Episode 671: Gary Ridgway : Redux Part I - Wrong Way Gary

Summary

Last Podcast On The Left

Episode 671: Gary Ridgway: Redux Part I – Wrong Way Gary
Release Date: July 3, 2026
Hosts: Marcus Parks, Henry Zebrowski, Eddie Pepitone

---

Overview

This episode marks the start of a three-part deep dive into the life and crimes of Gary Ridgway, the "Green River Killer," revisiting and expanding upon their original coverage from early in the podcast’s run. The hosts use updated research, more sources, and matured perspectives to revisit the story—aiming to paint a more complex, complete, and responsible portrait of one of America’s most prolific serial killers. Expect wit, dark humor, and sharp cultural criticism as the team tracks how Ridgway was shaped by trauma, social context, and sheer dumb luck, while also setting the table for future themed discussion about the era of the American serial killer.

---

Major Discussion Points & Insights

---

1. Why a Redux? (04:00–06:00)

• The hosts admit their first Ridgway coverage was shallow, based more on cursory internet research than deep dives.
  • Marcus: “At that point, I was still on, like, six podcasts a week... basically looking at Wikipedia pages… Not sleeping much, working, like, 90 hours a week. It was insane.” (04:01)
• New info, source material, and a more confident production team make now the right time for a comprehensive, nuanced return.

---

2. Gary Ridgway’s Place in Serial Killer History (05:09–06:59)

• Ridgway was unmatched in victim count, murdering at least 45 women (likely more) between 1982 and 1984.
  • Marcus: “While Jack and the Zodiac only got five each, Gary Ridgeway murdered at least 45 women between 1982 and 1984 alone.” (06:28)
• Ridgway might have killed many more than confirmed; he experienced dissociative episodes and often couldn’t distinguish fantasy from reality.
  • Henry: “He was thinking about killing for so long that he also doesn’t remember what was the ones he actually did and what were just a walking fugue state fantasy.”
• Seattle-Tacoma in early 80s: a “serial killer buffet,” with several killers operating simultaneously (08:51–09:55)

---

3. Complexity Beyond ‘Missionary Killer’ (10:23–11:24)

• Past portrayals focused on Ridgway as a “dullard,” driven by a simplistic “cleanse the world” mentality.
• New evidence paints him as more complicated—exhibiting behaviors found in infamous killers (e.g., necrophilia, communication with police)
  • Marcus: “He somewhat attempted to be a kind of BTK or Zodiac... and he committed necrophilia multiple times.”
• Relationships with women were rooted in dysfunction but not deprivation—he always had a wife or girlfriend, even as he confessed deep loathing.

---

4. Cultural & Historical Context (12:51–15:45)

• The late 20th-century “serial killer explosion” isn't just about individual psychology—broad social context matters.
  • Marcus: “Now that we’re decades past these crimes... we might finally have an answer... something far more definitive and provable beyond the soul theory that leaded gasoline ruined the brains of the boomer generation.” (13:23)
• Discussion on social changes: advances in DNA forensics, rising awareness due to social media, and a shift from “slow burn” serial killing to “mass event” violence.
  • Henry: “A lot of serial killing does involve attention seeking. And now… it’s much easier because you can just get a military grade rifle and… immediately get all the attention you crave.” (14:23)

---

5. Sources (16:07–16:59)

• Anne Rule’s Green River Running Red (primary, in-depth biography)
• James Richmond’s Gary Ridgway: The Green River Killer (case details/psychoanalysis)
• Caroline Fraser’s Murderland (recent release on the era of serial killers)

---

6. Gary Ridgway’s Childhood: A Recipe for Disaster (17:10–29:36)

• Family Background: Double-whammy of dysfunctional parents. Mother was dominating, humiliating; father absent and embittered.
  • Marcus: “Both of them absolutely contributed to the horrific mindset that enabled Gary to do what he eventually did. Usually it’s just one, but this time, boom, two barrels.” (17:10)
• Neglect & Abuse:
  • Bed soaker (not just a bedwetter—urinated the bed nightly into adolescence); tormented with humiliating "pee-pee" rituals.
  • Marcus: “...she would furiously scrub his genitals until they were raw.” (41:54)
  • Parental violence, favoritism, shaming, and physical/psychological neglect
• Early Signs of Psychopathy:
  • Fire-setting (arson) by age 7
  • Animal cruelty (e.g., suffocated pet cat), enjoyed watching birds die (30:56–31:57)
  • Hits all points of the “McDonald triad” (bedwetting, firesetting, animal cruelty)—but hosts deconstruct this framework, noting modern science sees these more as evidence of abuse than criminal destiny.
  • Marcus: “It is most definitely a sign of childhood abuse. And as we know, while not all serial killers have childhood abuse, the vast majority do...” (35:25)
• Sexual & Emotional Confusion:
  • Mother’s humiliating, sexualized “punishments” contributed to fusing anger, shame, and arousal.
  • Awkward, sometimes predatory, sexual behaviors as a teen—public exposure, frottage, obsession with spying on girls, and sexualized violence fantasies involving his mother and classmates.
    • “He was both angered and incredibly horny every time his mother scrubbed the urine from his genitals. Which of course fused anger, hatred, and sex in Gary’s developing mind.” (42:07)

---

7. Early Violence and Blurred Memories (55:15–59:58)

• At 16, lured a 6-year-old boy into the woods and stabbed him, laughed as blood filled the boy’s boots; boy survived, Ridgway went unknown as perpetrator for 36 years.
• May have drowned a boy; at least two local drownings matched his description—theme of confusion or suppression of “early kills.”
• Began “patrolling”—fantasizing (and sometimes acting on) stalking, harming women and children in his orbit.

---

8. Transition to Adulthood: Relationships & Military Service (59:58–63:43)

• Socially awkward, but managed to date steadily; married high school girlfriend Claudia
• Drafted into Navy (served on USS Vancouver)—joined ranks of Vietnam-era serial killers (Berkowitz, Lake, Shawcross, etc.)
• Exposure to sex workers overseas; developed fixation on penetration/insertion fetishes, and likely suffered additional trauma or humiliations (details unclear, even in his own confessions).
  • “He said this developed [from] experiences with local Filipino sex workers who would walk up to sailors, reach under the skirts, and pull out pre-inserted beer bottles...” (63:10)
• Brought home both vices (sex workers) and resentments (related to STDs, confusion over relationship dynamics) to the U.S.

---

9. Work Life and Emergence of “Wrong Way Gary” (70:18–73:08)

• Return to blue collar employment in truck detailing (Kenworth Trucking). Demonstrates learnable but rigid personality—could nail down tasks if unchanged, but froze with novelty.
• Earned his workplace nickname “Wrong Way Gary” due to repeated mistakes in job tasks.
  • Marcus: “He did not like the nickname… They would call him Wrong Way Gary.” (72:04)
• Notorious “overfriendly” behavior with female coworkers—unsolicited touching, shrugged off in the era as harmless, but foreshadowed darker compulsion.

---

10. Relationships: Patterns and Escalations (73:08–78:57)

• Multiple marriages (Claudia, Marsha)—relationships marked by controlling, obsessive sexual habits (insistence on bondage, anal sex, sex outdoors) but also by routine and bland domesticity
• Deepening religious mania post-fatherhood. Fanatical attendance at Pentecostal churches, fixated on Bible, tears during church.
  • “He would read the Bible both at home and at work. She said that tears would fall from Gary’s eyes during services.” (78:57)
• Continues dual life: churchgoing family man longing for “normalcy” but simultaneously consumed by sex worker obsession

---

11. The Role of His Mother & Church: Misogyny and Control (81:05–83:18)

• Mother continued to dominate, interfere in his finances, and provide a model of womanhood as both tyrant and sex object.
• Religious teaching compounded misogyny, pitting “sinful” and “proper” women against each other in his worldview.
  • Marcus: “It’s very easy with Christianity to come to the conclusion that women are evil because there are many churches that preach that specific thing.” (79:47)
• Development of a narcissistic, fragile masculinity that would fuel later violence.

---

12. Downward Spiral: Divorce, Rage, & First Murders (83:18–92:10)

• Marriage to Marsha dissolves as his controlling behavior escalates; divorce triggers spike in anger, resentment, sexual frustration, and entitlement.
• Choked a sex worker during a date; narrowly avoided jail after arguing "self defense" to police (she bit him during oral sex).
  • Marcus: “The police absolutely questioned Gary, but Gary calmly explained that the choking was a justified act of self defense because the woman had bitten his penis during oral sex. The charge got dropped.” (94:06)
• Becomes more predatory—confesses to girlfriends that “something happened,” admits desire/attempts to kill women even before actual murder spree begins.
  • “After Gary let go, he tried dodging around the other side of the car like a little kid trying to get away with something... this was the moment when something vicious and evil had been unleashed.” (84:59)

---

13. The Stage Is Set for the Killings (97:45–100:49)

• Now living on the “strip” near SeaTac—easy, anonymous access to sex workers
• Rejected yet again by a partner (Darla), resumes using sex workers regularly, doubles down on hatred and rage toward women
• Begins confessing odd “almost kill” stories to girlfriends and making ominous references to “watch the news”
• Hosts preview: Next episode will detail Ridgway’s killing spree and the wider cultural context

---

Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On covering Ridgway better now:
  • “Now that we got a whole team working on this… we can finally tell the story of the Green River Killer the way it was meant to be told—through pantomime.” – Marcus (13:39)
• On Ridgway’s simplicity:
  • “His key to success was simplicity; he didn’t get all fancy…he was not digging holes. If he was digging holes, we might actually have created a lot more evidence.” – Henry (10:06)
• On the “why” of serial killing:
  • “The real question is, how does a mind that gets pleasure from murder develop? And why the fuck were there so many of them during the 70s, 80s, and 90s? Where did they all go?” – Marcus (12:51)
• On the McDonald Triad:
  • “It’s actually a sign of childhood abuse.” – Marcus (35:25)
• On Ridgway’s mother:
  • “She would overly focus on cleaning his privates while barely dressed herself...so called sexual awakening came while his mother was scrubbing his junk with a grimace on her face.” – Marcus (42:12)
• On workplace nickname:
  • “He did not like being called Wrong Way Gary... which is better than Piss Pants Gary.” – Henry (72:04)
• On pernicious religious influence:
  • “He would read the Bible both at home and at work. She said that tears would fall from Gary’s eyes during church services.” – Marcus (78:57)
• On pathological attitude:
  • “He’s stupid, but he knows that, you see. That’s the biggest injustice about being stupid—you can know you’re stupid.” – Henry (92:10)

---

Timeline/Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:11 – Entering Ridgway "headspace" – humorous intro
• 04:00 – Why redo the Green River series?
• 06:59 – Ridgway’s true body count and dissociation
• 09:55 – The “serial killer buffet” in 1980s SeaTac
• 10:23 – Rejecting the “simple missionary killer” story
• 16:07 – Acknowledging main sources
• 17:10 – Ridgway’s parents and family background
• 23:40 – School struggles, anger, and vandalism
• 29:36 – Fire starting and animal cruelty; McDonald Triad critique
• 41:54 – Humiliating sexualizing punishment, bedwetting, and abuse
• 55:15 – First extreme violence (stabbing the "cowboy" kid)
• 59:58 – Shift to high school, early dating, and social oddness
• 61:24 – Navy service and experiences with sex workers
• 70:18 – Entry to Kenworth, nickname "Wrong Way Gary"
• 73:08 – Grabbing Marsha, sexual violence, and escalation
• 78:57 – Increasing religious fanaticism and misogyny
• 83:18 – Divorce with Marsha, support-finding
• 94:06 – First arrest in connection to sex work/choking
• 97:45 – Setting the stage: new house near SeaTac “strip”
• 100:49 – Preview for Part II

---

Tone & Style

The episode is characteristic of LPOTL’s sharp, darkly comedic, conversational style. The hosts blend irreverence and chilling narrative, balancing well-researched analysis, gallows humor, and their personal context. Heavy topics are leavened by absurd riffs (e.g., “Piss Pants Gary,” “bed soaker as Michael Phelps of pee”) and banter, while careful to explicitly separate irreverence from disrespect for victims.

---

Conclusion/Set-Up for Episode II

Part I closes by establishing Ridgway’s psychological formation, social environment, and abuses that contributed to his evolution. The notorious period of serial murder is about to begin as Ridgway—divorced, angry, living alone near the SeaTac strip—fully embraces his monstrous compulsions. The next installment promises to cover the spree years and put the Green River case in the broader context of the “serial killer era” in America.

---

NOTE: This summary omits advertisements, extended off-topic riffing, and unrelated show plugs per guideline.

Transcript

[Henry Zebrowski]

On July 10, get ready for the family reunion from hell. From the producers of the horror classic Evil Dead comes a brand new nightmare and the scariest installment yet. After her husband's mysterious passing, a widow seeks comfort with her in laws in their secluded cabin in the woods. But as they one by one turned into something much more sinister, she discovers that every family has its demons. Evil Dead burn only in theaters July 10th. Rated R. Under 17 not admitted without

[Marcus Parks]

parent

[Henry Zebrowski]

insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why drivers have trusted progressives. Name your price tool for years. Just tell Progressive what you want to pay and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Visit progressive.com to find a car insurance rate that works for you. Progressive Casualty Insurance company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

[Marcus Parks]

Law. There's no place to escape to. This is the last on the left. That's when the cannibalism started.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What was that? We going trying to get into the Gary Ridgeway head space. I put a plastic bag over my head for a while this morning to kill off some of those extra pesky brain cells. You know, just trying to get. Guy gave. Kill the. I'm like, that's the way to get into Gary Ridgeway.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Kill the.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You going to kill the. Just because that's his. One of his favorite sayings.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's catchphrase.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I didn't want to get too crazy and violent with it, so I just did a really bad job of painting a truck.

[Marcus Parks]

Welcome to last podcast on the left. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with method actor Henry Zabrowski.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm a go because he reminds me a little bit of what's his name from South Park.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, Timmy.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Timmy.

[Marcus Parks]

No, no, not Timmy.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Jimmy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Jimmy.

[Marcus Parks]

Jimmy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, I think. I think.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's got those little eyes too. He's got those little blinky little rat eyes.

[Marcus Parks]

The beadiest eyes in serial killer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He has that. He has the Arthur Shawcross tell.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Where. When they're. When they're saying. When they're talking about that particularly make them horny, they get real blinky.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, that's indeed.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

And we have the man who doesn't get blinky at all when he gets horny. As far as I know, it's Ed Larson.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. No, I don't think. I think I just shut him and go to sleep.

[Henry Zebrowski]

See, my eyes are wide open.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's one long blink.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now I want to see.

[Marcus Parks]

Today we have a redo. We have a second Pass. It's yet another look at a serial killer that we covered long ago. Today we start our journey on Gary Ridgeway.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I've brought this up before, and I once did one of those, like, horrible tests, like, which serial killer are you? And I got Green River Killer.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know what? I can see it.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay. Yeah, you're. You're blue collar.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What I like to do is go, I. I got to kill a. She's a. I got kill.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I like the woods.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He does love the woods.

[Marcus Parks]

He does. He does. Amongst many other things, he does love the woods.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I was just in Renton, which is next to see SeaTac. Oh, yeah, I was just there, and we had a nice place on the right. On the right on the Lake Washington there. And I walked through the woods, and it's nice. I can see why it would get you horny.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's real quiet and private, too, right?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, absolutely. I'm smoking all kinds of weed. No one said it's great.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But the reason why we're doing this redux is because, you know, when we were. When we did this series back in the day, we had kind of like. It was. We're still in the research, figuring out what we're doing.

[Marcus Parks]

Very. I mean, this is back when it's like, I. At that point, I was still on, like, six podcasts a week. Yeah. And also editing all of them and producing all of them. So, like, I was basically, like, looking at Wikipedia pages and, like, checking out, like, a couple of, like, Murderpedia pages and trying to put shit together. Not sleeping much and working, like, 90 hours a week. It was insane. So it was a. Let's say, a bad job, but it

[Henry Zebrowski]

was fun to do. But at the same time, we did not. Because normally it's like the opposite. Normally when we do the old episodes, we got into the really graphic, and we didn't get to all the other, like, context and stuff where this time. It's so wonderful to know that when we got back into it, the information's actually way more up than we even ever thought in the beginning, and that's great for us.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Now.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He.

[Eddie Pepitone]

From my. I watched the documentary on HBO Max yesterday, and I obviously, I read the script to prep today. He seems like he might be the worst.

[Marcus Parks]

He's up there. He's definitely. As far as body count goes, he's one of the most prolific in American history. Samuel Little beat him, though, by a lot. But he is definitely in that area of amongst the worst.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And you know how I described him? Okay. He does it the Kirby Puckett style. He's simple. Yeah, right. You know, I mean, he's the bunter. That's what this is all about. This is about moving guys around bases, right? Moving sex workers to various shallow.

[Eddie Pepitone]

He's an RBI guy, not a home run guy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Exactly. He's a clutch player.

[Marcus Parks]

So, as we said, many years ago, we attempted an episode on Gary Ridgeway. And while we did the best we could with the resources we had at the time, we. We realized after looking at this story again that we didn't really capture the full picture. Especially considering how new information has come to light that might actually explain the mystery of Gary Ridgeway. See, last time we described Gary Ridgeway as a man who was really only good at one thing. He was a dullard. But he also managed to evade police for decades as one of the most prolific serial killers in American history, despite the efforts of a massive task force. In fact, before the advent of DNA testing, the so called Green River Killer case, as Gary Ridgeway's murders are known, was shaping up to be yet another unsolved serial killer mystery, like the Zodiac or Jack the Ripper. But the biggest difference between those cases and Green river is the sheer volume of victims. While Jack and the Zodiac only got five each, Gary Ridgeway murdered at least 45 women between 1982 and 1984 alone two years. And that doesn't even count the women he murdered afterward and the women he possibly murdered before.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And we've talked about this before with these types of serial killers. There's always the ones in which they killed way less than they said that they did, and they're doing it for attention. And then there's the ones that might have killed way more. And Gary Ridgeway is firmly in the camp of might have killed way more. Yeah, because he even, he said, I don't remember. I don't remember heck of a lot. I kind of go in a different direction a month. And then he's just like, starts thinking about it in a way where he, like he goes off into a fantasy world and he doesn't even remember. And then he's like, I don't know whether or not that was a dream or that was a fantasy. And he's just like he was thinking about killing for so long that he also doesn't remember what was the ones he actually did and what were just a walking fugue state fantasy he was in.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You know what's interesting is like, sometimes, like, I bet when I was younger,

[Henry Zebrowski]

it's catching.

[Marcus Parks]

It's really catching.

[Eddie Pepitone]

When I was younger, I remember I used to get in a lot of fights and I remember one fight, my biggest fight.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't remember it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, like I went into like a few state and so like they kind of makes I feel like violence, extreme violence can bring on just you not knowing what's going on.

[Marcus Parks]

It's not violence, it's anger. Because I bet that during that fight you were probably the angriest you have ever been in your entire life.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I guess I don't remember. I was perfectly fine afterwards.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And then.

[Eddie Pepitone]

The power of man.

[Marcus Parks]

So Gary Ridgeway would pick up sex workers from the areas around the CAC International Airport and the Interstate 5 corridor. Pretend as if it was going to be a normal transaction. Then he would strangle women to death before dumping the bodies in isolated wooded areas around the Seattle Tacoma region. Gary was able to do this dozens of times because the area in which Gary obtained and disposed of victims was almost tailor made for a serial killer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Thanks God, I kind of did that.

[Marcus Parks]

God and man. God and man working together.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, there's a reason they think Bigfoot's in those hills. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, during the years Ridgeway was active, the corridor where you'd find SeaTac Airport between Seattle and Tacoma was known as the strip. The strip was essentially a sex buffet of lost women plying their trade on two lane highways and logging roads. Which was all prior to SeaTac and Corporation as a city surrounded by wilderness. So all Ridgeway had to do was find a place where he could murder someone out of sight. And once the deed was done, he was spoiled for choice as to where he wanted to dump the body. Now, had Ridgeway buried his victims instead of just rolling them into ditches or leaving him out in the open, the Pacific Northwest likely wouldn't have even known there was a serial killer on the loose because his victims were all sex workers whose disappearances likely wouldn't have been investigated. Well, they would have known there was a serial killer on the loose. Because as we'll get into in the next episode, there are about four to six serial killers operating at the same time as Gary Ridgeway in this area.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Really?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I also truly think the key to Gary successes was simplicity. I think if we're adding he didn't get all fancy with it. No, no, no. I think we're adding steps hold like

[Eddie Pepitone]

trophies or anything like that, right?

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no. Well, he did it in wor. He did bad, horrific things, but he did it in the old fashioned way by letting it just sit out, you know, like he was not Digging holes. If he was digging holes, we might have actually created a lot more evidence than he wanted to because he's a fucking moron.

[Marcus Parks]

He might have. Yeah. But after looking at Ridgeway again, there really is so much more to his story than just a guy with an ague of 82, a grudge against women, and a Bible to clutch whenever he needed justification for his actions. Because that was last time when we did it. Like, we went really hard on the missionary killer angle that, you know, he. He did it because he believed that the sex workers deserved it, that he was getting them, that he was wiping the earth clean of these sinful ladies. And it's a lot more complicated than that. That's. That's way too simplistic.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, it's way more complicated than that because he has this push and pull with them. You even hear now. Now that I've watched chunks of the confessions can see it. He had that sort of like, the only ones to get me, but also they must be killed. They must got to kill the. Because he's like, he can't handle the fact that they're the only ones giving him any form of affection at the time. And then he got married three times. Three times. It's easy, guys.

[Marcus Parks]

I would push back on him not getting any affection.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, no.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary Ridgeway ever, ever without a girlfriend or wife.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Ladies love Gary.

[Eddie Pepitone]

He was fine for a trailer park. He looked all right. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What?

[Eddie Pepitone]

He looks fine. He looks like a shop teacher.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Side Stories, lpotlmail.com Please answer. Eddie.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I said fine.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, what we missed last time was that Ridgeway exhibited a wide range of serial killer behaviors that we saw in many of the most infamous mass murderers of the late 20th century. He somewhat attempted to be a kind of BTK or Zodiac by writing near unintelligible letters to the press and police. And he committed necrophilia multiple times throughout his most active period. In other words, he exhibited far more complicated behavior than what we had originally covered.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Thank you. People said what I do is complicated since I serious earlier.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You shortened Jack the Ripper to Jack, and I never heard anyone do that before.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah, well, you know, I mean, you can call him Saucy Jack, but

[Eddie Pepitone]

I think Zodiac Killer, I would look Zody.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Hey, Zodie. Hey, hey, hey. Shut the fuck up. Hey, you got your best Zodiac Zone.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You got the gun of the knife today Zone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I never should have told that guy. God, I am big Malflare.

[Marcus Parks]

But the question people always have about these guys is why they did what they did. And while the easy answer is it's they do it because it makes them feel good, the real question is how does a mind that gets pleasure from murder develop? And why the fuck were there so many of them during the 70s, 80s and 90s? Where did they all go? Well, now that we're decades past these crimes and we can take a larger view of the 20th century. I mean, the 20th century is 26 years ago at this point.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Shut up.

[Marcus Parks]

We might finally have an answer here, something far more definitive and provable beyond the soul theory that leaded gasoline ruin the brains of the boomer generation. But it is going to take us three full episodes to explain it. And now that we got a whole team working on this weekly grind of ours, we can finally tell the story of the Green River Killer the way it was meant to be told through pantomime.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You can't hear it. You can't hear it. It's hard to just imagine describe it. And if you could.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh yeah, Henry is choking his hands now he's crying while he does it. And hey, that's it. Yeah, yeah. No stabs or nothing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, no, he's all jokes.

[Eddie Pepitone]

The now I think that there has been a major calm down in this type of stuff because of DNA testing. I think that people just get caught way earlier.

[Marcus Parks]

It's part. That is part of it. It is definitely a part of it, but it's not.

[Eddie Pepitone]

People are just as evil now as they were back then.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But the phenomena might have changed to more effective attention seeking because a lot of serial killing does also involve attention seeking. And now it's much easier because you could just get all you need to get a military grade rifle and bring it to a public square and squeeze off a bunch of shots and then you immediately get all the attention. You grave.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Now you just do it all at once.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Ye.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. And there, I mean there are other things besides DNA testing. There's also social media. People are. It's noticed when people go missing a lot faster. Yeah. Like things like that. So yeah, people do get caught earlier,

[Henry Zebrowski]

but the kids don't run away anymore. They need to stay in their homes now.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because kids are. They don't. Don't have any function skills.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So they don't go hang up at the train yards anymore.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Sure. Yeah. Now they're all just playing video games.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Like you'll miss the days when kids ran away.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Now the scariest place to be is on Roblox.

[Marcus Parks]

But the other thing is, is that the 70s, 80s and 90s like the one on one crime, like just general all around crime that is way, way, way down. It's still way. I mean, there's still just as many lost people around that you can prey on today as there were back then. In fact, there are more, there are far more people in this country now than there were back then. But there are reasons why things have calmed down so much and why crime is at its lowest point ever.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Also like, I feel like back in the day you would get into a fistfight, a cop would catch you, like, all right, boys, break it up, go home, walk it off. Now you're like, everyone just goes to jail.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. It was also back in the day, not the children weren't armed. And I think they used to just fight each other and then they wouldn't go back and get guns and then come back and finish the jobs.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, well, maybe so. Maybe no.

[Eddie Pepitone]

We'll see.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We'll see.

[Marcus Parks]

I mean, but that's like. We're gonna get more into that in the coming episodes. Okay, but before we get into the story of Gary Ridgeway, let's acknowledge our sources. First, we've got the classic Green River Running Red by Anne Rule.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It is thick, 800 pages.

[Marcus Parks]

Wow, it's a big one. Yeah. Anne roll. She's the same one who, you know, wrote the definitive book on Ted Bundy, famous true crime author. Then we've got the source for the juicy stuff which was found in Gary Ridgeway. The Green River Killer by James Richmond. And finally, we got the new kid on the block, Murderland by Caroline Fraser. This book was released just last year and for me, it really is the final word on why and how the 70s, 80s and 90s will forever be known in the annals of true crime history as the era of the serial killer. And so, without further ado, let's get into the story of Gary Ridgeway, AKA the Green River Killer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Pee paid scary.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Pee paid Scary.

[Marcus Parks]

So Gary Leon Ridgeway, cool name. Yeah. Gary Leong.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

He was born In February of 1949 in Salt Lake City to Mary Rita and Thomas Ridgeway. These two people hold the distinction of being one of those rare double shots of horrible serial killer parents because both of them absolutely contributed to the horrific mindset that enabled Gary to do what he eventually did. Usually it's just one, but this time, boom, two barrels.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that's how we get the number one killer in America next to Samuel Little, who, you know, again, I feel like he didn't count enough because he didn't really wasn't proud.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary was proud.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now, Gary grew up as the middle child in a struggling family that grew their own food and searched junkyards for useful scrap that could be fixed up and sold. It was a family trait that Gary would carry throughout the rest of his life as a free man. It was a practice he called fandom. Treasures.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I can't believe you guys get all this new stuff. It's crazy. Get old stuff. It's covered. Old rusty pee. Pooping. Great treasure to me. You guys don't like this, you do this. Are there scrap families?

[Marcus Parks]

Scrap.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Absolutely.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They love. They're very popular still to this day.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. My family was. We were like firmly middle class. We still love going to the dump.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wow.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You know, they still got the copper wiring. You know, it's got a lot of copper wiring.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Data centers.

[Marcus Parks]

Let's go,

[Henry Zebrowski]

Naruto. Run.

[Marcus Parks]

So after a short lived and failed attempt at running a bar together, Mary Rita Ridgeway settled temporarily into the role of a housewife while Gary's father Thomas worked construction and a few stints as a truck driver. One job had late hours, while the other required Thomas to be gone for days at a time. Once, when Mary Rita was home alone, Gary's little brother Eddie got sick. The Ridgeways had no money, so Mary Rita took little Eddie out into the snow bank to bring his fever down. The kid did survive. Survive. But little Eddie came away with permanent brain damage owing to Mary Rita's attempts at a folk remedy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Like he was Conan's sword just held

[Eddie Pepitone]

him by his ankles and dipped him into the snow.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Tang holds.

[Marcus Parks]

Little Eddie, however, was not the only person with developmental problems in the family. Gary Ridgeway himself was always described as slow. Besides being dyslexic, it took him a long time to memorize anything. And when he did, his recall was still full of gaps. Gary couldn't remember the names of his own pets, couldn't remember the names of his fellow children.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Scraps. Dusty. Spookers. Cat. Get out of here.

[Marcus Parks]

He was considered such a lost cause from a young age that teachers would routinely sit him in the back of the class just so he wouldn't bother the other children and so they wouldn't have to pay attention. They could just forget about it. Shut up, Gary. The kids with the future are trying to learn.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I'll be burned to school. That.

[Marcus Parks]

Slow intellect, however, wasn't Gary's only childhood problem.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, no.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary Ridgeway was a bedwetter, which only Added to the annoyance sense that his mother, Mary Rita, felt towards him for being slow.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Can we change the distinction here? Because some people. Bed wet.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary Ridgeway was a bed soaker.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's a difference. There's a distinct difference in bed pee pee. He's the Michael Phelps.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Of bed peepee.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. He was a water bed filler upper.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Some people are 70 liquid. Gary Ridgeway as a child was like 83 liquid. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

He's like in that first X Men movie where the guy turned the senator turns into water like that. Well, Gary also had severe allergies and a constant runny nose, which he always wiped with his shirt sleeve. His eyes would swell and tears would constantly run down his face, which earned him the nickname crybaby amongst his fellow children. That, of course, was in addition to the bullying he got just for being slow. By the age of eight, Gary remembered being always sad, always angry, because there was just so many things wrong with him. Little things, but they added up. Out of the three Ridgeway boys, Gary had two brothers. Gary became the primary target for his parents. Anger and punishment.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's like the Goldilocks scenario. Yeah, but for punishing your child.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary's younger brother Eddie, he had the brain damage, so he got pity from Gary's mother and. And her own guilt about the fever often got little Eddie a pass. But Gary's older brother Greg was intelligent and handsome. So his parents were constantly asking, why can't you be more like your brother Greg? Gary, why can't you be more like Greg?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I ask myself every day about me. Ask myself every day. I wish I could be more like. And honestly, it'd be kind of nice if you could maybe put my head on ice a little bit, maybe do something, maybe kind of make me snowman like I made Eddie. Because it seems to be everybody like,

[Eddie Pepitone]

oh, there's a Greg Ridgeway who's a professor of criminology. It's not the same guy, but I find it interesting.

[Marcus Parks]

It is interesting.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

It's like a guy who runs a hamburger joint named Burger.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Hey, my name's Mr. Cheeseburger, all right? That's a whole name.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's my wife, Buns.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, to make matters even worse, Gary's family moved frequently, so Gary never had time to make friends. Wherever the Ridgeway family went, the bullies found Gary. But Gary had no refuge at home either. His father would actually get angry at Gary instead of the bullies every time. Gary got the shit beat out of him. Now because he was slow and because the family moved around so much, Gary got held back a grade in elementary school. And it wasn't the last time that this would happen to Gary. But when Gary learned that he was going to have to repeat a grade, something snapped because the kids had nothing but hatred for him, and his parents had nothing but disappointment. In fact, Mary Rita came to believe that Gary was just lying about not being able to read.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I wish I honestly could be. This would be truly be the funniest prank of all time, but it's not. You know, I can't read. I don't know how to read.

[Marcus Parks]

And so Gary's legendary anger, the anger that would be unleashed upon the Pacific northwest in the 1980s, began to manifest itself physically. After learning that he was going to be held back, Gary walked to his school and smashed out several windows by throwing rocks.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Me, I'm a. I can't go back to eighth grade. I'm just gonna throw a rocks. Pile of rocks here and throw these rocks in there.

[Marcus Parks]

This is like second grade, second, third grade. So it's around there. And, you know, and I. You know, I went to a school where our classes were, you know, between 10 and 15, kids really small. And, man, at the start of every school year, it was always the kids who got held back, because every year, you'd get a kid added to your class, and you'd lose a kid. Yeah, and those were always the bullies. They were always the angriest kids because

[Henry Zebrowski]

they were also older and bigger than everybody.

[Marcus Parks]

Far older, far bigger. Oh, yeah. The kid who broke my collarbone, he was the one who spiked me. He'd been held back twice.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I think by that point, I made him very strong.

[Marcus Parks]

He was very strong. He's incredibly strong. I think he's dead now.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. There was a guy who straight up, like, shot someone in the head in his front yard. And he was like, in my high school.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Yeah. He's just like. He's smoking with the security officers.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Call me a squirrel because I'm covered in acorns. That's right. So many people are focused on where their money is today. And Acorns is the financial wellness app that cares about where your money is going tomorrow. Let acorns work for you. You put acorns in the ground, and you're gonna get trees tomorrow. That's right. Investments. And with the acorns potential screen, you could find out what your money is capable of. I always do that. I'm like, I want to invest in something that I like, let's say cheeseburgers. Okay, that's kind of hard to do. Acorns will help you find a cheeseburger that is ripe for you, so sign up now and Acorns will boost your new account with a $5 bonus investment.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Join the over 14 million all time customers who have already saved and invested over $27 billion with Acorns. Head to acorns.com left or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non client endorsement Compensation provides incentive to positively promote Acorns tier 2 compensation provided potential subject to various factors such as customers account age and investment settings. Does not include Acorns fees. Results do not predict or represent the performance of any Acorns portfolio. Investment results will vary. Investing involves risk. Acorns Advisors LLC in SEC registered investment advisor view important [e-mail] left summer schedules

[Henry Zebrowski]

can get busy fast with camps, vacations, sports, family time and you know every single time Carmi eats a block of dark chocolate, we got to take her to the emergency room. You know how many how much time that takes. All right, I accept. Excel makes it easy to keep learning part of the routine in just a few minutes a day. Iexcel is an award winning online learning platform that helps kids truly understand what they're learning, whether they're building math confidence, strengthening reading and writing skills, or reviewing science concepts from Pre K through 12th grade. IXL offers personalized interactive learning that adopts to each child's level and pace. Which is great because Carmi has been really slow in biology and Wendy has really been struggling with American history, mostly just because she doesn't agree with the way it's being taught. So it's really important you make an impact on your child's learning. Wendy as soon as she gets her chicken, she is ready for all of her lessons and Carmi just really has to eat five or six bites of of liver, beef liver, chicken liver and then she can really get down to I'm hoping this is the year she reads To Kill a Mockingbird. So really ixl thank you. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now and last podcast on the Left. Listeners can get an exclusive 20% off at IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com left visit ixl.com left to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price.

[Eddie Pepitone]

All right, I know what you're thinking. I like to go banking, but I don't want to give to these big old banks all the time that cater to the 1%. Well, go ahead and get yourself hooked up with Chime. It's banking built for you, not just those rich jerks. And they got thousands of fee free ATMs because why pay to get your own money? Chime is working for you, man. You get your Chime card, you're gonna get travel perks. You're gonna get into airport lounges is you're gonna get those chicken thighs. You know, every time I go to an airport lounge, I get chicken thighs. And you know what I say whenever I see a plate of chicken thighs, give me more. Chime's gonna get you those chicken thighs in these lounges. All right? Sure, they could serve other types of meat, but why would you when chicken thighs are so delicious? Chime is not just smarter banking. It's the most rewarding way to bank. Bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee free today. Head to chime.com left that's chime.com left. It only takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank. Banking services for Chime card provided by Chimes Bank Partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges. Stated cash back for Chime prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking account ranking based on J.D. power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on travel perks, go to Chime.com disclosures.

[Marcus Parks]

Now. Around the same time that Gary was being held back, Gary also started experimenting with fire. In second grade, he started playing with matches and eventually set his own garage ablaze. He became terrified and ran away while a neighbor called 91 1. And even though he assumes his parents beat him for starting the fire, he said he doesn't remember, his experimentation with fire didn't stop. He just learned to do it elsewhere so he wouldn't get caught. So starting in the second grade, Gary started setting fires in garages around his neighborhood before running away when he heard sirens to hide until it got dark enough to safely sneak back home. It's crazy. Just know there's this demented second grader, seven year old.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Running around your neighborhood. Any open garage. Garage running inside, setting it on fire.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, dude, I feel like that's how the goblin loose. Yeah, it is a goblin loose. And that's why. But I think you have full immunity to clunk a little child in the head that's doing that. Like if you're setting things on fire and setting structures on fire, I think you can get one clonk from a stick.

[Eddie Pepitone]

His dad tried.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I know.

[Marcus Parks]

You know what I'd say? I wouldn't say A clunk in the head, because that can cause permanent damage. Kick him in the stomach.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, yeah, yeah, go kick in the ass. Get out of here.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You tie them up, throw them in the swimming pool.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, that'd be fun as hell. God, these are all great to do to a nursing child.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, besides the bedwetting and the arson, besides that, Gary also had a streak of animal cruelty. When he got older, he found that he enjoyed herding things, starting with the birds that he would shoot with his BB gun. Gary found that when the birds hit the ground dead, it made him laugh. Another time, in a moment of frustration, Gary took one of his own pet cats and suffocated it by throwing it in the cooler. Killer. And shutting the lid. And so that brings us back to the infamous McDonald triad, which for years was used to identify serial killers. See, it was widely believed specifically after true crime got so popular in the 2010s that if someone wet the bed beyond the age of five, started fires and engaged in animal cruelty as a child, it was a good indicator that they would become a serial killer as an adult. But while the McDonald triad has since been discredited, or at least criticized, I got curious about the Triad's origins when it all came back with Gary Ridgeway. And I got curious as to why people no longer use it as an indicator that someone might be a serial killer.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Lots of people do it. It's not that uncommon.

[Marcus Parks]

It's. It's really not.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, I'm. I'm glad it's not that common. Yeah, but it's not uncommon enough that it's just tied to serial killer.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, I know, but you're a boy. Fire's cool. Stepping on a lizard's cool.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, you get over it pretty fast. I know that I have anytime was curious about doing something weird to an animal and stuff. Like the second anything felt like bad, I was like, ah, you know, like my brain would be like, no, I wasn't into it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, well, I always saw, I always saw that as once you made the jump from like cold blooded to warm blooded, that's when you like really. That's when the evil really starts.

[Marcus Parks]

Actually, that is the. That is the line.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Strangely enough, I. I never crossed that line myself, but yeah, frogs beware.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, frogs are different. A frog is different than like a corgi. Yeah, exactly.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It's a big difference.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, the McDonald triad came from a six page paper called Threat to Kill by a forensic psychiatrist named John McDonald published in 1963. McDonald was studying violent psychiatric patients and noticed that bedwetting beyond the age of five, compulsive, fire starting and animal cruelty appeared in many of the children on these psychiatric wards. McDonald, however, never explicitly, explicitly said that his triad, a bedwetting, fire starting and animal cruelty in children led them to become serial killers as adults. It actually didn't even lead them necessarily to become violent as adults. In fact, McDonald only used a sample of 100 patients and none of the people he studied for the paper had actually committed violence. They'd only threatened it. Hence his title, Threat to Kill. But the pioneers of behavioral science, the FBI profilers Robert Ressler, Ann Burgess and John Douglas, whose story was loosely adapted for the Netflix show Mindhunter, they combined threat to kill with a book MacDonald had written in 1960 called the Murderer and his Victims. They then ran with the so called McDonald triad in a direction that even McDonald himself didn't expect. All in an attempt to try and solve the why of serial killers.

[Henry Zebrowski]

When serial killers began to be a. Well, they were start to acknowledge it. The one, the main issue is as always we see, is that they want, want a structural fix that works every time. Sure. So they'll give you money, right? Because even the guys in within these like the FBI and all this stuff, they have to like pitch their own inner projects up the channel. So it's like stuff like this, they put together this like McDonald triad, like fix all, like look, this is how we'll find serial killers and stop them.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, it was just, it was a part of a, you know, a massive thing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And then everybody jumped on it because like, oh good, then we can fix serial killers. And it's just like, oh well, let's hold on a second.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. After the McDonald triad was introduced in the, into the cultural zeitgeist by the FBI Behavioral science Unit, it became almost a comfort to a lot of lay people. It was a path towards maybe explaining the act of serial killing, which to most people is something that seems utterly unexplainable. But in 2018, authors Charlotte Parfit and Emma Aene, they looked at the McDonald Triad with fresh eyes and found that while the triad is not necessarily a predictor for future serial killing or even violent behavior behavior, it is most definitely a sign of childhood abuse. And as we know, while not all serial killers have childhood abuse, the vast majority do have absolutely horrendous childhoods. So we can forgive the BSU for jumping the gun a bit on the McDonald triad. This revelation was actually a, it was a great relief to me personally because I absolutely Hit every single point of the McDonald triad. As a child. I wet the bed beyond the age of five, I can admit it now as a 43 year old man, I was absolutely obsessed with fire. And although I'm not proud of it, I dabbled in animal cruelty with various local amphibians in very cruel and increasingly bizarre ways.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Memories that disturbed me today.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. But it's good that they disturb you.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yes, me too. You know, I, you know, tie a lizard to a bottle rocket, you know, he's, you know, like that, you know, his boys having fun. See, I, I was, I was always with girls. Yeah. Never did that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We played animals. Yeah. Where we'd act like different an animals.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. That's fun. I did that game, but it was always in a pool. I was always a dolphin. And I lost. I would, you know, I didn't wet the bed as much, but like I, I slept. Walked and peed in cabinets.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Wow. I slept walk a ton too.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'd had none of these really. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Good boy.

[Marcus Parks]

You were such a good boy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He was. I was. But I didn't sleep until I was like, gate.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. And there's no extra lizards and queens.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, no, no, I wasn't like that. I wasn't surrounded by nature.

[Marcus Parks]

It turns out the McDonald triad is not an indicator that we had the seed of a serial killer or the seed of a violent person laying dormant somewhere inside of us. It is, however, an indicator that my personal childhood environment created conditions where I have to do a shitload of therapy to untangle all the. That happened to me and around me when I was a kid. If I ever want to live a happy, happy and healthy life. It wasn't my fault that I was raised in a West Texas nightmare factory seemingly designed to traumatize people like myself. But it is my responsibility to deal with that so it doesn't continue to up my life. Gary Ridgeway, needless to say, never dealt with anything. And the anger he felt as a result of his childhood traumas, which are about to get a lot worse, it was so intense that it contributed to the violent death deaths of dozens of people. And of course, the childhood trauma is only one of many factors that led to the creation of Gary Ridgeway.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I also think it's Gary's attitude. I think Gary's attitude's got a little bit to do with it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Henry thinks Gary Ridgeway has a bad attitude.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think that he needs a little.

[Eddie Pepitone]

People come here for intense hot takes.

[Marcus Parks]

They really do. They really do. I mean, God, I, I Hope no Netflix keeps us after that one.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, I for one think he's a real jerk. Thanks, Norm.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, When Gary was 11 years old, his family finally moved to the Seattle Tacoma area where Gary would live until he was finally arrested decades later. The Pacific Northwest is also where Gary Ridgeway's behavior would greatly escalate in a number of ways, for reasons that we will discuss in depth on episode two, too. So Gary's dad got a job driving Metro buses in the Seattle area, while his mother got a part time gig as a salesperson at a local JCPenney.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what my mom did.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Really?

[Henry Zebrowski]

She worked at JCPenney's.

[Marcus Parks]

Really?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Pennies?

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Are you lying about anything in your childhood about the things that you did or didn't do?

[Henry Zebrowski]

No. Mom didn't wash me till I was a wreck. That was dad's job.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I spent a lot of time in JCPenney's, but it was just my mom, you know, that was the card. The place that we give her.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Credit card. Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. But that's, you know, we. All of our. All of our families did credit card fraud at J.C. pennant.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, that's also where the Ticketmaster was.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Wait in line. So the family bought their first house in an area that is now known as the city of CAC but with yet another move, Gary's bedwetting returned with a vengeance.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Starting when Gary was around the age of 12, Mary Rita Ridgeway began angrily yanking him from bed. When he would wake up and announce that he had wet himself, she'd drag him to the bathroom and throw him into a tub of ice cold water, screaming the quote, only babies.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What? The bed, Gary. Only babies.

[Marcus Parks]

Are you a baby, Gary?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Okay, I want to bed. Can you come in, like, being too old, be like, hey, just so you know, went to bed. Oh, man, my bed's all wet, Mom.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, this would be yelled repeatedly while Mary Rita dragged Gary through the house, which of course woke everyone up. And it was meant to add to Gary's humiliation. This would happen at least three times a week during this time period. Sometimes it would happen every single night. And this happened up until gary was about 15 or 16 years old. From 12 to 15 or 16 years

[Henry Zebrowski]

of this, let's just say I don't know if it was just about the pee pee, Markus.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, we're gonna get into that right now.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't know if it was. And that's the problem, is that sometimes mommies can be a little naughty too. And that's what you gotta be careful of. Because sometimes mommies, if you're too naughty, you make the baby naughty.

[Marcus Parks]

Hope all of our mothers out there really paid attention to that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Just know that, right? No, you naughty mother.

[Marcus Parks]

That's a good advice. Naughty mommy makes naughty baby. Yeah, write that down.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wink. And that makes angry daddy.

[Marcus Parks]

But because the return to bedwetting coincided with Gary Ridgeway reaching puberty, the mommy wires got appallingly crossed. Mary Rita would often leave her bathrobe open, especially when she was dragging Gary to the bathtub in the middle of the night. And Gary would become aroused at the sight of his mother.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's big hooters because, you know, moms, I always think. But you always love when my mom slept in the nude. You know, like, you know how awesome that was when your mom got done with the penny? She got done alpha pennies. Kicked off those heels, stripped down to her bush and just relaxed.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It's crazy. I grew up in South Florida, one of the hottest places in the world, and I don't think my mom could have worn more clothes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

My mom was so sheathed, she was so clothed. Thank Christ.

[Marcus Parks]

Once Marita got Gary to the bath, she would furiously scrub his genitals until they were raw.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Baby's penis is covered in urine. Baby's penis needs to be cleaned by mommy. Yeah, it's crazy.

[Eddie Pepitone]

We got all these quotes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, that was a direct record.

[Marcus Parks]

She would overly focus on cleaning his privates while barely dressed herself.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Bobby, I think you must be somewhere around the.

[Marcus Parks]

Then she'd vigorously dry him off when she was finished. Gary remembered many interaction during this whole process. Gary in fact, said that his so called sexual awakening came while his mother was scrubbing his junk with a grimace on her face.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Ah, look at what you done, you pig. Look at this. Oh, look what you. Oh, you disgusting urine covered dick. Oh, I hate how covered in piss and shit you are.

[Marcus Parks]

The pig. You got that from your mom? Father, yes. Getting called a pig.

[Henry Zebrowski]

My mommy, they gave him old Henry's

[Eddie Pepitone]

mommy treated like a bad dog.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah. And later, Gary said that he was both angered and incredibly horny every time his mother scrubbed the urine from his genitals. Which of course fused anger, hatred, and sex in Gary's developing mind. And keep in mind that this is not something that happened once, twice, twice, five times, ten times, three times a week for years, if not every night for years.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Can I ask you both, like, let's say you were fathers and you were, like, let's say, let's put yourselves in this kind of scenario.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Mr. Ridgeway. Yes, I'm Mr. Ridgeway.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. And you, like, noticed every single time, you know, they're bringing him in there, they're washing all the pee pee off of his penis. And he's getting super hard.

[Marcus Parks]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And the boy keeps getting old. Older.

[Marcus Parks]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

At some point when he gets hard, like, do you think that, like, there's no, like, putting some brakes on the process here?

[Marcus Parks]

You're assuming that the father ever got out of bed. Yeah, like, that was the thing. Lucky he is. Thomas Ridgeway would just stay in bed. It's not like he would come in and supervise.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But what if you saw your son getting hard every time his mom was. Why your teenage son, every time she washed his genitals. Right. Covered in urine, he got hard from.

[Marcus Parks]

Conversation's going to be had.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Would you be like this should probably. I think we should let his coach do this. Like this maybe is a teacher's job. They should be doing this at school.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. I just think he was just not present. You know, it's probably just hammered and smoking cigarettes in the other room and not giving a. About his family being a real dad.

[Marcus Parks]

He was also. He was terrified of Mary Rita. Like, Mary Rita was an incredibly domineering woman. But don't worry. I mean, he's. His contributions to Gary Ridgeway's pathology is going to be coming up soon.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Because Mary Reed has got those big old stinky bags.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's right. She's big stinky bag, old stinky, flappy bags.

[Henry Zebrowski]

How I wish I was baby Gary.

[Marcus Parks]

Since the area where the Ridgeway family had moved to was not yet a city, their home was surrounded by woods where the Ridgeway boys would explore and play. Gary therefore became very familiar with the forests of the Pacific Northwest. And that familiarity would later be used to find all the right spots to hide bodies. Partly, though, Gary was going out into the woods to avoid the constant conflicts between his parents. Mary Rita had become more dominant over the years, ordering Thomas to beat their children when she thought they deserved it. Gary therefore began to view his father as weak and soft, while women in general became monsters. Mary Rita also got far more serious about religion. The Ridgeway boys were brought to Mary Rita's Catholic church every Sunday, but their father was barred from coming because the local priest had a problem with the divorce Thomas had before his marriage to Mary Rita. This, of course, caused even more rifts.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let's go, Gary. We're going to church where your father's not alive. Let's go, Gary. Oh, you got Urine all over.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Let me.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let me really watch him.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Let's go.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Your father's not allowed in God's house. Let's go.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Gary, your impression is scaring Marcus. Oh, let me pack my tits.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I forgot to pack my tits.

[Marcus Parks]

That loose and stinky.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. And big. Yeah, yeah. It's before they made tit deodorant.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Big stinky bags.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Big stinky, flopping bags.

[Marcus Parks]

Even though Mary Rita was obviously noticing her son's bath time boners, did I

[Henry Zebrowski]

see you at JCPenny's earlier today?

[Marcus Parks]

Sexual pleasure was something that was discussed with scorn in the Ridgeway home. Mary Rita herself taught her boys that masturbation was one of the worst sins of all, that she actually told them that it was better to rape a woman than it was to masturbate.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is what so much changes.

[Marcus Parks]

This is what Gary was being told right as he entered puberty. And the shit that Gary was hearing from his mother resulted in a myriad of abnormal sexual habits. He became a neighborhood window peeper, spying on girls in his neighborhood before being chased off by a parade of angry fathers. In one instance, Gary believed when an older girl came over to his house with friends to watch tv, that all he had to do to have sex with her was to surreptitiously put his erection in her field of vision by pulling his shorts to the side and showing off his erect penis.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It seems that the. The. The elevator has reaches forward. Ding dong. Over here.

[Marcus Parks]

Over here. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I actually just watched a body cam where a guy would hang out at a gas station with his penis and a penis pump, and he'd, like, get it all engorged and open to the window, and he would do where women go by. He'd go, excuse me, miss, May I interest you in this?

[Marcus Parks]

It's awful.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I hate when they're nice. Yeah, it's like almost worse.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Commercial.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, supposedly Gary watched TV with his neighbor and a whole group of his older brother's friends, and he tried this bizarre little game over and over again for months. The girl never once reacted or at the very least never acknowledged it. She did the right thing. Well, she should just. Should have stopped going over there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

She slugged him in the mouth.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. And been like, should have some of those boys.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Well, you know what it is, But

[Marcus Parks]

I think no one noticed. That's what he said. He said. He always said that no one noticed. No one said anything. And I think if he was bullied as much as he was, because this is like his older Brother's friends. And like, I know neither of y' all got older brothers. I got two older brothers. When your older brother's friends see anything to make fun of you for, they go for it. Like, they go for it hard.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But what an ultimate example of what Gary's sort of talking about, right? He can't even pull his dick out and get a reaction. He's in this area of all these kids, and he's going, like, anybody see what. See what Gary's doing? Anybody see what Gary's doing? And he's in the corner and they're. Nobody. Everybody's just going. He's like, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Gary puts his penis out.

[Eddie Pepitone]

And that's exactly how he got away with it for so long. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it is. Now, Gary was a loner both before and after puberty. And since he believed masturbation was a sin that was worse than rape, he got his jimmies out by becoming a fro. How do you. Actually. How do you. Is fr.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Fr.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Honestly, let's not put the French spin on.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I never heard the word before my whole life. Frod. Frod. Fraud.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Call him just a fraud.

[Marcus Parks]

Fraud. Yeah, yeah, that's one of the. That's the terms. It's when you rub up or brush up against somebody for sexual pleasure.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, of course. Course the French thought of that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But, you know, it's like you do it on the train. Like, it's. It. It happens a lot in New York City. It's the thing of where you could just kind of, like, the guy just sort of lets the tip of his

[Marcus Parks]

penis touch you, or it's also trying to rub up against a woman's breast, you know, just like that. So. And you're always making it look like an accident, like, oh, sorry, but very much doing it on purpose.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Walk around with the palms of their hands facing out and stuff like that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Ah, yeah. Are you a fro.

[Eddie Pepitone]

No, I got grabbed.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah. Men. See, I've been frauded several times.

[Marcus Parks]

I've been frauded myself a few times. Yes. It was also around this time that Gary found that killing living creatures made him feel better about his anger. After suffocating the aforementioned cat at the age of 14 and throwing the corpse amongst the local roadkill, Gary found that killing something, killing anything, it made him feel strong. Strong and important. While Gary was discovering this disturbing quirk to his personality, his father took a second job at a mortuary and quite unwisely decided to be open and honest with his son about everything he heard while working with the dead. Thomas Ridgeway would tell the teenaged Gary stories about a co worker who would commit necrophilia with the female corpses. He would go into grotesque and unnecessary detail with his young son about his co workers necrophilia.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Son, this is a funny story. I don't know why you're not laughing, son. This is a funny story about the time I saw Carlos and we Eiffel towered that old blind woman.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Stop taking notes. I'm telling a story

[Henry Zebrowski]

just so interested.

[Marcus Parks]

God damn it. Every time you say my. You say that we don't spend any time together. And the moment that we find something that I think that we're going to connect on, you just blow me off.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What's he like?

[Marcus Parks]

Well, this caused necrophilia to become central to Gary's sexual fat fantasies because he began to believe that when you were having sex with a corpse, there were no feelings involved one way or the other.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It could be super casual.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Thomas would also be quite vocal about his personal hatred towards sex workers. He thought they were subhuman. And even though Gary would become a frequent customer on the block both with sex workers he did and did not murder, he would hold the same opinions as his father throughout his. His life. Now, as far as his mother went, she also overshared with Gary when it came to the sexual escapades that came as a result of her work at JCPenney. Henry, did your mom ever talk about her sexual escapades at JCPenney? The way the sex. How sexy things got.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The worst part is when I learned how she knew the term bukkake. And at first I thought it was because she had went by the sushi area by in the food court and it turns out. No, no, no, no. She met mystery Yakimoto. No, no, she never had sex there.

[Marcus Parks]

No, I don't think so.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cuz when we went to J.C. penney, you got to remember that was a classy place for us.

[Marcus Parks]

Sure.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That was the classy place. That's where I got my communion suit.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, J.C. penny, by the way. I mean, really. I mean, Dillards was always considered to

[Henry Zebrowski]

be about J.C. you guys had. We. We dreamt of Dillard.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Really? Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Occasionally we'd go to a Bloomingdales or Bird eyes.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Who are you? What are you. Oh, Mr. Vanderbilt over here.

[Marcus Parks]

Don't even get me started on service merchandise.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, my mom never. Or got sucked or. Or got gaped in a J.C. penney's.

[Marcus Parks]

At least that she told you about.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And honestly, I'll call her and ask. Just.

[Eddie Pepitone]

She told me, and she wouldn't tell you.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm trying to. Personally, I'm trying to separate the art from the artist. The art being her motherhood of me.

[Marcus Parks]

Understandable. Well, Mary Rita would tell Gary how much she enjoyed measuring men who needed to be fit for pants. Some men, she said, would get involuntary erections from her touch. Like you, Gary.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, usually when I'm drying them off.

[Marcus Parks]

Others would emit a certain scent that Mary Rita would inhale while she knelt in front of their crotch.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's not real.

[Marcus Parks]

No, it's like a musk. She liked it.

[Eddie Pepitone]

She'll shoot scent out of their.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, she's smelling a guy's dirty ass. Balls.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, that's turning. She's turned on by. By smelly balls.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, she's turned on by smelly balls. And she told her son about this.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Which is, like, the most, like, truly one of. Yeah, sure, you could be into dirty smelly balls. God bless you. But I'm saying that, you know, you just save that for the quilting route.

[Marcus Parks]

But think about this. He's got. His mother is talking about how much she gets turned on by smelly balls.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Her.

[Marcus Parks]

His father is talking about, like, yeah, you can fuck a dead girl. It's fine. It's okay. And this is what Gary Ridgeway's fucking growing up with.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Is it bad that I just got deja vu?

[Marcus Parks]

It's interesting. It's certainly interesting.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Interesting.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This used to be my playground.

[Marcus Parks]

But Mary Rita also continued pushing her son around to the point of depression and deep embarrassment, even beyond the bedwetting incidents. So Gary began fantasizing about murdering his own mother in great detail. He thought about stabbing her in the heart, choking her to death, and setting the house on fire with her still inside.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Still house on fire.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary even. Gary even fantasized about torturing his mother, thinking often about what it would be like to sew up her vagina with a needle and a thread.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It'd be kind of difficult, but also, I'd be proud if I could do it just because I finally finished something I wanted.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I mean, it's the first time he showed creativity.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Just trying to stay positive, I suppose.

[Marcus Parks]

It does show vague creativity.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I bet you he just watched his mom preparing the turkey one year for Thanksgiving. He was like, that's a good idea.

[Marcus Parks]

From fantasizing about killing his mother, Gary moved on to fantasizing about raping and killing his classmates. He began following them home with a massive erection while thinking about all the horrible Things he wanted to do. Gary privately referred to this as patrolling. Because these serial killers do love their little terms for their little games.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's all validating. It's all the in their head that makes in a structure.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eventually, Gary's constant rage translated itself into property damage, breaking and entering, excessive drinking and theft. But Gary found that the only thing that really released the pressure valve all the way was violence. And Gary's first violent act towards another human came in 1965 when he was just 16 years old.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is like out of Stephen King novel.

[Marcus Parks]

It really is. In a wooded area beside Gary's high school, Gary stumbled upon a six year old kid dressed as a cowboy. Cowboy. Innocently just playing. For some reason, seeing this child enjoying an afternoon playing cowboy, this filled Gary with uncontrollable rage.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Was he an Indian?

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't think he had any Cherokee.

[Marcus Parks]

No, no. So he approached the boy with a plan. He asked the kid if he wanted to go into the woods with Gary where they'd build a fort together because Gary said there were a lot of people around, quote, who'd like to kill

[Henry Zebrowski]

little boys like you.

[Marcus Parks]

So when Gary got the kid out to the woods and the kid picked up a sea stick, Gary pulled out his knife and stabbed the child in the torso, hitting his liver. Gary watched and laughed as the blood flowed out of the wound and filled up the child's cowboy boots. But instead of finishing the act, Gary simply walked away. The boy made his way to the road and was found bleeding out by a teacher. He survived, but Gary Ridgeway would not be named as the perpetrator of this crime for another 36 years. This, of course, was after he was arrested as the Green River Killer and he began listing his crimes times throughout his life. The cops looked back at the records, looked and found when Gary said it happened that there was a kid who was stabbed dressed as a little cowboy. It all happened.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary Ridgeway could not remember the names of his childhood pets, but he had a near photographic memory of every single crime he ever committed.

[Marcus Parks]

That's not true.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He would. Well, depends on what. Like he. Because of the. You could tell that he fantasized and thought about the, the stuff that was important to him.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of. There are things that were photographic, there were some things that were hazy. Let's just say he was all up.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's all up. But I mean, it just turns out for somebody who couldn't remember his pets, it was shocking how Many different shallow graves he could remember, different places he could go.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I just can't believe he was dressing up like a cowboy at 16. No, I was getting high.

[Marcus Parks]

And boy was dressed as a cowboy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Oh, no, Gary. Gary Ridway was a cowboy today. Howdy, Hope. You ready to set? We're gonna settle up and go down to the branches.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, so the kid was much younger. Okay.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, the kid was six years old.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Ah, I see it all makes sense now. I'm sorry.

[Marcus Parks]

It's all right. But while the incident with the little cowboy was Gary's first act of serious violence against another human, he also very likely committed his first murder. Murder around this time. Later, Gary would say that he was unsure if his first murder was a hallucination or a dream, which, as you're about to find out, is a common theme amongst Gary's confessions. There is, however, usually evidence linking Gary's hazy recollections to real life events. So they are worth taking seriously. In 1964, Gary said that he and a younger boy were swimming in a lake near Seattle when Gary suddenly wrapped his legs around his swim mate, its neck and dragged the kid into the water below. Gary said that the kid did fight back, but Gary held the kid underwater until he stopped moving. And once the kid was dead, Gary said he pulled the body under a nearby dock and left it floating there. Now, while that might have been a hallucination or a dream, public records show that two boys did indeed drown in that same lake during the same year. Gary recalled drowning this boy. So it is possible that Gary was responsible for. For at least one of them. And it's not uncommon for serial killers at this age when they're teenagers especially. Even if they end up killing women later on. To kill little boys and to just kill anyone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, they're around a little boy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And that's. But it sounds a lot like Ted Bundy. It sounds a lot like. There, there's that story, you know, with Ted Bundy with the little girl when he was a little girl. And it matches all his MOs later on, actually.

[Marcus Parks]

And we'll find that Gary Ridgeway and Ted Bundy shared. Share a lot in common. But even though Gary's life was becoming increasingly dark, both within and without, he actually evened out once he got to high school. When it came to social interaction, he actually began dating and eventually got a pretty girl named Claudia Craig to go steady after the two of them met at the supermarket where they both worked. Interestingly, Claudia's mother later said that when Gary came over to their house. And you know, he was 16, 17, he'd just sit there and never say a word. One day she said that he came over and just sat in a chair for a full eight hours, didn't say a word to anyone.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's fascinating.

[Marcus Parks]

Stared at the wall.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He's just weirdo dude. He's just always been. He doesn't know how to human like, he's like one. He doesn't know how to be a human being.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's better than jammering on for fucking eight hours.

[Marcus Parks]

Actually. That is true. That is true.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's all fine. If it was wasn't Gary Ridgeway, I'd

[Marcus Parks]

far rather forget that he was there than they get to the end of the eight hours. Like if you bring that kid over here one more time. Murder.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I hate Gary. Gary smells like pee.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. But by the end of it. Gary Ridgeway came out of high school in 1970 with the reputation of a normal, if dim witted individual. He'd been held back twice by the end of it and therefore graduated at the age of 20, barely able to read or write.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Wow.

[Marcus Parks]

But since this was 1970 and the draft of the Vietnam War was in full effect, Gary was actually smart enough to join the Navy to avoid the Army. Because in 1970, guys like Gary Ridgeway, that is guys that were poor and not too bright, they were amongst the first to be handed a rifle before being sent to die in the jungles of Vietnam.

[Henry Zebrowski]

God, he would have been a great Vietnamese corpse. Great over there.

[Marcus Parks]

So after going through basic training in San Diego, Gary was assigned to the USS Vancouver in the Philippines, making him yet another serial killer who served in the Vietnam War but came nowhere near combat.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So interesting.

[Marcus Parks]

Seven or eight. Wow. That we know of at the very. And that's just that we know of.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Who are some of the popular ones?

[Marcus Parks]

David Berkowitz. Leonard Lake.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, Leonard Lake was a heat skid. He definitely. Yeah, he was a big liar.

[Marcus Parks]

I think Arthur Shawcross maybe.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes, I'm pretty certain. Arthur Shawcross.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Henry. Dad.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

My daddy only could kill my dreams.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, like so many other serial killers in Vietnam, Gary Ridgeway discovered the wide world of sex workers overseas. David Berkowitz was another who got very involved with sex workers over there.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Barely tell. Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You don't know.

[Marcus Parks]

Apparently, though, something happened to Gary that he would never actually discuss. Which is surprising considering how Gary would talk about pretty. Pretty much anything once investigators got him going. Gary said that something happened with sex workers in the Philippines that he never got out of his system. Something that was so bad that he said he probably should have gone to counseling for it. But Gary refused to elaborate any further on what actually happened.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Probably got the kicked out of him by a pimp.

[Marcus Parks]

Maybe.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Maybe.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, one thing that Gary definitely talked about was how the Philippines kick started his lifelong fetish for inserting foreign objects into vaginas. He said this developed experiences with local Filipino sex workers who would walk up to sailors, reach under the skirts and pull out pre inserted beer bottles straight from the vagina. Wow.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Were they cold?

[Marcus Parks]

They were very warm. These beer bottles would then be handed over to a potential customer, I suppose as a way to impress or titillate the American sailors.

[Henry Zebrowski]

What did we just learn from the Anton Leve series? What have we learned about old men recently? I, I, they were disgusting. Yeah. Older men. And what they liked was actually way grosser than even what we like now. You mean men that from that time?

[Marcus Parks]

From that time period, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

There's something about like, like that being like my, the stories I heard from my dad when he used to go to Hogs and Heers. It was a lot of girls peeing on things and he the original Coyote Ugly.

[Marcus Parks]

Really?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's what it's all based off of.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's just a lot of old play that we weren't, you know, there was like panty raids.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Know.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, they put up with a lot more. They stopped putting up with stuff. Yeah, I didn't think that's. I think that's what changed.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He said stop, Stop. Last podcast on the left is all about the facts. So when Southern New Hampshire University came on as a sponsor, it was time to do some research. Turns out they offer more than 200 online degree programs. And get this, criminal justice and psychology are some of the most popular. Classes have no set meeting times, and tuition rates are some of the lowest in the U.S. want to learn even more about SNHU? Visit SNHU. Edu last. This is a paid ad by BetterHelp. You know, stigma shows up in a lot of different places. I know. I had to explain to my hand handyman about the devil imagery in my home. I had to explain that in our home, El Diablo Espeno. And he reluctantly agreed. I think largely just because he was in my home and he was scared. But over time, he began to see, huh? The devil can be my amigo. See, even in 2026, stigma can get in the way a lot of things. All right, My handyman almost didn't put up my, my floating media cabinet Right. You got to get support for your mental health. Maybe you've encouraged friends to consider therapy while avoiding taking the first step yourself because you're busy. Worried what others will think? Or telling yourself you should handle it alone? No, you need a team. Get therapy with BetterHelp, the world's largest online therapy platform. Give me a space to slow down and talk. Talk through what's building before it feels unmanageable. Says take a short questionnaire to identify your needs and Preferences and BetterHelp will handle the initial therapist matching work for you. Their industry leading match rate means BetterHelp typically gets it right the first time. Feel confident knowing betterhelp therapists work according to a strict code of ethics and are fully qualified. So don't let hesitation hold you back. Find support with BetterHelp. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] LastPod that's better. H E L P.com LastPod. In the United States of America, there's a break in every 26 seconds. That means somewhere right now an intruder is getting closer. The problem is most security systems only alert you after a break in has already started. That's too late. Choose SimpliSafe to secure your home. Using the Outdoor Camera Series 2 and advanced AI alerts, SimpliSafe's US based live agents identify threats on your property and help deter them. Stopping crimes before it starts. That's real peace of mind. They've got a really great security system that makes sure people don't get in your house or it makes a big noise. And to me that's a big, big deal for me is that it protects all of our yelling with a siren in our studio, which is one of the most important things that can be protected. I don't care if thieves come and kidnap us. They don't care if if marauders come and steal our staff and bring them to another country against their will. As long as our words aren't affected. As long as they're precious date isn't affected. And Simply Safe does that. And for that I say God bless you. Simply Safe. God bless you. God bless you. Simply God bless you. Experience greater peace of mind with Simply Safe now available with an exclusive discount for our listeners. Right now you can get 50 off your new system by visiting simplisafe.com lpotl that's half [e-mail] lpt o t l There's no safe like Simplisafe.

[Marcus Parks]

Like a lot of Navy men at the time, Gary caught gonorrhea twice during his time in the service. But he surprisingly didn't place the blame for that on the sex workers. He said they actually treated him well and they introduced him to the more erotic sexual practices beyond the vanilla missionary position.

[Henry Zebrowski]

He means doggy style. That's what he became obsessed with. Obsessed with.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary would, however, also later tell his second wife that he developed a hatred for these same Filipino sex workers. So Gary had developed a relationship with sex workers that was, to say the least, messy. He both loved them for giving him pleasure and he hated them for what that sin represented. But even though Gary was having sex with women in the Philippines who both were and were not sex workers, he had shipped off to the Navy as a married man. Man. His high school girlfriend, Claudia Craig had actually agreed to marry Gary before he

[Henry Zebrowski]

went off to the Philippines marrying Pete Pants Gary, man. Yeah, it's men or dogs. Unbelievable. You take on that piss soaked gentleman and then he's going to go and get covered in gonorrhea and the war.

[Marcus Parks]

By the time they got together, he cleared up the pee pee. The bed wedding stopped when he was about 15.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I don't know if it ever leaves your spirit, you know what I mean?

[Eddie Pepitone]

In the, in the doc it said that he got gonorrhea and chlamydia and that he resented the sex workers for it. And that's kind of like why he started killing people down the road.

[Henry Zebrowski]

The doc simplified.

[Marcus Parks]

Huge simplification.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

That's a massive, massive simplification.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Doesn't chlamydia untreated make you crazy?

[Henry Zebrowski]

He was treated.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh okay.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, because they. He goes. He got treated at the military hospital. He went and got, he went and got va if you catch. Go somewhere and get for it.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. And yeah, and really all of these details in true crime, it's really hard to pin down what's real and what's not. Did he get gun twice? Did he get guna once and chlamydia once?

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's from. It's his story.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Cuz he lies too.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Now Claudia was left back in San Diego, but she was just as unfaithful as Gary. And because both of them were unfaithful, the marriage fell apart. Less than a year after they got married, Gary branded his wife a even though he had also stepped out dozens of times. And Gary's hatred towards women grew even more. Now, he had tried a few relationships after returning from the Philippines to Washington state, but after he found that he couldn't make anything last more than a few months, he Returned to sex workers, all while his rage towards women continued bubbling in his belly. After Gary received an honorable discharge after 23 months in the navy, he got a job at a plant called Kenworth Trucking that specialized in the production of medium and heavy duty commercial trucks, 18 wheelers and such. There it was discovered that Gary had an affinity for d detailing vehicles, which involved painting the lettering, logos and stripes that indicate which truck belongs to which company or which trucker. Because this is the age of the trucker.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is when truckers, they were the ones killing sex workers with impunity. And we should have, you know, like, we celebrated them by saying, here you go, here's some ptsd.

[Marcus Parks]

Kings of the road they were. But Gary did not start off as a master detailer. And whatever Gary did, he always started off making mistakes. But once he got it, he could nail it. The only thing that would trip Gary up is if some part of the process changed. And Gary up so often that he got the long lasting nickname wrong way because of how many times he would have to repaint an entire truck after using the wrong color or the wrong kind of paint. Wrong way. Right. Ridgeway.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And he did not like the nickname.

[Marcus Parks]

He did not like being called because they would call him Wrong way Gary.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, Wrong way Gary. Wrong Way, which is placed replaced piss pants Gary. And he just been like, I'm gonna bring the building there.

[Marcus Parks]

As far as his reputation at work went, Gary was known as friendly, if overbearing, because what gave people pause was Gary's behavior towards female employees. On many occasions, Gary would approach a female co worker and massage their shoulders without asking them. And since this 1972, his behavior was shrugged off as, oh, Gary, he's friendly. He's just a little too friendly, but essentially harmless.

[Henry Zebrowski]

All, I think all the sex working kind of made him weird with ladies.

[Marcus Parks]

He might have. Yeah, man. But even though Gary was a creep, he never had trouble getting wives, much less girlfriends. And he met his next wife, Marsha Winslow, using a tactic that would probably get him pepper sprayed in this day and age.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's just hard out there for women, okay? And the bar is extremely low. And it is only just raised about three inches, maybe.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, in 1972, Marsha Winslow was driving a scenic loop that circled Lake Washington, and a car very suddenly pulled up quickly and closely behind her own. Marcia pulled over, assuming it was a cop that was trying and somehow failing to give her a ticket. Because for being honest, it's not like Gary Ridgeway. He did not. The women that he was with were also they were about as smart as he was.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I will, yeah, I get it.

[Marcus Parks]

It kind of, it comes up over, over again.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You have to be because.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Because any intelligent woman would just him out.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes. This woman was pulled over by him in a way that is very frightening. Very frightening in the fact that she's just like, no, okay, I guess I'll

[Marcus Parks]

see what he wants. But instead, it was Gary Ridgeway who introduced himself as an interested romantic party.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I just would it say you were speeding back there into my romantic inclination.

[Marcus Parks]

Incredibly, Marsha was charmed by his clean cut appearance and his military manners. And even though he accidentally called Marsha by his first wife's name the first time they had sex, Classic. Marcia and Gary quickly moved in together and were married by 1973. Now, while Gary's first wife said that his sexual habits weren't anything special, Gary insisted on anal sex with his second wife, Marcia, and sometimes tied her hands and feet with belts from bathrobes. He started getting into bondage.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Suddenly do it upside down.

[Marcus Parks]

On Asia, Gary also began exploring his fetish for having sex outdoors, usually off hiking trails or campsites. Incidentally, he and Marsha would have sex in many of the same places that Gary would later hide the bodies of his murder victims.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Aww,

[Eddie Pepitone]

cute.

[Marcus Parks]

Eventually, Gary became so fond of having sex outdoors that he installed silk screened wallpaper featuring forest scenes on the headboard of his bed so he could still, still quote, enjoy the view while having sex indoors.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, I'm going. If you could just stop moving your head around because I got all these pine cones. Putting these pine cones next to your head.

[Marcus Parks]

On these trips, though, Gary's behavior was also becoming more sinister. He would suddenly disappear into the woods during hikes so he could practice being completely silent to the point where his wife was worried that he wasn't coming back. And then at the height of her fear, as she's wandering around saying, gary, Gary, where are you? He'd either jump out from behind a bush and go, go. Or he'd grab her arm from behind. Later, Marcia would say, quote, he liked

[Henry Zebrowski]

to see how softly he could walk so that he could be just totally n less and he could do it too.

[Marcus Parks]

There's an exclamation point on that because I can. Because that's the thing is like, that's not the voice that I hear is

[Henry Zebrowski]

just like, it's like, see how softly he can do it too, you know? Oh, he styled as a snow cap.

[Eddie Pepitone]

A lot of people say I sound like a man.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I agree.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, Maria lasted Far longer than Gary's first wife. And by 1975, Marsha had given birth to Gary's first son, Matthew.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Where's he at?

[Marcus Parks]

You know what? Give him his Privacy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Side stories. Lplmail.com Love to hear from you.

[Marcus Parks]

I'm guessing wherever he is, is he's got a different last name.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

After Matthew's birth.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Bing way.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Sorry, continue. I know we're supposed to give these people their privacy because it is only right, but I'm always so curious where the fuck they're off hiding. Of course, you know, it's like you because, I mean, it's got to just destroy you.

[Marcus Parks]

Most of them are just off trying to live their lives. Every once in a while, you get somebody who wants to come forward and make it their entire identity. Identity. Like Dennis Raider's daughter. Yeah, like some. But that's up. That's all sorts of very rare. Most of the time these people change their names. Like a lot of serial. A lot of them in the past. Like, as soon as the guy, the husband gets arrested, the mother will move, change their name, and never speak to them again.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, I would just. Man, if that was my dad, I would just make sure. I mean, I'm already not having kids, but, like, I would just make sure I don't have kids.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, they just snip it off. Yeah, yeah. Or just do the inside cut.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Kill the butt line.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. God, I know. We don't deserve it anymore.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I'm actually, there is an interview with Matthew Ridgeway in the News Tribune from 2000 from. It was updated in 2021.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wow.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And it's him being like. It's just weird because, like, my dad never used racial slurs. He never yelled. He never talked about prostitutes.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It was just.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I mean, I don't know, he just. He was just trying to be a father. Like you see in the TV shows.

[Marcus Parks]

Father Knows best. Gary knows best.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary knows best.

[Eddie Pepitone]

That's how bored we all were during COVID came out of hiding.

[Marcus Parks]

Talk about his father.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Actually, I give you some attention. I didn't you guys notice? I've been. I've been twitching them home.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, after Matthew's birth, Gary got far more religious. But rather than following in his mother's Catholic footsteps, Gary joined several Protestant churches. As if one church wasn't enough, Marsha described Gary as being almost fanatical about religion. After the birth of their son, he would read the Bible both at home and at work. She said that tears would fall from Gary's eyes during church services. And he'd spend his nights watching tv. TV while clutching his Bible. Gary even started walking door to door in his neighborhood, trying to convert his neighbors. But he would get furious when those neighbors inevitably slam their doors in his face again and again.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Is that common? Like people being really religious and also being serial killers?

[Marcus Parks]

No, not really.

[Eddie Pepitone]

They're usually atheists.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It depends, because there's also. There's a whole subset. There's the missionary killer. There's a. There's a subset of. Of killer that is entirely religiosity, like, based. It's like their own fantasy world. So it really depends, like, largely you. It would turn. It would turn into a new category. He is a guy that would use the Bible for what I'm gonna. My. My call, my fucking Sunday morning psychiatrist call is the fact that he used it as, like, a lot of people use it, which is the possible Hail Mary pass at the end of life. And that he was constantly trying to validate the feelings that he was feeling. Feeling. Because weirdly, it all came from this, like, emotional place.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's very easy with Christianity to come to the conclusion that women are evil because there are many churches that preach that specific thing and

[Henry Zebrowski]

many verses in the Bible that talk about it. And the whole story of Adam and Eve and every single woman that is ever around Jesus Christ is always just tempting him and doing it. It's almost like they. They've been putting that idea that women are evil expendable in our brains ever since we started this whole process.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Y. It's. The Catholic Church still won't let women be priests. And whenever they want to get more involved, they put them in a habit and stick them in a building.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You want to know why? You want to know why? It's because. I'm starting to think it's because women hold people accountable. Yeah. Part of the function.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah. Also, I remember him saying in the doc that he. That he thought that he would be forgiven if he asked for it. Sure.

[Marcus Parks]

That's the Hail Mary that Henry's talking about.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, it's. It's.

[Marcus Parks]

There's always that back pocket they always got.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Look at David Berkowitz. That's all it is. He's Mr. Jesus now.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

When David Berkowitz and Gary Ridgeway die by. By the rules of Christianity, both of them are going to heaven.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Them.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This could be them. Charlie Kirk, Michael Jackson, all of our favorites.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Conor McGregor, all having a great time.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary's main church was Pentecostal, and his pastor and Steel, which Is bad.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Bad idea for him.

[Marcus Parks]

And his pastor instilled even more archaic views about women. Be the horrible. His parents had already taught him. The Pentecostals taught that wives and daughters wouldn't make it to heaven if they didn't obey their husbands. And even something as small as having short hair or wearing the color red, both of those things massive sins for women.

[Eddie Pepitone]

What if it's our hair?

[Henry Zebrowski]

Even worse.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Rose out of her.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Cut her head off. Cut her head off. Save it.

[Marcus Parks]

This of course caused a rift in Gary's marriage, just like it had in his parents marriage. Although the male and female roles in Gary's marriage were reversed. But speaking Gary's mother, Mary Rita soon became the main pressure point in Gary and Marsha's marriage. For some reason, Mary Rita had access to Gary's bank accounts and she made her opinions known concerning how Gary and Marcia spent their money.

[Henry Zebrowski]

People are weird with that.

[Marcus Parks]

Really weird about it. On weekends, Gary would spend his free time with his mother instead of his wife. But Marsha soon discovered that it was probably for the best if Gary went on these visits alone. One night when Marsha came along, Thomas and Mary Rita got into a fight. And Mary Rita got so worked up that she smashed a plate over her husband's head. Thomas left the room without saying a word, which had become a pretty common reaction from Gary's father throughout Gary's life when his mother got abusive. But by the early to mid-70s 70s, Gary's head was filled with a bunch of Pentecostal about how women were supposed to act. And Mary Rita had only become more domineering after she'd been promoted to a manager position at JCPenney.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You can't with that.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Is it wrong that I'm like rightfully so? Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Work a 9 to 5. So the idea of how a woman was supposed to act as it was presented in Gary's Pentecostal church. That became mixed with Gary's hatred towards the fair, their sex which edged him closer and closer towards serial murder. After Gary got switched to night shifts detailing trucks and Marcia started taking classes during the day, the relationship began to dissolve. Marcia then got gastric bypass surgery and lost a lot of weight.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It's always a warning sign, fellas.

[Marcus Parks]

And she used her newfound confidence to start a career as a professional singer, entertaining locals at nearby bars.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I just love her life.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I love it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Her life is insane.

[Marcus Parks]

She's on the a great trajectory.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I don't like this family, Gary. I'm getting to bypass it and I'm Becoming a singer, I had a thing about it.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Gary. Gary. Always making a big deal about the Bible, but my Bible's the songbook of Liza Minnelli.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary, of course, hated his wife's new lease on life, and he started accusing her of sleeping with other men during her late nights entertaining. This was, of course, projection, because Gary had stop seeing sex workers throughout his two marriages, despite what the church might have to say about it, because remember, he still thinks that masturbation is one of the worst sins in the world. Things between Marsha and Gary came to a head one night when they returned home from a party where they'd both been drinking. They argued all the way home, but when they pulled into the driveway and Marsha got out of the car, Gary hung back. He then snuck up behind her using his silent technique, and he began choking her so she couldn't see who was doing it. Marcia actually thought for a second that some stranger was indeed attacking her. But she soon realized what was really happening. See, after Gary let go, he tried dodging around the other side of the car like a little kid trying to get away with something. Then he emerged, pretending to be shocked that, oh, my God, some guy just tried choking you. That's crazy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You wouldn't believe me. I saw me at be lies and a big dumb mouth Ringo hair mustache.

[Marcus Parks]

Marsha, of course, knew that Gary was the perpetrator. But for Gary's part, he said that this was the moment when something vicious and evil had been unleashed. He later admitted that choking her had majorly turned him on. He said, quote, well, after that, I

[Henry Zebrowski]

wanted to have sex with a prostitute and kill her doing that.

[Marcus Parks]

Direct quote. And one of the many things it's hard to pin down concerning this is

[Henry Zebrowski]

what I like, you know, I mean, it's so hard. We go through everybody's house, like, do what you love, and then you never have to work a day in your life. Life. And actually, what Gary shows is an exact example. When your passion becomes your work, you actually never stop working. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, that's true.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Epiphanies aren't always good.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, there's been a couple of, like, true eureka moments that have been pretty bad for us.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, really bad.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

The same guy who created leaded gasoline also created CFCs. We could have used two less eurekas from that guy.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You could just see the guy pouring Covid 17, pouring 18 together in one vial.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, one of the many things that's hard to pin down concerning Gary Ridgeway is exactly when he began murdering women, he told investigators that it was, quote, very possible that he'd killed several women during the 1970s. But his memories were hazy. The best he could offer was a vague memory of killing a sex worker while he was living with Marsha. But he could only remember that something went wrong on a so called date and that he'd probably killed a sex worker during that date.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's just saying. This is just how many he killed.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, it's weird. I kind of believe him.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, 100%. I absolutely believe him. He's not smart enough to lie and

[Henry Zebrowski]

he's, he's not a Henry Lee Lucas. There is. He brought, he corroborated quite a bit of what he was talking about later on. It's just, you know, it's just hard when you look at him and you're like, you can't believe how much devastation this little fucking idiot did.

[Marcus Parks]

But you can also tell that he's also, also trying to figure out like what happened. Like he's, he's trying to figure out like that's why he's talk. He talks so much and he's, he's like, he even, it's a, he's a mystery even to himself.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And when they do those.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Right.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We'll get into it later on when they do the thing where they drive him around and stuff and he's just been like, thank you, Mr. Grayson, thank you so much. And he's just like this nice little man and he's like whistling and stuff.

[Marcus Parks]

Now, according to Marcia, Gary kept coming home later and later throughout the mid to late 70s. And he'd often walk through the door wet and covered in dirt with no other explanation other that his car had broken down again and again and again. She also noted that Gary always kept several rolls of a protective plastic covering called Visqueen in the bed of his truck. And several of his later victims would of course be found covered in the same variety of plastic wrap.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And you know, he got that from his detailing job.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, yeah, of course. So no fingerprints on that?

[Marcus Parks]

No actually.

[Eddie Pepitone]

So he must have used gloves.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, well, this is, it really depends, dude. Because it's like in terms of the technology, fingerprint technology is really nowhere near anything that they show on movies and television.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, it is.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So it's such an inexact science and it's so not dependable that like it's so hard to do because. Because you have to, you have to, you have to make sure nobody up the. The scene.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It has to be pristine.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It has, I guess it's all covered in dirt, too.

[Marcus Parks]

Well, also remember, like, his victims were usually found two, three days later, sometimes some weeks later, years later. This is the Pacific Northwest. It's raining all the time.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

You know, so that. That. That makes forensic evidence like fingerprints really difficult to lift. Now, investigators tried their damnedest to pin down Gary's first kill, but the best Gary was. Gary could do was vaguely recall two or three times in which he thought he'd killed a woman. In these incidents in the late 70s, Gary said that he might have strangled women, then left their bodies in the middle of the street against the fence in a popular park or lying against a newsstand, where they would definitely have been found. But Ridgeway said that he'd never heard any reports in the media about these women. So he concluded again and again that he had only choked these women until they'd lost consciousness. And after Gary left them, he. He thought that they'd just woken up and walked away saying, quote, you'd figure

[Henry Zebrowski]

that she'd wake up if she wasn't dead.

[Marcus Parks]

You'd figure.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, you would.

[Henry Zebrowski]

If that's. If I was a bit man, which I am, I'd put $10,000, then I kill those women.

[Marcus Parks]

By 1980, Marsha had finally had enough of Gary Ridgeway. That summer, she told Gary to go out and treat himself to a nice breakfast alone. And while he thought it was a strange request, he still did what he was told.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Simple guy, simple little gu.

[Marcus Parks]

Simple guy, simple gal.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Go get some breakfast. Imagine that. Imagine you come home, you know you're in trouble.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

How much trouble you're in if you're. If your wife goes, hey, go get some breakfast.

[Marcus Parks]

Go off get breakfast.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Go get breakfast.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Honestly, it'd be a great way to deal with fights.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, I just keep driving.

[Marcus Parks]

But when Gary came back home, he found a moving van in the driveway and a very surprised Marsha, who she had expected. Expected to have all of her shit and all of her son shit packed up and gone by the time he returned.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Didn't you go to the goddamn Shoney's? I thought you were going to the buffet. As a matter of fact, I actually stopped by the Burger King and it gets fridge, so it was actually pretty fast for me

[Marcus Parks]

because, you know, if Marsha thought that she could get all of her stuff moved out of the time it takes a man to eat a stack of pancakes. Like I said, not. Not the brightest bulb either.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

But regardless of Marcia's cognitive abilities, Gary was extremely upset that Marsha had left. He'd wanted to be a normal family man. And now he'd had his second marriage fail after seven years and they've also got a five year old son together. Gary's anger only grew when he found out he had to pay child support. But the new expense certainly didn't stop him from doling out 20 bucks a blowjob to the sex workers he continued picking up around the SeaTac Strip. Later, a forensic psychiatrist asked Gary why he wanted to hurt sex workers in the first place. And Gary lamely offered that it was because. Because women had hurt him specifically his first two wives had hurt him. Gary in fact said that he had thought about killing Marsha because he didn't want to be seen as a loser with two failed marriages. Gary even speculated that if he had just killed Marsha back in 1980, he would only have the murder of one woman on his conscience instead of 50 plus. And he actually used that number, he said 50 plus. Because by the end of it, Gary himself only had a vague idea of how many women women he'd killed. But he said the only reason why he didn't kill Maria is because he knew he would be the prime suspect. Which proved that for Gary Ridgeway, killing was absolutely a choice.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, so it's weird. He's stupid, but he knows that, you see.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Well, that's because this is what being stupid, that's like one of the biggest injustices about being stupid is that you can be stupid and know you're stupid and. No, he know he's just stupid. Smart enough to know how stupid he is. And he can't see. It is like a fog. Like he can't see all of the reasons for the decisions that he makes because he works really instinctually and he doesn't have. Which shows again he, he would have killed Marsha. If he was going to kill her, he would have killed her. And I actually partially think it's the other. It's the I kind of thought in my head, get this. Sex should have been free. We should be doing this. She should be loving me. This is like a thing. And when I kill her it wipes out the whole incident. I feel like there' some of that too. And then we'll also find out later on he killed them to freeze them in place.

[Marcus Parks]

Possibly. Yeah. I mean free to.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So then he could do whatever he want.

[Marcus Parks]

Not all the time, but sometimes. Yeah, enough.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know what I mean?

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah. I mean I think with Mara, the only reason why he would kill is like he would kill her so no one would find out about the Divorce? Yeah, because if he killed her, then he's a grieving widower with a young son and he gets a lot of sympathy from his church, from his peers, from his parents, from everybody. But he knew he was smart enough to know, like the husband's always the first person, so. Yeah, always a choice for him. Now, not too long after Marsha filed for divorce, Gary was arrested for the first, but certainly not the last time in relation to prostitution. After cruising for a lady of the night, Gary picked one up and began choking her the same way he choked Marsha. This woman survived and did report the assault to the police. But Gary, guess what happened. The police absolutely questioned Gary, but Gary calmly explained that the choking was a justified act of self defense because the woman had bitten his penis during oral sex. The charge got dropped.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, yeah, we all know that story. Yeah, buddy, get out of here.

[Marcus Parks]

Get out of here. And the cops had no further questions for Gary Ridgeway. Cops are great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Damn, that's horrifying.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Very bleak. Very bleak.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Even if his case is true, it's still. It's very. Choking a woman.

[Marcus Parks]

Very bleak. Yeah, it's still choking a woman. Yeah, yeah, it's just ended.

[Henry Zebrowski]

But you forget, Eddie, it's not a woman to them, it's a sex worker. So she's expendable.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yes. Did he get. Still get arrested for the sex work thing?

[Marcus Parks]

No, not worth it. Well, I can't really prove that. They have to catch in the act.

[Eddie Pepitone]

He said she bit his dick.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah, that's what guys do, buddy.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, it's.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know how many you choke, right? You know how much you love doing that.

[Eddie Pepitone]

My insides just vomited when you said that.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know how much you love doing it.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, some really foul. Henry, you don't like that?

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, I know what he likes.

[Marcus Parks]

After his divorce, Gary discovered a support group called Parents Without Partners. And he began meeting women that he didn't have to pay to be in his presence. After his divorce was finalized In May of 1981, Gary began dating a woman who is known only as Darla.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Darla sounds like she'd be for Gary.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, Darla's for. I would say Darla's for Gary, but Gary's not for Darla.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Damn.

[Marcus Parks]

Just like he done with Marcia. Gary quickly moved in with Darla in her West Seattle home. Although she had no idea what kind of person she was, Darla wasn't really a think ahead type of gal.

[Henry Zebrowski]

No, man. She found the fun lady.

[Marcus Parks]

She really is. She quickly discovered. Discovered that Gary was The type who liked sex wanted it up to three times a day. According to Darla, sex was basically Gary's hobby. And Darla liked sex, too, so that was all right as far as personality went. Darla described Gary as gentle, if a bit dim and detached. But Darla pretty much saw Gary as just a fun fling. He liked having sex outdoors. Darla was an exhibitionist. And since Gary was clean, considerate, and drink much, he was surprisingly safe.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Such a bar is just so low. I like Gary because he likes the outside. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I hate wolves.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's what I like. I like getting leaves in my clothes. Yeah.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Hell yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I saw branch snapping. Oh.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I just squirted.

[Marcus Parks]

Things used to be simpler.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Darla and Gary therefore began exploring their sexuality even more. And Gary reached awakened his insertion fetish by shoving fruit up Darla's vagina while she was tied up. She did say he never hurt her. And the weirdness of it all was actually quite exciting for my reading. Gary and Darla seem like the type of couple who would send nude Polaroids to men's magazines like Gallery for their Girl Next Door spreads today. They're the type who'd probably upload videos to pornhub under the amateur heading.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Nobody knows what gallery is.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Nobody does. It's only Marcus who collects hundreds of them. You know, you know how you know your favorite magazine.

[Marcus Parks]

Okay. Gallery. It's better than Hustler, but not as good as we. I'll say that. As far as information goes and as far as, you know, you ever.

[Henry Zebrowski]

You know, you don't.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You have a subscription to Slit magazine.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Dead Girl is Dead Girl.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Mom.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Hey.

[Marcus Parks]

You took it to that place. These are classy magazines.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Dead Girl Month. It's all girls were alive last month.

[Marcus Parks]

But while they were all having a fun, sexy time.

[Henry Zebrowski]

O. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Gary decided in 1981 that he wanted full custody of his son.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. He needs to be a dad.

[Marcus Parks]

Darla.

[Henry Zebrowski]

This is my first thought.

[Marcus Parks]

Darla, however, already had four kids that were all in the custody of their respective father.

[Eddie Pepitone]

She fucks in the woods.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. A father of my first son was the God Pam. Yeah. The green man of folklore.

[Marcus Parks]

Like I said, you look at these, like the pictures that they send in these old magazines. Like, what kind of person, what kind of people are these? And it's Darla.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

Oh, yeah. Darla. Waitress, Pacific Northwest. But she didn't really want to even raise her own kids, so she certainly didn't want a hand and raising anyone else's. So Darla broke up with Gary And Gary got another woman to hate. Soon after though, Gary bought a house on the aforementioned strip in what is now the city of Seatac between Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. This was the Pacific Highway South Highway 99 corridor south of Seattle around Seatac Airport, which was quite the popular spot for sex workers. And so Gary now had a house that was right next to a location where the sex workers were abandoned. Available in numerous. And if we go by what another of his girlfriends said, the one after Darla, this easy access was marching Gary closer to murder. This former girlfriend, whom Gary had also met through the Parents Without Partner support group, said that on Christmas Eve 1981, Gary broke down and told her that he had nearly killed a woman recently.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Let's just say Gary, these conflicts confessions are more of a February thing, okay? Because really, honestly, I just want to watch White Christmas. I don't want to do this right now.

[Marcus Parks]

Mid January at the earliest.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I think so.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Also, parents love partners is like a good idea, but it should clearly be single moms and single dads.

[Henry Zebrowski]

It should just be, all right guys, you're sad.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Let's all welcome to mistakes weekly.

[Marcus Parks]

Two months later, in February of 1982, Gary told another girlfriend that he'd done something. And while he didn't say what that something was, he did tell his girlfriend to pay close attention to the news in the coming days. Now, no sex worker murders showed up in the news, but Gary later said that he vaguely remembered murdering a woman at his house around around this time and dropping her body off somewhere on Highway 18. The identity of this woman, if she does indeed exist, remains unknown. But Gary was just two months away from his first official victim whose murder would kick off a vicious two year long murder spree and a decades long investigation. That of course is where we'll pick back up next time for Gary's legendary rampage and and a full exploration of the how when it comes to the age of the serial killer.

[Henry Zebrowski]

God, it feels so good to be back in the blood. Sure like doing true crime. I miss true crime.

[Marcus Parks]

Honestly.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Henry Zebrowski]

So good work, Marcus. Thank you. Good work everybody. Good work Eddie.

[Eddie Pepitone]

I didn't. I didn't do much but watch a

[Henry Zebrowski]

documentary patreon.com podcast you can listen to these episodes ad free. You can also see last stream of the the left live every Tuesday 5pm PST. Also go to LP on the left for all of your social media needs. I am going to stress you need to go to LPN TV on YouTube. Watch our new HGX2. Yes, if I have to hear One more person says, you know, why don't they promo these on the show?

[Marcus Parks]

This is the only.

[Henry Zebrowski]

I know. It's at the end. We do it at the end because in the beginning it's annoying. Yes, right.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It's a respect for you.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We do it at the end. But that's the thing is that you'll listen to the end. But for those who you listening, I love you.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, check out HGX too. It's great.

[Eddie Pepitone]

It really is unbelievable. Everyone put their best foot forward on that one.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And we have an announcement coming very, very soon about Bloodbath 77. Yeah, that will be coming out very, very soon. And then we will also be go check out. We got new things from no Dogs coming out. We got new things from the brighter side coming out. We got new things from Spun new things from Roman. Go and check out all of our various YouTube channels. Channels. Yeah, right now.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Nerd of Mouth Too is on YouTube now.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yes, it is. We are. We got them on camera. They are on camera now.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Wide leg.

[Henry Zebrowski]

And you can really soak it in. Soak in them, Nerd.

[Marcus Parks]

Soaking our boys.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Soak them in. I wish you could be in that room.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Oh, man, we got two JK Ultras left. And most importantly, if you're sad that you missed the freaking tour, we are putting what our last show in Oklahoma City is going to live stream out. So you guys can get to tickets to that. Stay tuned for exact instructions on that. But that is going to be next week. It's going to happen. I can't wait for everyone to see this show. We've refined it over two years. We've been working on this thing and we're going to put it to bed. And I really want whoever hasn't seen it to see it, cuz it is amazing.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Please.

[Eddie Pepitone]

So we're going to be in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 17th. And then we're going to be in Oklahoma City on July 18th. And then I'm solo running over to Plano, Texas right after that on July 19th. So come hang out with me.

[Henry Zebrowski]

That's where you're gonna meet like what's his name from no country of Old Men.

[Marcus Parks]

You got to go over to San Angelo for that. You're not Plano.

[Eddie Pepitone]

You're just basically too close to Texas.

[Marcus Parks]

You're in Dallas. Plano is Dallas.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Keep saying Plano, but it is Dallas.

[Marcus Parks]

Yeah, you're, you're. You're in Dallas and you got a trip. Travel quite far to get to the psychopaths.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah.

[Marcus Parks]

In San Angelo. One of those days. Yeah, we'll get you out there.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Thank you. I appreciate it. Also this next weekend, July 10th, 12th and 13th, I'm in the tri state area. Come find me. I'm going to be in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania for Salute to Bethlehem, Newark, New Jersey on the 12th and City Winery in New York City with a bunch of I, I booked some friends of the round table as a little surprise for you guys. So that'll be to be a lot of fun.

[Marcus Parks]

That's really nice.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Yeah, bringing them Chuckle Hutters out of retirement and I love to hear it.

[Marcus Parks]

Dust them off, bring them up.

[Henry Zebrowski]

We'll be back. We'll see you next week. Hail sweet Satan nugging peds.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Get. I'm going to hail my new cousin Melody and Mitchell who got married right next to the forest where Gary Ridgeway was murdering these people.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yay.

[Marcus Parks]

May your union be blessed.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Yay. Another wonderful connection.

[Eddie Pepitone]

Welcome to the family, Melanie.

[Marcus Parks]

Your outdoor space is where you unwind and make memories. So make it count.

[Henry Zebrowski]

Belgard pavers are designed to elevate your outdoors.

[Marcus Parks]

Designed forward and built to last. Learn [e-mail] that's B E L G A R D dot com.

[Eddie Pepitone]

What's Spectrum Internet? It's the most reliable Internet to stream, game and browse the way you want. It's also security to keep your whole family safe online. And it's adding the power of Wi Fi 7 to your home so you're ready for today and tomorrow. That's fast, secure and future ready Internet for your family. So what's Spectrum Internet? It's everything you want it to be. Switch [e-mail] services not available in all areas. Restrictions apply.