Original Airdate: 2/3/04

Cold Case 56 - The Green River Killer

Case #1: The Green River Killer
It began with the murder of a 16-year-old girl, Wendy Lee Coffield, who was strangled with her own blue jeans and dumped in Washington state’s Green River. By the end of the summer of 1982, King County detectives would have a bona fide serial killer on their hands— and the bodies of five young women to prove it.

King County Sheriff’s detectives had no idea who was behind the killings. They knew only that he picked the most vulnerable victims—prostitutes and runaways. By 1983, the killer hit full steam, killing as many as 5 women per month. The so-called Green River Killer continued to stalk the same area for victims —the Pacific Highway South near Sea-Tac airport – but his dumping ground shifted from the Green River to the thick green forests surrounding Seattle.

The Green River Task Force, forged from the elite of law enforcement, fell behind the curve. By the time detectives found more victims in the woods, they were nothing but bones, with little forensic evidence. The killer was months, even years, ahead of the police. By the late 1980s, the body count was in the high forties, but the killer appeared to have stopped. The Task Force had few good leads and was all but disbanded by King County. The Green River Killer case went cold.

In 2001, Sheriff Dave Reichert, who was the first lead detective on the case back in 1982, decided to push the unsolved murders forward using forensic DNA. The Washington State Crime Lab linked four of the murders to Gary Leon Ridgway – a truck painter who was a suspect back in the mid-1980s. Within months, forensic paint analysis linked Ridgway to three other murders. With the case building against him, Ridgway entered a plea agreement with the Green River Task Force. In exchange for a sentence that would spare him from the death penalty, Ridgway began to tell his secrets – and lead investigators to graves that he had kept hidden for more than 20 years.