It was mid-October 2020, sometime before dark. Cecile Gaspar and her husband, Warren, had recently returned to their small town in southwest Colorado, just outside Mesa Verde National Park, when their doorbell rang. The two men outside introduced themselves as detectives from the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle.
One of the detectives, Sergeant Anthony McNabb, got right to the point: they’d come with news about Cecile Gaspar’s daughter, Wendy Marie Stephens.
She was stunned. Wendy had run away from home 36 years prior, and her mother had long since stopped waiting for a call. Now the detectives said they finally had answers: Wendy, 14, had been identified as the youngest victim of serial murderer Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Ridgway, one of America’s most devastating serial killers, terrorised King County, Washington. Although convicted of killing 49 young women and girls, he has confessed to 71 murders, and some investigators believe the actual number is even higher.
After nearly 40 years of worrying and wondering, 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 October 10, 1968, she was the only daughter of Gaspar and her then-husband, Charles Stephens (who died in 2014). The two separated soon after, but 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.”
When Wendy was 11, they moved with 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 Gaspar worked as a nurse.
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. “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 2092 kilometres to the northwest. In King County, among the verdant evergreen forests outside Seattle, 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-defence 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. 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.
Although detectives didn’t know it at the time, Coffield’s murder was the beginning of a long, nightmarish chapter for King County — with Ridgway, then a nameless spectre, at the centre.
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 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.
As the winter of 1982-83 wore on, Gaspar did her best to keep track of her daughter.
That spring, 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 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.
That summer, Wendy 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”, Gaspar said.
The next day, 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 centre, back to her chatty, convivial self. For a moment, everything seemed normal.
Just a day or two later, sometime in August 1983, Wendy ran away for the last time. “My family left, and she was gone,” 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, Gaspar looked frantically for Wendy, scouring the neighbourhood by car and gathering intelligence from her daughter’s friends.
After months of silence from the local police, 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.
Gaspar struggled to resume life without Wendy. She saw a counsellor once a week, and although 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.
One night, five or so years after Wendy’s disappearance, 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: Jensen. The nameless women continued to haunt him.
Kathy Taylor, who worked the case as a forensic anthropologist and died last year, joined the team in 1996. Then, remarkably, DNA profiling arrived on the scene, revolutionising criminal investigations and leading to the first breakthrough in the Green River Killer case in years.
A few months later, in November 2001, 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.
They got Wendy’s dental records and a full DNA profile, which they entered into CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database.
In 2003, 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 police to crime scenes, including where he killed Wendy.
Around the country, Ridgway’s sentencing brought renewed attention to the investigation. Even Gaspar briefly wondered whether he might’ve been responsible for Wendy’s disappearance. But it seemed absurd that her daughter could be the victim of a serial killer.
DNA analysis, however, didn’t turn out to be the solution investigators had hoped. In fact, it would be two more decades before Wendy’s case saw any significant progress.
In autumn 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 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, California. 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.
As they later learned, the invisible match was 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-in” policy that hid Gaspar’s profile from everyone except for law enforcement investigators, they would have identified her immediately.
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.”
In early 2021, Gaspar received Wendy’s ashes, which she scattered near her home in Colorado. After so many years of unrest about her daughter, Gaspar feels “relief and lightness and knowing that she’s been sent on her way”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Leah Worthington
Photographs by: Aubrey Trinnaman
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES