SEATTLE - This week, a slight man with thick glasses - a man who has been married three times and is the father of one child - is to stand before a judge who will ask him at least 48 times how he pleads to separate charges of murder.
Each time, Gary Leon Ridgway will respond guilty
sources involved with the case have told The Associated Press. When it is over Wednesday, he will have more murders on his record than any other serial killer in the nation's history, and a mystery that confounded detectives for two decades will come to a close.
Ridgway, 54, a longtime painter at Kenworth Truck Co., is expected to admit to being the Green River Killer, named for the river south of Seattle where the first victims were found.
The plea would spare him the death penalty in King County, instead assuring him life in prison without parole, the sources said. However, two of the bodies on the official list of Green River victims were found in Oregon, which has capital punishment, and it is 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.
Ridgway had been a suspect from 1984, when Marie Malvar's boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup 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 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.
It turned out that the killings continued long after detectives thought the Green River Killer had stopped, the sources said. The last victim on the official list disappeared in 1984, but one of the cases Ridgway is expected to plead to involves a woman killed in 1990, and another involves a woman killed in 1998.
That has stunned some criminologists.
Once they're identified as a suspect they usually stop said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence at Northeastern University in Boston. Ridgway is really a rare specimen
even among his peers
in being able to avoid apprehension for such a long time.
Ridgway's pleas to 48 counts would give him more convictions _ though not necessarily more slayings _ than any other serial killer in the nation's history, Levin said.
John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on men and boys in Chicago in the 1970s, was convicted of killing 33. Ted Bundy, whose killing started in Washington state, confessed to killing more than 30 women and girls, but was convicted only of killing three before he was executed.
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