Kimberly L. Nelson, a 21-year-old Caucasian female, vanished on or around October 31, 1983, from the Pacific Highway South area in Seattle, Washington, a stretch of road also known as the "Sea-Tac Strip." Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nelson had found herself in Seattle, where she was known to frequent this area. On that Halloween, she was with a friend at a bus stop near the Ben Carol Motel.
Her friend left for a short time, and when she returned, Nelson was gone, never to be seen alive again.
For years, her disappearance remained a mystery, one of many unsolved cases of women who had vanished from the same area during that time. The emotional toll on her family, with a mother and stepfather in Michigan and a father in Florida, was immense. It wasn't until June 1986 that her partial skeletal remains were discovered off Interstate 90 near North Bend, Washington, confirming the tragic outcome her family had feared. Her identification marked another victim in a string of slayings that had terrorized the region.
The investigation into the deaths of numerous women in the Seattle and Portland areas eventually led police to a single suspect. Decades after Kimberly's disappearance, advancements in DNA technology allowed investigators to definitively link Gary Leon Ridgway, the "Green River Killer," to several of the victims. Ridgway, a truck painter from a nearby town, was arrested on November 30, 2001. In a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty, he confessed to a vast number of murders, including that of Kimberly Nelson. He admitted to killing her and led authorities to the locations of other victims. Ridgway pleaded guilty to her murder, along with many others, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
