SEATTLE – After conceding that he killed so many women he could not keep them all straight, Gary Leon Ridgway calmly said the word “guilty” 48 consecutive times in response to a judge’s recitation of murders that date back 21 years.
By the time the list of strangled and mutilated young women came to an end, Ridgway, 54, an Auburn truck painter with a high school education and a habit of sneaking up on people noiselessly in the woods, had owned up to being the Green River killer. He pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in the United States.
His confession in a Seattle courtroom Wednesday, which Ridgway made as part of a plea bargain that will allow him to escape the death penalty, resolves what King County Sheriff Dave Riechert called a decades-long “reign of fear and universal uncertainty” in the Seattle area.
It began in 1982, when the naked, sexually abused bodies of young women, many of them prostitutes or runaways, began turning up in ravines, on roadsides and in the Green River, south of Seattle. The last murder that Ridgway confessed to occurred in 1998, although investigators suspect he may have committed other murders after that.
“I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex,” Ridgway said in a six-paragraph statement that provided a coldblooded rationale for his killings.
In a courtroom that seemed stunned by revulsion and grief, the statement was read aloud by prosecutor Jeff Baird. After each paragraph of the statement, Baird paused and asked Ridgway if it was true. Ridgway turned to the prosecutor each time, with his eyebrows arched above large horn-rimmed glasses and said, “Yes.”
The courtroom was packed with relatives and friends of the victims. Many said they are angry at the plea bargain – mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole – because it allows Ridgway to live.
Others were angry it had taken to so long to solve the case, even though Ridgway had been identified as a suspect in 1983 and had provided saliva samples with his DNA in 1987.
“He needs to die,” said Debra York, aunt of Cynthia Hinds, who Ridgway admitted strangling in August 1982. “He has taken a lot of innocent life that didn’t deserve to die.”
Ridgway said in his statement that he killed prostitutes because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. They were not quickly reported missing, he said, if they were reported at all.
“I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught,” he said. “I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibility could.”
In the statement, Ridgway said he stripped his victims of their clothes and jewelry to make them difficult to identify. He also said there was a plan behind his disposal of the bodies.
“I placed most of the bodies in groups, which I call clusters,” he said in the statement. “I did this because I wanted to keep track of all the women I killed. I liked to drive by the clusters around the county and think about the women I placed there.”
King County prosecuting attorney Norm Maleng said he agreed to the plea bargain because forensic evidence linked Ridgway to just seven of the Green River killings. Without a guilty plea – and Ridgway’s promised cooperation in locating missing bodies – Maleng said investigators would have had no way to solve more than 40 remaining murders.
“Justice and mercy for the victims, the families and for our community,” Maleng said. “That is why we’ve entered into this agreement.” He said he believes the plea deal will not compromise his office’s future ability to seek the death penalty.
According to the plea bargain, Ridgway agreed to stand by his confession even if he is prosecuted in other counties or states where he could face the death penalty. The bodies of at least two of his victims were found in Oregon. Ridgway said he dumped them there to throw police off his track.
Before his arrest, Ridgway had worked for more than 30 years at a plant that makes Kenworth trucks. At the plant during the 1980s and ’90s, some of his fellow workers knew that he was a murder suspect and that he frequented prostitutes, and they sometimes called him “Green River Gary.”
In the courtroom, Ridgway showed no emotion. A short, stocky man with brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, he wore red prison garb, sneakers and a belt with attached handcuffs, which deputies took off before he listened without expression to the names of the women he killed and the places where he dumped their bodies.
Ridgway was arrested two years ago after DNA evidence taken from three of his victims was found to match his saliva. Authorities had this information for nearly 14 years, and have been criticized for not moving faster to make the match.
But Maleng insisted on Wednesday that police made the arrest as soon as “modern forensic science caught up to Ridgway.”
According to court documents released after the hearing, Ridgway found it difficult at first to tell the investigators the truth about his murders.
He described himself as a pathological liar, the documents said. He initially blamed the murders on anger at the sexual behavior of “garbage” prostitutes or on the problems in his three failed marriages (he has one son) or on lack of sleep.
But he later acknowledged that he picked up women intending to kill them and said he “took pride” in “what I do.” He strangled all of his victims.
Ridgway told investigators he preferred to kill prostitutes at his house after showing them his son’s room and reassuring them that he was not going to hurt anybody.
“I always had it in my mind to kill them,” he told investigators, speaking of prostitutes. He said he slept a few hours a night and devoted his free time to finding, killing and disposing of as many prostitutes as he could. More than forty of his killings occurred between 1982 and 1984.
Many of the women Ridgway met and later killed asked him if he was the Green River killer, he told investigators.
“Uh, do I look like the Green River killer?” he said he would ask the women in response. “They always thought it was a big tall guy.”
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