Murder accused may be America's most prolific killer

A man who has been married three times and is the father of a child, is to stand before a judge in Seattle this week accused of 48 charges of murder.

Gary Leon Ridgway, 54, slight and bespectacled, is expected to admit being the Green River Killer, named after the river south of Seattle where the first victims were found.

Ridgway is expected to plead guilty to all of the charges, sources have said and after the case he will have more murders on his record than any other serial killer in America’s history.

The pleas will spare him the death penalty in King County, and assure him life in prison without parole, the sources said.

However, two of the bodies on the official list of Green River victims were found in Oregon, which has capital punishment, and it is still unclear whether Ridgway will plead to those.

The remains of scores of women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, turned up near ravines, rivers, airports and roads in the 1980s. Police officially listed 49 women as probable victims of the Green River Killer.

Ridgway had been a suspect since 1984, when Marie Malvar’s boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck identified as Ridgway’s.

But Ridgway told police he did not know Malvar, and a police investigator in Des Moines who knew him 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.

Ridgway was arrested as he left work on November 30, 2001.

Ridgway’s pleas to 48 counts would give him more convictions – though not necessarily more killings – than any other serial killer in America’s history.

John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on men and boys in Chicago in the 1970s, was convicted of killing 33. Ted Bundy, whose killing started in Washington state, confessed to killing more than 30 women and girls, but was convicted only of killing three before he was executed.