Gary Leon Ridgway was born on February 18, 1949, in Salt Lake City, Utah, the second of Mary and Thomas Ridgway's three sons.
Ridgway had a bed-wetting problem until he was 13, and his mother would wash his genitals after every episode
Ridgway graduated from Tyee High School in 1969 and married his 19-year-old high school girlfriend, Claudia Kraig.
In 1980, Ridgway was arrested for allegedly choking a prostitute, but no charges were filed after he claimed that the woman had bit him.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ridgway is believed to have murdered at least 71 teenage girls and women near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington. In court statements, Ridgway later reported that he had killed so many that he lost count.
Ridgway was arrested in 1982 and 2001 on charges related to prostitution.
Ridgway began dating Judith Mawson, who became his third wife in 1988.
On November 5, 2003, Ridgway entered a guilty plea to 48 charges of aggravated first degree murder as part of a plea bargain, agreed to in June, that would spare him execution in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of his victims and providing other details.
On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge Richard Jones sentenced Ridgway to 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole and one life sentence, to be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to an additional 10 years for tampering with evidence for each of the 48 victims, adding 480 years to his 48 life sentences.
Ridgway was placed in solitary confinement at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla in January 2004.
On November 23, 2005, the Associated Press reported that a weekend hiker found the skull of one of the 48 women Ridgway admitted murdering in his 2003 plea bargain with King County prosecutors.
On May 14, 2015, he was transferred to the USP Florence High, a high-security federal prison east of Cañon City, Colorado.