“And their bodies were left there?”
“Yes.”
“Were they prostitutes?”
“Well, they were questionable.”
Ted said he did not believe that Wendy Lee Coffield was the first victim, because a novice killer would likely have to build to the level of activity that we encountered at the outset of the series in 1982. So, yes, maybe the killer tried other approaches before.
“Liken it to somebody who’s looking for the right hole to fish in,” Bundy said. “He’s fishing here and there and maybe not catching much, but taking too much of a risk in the meantime. It could very well be that someone like this would break into a house and kill a woman, and then find it so risky and so unnerving and so difficult, quite frankly, that he would look for something that was perhaps easier.”
Lynda Healy’s basement bedroom murder in 1974, of course, crossed my mind as he spoke. As far as we know, Ted abandoned that approach until January of 1978 in Tallahassee.
“How about the hunt, though?” I pressed him. “Is the fact he would do one in a residence more of a thrill for him?”
“The question is,” said Ted, “did he select this woman beforehand? Or is he just like Albert DeSalvo, just knocking on doors? It makes a difference. There’s hunting involved in either case, a certain amount of expertise and sort of feeling out, you know, apartment complexes and looking at names on mailboxes. If you could talk to Albert DeSalvo’s spirit you’d find there’s something of an art to it. But if in fact he tracked a woman from a bar, that’s a little bit more sophisticated.”
Then Ted tried to sell us a novel concept that the Green River killer, “deeply disturbed” as he clearly was, might also be afflicted with a conscience or at least was capable of regret. It is axiomatic among mental health experts that psychopaths are incapable of feeling guilt or regret.
But Bundy mounted a sort of sympathy-for-the-devil argument, beginning with the fact — based on personal experience — that the time demands on a busy serial killer make it tough for him to keep the other, public, parts of his life running smoothly, and this is very stressful.
“When he’s doing all of this,” Ted said, “he can’t be conducting normal relations with people. His whole life is upset. He’s carrying around these terrible secrets. He might find it hard to hold a job. The pressure of threatening detectives. Notwithstanding what anyone says, I’m sure there’s got to be a sense of remorse. It may not be very strong. It may be stronger some times than others.”
This was quite an assertion. “You don’t believe this theory that some people have no remorse?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he replied. “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that theory at all.”
He raised alcoholics as an example, as if being a drunk were comparable to committing serial sex murders. “Alcoholics that I have known,” he told us, “suffer a great deal of remorse. I mean, they can’t hold a job. Their families are falling apart. They’re being mean and cruel to people, yet they still drink. They feel very bad about it, but they can’t stop themselves.”
Same thing for killers, said Ted.
“I’m sure there are some people who kill who feel no remorse,” he conceded. “But I think it’s accurate to say that just because a man feels remorse doesn’t mean he wants to turn himself in and be executed by the state. Because a man feels remorse doesn’t mean he can control the deep drive that causes him to kill.
“So I think there very well may be gaps, periods where between victims the reason he doesn’t do anything is because he’s just despondent over his inability to control his behavior.”
The balance of Ted’s little speech sounded defensive. “There’s only one person who knows the real person,” he said. “And he’s quite capable of feeling all the ranges of emotions that you do. Don’t overlook the fact that that in many respects he is, in fact, as normal as anybody else.”
Sure.
Ted did not once say remorse for killing people. What he really seemed to be discussing was self-pity, remorse for how personally disruptive the serial killer’s murder drive was, and of course the fact that it can, as it did in his case, lead to arrest and condemnation for his crimes. I know he was very sorry that occurred.
According to Ted, this killer’s remorse we were discussing in fact can be a suspect’s Achilles heel, the one weakness a cop might exploit in the right circumstances. “I would say,” he explained, “that if you ever feel like you have a good suspect, probably the best way to approach him is quickly. I’m serious. If you give him any time to collect his thoughts, he’s more than likely to be able to compose himself again, because he’s a very controlled individual.
“But if you catch him unawares and come down on him – God forbid that you violate his constitutional rights – I think you stand a much better chance of getting him to open up. It’s a tremendous burden he’s carrying around with him.”
“You do believe there’s a chance that this person might talk about what he’s done?” asked Dave.
“Well, sure,” said Ted. “If you catch him at it, sure. It’s a tremendous burden he’s carrying around with him. And you’ve got to make him think that you think he’s guilty. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it?”
We just looked at him.
“But this is a terrible case, and if you think he’s guilty and he’s carrying around this particular burden, he’s going to want to just let it off. He’s going to be so torn up inside he’ll let it [go], I think. If he’s the kind of person I think he is.”
Another insight Bundy felt was important to share was the possessiveness he said some serial killers feel toward their kills. “That’s one way of describing it, in rather bland terms,” he said. In fact, he was describing a feature of necrophilia. “[It’s a] possessiveness where the corpse could easily be as important as the live victim, in some respects. I mean, it’s that physical possession and ownership, a taking if you will, that is part of the syndrome. This is one of the reasons I think he returns to the dump site to either view his victim or in fact even interact with the body in some way.”
Again, Bundy wasn’t about to explain what he meant by “interact.”
***
There was a specific tension between Ted and me that would tend to sharpen over time. He was primarily interested in discussing the “why” of serial murder, while I had a practical interest in the “who, what, when, and where” — and “how” — of the crime, the better to understand serial killers and catch them. I didn’t need to get in touch with the inner killer in order to do my job.
“Possession” as he described it was an abstraction, and distraction, to me. Nor was it new. He and Michaud had discussed possession years before. So I yawned once more and looked away.
“You seem troubled,” Bundy said. “Am I boring you?”
***
One strategy we’d discussed with Dr. Liebert for prodding Ted from his arm’s-length analysis of the Green River cases toward a substantive discussion of his own killings was to show him a crime scene. Liebert agreed that such a picture likely would give Ted a jolt. It was worth a try.
The photo we selected was from the Thurston County sheriff’s case file for Kathy Devine, the 15-year-old whose remains were discovered in June, 1974, at Camp Margaret McKinney, which is southwest of Olympia. Devine had been stabbed and raped. We had a prima facie reason for showing Ted the picture; Devine had disappeared December 7, 1973. She had disappeared from the streets of North Seattle, as a number of the Riverman’s victims had, too. She was last seen climbing into a green pickup driven by a white male. Bundy owned a green pickup at the time and had grown a thick beard. He was a solid suspect in the then-unsolved homicide.
“Whenever we’ve gone through our records,” I said as I placed the black-and-white photograph on the table, oriented toward Dave and me, “we found cases similar in nature to the Riverman’s.”
Ted rotated the photo to get a better look and was at once transfixed
. His eyes widened and darkened. His jaw jutted out. We could see the blood pulsing through the surface vessels of his head and neck. Bundy had gone into a type of dynamic trance in which some long-ago thrill seemed to burst forth in his memory, flooding his consciousness and blotting everything else – us, the room, the prison – from his mind. This, it was easy to intuit, was possession: Ted the possessor, as well as the possessed.
In time, he looked up. “Now where was this body located?”
Dave told him.
“Off a dirt road…,” Ted began to say, then stopped and turned the comment into a question. “How far off the road?”
Dave said Kathy Devine was found in a parking area. Her killer had carried her only a few feet before dumping her.
“There’s no attempt to conceal the body,” Bundy observed and added that the killer had left the victim’s clothing at the scene, potential evidence. Then he mentioned a detail difficult to make out from the photo, but not so at the scene itself. The victim’s jeans had been distinctively ripped or cut, which would have required “a pretty strong individual,” as Bundy put it.
“What are your impressions of the kind of guy that would have done something like this as compared to what we’re looking at?” asked Reichert.
Ted quickly gathered his thoughts, reverting to serial-murder consultant mode.
“If he’s capable of it,” he answered, “he’s had 10 years to change his M.O. and his — whatever you call them — his fetishes or his rituals or his fantasies will change every time, too. So he might be taking girls’ clothes over one period of time or not. There’s no question about that.”
***
As our allotted time with Ted drew to a close, Dave asked, “What made you say, ‘Okay, I need to contact the task force?’ ”
“It was a whole bunch of things,” Ted said. He had been reading the Green River articles in the Tacoma paper, he explained, and they were fresh in his mind over the several months of disciplinary confinement following his failed escape, when nearly every form of communication was denied him, from television to magazines, visits from Carole Boone, who had become his wife, and mother of his daughter. He wasn’t even allowed out into the yard for exercise.
So, according to Bundy, he had lots of time to keep turning the Green River cases over in his head. “I just said, ‘Well, I may be able to contribute something.’ It’s interesting. I’m not being altruistic here. I’m fascinated by it.
“And so that’s when I wrote to you. I had nothing else to do. I had this on my mind and I felt disposed toward doing it. I’m sure I’m not really telling you anything you hadn’t thought of or talked about before.”
“So we can count on you to continue to write us with thoughts you might have about this case?” Dave asked.
Here Bundy saw his chance to ingratiate himself, strengthen the bond.
“If you’re not bored,” he said, and then turned to me. “Are you, Bob, totally interested? If you feel I can be of some value, I’d love to. Now that I have a better grip on what’s going on, I feel really I do have a foothold on this situation.”
In his eagerness to please Ted was even mixing his metaphors, unlike him.
“Well,” I said, “don’t be too overconfident,” and explained that we’d shown him only a small slice of the information the task force had accumulated. “It is just a mammoth case,” I said.
Dave then asked when Ted might be ready to talk to us about his own criminal history. “Can you see Ted Bundy contacting us in the future and saying he’s ready to talk?” Reichert wondered.
“That’s a hard question to answer,” Bundy replied, even though he certainly knew it was coming. He continued carefully.
“I think it’s good that I’ve been able to talk to you, because I feel like I have a certain amount of rapport, even though we’ve just talked about this case.
“You know, it’s easy to depersonalize somebody and think of him as an adversary, or somebody who is out to get one. Come face-to-face, you know, a lot of that hostility and those stereotypes and impressions tend to fade away, and I realize that they’re just people, too. And so I think, yes, I can see myself talking to you sometime in the future.”
That was as definitive as he was going to get.
Our last subject of the day was the use of computer-analyzed lists as an investigative tool, which we had pioneered in the “Ted” investigation. I told him how Dunn, McChesney and I had ranged all over the map with our lists. Besides the obvious ones like VW owners and Teds who had been telephoned into us as suspects, we had taken down the names of roughly 500 people who had ridden at the Black Nugget Horse Ranch near the Issaquah dump site; the 1,200 or more folks who’d been guests at motels in the vicinity; the 1,000 who served the public at nearby groceries, gas stations, fast-food joints, and the like; all the students who’d transferred among the University of Washington, Central Washington State College, Evergreen College, and Oregon State University; all the names from the victims’ address books. We even entered all the names and addresses from any scraps of paper found in any of the victims’ rooms or residences.
I also explained about the Top 100 Suspects list, being careful, as I went through all that we did, to show how this approach was going to yield us Ted Bundy as our prime suspect whether or not Detective Forbes had called that August day in 1975, announcing Ted’s arrest. The Utah authorities had gotten lucky, for sure, and we all were grateful for that. But Ted’s number already was up, quite literally.
This revelation seemed to bother him, to upset a cherished belief that he was smarter than us, that his arrest was a fluke. The plain fact that we had been steadily plodding toward a solution offended his self-image.
He offered a couple of list ideas of his own. He suggested that if the Washington State Patrol registered any information on cars they found parked along remote roadsides at night, we might add them to our database. Similarly, he said, we might ask the same thing of logging truck drivers, who regularly traveled the same forest routes.
“Forgot one more list,” I said as we stood to go. “We included people who’d been injured at the Crystal Mountain ski area.” (In the nearby Cascades)
“Just Crystal Mountain?” Ted asked. “Why Crystal Mountain?”
“Well,” I said, savoring the moment, “I’ll tell you why. It was because when our suspect talked to one of the Lake Sam witnesses and made casual talk about what he enjoyed, he mentioned Crystal Mountain.”
“Yeah?” Bundy asked, impressed.
“Yeah.”
“How about that! You learn something every day.”
I couldn’t help smiling. “It shows up once in a while.”
“Yup.”
One more list (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:45).
Chapter Nine
‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’
Ted penned us a note from his cell that Sunday night. It read like the citation for some sort of award.
“Dear Bob and Dave,” he wrote, “I appreciate you taking the time and coming to talk with me. I hope you found it worthwhile in some way. Your dedication to your work and your knowledge of the cases were impressive. It’s not the volume of your knowledge of the cases that struck me, but it was that you knew enough to be asking a lot of vital questions, insightful questions. You managed to give me a glimpse of the massiveness and complexity of the investigation. I can see how easily people in your position can be overwhelmed by it all. It was a humbling experience in that you showed me what an inflated notion I had of my ability to help you in some meaningful way.”
Okay, Ted was a suck-up. Yet his fascination with the Green River cases was genuine, I thought, and his investigative ideas were welcome. As for his eager concern that I endorse his contribution to the investigation — he almost begged for my approval — that had everything to do with his emerging scheme to avoid, or at least delay, his date with Old Sparky.
In the coming months, he wrote us ceasele
ssly about Riverman and his cases, dispatching 50-and 60-page letters filled with his rambling ruminations on the investigation, frequent requests for more information, and, repeatedly, new arguments for holding the Slasher Movie Festival, which was becoming a fixation.
In parallel, Bundy also fostered a relationship with FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier, a member of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, or BSU, later lionized in Red Dragon, book and movie, from which the unit got the nickname “Hannibal Lecter Squad.”
Hagmaier had approached Bundy as a possible subject for an expansion of the BSU’s well-known study of 36 serial killers, originally undertaken in the 1970s. Ted agreed to talk to the agent, at first in the third person. As Hagmaier explained to television documentarian Mike McCann, Ted opened up to him very slowly over a number of years, never actually confessing to a specific murder or telling Bill anything he could independently verify. Instead, Bundy conducted an extended tutorial on his own experiences as a serial killer.
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