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When Ridgway moved into his new house on south 348th Street in Auburn nearly five years ago, one of the first things he did was cut down all the trees on the property. "That had some neighbors pretty pissed," says Clem Gregurek, 69, a former Boeing employee whose house is next to Ridgway's. "He was one of those quick, hyper people," says Gregurek. "He was nervous. He was fast in everything he did. He was even fast mowing the lawn." Before moving to Auburn, Ridgway lived in Des Moines, Wash., only a few minutes' drive from the strip. He went around to his neighbors pointing out that prostitutes were turning tricks on their street. His complaints prompted police to increase patrols of the area. Last November, when news of his frequenting prostitutes came out following his arrest for the four murders, neighbors were shocked at his hypocrisy. Says Janine Mattoon, 50, a nurse who was Ridgway's neighbor in Des Moines: "Here is someone who is upset about there being too many prostitutes in the neighborhood, and then he is actually seeing prostitutes."
Ridgway was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Feb. 18, 1949. He has two brothers, Greg and Tom, and when they were young their family moved frequently between Utah and Idaho, finally settling in Washington in 1958. Like Reichert's, Ridgway's family was poor. His father drove trucks when he could get the work, while his mother brought up the three boys in a 600-sq.-ft. house off the Pacific Highway near what would become the strip. The boys slept in bunk beds in the same room and spent much of the time outdoors. "We literally crawled on our hands and knees over the area around SeaTac where this [series of killings] was supposed to have happened," says Greg Ridgway, 54, who works for a computer company.
Their father wasn't around much, and when he came home the boys would beg to go out with him into the woods and cook up some breakfast on an open fire. Their mother was, in Greg's words, "a strong woman." Gary Ridgway's second wife Marcia said the mother completely dominated the boys' father and that the young Ridgway once saw his mother break a plate over his father's head at the dinner table.
Gary had problems at school because he was dyslexic, and was held back a year. He joined the Navy before he graduated from high school, and was sent to Vietnam. "He spent his time on rivers in patrol boats being shot at. These were things we didn't talk about--his anger about things in Vietnam, if there was any," says his brother Greg. When Ridgway came back to the U.S., he got a job painting Kenworth trucks in a factory in Renton, Wash. He kept this job for 30 years. He married three times, and has a son from his second marriage, who is in the Marines. In the late '70s Gary became fanatical about religion, according to Marcia. He would go from door to door proselytizing for a Pentecostal church and would be infuriated when people refused to listen to him. At home he would sit in front of the television with a Bible open on his lap, and he often cried after attending church services.