KING COUNTY SHERIFF AND WOMAN REACT TO FILING OF SERIAL MURDER CHARGES, 2001-12-05 (photo)

King County Sherriff Dave Reichert and an unidentfied woman fall to their knees embracing each other and crying emotionally at the King County Courthouse on December 5, 2001 following the announcement of 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