Famous cases and forensics

On August 15, 1982 while floating downriver on a raft, a man saw what he thought was a mannequin floating in the water. After falling in the river trying to move what turned out to be a dead body, the man saw at least one other partially clothed woman in the river. He called for help and soon the police came. The officer didn’t believe the man and waded into the river and made his own discovery. This was three in the string of several female victims found in or near the river over the past several months. It had been determined that all of them had died from strangulation. The Green River Killer was born.

            A special team was assembled to work on the cases and they were inundated with information. The officers were so overwhelmed a fair amount of their information became misplaced. Due to all the information the police asked for volunteers to help. What they were able to find out was that most of the women were prostitutes in Seattle. Interviews of many of the women failed to produce anything but one woman did give them a report of a man who had raped her and also talked about the Green River killings, that man drive a blue and white truck. Other accounts of the same truck poured in and Charles Clinton Clark was arrested. Clark admitted he assaulted some of the women but he released his victims after he attacked them and he had an alibi for the times of the Green River killings.

            It was after a FBI profile of the murderer came out that the police started to suspect someone that had volunteered to help them, a taxi driver named.  During the investigation, at least thirty more girls were found dead along the river or connected in some way to the same killer. Gary Ridgeway was questioned multiple times in 1987, a search warrant was served on his home and “bodily samples” were taken from Ridgeway as part of the search warrant. The task force did not know it at the time but they were making it possible to discover a serial killer, albeit many years down the road. Hair and saliva samples were taken from Ridgeway but he passed a polygraph test and was released. The case went cold for many years until the science of DNA came along and Ridgeway was arrested on November 30, 2001. Ridgeway had left a trademark in his victims. He would enter them from behind while strangling them, he ejaculated inside them and then pushed rocks into their vagina. Ridgeway was preserving his own evidence and after DNA testing of three of his victims it came back as a match to the hair and saliva samples taken from him twenty years prior.

            Very simply put, every cell in the body contains about one foot of DNA packed into less than a millimeter of space. This DNA contains all the information about a person, their hair color, eye color, matches up to a person’s relatives and tells us virtually everything we would want to know about someone. When Ridgeway ejaculated into his victims and then pushed rocks into their vagina he preserved his DNA and investigators were able to obtain samples as evidence even though they did not know at the time that the science of DNA would catch their killer. Those samples were compared to the DNA Ridgeway left in his victims and were found to be a match.