The Gree River Killer

The case of the Green River Killer has been a study in frustration. For 19 years detectives in the Pacific Northwest have combed the region for the man believed responsible for the murder of 49 women, mostly runaways or prostitutes. The first bodies were found in 1982 on the banks of the Green River, about 20 miles south of Seattle. The killing spree ended in 1984. No arrests were ever made, until now. For nearly 20 years, detectives hunting for the Green River killer knew in their hearts that Gary Leon Ridgeway was probably their man. They tailed him for years, questioned him repeatedly, searched his home and dug deep into his life. But in the end, it all came down to the fateful day in 1987 when a detective forced the South King County truck painter to chew on a tiny piece of gauze. Friday, King County sheriff's investigators arrested Ridgeway, announcing that new DNA-testing technology had turned the 14-year-old saliva on that gauze into their golden evidence, tying him to the slayings of four women in the nation's largest unsolved serial killing. The nation's worst serial killer has been sentenced to 48 consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole. Gary Leon Ridgeway, known as the Green River Killer, already had confessed to murdering four dozen Seattle-area women in the 1980s and '90s. Ridgeway escaped the death penalty by agreeing to provide investigators with information and burial sites for dozens of his victims. (GENE JOHNSON (2003)

A young detective in 1986, Dave Reichert had been working the case of the Green River killer night and day for years, and with at least 40 dead and no promising leads, he decided to take Ted Bundy up on his offer of help. Bundy, a native of nearby Tacoma, Washington, who was on death row in Florida for his own serial killing spree in the 1970's...