YAKIMA -- A serial rapist whose convictions for the 1987 murders of two Yakima women were among hundreds overturned by a sweeping Washington Supreme Court decision reached a last-minute plea bargain with prosecutors this week.

With a jury selected and awaiting opening arguments, John Bill Fletcher, 55, agreed to plead guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in exchange for a sentence of slightly more than 34 years, which is at the low end of the standard range.

The plea averted the need for a trial that was estimated to last three weeks. It had taken attorneys three days to select a 12-member jury from among 120 potential jurors interviewed.

A native of Texas, Fletcher was already serving a 43-year sentence for a 1987 rape spree when new DNA testing linked him to the unsolved stabbing deaths that same year of Theresa Branscomb and Bertha Cantu.

Investigators had strongly suspected Fletcher in the murders of the two women, whose bodies were found dumped months apart in the Parker area, south of Yakima.

It wasn't until 2001 that improvements in DNA conclusively linked him to the slayings.

"If he had not been caught back in 1987, we would have had our own serial killer here in Yakima County," then-county prosecutor Jeff Sullivan said at the time.

Fletcher had just settled into a 60-year prison sentence for the murders when the first of two momentous rulings by the state Supreme Court in 2002 gave him and hundreds of convicted killers across the state new hope.

Known as Andress cases for the name of the defendant in a fatal King County bar fight, the court held that assault without proof of intent to kill was too similar to manslaughter and could not serve as the basis for a felony murder conviction.

A felony murder is a homicide that occurs during the commission of a different felony, such as arson, rape or robbery.

The Legislature immediately rebuffed the court by expressly adding assault as a predicate felony.

That didn't stop the court from later applying the ruling retroactively, thus invalidating hundreds of felony murder cases statewide, including Fletcher's and a dozen others in Yakima County.

Prosecutors won new convictions in most of the cases, but the Fletcher case limped along for years as prosecutors struggled to rebuild the aging case amid evidentiary challenges by Fletcher and a revolving cast of defense attorneys.

Fletcher's is the final unresolved Andress case in the county, and believed to be one of the final outstanding cases in the state.

Fletcher had moved to Yakima only a few months before his crime spree is known to have begun in 1987.

He was living with his mother after having been paroled just seven years into a 20-year sentence in Texas for aggravated rape.

Altogether, investigators linked him to at least six rapes in the Yakima Valley, including an attack on a woman he stabbed 16 times before she escaped by wading across the Yakima River.

That attack made him the prime suspect in the stabbing deaths of Branscomb, 20, and Cantu, 26.

Based on a written promise from then-prosecutor Sullivan not to seek the death penalty, Fletcher provided the prosecutor with a detailed confession of the slayings that was read at his plea hearing in February 2002.

For evidentiary reasons, however, the confession was no longer admissible.

Fletcher is scheduled to be sentenced this afternoon.

It had taken prosecutors and defense attorneys several days to seat a jury that had not been influenced by earlier news accounts of the case.