Woman Recalls Meeting with Infamous Green River Killer Several Times 40 Years Ago at Night

A woman, Jill McCabe Johnson, recounted the chilling encounters she had years ago with a serial killer unbeknownst to her and ended up having a one-night stand with him.

Jill McCabe Johnson recalled meeting with the infamous Green River Killer several times 40 years ago at night. Johnson penned an essay on Slate about the multiple interactions she had with Gary Ridgway.

Johnson wrote that she met Ridgway in the 1980s at a dance hall, and one night he took her home. Nearly four decades later, she made a disturbing discovery about him.

Johnson said she met Ridgway when she was 18 years old at the White Shutters, once a country-western dancehall near Seattle airport.

She described him as slender with light brown hair and had blue eyes. Ridgway claimed to be 29, but she could tell he was older than that.

“I had no reason to suspect anything odd about Gary back then. I ran into him a few times over several weeks, and he seemed nice enough,” Johnson writes.

She said his hands did not stray during slow dances, and he never tried to sneak a kiss. Johnson shared one evening, Ridgway gave her a ride home in his pickup truck. While in her apartment, she still did not feel in any danger with him in her bedroom.

Ridgway talked about his job as a painter and showed Johnson his business card and a photo of his young son, revealing he and his wife were going through a divorce.

After they had sex, Johnson’s roommates came home and scared off Ridgway. When he contacted her again for a follow-up date, she turned him down. From thereon, she spotted him parked outside her apartment multiple times in subsequent months.

Twenty years after their encounter, news broke that the notorious Green River Killer had been apprehended in Renton, Washington. The suspect’s name was Gary Ridgway, a father of one who finalized a divorce in 1981 and had worked in a paint shop.

“The Gary in the news looked kind of familiar, but squintier and heavier than the man I remembered, and his hair seemed a little darker too," Johnson said. She convinced herself it was a coincidence and told herself it could not have been the same man.

According to ABC News, genetic genealogy helped identify the youngest known victim of the nation's most prolific serial killers almost 37 years after her remains were discovered near a baseball field south of Seattle.

Wendy Stephens was 14 years old and had run away from her home in Denver before Ridgway strangled her in 1983. He terrorized the Seattle area in the 1980s, and since 2003, he has pleaded guilty to killing 49 women and girls.

Ridgway targeted prostitutes because he knew they would not be reported missing right away, the 54-year-old confessed. He said he killed many of them as he wanted without getting caught.

Ridgway’s modus operandi was strangulation. "Choking is what I did," he said, "And I was pretty good at it." He was also good at covering his tracks. From 1982 until his arrest in 2001, he dumped bodies, planted bogus clues, and repeatedly relocated his victims' remains effectively.