Terrible Secrets

by Robert D Keppel

  Highlights of Hagmaier’s research sessions with Ted at the prison include Bundy’s explanation of how he selected his victims with extreme patience and care, sometimes stalking them for weeks in advance of killing them. This was one way he felt superior to prostitute killers, such as the Green River killer.

  Hagmaier also shot down the common misperception that Bundy deliberately sought out as ideal victims girls and young women with long hair, parted in the middle, often wearing hoop earrings. “He mentioned a number of times,” Hagmaier told McCann, “that his victims were chosen not because of a particular physical profile. He was looking for people who should have known better: bright, articulate, clean people, not prostitutes or hitchhikers, but people who should have known better, who came from ‘good’ families, as he would say, who were brought up in a good Judeo-Christian environment. . . .”

  Despite these preferences, Bundy conceded to Hagmaier that he’d picked up and killed a number of hitchhikers, some quite young, including the nameless female he said was his first homicide, in May of 1973, near Olympia. Ted said she was the only victim he killed with his bare hands and that he threw her dead body down a hillside. Then he went home and waited for what he believed was the inevitable visit from the police. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t come out of my room. I wet my pants,’” Hagmaier remembered.

  Bundy told Bill that with every day the cops did not show up to arrest him, he grew stronger. “He said it was at that point, ‘When I recognized that I could get away with murder. I crossed the line.’

  “He would give the analogy that life is full of lines and when you do things that you would not normally do, when you cross the one, it’s always easier to cross the second time, and it would be easier [still] to cross the third. He would talk about the man who comes home from work, angry with his boss, and one day he slams the door. The next day he crosses another line and kicks the dog. And it’s not long before he crosses other lines and he’s beating his wife. He said that each day [the man] does that without retribution it becomes part of him, and that’s the way it is with serial killers, as well.”

  Bundy said he planted false clues – such as beer cans bearing other people’s fingerprints and saliva – at his dump sites. Interestingly, after we finally captured the Green River killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, in November of 2001, he said in his videotaped confessions that he, too, salted his dump sites with such false leads.

  Ted also told Hagmaier that Kimberly Leach was a victim of opportunity. He claimed that he’d driven to her middle school that morning in the FSU van looking for a teacher, or maybe one of the kids’ mothers, to kidnap and kill. But after circling the school several times in search of likely prey, he settled on what was available, a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

  I think he was lying.

  ***

  In February of 1986, Florida Governor Bob Graham signed Bundy’s first death warrant. Ted’s legal representation at that point fell to Jim Coleman, a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., and Polly Nelson, a young associate at Wilmer, Cutler, who had recently graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School. They would represent Bundy pro bono.

  One of the first things Nelson did was arrange for Dr. Art Norman, a psychologist, to evaluate Ted as Nelson and Coleman cast about for a strategy for saving Bundy’s life. That spring, Norman reported on his session with Ted at the Wilmer, Cutler offices in Washington.

  Nelson was appalled at what she heard.

  “Dr. Norman didn’t say that Ted had brain damage,” she recounts in her book, “he didn’t say that Ted was mentally ill, he said that Ted just had wanted to kill. Dr. Norman said it was no different than a hunter shooting a deer and tying it to the hood of his car — only he’d gone after the game no one else dared to, the game that was the most highly valued: attractive young women. Ted was the ‘super male,’ he’d gone all the way. He’d dared to break the ultimate ‘taboo.’ Dr. Norman was fascinated by what Ted had told him. He continued on in great detail about exactly how Ted himself saw his murders. The rest of us didn’t speak as the room closed in.”

  Nelson and Coleman were not pleased to learn that Bundy had been talking to me and to Hagmaier and put a stop to it. I received only three letters from Ted that year. In one of them he complained how I kept prodding him to discuss his own cases. He informed me that he had been “disappointed” when he first learned I would be the task force’s representative, because “I knew that you had been an investigator in certain cases where I was a suspect. I felt that these unsolved cases would naturally tend to preoccupy you and perhaps detract somewhat from what I had to say about Green River.” As a consequence, “I never felt that we established a dialogue in the Green River case.”

  I doubt Bundy grasped just how transparent his machinations were.

  Recently I had proposed to him in a letter that we begin a review of the “Ted” cases, taking a couple at a time, working them thoroughly, together. “I cannot help you out of your situation in any way,” I emphasized. “I cannot offer you anything but my trust and promise that the correct information will be passed on to other law enforcement agencies.”

  That was not what Ted hoped to hear.

  “I was very much surprised that you would bring such a proposal to me,” he responded in the letter, which seemed it was more likely meant for his lawyers’ eyes than mine. If not, Bundy held me in even lower esteem than I had imagined.

  The following year, according to Nelson, she and Coleman went to the prison to finally hear their notorious client describe one of his murders in the first person. In view of his convictions and the evidence against him, defending Ted as an oppressed innocent as he’d insisted Mike Minerva do was not a viable option. Bundy once more was told to weigh revealing his “terrible secrets” against the finality of electrocution.

  He still couldn’t do it.

  “Ted began with a string of disclaimers,” Nelson writes. “ ‘This is very difficult for me, I have a lot of resistance to bringing this into the open — it’s part of me that needed silence to survive,’ and ‘I’ll use the term “I” because I know it was me, in the conventional sense, but you have to understand that it was not the same person who is talking to you now.’ Then he described the steps leading up to one of his first murders, a blond in the vestibule of her apartment building. He stopped after recounting his still-clear vision of her unconscious body laid out on the floor, after he had hit her with a club, her long hair spread out like a fan above her head. He could go no further, he could not describe what happened next. He choked. He heaved with sighs.

  “‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’

  “After a moment he skipped ahead and talked about pulling the woman’s body into the weeds at the back of the building, his searing remorse and horror, his mantra of assurance to himself that it would never happen again, the beast had been satisfied, the Good Ted would take back his life. He still could not admit to the murder itself, the actual moment of killing.…”

  ***

  In early May of 1987, the Associated Press moved a story out of Boulder, Colorado, where, according to the wire service, Ronald M. Holmes, who taught criminal justice at the University of Louisville, had explained at a police seminar how Ted had spoken to him of a “person” who raped and killed a young girl when he was 11 1/2 years old, and threw her body in a ditch in front of her house. Holmes reportedly also said at the police meeting that he believed Ted had killed 365 victims.

  I knew that Bundy had been exchanging letters with Holmes; Ted shared with me the correspondence. The professor had first contacted Bundy in late 1984, requesting an interview that Holmes said he hoped to turn into a presentation at an upcoming seminar. Ultimately, Bundy met with the professor and also disclosed to Holmes my correspondence with him, which annoyed me when I later learned about it.

  The AP story received close attention in the northwest because of the lingering local questions over the disappearance, in 1961, of eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr, w
hose family lived in the north end of Tacoma, not far from the Bundys’ house. Someone boldly snatched the girl from her upstairs bedroom in the middle of the night as her parents slept downstairs and then silently spirited her away. She has never been found, and no arrests have been made in the officially unsolved case. Bundy, although he was just 14 at the time of the crime, emerged as a leading suspect, at least as far as the press was concerned, after his Utah arrest in August of 1975.

  In the autumn of 1984 Ted wrote to Dr. William Conte, a Tacoma psychiatrist who was close to the Burr family, categorically denying any role in Ann Marie’s disappearance. “I have no absolutely no knowledge of what happened to Ann Marie Burr 23 years ago,” he wrote. “I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Nothing. At the time I was for all practical purposes a normal, healthy 15-year-old. Even the thought of harming another human being would have been as ghastly and alien as the thought of jumping off the Narrows Bridge.”

  Because the girl’s disappearance was a Tacoma case, we never got involved in the investigation. Ted might have committed the murder, but I doubt it. I did know, Bundy’s protestations notwithstanding, that the Burr family still was not satisfied that he was innocent. So his alleged claim to Holmes that the “person” was an active killer by age l1 ½ was bound to upset them.

  Then the Tacoma News Tribune published an interview with Holmes under the headline, “Experts says Bundy killed girl, 8, when he was 14.” According to the paper, Holmes estimated Bundy “could be responsible for as many as 400 murders.”

  In this interview, Holmes remembered talking to Ted about the “person” responsible for Lake Sammamish and our other abduction murder cases.

  “I then asked him if it would be reasonable to assume that this ‘other person’ may have had earlier victims,” the News Tribune quoted Holmes.

  “He said, ‘Well, this other person we’re talking about may have started much earlier.’

  Holmes asked, “How early?”

  At age 14 or 15, Bundy told Holmes.

  “The first victim of this other person could have been an 8- or 9-year-old girl,” Holmes said Bundy told him.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt Bundy did it,” Holmes said to the News Tribune, although he conceded that Ted had not actually confessed to the crime, nor did he have any hard evidence of Bundy’s culpability.

  I sent Bundy the AP story.

  “Dear Ted,” I wrote, “I have enclosed a recent news clipping and am interested in your reaction to it. I mentioned in a previous letter what I thought of Dr. Holmes and the fact that you revealed to him that we were corresponding. Apparently he chose this particular occasion to exploit his conversations with you. No doubt this garbage has caused strain on the Burr family, but I don’t think Holmes thought about that. It appears Holmes is turning you into Henry Lucas’s rival. I wonder if there is any correlation between 365 murders and the number of days there are in a year. No telling what he will say about you if you are executed. I hope someday you will choose the proper forum for the truth.”

  Bundy denied everything in a July 6 letter to me. “I didn’t discuss my background or the allegations against me,” he wrote, “not so much as a single case, not in the first, second or third person, not directly or indirectly. During that meeting and in subsequent correspondence, it became clear that Holmes did not have the kind of capabilities needed to make use of my knowledge.”

  Chapter Ten

  Endgame

  Bundy’s tenuous legal prospects deteriorated significantly in December of 1987 when U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp denied Nelson and Coleman’s petition for a new trial in the Leach case based on their claim that Ted had been incompetent to stand trial. In his statement from the bench, Judge Sharp characterized Ted as “a diabolical genius” and “a most intelligent, articulate, complex individual.” Added the judge, “I don’t really feel that anybody that was in this courtroom seriously, seriously questions Mr. Bundy’s competency.”

  With time getting tight, Ted, in consultation with his civil attorney, Diana Weiner, evidently decided now was the moment to finally get serious about offering confessions for an execution delay. In one idea Polly Nelson characterized as a “grisly plan to dole out details for favors,” that would probably hasten the day of his execution if appellate courts heard about it, Ted reckoned it would take interviewers a year to fully debrief him, and then another two years of life would be his just compensation for coming clean at last.

  His earlier disappointment with me notwithstanding, Bundy took me off his shit list and, in a letter dated February 11, 1988, invited me back for another conversation. We met at the prison at midday on the 22nd.

  We started with a discussion of my latest initiative at the attorney general’s office, a statewide computerized system, modeled on the VICAP concept, that would collect, collate and analyze all murder and sexual assault cases in the state, whether the offender was a stranger to the victim or not, to create a relational database of practical value to local detectives. Just a few months earlier, I’d received a large grant to get started on the program, which would be called HITS, for Homicide Information Tracking System.

  We touched on the pluses and minuses of the VICAP program, then Ted brought up the FBI’s serial-killer study and remarked, apropos of nothing, that the BSU agents out conducting the research interviews were “up against some pretty formidable problems because, obviously, not everybody accused of that kind of criminal behavior is going to talk to them.”

  Wink. Nudge.

  “And even if they do,” he continued, “there’s a question whether they’re going to be totally candid with them.”

  Ted had set the bait, and I was more than willing to bite. As the time approached when he knew he would have to deliver full and complete confessions to – maybe – save his neck, he had decided he needed someone to draw the terrible secrets from him, someone he could train in the art of interviewing a serial sex killer. As time and experience would prove, he’d chosen me as his pupil.

  I allowed that Edmund Kemper in California was probably an example of what Bundy was talking about. Kemper had woven some fairy tales for his interviewers.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s curious that someone would admit to that kind of conduct and then, over the years, for whatever reason or psychological need they have, to fabricate or embellish the story.”

  “Do you challenge them?”

  “Oh, yeah. I can see through a guy very quickly. I had a guy sit down and just tell me stories. I know he was telling me stories. And yet I also know that essentially he’d done what they said he did. But he had a need to tell it a different way so he looked different. He looked better in his own mind, okay? He wasn’t a savage, lust-filled killer. It’s very curious how some guys will rewrite history to satisfy their own needs. And they will lie to themselves, perhaps.”

  “And they will lie.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:15).

  Ted was being disingenuous here.

  Several years before, he told FBI Agent Robert Ressler of the BSU that Kim Leach had suffocated in the mud as he sexually assaulted her. Bob Dekle, who prosecuted the case, points out in his book, The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution and Execution of Ted Bundy, that the physical evidence strongly suggests that Bundy almost surely murdered the girl in the back of his stolen van, most likely by slashing her throat with a huge Buck brand hunting knife he’d bought in a Jacksonville sporting goods store, probably for the occasion.

  Was Ted trying to edit history, make himself seem somehow less loathsome? Possibly. Kim Leach’s murder always embarrassed him. But Dekle argues in his book that Ted probably made up the story out of a psychopath’s need to control every encounter, to confound his interlocutor and thus demonstrate his superiority. Truth in such circumstances becomes a relative commodity.

  Bundy returned to his experience as an interviewer himself as we moved to the second lesson, what he called “the morality of mu
rder.” He said that one of the inmates on the Row had spoken to him at length and in gory detail about any number of women he’d murdered, crimes for which this killer’s conscience remained unclouded. But he adamantly would not discuss one murder, because he’d had a relationship with the victim.

  “All these other women were strangers,” Ted said. “But this one woman he knew. He felt justified in killing strangers. He did not feel justified in killing people he knew. He felt these were okay murders; this one was bad. And he could not talk about it.

  “He finally started asking me questions. He said, ‘Well, what would happen if they found a body that was like this and like that? What do you think people would think?’