Judith Mawson was cleaning the garage when two detectives arrived. Her husband Gary, a truck painter, had just left for work. That was how she learned that the man she had been married to for 14 years was the Green River Killer.
Gary Ridgway strangled women, many of them prostitutes and teenage runaways, whom he picked up on Seattle’s Highway 99. He then abandoned their bodies in remote areas near the river. He killed for more than 20 years and kept an entire city terrified.
At home, according to Judith, he was a different man: cheerful, kind, attentive. There were never any outbursts of anger or unexplained absences. “He made me feel like a newlywed every day”, she recalled. Until he confessed, she defended his innocence, convinced that it was all a mistake.
Author Pennie Morehead, who wrote the biography of this unsuspecting wife, concluded that a person can lead two completely different lives. Gary told her he wanted to stop, but couldn’t: killing was to him what beer is to an alcoholic. And for 14 years, he went from one life to the other without anyone noticing.
