Green River Killer’s youngest victim identified as missing 14-year-old girl

The groundskeeper's dog came home from the baseball field with a leg bone.

SEATTLE (AP) — Genetic genealogy helped identify the youngest known victim of one of the nation’s most prolific serial killers almost 37 years after her remains were discovered near a baseball field south of Seattle.

At 14,  Wendy Stephens had been reported as a runaway from her home in Denver in 1983. She is believed to have been strangled early that year by Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer,  the King County sheriff’s office announced Monday.

Ridgway terrorized the Seattle area in the 1980s, and since 2003, he has pleaded guilty to killing 49 women and girls. Four of the victims — including Stephens — had not been identified.

Researchers at the DNA Doe Project, a volunteer organization that uses publicly available DNA databases to find relatives of unidentified victims, helped make the identification.

The remains had been found in a wooded area next to a baseball field in what is now the suburb of SeaTac on March 21, 1984, after the groundskeeper’s dog came home with a leg bone. She had been killed a year or more earlier, investigators believe.

Discovered at the same time were the remains of another Ridgway victim, Cheryl Wims, last seen alive on her 19th birthday, May 23, 1983.

Stephens’ family requested privacy and declined to speak with reporters, said Sgt. Tim Meyer, a spokesman for the King County sheriff’s office.

The DNA Doe Project team that identified Stephens had entered her DNA information into a genealogy website and come up with matches for distant cousins from two branches of the family. By building out a family tree with census, birth and other records, they pinpointed where the two intersected — Stephens’ parents. After finding the missing-person report from 1983, they matched her DNA directly with one of her parents.

It only took a few weeks for the team to come up with Stephens’ name. But it could have been even quicker: Years ago, one of Stephens’ parents entered DNA into the database GEDmatch, in hopes of finding her or any children she might have had.

That would have provided a quick DNA hit. But in 2019, GEDmatch changed its policies to protect the privacy of users by requiring them to opt in if they wanted law enforcement to be able to use their DNA in investigations. Because the parent had provided the DNA before the policy change and  had not subsequently opted in, the investigative team didn’t see the parent’s DNA profile.

Ridgway preyed on young women in vulnerable positions, including sex workers and runaways, mostly from 1982 to 1984. He sometimes showed them photos of his own young son to gain their trust.

He was long a suspect in the Green River killings — so called because the first victims were found in the Green River, which runs through several south Seattle suburbs. Detectives were unable to prove his role until 2001, when advances in DNA technology allowed them to link a saliva sample they had obtained from him in 1987 to semen found on several victims.