Terrible Secrets

by Robert D Keppel

  As the girl tried to sort out “Burton’s” question, her brother Danny, 20, arrived on the scene in his truck. Danny asked his little sister who the guy was, while at the same time he directed Leslie to get into the truck “What do you want!?” Danny called to Bundy, then exited his truck to confront the stranger face-to-face. Ted mumbled an answer, rolled up his window, and drove away.

  That night, Bundy used a Visa card in the name of Ralf Miller to pay for Room 443 at the Holiday Inn in Lake City, Florida, about 60 miles east of Jacksonville along Interstate 10. One witness described Ted as “scrubby” with “slurred speech.” A maid remembered he had “funny eyes.”

  The next morning was rainy. Bundy departed the Holiday Inn without bothering to check out. Several witnesses later reported a man driving a white van in the immediate vicinity of Lake City Junior High School, where 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach, a seventh-grader, disappeared on her way between buildings at about the same time. She was never seen alive again.

  Bundy drove the 100 miles west to Tallahassee that day, pausing about 30 miles into the trip to dispose of Kim Leach’s body under an abandoned hog shed in the thick undergrowth around Suwannee State Park. Late on Sunday, the 12th, he stole an orange 1972 VW Bug off the streets of Tallahassee and headed west on Interstate 10. He made about 150 miles to Crestview, Florida, by Monday morning, then spent the day stuck in the sand in a restricted area of Eglin Air Force Base. Finally digging himself out after dark, he pushed on another fifty miles to Pensacola, where a motel clerk flagged the hot credit card he presented her, and he quickly departed. Ted spent Monday night trying to sleep upright in the VW.

  Tuesday — Valentine’s Day — he found a men’s sports facility at a local community college where he could shower, shave and change. Then he washed his clothes at a Laundromat, pulled on the shirt he’d worn the day he killed Kim Leach, and spent most of the rest of the day at the beach. In the evening, Ted ate a big meal and drank a considerable amount. Later that night, he was caught trying to rifle a woman’s purse at a bar and just managed to talk his way out of a visit with the police.

  However, the end of his run was at hand. At 1:30 on the morning of the 15th, Bundy was driving the VW slowly, with the headlights off, through a residential section of Pensacola when Officer David Lee in his cruiser noticed the orange Bug and radioed its license number to the dispatcher. The car came back stolen, so Lee prepared to make an arrest.

  He pulled up behind the Bug and switched on his blue light. Bundy pulled over. Sidearm in hand, Lee approached the Volkswagen and ordered Ted to stand in front of the vehicle, hands on the trunk. As the officer glanced into the car to see if there was a passenger, Bundy took off running down the street. Lee fired a shot. Bundy stopped. They scuffled. Lee squeezed off another shot. Ted took a couple of hits on the head from the barrel of Lee’s revolver, and soon it was all over.

  On an otherwise silent ride to jail, Bundy told Lee that he wished he’d killed him and then asked if he ran when they got to the police station, would the officer shoot him dead? Once he was booked and taken to a cell, Ted immediately fell into a deep asleep.

  ***

  He first identified himself as Kenneth Misner, a well-known Florida State University athlete whose identity Bundy had hoped to assume. A photocopy of Misner’s birth certificate was in Ted’s mail the day he drove back to Tallahassee after killing Kim Leach. When Misner himself called the jail from Tallahassee, Bundy changed his name to John R. Doe. Not until Thursday night the 16th did he finally divulge his true identity, and then only after he was given access to a telephone and a promise that no announcement of his arrest would be made until nine o’clock on Friday morning.

  His interrogators — Detective Norman Chapman of the Pensacola police, Detective Don Patchen of the Tallahassee police, and Stephen Bodiford, a detective with the Leon County sheriff’s office — had no trouble with keeping his arrest from the press a while longer. They didn’t know who Ted Bundy was, although they’d soon learn.

  Much to the consternation of the public defenders who were then representing him, Bundy sat down with the detectives for five long interrogation sessions; Patchen recalls they spent at least 80 hours with Ted. The triple-team approach later came in for some criticism, but I think that rotating the three of them in and out of the interview probably kept each of them fresher and better able to keep Bundy focused on what they wanted to discuss, not his agenda.

  As far as I know, this was the first time Ted ever spoke, albeit indirectly, about what he was then calling “my problem.” He confided that he was a peeping Tom and had a pornography habit, but though he made no pretense of innocence to the officers, Bundy either clammed up or grew vague whenever they steered the interrogation back to the Chi Omega cases or the Leach homicide. “The evidence is there,” he said repeatedly of the sorority house. “Go look for it.” The Kim Leach episode was “horrible,” he said. The detectives “wouldn’t want to see her.”

  Patchen remembers that the three of them stressed that a first-degree murder conviction would surely mean the death penalty in Florida, while a confession might keep Bundy out of the electric chair, Old Sparky. At one point, they asked what it would take for Ted to clear up all his cases everywhere. He replied that he’d like to be sent back to the state of Washington. In Seattle, we were very interested in such a deal. Although I didn’t think it would ever happen, we were serious enough that Phil Killeen from the county prosecutor’s office was assigned to handle the details from our end.

  Ted asked to see a Catholic priest. Father Michael Moody visited him. Later, Bundy would tell Stephen Michaud that Moody advised him not to talk to the police. Don Patchen says the meeting with the priest marked the end of the confession talks.

  Years later in a conversation with Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist, Bundy talked of a malicious voice in his head that directed his crimes against women. “When I was first arrested,” he told Dr. Lewis, “I know that if the police had sat me down in a room, let me get drunk on, say, bourbon — a drink that really made me more vicious — hard liquor and 7-Up or something, and showed me some really hard-core pornography, I could have talked to them from that perspective. It would have come out of me just, it would have blossomed right out of me.”

  Ted instead filled the long hours, first in Pensacola, and then in Tallahassee, with a carefully couched discussion of murder, implying throughout that his knowledge and experience were gained firsthand. But he never directly acknowledged that he was a killer. For example, as Bodiford explained in a later deposition, “We talked one night about his car. He said the front seat was either loose, or out of it, the right front of his Volkswagen.

  “Well, why?”

  “Well, I can carry things easier that way.”

  “You mean you can carry bodies easier that way?”

  “And he said, ‘Well, let’s just say I can carry cargo better that way.’

  “Now we ask him, ‘That cargo you carried, was it sometimes – was it damaged?’

  “And he said, ‘Sometimes it was damaged, and sometimes it wasn’t.”

  Toward the end of the conversations, Don Patchen went into the interview room at the Leon County Jail without Bodiford and Chapman. Ted had so far refused to discuss his total number of victims, but Patchen had thought out an approach he believed might work.

  He told Bundy that he was a Vietnam veteran and that he was tortured by the recollection of all the people he killed during the war. His conscience was deeply troubled. His dreams were full of terrors.

  “So what about you, Ted?” Patchen asked. “If you can live with yourself, you must not have killed as many as I did. How many is it?”

  According to the detective, Bundy indicated the answer was three digits and did not elaborate. Patchen took the response to mean that Ted had killed a hundred or so victims. Unfortunately for posterity, the batteries in the tape recorder had given out, and the police did not videotape the sessions with Ted. So the common suspic
ion that Bundy killed a hundred or more women ultimately rests on this single, enigmatic remark and Don Patchen’s interpretation of what it meant.

  Bundy wouldn’t even be that specific when it came to came to discussing Kim Leach. Various people have opined that Ted strove to sustain the fiction of his innocence in the 12-year-old’s murder because his fellow inmates looked upon “baby rapers” with deep and menacing disapproval. It also may be that he was embarrassed by the crime, which belied his public image as the deadly handsome meta-murderer – evil wizard of the dark. Kidnapping and killing a pre-teen was hardly the stuff of legends.

  Although Leach’s body would not be recovered until April, Bodiford already was building a strong circumstantial case that pointed directly to Ted as the young girl’s killer. All three Florida lawmen pressed their suspect to give the Leach family at least the cold solace of retrieving their daughter’s remains. But Bundy felt neither guilt nor remorse for any crime – nor was he concerned with the lifelong ache he’d planted in her parents’ hearts.

  The possibility of redemption didn’t interest him, either. “He raised up in the chair,” Bodiford testified at his deposition, “and grabbed the pack of cigarettes and crumpled them and threw them on the floor and said, ‘But I’m the most cold-blooded sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet’.”

  Chapter Two

  Keppel versus ‘Ted’

  I always wanted to be a cop.

  I was born June 14, 1944, in Spokane, Washington, David and Eileen Keppel’s only child. My mother was an excellent amateur ice skater. My dad, a Marine veteran of World War II, spent the rest of his professional life in law enforcement, first as a Spokane County Sheriff’s deputy, then as eastern Washington representative for the state liquor control board, and finally as a store detective for the Rosauers Supermarkets chain in Spokane. My parents met at an ice show in which my mother appeared as a featured performer and my father carried the U.S. flag out onto the ice as part of the event’s honor guard.

  I was a jock. My specialties at Central Valley High School were track and field and basketball. I cleared six feet, five inches in the high jump while at Central Valley, good enough to win the state championship. We also went to the state basketball tournament, losing by one point to a talented group from Garfield High School, in Seattle.

  In 1966 I was the Pac-8 High Jump Champion. I cleared more than 7 feet in 1965, making me one of the top two high jumpers nationally. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel)

  ———

  These successes meant a scholarship to Washington State University in Pullman, where I became the first person ever to high-jump seven feet in Washington and was named a track All-American twice. I also played varsity basketball at WSU for two years. I graduated in 1966.

  My determination to become a policeman was largely due to my father’s influence. He had numerous friends who were police officers; there were cops in our house all the time. They’d come over for poker games. I’d sit at the table with these guys, listening to them tell exciting cop stories about how they caught the bad guys. They all wanted me to come work for them someday, and so did I.

  My approach to policing also was largely shaped by my father, whom I respected deeply. Dad believed an officer’s first priority should be to help people. For example, when he was dealing with shoplifters at Rosauers, he was interested in achieving something more than just an arrest. He felt that if he could get these people to confess their crime, and perhaps pay for what they’d stolen, then that accomplished more, for all concerned, than just putting them in jail. I noticed that he had a lot of success with this attitude.

  At WSU I majored in police science, now called criminal justice. The first-year administration classes were pretty boring. The second year was criminal investigation. I also took criminology-type classes in the sociology department, and then science courses, including biology, geology and anthropology with a law enforcement focus. I learned how to conduct a polygraph interview. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I delayed my inevitable entry into the military draft and trip to Vietnam to spend another 18 months at WSU to complete my master’s in police science.

  Directly after receiving my master’s degree in 1968, I joined the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, where my godfather was an assistant chief. Before being drafted, I spent six months as a deputy there. Drove a police car, wore a uniform. Had a gun. Didn’t know what I was doing, but I liked it.

  After basic training, the Army sent me to military police school and then straight to the military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, where I learned to be a jailer. At Leavenworth, I got in touch with a girl I’d known in high school, Sandra Lingren, who was then a senior at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Sandra is known as Sandy, although she spells it Sande. She had dated my best friend at Central Valley and I had dated hers.

  Now, seven years later, I wanted to know if Sande would like to go out and luckily enough for me, she did. We started dating.

  In 1968, I applied for, and received, a direct commission as a first lieutenant. Sande and I were married on November 2 of that year.

  I received further training in Georgia and at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where I made captain. Then I was shipped to Vietnam to serve as a sort of military police chief at the Army base at Phu Hiep, which was in the center of the country, right on the coast. About a hundred MPs reported to me, and they did all the police-oriented tasks — traffic, crime, murder, suicide. I did some coordination with the Vietnamese and Korean police. We also had a dog platoon that provided security to the Air Force base next door. It was a full-service police station.

  In January of 1971, after my discharge from the Army, I entered the King County police academy, which trained all sheriff’s deputies and Seattle police officers. There were 50 cadets in my class. They elected me president because, at 26, I was the oldest guy with the most experience. The academy lasted for seven long months.

  Once I got out on the street, I had some trouble with my fellow deputies who were crooked. I snitched on them, and they resented it. Partly because of these conflicts, I was transferred frequently. However, since my godfather was still an assistant chief, I was protected from retaliation.

  The various sheriff’s offices all played competitive team sports against one another, as well as against some agencies in Pierce County to the south. Everyone took these games very seriously. Since I was good at basketball and football — I played guard, as I had in college, and wide receiver — I had at least as many allies as enemies among the other deputies. Our quarterback was Dave Reichert, who was great. Dave could throw a pass the length of the field. He later headed up the Green River Task Force and joined me for my first interview with Bundy. Dave went on to serve two terms as King County sheriff and was elected to the U.S. Congress as a Republican in 2005.

  Though I fully subscribed to my father’s philosophy of policing, I discovered that it wasn’t always easy to play the role of the citizen’s helper. For example, I wasn’t going to make any deals with robbers and burglars. They were going to go to jail. But unlike most police officers, I actually enjoyed going to domestic disturbances — family fights — because it was a chance for me to counsel one side or the other, or both, so maybe they’d stop beating on each other, treat one another better. Other officers correctly see such calls as a chance to be assaulted themselves and are very wary of them. I saw this sort of work as basic to my role as a deputy. I enjoyed helping people.

  ***

  In February of 1973 I joined the burglary/larceny detective unit.

  I believed that detectives were the thing to be in a police department, the ultimate idea of a cop. Part of me liked using science and statistical tools, such as databases, to help solve crimes. I also liked collecting evidence at a crime scene, having the scene tell me something, putting all it all together.

  But the most important thing a detective does is think, all the time. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to know to d
o my job better? That’s what good detectives do, anyway. The poor ones tend to just react.

  Experience, skill and the investigative mindset commonly come into play in all investigations, yet they are urgently important in homicide cases. One obvious reason is the comparative gravity of the crimes. It may be an economic or emotional catastrophe to have your car stolen, or your house burgled, but that is nothing compared to the murder of your child. The pressure to solve a homicide, and quickly, is intense. It comes from the victim’s family, from your department, from the press, and from within. Time is always precious. The longer a murder remains unsolved, the more likely it will never be solved.