Last Podcast On The Left

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Episode 671: Gary Ridgway : Redux Part I - Wrong Way Gary

Explore episode Jul 3, 2026
True Crime
The Philippines and the Birth of Gary's Fetishes

Episode 671: Gary Ridgway : Redux Part I - Wrong Way Gary · Jul 3, 2026 True Crime

During his Navy service in the Philippines, Gary Ridgway encountered sex workers who performed acts — including removing pre-inserted objects from their bodies — that activated a lifelong insertion fetish. He also developed conflicted hatred toward the women he became dependent on for pleasure, and experienced an unspecified trauma he refused to ever discuss but acknowledged needing therapy for.

3m 15s

Where this was said

High School, First Marriage, and the Navy

At 1:03:10 · chapter starts 1:01:40

By the end of high school Gary had been held back twice, graduating in 1970 at age 20, barely able to read or write. He joined the Navy rather than risk being drafted into the Army — a calculation the hosts note shows a baseline of self-preservation intelligence. His high school girlfriend Claudia Craig agreed to marry him before he left. In the Philippines, assigned to the USS Vancouver, Gary encountered a world of sex workers who introduced him to sexual practices far beyond the missionary position. He contracted gonorrhea twice. Something happened there — Gary refused ever to specify what — that he said he probably should have gotten counseling for. He also developed a lifelong fetish for the insertion of foreign objects, sparked by Filipino sex workers impressing sailors with pre-inserted beer bottles. When he returned home, Claudia had also been unfaithful; he branded her a whore and the marriage dissolved in under a year.

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