Research Paper on:
Investigation of the Green River Serial Killer Gary Ridgway

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
prostitutes or women not reported missing, the public has accused the law enforcement authorities in taking too long before beginning their investigations on the cases. Reports of uninterested investigators related  to missing prostitutes infuriated the public and it was not until 49 bodies had been found that a proper task force was formed in 1984. By 1984 however, the killings  had stopped leaving the investigators with an even harder case to try and compile findings on old evidence and decomposing bodies. After almost  twenty years of investigations, police arrested Gary Leon Ridgway in Seattle Washington for the Green River murders which occurred between 1982 and 1984 based on DNA evidence. During those years,  it is estimated that at least 49 women were killed after begin abducted from an area near the airport known as the Strip, sometimes raped and strangled. Most of the  victims ranged between the ages of 15 and 21 (Booth 2001). Originally dubbed the "Green River killer" because he dumped his initial  victims into the Green River and weighted them down, the murderer also dumped bodies in roadside woods that were discovered so long after the fact that the bodies were badly  decomposed and hard to identify. Although Ridgway had always been considered one of the top five suspects in the case, County sheriff Dave Reichert, one of the original detectives on  the case, does not consider that the cases are closed (Booth 2001). Since most of the victims were prostitutes, Ridgway was considered a  possible suspect in 1980 and 1982 when he was accused of crimes involving other prostitutes which were later dropped. In 1987, Ridgway provided investigators with a sample of his DNA