Associated Press
SEATTLE — The King County Council has approved an additional $1.4 million in property taxes to help pay for investigation of the Green River serial slayings case.
The proposal approved Monday night would authorize collection of the full authorized amount of the county’s Automated Fingerprint Information System property tax levy.
The increase, proposed by Councilman Larry Phillips, will cost the owner of a $200,000 house about $1.70 more per year.
Gary Leon Ridgway, 52, of Auburn, is charged in four of the Green River deaths. But investigators have attributed the deaths of as many as 49 women to the Green River killer, who operated in the early 1980s.
A $500,000 federal grant announced last week will help King County re-examine DNA evidence in the case.
King County Executive Ron Sims has estimated the overall cost of the investigation will range from $8 million to $12 million over the next two years.
Among the costs, Maleng said, will be the assigning of additional prosecutors to the cases. Investigators also will have to convert millions of documents from case files into electronic files that can be shared via computer.
The arrest of Ridgway has attracted attention all around the region. King County detectives investigating the Green River killings met Tuesday with Canadian investigators trying to solve the disappearances of about 45 prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver, British Columbia.
Four investigators from the Vancouver Police Department, including a crime analyst and forensic biologist, joined King County detectives at the Regional Justice Center in Kent to discuss any evidence that might connect Ridgway to any of the unsolved cases in the Vancouver area.
Unlike the Green River victims, none of the Vancouver prostitutes’ bodies has been found. There are no crime scenes and no strong suspects, police said.
Some of the Vancouver women have been missing since 1984 — about the time when investigators say the Green River killings appear to have stopped.
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