Gary Ridgway Chose the Women Society Had Already Decided to Ignore
- Alex Andrews
- 12 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Whenever a serial killer targets sex workers, the same political argument seems to emerge.
Before the victims are even buried, someone claims their deaths prove we need stronger laws against buying sex. The logic sounds simple enough: if fewer men bought sex, fewer women would be harmed. It is a comforting explanation because it suggests that another law, another arrest, or another slogan could have prevented unimaginable violence.
The Green River Killer tells a very different story.
When Gary Ridgway was finally arrested in 2001, he would ultimately confess to murdering 49 women, making him one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Most of the women he targeted were involved in the sex trade, many struggled with addiction, many lived in poverty, and many had already learned that the world did not see them the way it saw other women. Their disappearances rarely made national headlines. Families searched. Friends worried. Other sex workers whispered warnings to one another. But the urgency that often accompanies the disappearance of middle-class women was largely absent.
Ridgway understood that long before anyone else was willing to admit it.
When investigators later asked him why he targeted sex workers, his answer was brutally pragmatic. They were easier to kill. They were less likely to be reported missing immediately. He believed police would not prioritize their disappearances, and he believed he could continue killing without attracting the same level of attention he would have received had he targeted women from more socially privileged backgrounds.
For years, he was right.
That fact should fundamentally change the conversation. The question is not why Gary Ridgway bought sex. The question is why he correctly believed that the women he murdered could disappear with relatively little public alarm.
The answer has nothing to do with a lack of criminal laws.
When Ridgway was killing, prostitution was already illegal. Buying sex was already illegal. Rape was illegal. Kidnapping was illegal. Murder was illegal. Every crime he committed carried severe criminal penalties. If the existence of laws were enough to stop violent men, Gary Ridgway's killing spree should never have happened.
Yet it did.
This is where discussions about the Nordic Model often lose sight of reality. Supporters argue that criminalizing buyers reduces demand and therefore reduces violence. But Gary Ridgway was not an ordinary buyer making a cost-benefit calculation about whether a solicitation charge was worth the risk. He was a serial killer. A man willing to rape, torture, strangle, and murder women is not likely to abandon those plans because lawmakers increased the penalty for purchasing sex.
That assumption asks us to believe something that defies both common sense and decades of criminological research: that the additional crime of solicitation would somehow deter someone already prepared to commit murder.
It is difficult to imagine Gary Ridgway saying to himself, "I was willing to become one of America's worst serial killers, but now that buying sex carries a harsher penalty, I've reconsidered."
The reality is almost certainly the opposite.
If buyer criminalization had influenced him at all, it likely would have influenced how he approached his victims. Like many buyers operating under criminalization, he would have had additional incentives to conceal his identity, use false names or untraceable phones, avoid sharing personal information, insist on rushed negotiations, and meet in more isolated locations. Those are precisely the kinds of conditions sex workers have warned about for years because they make screening more difficult and make dangerous people harder to identify before violence occurs.
Violent predators do not need more opportunities to hide.
Yet that is exactly what happens when the exchange itself is pushed further into secrecy.
The Green River murders also expose another uncomfortable truth. Ridgway did not simply exploit individual women. He exploited society's beliefs about them. He understood that sex workers occupied a place where stigma could become a weapon. Every delayed missing-person report, every dismissive comment about "just another prostitute," every assumption that these women were somehow responsible for their own victimization reinforced the environment in which he operated.
Stigma became part of his hunting strategy.
That lesson has been repeated again and again.
Robert Pickton preyed upon women in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside while families begged police to take disappearances seriously. Samuel Little targeted women living on society's margins because he believed their deaths would not receive sustained investigation. Rex Heuermann allegedly selected women he believed could disappear quietly. Different decades. Different cities. Different men.
The same calculation.
Who can I hurt that no one will immediately fight for?
That is not a demand problem.
It is a disposability problem.
This is also why sex workers become frustrated when critics ask, "Why do you want violent buyers decriminalized?" We don't.
Violence is already illegal.
Rape is illegal.
Kidnapping is illegal.
Murder is illegal.
Nothing about full decriminalization changes that.
A client who rapes a sex worker should be prosecuted for rape. A client who murders a sex worker should spend the rest of his life in prison. Full decriminalization has never been proposed otherwise.
What it does propose is removing criminal penalties from consensual adult sex work so that workers have more - not fewer - tools to identify violent people before they become victims. It allows workers to verify identities, share information about dangerous clients, work legally together, hire security, and report suspicious behavior without fear of arrest.
Those are not protections for violent men.
They are protections against violent men.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Green River Killer is not that America lacked enough prostitution laws. It is that Gary Ridgway correctly understood which women society had already decided mattered less. He exploited stigma every bit as much as he exploited physical vulnerability.
That should give pause to anyone who argues that more criminalization is the answer.
Because before we ask whether another law would have stopped Gary Ridgway, we should ask a far more uncomfortable question: If he were hunting today, have we done enough to convince a predator that sex workers are no longer the women society is willing to ignore?
Until the answer to that question is unquestionably "yes," we should be very careful about confusing more criminalization with more safety.
