I asked what he thought about the instances where the killer apparently grabbed two victims on the same day, echoes of Lake Sam.
“It might not be because he wanted to,” Bundy replied, “but because he just got locked into a situation where he was so driven he had to. He saw one and to get one he had to get two and took two. But this seems to confound the general pattern where he goes for one, you know? One person is easier to control than two, unless he has very good technique. No one that I’ve heard of has escaped from this guy, and obviously he has a very good technique once he makes the move.”
“What do you say about his pattern?” I asked.
“You shouldn’t lock yourself into a pattern,” Ted said, “because that limits your options, and you don’t want to limit your options. But as far as his pattern goes, I’m looking here at frequency, how often he does it. He does one a week in July and he does five in August and he settles down to two or three a month until next May where he gets four. That’s pretty damn active. He’s going Sunday through Saturday, generally speaking. And he doesn’t show a preference for weekends, you know. He’s spreading them out. Two and three a month is pretty intense.”
“How long can he keep that up?” Dave asked.
“Until you catch him.”
***
Could press reports about body discoveries affect Riverman’s decision to kill?
Ted didn’t think so. “It’s not inconceivable,” he said. “He might be getting an ego charge out of beating you people, staying ahead of you. But that’s not what’s motivating him.”
“What is?”
That one sent Bundy stuttering, because it invited a response based on his own experience. After hemming and hawing, he managed a few coherent sentences. Buried within them you can find his agenda. “This would be purely speculating,” he said. “There are an infinite number of ways to explain how a man can come to a point where he destroys human life as this person has. I suppose the only way to really know, someday, is to have the man studied.”
For now, explained Bundy, all he knew was that the answer lay in the fusion of sex and violence in the killer’s mind, a fairly self-evident observation. “I don’t know if it’s anything anybody can rationally describe or explain,” he said, “except the fact that sometimes our society promotes that link between sex and violence unknowingly.”
Think of the killer as a victim, too, he was suggesting, then quickly shifted gears, trying to push the conversation toward two stratagems he’d cooked up “that might help you develop some suspects.”
Chapter Eight
A slasher film festival
In 1980, after he was prosecuted for murdering Kim Leach, Bundy spoke at length with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth at the prison for their book, The Only Living Witness. When he refused to substantively discuss his crimes, the authors invited him to do so in the third person, to “speculate” about the killings and the person who committed them. Bundy agreed to do so. Although he never came close to a confession that anyone could take to court, he did speak, obliquely, about himself, revealing, for example, that he’d taken at least one victim home with him. Later, talking to Detective Dennis Couch from Salt Lake City in the first person, he’d confess to taking a number of victims home for private time with them.
Ted seemed to like this third-person device and resorted to it in several subsequent interviews with detectives. But he knew that it wasn’t going to work with Dave and me in 1984. We wouldn’t let him hide behind some alleged fiction. So in order to share with us his frank estimations of the Green River cases — without openly confessing to any homicides of his own — he gave us a song-and-dance about how he’d interviewed other serial killers on Death Row, pulling from them their innermost secrets. Prominent among Bundy’s interviewees was his friend Gerald Stano — “one of the nicest, pleasantest individuals I’ve ever run across” — who talked with Ted about some of the estimated 20 to 40 Florida women Stano murdered. Bundy could now speak with unique authority on serial murder, having heard the straight story from the horses’ mouths, so to speak.
His bullshit bona fides established, Bundy proceeded to tell us how he knew from talks with his Death Row associates that the Green River killer was returning again and often to his dump sites, until they were discovered, to monitor them, to check for possible police activity, and — Ted was squeamish about discussing this — for necrophilic playtime with whatever was left of the dead women.
Ted then presented to us his first creative idea for catching the killer. Reasoning from the certainty that the killer was repeatedly returning to his dump sites, Bundy said, “If you ever find a fresh body, and if it looks like it’s a Green River victim, I’d put that site under surveillance. I wouldn’t move in. I think that that sounds a little bit odd to you, but let me show you why I think surveillance should be done and how it would be done.”
He said that he’d given this notion a substantial amount of thought and had 20 pages of handwritten notes on it. No question, dump sites were Ted’s specialty.
“Assuming some time down the line you find a fresh body,” he elaborated, “somewhat fresh anyway. I’d move in, secure the area, try to keep everything off the radio and set up a surveillance network in that area.
“Now, you might want to move the body under cover of darkness because, let’s face it, if your man comes back to that site, by the time he gets on top of that body, you’re already going to be in on him. So the body doesn’t have to be there.
“I know the police instinct is to move in and scour the site, call everyone in, Explorer Scouts crawling on their hands and knees. This always fascinated me and appalled me, because I said, ‘Jesus Christ! If they’d only waited they’d find somebody. The guy would have come right up to them!’ In my opinion, the best chance you have of catching this guy red-handed is to get a site with a fresh body and stake it out.”
I asked if the killer might return to a site once it was discovered by the police. If so, perhaps we should take license tag numbers of passing vehicles when a dump site was being processed.
“I don’t think he would,” Bundy said. He acknowledged that certain types of criminals might, such as some arsonists who enjoy watching fire departments battling their blazes. But the Green River killer, Ted surmised, “is not going to want to get near you, unless he is a little bit off, and a thrill seeker.”
Was he taking victims home, I wondered.
“My guess,” he replied, “is he doesn’t have a family. Probably your typical serial killer. And he has a lot of time on his hands without worrying about who’s asking where he is. So I say there’s a good possibility that he could well take them home, right? And keep them for a while.”
On the other hand, Ted noted that Riverman’s dump sites were in many instances close to where his victims had disappeared, suggesting to him “that they’re being killed in a few hours, in the car, and dumped.” So although the killer might be taking some of the dead prostitutes home, “it doesn’t look like it to me.”
“You mentioned you had another proactive-type item,” I said.
“Oh, yeah!” he answered brightly. “This is a little bit more creative. Let me get my notes.”
He produced a sheaf of handwritten notes and began his pitch. “I think it’s safe to say that the guy fantasizes a lot,” Ted began. “That is, he finds a way of vicariously experiencing the thing that gets him off, which in this case is killing young women.
“One reason for doing it vicariously is that it’s a lot safer sometimes to read a book or go to a movie, and maybe a lot more convenient than to run out and actually do it. If you follow what I’m saying here, the guy who’s killing these women, it’s like a hobby to him.”
Either Dave or I must have cocked an eyebrow, because Ted paused for a moment, then went on.
“Well,” he said, “it may be more than that. It may be an obsession. But just like anybody who has an obsession, whether it be fishing or bowling or skiing, he has way
s he can vicariously satisfy it. Maybe going to peep shows, and maybe reading detective magazines, and, I think, there’s an excellent chance he gets off by going to look at what they call slasher films.
“I know it sounds weird. Years ago, I read a psychiatrist who said, you know, ‘If you could only photograph everyone who came out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would have a mug book of all the active, violent offenders against women in that particular area.’
“And I’d have to say that he was right on the mark, generally speaking. If I ran up against a dead end in this case, was really looking for some exciting new leads, I’d ask, ‘How will I take this idea that people who want to act out violently also get a thrill through books and magazines and films and TV and turn it into an actual technique for developing suspects?’ And I said, ‘You know, have a slasher film festival!”
At that moment, our tape recorder crashed to the floor. Dave picked it up and got it running again.
Ted laughed.
“You might think this is a little bit odd,” he went on, “but I really can tell you I don’t think it is.”
He seemed familiar with the slasher genre. “There have been quite a few out recently that dealt with the death of young prostitutes,” he said. Although he had been kept on disciplinary confinement — a sort of isolation — since his failed escape try the previous summer, Bundy seemed to be keeping up with at least one form of modern entertainment. He explained that ideally we’d have five or 10 of these movies playing at once.
“I would try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie out there,” he told us. “One that’s never been broadcast or shown in the Pacific Northwest. I would pick two theaters: one in Seattle and one in the Tacoma area, outside of the general vicinity where these girls have been disappearing. I’d find a theater that was out and away from other activities so that people would have to park right in front of the theater, as opposed to a downtown theater where they might park away.
“I’d see that the film was well-publicized in the Seattle and Tacoma newspapers, with the most lurid photos showing the girls being, you know, and the knife and the whole thing. Guaranteed to arouse those passions which, quite frankly, are unfortunately very unhealthy to arouse in people.
“Then for a period of a couple weeks I’d photograph everybody that came in and out of those theaters. I know that sounds weird, but believe me it isn’t. I’d photograph every male that came in there, and I’d also try to correlate the guy’s photograph with the license plate number on his car. That would be the only way you could link a face with something concrete that you could follow up on later, see?”
I nodded.
“If you have any eyewitnesses at all or if you in the future have any eyewitnesses – you would have a collection of individuals that I think would truly amaze your crimes-against-persons people. You would have people coming out of the woodwork, men who generally speaking are as normal as the day is long, who really are highly controlled individuals, but who indulge their violent fantasies . . . and their names are on no computer, their fingerprints are on no files, and the only time you ever see them come out in public is to view some of these movies, to get off. And there’s no other way you can reach them. Like, you know, bees to honey.”
Bundy’s idea certainly was among the more unusual investigative initiatives I’d ever heard proposed. But although I didn’t doubt that Ted knew whereof he spoke when it came to serial killers’ movie choices, it was an innovative but obviously unworkable scheme.
***
We broke off at about six that evening, then started again at 9:30 on Sunday morning. Overnight, the University of Washington played Washington State for the Apple Cup, emblematic of major college football superiority in the state, and a big deal for alumni from both schools. Bundy’s Huskies beat my Cougars 38-29.
I would have been happy to get the next morning’s discussion started with a little bantering back and forth about the game, or actually any topic besides murder, which clearly occupied Ted to the exclusion of almost everything else. He showed no interest.
Instead, he returned at once to his theme of alternatives to killing. “He’s very intense,” Bundy said again of the Green River killer. “As you can see, periods where he gets one and two a day, at times. That’s an extremely intense kind of need that just doesn’t go away.
“But there are times I’m sure he recognizes that if he keeps doing it as much as he’d like to do it, then he’s just courting disaster. He’s going to make a mistake and he knows it. So there are times when instead of actually doing it, he’s just going around hunting, pretending he’s doing it. Not pretending, but just going around, let’s say, developing more information, finding out where more prostitutes are hanging out; maybe just sort of stalking them, but not snatching any of them.”
Dave asked if the killer would have sex with a prostitute and then let her go: serial-killer catch and release.
Ted thought so. “I think there’s an excellent chance he has picked up a number of prostitutes whom he’s later released, for any number of reasons. Perhaps he just felt an unusual wave of compassion. Maybe he was surprised at some point and felt it’d be too risky to kill that particular individual. Maybe somebody saw him.”
Every one of these women, if they existed, were potential witnesses for us. But how to find them?
“Would there be anything unusual that he might do that maybe our officers [should] ask these girls?” Dave wondered.
Bundy replied that prostitutes no doubt were accustomed to a lot of strange behavior and that in any event Riverman probably made his move so quickly that there wasn’t time to observe anything out of the ordinary. He did suggest asking the prostitutes if any john had driven them to a particularly remote or secluded spot.
Later in the conversation, Ted added that we might consider asking the women about guys who parked away from the strip and approached them on foot. “I just don’t think he’s the type that’s going to drive up to the curb and have them get in,” Bundy explained. “He’s more careful than that. He doesn’t want anybody to overhear what he says to the girls. He doesn’t want anybody to see him, if that’s at all possible. And he certainly doesn’t want anybody seeing him get in the car.”
Also, in light of Riverman’s apparent success once a victim was in his power, Ted thought we should be alert for escape-proof vehicles such as vans, or cars with passenger doors that don’t open from within. I resisted the temptation to bring up vehicles with missing front passenger seats.
“How about the pickup?” I asked instead. “[The strip is] heavily patrolled. There are police officers out there harassing prostitutes all the time. How does he feel so good in there?”
“The same way Wayne Williams felt so good in Atlanta,” Ted said. “He knew the scene inside out. Because there were young, black children disappearing, there was an incredible amount of pressure. And yet he was just doing his thing. Why? Because he was a fish in water. He knows these individuals. He knows how to manipulate them. He might not even be coming up to them as a john, even though that appears to be the most reasonable explanation.
“He may be offering them employment, or money or drugs. Calling them on the phone even. I’m not saying he has one technique. He may not be a wizard, but he’s bright enough to understand that he can’t be approaching [his victims] the same way every time. I was continually amazed by this guy’s balls.”
I watched Ted closely. His face was deeply lined. He sweated and he frowned almost constantly. His eyes were bloodshot. Obviously, he was in deep pain, and I thought I knew why. There was really only one dimension to his being — murder — and it trumped everything else. Once he’d fallen into the black hole and begun killing, he became the black hole, a human figure occupying a void, an inadequate cipher — total personal worthlessness that he recognized as well in the Green River killer. There cannot be a more consummate loser than that, which I could see was horrible for Ted to contemplate.
“What is
this guy’s ‘thing’?” I asked. “Is he all wrapped up in the approach? Is he all wrapped up in the event? Or is he all wrapped up in post-event behavior? Is there something we could key on?”
“I don’t have any feeling for that,” he answered. “I don’t know what condition the bodies were in, or anything. [But] I can try to answer part of your question. I think the hunt, the searching out, is always a big thing for him. He’s probably invested a lot of time and effort into it. As to what he might do to them once he gets them, that’s a big blank spot in my mind. I mean, I can’t even begin to guess.”
To the contrary, I felt Bundy probably had a pretty good idea of the sorts of things Riverman liked to do when he was alone with a dead body. But that was a piece of information he was not about to share — then or ever, as it turned out.
I again pushed the discussion back toward Ted’s murders by asking if the killer might at one time have broken into women’s residences and strangled them in the middle of the night. “We do have some of those a couple of years previous,” I told him. “They’re basically unsolved. Would he have said, ‘This is too dangerous, too chancy?’ ”
Terrible Secrets Page 11