Gary Leon Ridgway today admitted to being the Green River Killer, responsible for the deaths of 48 young women in the longest serial murder investigation in U.S. history.

"I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight," he said in a statement read by Deputy Prosecutor Jeff Baird.

"My plan was I wanted to kill as many women I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," he said. "I picked prostitutes as my victims because I hate most prostitutes and I did not want to pay them for sex. I also picked prostitutes for victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed."

Ridgway's deal to plead guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder means he will be spared from execution. He now faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. A sentencing date has not been set.

Some relatives of the Green River Killer's victims wept quietly in the King County courtroom as one by one, Ridgway calmly admitted killing each woman and dumping their bodies off county roads, in rural areas and in the river that gave the case its name.

"In most cases when I murdered these women I did not know their names," he said.

Investigators once pegged the Green River Killer's murderous frenzy as lasting from 1982 to 1984. They now know Ridgway's violent streak started long before that - and continued long after.

In his statement read in court today, Ridgway said he thought the fact that his murder victims were prostitutes might enable him to avoid capture.

"Most of the time I killed them the first time that I met them and I do not have a good memory for their faces," he said.

He said he thought he could "kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught." He also said he took jewelry and clothes to get rid of evidence.

"I killed most of them in my house hear Military Road and I killed a lot of them in my truck not far from where I picked them up. ... I remember leaving each woman's body in the place where she was found."

A more-than-80-page court document related to the case describes how Ridgway had sex with his dead victims.

"I placed most of the bodies in groups which I call clusters," he said. "I liked to drive by the clusters and think about the women I placed there."

He also said he usually "used a landmark to remember a cluster and the women I placed there," but on occasion abandoned a potential cluster because of a perceived risk associated with the site he chose.

The portion of the prepared statement that dealt with the specific killings began, "I strangled Wendy Lee Coffield to death." It went on to the death of Debra Lynn Bonner, Marcia Faye Chapman, Cynthia Jean Hinds and through the four dozen names -- some still unidentified and listed as "Jane Doe, B-10" or "Jane Doe, B-16."

After Baird read the description of each death - most including the phrase, "I picked her up planning to kill her" - he asked Ridgway whether it was his true statement. Ridgway answered, "Yes, it is."

When all was said and done, he had been convicted of more murders than any serial killer in the nation's history.

In an overflow room outside the courtroom where the proceeding were broadcast on closed circuit TV, most of the 60 people watching sat attentively and quietly until Baird began reading the statement describing the killings.

At that point, some of the victims' family and friends, as well as some reporters, began sobbing.

Ridgway's guilty pleas are part of a deal that will spare him from execution in the King County cases. No deal was cut that might spare him from death penalties in other jurisdictions. Remains of some victims were found outside the county and in Oregon.

Ridgway, 54, of the south Seattle suburb of Auburn, was arrested Nov. 30, 2001, as he left his longtime job as a painter at Kenworth Truck Co. Prosecutors said advances in DNA technology had allowed them to match a saliva sample taken from Ridgway in 1987 with DNA samples taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.

Ridgway had been a suspect since 1984, when victim Marie Malvar's boyfriend reported that he last saw her getting into a pickup truck later identified as Ridgway's.

But Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar. A police investigator in Des Moines, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, who knew Ridgway, cleared him as a suspect. Later that year, Ridgway contacted the King County sheriff's Green River Task Force - ostensibly to offer information about the case - and passed a polygraph test.

Detectives continued to suspect him, however, and in 1987 they searched his house and took the saliva sample that would eventually link him to the killings.

Court documents released at the time of Ridgway's arrest indicated that many of the spots where bodies were found were in or near areas where Ridgway had sex with his second wife. The couple divorced in 1981.

Also disclosed today was that more than a decade before he strangled his first Green River victim, Ridgway, then 17, stabbed and seriously wounded a little boy, who survived.

A first-grader at the time -- 1966 or early 1967 -- the victim now lives in California, a source said. Details of the attack were confirmed by another person involved in the case.

The stabbing came 16 years before Ridgway's murderous frenzy from 1982 to 1984, which targeted women in the Seattle area, mainly runaways and prostitutes. The first victims turned up in the Green River in South King County, giving the killer his name.