Now Playing
Life for Answers: Inside the Plea Deal That Traded Death for Truth
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 2003, King County prosecutors gave Gary Ridgway his life — and got forty-eight guilty pleas, forty-eight hours of confession, and the locations of women still missing. This is the calculation behind the most debated deal in American criminal history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what makes the nineteen ninety-three decision genuinely hard to defend, even now. The prosecutors had their man.
We've covered the long arc of this investigation across earlier episodes. The brief version: Ridgway was a truck painter at the Kenworth factory in Renton, Washington.
The arrest was clean. The DNA evidence was strong.
The agreement reached on June thirteenth, two thousand and three was direct in its terms. Ridgway would plead guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
Understanding why the deal took the shape it did requires understanding who the victims were and why their cases had been so difficult for so long. Ridgway deliberately targeted prostitutes and runaways.
November of two thousand and three. Ridgway entered formal guilty pleas in a King County courtroom.
The investigators got information. The question of how useful that information proved to be is more complicated.
Gary Ridgway killed at least forty-nine women. The number may be higher.
Ridgway is still alive. He's in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.