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murders seem to mysteriously cease without the offender ever being identified.) Others commit suicide, move on to commit other crimes, or turn themselves in to police.
 A “Typical” Serial Killer: Gary Leon Ridgway, “The Green River Killer”
    When fifty-four-year-old Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty in November 2003 to the murder of forty-eight prostitutes in Washington State in the 1980s, and as the result of his plea was spared the death penalty, the media lamented that there was nothing new to learn about serial killers from Ridgway. 10 Even though he now holds the record in the United States for killing the most victims—and perhaps for evading authorities the longest—Ridgway seems to have eluded the kind of frenzied press coverage that serial homicide cases frequently attract. Ridgway was so typical and his victims, as street prostitutes, held in such low esteem in society that even the remarkable number of deaths did not evoke more than mildly routine press coverage outside the Washington State area.
    Indeed, Ridgway does represent everything typically known about serial killers. Born in 1949, he is the middle child of three sons who grew up in a working-class neighborhood south of Seattle. His mother was reportedly highly domineering over the sons and her husband. According to one of Ridgeway’s former wives, she once broke a dinner plate over the father’s head. 11
    As a child Ridgway was a slow learner, failed twice in school,committed acts of arson, suffocated a cat, and paid a little girl to allow him to molest her, and as a teenager he nearly stabbed to death a six-year-old boy for no apparent reason.
    He was married three times. His first wife claims their marriage failed because his mother dominated him. She described him, however, as socially and sexually normal.
    When arrested, Ridgway was steadily employed as a $21/hour truck painter at the same place he began working in after graduating high school thirty-two years earlier. His fellow workers remembered him as a gregarious and pleasant fellow worker and would socialize with him after work. Some of the women he supervised recalled that he was a patient instructor who never yelled at them.
    He owned a $200,000 house, had a son, walked his dog, was friendly with his neighbors, went to church, held garage sales, sold Amway products, had friends, and read the Bible avidly, and for a while he proselytized door to door, calling on his neighbors to come closer to God. He also strangled at least forty-eight prostitutes, dumped them in wooded areas in what he called “clusters,” and would return routinely to have sex with their decomposing corpses.
    His second wife remembers him as a loner obsessed with anal and oral sex. Both his second and third wives recalled he used to like having sex outdoors. Only after his arrest did they realize that those locations were at or near those where some of his victims were dumped.
    He killed most of his victims in a two-year span between 1982 and 1984. He carefully deposited cigarette butts and chewing gum belonging to others at the crime scenes and body dumps to mislead police. (He did not smoke or chew gum.) He trimmed the victims’ fingernails in case there was evidence lodged under them. He dropped advertising leaflets around the body of one victim, hoping to mislead investigators, and transported the skeletal remains of two victims in the trunk of his car to another state while on a camping trip with his son. Ridgway confessed that he had placed a mound of sausage, trout, and a wine bottle on one victim’s body, creating a “Last Supper” scenario in order to deliberately confuse the police. In police terminology, Ridgway’s attempt to give a false meaning to the crime scenes is called staging.
    Ridgway became a suspect in 1984 when police caught him solicitingprostitutes; his co-workers often kidded about it behind his back, calling him “Green River Gary”