- Canadian police said Ridgway is also a suspect in 61
similar killings in British Columbia, which borders Washington state.
-
- SEATTLE (AFP) -- America's
most prolific serial killer, Gary Ridgway, may have murdered far more than
the 48 women he has been convicted of strangling, detectives said Thursday.
-
- Ridgway formally confessed on Wednesday to murdering
48 prostitutes, drug addicts and runaways between 1982 and 1998 under a
plea deal that spares him the death penalty, but police said they may never
know how many people he really killed.
-
- "He told us in interviews that he has killed at
least 60 women," said Sergeant John Urquhart of the task force that
ended the so-called Green River killer's two-decade rampage around the
northeastern city of Seattle.
-
- "We have charged him with 48, but there are other
murders that we may or may not be able to charge him on and we have not
been able to confirm his figure of 60-plus victims.
-
- "It's certainly a possibility that there are other
murders of his that we may never solve, or that there are others that have
technically been solved but that we may not be able to charge him with,"
he said.
-
- "It's not over yet," he said. "We continue
to investigate and we are still talking actively to Ridgway and still have
open homicides that we are actively looking into."
-
- In his chilling confession read to a court on Wednesday,
Ridgway said he had difficulty remembering how many women he had murdered
after years of "patrolling" parts of Seattle in search of vulnerable
women to kill.
-
- "I killed so many women, I have a hard time keeping
them straight," he said in his statement that was read to the court
by a prosecutor as the killer stood with his head bowed, but showing no
signs of remorse.
-
- Ridgway then answered "guilty" in a calm and
emotionless tone to 48 charges of premeditated aggravated murder.
-
- He said he dumped the bodies of his victims "in
clusters" close to the Green River, a practice that earned the murderer
that terrorized the area for two decades the sobriquet of the "Green
River Killer."
-
- He was arrested in November 2001 after the discovery
of fresh DNA evidence and was charged with seven of the "Green River"
murders that were thought to have been committed between July 1982 and
February 1984.
-
- The three-times married Ridgway originally pleaded not
guilty. But it emerged last week that prosecutors had struck a deal in
the case, despite pledges not to do so.
-
- But Ridgway astounded police and relatives of the victims
by admitting to two murders that had not been attributed to the Green River
killer while denying killing several women who had been thought to have
been victims of the Green River killer.
-
- The Green River murders were the worst unsolved US serial
killings on record and Ridgway's 48 murder convictions officially make
him the most deadly killer in US history.
-
- Canadian police said Ridgway is also a suspect in 61
similar killings in British Columbia, which borders Washington state.
-
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