Inside Gary Ridgway’s 3 Marriages and His Secret Life as a Serial Killer

Gary Ridgway spent nearly two decades living a double life. While secretly murdering dozens of women across Washington state as the “Green River Killer,” he held a steady job, attended church, maintained friendships and, perhaps most remarkably, built three marriages that outwardly appeared ordinary.

When DNA evidence led to his arrest in 2001, Ridgway eventually pleaded guilty to 48 murders to avoid the death penalty and later pleaded guilty to a 49th. Investigators have long believed his true victim count was much higher. Yet for many people who knew him—including the women who shared their lives with him—the news seemed almost impossible to believe.

Each of Ridgway's marriages reflected a different chapter of his life, but together they reveal one of the most unsettling aspects of the Green River case: his extraordinary ability to appear kind, dependable and even loving while concealing one of the deadliest serial killing sprees in American history.

Before Ridgway married for the first time, he had already experienced a troubled upbringing that investigators later examined for clues to his violent behavior. Born in Utah in 1949 and raised near Seattle, he grew up in a turbulent household and later described a deeply conflicted relationship with his domineering mother. Psychologists who evaluated Ridgway after his arrest pointed to that family dynamic, along with his lifelong struggles with anger and sexuality, as part of the background that shaped his attitudes toward women.

Ridgway's first wife was Claudia Kraig, whom he met in Seattle while they were both young adults. The couple married in 1970 after a whirlwind courtship, but the relationship quickly unraveled while Ridgway was serving in the U.S. Navy. According to reports, Kraig began seeing another man during his deployment, and despite a brief attempt at reconciliation after he returned to Washington, the marriage ended less than two years later.

The divorce stuck with Ridgway. Years afterward, he still spoke bitterly about Kraig to later girlfriends and his second wife, portraying her infidelity as a betrayal and claiming—without evidence—that she had become a prostitute. He also admitted he still loved her, a contradiction investigators later saw as an early glimpse into the resentment and hostility toward women that would define his crimes.

Ridgway married Marcia Winslow in 1973, and together they had a son, Matthew. To many, Ridgway looked like an ordinary working husband and father. He held a full-time job and became deeply involved in evangelical Christianity, reading the Bible aloud, attending church regularly and insisting his family follow strict religious teachings. Friends often saw him as polite, dependable and almost painfully ordinary.

Behind closed doors, however, Winslow later described a far more troubling marriage.

She recalled Ridgway's unusually intense sex drive, his fixation on sex workers and increasingly controlling behavior. During one argument, she said, he suddenly grabbed her in a chokehold. She escaped unharmed, but after his arrest, the incident took on chilling significance after strangulation was found to be Ridgway's signature method of killing.

Winslow also remembered that Ridgway sometimes wanted to have sex in secluded wooded areas—places investigators would later recognize as similar to the locations where victims' bodies were abandoned. At the time, she saw those requests as unusual but not sinister; only years later did ordinary memories become impossible to separate from what investigators uncovered.

The marriage eventually ended in divorce in 1981. The collapse of his second marriage coincided with the start of Ridgway’s killing spree, and between 1982 and 1983 he’s believed to have murdered the majority of his victims. 

Judith Mawson met Ridgway in 1985 after spotting him at a tavern. She later said he was polite, well-mannered and made her feel special almost immediately, a feeling she valued greatly since her tumultuous first marriage had collapsed due to fears over her children’s safety. However, Mawson was completely unaware that just days after their first meeting, Ridgway was questioned by law enforcement as a potential suspect in the murder of local sex workers.

They married in 1988 and spent the next 14 years building what she believed was an exceptionally happy marriage. Years later, Judith would describe Ridgway as "the perfect husband."

He left love notes around the house. He brought her flowers for no particular reason. He made coffee for her in the morning, helped with chores and danced with her in the kitchen. She later said he made her feel "like a newlywed every day." Friends and neighbors saw the same thing—a quiet, affectionate couple whose life seemed almost boring in its normalcy.

That ordinary life came crashing down on November 30, 2001.

After Ridgway left for work at the Kenworth truck plant, two detectives knocked on the door of the family home and told Mawson her husband had just been arrested in connection with the Green River killings. She initially refused to believe them. Even after hearing the accusations, she remained convinced police had made a terrible mistake, because nothing about the man she loved resembled the monster investigators described.

Only later did detectives begin explaining the clues she had unknowingly lived alongside. When she first moved into Ridgway's home, the house had no carpeting. Investigators later told her they believed he had removed it after wrapping one victim's body inside it. She remembered mornings when Ridgway occasionally left unusually early for what he said was overtime work. Detectives believed some of those unexplained absences coincided with murders. Looking back, she realized there had been moments she could never have understood.

Investigators also noted a striking pattern: of the 49 murders to which Ridgway ultimately pleaded guilty, only three occurred after he married Mawson in 1988. Mawson has since said she believes she may have unknowingly saved lives by giving Ridgway the stable relationship he had long wanted. Ridgway, however, told investigators that he’d considered killing his mother, Winslow, Mawson and even his son, Matthew. 

The couple divorced a year after his arrest. Mawson eventually chose to speak publicly about her experience. In the 2007 book The Last Victim: A True-Life Journey into the Mind of the Serial Killer, author Pennie Morehead described Mawson’s marriage to Ridgway and the shock of learning his secret life. Rather than portraying herself as someone who ignored obvious warning signs, she has consistently maintained there were none. Ridgway, she believes, succeeded because he carefully separated his ordinary home life from his life as a killer.

Her decision to tell her story also brought legal challenges. After Ridgway's arrest, the mother of victim Opal Mills filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against both Ridgway and Mawson, seeking to ensure neither could profit from the case. Although Washington law already prevented Ridgway from earning money from his crimes, the lawsuit argued that any proceeds Mawson might receive from future books or media projects should be directed, at least in part, to organizations supporting vulnerable women and victims of sexual violence. Mawson maintained she was an innocent victim herself and should not be held financially responsible for crimes committed before she even knew Ridgway.