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The victim of a serial killer has had her remains formally identified nearly forty years after she disappeared.
Gary Ridgway, now aged 73 and known as the 'Green River Killer' currently behind bars for life after he was convicted in 2003 for the murder of 49 women in the state of Washington. For his crimes, he is currently serving 49 consecutive life sentences, which means he will die in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Ridgway is one of the country's most prolific serial killers, and has admitted he has killed as many as 80 different women. However, officials have only managed to gather enough evidence to convict him of 49 murders at the time.
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The victim's bones were tied to the name of Lori Anne Razpotnik, who disappeared in 1982 at the age of 15. Her remains were found three years later, and had been known to officers solely as "Bones 17" until they were attached to her name.
Razpotnik ran away from home as a teenager, never to be seen again. It is now thought the bones are hers, as the DNA on the bones matched the profile detectives had built of her, according to the King County Sheriff's Office, who was leading the investigation.
As well as this, it means that just one of Gary's confirmed victims remains to be identified by police. The remains of "Bones 17" were discovered somewhat by chance after a car crashed down an embankment in the Washington town of Auburn.
As the driver veered off the road and into a cemetery, the car eventually stopped in an area where three sets of bones were discovered including those of "Bones 17". Of the three remains, one was formally identified before the breakthrough, with one set of bones being linked to 16-year-old Kimi-Kai Pitsor.
A special task force was set up to discover the identities of "Bones 16" and "Bones 17", but investigators found little leads. Solving the murders became a top priority for the force, but it was only recently that link to Lori Anne was made.
"Bones 16" was also identified in 2012, as being Sandra Major, aged just 20 when she disappeared. She had been seen climbing into a truck in the north of Seattle in 1982 when she was last seen alive.
Ridgway led officers in circles after he admitted his crimes and was convicted for the murders twenty years ago. After confessing to the crimes, he admitted he could not remember anything specific about how they died.
He admitted at the time that he would target prostitutes as he "could kill as many of them as [he] wanted without getting caught". After he was put on trial, Ridgway offered to help officers find the other bodies in exchange for sparing him from the death penalty.
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- Serial Killers
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