I was pretty good at choking, says killer of 48 women

Ridgway, a short man with glasses, thinning hair and a sandy moustache, pleaded guilty to more murders than any other serial killer in US history.

He struck a plea bargain that will spare him from execution for those killings and bring life in prison without parole.

For a half hour, he listened in court with an utter lack of expression as his own account of how he picked up each victim and where he dumped the body was read aloud. In a matter-of-fact way, he confirmed the details, responding ”yes” over and over in a clear voice as victims’ relatives wept quietly.

“I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could,” he said in a statement read by a prosecutor. He also said: “I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.”

The statement yesterday opened an extraordinary window on the twisted mind of a serial killer. In it, Ridgway said he left some bodies in “clusters” and enjoyed driving by the sites afterwards, thinking about what he had done. He said he sometimes stopped to have sex with the bodies.

“It was hard to sit there and see him not show any feeling and not show any remorse,” said Kathy Mills, whose daughter Opal was 16 when she vanished in 1982. Opal’s body was found in the Green River three days later.

Ridgway’s lawyers said he was, in fact, sorry and would express that to the families at sentencing in six months. Defence attorney Tony Savage said Ridgway’s emotions came ”in private, in emotional ways, in tears and in words. … He feels terrible remorse”.

At a news conference, King County prosecutor Norm Maleng said his first reaction to striking a deal that would take the death penalty off the table was no. But he said he finally agreed to bring a resolution to dozens of unsolved Green River cases.

Since signing the deal, Ridgway has worked with investigators to recover the remains of some victims. Ridgway has been married three times and has a son, but none of his family members attended the hearing.

“Justice and mercy for the victims, the family and our community – and that is why we entered into this agreement,” the prosecutor said.

The Green River Killer’s murderous frenzy began in the Seattle area in 1982, targeting 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.

The killing seemed to stop as suddenly as it started, with prosecutors believing the last victim had disappeared in 1984. But one killing Ridgway admitted to was in 1990, and another was in 1998.

In many cases, the killer had sex with his victim and then strangled her.

“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.”

He said he preyed on prostitutes “because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught”.

“I picked prostitutes as my victims because 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.”

He stripped the victims of their clothes and stole their jewellery, leaving some of it in the women’s bathroom at the plant where he worked as a truck painter. He said he got a thrill from thinking a co-worker might find and wear the items.

He also told investigators that when he was in his mid-teens, he stabbed a six-year-old boy for no apparent reason. The victim, who now lives in California, told investigators Ridgway lured him by asking if he wanted to build a fort, then sank a knife into his liver.

The victim said Ridgway laughed as he bled, then wiped the blade off on the boy’s shoulders. The boy spent weeks in a hospital recovering.

Ridgway, who was from the Seattle suburb of Auburn, was arrested in 2001 while leaving work.

Prosecutors said advances in DNA technology let them match a saliva sample taken from Ridgway in 1987 with DNA samples taken from three early victims. He was also connected to some of the victims by microscopic particles of paint found on the women. The paint had come from his workplace.

Ridgway 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.

But Ridgway told police he did not know Malvar. Later that year, Ridgway contacted the King County sheriff’s Green River task force – ostensibly to offer information – and passed a lie detector test.