Gary Ridgway had been a suspect in the killings for 18 years when he was finally arrested. They'd talked to him a lot, and according to The New York Times, Ridgway had taken (and passed) two polygraph tests, and he'd been questioned by police countless times — so many times, in fact, that his coworkers at the trucking company he'd worked at for around three decades had taken to calling him Green River Gary. Sometimes, they just called him "GR."
While Ridgway had never been charged with the Green River killings, he still had some run-ins with the law. In 1980, The Washington Post says that a sex worker accused him of choking her. The case disappeared, but his later confession (via CBS) puts that in a terrifying perspective. He wrote in his formal statement, "Choking is what I did and I was pretty good at it," adding that he targeted mostly sex workers and runaways, and that he would revisit the bodies "for two or three days... till the flies came."
In 1982, Ridgway was charged and convicted — of solicitation, when he approached an undercover police officer (mug shot, pictured). But those who knew him had another problem with him: he and his wife had cut down a forest of trees on their property when they moved in, but ultimately, they got used to seeing him walking his poodle around the neighborhood. Even after his arrest, they described him as basically a "nice guy."
