very brutal fashion. >> opal mills was her best friend. >> opal was a fighter. the fact that she had a lot of scratches on her knuckles, nails broken which meant to me that she fought. but for her to have fought and lost i think was probably -- i think that's the thing that scares me the most. >> bodies kept turning up week after week. the task force was working hard but at the end of three months they came up empty. politicians fretted about all the money being spent with no results. and ordered the sheriff to pull all the cops working the case. all but one. dave reichert did not give up. >> i became the sole investigator from about end of september to about august of 1983. and there was a lot of frustration on my part. >> worse still, more young women went missing from the sea-tac strip. ten more by the end of 1983. 25 the next. a poster with the faces of the murdered went up at headquarters. but despite the detective's hard work, there was no arrest. cynics said police were not trying hard enough to find the killer, because the victims were thought to be disp

. >> at the green river site where the bodies of cynthia hinds, marsha chapman and opal mills were discovered, ridgway admitted he shoved rocks into two of them. a detail never publicized. >> the people that found them would know that i put rocks in them and it's kind of like my secret and the task force's secret. >> ridgway confessed something the task force had long suspected, that he had had sex with some of the victims after they were dead. >> i was getting more twisted. >> that, he revealed, was why he had chosen new body dumping sites that were farther away from his home. detectives had long wondered about that and it gave them a glimpse into how the mind of this serial killer worked. >> i started leaving them out further so i wouldn't have sex with them. just kill another prostitute. >> investigators had agonized over whether they could have caught him earlier and perhaps saved the lives of dozens of young women. they were almost afraid of the answer. ridgway was about to tell them just how many times they had come close. >> and he tells of a victim who came close to getting away. >> s