Seattle, WA ? This week, a slight man with thick glasses, a man who has been married three times and is the father of one child, is to stand before a judge who will ask him at least 48 times how he pleads to separate charges of murder.

Each time, Gary Leon Ridgway will respond “guilty,” sources involved with the case have told The Associated Press. When it’s over Wednesday, he will have more murders on his record than any other serial killer in the nation’s history. And a mystery that confounded detectives for two decades will come to a close.

Ridgway, 54, a longtime painter at Kenworth Truck Co., is expected to admit being the Green River Killer, named for the river south of Seattle where the first victims were found.

The plea would spare him the death penalty in King County, instead assuring him life in prison without parole, the sources said. However, 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.

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 who knew him cleared him.

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 victims.

Ridgway was arrested as he left work Nov. 30, 2001, and later pleaded not guilty to seven killings. But facing DNA evidence and the prospect of the death penalty, he began cooperating.

Pictured above are some of the slaying victims of a 1980s killing spree in the Seattle area. The remains of scores of women, mainly runaways and prostitutes, turned up near ravines, rivers, airports and freeways. Of them, investigators officially listed 49 women as probable victims of the Green River Killer. The suspect in the slayings, Gary Leon Ridgway, is expected to plead guilty to at least 48 charges of murder.

He confessed to 42 of the 49 listed killings, as well as six not on the list, the sources have said.

Ridgway’s pleas to 48 counts would give him more convictions — though not necessarily more slayings — than any other serial killer in the nation’s history, said Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence.

John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on men and boys in Chicago in the 1970s, was convicted of killing 33. Ted Bundy, whose killing started in Washington state, confessed to killing more than 30 women and girls, but was convicted only of killing three before he was executed.