Mary Bridget Meehan

Mary Bridget was eight months pregnant when she vanished. Born in 1964, she was adopted shortly after her birth through the Catholic Charities Organization by Patrica and John Meehan of Bellevue, Washington.

Patricia, a bookkeeper and John, a van driver, had two children of their own, Maeve and Dennis. They were an Irish Catholic couple who wanted more children, so they welcomed Mary Bridget and her brother Timothy.

Her family stated that she liked to be called Mary, but her friends remember that she preferred to go by Bridget.

Mary Bridget had a happy childhood with the Meehans, and she loved animals although she and other family members were allergic. She used to bring home stray cats and hide them in her room, Dennis remembers.“Sure enough, we’d start sneezing and coughing. We’d find them, and my mom would say, ‘You can’t keep them- see how everyone is sneezing?’ And Mary would say, ‘But I want them! I want them!”

Mary Bridget found school difficult as she had a hearing problem. When she became a teenager, she began to cut classes without her parents’ knowledge. Her report card told them she was dangerously close to failing and often absent.

When she was 14 or 15, she met a man called Jerry. He was older than her, and her parents disapproved. It only made her want him more.

Mary Bridget’s grades began to drop even more. She stopped studying and disobeyed her curfew, often sneaking out to meet Jerry. 

Finally, Patricia and John had had enough. They gave Mary Bridget a choice: she could either follow the rules, or find somewhere else to live. She paid no mind, and was shocked to find the door locked when she came home late one night.

Mary Bridget had no street sense, but she was stubborn. She moved in with Jerry and soon after became pregnant at the age of 15. She wanted the baby, but miscarried.

The second time she became pregnant, she told Jerry that she would not have an abortion. Jerry kicked her out of the house, leaving Mary Bridget on her own again. She wouldn’t return home to her parents though she was welcome, instead moving between friends’ houses.

Mary Bridget had a miscarriage with the second baby as well. In her book Green River, Running Red, crime writer Ann Rule said “The loss of the babies was so traumatic for her that she could never really talk about it beyond saying that she had lost a baby. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she had miscarried two. She felt that she had failed.”

Around this time, Mary Bridget had a lot of young men that longed to date her. However, she didn’t trust anyone anymore. Still, she befriended them. She lived for a time with a man named Andy and his mother in 1979, but she never dated him.

Andy’s best friend Dave fell hopelessly in love with Mary Bridget. He has never forgiven himself for not being able to save her from her fate, though he tried as hard as he could.

Mary Bridget and Dave spent the summer of 1979 together in Andy’s house, smoking pot and doing LSD. “Bridget and I used to take it and spend hours in hideous self-dissections, examining our inner workings, our worst fears, our problems…We thought we were being honest.”

When Andy joined the navy, Mary Bridget began going to Youth Eastside Services, a group set up to help homeless teenagers. She also hung out at spots where burnouts gathered, presenting herself as tough.

“She had a fearless nihilistic quality that I really admired at the time. Now I see we were both just scared of life and it wasn’t going very well for us.” Dave remembers.

Rule writes about one instance of this.

“Bridget once mentioned something to [Dave] once about having a baby, and he shot back, without really thinking, ‘Oh, you’d be an awful mother!’ Her face crumpled as she answered, ‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’ And she began to cry. It was the first and last time he saw her cry. He panicked when he remembered that she’d said she’d lost a baby, and apologized. She seemed so tough most of the time that he thought she had no nurturing qualities at all, and he was too young to realize how tender she was behind her mask.”

Mary Bridget told Dave that she dreamed of being a singer, and she loved bands such as Heart and the B-52s. They bonded over their love of music, and would listen to their Pink Floyd’s The Wall tape.

“I may have painted a darker portrait of us than I should have. We were cynical and messed up, but our emphasis was on saying above it all.” As the summer came to an end, Mary Bridget and Dave began to drift apart. 

She began living in a halfway house, but told Dave she found it ‘awful.’ Dave began dating a new girl, and one day Mary Bridget went to his house when she was there. Mary Bridget was polite, but after she left Dave never saw her again. 

In late 1981, Mary Bridget moved back home. She decided to go to a continuation school to get her GED and turn her life around. There, she met Ray.

Ray was physically abusive to Mary Bridget, even when she became pregnant for the third time. He once punched her in the chest and broke her ribs. 

Mary Bridget gave birth to a baby boy named Steven. Although it pained her to do so, she knew she couldn’t raise a baby, so she gave him up for adoption. She told friends that the baby had died at birth.

Rule states: “On New Year’s Eve, Dave received a phone call and he recognized Bridget’s voice instantly, even though he heard only a bone-chilling wail that became a high-pitched shriek or maybe hysterical laughter. And then she hung up. He would always believe that her call was a cry for help after her baby ‘died,’ but he didn’t know where she was or how to reach her.”

Mary Bridget lived with her parents until February of 1982. She moved in with Ray and they went from motel to motel, with Mary Bridget possibly becoming involved with sex work around this time.

Mary Bridget became pregnant again. The baby was due in late November 1982. 


On September 15, 1982, Mary Bridget left the Western Six Motel she was living in to go for a walk. She never returned.

Soon after her disappearance, Ray moved out and found another girlfriend. Mary Bridget’s family did not stop searching for her. Dennis didn’t believe that she was working the streets pregnant, but he says that she was trusting enough to accept a ride from a stranger.

When she vanished, she was 18 years old and 8 months pregnant.

On November 13, the remains of Mary Bridget Meehan and her unborn baby were found buried in a shallow grave near Tyee Golf Course in SeaTac. She was the only Green River victim to be found buried.

Later, Ridgway stated that he had picked her up as a prostitute, and that she had angered him because, being 8 months pregnant, she would only perform oral sex. He told detectives he was “paying for the vagina."



At Gary Ridgway’s trial, Mary Bridget’s brother Tim gave a statement ."I can only hope that someday, someone gets the opportunity to choke you unconscious 48 times, so you can live through the horror that you put our daughters, our sisters, our mothers through.

“I’m glad you choked my sister from behind. That’s right, I am glad you choked her from behind. The reason why? At least I know, as she took her last breath and closed her eyes, I know her last visual memory wasn’t of you, the real garbage in our society. May God have no mercy on your soul.”

Credit by : Google Site