The families who waited 20 years for Gary Ridgway's confession — and the cost of the plea deal

The Green River runs south of Seattle, slow and rural, and between 1982 and 1998 it kept giving up bodies.

Dozens of women, most of them sex workers, runaways, or otherwise vulnerable, were murdered and dumped in or near its banks.

The killer had no name for nearly two decades.

The newspapers gave him one: the Green River Killer.

Mothers and sisters came to courtrooms and pleaded for answers.

They sat through hearings where detectives offered little and the case stalled.

They watched as a prime suspect was cleared, as an interview in 1984 went nowhere, as a polygraph was passed.

Twenty years of waiting, of showing up, of asking the same question.

Then, in 2001, DNA evidence from semen samples linked a truck painter from Auburn, Gary Ridgway, to four of the murders.

Not because the families had been heard. But because the science had caught up.

The specific identities of those first four victims are not named here.

The record does not say which families sat in which courtroom on which date.

What is documented is the wait: two decades, unsolved, with the river as the only constant.

What the families felt in that room — relief, anger, exhaustion — is testimony, not a legal finding.

They had a name at last.

They had waited twenty years to hear it.

THE FIRST BODIES AND THE STALLED HUNT

The first bodies were found in the Green River in 1982.

Two women, pulled from the water, their names now part of a case file that would grow for sixteen years.

Detectives formed a task force that at its peak involved dozens of officers from multiple agencies.

The source does not say exactly how many officers, or exactly how many bodies were found that first year.

What is documented is the stall.

A prime suspect, Melvin Foster, was cleared after extensive investigation.

He was a suspect. He was cleared. The case went back to the river.

In 1984, Gary Ridgway was interviewed.

He passed a polygraph.

He was not arrested.

He was a truck painter from Auburn, a married man, a longtime employee of the Kenworth factory.

He was interviewed. He was polygraphed. He walked out.

The task force used profiling and geographic analysis.

They mapped the river, the dump sites, the patterns of the missing women.

But the case stalled for years.

Lead detective Robert Keppel had worked the Ted Bundy case before this one.

He had studied serial killers. He had worked with the FBI.

His interrogation strategy would matter later, but in 1984 it did not matter yet.

How does a man who was interviewed and polygraphed slip through?

That is the question the families carried.

Not because the record shows a mistake. Because the record shows a man who was asked, and who answered, and who was let go.

The river kept giving up bodies.

The task force kept working.

The families kept waiting.

They had a name at last, but the name came later.

In 1984, they had nothing but a stalled hunt and a polygraph that said the wrong thing.

THE DNA BREAKTHROUGH AND THE CONFESSION