psychological expertise, Melvin said that he'd taken a couple of psychology courses at prison. So they'd better listen to what he had to say if they wanted to catch this Green River fella. I'd all think or two about killing sex workers, and I'd think the first thing he got to be. the receipts. The first part is he was probably right. Yeah, you're like, wow.

That's incredible. Yeah. Probably said, I bet you his James Gary. I bet you were who's had a car detail. Melvin of you don't fucking shut your mouth. Now, Detective Breaker can be somewhat forgiven for assuming

that Foster was the killer because it wasn't uncommon for serial killers to insert themselves into an investigation. Ed Kimper had done that just a few years, earlier. Furthermore, Melvin Foster had personally known several of the sex workers who'd been killed. I don't want to know. Do you able to tell you how I knew him?

They were Freds. Freds and well-wishers. We were on a pickleball team. Yeah. So, from late 1982 until the summer of 1983, the Green River Task Force put such a focus on Melvin Foster that Melvin ended up

filing complaints against Detective Dave Rockert for harassing him 132 times. He had him followed. He tapped his phone. He tampered with his mail. But while the task force was harassing Melvin Foster, they were also bringing in the big guns in the early months of 1983, all while bodies kept popping up and women kept going missing off the streets. To help catch the Green River killer, the task force involved the FBI's behavioral science unit, and specifically, they enlisted the help

of legendary profiler John Douglas. And in 1983, John Douglas was at the absolute peak of his career. He'd already finished his groundbreaking interviews with 36 convicted killers, the so-called mind hunter talks, which he would publish in a book in I think 95. Douglas, by that point, I mean, it means he'd already interviewed Kemper. He'd interviewed Berkowitz, Manson, Bundy, Gacy. But what had really put Douglas over the top was the creation of a profile in 1981 that had assisted police in the investigation and arrest at the man convicted for the Atlanta child murders, Wayne Williams.

She, Douglas had been instrumental in convincing investigators in Atlanta that they were looking for a black guy because investigators had convinced themselves that the killer was white. That's where all that they were going around every neighborhood in Atlanta saying, asking like, were there any white guys talking to black kids? Yeah, because they'd stand out. Yeah, and it's the time when white people were killing a lot of black people in the South. Well, also just straight up, white guys are the ones that do the type of sexual crime towards children more often than not in terms of the profile.

Yeah, well, that's correct. We know that's incorrect. We know that's incorrect. They're the ones who got caught because a lot of times, like if a sex worker was black, their murder is not getting investigated at all. It's a less dead. Yeah. DNA.

Yeah, DNA, exactly. And of course, you know, we know that serial killers often kill within their own race. So black serial killers were less likely to be caught because the murders they committed were less likely to be investigated. Douglas also told investigators in Atlanta to stake out bodies of water where it was easier to get rid of physical evidence and these tips eventually led to the arrest of Wayne Williams.

Then Douglas gave prosecutors tips on how to break Wayne Williams on the stand. This resulted in Williams, revealing not only his hatred for children of his own race, but also Williams' knowledge concerning the best way to choke someone until they passed out. It's not something you want to say

on the stand in your own murder trial. Honestly, he should have been on the stand the first place. Yeah. Wayne's mistakes came as a direct result of Douglas's guidance. So at this point, he's a fucking legend already. And we will eventually cover Wayne Williams, but also the idea that Wayne Williams was not alone.

Yeah. I think that Wayne Williams was one of several killers operating at the time. And one of the killers is definitely some KKK guy that was using the Wayne Williams crimes as a smokescreen as well. Now, as far as the Green River killer went, yeah, it's real happy shit. It's real thick. I was just thinking.

You're like, I actually stop myself from saying, Cool. So I remember, in our generation, cool is the same thing as interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. As far as the Green River Killer went, John Douglas was not as useful as he was during the Atlanta child murders. Douglas believed that the killer could be a cop or someone impersonating a cop, and this did somewhat jive with anonymous notes sent to the team.

Yes. One note had claimed that the killer was a former police officer known only as Tonto. because this Tonto had often picked up underage sex workers while he was on duty. So the wrong lines of investigation were being pursued again and again, even though the paint evidence was still just fucking sitting there waiting to be discovered. Probably should have arrest Tonto anyway. Yeah, why don't we think a look at Tonsor? Yeah, I mean, but he's not the Gary River killer.

It doesn't seem like you find this Tonto fella. Well, sir, that's hard when you're a real lone ranger. Dougas also erroneously said that the killer had been raised by a single mother. But he did nail that the killer had been raised by a domineering, nagging mother. And he did guess that the killer had been a subpar student in school. Douglas also guessed that the killer believed that women couldn't be trusted. The rage, the killer felt, particularly towards women who openly prostituted themselves, Douglas guessed.

This caused the killer to rationalize that he was doing a service to mankind by removing these women from society. Douglas also said that this guy worked in manual labor and that he was a beer drinker and a smoker. This, of course, resulted in an utterly useless profile because there were tens of thousands of men who hated women

working in manual labor, spending their nights smoking and drinking in bars across the Pacific Northwest. I think most of them have built most of the biggest, you know, the buildings and bridges and the giant things of this great country of art. It's very popular, very popular.

It's very popular. Review, yeah. That's also not to mention the fact that Gary didn't smoke, and he only drank beer on occasion. Do you think that he liked classic rock? I bet he liked big tits and small butts. I bet he liked looking at the stars, and I bet he also liked firing a guy. You know what we got here, a real sandwich eater? Someone who loves a sandwich.

He's kind of a guy that he goes into an Italian restaurant, he's eating spaghetti. But if he goes into a Japanese restaurant, he's eaten what's there. You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking he's a guy who likes sneakers. Yeah. But also, lovers when it goes out. Maybe pants. He probably wears pants.

And a hat in the winter, sometimes in the summer, depending on the sunshed. Well, part of the reason my investigators are trying to narrow their scope is because the Pacific Northwest had an incredible amount of homicides to solve even outside of what Gary Ridgeway was doing. See, Gary wasn't even close to the only guy who was. was murdering women in the CETAC area in the early 80s. Prior to the killing spree that Gary began in July of 1982,

a large number of women have been found murdered in the Seattle-Tacoma area in a variety of ways. It's like trying to start a true crime podcast in 2026. The market's crazy saturated. It's crazy because like growing up on the East Coast, I always look at like Washington as a bunch of fucking pussies who didn't do anything. But it's like, no, they're murdering. Dude, we're about to get into it. Holy fucking shit was the Pacific Northwest.

Northwest so incredibly violent. Oh, yeah. Well, most of these victims were sex workers who'd been either strangled, beaten, or stabbed to death. And because they were considered among the last dead, those murders were not investigated further, at least not in any meaningful way. So, why were there so many violent deaths in the Seattle-Tacoma area during this time? We can even extrapolate this question and ask why there were so many murders,

rapes, assaults, and serial killings across the entirety of the United States. throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The weather? Honestly, who's El Nino is what it was. I do believe it was the no man's land of Oreo speed wagon running the audio wage. And that means like one of the low points of American culture.

Have we ever looked at the effect of Todd Rungren's production? Yeah. Did we just on? Did we look at this? Can we look at it? Well, for the final answer to the serial killer question, It is time for us to discuss Murderland by Caroline Frazier. While we're going to go a little surface level on our explanation here, I would highly recommend reading this book if you want the nitty-gritty,

yet highly readable details on how all this shit went down, especially if you liked our DuPont series, Murderland, who, that is the fucking book for you. So while Frazier certainly links her findings to the lead theory that leaded gasoline caused the serial killer epidemic, she goes far beyond that theory, although the causes discussed in Murderland are certainly still environmental and industrial. While the scope of the theories in Murderland run across the entirety of America, there's a lot of focus on Tacoma, Washington,

because Tacoma is where both Gary Ridgeway and Ted Bundy spent their formative years. Additionally, even though he wasn't a killer, as far as we know, Charles Manson was also imprisoned on an island east of Tacoma for five years in the early 1960s. So Tacoma certainly has some bona fides when it comes to the world of mass murder. Never mind, scores of what seems to be uncought serial killers

that were happening in the area at the same time. Yes. And Jimmy Hendricks really could murder that guitar. I mean, he definitely murdered the concept of taking a right-hand guitar making the left-hand guitar. Exactly. I mean, yeah, by the early 60s, yeah, Hendrix is,

he's already out in the, he's already out in England by that point, I think. Oh, okay. Yeah, but as we'll get into, the damage is done. And it wasn't as much Seattle as it was Tacoma. It could have just grown his dick. It may have. You had a

notoriously large penis. I've seen it as well. I think it makes you a better guitar player. Having a large penis? Yeah, I should talk to my friend who fucked them. Live from your play. Now, thanks to American Industrial Powerhouse families like the Vanderbilt's,

the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and of Of course, the DuPonts, Tacoma, Washington was a hotbed of industry going all the way back to the late 19th century. There were no less than 53 industrial plants in the center of the city at its industrial peak. And the industrial smells of decomposition, putrefaction, and acidification, it created a staggering odor that was referred to as the aroma of Tacoma as early as 1901. Tacoma was such an industrial hellhole throughout the 20th century that Frank, Herbert used his hometown of Tacoma as inspiration when he wrote Dune

in the 1960s. Because the plants were still producing millions of gallons of toxic waste every day that absolutely destroyed the environment and made poison out of the very air, Frank Herbert breathed. I would love to find out the big fat guy that he based

a baron. Yeah. I wouldn't know who that guy was. The big, weird, evil gay man that was that he built that he based a baron on, because that's Gandy bribe. Yeah. I didn't realize Tacoma was that boring. It's pretty yeah. Dune. Dune's super boring.

Food that's different. Which is because you'll get the political intrigue. No, they said in the waters around Tacoma nothing survives but barnacles. It's an ab, I mean it's just gone.

Oh, it's disgusting. Now the most egregious offender when it came to dumping industrial waste into the air, land, and waters at Tacoma, I was a Tacoma smelting and refining company, which boasted a smokestack that reached 307 feet into the air. Wow. This smelting plant focused on the mining and processing of gold, silver, copper, and lead,

starting in 1890. But everything about American industrialization became supercharged in the late 1930s and early 1940s as a result of World War II. See, it's a well-known fact that America helped win the war against the Axis Powers because of our vast resources and our industrial might. But the consequences of our near-total industrialization during that war, they have often been ignored in the years since. It was said that metal wins the war,

and as we talked about in our series in the DuPont family, World War II was a war of chemicals and metal. The metal we produced in the United States as a part of the effort, the iron, the steel, the aluminum, the copper, and especially the lead. It dwarfed the levels of every, industrialized nation on earth. Yeah. Fuck yeah.

Our role in World War II as the provider of those metals was only made possible by the incredible amount of industrial smelters that we were able to build and operate. And by running those smelters constantly, we overwhelmed the Axis powers with metal. Helders smelter. Yeah. Helders smelter. The serial killer epitaphers, the serial killer epitaphers. was basically America smelted and dealt it.

Very smart. That actually is a smart pun. We smelt it and dealt it to ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As author Caroline Frazier put it, copper is the nervous system of a warring nation because it's used in the wiring of every engine that ran every machine of war.

Copper is only usable after it's smelted, which required numerous smelting plants. What does it start as? It's copper, but it's a, But they mine it out of the ground, so it's coming out of a mine. Closer as a rock. Yeah, you get to remove the copper from, you know, all of the other trace metals that are mixed in with it, all the rock. That's what a smelter does.

Boil it? Kind of. I don't really know the... I'm not going to tell you how to mine. It's like gold comes from the mountain, too. You're not asking about that. Yeah, honestly, you know what the truth is? Is that for so long, like, all of these things I didn't fully understand, like, I didn't understand that iron had to be made.

That steel had to be made. That copper had to be made. Like, I kind of always thought. like, I'd you fucking get that stuff. Just pulling pipes out of a mountain? Yeah. That certainly is great.

Yeah, I have not an industrialist, Eddie. Okay? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, is that you do have, and, well, I mean, therein lies the problem. Yeah. Because, you know, copper does not come out of the mountain, you know, in usable chunks. It has to be separated from all these other elements.

And as we'll get into here in a second. Those other elements include lead and arsenic. And speaking of lead, that was used to manufacture an estimated 47 billion bullets for us and our allies between 1940 and 1945. And every one of them useful. Yeah. Taking out them nuts. Yeah. And so to overwhelm the Axis powers with metal, America turned towns like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Tacoma into Indochem.

industrial powerhouses. One thing you may have noticed is that those were also all cities that were considered incredibly violent in the second half of the 20th century. Don't forget Newark. The Raritan Bay is still fucked. Yeah. Oh, Norick. Yeah.

Fucking, uh, what's the other? Camden. Camden. All it was across the river from Philadelphia. Also, uh, Rochester, where the hillside stranglers were, uh, born. And so was another two other... Arthur Shawcross. Yeah. He wasn't born in Rochester.

operated in Rochester, but the four serial killers came out of Rochester seeing the thing, gigantic industrial plant, just dumping chemicals into the water. Yep, which we learned doing side stores life. Yep. Very nice. Well, there are byproducts to industrialization of any sort. And those industrial plants that were built in cities across our country, they caused environmental devastation on, seriously, a scale that has never before been seen on planet

earth. Every city was poisoned by the byproducts of these factories during World War II, but it didn't stop after the Nazis, the Japanese, and the Italians were defeated. There was far too much money being made. So many of these factories stayed in production for decades to supply the Cold War, which, of course, came immediately after World War II. Well, the key is that, I mean the main thing is the responsibility on the military to figure out the new war that we could get into in order to keep all these things going.

So that's what I understand. Like, when it comes down to, it's like they're just trying to help. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I make the bullets. You give me the war. That's all we got to do. And so an industrialization effort began back in 1940 that put plants like the one in Tacoma in or near major American cities across most of the country.

And as a result, the so-called greatest generation of serial killers begins at exactly the same time. Exactly the same time. Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan. Happy 250, America. We got to go through the list, Marcus. 1940. Let's start there.

It's before we're in it, but it's after we started helping. That year saw the births of Clifford Olson and Samuel Little. I know those guys. Samuel Lilly, number one, most prolific serial killer in American history. 1941, Richard Speck Oh, that guy, that's fun. 1942, Tazinsky and John Wayne Gasey. Wow!

43, Rodney Alcala. Everybody's favorite. 45, that's the bumper year. You get Dennis Raider, Randy Kraft, Leonard Lake, Arthur Shawcross. Wow! Ted Bundy, 1946. Herb Mullen, Otis Tool,

Herb Baumister, William Bonin. That's 1947. 1948, Ed Kemper. Wow. Then, in 1949, you've got both Gary Ridgeway and Canada's Robert Picton, who was born and raised just north of Tacoma in Vancouver.

So you get the picture here. But while these are all the big names that your average last podcast listener would recognize, you really only begin to see how pervasive this problem was when you take the wider view. According to serial killer expert Peter Vronsky, there were 55 known serial killers in the year 1940. 10 years later, there were 72.

In 1960, 217. But when the men born during World War II begin to come of age in 1970, those numbers grow exponentially, 605 serial killers. Wow, we're so industrial. That we know of. Yeah. The peak of serial killers hit before Gary Ridgeway even began in 1980.

There were no less than 768 known serial killers at the start of the Reagan era, which also saw the highest homicide rate period in American history. But in 1990, the number of serial killers started falling. 669 were active that year, and that number dropped by almost half by the year 2000. As we entered the modern era, between 2010 and 2020, there were only 117 active serial killers, which gets us closer to 1950 levels.

It's because we're illuminating, you know, we don't hang out anymore. That's what that is about, really. connection. Yeah. That's social media. Yeah. But that number is even more incredible when you consider America's population growth. Back in 1950, there were only about 151 million Americans.

Today, we've more than doubled that population, which puts us somewhere around 350 million. So when you look at percentages, we're probably far below even 1940 levels when it comes to active serial killers. And that's because, you know, as we said, the lucid. of assault rifle laws. I do believe that. They're getting access to giant machines of death that made mass death in a public avenue super easy.

And then that was the idea is that then the mass death that you can commit. Like now people are just doing spree murders and mass shooting events in order to get the attention that they so crave. Because again, no one goes out anymore there's no third space. It's so hard to pick up.

There's nowhere the kids can go to just mill about. There used to be like fun places where the kids go to Milibout with no parents and you can scoop them and stuff. Now you've got no place to go. They're inside playing video games. Yeah, because back then they only had like a handful of spree killers. Yeah, well, yeah, Howard Unrug.

Yeah, Charles Starkweather. Yeah, Whitman. They were there. They were there, but there's only a couple of them. It just sort of, the type of crime has just sort of turned into something else, but it's not. But serial killing involves another level of pathology that mass murder does not. It's like homework is involved. Yes.

Well, and also, the other thing you have to also realize is that it, It's not just zero killing. It's not like all of this stuff. Yeah, it's every kind of violent crime that you could possibly imagine. It's assault. Domestic violence. Yeah, domestic. Through the fucking roof at this point.

Massive. It's fucking huge. Like, every type of violent crime is at its fucking peak during the serial. Gangs are at their highest at this point, too? Yeah. I saw that movie. Oh, the bikers that we talked about earlier. Like, how many fucking bike, do you remember how many biker gangs there used to be?

It was fucking everywhere. That's Marlon Brando's fault. Yeah. I know, you see, when we were in London, Ontario, and the same thing with Australia. We don't deal with bikers as much anymore in the United States of America as they're dealing with it in Canada and Australia. Yeah, they were like, be careful the hell's angels. We're like, really? Wow.

When are we going to run into the hell's angels? No one said that to me ever. No one else I was thinking about earlier in the episode was how many serial killers do you think, like, were never caught and just died like in a drunk driving accident? Hundreds. Yeah. Yeah. Hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands. Or guys that have killed one person.

I feel like there's a lot of that, too, where a guy will, in a midst of many people committing crimes, will commit a crime within this sphere and then kind of just drop off the face of the planet. Yeah, because there's a pathology that has to exist to create a serial killer. Like, there's, you know, they never come from nowhere. There's always something. Yes, a pile of problems creates a serial killer. It's a pile of problems. And it leads, and it usually leads to them committing that first murder accidentally. they find they really like it, and so they keep going.

But there's also so many men during this time period who are committing a single murder accidentally. I wouldn't say accidentally, let's say not a premeditated murder. Like it's a moment of passion. They kill someone, and then they just kind of have to live with that for the rest of their lives because they fucking murdered someone. Yeah, that's what I did. Again, I'm still ideal with that.

And I think that the guilt I feel is punishment enough. Yeah. Now, there were copper smelters like the one in Tacoma located in cities all over the United States, and that copper was streaked with other metals and chemicals. The most consequential byproducts, as I said earlier, were arsenic in lead. And while the arsenic was... Where does old lace come in? While the arsenic was indeed... Gary Fridgeway used that to strangle people.

Yeah, he did. Yeah, he did. Well, the arsenic was indeed a problem. I mean, it was the amount of arsenic that we used in pesticides all across the country. that fucked up so many kids, that fucked up so many. Fucked me up. I grew up in the middle of a fucking cotton field with crop dusters dropping arsenic

and horrible shit on my house for the entirety of my childhood. Who knows what the fuck that did? But the Tacoma... Nothing! The Tacoma smelter also belched incredible amounts of lead into the air in every direction,

mixing it with arsenic every time the smelter coughed, so to speak. These coughs caused white ash composed of lead and arsenic amongst other metals to settle over the entire town where the populace would breathe it, eat it, and drink it. Animals who looked the white ash would subsequently collapse and die, while the kids who breathed it got rashes and asthma amongst a wide array of intellectual and emotional disabilities.

Yeah, and very high suicide rate in that part of the country. Very much so. It's the clouds. Wow, I actually didn't even put that together. I didn't even think about the Pacific Northwest high suicide rate. Always blamed and was like, oh yeah, it's the weather. What do you expect? He's like, you know who else has fucking rainy weather?

England. Yeah. Like the entirety of fucking England. Fucking many places have rainy weather. It rains every day in Florida. It's like one of five types of weather. It's going to be, it's going to rain. Yeah.

Now, the long-term effects that are known to come as a result of lab poisoning are the same things that we saw in Gary Ridgeway after his family moved to Tacoma. If you'll remember, Gary's behavior greatly escalated after his family moved to the Pacific Northwest. And while that was often blamed on the stress of the move, we can now see that the cause was almost certainly his new exposure to the Tacoma smelting plant. Children exposed to high levels of lead become cruel, unreliable, and impulsive. They're irritable, nervous, inattentive, and slow to learn. Sometimes they scream and bang their heads on surfaces. They're tortured with dreams that border

on hallucinations. These kids also, if we may go back to the McDonald Triad, they were more likely to set fires and wet the bed. These were both behaviors that greatly increased with Gary Ridgeway only after his family moved into the environmental imprint of the Tacoma

Smelter, which unloaded 226 tons of lead into the air every year by 1960. In 1961, Gary Ridgeway was a newly arrived 12-year-old boy who would wet the bed, start fires. He couldn't get his shit together in school.

We also discovered that beyond just his fantasies, Gary was having full-on hallucinations in which he would have sex with his mother, then cut her throat with a kitchen knife. He just really thought about it. Yeah. I bet I could have taken it. No. Yeah, I think it would be fine.

I think I'd be strong. Yeah, I was getting fucked up early. Yeah. I mean, dude, you were, New Jersey during those years. Like when you were a small boy, right? Occasionally. Yeah, I'd summer and Elizabeth.

Okay. Yay. Yeah, that's what I got close. All right, all right, all right. And you only get irrationally angry about like sandwiches. Oh, my God. Don't fucking get me. I know.

I'm sorry. I'm ready. I gave you believe. I'm sorry. Oh, we're trying to have a nice time. Yeah, I know. I know. I saw.

But lest you think we're confusing correlation with causation here, the Tacoma smelter's effects did not stop with Gary Ridgeway. Besides producing Ted Bundy, Washington State had murder rates in 1974 that were 30% higher than the rest of the nation. Furthermore, Bundy and Ridgeway aren't the only infamous serial killers connected to a smelter. A smelter emitting tons of lead, zinc, cadmium, and arsenic was operating in El Paso, Texas at the same time that Richard Ramirez was born and raised in same said town. If you'll remember, the Nightstalker's siblings also displayed physical and mental difficulties that correspond with lead and arsenic poisoning. And Richard Ramirez's cousin was also an absolute psychopath who had murdered his way across the countryside of Vietnam during that particular conflict. Guess what I just found.

Rochester smelting and refining plant. It literally was right in the middle of the fucking city. They literally do, they mine and do aluminum smelting literally in the middle. middle of the city. Yep. Yeah, most of these plants are right in the middle of the city. And the El Paso plant had numerous incidents in which giant toxic clouds just settled over El Paso.

And not just El Paso, you know, Juarez is right there. And Juarez has a... Murder capital of the world. Huge murder. Yes. Yes, so many murders in Juarez. So many murders. And they don't need the help.

Yeah. They don't need to be leadened. But that's the thing. If you look at it, this could be why. Who for you know? could be a big reason why Juarez became such a violent place. Yeah. We should start outsourcing

this. What other countries deal? We have. We did. Oh, okay. Yeah, we do that. Yeah, we do that. And guess what? Every single time we make a bunch of like zero killers in another country, guess what they do? They fucking attack us or something. They just do something else. Like, that's the problem. It never stays over

there. But I love coppers. We all do. We all do. The business is produced in all this pollution, they knew that these industrial plants were absolutely ruining a generation of Americans. But they didn't see any reason to change just so long as the profits were sound. And they had no reason to change because the victims were often poor, black, or both. And also stuff about cancer, medical problems, who fucking gives a shit by the time you even notice it? You can't

take it back to us. Fuck you, bitch. Yeah. And also, these guys don't live anywhere near these places. No, they're not dealing with their shit. Hell no. In fact, once the EPA started finding these companies for their crimes against humanity, the company, would do a cost-benefit analysis for every smelter, and if the cost of the fines was cheaper than shutting down the smelter, they'd just pay the fines and continue the pollution. The El Paso smelter that produced Richard Ramirez, for example, it still made $10 million in profits after the company paid damages for the destruction it caused. Well, after they pay the damages for the destruction it caused during one particular incident that was particularly bad. Yeah. But no smelter was worse than the one in 10.

Tacoma. That one wasn't shut down until 1993, and that was only after the EPA labeled it as the most polluted site in the entire country. Do you know how fucking awful you have to be to be the most polluted site in America? Fucking Christ. Pretty intense. It is fucking awful. It's just a cost of doing business, and it's so insane. You see banks doing the same shit today when they get sued for overdraft fees and stuff like that. It's like a slap on the wrist for the money they're actually fucking making. Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. Hey, I do, we're the Tacoma smelters. And, yeah, yeah, you guys, we're going to put it. This is our first head. You guys know it. It's a song about a girl born with one eye and three fingers. Incomplete girl. Let's go, guys.

But before we get back to Gary Ridgeway's story, the theories in Murderland could also answer another lingering question when it comes to the serial killer phenomenon. Namely, why are men so grossly overrepresented in the serial killer population? Because dudes fucking rock. Dude's got to fucking do some shit. sometimes, man. Sometimes you've got to equalize. Yeah, man. These boots are made for walking. These hands are made for strangling. Yeah, bro.

Dude's got to do some shit. Written by a man. With boots are made for walking? Yeah. Oh, really? Lee Hazelwood. Oh, good for him. Yeah, I wrote it for Nancy Sinatra. Oh. I'm kind of angry about that. Is Jolene written by a man?

No, I think, I believe that was written by Dali Parton herself. I think so. Now, the easy answer here is to say, well, Men are awful. They're dogs. That's why there's so many more... Choose the bear. I choose the bear.

Yeah, that's why there are so many more male serial killers and female serial killers because we're more prone to violence, more prone to do these sorts of things. Yeah. But the real answer is far more complicated, and it's rooted in actual silence. Me don't care. See, early exposure to lead is particularly damaging to the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the human brain that regulates a... aggression. According to some studies, that area of the brain is larger in men, and that same

part receives far more damage when men are exposed to high levels of lead, as opposed to what happens to women's brains when they're exposed to the same chemicals. The damage to this subpart of the prefrontal cortex, author Caroline Frazier believes, this might just explain why the vast majority of serial killers during the age of the serial killer were indeed male. Well, much how we were saying a serial killer is made of a pile of problems. So being a man is just one of the main triggers in there

that allows us, because we're already more aggressive than women. It's the base. It's already there. So it makes sense that it would all accentuate and we would become even more violent than we already predisposed to. And there's also, you know, all of time to look at Yeah. Yeah.

I still believe in a matriarchal society, they would commit just as much war. It just might be a little neater and a little bit. It smell nicer. Oh, like a lady's bathroom. Like it's still a holocaust in there. Oh, no.

A woman's bathroom is much worse than a man's bathroom. Well, it smells worse. It can. I think it depends on where you're going. There's blood and fucking shit and fucking violence and hair and shit. God knows what happens in there. It's not blood. It's lining.

Oh. He is correct. So now that we've got all that cover. Great. Lining's? Lining's are clean. I heard that. I can eat them. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the question is answered. Oh, yeah, it's fair. It's like, as far as, like, why do serial kill? That's it.

And it's why serial killing is going down in terms of that type of pathology and other types of violence and other kind of phenomena are certainly to fill that gap. Yeah. Which in terms of there's, which we will eventually get to how social media is probably the lead poisoning over the next generation. I was just going to say that. Mix with just straight up blood poisoning. Yeah. Yeah, well, that's the thing is that now that the current administration has put in so many environmental deregulations, we're never, of course, going to get back to the levels of smog and industrial

pollution that we were at in, you know, the 50, 60s, and 70s and 80s, and 80s. But there could be consequences. Oh, yeah. If there are consequences in 20 years because of, you know, what's happening right now, I wouldn't be surprised in any way whatsoever. Yeah, I'm sure there's all. already fucking consequences. 100%.

Well, now that we've got all that covered, let's return to the story of Gary Ridgeway. Now, Gary finally turned up on the radar of the Green River Task Force in November of 1982, but not because of the investigative prowess of the police.

Instead, after killing well over a dozen women, Gary Ridgeway accidentally let one go. A young woman... Now that's a whoopsie doodle. A young woman named Penny Bristow

said that Gary Gary picked her up near CETAC Airport, and after he offered her $20 for oral sex, she jokingly asked Gary if he was the Green River killer. He denied it, and she believed him. So they drove to a secluded spot to engage in their business transaction. Gary, however, could not get an erection. So he became so explosively angry that he knocked Penny Bristow to the ground and slammed her face in the dirt. He then wrapped his arm around her neck for a chokehold, but when Gary readjusted for a better grip, Penny broke free and ran off.

Gary tried to follow, but his shorts were still around his ankles in anticipation of the blowjob. So Gary tripped forward like a nightmarish cartoon character when he gave chase, and he literally knocked his own dick in the dirt. By the time he gathered himself and had his shorts pulled up, Penny had already made it to a mobile home where she screamed for help. Recognizing this was a lost cause, Gary got back in his truck and drove away, while Penny soon reported to the police that she had in fact encountered and survived

the Green River killer. And he looks like Bean Bunny. And all he does is blink. He just blinks and blinks and blinks. He can't so much wind. His blinks. God, he should have gotten caught so much earlier, just constantly. So many times.

Now, Penny identified that Gary Ridgeway was driving a company vehicle from Kenworth trucking and had the police gotten around to the paint evidence by this point, they would have had Gary dead to rights, but they didn't. And they also didn't follow up on Penny's report in any meaningful way. See, police tracked Gary Ridgeway down, but Gary told the police, yet again, that he'd only choked Penny because she'd bitten his penis.

Penny, meanwhile, was so traumatized by the incident that she didn't move forward with assault charges. So the police stopped the investigation into Gary Ridgeway without even arresting him. I mean, they didn't even bring him into the station for questioning. Like, they asked him questions at work. Like, it's a fucking episode of Law and Order SVU. And I also think that it's an interesting industry to be in in which police officers can come in, ask you at work, are you the Green River killer?

Did you kill all these sex workers? And then you can use an actual defense of saying, no, but that sex worker bit my penis. So I had a puncher in the face. And their bosses are going to be like, you know, Gary's innocent. Like, they're just like, yeah, well, that's Gary. He always does things the wrong way. You know, they can't.

But the evidence clearly is, at least first of all, definitely still assault. Yeah. You know, no matter what. But also, it's like, if you attacked her because she bit your penis, why are you strangler from behind? Well, I mean, they didn't even think to ask these questions. She has teeth in her butthole. Oh. Have you ever heard of batata dintata?

There's batata de tata. Well, Cheney's tip was just one amongst hundreds. And for some reason, not a single investigator got a sense that something was off when they were in Gary Ridgeway's presence. It's because he was visibly mentally handicapped and he was the way he was. It's just that he's so unassuming. I don't know anything about that. They're all expecting some monster, you know, some sort of like someone with huge teeth and like a gigantic man. And like big hands.

Yeah, who's like on the verge of explosion at every second. And Gary Ridgeway just, hi. Well, I feel like if they had, like Sam, Samuel Little was so homeless that he just didn't even get picked up. Where, like, I feel like it's like the op. They were expecting Samuel Little. Yeah. They were expecting this, like, taciturn, truly like next to silent colossus with hands

that are a fucking 12 inches long. Yeah. Anti-social. Yes, a huge, a huge rambling monster. Yeah. But no, he was Rick Moranis. But this could also be a commentary on just how incredibly violent everyday life really was for these people in Tacoma.

Cops were so overwhelmed with murders, rapes, and assaults that someone like Gary Ridgeway could go under the radar using the same bitten penis excuse twice in his many years without anyone noticing. Let me see that penis. That would be my first take. Let me see that penis. Pull it out.

Let's see it. I want to see the bite marks. Now, Gary's unassuming demeanor was one thing. But Gary Ridgeway was actually very good at evading arrest aside from, of course, the paint evidence. He learned to cut his victim. fingernails after a murder because the women always fought back and they usually managed to scratch his skin. So the fingernails will cut to remove forensic evidence.

The clothes of his victims, meanwhile, were donated to Goodwill stores where they were permanently lost in a shuffle and sold to unsuspecting customers. How many times have we bought a shirt that came off a fucking recently murdered corpse? Many, many, many. I don't fit into women's clothes that well. See? And that's what's nice about being a big fat guy is that bigger guys are less likely. to be the murder victims. Normally we die alone in our homes

and are discovered by EMTs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's why I got all the soup stains. Yes. Gary also began planting evidence at murder sites by collecting cigarette butts and chewing gum from other locations. Then he would scatter the debris amongst his body.

See, he's getting smart. Yeah, Gary also took motel. I mean, this next one is like, it's a dumb guy's idea of a smart idea. Yes. He took motel pamphlets and car rental agreements that he found at the airport. then he threw them around the body sides

to make it look like the killer travel a lot. At times, he would even leave behind a hair pick. So the cops would think that the killer was a big black pimp with a big afro. Oh, my God. I bet that fucking worked. Dude, it sounds like with him doing this, yeah, it's stupid, but it sounds like he was dealing with stupid cops. So they were all just like,

oh, whatever. They just found it all, and then they just, he, if you were going to say, he managed to evade for fucking decades. Yeah. Yeah. The numbers don't lie. Yeah. And so it was not...

You sound like a baseball announcer. Like, ladies and gentlemen, the deference don't lie on Kirby Puckett. And what it comes down to it is a W is a W. That doesn't matter if it's a pretty one. And that's what we're seeing here today in the C-TAC area. If you kill three out of ten, you're making the Hall of Fame. That's 30% right there. Those are big numbers.

It's a big Hall of Fame numbers. And so is 1982 turned into 1983. Gary Ridgeway continued his murder. spree by rotating his dump sites and memorizing every location for later use. If a body wasn't discovered at a certain site, Gary knew that it was safe to use again. And sometimes these sites would be mere miles from Gary's own home. He had like a photographic memory of the places because he'd be like, that stump wasn't there, that thing was over here.

And because he would do it by like trees, like specific trees. You love the woods. He did. We're using these tactics. Gary killed six more women between early March and late April, and his continued murder spree would land him in the crosshairs of investigators yet again for the second time in less than six months. On April 30, 1983, Ridgeway murdered an 18-year-old named Maria Malvar.

But Maria's boyfriend, who I suppose was in on the sex work game, he saw her get into Ridgeway's truck. The boyfriend wrote down the make, model, and plate number, then followed Gary to his home, where he wrote down the address. Now Maria, of course, disappeared completely that night, and her body wasn't found until Ridgeway finally led investigators to the dump site at Star Lake decades later. But when Maria seemingly fell off the face of the earth in 1983, her boyfriend gave all the information that he had collected on Gary Ridgeway to the police. This time, Gary was hauled in for a full question and answer session, but Gary's demeanor again did all the heavy lifting. Gary said he had never met

Maria Mulvar and he actually didn't know anything about sex workers at all because he didn't do that sort of thing now the police knew this was a lie because Gary's truck had been identified as belonging to a regular purveyor of prostitution by both sex workers

and by police posing as sex workers this is of course due to the fact that Gary did not kill every sex worker he picked up that's how they get a good reputation on the scene not to mention he's on the record twice for getting his penis bit by sex workers And everybody in the scene, the only way they operate is buying information shared amongst each other. Yeah.

But also, you know, him getting his penis bet, like, I don't know what the task force was even told about that. I don't know if it got to them. And it's not like they had, like, a computer database where they can type in the name Gary Ridgeway. And, like, everything that ever happened to him comes up instantly. You know, if one guy doesn't tell another guy about it, he don't know about it. But Gary's denial was enough for the task force. And since they didn't have concrete evidence of foul play, because this woman's body wasn't found. until 2003,

Gary... Gary was released back into the world, although his name did remain on the list of possible suspects. Man, that's such a long time.

To think that, like, it's just hard for me to, like, wrap my head around, like, a piece of land not being touched by a human for 20 years. Mm-hmm.

Well, that's, to be honest, that speaks to his knowledge of the area. It speaks to the fact that you go out there because it's like in the middle of, really, it's the middle of fucking nowhere.

And it's between all these highways. It's like, it's gross. place. Well, it's just these rural roads. You know, how many times you've driven down a rural road in Florida, you know, back in the day? And the, a road that you drove down a thousand

times that you never stopped at once. Yeah, that's where my recent, the last time I killed a sex worker, I just dumped your body off by the 250th celebration. Just because no one's there. No one's there. And so it's just nice of his letter there and just open to the sky.

Yeah. I feel like his only witness was like Bigfoot. Yeah. Man, Bigfoot's seen some shit, dude. And he's just like, I'm not seeing anything. Now, after the murder of Maria Malvar, Gary Ridgeway decided to experiment with his next victim, who also just happened to be the first victim who was not also a sex worker. Rather, Caroline Christensen was just a woman who had decided to go home with Gary after meeting him

at an establishment called the Red Barn Tavern. None of you all have a fucking excuse. None of you have an excuse to be single. You know, like, it's like a garage with pulling women. That's what I'm saying. None of you got a fucking excuse, dude. It's crazy how he was able to pull women. It's easy when you're a sociopath.

Yeah, yeah. Like, that's psychopathic. Like having psychopathy means you're naturally extroverted. Yeah, you don't take no for an answer. Yeah. Yeah, it really comes down to that. At least I think that's what it comes down to. Yes.

But Carol was in a hurry to get the deed done. And for some reason, being in a hurry to get the act over and done with, This is one of the main things that triggered Gary's intense and all-consuming rage. It could actually make him decide in the moment that he's going to murder a sex worker if she's like, hurry up, hurry up. I got to get back. I got to get back. Made him incredibly angry. Yeah, you can see. Like, let's be a patient a little bit.

Sometimes it takes some time. Oh, you can see. Yeah, he had to get the motor running. Well, I can see that that could make him crazy because that's what people probably said to him in fucking work. Yeah. He's wrong way, taking his time, having to work overtime to feel. fix his job. Probably also meant he couldn't get it up. It probably meant it

it took him a second to work it up to we can get it up and if they can't, if she wants to go right away, then he can't get it up. So that's what that girl Penny said. It was after he couldn't get it up. You know, they can't stay there all day, you know, waiting for that flag to come up to math. That's always his lesson, girls. If he can't get it up, you just run.

You just run. If you don't know him, if you don't got any money and time invested in him, you just get out of there. Just practice the sentence. It's okay, sweetie. This is great. Honestly, more than it's okay. This is great. Just always like, wow. I'm honestly, thanks.

This is great. Now I can finally get around and watch the last season of the bear. Wow, this is great. We've practiced that. Oh, thank God you can't. Well, after he was filled with rage, Gary choked Maria to death,

drank a bottle of lamb rusco wine, and redressed her body before loading it back into his truck. Along with the body, though, Gary also brought the empty bottle, some ground sausage, and two freshly gutted trout. Once he dumped the body, he staged the scene,

laying her corpse face up with a grocery bag over her head. He then left the gutted trout on top of the body, which Gary hoped would attract animals. The body was found five days later by a family foraging for mushrooms. I imagine Eastern European immigrants. Sure. Here comes truffle. That's stupid.

That's stupid. I'm angry. No. No, here comes trouble. No. Well, they came across the corpse with the bag still over its head and its arms folded across the torso with ground sausage laying on top. The trout was still there as well, laying vertically across her throat while the wine bottle was also sitting on her lower torso. No animals had come, so Gary's surreal scene had remained intact.

And, of course, further baffled investigators. Why would you do this? Salvador Daly was here. Let me take a look at this. God damn it, I knew for a fact that this was done by chef boyardee. Is this something kind of chef's tasting experience? I must know. We must find the guy.

Where's the big hat? Where's that Swedish Muppet? I'm telling you, I think we need to look into the country bear jamboree. And so Gary continued his murder spree by killing 10 more women over just the summer of 1983. Gary also got better at hiding the bodies because, Some of these victims weren't found until Gary led investigators to some of his secret dumping grounds decades later. Well, he said because they were special. There were certain ones.

He had ones that he grouped up that he viewed as throwaway ones. And then he had ones that he considered special. And he would put them way far away from everywhere else. And so those are the ones he would go visit time and time again. You know, it wasn't like the rest of the country. He wasn't overtaken with E.T. fever. Yeah, he was distracted. What are you watching?

That's a scary alien. I don't like that an alien. I don't like when they have to chase him. It's scary. It's scary. But in September of 1983, Gary Ridgeway seemingly decided that he wanted it all to come to an end because he began trying to help investigators in his own in-emittable Gary Ridgeway style. While he couldn't bear to straight up turn himself in, he did write a grossly misspelled,

barely legible letter to the Green River Task Force, which he titled, going about catching the GRK. Go about catching the GRK. I had like a fucking like a Harrison Keeler bit. Like one of those things where it's just... Pray, Hobie Kippet is. Going about catching the GRK.

So was BTK around at this point? Were they calling him BTK? Was he like... Yeah, yeah, actually at this point. And he was inspired by him, right? Maybe. I mean, G RK, B-T-K, yeah. I mean, I think maybe he did like a...

He liked an acronym. I just think he's just... God knows. He was a student of serial killers. Yeah. He was. Yeah. Well, in the letter, Gary told police to, quote,

take the pictures of customers with ladies. Because, quote, if the lady died, he'd be the last one seen with her. He also encouraged the police to have, quote... Better police and prostitute relations. Mm-hmm. Amongst many other suggestions, Gary even told the police... to show sex workers the locations where bodies have been found, then asked them who else had taken them to that side.

Because Gary had taken sex workers to murder sites, both before and after murders, without killing them. But despite Gary's own best efforts at helping the police catch him, the victims just kept coming. That was like the most useful serial killer letter of all time. It really was. It was giving them like tactics on here is how you catch me. This is me. I'm telling you how you do it. Yeah.

But they also don't know. Of course then. If this is from him or not. They know now that it was from him, but back then, like, who fucking knows? Because when you read, it's, you can barely read it. You need an interpreter almost. By the end of 1983, Gary Ridgeway had murdered 26 girls and women in that year alone. Now, it's not like Gary Ridgeway never showed up on police radar ever again.

Questioning and clearing Gary, it became almost a routine to the police during Gary's most active period. because Gary would indeed show up a third time before 1983's end. Three times they talked to him. That's fucking insane. In November of that year, Gary murdered a girl named Kimberly Nelson, but a friend had seen Nelson get into Gary's truck. That friend thought that Gary was suspicious, so she had written down Gary's plate number.

Nelson, of course, disappeared. So the friend went to Detective Dave Reichert at the Green River Task Force with Gary's plate number. She ever go see David Gaperfield? Is this some kind of magic show kind of difference? The information, however, wasn't used, nor was Gary questioned. According to Detective Dave Reichert, the police report was lost. So he never got it. Not his fault.

This was more gross incompetence, because this report, along with the one involving Maria Malvar, would have no doubt made Gary Ridgeway suspect number one. Two women. It had been reported in one year, two women. But people had gone to the police and said, like, hey, here's a girl, went with this guy, now she's gone. Go look at him. And the idea of the police report being lost, that's not an excuse.

That's also bad police work. Really bad. Yeah, it speaks to the general incompetence of the entire squad. Also, wasn't his truck red? Like, wasn't it like a different, like not a common color? He had a few different trucks. Oh, okay. Well, he would use his truck.

He would use his company truck. You know, he had a fair amount of vehicles that he could use. He had several pickups. He had an aqua blue, green. He had another one. He had one with his primer. colored, he had a 1977 Ford F-150. I mean, we all own many

cars throughout our lives. Yeah. I had a Honda once. My Subaru is now blue. It was green. Mine was champagne. The Green River Task Force did get around to questioning Gary again in 1984, but only because

he was still on the suspect list. When Gary was brought in, he fully agreed to take a lie detector test in which he was asked about every single known victim one by one. But again, Gary's demeanor won out. And I think this does tell you how Gary was able to convince the police again and again. There's nothing going on here. Because Gary Ridgeway beat the fucking machine. He passed the test and was thereafter no longer considered a top suspect. But this is also yet another reason why lie detectors have no place

in police investigations. Yeah. Well, you know what they're for? A real way to use a lie detector is Like in a magician show, you use it as a, like, because you know as a police officer, it doesn't hold up in court. But you can use it in a interrogation technique to try to get a confession. That's the idea. Well, sure, but they used it here to try to see if Gary Ridgeway was the Green River killer or not. And they ended up taking him off the list because they used a lie detector, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of women. And I think that's because of the change in police a procedure later on where this was in the day where like, No, this is a machine that can read your mind.

Yeah, yeah. And then what happens if you have no mind to read? Yeah. You know, Gary Ridgeway, there ain't nothing. Yeah. The stutter threw it off. It didn't know which word was the lie. Now, to be as fair as possible in the midst of all this incompetence,

the Green River Task Force had identified 100 possible suspects by June of 1984. And while many men have been investigated, very few could be eliminated. See, the men who visited the sex workers at the strip were, let's say, the less desirable elements of society. They were mostly loners who didn't have anyone who could verify their whereabouts. So corroborating their alibis was a time-consuming, if not impossible task. Oh, you know, nobody? Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like my personality and everything I've ever done, you know?

So Gary was just one name amongst dozens. And while 11 more bodies would be discovered between February and April of 1984, Ridgway would take a break. And he would not kill again until October of 1986. Up until this point, he hasn't gone more than a month or two. Now he's taken two and a half years off. Sabatical. As for the reasons why, Gary paused.

Tune in next week, where we'll cover both the week. woman who stole Gary's cold little heart in addition to the mass murderer who attempted to save his own life by helping the cops in their search for the Green River Killer. Conclusion.

Next week. I didn't know about the other part. That's kind of fun. You're going to like it. I'm excited for that. On us, we'll go through even more. Go finding his confessions is fascinating. I think if you look at the man talking, you can see way more of like

Because it is. It's like, because he'd cry a lot, too. It's like, you know, that thing, too, he'd cry, and he'd be super, like, they just didn't think he'd be the man to kill 70 people. Had no idea. No, or they'd, yeah, they just, he was the boy least likely to, as they say. And I say, straight up, that shows, don't want anybody pin you into what they say they think you can do. Okay. Don't be limited by other people's thoughts of you. That's what this whole series is about.

We could take all kinds of lessons from this. Yes. Welcome to Patreon. Go to Patreon.com slash podcast on the left, and you can go and you can listen to our show, ad free. You can all see last stream on the left live live every Tuesday, 5 p.m. PSD. It's easy to do us on Patreon. Yeah. And don't forget to watch our faces live to see all of our wonderful whiter teeth.

White? Our teeth are getting wider, I think. Yeah, I think we're all doing some good bleach and work. I've been washing them. Wash it's on Netflix every week. I got an electric toothbrush. It's nice. Yeah, I'm excited about it.

That makes me happy. It works in my butt too great. That's pretty great. Yeah, guys. We're hitting the road. All right, so next weekend, the last two J.K. Ultra shows are happening. Yes. Okay, we're going to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma on the 17th.

We're going to be Oklahoma City on the 18th. A lot of fun. We hope to sell those shows out. If you weren't able to see J.K. Ultra live on the road, you have a chance during the 18th show, the Oklahoma City show. We're fucking putting it on the old live stream. Yep. So if you can go to LPO.

t-L-kiswe.com. That's K-I-S-W-E. Go there and we are going to be selling our live stream for you guys to check out. It's going to be available for two weeks. So go check out J-K. Alger before we finally put this baby to bed. Yeah, baby. Come and check it out and watch us.

Yeah, and it'll be the last time you can see all three of us live for many, many months because we're going to be taking a break until next year on last podcast shows while we. take a rest after the last, what, two and a half years. We've been touring almost constantly. Oh, yep. And write a new show. Mean old, big boy, we're going to be out there, though, and you'll see new dates over on

last podcast and the left.com. Yeah, and if you want to come see me solo on the road, go to Eddie Tunes.com where I fucking use that website for fucking good. He does. Well, hail Satan, everyone. Oh, how good. Hail, uh... Hmm.

Let's see. We mentioned. We mentioned hauling oats. They're actually kind of pricks. Yeah. Yeah. He's mean. Yeah.

Jimmy Hendricks. Yeah. Hail Jimmy Hendrix. And more importantly, hail the band of gypsies. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great album. Well, let's not forget about Mitch Mitchell.

Mitch Mitchell's phenomenal drummer, but I'm a band of gypsies fan. Ben Gypsies is incredible. It's incredible.