Terrible Secrets

by Robert D Keppel

  Ted would go to any length to protect his terrible secrets.

  ***

  Bundy was tried and convicted and sentenced to death in Miami for the Chi Omega cases that summer, then convicted and sentenced to death in Orlando for killing Kim Leach the following February. His frequent courtroom tantrums and the grim evidence of what he’d done to his victims — broadcast nationwide — seared the cases into the public mind. The onetime media darling was now perhaps the most widely loathed and detested individual in the country, the poster boy for criminal depravity.

  There was no chance that he’d ever leave the Sunshine State alive and therefore no possibility he’d ever have to answer in court for his depredations all over the West. It was deeply frustrating for me to have worked so hard at bringing him to justice in Washington State, without then seeing justice served. An important part of that regret was the realization that I probably would never get answers to questions I’d been carrying around in my head since “Ted” first invaded my life in the summer of 1974.

  ***

  Serial killers may have been unknown back then — the earliest use of the term in its modern sense that I’ve found was in a ’50s-era textbook — but by the late 1970s they were cropping up like crocuses. Among the more infamous of these offenders, David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” was arrested in 1977; John Wayne Gacy, the “Killer Clown,” in 1978; and Kenneth Bianchi, the “Hillside Strangler,” in 1979.

  Since 1974, I had read widely and deeply in both the professional and popular literature on what sometimes is called motiveless murder. I had attended seminars and FBI workshops, reached out to officers in other cities where serial killers had struck — including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco — and systematically familiarized myself with their investigations.

  Similarly, since in Washington State we had created one of the first serial-killer investigative task forces, and therefore had practical knowledge of what worked and didn’t work, in these team exercises, other jurisdictions also looked to us for help. I found myself in demand as a consultant to other police departments around the country as they grappled with the same grim mysteries that we faced.

  For example, in July of 1979, the so-called “Atlanta Child Killer” went to work, murdering 30 or more young black men and boys with impunity over the next two years. Many of the victims’ bodies were recovered from area waterways, particularly the Chattahoochee River. It appeared that the killer was dumping some of the bodies into the water from bridges late at night.

  On Wednesday, May 20, 1981, I joined a group of other detectives from around the country who gathered at the Atlanta Hilton to consult on the case. In the course of the meeting, I suggested that the Atlanta police stake out the bridges, placing officers at both ends of the spans, and also in boats under the middle of the lengthier ones. I was delighted to learn that they were beginning to do just that, and it worked!

  At 3 a.m. on May 22, the day our panel of serial-killer experts headed home, two two-person teams of police officers and FBI agents were stationed at the James Jackson Parkway Bridge — Interstate 285 — over the Chattahoochee when they heard a loud splash that sounded a lot like a body had been thrown from the bridge into the water.

  A white Chevrolet station wagon was stopped, and its driver, Wayne B. Williams, a black amateur radio station operator, well-known among young people in the black community, was questioned for 90 minutes and released. Two days later, the body of 28-year-old Nathanial Cater was pulled out of the Chattahoochee about 200 yards downstream from the bridge. Fibers and dog hairs found with Cater connected him to Williams and ultimately led to the killer’s successful prosecution.

  After my interrogation of James Lee Slade, this was my second favorite moment as a detective, ever. Instant gratification.

  Late in the 1970s I began to think about teaching as a second, or parallel, career and took a master’s degree in adult education at Seattle University, expecting to go on to a doctorate. I wanted to learn more about adult education, but discovered in the course of my studies that my interests went beyond an education degree. My avocational track was shifting in a new direction. After years of studying everything I could about serial killers, I’d come to understand how little of practical value actually was known about them and how much rank speculation passed for expertise in the field. In time, this realization, combined with the frustrations of the Ted cases, catalyzed in me a determination to establish my own standard of murder scholarship; to master the subject of murder, specifically serial murder, in all its infinite variety. I decided to get a doctorate in homicide.

  In 1980, I prevailed on the University of Washington to allow me to design an independent, multidisciplinary course of study leading to a Ph.D. My seven areas of inquiry would be pathology, odontology, psychiatry, psychology, law, sociology, and anthropology. I found willing advisors in each area and then went to work, one subject at a time, to learn what each discipline had to teach me about murder. In all, the process would require 12 years of work.

  ***

  I left the King County sheriff’s department in March of 1982 after eight years there as a detective and accepted the position of lead investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, working out of Seattle. The new job promised a lot more responsibility — I was basically the chief detective for the state, and the chance to work a much broader range of cases. But barely had I figured out where the men’s room was before I found myself in the middle of another serial-murder investigation, the so-called Green River Killings.

  Western Washington’s Green River, one of the state’s premier steelhead-fishing streams, rises in the Snoqualmie National Forest then flows west and north toward Seattle, where it becomes the Duwamish River before emptying into Puget Sound at Elliot Bay. Along the way, the river passes through Kent, a mid-sized working-class community that lies adjacent to the region’s major commercial airport, Seattle-Tacoma International, or Sea-Tac.

  July 15, two boys pedaling their bikes across the 150-foot Peck Bridge over the Green River in Kent – about 20 miles south of downtown Seattle — saw the naked body of a white female caught on a snag in the middle of the stream. She was Wendy Lee Coffield, the earliest known victim of the Green River killer, or Riverman, as Ted liked to call him. Coffield, a 16-year-old prostitute from Tacoma, where she was last seen eight days before, had a pair of blue jeans tied around her neck. Her official cause of death was ligature strangulation.

  On August 12, not far south of the Peck Bridge, a second nude female was found dead on a sandbar in the river, exposed by low tide. Her name was Debra Lynn Bonner. She was 23, white, also a hooker from Tacoma, last seen on July 25 afoot on a nearby strip of Pacific Highway South, infamous as a busy prostitute stroll that runs south from 140th Street to 216th Street. She, too, had been strangled with an article of clothing that her killer left knotted around her neck. Because Bonner’s body lay just outside the Kent city limit, the responding officer was Detective Dave Reichert from the sheriff’s office, my old football teammate from our rookie days together. Reichert, coincidentally, grew up in Kent and knew the river well.

  In spite of, or perhaps because of, our area’s experience with Bundy, the discovery of two recently murdered prostitutes, nude, a few feet from one another in a local river, did not ignite the widespread suspicion among the cops that another serial killer had set up shop. That certainly was my fear, but few of my peers shared it. I thought they had their heads in the sand.

  Three days later, my apprehensions were borne out when three more nude females were found murdered in, and beside, the river, about a half mile from where Coffield and Bonner were found. The two in the water had been weighted to the bottom by heavy stones. The first, Marcia Faye “Tiny” Chapman, 31, an African-American mother of three, had been reported missing by her mother two weeks earlier, near where she lived on Pacific Highway South. Chapman supported her kids by hooking.

  The second victim was Cynthia Hinds, 17, also
black, last reported seen on August 11, trolling for johns on the strip, about 12 blocks from where Chapman vanished.

  Dave Reichert was the detective in charge of these new cases as well. As he oversaw a team of deputies at the scene, Dave hauled around a large-format camera like the ones we used to document our discoveries at Issaquah and Taylor Mountain, photographing the bodies in situ, and also any evidence that turned up.

  The river’s edge was steep and dense with thorny blackberry canes more than five feet high, and the going was slow. Dave wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just evidence, when he almost stumbled over yet a third dead female, once again nude.

  “I’ve got another one!” Reichert shouted.

  This victim was Opal Charmaine Mills, 16, also black. Mills had been cited for soliciting sex. Her last known location was a phone booth on the strip. She was calling home, collect.

  It required eight days to identify Chapman, Hinds, and Mills, a lifetime in a homicide investigation. Unlike Coffield and Bonner, none of the three was found with a ligature around her neck, but Dr. Donald Reay, the King County medical examiner, determined that all three died of asphyxiation.

  The sheriff responded to the five discoveries by assigning 25 detectives to what already was being called the Green River Killings. In late September, a sixth victim was added to the list. She was 16-year-old Gisele Ann Lovvorn, a white girl, last reported seen on July 17, two days after Wendy Coffield’s body was found. Lovvorn worked the strip, as had the others. She was found nude, dead from ligature strangulation, in a deserted subdivision just south of Sea-Tac, about seven miles from the killer’s original river dump sites in Kent.

  Then the reports of slain prostitutes tapered off. The 25-detective task force was gradually pared back to just five investigators. By the beginning of 1983, a vain hope was spreading among the sheriff’s top brass that the previous summer’s spate of hooker homicides was an aberration. Even if there was one guy out there murdering prostitutes, it seemed to some in the department as if he might have moved on, becoming someone else’s headache.

  That’s when I received a visit from a distressed and nearly distraught Dave Reichert. The Green River Killings had begun to consume him, creating in Dave a single-minded fixation I remembered well from 1974, when “Ted” was a constant taunting presence in my head. The complete lack of apparent progress in the investigation was sapping Reichert’s self-confidence, stirring fundamental doubts about his competence as a cop.

  On top of that, Dave confirmed what I had been hearing, that the sheriff might disband the detective task force altogether, leaving the six cases in Reichert’s lap. I didn’t share the general optimism that the killer had stopped or departed. Something told me that he simply had started doing a better job of disposing of his dead victims and that sooner or later this case would forcefully recapture everyone’s attention. I also was familiar enough with serial-murder investigations to know that one detective working on his own would be no match for such a killer. Dumping the Green River cases on Dave Reichert, in my view, would be as short-sighted as it was unfair.

  I hit on a possible solution. As an employee of the attorney general I could have no active role in the sheriff’s investigation, but I could bring my experience to bear as an outside consultant, if asked. I told Dave that if I was approached by the sheriff’s office to review and analyze their cases, and possibly offer some suggestions, I might be able to redirect their thinking.

  Less than an hour after he left my office, I received a telephone call from Major Richard Kraske, who’d been my lieutenant back in the “Ted” days. Dick already had come to me on a couple occasions to confer on the Green River investigations. Now he asked if I would take a more systematic look at what they were doing. Reichert had played it just right. I said sure and soon was at work on a 33-page report I’d deliver that May.

  I found much about the investigation that needed correction. There was the familiar data overload; thousands and thousands of unsorted details had been collected. Unresolved discrepancies littered the witness statements, making it difficult to assemble reliable victim narratives. There was no system for prioritizing suspects.

  My principal finding, which surely dismayed Kraske, was that the investigation was undermanned and not nearly aggressive enough in its outlook. I was not convinced that Wendy Coffield was the first victim, so my specific suggestions included a detailed review of all known prostitute murders and cases of female strangulation in western states for the past five years.

  It appeared from the reports that the investigation also had overlooked the possibility that our killer had previously been active in the area. I suggested they conduct retrospective research on similar deaths predating Coffield’s to see if any individuals of interest popped up. In conjunction with that effort, I advised a review of any possible source of information, from suspicious-circumstance reports to game wardens’ written observations that might indicate suspect behavior.

  I said the killer, like Ted, probably would not confine himself to King County, so they should reach out to other jurisdictions, share information with them, and try to keep communication flowing both ways. Similarly, I wrote that uniformed patrol officers needed to be kept in the loop. In order to make a useful contribution, these men and women needed to know what direction the investigation was taking. I was reminded that, as in the Bundy case, it is often a street cop who collars the serial killer in the course of discharging his or her regular duties. They need to be alert to what’s going on.

  Besides reviewing documents at my desk, I also needed to get out into the field, particularly to visit the dump sites for whatever insights I might gather from them. When Dave brought me to the stretch of river where Chapman, Hinds and Mills were found, I was immediately struck by the privacy and seclusion of the area, only a short drive from the heavily traveled strip where the killer apparently had picked up all three of the women.

  In fact, the site offered him many of the same advantages I’d noted that “Ted” enjoyed years before at the Issaquah dump site. There was even a pull-off near the river, largely obscured by tall weeds in the summertime, where he could do what he desired in privacy, while monitoring the road for the sound of oncoming vehicles or, at night, the sweep of approaching headlights through the grass. It must have galled him to have this obviously well-scouted hideaway discovered so soon after he began putting it to use.

  ***

  As the sheriff’s office considered whether to act on my various proposals, I took part in the early planning of the first national response to serial killing, a computerized database and tracking network that eventually would be known as VICAP, for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. My involvement began the previous December with a telephone call from Pierce Brooks, a detective legend at the Los Angeles Police Department who also had been a member of the consulting team in Atlanta. Pierce was probably the most skilled and respected police detective in the country. When he had something to say, you listened.

  Brooks began his career in the late 1940s, still the Stone Age of information technology for law enforcement. As he explained to me, if he wanted to research a suspect’s history to see if similar crimes had been committed in LA or elsewhere, he was forced to plow through newspaper archives, page by page, an inefficient, unreliable and time-consuming process that nonetheless could yield vital information.

  I could empathize. Roger Dunn and I used the police teletype and did a lot of telephoning and letter writing, but save for what Roger learned from fellow detectives at the Boise conference in May of 1975, we were largely unaware of the bludgeon and strangulation murders, so similar to ours, that began in Utah and Colorado soon after our killings stopped.

  Pierce sketched out his idea for a national resource center, built from detailed police detectives’ reports of apparently motiveless or otherwise baffling cases of multiple homicides and organized to isolate and highlight every conceivable facet of these crimes. I could see that over time, as more a
nd more reports from various local law enforcement agencies were folded into the database, it could become a formidable investigative tool.

  A detective in Seattle, for example, might want to know about stabbing murders of young gay hustlers whose bodies turned up in local waterways. An analyst at the center would consult the system to see if any similar cases had been reported or, perhaps, if there was some specific detail common to a number of reported hustler murders. If the computer revealed matches, then all the agencies in question would be made aware of the similarities. They could then consider together the possibility they were all pursuing the same offender and determine how to leverage their investigations in order to abbreviate his career and save lives.

  I thought this was a great idea and told Brooks he had my support. Then he got to the real point of his call. Did I think such a network would have led to an earlier apprehension of Bundy? Obviously, Pierce was looking for a selling point when he took his proposed project before potential funding agencies and the politicians whose blessings would be critically important to its success. Everyone knew who Ted Bundy was.