1982-86: A decision about evidence
In July 1982, the body of Ridgway’s first known victim was pulled from the Green River in suburban Seattle, a pair of blue jeans knotted around her neck.
Embedded in the denim used to strangle 16-year-old runaway Wendy Lee Coffield were the tiny spheres of spray paint that would take more than two decades to detect.
After four more bodies were found dumped in and along the Green River within a month, the King County sheriff assembled a task force to track down a serial killer.
The killer kept preying on vulnerable women and girls, many of whom were runaways or had been involved in street prostitution, leaving the bodies in remote, wooded stretches. Investigators compiled a list of hundreds of potential suspects and amassed a mountain of evidence from the dumpsites, turning much of the material over to state forensic scientists for analysis.
Ridgway first came to the task force’s attention in 1983, when 18-year-old Marie Malvar disappeared after she got into a pickup truck with a man on Pacific Highway South. Her boyfriend and pimp later spotted what he thought was the same truck in front of Ridgway’s house and reported it to police.
Ridgway told a detective he knew nothing about Malvar’s disappearance, but he kept resurfacing in tips and brushes with sex workers over the next several months. He voluntarily spoke with detectives and acknowledged he’d been arrested before for soliciting a prostitute. He said he’d continued to routinely pick up girls working the street and had even encountered two of the killer’s presumed victims. But he denied having harmed them. In 1984, he agreed to take a lie detector test — and passed.
By then, the killer had left behind key microscopic evidence that could have helped unmask his identity, records and interviews show. Along with the jeans used to strangle Coffield, the paint spheres were trapped in the weaves of fabric eventually found with seven other bodies and bones, records…
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