Truck painter pleads guilty killings

SEATTLE -- Gary Ridgway, the former truck painter long suspected of being the Green River Killer, pleaded guilty Wednesday to 48 murders. "I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a confession read aloud by prosecutors.\n"I wanted to kill as many women that I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," Ridgway said in the statement.\nSome victims' relatives wept quietly in the courtroom as Ridgway, in a clear but subdued voice, admitted killing each woman.\nHe then entered formal guilty pleas to the 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder -- a process that took nearly 10 minutes. As Judge Richard Jones read each count, Ridgway replied, "Guilty."\nRidgway, 54, made the pleas under a deal that will spare him from execution in the King County cases and result in a sentence of life in prison without parole.\nHowever, no deal was cut that might spare him from death penalties in other jurisdictions. Ridgway has not been charged elsewhere, but admitted dumping victims outside the county and in Oregon.\nThe King County agreement, signed June 13, puts more murders on his record than any other serial killer in U.S. history.\nSince signing off on the deal, Ridgway has worked with investigators to recover still-missing remains of some victims, one of the most baffling and chilling serial killer cases the nation has ever seen.\nThe Green River Killer's murderous frenzy began in 1982, targeting women in the Seattle area, mainly runaways and prostitutes. The first victims turned up in the Green River, giving the killer his name. Other bodies were found near ravines, airports and freeways.\nThe killing seemed to stop as suddenly as it started, with prosecutors believing the last victim had disappeared in 1984. But one of the killings Ridgway admitted to occurred in 1990 and another in 1998.\nIn court Wednesday, Ridgway entered the 48 guilty pleas, one by one.\nHe said in his statement that he killed all the women in King County, mostly near his home or in his truck not far from where he picked them up. He said he enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done.\n"In most cases, when I killed these women, I did not know their names," Ridgway said in the statement. "Most of the time I killed them the first time I met them, and I do not have a good memory of their faces."\nHe said he had several reasons for preying on prostitutes.\n"I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex," he said. "I also picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."\nRidgway, of the Seattle suburb of Auburn, was arrested in 2001 as he left his longtime job as a painter at a truck company. Prosecutors said advances in DNA technology had allowed them to match a saliva sample taken from Ridgway in 1987 with DNA samples taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.\nIn many cases, the killer had sex with his victim and then strangled her.\nRidgway had been a suspect as early as 1984, when the boyfriend of victim Marie Malvar reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck identified as Ridgway's.\nBut Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar, and investigators 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.\nHe is scheduled to be sentenced within six months to 48 consecutive life prison sentences without parole.