TRUTH OR DEATH

Paige Elizabeth Miley was a 21-year-old prostitute back in 1983. It was a cloudy fall night when, Miley says, she talked briefly with a man who would later be accused of four of the 1982-84 Green River murders. The man asked where her "tall, blond friend" was, and Miley guessed then and there that he probably was the abductor of fellow prostitute Kim Nelson two days before. That was the only time they had worked together along the so-called Sea-Tac Strip—the commercial area east of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, along what is now International Boulevard in the city of SeaTac.

Today, Miley is a 40-year-old heroin addict with more than 300 arrests behind her, a prison inmate doing 12 to 34 months for burglary and forgery in Nevada. She also is about to become a key witness in one of the nation's most notorious murder cases. Authorities want to depose Miley before the trial. Among other reasons, they fear she might be a possible future victim of homicide or drug overdose and not live long enough to testify against Gary Leon Ridgway, the Auburn man the King County Sheriff's Department and the King County Prosecutor's Office hope to prove was the one and only Green River Killer. By including Miley's story and similar other collateral evidence, the prosecutors suggest that Ridgway alone was responsible for all 49 Green River murders, even though he's charged with only four.

Now 53, Ridgway was a longtime employee at the Kenworth Truck factory in Renton when he was arrested on Nov. 30, 2001. Based on a saliva sample he gave in 1987, police had obtained new DNA test results that tied him to sperm found in three of the victims—Marcia Chapman, 31, Cynthia Hinds, 17, and Carol Christensen, 21. (DNA tests of sperm found in Opal Mills, 16, were inconclusive, but her body was found near Chapman's and Hinds'.) The authorities have argued that the DNA results are accurate far beyond any random chance, given that the women were killed so soon after the sperm were deposited. The defense intends to attack the science of the new DNA technology used in the case.

Officially, King County authorities say the Green River Killer claimed the lives of 49 women during an 18-month period in 1982, 1983, and early 1984. (See list, page 23.) The death toll could be far higher. An almost equal number of similar unsolved murders are under review by the defense. Like Nelson, most of the official 49 victims disappeared from the Sea-Tac Strip.

The decision to include Miley's claim of her brief encounter with Ridgway and evidence from the 45 Green River cases in which he is not charged is one of the main reasons Ridgway's defense could cost King County as much as $4 million to $6 million. Costly, too, is the related decision by the King County Prosecutor's Office to seek the death penalty.

"We will not plea bargain with the death penalty," King County Prosecuting Attorney Norm Maleng said last December. Maleng might have thought he was seizing the moral high ground. But the consequences of that posture are profound: Without a confession in exchange for a life sentence instead of death, the community might never know what really happened in the worst serial-murder case in American history, because a cogent case can be made that Ridgway might not be the only person responsible for the murders. While putting Ridgway to death would satisfy some narrow—in some cases, political—ends, it would leave unresolved the question of whether someone else is still out there, still killing.

IN NOTIFYING THE COURT last April that his office would seek the death penalty, Maleng veered sharply from the course adopted in a similarly horrific murder case in Spokane. There, prosecutors assessed the costs and benefits of seeking the execution of Robert Yates and decided that bargaining for information, by granting him his life, was worthwhile to establish what happened to 13 women who were his victims between 1975 and 1998. Yates did eventually receive the death penalty, last month in Pierce County, for two other murders. The uncertainties are even greater in the matter of the State of Washington v. Gary Leon Ridgway. There are, for example, seven women among the official 49 who are still missing, as well as four whose skeletal remains have never been identified. There also are as many as 52 other women who might have been killed by the person or people responsible for the Green River murders—many after Ridgway was first identified as a suspect in 1986. This is according to the police themselves, who long ago admitted that, barring a truthful confession from the actual killer or killers, there is no certain way to know who should be on the list.

The prosecution of Ridgway is an unmistakable attempt by authorities to close the book on the Green River case once and for all, so they can say to the public that the nightmare is finally over. The outcome has political consequences for Maleng as well as Sheriff David Reichert, both of whom are elected officials. By implying that Ridgway is the killer, Maleng's office can be seen as finally having brought the nation's worst serial killer to justice. Reichert, the first detective on the scene when the case began two decades ago, who eventually served as lead investigator on the multijurisdictional Green River Task Force and who has kept in touch with some victims' families ever since, could brandish Ridgway's scalp as a satisfying personal and professional accomplishment that couldn't hurt if he decides to run for governor. (Neither Reichert nor Maleng would comment for this story.)