Aug 4, 2026 · 55 min · 20 segments
Retired FBI agent and criminal profiler Candice DeLong explores the disturbing case of Gary Ridgway, known as the Green River Killer. Beginning in the summer of 1982, young women began vanishing from…
Candice DeLongHost
If you drove south out of Seattle toward the airport, you drove down a long commercial strip called Pacific Highway South, State Route 99.
Motels, diners, truck stops, taverns, the kind of road every American city has and no American city looks at too closely.
And on that strip in the early 1980s, there was a street economy of young women.
Some were sex workers, some were runaways, many were both, and many were teenagers.
They worked the strip because the strip was where the customers were, close to the airport, close to the highway, close to men passing through who would never be seen again.
On July 15th, 1982, two boys bicycling across a bridge looked down into the Green River and saw the body of a 16-year-old girl named Wendy Coffield.
A month later, a slaughterhouse worker looking out over the same river spotted another body.
When police arrived and began working the scene, they found not one woman in the river, but three.
By the middle of August 1982, five young women had been pulled from one stretch of one river in a matter of weeks.
Her family called her Deb, and she still called home a few times a week, and she ended every call the same way, "I love you.
Her friends called her Tiny, and she was a single mother raising three children, ages 11, nine, and three.
Cynthia Hines, who went by Cookie, was 17, and Opal Mills was 16, a bright kid who dreamed of becoming a model and who had a name for every stuffed animal on her bed.
Her last phone call was to her big brother, Garrett, the boy whose job from the day she was born had been to protect her.
Law enforcement had a serial killer, an active one working faster than any investigator there had ever experienced.
The newspapers gave him the only name anyone would have for the next two decades, The Green River Killer.
If you drove south out of Seattle toward the airport, you drove down a long commercial strip called Pacific Highway South, State Route 99.
Motels, diners, truck stops, taverns, the kind of road every American city has and no American city looks at too closely.
And on that strip in the early 1980s, there was a street economy of young women.
Some were sex workers, some were runaways, many were both, and many were teenagers.
They worked the strip because the strip was where the customers were, close to the airport, close to the highway, close to men passing through who would never be seen again.
On July 15th, 1982, two boys bicycling across a bridge looked down into the Green River and saw the body of a 16-year-old girl named Wendy Coffield.
A month later, a slaughterhouse worker looking out over the same river spotted another body.
When police arrived and began working the scene, they found not one woman in the river, but three.
By the middle of August 1982, five young women had been pulled from one stretch of one river in a matter of weeks.
Her family called her Deb, and she still called home a few times a week, and she ended every call the same way, "I love you.
Her friends called her Tiny, and she was a single mother raising three children, ages 11, nine, and three.
Cynthia Hines, who went by Cookie, was 17, and Opal Mills was 16, a bright kid who dreamed of becoming a model and who had a name for every stuffed animal on her bed.
Her last phone call was to her big brother, Garrett, the boy whose job from the day she was born had been to protect her.
Law enforcement had a serial killer, an active one working faster than any investigator there had ever experienced.
The newspapers gave him the only name anyone would have for the next two decades, The Green River Killer.
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