'I Killed So Many Women ... '

Gary Ridgway pleaded guilty Wednesday to more murders than any other U.S. serial killer has ever committed, admitting to 48 slayings in order to escape death himself.

"I killed the 48 women listed in the state's second amended information," his statement read. "In most cases, I did not know their names. I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight."

The so-called Green River killer will avoid the death penalty by cooperating with prosecutors.

In the statement read in court by prosecutor Jeff Baird, Ridgway admitted to killing most of the women in his truck. He said he preyed mainly on prostitutes because he did not want to pay them for sex and thought their deaths would go unnoticed.

"I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could," his statement continued.

Ridgway then acknowledged his guilt in specific cases. The descriptions bore similar language.

"I picked her up planning to kill her," Ridgway's statement said in each case. He then described how he killed each woman, and where he left the body. Often, he buried them in or near the Green River.

Some relatives of victims wept quietly in the courtroom. Speaking in a quiet voice, wearing scarlet prison clothing, Ridgway acknowledged each of his statements.

Before and after his statement was read, Ridgway answered lengthy series of questions from the prosecutor and then the judge. These established that he recognized the plea document and all its stipulations, had discussed it with his attorneys, understood that he had the right to remain silent and to have a trial, and grasped that he would spend his life in prison without any possibility of parole.

Ridgway then was asked to give his plea to each of the 48 counts. After the judge read each charge, Ridgway answered "Guilty," nodding his head slightly each time.

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng told CBS News Correspondent John Blackstone his immediate reaction to Ridgway's offer to plead guilty in exchange for his life was no—a "strong emotional no."

But later Maleng says he saw benefit in a plea bargain that would solve more than 40 unsolvable cases.

"Gary Ridgway does not deserve our mercy," he said. "The mercy is directed to families [whose] grief is still fresh 20 years later. They are deserving of truth."

Many families are grateful, reports Blackstone, but others say Ridgway should die.

"I want him done. I'll do it myself. If I have to, I'll do it myself," says Jose Malavar, the brother of victim Marie Malvar.

Some experts say the plea bargain deal raises questions about the future of capital punishment.

"How can anybody justly get the death penalty if he doesn't," says John Junker, a law professor at the University of Washington.

Ridgway, 54, a one-time truck painter dubbed the Green River killer by authorities, will escape the death penalty in Washington state. But two of the bodies on the official list of Green River victims were found in Oregon, which has capital punishment, and it is still unclear whether Ridgway will plead to those.

The remains of scores of women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, turned up near ravines, rivers, airports and freeways in the 1980s. Of them, investigators officially listed 49 women as probable victims of the Green River Killer.

Since signing off on the deal, Ridgway has worked with investigators to recover still-missing remains of some victims in the case. Some of the victims remain unidentified.

"This deal gives a little bit of something to everyone," said CBS News legal consultant Andrew Cohen. "It gives the family members of victims a little peace and perhaps a chance to know what happened to their loved ones. It gives prosecutors an opportunity to find out exactly how and why Ridgway committed these awful crimes. It saves the time and expense of trial and it spares the defendant from a possible death penalty."

The Green River Killer's murderous frenzy began in 1982, targeting women in the Seattle area, mainly runaways and prostitutes. The first victims turned up in the Green River, giving the killer his name.

The killing seemed to stop as suddenly as it started, with prosecutors believing the last victim had disappeared in 1984. But one of the killings Ridgway admitted to occurred in 1990 and another in 1998.

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

But Ridgway told police he didn't know Malvar, and a police investigator in Des Moines, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, who knew him cleared him as a suspect.

"They had him arrested one time but they let him go," Kathy Mills, the mother of 16-year-old victim Opal Mills, told CBS News. "So think of all the young ladies who could have been saved if they'd kept him."

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 a saliva sample. It was 13 years before DNA technology caught up to their suspicions and they could link that sample to DNA taken from the bodies of three of the earliest victims.

Ridgway was arrested as he left work Nov. 30, 2001, and later pleaded innocent to seven killings. But facing DNA evidence and the prospect of the death penalty, he began cooperating and trading information for his life.

He confessed to 42 of the 49 listed killings, as well as six not on the list, the sources have said. He directed authorities to four sets of previously undiscovered remains.

Ridgway is still a suspect in the seven remaining cases on the original list of 49 because any denials he has made in those cases have been "equivocal," sources have told The AP. His agreement with prosecutors stipulates that he will continue cooperating for six months. He will be sentenced at that time.