More freedom for serial killer

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This article was published 06/09/2015 (3922 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SEATTLE — Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer who confessed to murdering 49 women, will have more freedom and social contacts at a federal prison in Colorado where he has been sent by Washington state prison officials.

Since his conviction in 2004, Ridgway, now 66, has lived in virtual isolation at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, serving life without parole after confessing to a string of sex slayings that spanned nearly 20 years. Dozens of young women, mostly street prostitutes, were murdered and dumped by Ridgway, many along the banks of the river that lent the killer its name.

After his arrest in 2001 based on DNA evidence, Ridgway agreed to an unprecedented plea bargain with King County prosecutors, in which he agreed to detail his crimes in exchange for no death penalty.

Prosecutors were eventually able to charge him with 48 murders between 1982 and 1998.

He pleaded guilty in 2011 to a 49th murder. By Ridgway’s count, the number of victims is closer to 70.

The intent of the move to a maximum-security federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo., was to provide Ridgway with an opportunity to live in a prison’s general population.

In Washington, Ridgway’s notoriety would be a virtual death sentence in general population. Prison documents on his transfer, obtained through a public-records request, indicate he was easily recognizable and a target of other inmates.

In Colorado, where Ridgway is less well-known, he was to be placed in the general population, where presumably he could mingle with other inmates and have access to a job and other privileges, according to state Department of Corrections documents and the Bureau of Prisons inmate manual for the Florence prison.

The move was made in May, at a cost of nearly US$20,000 for a private plane to fly Ridgway and another unidentified inmate to the Colorado prison, the documents show.

However, Ridgway will not be housed in the so-called supermax prison on the same campus, called Admax, where the country’s most dangerous prisoners are kept in solitary confinement. Residents there include would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

— Seattle Times