. It pressured Ridgway into confessing to 48 murders and leading detectives to four previously undiscovered bodies in exchange for sparing him the death penalty.
Trace evidence expert Skip Palenik first heard about the Green River murders in 1985 while training forensic scientists in Seattle.Jeff Baird, the retired King County senior deputy prosecutor who led the prosecution of Ridgway and ultimately brought Palenik into the case, said in a recent interview he’d never heard about Palenik’s visit to the crime lab in the 1980s or knew the paint spheres could’ve been found then.
Sisters of Patricia Yellow Robe, Ridgway’s last known victim, said the revelations are upsetting but mean little now. After four more bodies were found dumped in and along the Green River within a month, the King County sheriff assembled a task force to track down a serial killer. But with the volumes of evidence, the staffing constraints and the workload of other cases statewide, crime lab officials had to choose what evidence to analyze, said Cwiklik, the lab’s trace evidence supervisor at the time., which “usually would have been the most fruitful,” Cwiklik said in a recent interview.
The same year, Palenik, the renowned trace evidence expert, learned about the case. Palenik, then a senior researcher at the Chicago-based McCrone Research Institute — a leader in microanalysis — taught workshops around the country. He’d just finished teaching a basic forensic microscopy course at the crime lab in Seattle when George Ishii, then the director, told him about the Green River murders, Palenik said in a recent interview.
In hindsight, Cwiklik said, the crime lab should have shifted its focus from hairs and fibers and turned to analyzing smaller particles in the trace evidence recovered from the dumpsites. Jensen, who dedicated most of his career to the case, was stunned to learn recently from an NBC News reporter that the capability to detect the paint spheres that linked Ridgway to some of the victims had existed years earlier.
Jensen’s list of the killer’s suspected victims grew to nearly 90, including dozens of homeless or drug-addicted girls and women who’d disappeared or were dumped in remote places across western Washington.When Patricia Yellow Robe’s body was found in bushes outside a wrecking yard south of Seattle in 1998, she wasn’t considered a victim of the killer. The medical examiner ruled her death an accidental overdose.
Thanks Obama :)
Racist refuses to cover news!!!