Tweet
Have they caught the Green River Killer?
Suspect admits to 48 Green River killings
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gene Johnson
Nov. 5, 2003 | SEATTLE (AP) -- Gary Ridgway, the former truck painter suspected of being the Green River Killer, went into court Wednesday and admitted to 48 murders. "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in court.
Ridgway, 54, admitted to the murders -- more than any other serial killer in U.S. history -- in a plea deal that would guarantee he avoids the death penalty in Washington state, sources told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Instead, Ridgway would receive life in prison without parole.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," Ridgway also said in the statement.
However, two of the bodies on the official list of Green River victims were found in Oregon, which has capital punishment, and it was still unclear whether Ridgway will plead to those.
The remains of scores of women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, turned up near ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the 1980s.
Of them, investigators officially listed 49 women as probable victims of the Green River Killer, named for the river south of Seattle where the first victims were found in 1982. In many cases, the killer had sex with his victim and then strangled her.
Ridgway had been a suspect ever since 1984, when Marie Malvar's boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck identified as Ridgway's.
But Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar, and a police investigator in Des Moines, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, who knew him cleared him as a suspect. Later that year, Ridgway contacted the King County sheriff's Green River task force -- ostensibly to offer information about the case -- and passed a polygraph test.
Detectives continued to suspect him, however, and in 1987 they searched his house and took a saliva sample. It was 13 years before DNA technology caught up to their suspicions and they could link that sample to DNA taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.
Ridgway was arrested as he left work Nov. 30, 2001, and later pleaded innocent to seven killings. But facing DNA evidence and the prospect of the death penalty, he began cooperating and trading information for his life.
He confessed to 42 of the 49 listed killings, as well as six not on the list, the sources have said. He directed authorities to four sets of previously undiscovered remains.
Ridgway is still a suspect in the seven remaining cases on the original list of 49 because any denials he has made in those cases have been "equivocal," sources have told The AP. His agreement with prosecutors stipulates that he will continue cooperating for six months.
====================================
If this ain't a Henry Lee Lucas situation, then
Rot in prison for the rest of your misbegotten life mother****er!
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Gene Johnson
Nov. 5, 2003 | SEATTLE (AP) -- Gary Ridgway, the former truck painter suspected of being the Green River Killer, went into court Wednesday and admitted to 48 murders. "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud in court.
Ridgway, 54, admitted to the murders -- more than any other serial killer in U.S. history -- in a plea deal that would guarantee he avoids the death penalty in Washington state, sources told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. Instead, Ridgway would receive life in prison without parole.
"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," Ridgway also said in the statement.
However, two of the bodies on the official list of Green River victims were found in Oregon, which has capital punishment, and it was still unclear whether Ridgway will plead to those.
The remains of scores of women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, turned up near ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the 1980s.
Of them, investigators officially listed 49 women as probable victims of the Green River Killer, named for the river south of Seattle where the first victims were found in 1982. In many cases, the killer had sex with his victim and then strangled her.
Ridgway had been a suspect ever since 1984, when Marie Malvar's boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck identified as Ridgway's.
But Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar, and a police investigator in Des Moines, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, who knew him cleared him as a suspect. Later that year, Ridgway contacted the King County sheriff's Green River task force -- ostensibly to offer information about the case -- and passed a polygraph test.
Detectives continued to suspect him, however, and in 1987 they searched his house and took a saliva sample. It was 13 years before DNA technology caught up to their suspicions and they could link that sample to DNA taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.
Ridgway was arrested as he left work Nov. 30, 2001, and later pleaded innocent to seven killings. But facing DNA evidence and the prospect of the death penalty, he began cooperating and trading information for his life.
He confessed to 42 of the 49 listed killings, as well as six not on the list, the sources have said. He directed authorities to four sets of previously undiscovered remains.
Ridgway is still a suspect in the seven remaining cases on the original list of 49 because any denials he has made in those cases have been "equivocal," sources have told The AP. His agreement with prosecutors stipulates that he will continue cooperating for six months.
====================================
If this ain't a Henry Lee Lucas situation, then
Rot in prison for the rest of your misbegotten life mother****er!
ACK!
Comment