Cecile Gaspar wasn’t home when the men first showed up. It was mid-October 2020, and she and her husband, Warren, were spending the day with a grandniece, their weekly babysitting engagement. But she caught a glimpse of the visitors through her doorbell camera and, noticing their tucked-in shirts, she shrugged them off as Mormon missionaries. They came by again while she was out.
Some time before dark, she and her husband returned to their small town in southwest Colorado, just outside Mesa Verde National Park. Shortly after they got home, the bell rang a third time. When her husband answered the door, the two men introduced themselves as detectives from the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle and asked to speak with Ms. Gaspar. Seattle? she wondered, as she searched for her face mask. And how did they know her name?
They sat in the living room, masked and at a distance, as the outline of Mesa Verde’s distinctive peaks darkened through the window. One of the detectives, Sgt. Anthony McNabb, got right to the point: They’d come with news about Ms. Gaspar’s daughter, Wendy.
She was stunned. Wendy had run away from home 36 years prior, and Ms. Gaspar had long since stopped waiting for a call. Now, the detectives said they finally had answers: Wendy Stephens, 14, had been identified as the youngest victim of the serial murderer Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.
Ms. Gaspar struggled to grasp what she’d been told. “I was able to hold it together until toward the end, where my defenses finally started falling apart,” she said in an interview, her voice still tinged with disbelief. “How can anybody wrap their head around their daughter being killed by a serial killer?”
But Ms. Gaspar was hardly alone. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Ridgway, one of America’s most devastating serial killers, terrorized King County, Wash. Though convicted of killing 49 young women and girls, he has confessed to 71 murders, and some investigators believe the actual number is even higher.
The sheer number of women he killed, and over such a long period of time, meant so many unknowns: There were women he confessed to killing whose bodies were found and identified, but what had they endured in their last hours? There were women he confessed to killing but whose bodies could not be found. Were they actually dead? There were women whose bodies were found but not identified. What mother had been missing them for decades? And what of the countless women who had just disappeared in those years, whose families would always wonder whether their daughters ended up in Mr. Ridgway’s truck?
The identity of Wendy Marie Stephens was one of those unknowns.
But after nearly 40 years of worrying and wondering, Ms. Gaspar now knows what happened to her daughter. Through interviews with family members, police officers and forensic investigators, we can stitch together the life and death of a young woman who was known as “Jane Doe B-10” longer than she was known as Wendy.
Before her disappearance, Wendy was, in her mother’s words, a “magical kid.” Born on Oct. 10, 1968, she was the only daughter of Ms. Gaspar and her then-husband, Charles Stephens (who died in 2014). The two separated soon after, but Ms. Gaspar, 17 at the time, said raising Wendy as a single, teenage mother was surprisingly easy.
“She was everybody’s dream of a kid,” she said. “Not a crier. Not a whiner.” She recalled sitting with a young Wendy in her high chair and teaching her to enunciate new words. “I had no idea what we were getting into with her talking all the time,” she said, laughing. “She was one of those people you meet that would be like, ‘That’s too much information!’”
When Wendy was 11, they moved with Ms. Gaspar’s second husband, Alan Hodde (who died in 2010), to a suburb of Denver, a short walk from Wendy’s new school and the hospital where Ms. Gaspar worked as a nurse. The house, a two-bedroom with white-painted brick and mahogany trim, had an enclosed back porch and dining room where they’d sit around the table playing Yahtzee.
But what Ms. Gaspar remembered most is the time they spent outside, some of her fondest memories with her daughter. “Our outings would be in the mountains,” she said.
Wendy adjusted quickly to her new junior high, falling easily into a group of friends. As she moved into her early teens, her mother was struck — and at times, frightened — by her beauty and free spirit. Ms. Gaspar described Wendy’s “deep-set blue eyes” and the first glimpses of a girl growing into a magnetic young woman. “People weren’t strangers to her. Everybody was a potential friend,” she said. “I was always afraid for her because she was that way.”
Meanwhile, a dark saga had begun 1,300 miles to the northwest. In King County, Wash., among the verdant evergreen forests outside of Seattle, Gary Ridgway, 33, was starting to enact violent fantasies toward women. In the summer of 1980, he was arrested on charges of choking a sex worker. He claimed self-defense and was released, the charges dropped.
Then on July 15, 1982, two boys discovered in the Green River the body of a 16-year-old, Wendy Lee Coffield, who’d gone missing a week earlier. Ms. Coffield had run away from home and was making extra cash working “the Strip,” a motel-lined stretch of Pacific Highway South near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport that had long been a hub for transients and sex workers.
Though detectives didn’t know it at the time, Ms. Coffield’s murder was the beginning of a long, nightmarish chapter for King County — with Mr. Ridgway, then a nameless specter, at the center.
“At first, like, it’s not really happening,” recalled Dave Reichert, a former King County sheriff and the author of “Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer.” “You start out thinking you’ve got one body,” Mr. Reichert said. “And then all of a sudden you’ve got two.”
On Aug. 12, 1982, detectives found Debbie Bonner, 23, in the Green River. Just days later, they discovered three more victims in or near the river: Cynthia Hinds, 17; Opal Mills, 16; and Marcia Chapman, 31. “That’s when we knew that we had a serial killer,” Mr. Reichert said.
As word of the so-called Green River Killer spread throughout the community, Mr. Reichert said, families began keeping their daughters close. “It was a huge dark cloud over this community,” he said.
In Colorado, life had taken a turn in the Stephens household. Wendy began hanging with a different crowd, spending more time alone in the basement, and skipping school.
She became argumentative and stubborn, distancing herself without explanation. “She was going through those rebellious ages,” said Ms. Gaspar, who was at a loss for what had caused the sudden change, aside from a new, more freewheeling set of friends.
“She would just take off,” she said, describing disappearances that might last days or even weeks. “And there would be no forethought. She would leave in the winter without a coat.”
Ms. Gaspar’s sister, Judy Dove, remembered hearing about the change in Wendy, but never thought her disappearances were more than a phase. “Wendy strayed a bit, as some teenagers do,” she said. “We never thought that it would be permanent.”
As the winter of 1982-83 wore on, Ms. Gaspar did her best to keep track of her daughter. She’d drive around looking for Wendy, once even tracking her footsteps through the snow. She learned to rely on Wendy’s friends as “informants” who’d share tips on her whereabouts and reassure Ms. Gaspar that her daughter was safe.
Ms. Gaspar sought professional help for her daughter, hoping counseling could elicit answers: Where did she go? With whom? And, most inexplicably, why?
That spring, Mr. Ridgway became a suspect in the Green River case when a tip led detectives to his door. But he denied knowledge of the murders, and the police lacked further evidence to proceed. By mid-1983, King County investigators had found and identified eight victims, and a pattern: The killer was strangling young women — sex workers or runaways — many of whom were navigating the streets alone, after having escaped abuse or difficulties at home.
“They were somebody’s daughter,” said Detective Fae Brooks, who worked with Mr. Reichert on the Green River Task Force, formed to investigate the murders, and is herself a survivor of childhood sexual assault. “They were somebody’s sister, somebody’s mother, in some instances. They were human beings.”
That summer, Wendy Stephens disappeared for the better part of a month. When she returned, she acted “like nothing was wrong, nothing had taken place, she hadn’t been absent,” Ms. Gaspar said. “It was just really strange.”
The next day, Ms. Gaspar’s parents and sister came to visit from Phoenix. When her aunt and cousin joined unexpectedly, the gathering became a sort of impromptu family reunion — with Wendy at the center, back to her chatty, convivial self. For a moment, everything seemed normal.
“We talked while she was there,” Ms. Gaspar recalled. “It was one of those conversations of, ‘Yeah, Mom, I don’t know why I do the things I do.’”
Just a day or two later, sometime in August 1983, Wendy ran away for the last time. “My family left, and she was gone,” Ms. Gaspar said.
Over the next several months, at least 10 more women went missing from the Seattle area. Then, late in the afternoon on March 21, 1984, the King County Sheriff’s Office got a call.
“The guy that manages the Little League Baseball field in Burien said a dog just came home with a bone,” recalled Detective Tom Jensen, who had joined the Green River Task Force just weeks prior. At the park, just off Des Moines Memorial Drive, detectives followed the man to a swampy area outside the diamond where they found the rest of the remains. The next day, more bones were discovered nearby; both were soon confirmed to be victims of the Green River Killer.
The second body was identified as Cheryl Wims, 18, while the first remained a mystery — Jane Doe B-10, or Bones 10.
In Denver, Ms. Gaspar looked frantically for Wendy, scouring the neighborhood by car and gathering intelligence from her daughter’s friends. One friend reported that Wendy was in Washington, but was unsure if it was Washington State or Washington, D.C.
“I was really afraid for her,” Ms. Gaspar said, “because she was so gregarious and because she had become so undependable. I didn’t know what to make of any of it.”
Back then, there weren’t amber alerts or social media search pages.
“I had contacted the police,” she said. “They took a report, filed it. I badgered them a few times. I thought of putting her on a milk carton.” She kept her home phone number listed, just in case Wendy ever came looking.
The wondering became an obsession. “All kinds of things go through your head,” she said. She worried that her daughter, only 14 years old, had been kidnapped, or worse. “If your kid doesn’t come home, something’s wrong,” she said.
Dr. Kathy Taylor, who worked the case as a forensic anthropologist and died last year, was a teenager at the time of Wendy’s disappearance. She remembered the presiding fear. “There was such a high volume of victims,” she said in an interview before her death. She’d open the paper to read about the latest victim count and wonder: Who can do this and not get caught? And who are these women?
Stigma complicated matters, according to Dr. Taylor. Law enforcement officials did not always treat chronic runaways as potential victims, which could delay initial search efforts. After months of silence from the local police, Ms. Gaspar had begun to doubt if anyone was actually looking for her daughter. “She was just another kid that ran away that they didn’t care about,” she said.
Ms. Gaspar struggled to resume life without Wendy. She saw a counselor once a week and, though she wanted to discuss other things, all she could think about was Wendy. A support group for parents of runaways only intensified her feeling of alienation.
“Wendy had been gone a year or two,” she said. “Their kids were still in the process of running, and I was everybody’s horror story. I was like, ‘OK, well, they don’t need that, and I’m not getting what I need there.’”
She grew increasingly isolated and withdrawn.
“People would ask me, ‘Do you have children?’” she said. “For how many years, decades, I would not know how to answer that simple, innocent question.”
One night, five or so years after Wendy’s disappearance, Ms. Gaspar sat up in bed with a deep conviction. “There’s a certain tie that mothers and daughters have,” she said. “It’s not anything that we’re privy to in our small but tangible realm. My tie said that she was no longer walking on this plane.”
In Seattle, the investigation stalled for years. By 1991, the task force was reduced to one person: Detective Jensen. The nameless women continued to haunt him, he said, but “you can’t investigate a case, except to process the remains, unless you know who someone is.”
Dr. Taylor joined the team in 1996, and she too was frustrated — and galvanized — by Wendy’s case.
“She was so young and died before she ever really got to live,” she said. “And there had to be somebody missing her.”
Then, remarkably, DNA profiling arrived on the scene, revolutionizing criminal investigations and leading to the first breakthrough in the Green River Killer case in years. A few months later, in November of 2001, Mr. Ridgway was arrested when DNA found on three victims was linked to hair and saliva samples obtained from him almost two decades prior. After years of inactivity, detectives hoped to finally put names to the remaining unidentified bones.
“We thought: ‘This is great. Let’s get their DNA profiles in,’” remembered Dr. Taylor. They got Wendy’s dental records and a full DNA profile, which they entered into CODIS, the F.B.I.’s DNA database. “I just kept waiting for somebody to call and say, ‘My young daughter ran away,’” Dr. Taylor said.
In 2003, Mr. Ridgway agreed to a plea deal that would spare him the death penalty if he helped investigators find and identify the remaining victims. He led the police to crime scenes, including where he killed Wendy. He was hazy on the details, but said he thought he had picked Wendy up near a K.F.C. on Pacific Highway South before taking her to the ball field, where he strangled her and left her body.
One by one, detectives began to stitch together the extent of what Mr. Ridgway had done.
Around the country, Mr. Ridgway’s sentencing brought renewed attention to the investigation. Even Ms. Gaspar briefly wondered whether he might’ve been responsible for Wendy’s disappearance. “My mind had gone in a lot of different directions,” she said. But it seemed absurd that her daughter could be the victim of a serial killer. “That’s beyond the realm of possibility,” she said.
DNA analysis, however, didn’t turn out to be the solution investigators had hoped. In fact, it would be another two decades before Wendy’s case saw any significant progress.
In the fall of 2019, the King County Sheriff’s Office contacted Colleen Fitzpatrick, a co-founder, along with Margaret Press, of the DNA Doe Project. A nonprofit operation run by volunteers, the Doe Project had pioneered the use of forensic genealogy — the same technology used to find California’s Golden State Killer in 2018 — to identify Jane and John Does. “Somebody reached out to Colleen and said, ‘I’d like to see what you can do with one of Ridgway’s unidentified victims,’” remembered Dr. Press, who asked if the victim had another name. “They said, ‘Nope, just call her Bones 10.’”
The following spring, a sample of Wendy’s remains was shipped to a forensics lab in Santa Cruz, Calif. The extracted DNA sample went through several rounds of sequencing and bioinformatic cleanup.
In early September, the Doe Project uploaded the DNA kit to the public genetics databases GEDMatch and later FamilyTreeDNA. Led by a volunteer, Cairenn Binder, a team of five forensic genealogists began building out a family tree. Immediately they noticed the presence of an unknown but closely related family member. “Once in a great while, we get a hint that there’s somebody there,” Dr. Press said. “She’s invisible to us, but we can see her impact on the genetic networks that we’re working on.”
As they later learned, the invisible match was Ms. Gaspar, who had uploaded her results to GEDMatch in early 2019, on the slim chance it could lead her to Wendy. Were it not for a change in the database’s “opt-out” policy that made Ms. Gaspar’s profile visible to everyone except for law enforcement investigators, they would have identified her immediately.
From there, the genealogists quickly pieced together the family tree, filling in distant cousins and eventually drawing a line connecting the mother and father, or “the smoking gun couple,” as Ms. Binder calls them. This link united both sides of Wendy’s family, cementing her parentage. Family newspaper obituaries and a missing persons report from 1983 served as confirmation, and the Doe Project notified the Sheriff’s Office that it had a name.
“When I got that notification, that this was it, that this was Wendy, I can’t even tell you,” Dr. Taylor said.
But some unknowns persist. Today, the remains of two women are still unidentified, and others are suspected but unconfirmed victims. Investigators like Tom Jensen and Fae Brooks, who spent countless hours on their hands and knees, poring over lists of suspects, and brought heartbreaking news to the victims’ families, are hopeful that technology like forensic genealogy will continue that work. “The way Wendy was identified,” said Detective Jensen, “I never would have believed it was possible 10 years ago. And now we’re doing it.”
But answers are not the same as closure.
Ms. Gaspar described a certain amount of comfort that came with “not wondering if she’s going to call me or knock on my door, or how many grandkids do I have?” But, she added, “When you go to bed each night, and you think about the last of her moments, that’s not peace.”
For parents of the other Green River victims, support groups that formed in the ’80s gave them a place to mourn together. But those communities have long since dissolved. So grief, Ms. Gaspar said, is lonely. “It’s something that only you can experience within yourself.”
In early 2021, Ms. Gaspar received Wendy’s ashes, which she scattered near her home in Colorado. And in September of that year, she joined with friends, family and spiritual leaders on Zoom to, in her words, “honor the spirit that was Wendy.” For a long time the idea of hosting a service seemed daunting, even unbearable, but after so many years of unrest about her daughter, Ms. Gaspar feels “relief and lightness and knowing that she’s been sent on her way.”
“She had her own problems,” Ms. Gaspar said, “but she was a precious young life who hadn’t found her way yet.”
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