In the summer of 1983, a young White woman named Tina Marie Thompson, age 21, vanished from the Seattle, Washington area. She was last seen alive in the early morning hours of July 25, 1983, near South 144th Street and Pacific Highway South, a stretch of road known for its transient population. At the time of her disappearance, Tina had recently been released from the King County Jail.
Despite having a job as a waitress, she was also known to be involved in sex work, a vulnerability that characterized many of the women who went missing from the area during that era. There was no immediate missing person's report filed for Tina, and her absence went largely unnoticed by authorities in the initial days and weeks that followed.
It wasn't until nine months later, on April 20, 1984, that a grim discovery was made in a wooded area near the intersection of Highway 18 and Interstate 90 in Maple Valley. Human remains were found, but their identity was unknown. For a time, she was referred to as Jane Doe B-14. Investigators were in the midst of the Green River Killer investigation, a series of slayings that had been terrorizing King County, and they suspected this unidentified woman was another victim of the elusive serial killer. The victims were often young women, many of whom were involved in prostitution, picked up from the "Sea-Tac strip."
For over two years, Tina's fate remained a mystery to her family. Then, in July of 1986, a breakthrough came as investigators were looking into the aliases used by another victim. This lead prompted them to review dental records, which ultimately led to the positive identification of the remains found in Maple Valley as those of Tina Marie Thompson. Her case was officially classified as a homicide, another tragic entry in the growing list of women believed to have been murdered by the same individual. The community was left to wonder if the killer would ever be brought to justice as the number of victims continued to climb.
The answer to that question would not come for many years. The investigation into the Green River killings stretched on for nearly two decades, becoming one of the longest and most complex serial murder investigations in American history. Finally, in November 2001, a major break in the case came with the arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway, a longtime suspect. Advances in DNA technology definitively linked him to several of the victims. In 2003, as part of a plea agreement to spare him the death penalty, Ridgway confessed to a staggering number of murders, including that of Tina Marie Thompson. He was subsequently convicted of her murder along with dozens of others and sentenced to multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole. Ridgway's confession brought a long-awaited, albeit somber, conclusion to the search for Tina's killer.
