NorthwestFebruary 10, 2004

Associated Press

SEATTLE -- CBS snapped up a copy. True-crime writer Ann Rule bought a set. And for $2,220 -- plus tax -- you too could pick one up.

On Monday, the King County prosecutor's office made available 109 DVDs of interviews with Gary Ridgway, who was sentenced Dec. 18 to 48 life sentences without the chance of parole after earlier pleading guilty to killing 48 women in the Green River serial murder case.

Ridgway has the most convictions of any serial murderer in U.S. history.

The disks, totaling almost 250 gigabytes of data, include more than 400 hours of video and nearly 8,500 pages of transcripts, said Derek Dohn, CEO of Chameleon Data, which put the DVDs together.

A couple of employees declined to work on the project, he said, because of the grim material.

The small library of information covers only a portion of the case. The disks don't contain the hundreds of thousands of pages dealing with the rest of the investigation and the court proceedings, said Lisa Lawrence, a deputy prosecuting attorney.

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The disks cover 106 days of interviews that took place between June 13 and Dec. 16, 2003. In return for the plea agreement that spared him from execution, Ridgway confessed and detailed what he could remember about the killings, most of which took place in the early 1980s.

"It was the strangest experience of 25 years in law enforcement," King County sheriff's Detective Randy Mullinax told "60 Minutes II" in an interview to be aired Wednesday. "Gary Ridgway eating his breakfast and waving hello to me ... to have him say, 'Good morning' or 'Good night' to you for six-plus months was very strange."

The disks, which can only be viewed through a computer, also include video footage of field trips Ridgway took with detectives to sites where he dumped bodies.

The footage and transcripts were released in response to requests from the news media.

The public should be able to access the data at the King County Law Library in the next several weeks, Lawrence said.

"I think there are a lot of people in criminal and forensic psychology who could use it," said Jacqueline Helfgott, associate professor of criminal justice at Seattle University. "I would love to get ahold of that for my students."

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