The Green River Killer was finally captured, and on December 18, 2001, Ridgway was arraigned on charges of multiple murders and brought into the courtroom by several security officers. He seemed relaxed during his ten-minute appearance. Aloud, prosecutor Jeff Baird read the detailed charges for each victim, mentioning their names each time, saying that Ridgway caused the death of each woman, and referred to them all as human beings. In reply, Ridgway's defense attorney, Tony Savage, said, "His plea is not guilty to all charges. Let them prove it. I don't think they can.” Ridgway was ordered to appear in court again on January 2, 2002, when the King County prosecutors would be seeking the death penalty. In the meantime, Ridgway was held without bail.
It was reported in August of 2003 that his lawyers, led by Anthony Savage, were close to a plea bargain deal that would spare Ridgway the death penalty in return for his confession and assistance in locating the victims in the Green River murders. So, on November 5, 2003, Ridgway entered a guilty plea to forty-eight charges of motivated murder in the first degree as part of the plea bargain that would spare him execution. In exchange, he would collaborate in locating the remains of his victims and provide other details. In his statement supplementing his guilty plea, Ridgway explained that all of his victims had been killed inside King County, Washington, and that he had transported and deposited the remains of the two other women near Portland just to confuse the police.
On December 18, 2003, King County Superior Court Judge, Richard Jones, sentenced Ridgway to forty-eight life sentences with no possibility of parole, and one life sentence, to be served consecutively. He was also sentenced to an additional ten years for tampering with evidence for each of the forty-eight victims, adding 480 years to his forty-eight life sentences.
Ridgway resides at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington where another notorious killer lives, Kenneth Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler.
Jeffrey Dahmer
The Milwaukee Monster
Victims (17)
Background
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was born on May 21, 1960, in West Allis, Wisconsin, to Lionel and Joyce (nee Flint) Dahmer. Jeffrey was considered a normal boy until around ten years old. However, he lacked interest in activities or hobbies; he withdrew from friends and family; he would ride around on his bike in search of dead animals so that he could take them home and dissect them. He once went to the extreme of putting a stake in a dog’s head. By the time he reached his teens, Dahmer was a full-blown alcoholic.
At seventeen years old, Dahmer was always having fantasies about killing men and having sex with their dead bodies, but he did not act on his fantasy until just after he graduated high school in June, 1978. He picked up a hitchhiker, Steven Hicks, nineteen. They had sex, drank beer, and after that, Hicks wanted to go home. Dahmer did not want Hicks to leave and struck him in the head with a ten-pound barbell, killing him. Needing to dispose of the body, Dahmer cut the body up, packaged it in plastic garbage bags, and buried the bags in the woods behind his home. That was his first kill. It would be another nine years before he killed again.
Dahmer went on to attend the University of Ohio State for one semester. He drank most of the time, missed a lot of classes, dropped out, and then signed up for the U.S. Army. Of course, being an alcoholic, his stint in the army did not last long. Two years later, in 1981, he was discharged and went to live with his grandmother in West Allis where he lived for the next six years.
On September 15, 1987, Dahmer was in a hotel room with Steven Toumi, twenty-six, after spending the night at a popular gay bar. Dahmer later confessed that he did not know how he killed Toumi, but when he woke up, Steven was dead, and he had blood on his mouth. He went to a store, bought a large suitcase, stuffed the body inside it, took the suitcase to his grandmother's basement, had sex with the corpse, masturbated on it, dismembered it, and threw it in the garbage.
While staying at his grandmother’s, she noticed increasingly strange behaviors in her grandson over time. She found a fully dressed male mannequin in his bedroom closet; another time she found a .357 Magnum pistol under his bed, and then there was that terrible smell coming from the basement which Dahmer said was just a dead squirrel he’d brought home and dissolved with chemicals. In 1982 he was arrested twice for indecent exposure and then, in 1986, masturbated in front of two boys and was arrested again, but only got a slap on the wrist.
His grandmother had had enough of his weird behavior, the foul smells in the basement, the arrests, his late night outs. In 1988 she asked him to leave. At the time Dahmer was working at a Chocolate Factory and decided to get an apartment closer to his work on the west side of Milwaukee. Just one day after he moved into his apartment on September 27, 1988, he was arrested again for drugging and sexually molesting a thirteen-year-old boy. He was found guilty, fired from his job, sentenced to five years probation and one year working in a release camp for offenders, and was required by law to register as a sex offender.
Dahmer worked the release camp, was paroled two months early, and moved into a new apartment. Soon after moving in, he began his murder binge.
Murders
In 1988 and 1989, Dahmer killed James Doxtator, fourteen; Richard Guerrero, twenty-five; and Anthony Sears, twenty-six. He would party with them, have sex, murder them, dismember them, masturbate on their corpses, and then store them in the basement. Keeping the skull of Anthony Sears, he boiled it to remove the skin, painted it gray to make it look like a plastic model, and saved the trophy for two years – until it was recovered from his apartment on July 23rd, 1991. Later he explained that he used to masturbate in front of the skull for gratification.
In May of 1990, Dahmer moved into the apartment that later would become infamous: Apartment 213, 924 North 25th Street, Milwaukee.
In 1990, Dahmer picked the pace up of his killings. He murdered Eddie Smith, thirty-six, in June; Ricky Beeks, twenty-seven, in July; Ernest Miller, twenty-two, in September; David Thomas, twenty-three, also in September; Curtis Straughter, nineteen, in February 1991; Errol Lindsey, nineteen, in April; and Tony Hughes, thirty-one, in May.
In the wee hours of May 27, 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone, fourteen, was discovered wandering naked on the street, heavily drugged and bleeding from his rectum. Two young women from the neighborhood found the confused young boy and called 911. Dahmer chased after the boy to take him back to his apartment, but the women stopped him. When the police arrived, Dahmer told them that Sinthasomphone was his nineteen-year-old boyfriend, and they’d had an argument while drinking. The two women were not pleased and protested, but the two police officer turned the boy over to Dahmer. The police later reported a strange smell inside Dahmer's apartment, but did not investigate it. The smell was the body of Tony Hughes, Dahmer's previous victim, decomposing in the bedroom. The two policemen did not try to verify the boy’s age and also failed to run the background check that would have revealed Dahmer as a convicted child molester, registered sex offender, and still on probation. Later that night, Dahmer killed and dismembered the young lad, keeping his skull as a souvenir. Author Note: Officers Joseph P. Gabrish and John A. Balcerzak were fired after this incident but appealed and were re-instated.