SHERIFF AND PROSECUTOR TALK ABOUT MURDER CHARGES AGAINST RIDGWAY, 2001-12-05 (photo)

King County Sheriff Dave Reichert (L) gestures while prosecutor Norm Maleng (R) listens at the county courthouse on December 5, 2001, as Reichert talks about the filing of four aggravated murder charges against Gary Leon Ridgway who is accused of killing four young women in the early 1980s and disposing their bodies in areas South of metropolitan Seattle. Ridgway, 52, has been a longtime suspect in the unsolved Green River serial murder cases that involve up to 49 women and girls, many of them prostitutes and runaways. Ridgway, a trucking company painter from Auburn, Washington, and a longtime suspect in the cases, was directly linked by DNA to four murders and by other evidence to other bodies found around the Pacific Northwest. Reichert was one of the original detectives working on the 20-year-old Green River serial murder cases. REUTERS/Anthony P. Bolante APB/HK