In 1982, Ridgway took the life of his first victim, strangling a teenage runaway named Wendy Lee Coffield and dumping her body in the Green River, according to About. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he continued to commit murders along Route 99 in King County, Washington State, targeting sex workers and young runaways. He disposed of the bodies of many of his victims along the banks of the Green River, thus earning his infamous nickname, while others he buried in remote areas of the woods, per Britannica. Although a task force was launched in the late 1980s and over $15 million dollars was spent trying to capture the Green River Killer, Ridgway managed to elude the authorities until 2001, per Crime Library. The King County sheriff, Dave Reicher, used modern DNA analysis that had not been available in the 1980s to reexamine old strands of Ridgway’s hair that were still in police custody, and Ridgway was finally arrested on November 30, 2001.

In 2003, Ridgway was convicted on 49 counts of murder, but he is believed to have been connected to the deaths of as many as 80 women, according to Biography; Seattle’s KIRO-7 News puts the number at “more than 90.” He avoided the death penalty for his crimes by making a plea bargain, in which he agreed to tell prosecutors the location of the remains of other victims in exchange for life in prison without parole instead of the death penalty, per Crime Museum.