SEATTLE — For more than three and a half decades, she was known as “Bones 10” – the skeletal remains of a young female recovered from a swamp behind a baseball field near Sea-Tac airport.
Nineteen years later, she received an additional moniker in charging documents — “Jane Doe B10” — after the man unmasked as the Green River Killer admitted to killing her and dumping her body near the ballfield, before he eventually pleaded guilty to the murders of 49 women and girls.
But other than knowing she was one of Gary Ridgway’s victims, investigators never knew her true identity.
Until last year.
“She’s no longer Bones 10, she’s Wendy now,” said Dr. Kathy Taylor, King County’s forensic anthropologist, who for nearly 25 years had sought to put a name to the remains.
Using a genetic profile extracted from bone fragments last year, the DNA Doe Project — a nonprofit group of volunteer genetic scientists dedicated to finding names for unidentified remains — has helped King County investigators positively match the remains to the mother of a girl named Wendy Stephens.
Stephens, who was 14 when she ran away from her parents’ Denver home in 1983, is now believed to be Ridgway’s youngest victim, a King County Sheriff’s spokesman said Monday.
In early 2019, the girl’s mother took a direct-to-consumer DNA test and uploaded the results to a GEDMatch, genealogy website, “hoping to learn the fate” of her daughter, according to a statement from the DNA Doe Project. But under the site’s new policy restricting law enforcement access to DNA matches, the groups’ initial uploading of Bones 10’s DNA profile didn’t get a hit, the statement said.
The DNA Doe Project was later able to upload the data to a different genealogy site, FamilyTreeDNA, to obtain additional matches and eventually narrow down the candidate to Wendy Stephens. The group notified the Sheriff’s Office of the match on Sept. 27.
Stephens was one of four previously unidentified victims attributed to Ridgway as part of the Green River killings, a series of murders in the 1980s targeting young women and teens, many of whom were living on the streets and working in prostitution. In 2012, investigators used a relative’s report and DNA to link skeletal remains found in Des Moines in 1985 to 20-year-old Sandra Denise Majors.
Two other of Ridgway’s known victims, known as Bones 17 and Bones 20, remain unidentified.
Stephens’ case “always meant a lot to me, because I could tell that she was so young,” said Taylor, who first examined her remains in the mid 1990s. “Not only did he take her life, but he took her name.”
Over the years, Taylor said she has worked with retired Detective Tom Jensen and others investigators in trying to identify Ridgway’s nameless victims, by submitting DNA and other evidence to federal databases and constantly checking missing persons reports.
“But it’s been no hits, no hits, no hits,” she said. “We figured she was probably from out of state because we were finding nothing locally. So when we finally found out who she was, I was over the moon.”
After Ridgway’s arrest in 2001, then-King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng agreed he would not seek the death penalty against him in exchange for his cooperation in locating the remains of dozens of victims. Ultimately, Ridgway admitted to nearly 70 slayings, but at the time prosecutors said they had evidence linking him to only 48 cases.
In 2011, Ridgway pleaded guilty to a 49th homicide, admitting he killed 20-year-old Rebecca Marrero among his first victims. She was last seen in 1982.
Ridgway is serving a sentence of life without parole at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
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