/ Green River Killer

Prosecutors, task force talk about Green River investigation

01:34 PM PST on Thursday, November 6, 2003

From KING/KING5.com Staff and Wire Reports

SEATTLE - Members involved in the Green River investigation held a press conference Thursday to talk about the two-decade long investigation that culminated in Wednesday’s guilty plea by Gary Ridgway to 48 murders.

From King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng to the original detectives who investigated the Green River killings, the team spoke about the exhaustive and sometimes emotional efforts behind the investigation in what has become the largest serial killings case in U.S. history.

They thanked each other for all the hard work that was done over the past two decades to finally bring in Gary Ridgway. They said they never gave up because they wanted justice for each family of each Green River victim.

NWCN Jeff Baird, lead prosecuting attorney in the Gary Ridgway case.

Even after Ridgway's guilty plea, prosecutors said the investigation is not over yet.

"We - that is the Green River Task Force and the prosecutors - did not rely on solely on Mr. Ridgway's word alone," said Lead Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird. "He admitted more crimes than the ones we charged him with, but we did not take his word alone."

As part of his plea bargain, Ridgway has been assisting task force members in the investigation until he is sentenced six months from now, leading teams to precise locations around the Seattle area where he reportedly dumped victims’ bodies.

Since June, Green River Task Force members have searched 51 sites over 71 days and uncovered four sets of human remains.

“It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, or worse,” said King County Sheriff Dave Reichert. In one instance, said Reichert, teams found a single tooth in a two to three acre site.

Various team members expressed relief, gratitude, and emotion over their involvement in the investigation.

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Jeff Baird on Ridgway's plea Green River Task Force on the investigation Q&A with King County Sheriff Dave Reichert

"We're going to continue to find additional victims." “We’re just glad to have played a part in this and to answer some of the questions for victims’ families,” said Tony McNabb, a detective on the Green River Task Force.

The guilty plea by Ridgway, a 54-year-old commercial truck painter from suburban Auburn, will spare him from execution for those killings, bringing him life in prison without parole.

Asked about the serial killer’s motive, Sheriff Dave Reichert said, “He did it because he wanted to kill. Period.”

In a statement Baird read in court on Wednesday, Ridgway said he strangled many of the women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, during sex, and that he left some bodies in “clusters.” He said he enjoyed driving by the sites afterward, thinking about what he had done. He said he sometimes stopped to have sex with the bodies.

Baird said the slayings of dozens of prostitutes should cause society to re-examine how it deals with prostitution.

"We're talking about human lives, unsolved murders," added Reichert. "It is our job to solve these cases and we will continue to solve and investigate those unsolved murders."

The Green River Killer’s murderous frenzy began in the Seattle area in 1982. The killing seemed to stop as suddenly as it started, with investigators saying the last victim had disappeared in 1984. But one killing Ridgway admitted to was in 1990, and another was in 1998.

KING5.com's Liza Javier, KING 5's Arturo Santiago, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.