Green River probe may seek links elsewhere

By Luis Cabrera

Associated Press

SEATTLE – Following an arrest in the nation’s worst unsolved serial killings case, the King County sheriff is proposing a regional task force to investigate the deaths of more than 90 women.

Sheriff Dave Reichert has approached sheriffs in neighboring Pierce and Snohomish counties about jointly investigating women’s homicides occurring after the last of the 49 official victims in the Green River killings case disappeared in March 1984, sheriff’s spokesman John Urquhart said Tuesday.

“We will be very interested in other (deaths) in other jurisdictions that might turn out to have a common suspect,” Urquhart said.

Authorities won’t say whether they think the Green River Killer is responsible for any deaths beyond 1984. But the arrest last week of Gary Ridgway in connection with four Green River deaths has prompted investigators in San Diego, Calif., and Vancouver, British Columbia, to pore over files on scores of slain women for possible links to the suburban Seattle truck painter.

Urquhart said his department expects to receive more money this week to cover the costs of investigation, including processing evidence taken from Ridgway’s current home and three previous homes in suburban Seattle.

He declined to name the source of the funds but said the department had scheduled a Friday news conference on the money with Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Adam Smith, both

D-Wash.

Ridgway was to be charged today, King County prosecutor’s spokesman Dan Donohoe said. The 52-year-old painter at Paccar’s Kenworth plant was arrested on Friday in the deaths of four women whose bodies were found in 1982 in or near the Green River in Kent.

Detectives said DNA and other evidence linked Ridgway to the four victims, and court documents from 1987 say at least three other women on the list of dead or missing were last seen with him.

Investigators now are looking for links between Ridgway and the dozens of other Green River victims whose skeletal remains were found in brush-choked lots and forest ravines around greater Seattle and Portland, Ore.

In San Diego, where 44 prostitutes and other women were slain from 1985-1988, investigators were cracking old case files and beginning to look for possible links to Ridgway, Police Capt. Ron Newman said.

He noted that detectives on a 1988-92 task force had made seven trips to Seattle to meet with Green River task force members, but no firm connection had been made between the cases.

The San Diego County sheriff’s office likely would try to locate a DNA sample to be tested for a match with Ridgway, Sheriff’s Lt. Jerry Lewis said.

Investigators from a task force in Vancouver, British Columbia, where some 45 women involved in prostitution or drugs are missing and believed dead, were planning a trip to Seattle to discuss Ridgway’s arrest.

Urquhart declined to say whether King County had credit card statements or other information tracking Ridgway’s travels. Such information had cleared at least one previous suspect in the case.

On Tuesday, King County investigators continued to search for evidence in Ridgway’s current home in Auburn, as well as a SeaTac home where he had previously lived. Evidence collection at two other Seattle-area homes where Ridgway had lived was finished.

Clem Gregurek, Ridgway’s backyard neighbor for the past four years, said Tuesday afternoon that investigators no longer were digging through Ridgway’s yard, and it appeared their work was winding down.

“It’s just nice and quiet around here today for a change,” he said.

Gregurek, 68, said neighbors were still in shock at the arrest of Ridgway, a conscientious neighbor who, with his wife Judith, had transformed his lot into a landscaped showpiece.

“He was always doing a lot of work back there, running chippers and chain saws” after having numerous trees on the lot cut down, Gregurek said.

He said the Ridgways often were gone in their motor home on weekends, but he didn’t know where they traveled.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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