“It took us a while, talking generally, about how our minds work. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’ve already admitted to all these others. Why hold back on that one?’
“He says, ‘Yeah, but people will think I’m a really bad person.’
Morality of murder (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:13).
“This was something he held like a secret locked away in his chest. It was logically a foolish kind of reservation, because no one would think he was any more horrible than they already thought he was. This is what I found in a lot of guys I talked to. There are some things they’ll talk about and some things they won’t. They have a particular view of the world that you have to discover, a particular morality of murder.”
I asked how a police officer might exploit this insight during an interrogation. Ted replied there was a corollary to the morality of murder, and that was that serial killers have what he called “soft spots” for certain of their victims and will feel sorry for having killed them. This seemed liked a reworked version of killer’s remorse, which we’d discussed four years earlier, but I didn’t think this was a good moment to derail him with a challenging question.
The trick, he said, was to be sufficiently patient and understanding so that a killer will feel he can trust you with this information. In his case, Bundy explained, other cons recognized him for what he was, one of them, “so they know I’m not about to turn them in.”
It’s imperative, he said, for an interviewer to remain genuinely unfazed no matter how horrible the crimes he’s hearing about.
“What does a detective do to get to that sort of rapport?” I asked.
It’s not easy, he said.
“The scary thing,” Ted cautioned, “is you have to have real empathy. Real, not phony. Not just calling a guy by his first name or shaking his hand or giving him a cup of coffee and offering him cigarettes and going through all the standard procedure of putting a guy at ease, which is important.
Empathy (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:48).
“But there has to be a real empathy which, impossible as it may sound, lacks judgment. I mean, how do you detach yourself and say, ‘This guy did these things which I consider to be horrible and repulsive, and I’ve seen the impact it has on the community and the family’? How do you detach yourself from all that and all the personal stuff and just really try to get into the guy’s head without these barriers?”
Ted didn’t have the answer, so he restated the issue. “This guy has lived with this terrible memory, has lived with these urges and has lived with his behavior for so long, and has had to keep it secret just to be able to survive. I’ve encountered guys who have held this secret for so long and so tightly, even when it really didn’t make any difference anymore, that they couldn’t let it go. The mental apparatus that had been in place for so many years was so powerful against revealing this to anyone under any circumstances that they just couldn’t bring themselves to share it, even though they may have wanted to on some level.”
Bundy advised me to emulate his interview approach as closely as possible.
“As a detective,” he said, “I would try to come across as somebody that had known a lot of people who had done this; who has investigated a lot of cases like this; who understands what was going on; who understands the kind of thought processes, the kinds of motivations that would compel a person to kill another person like that. And not just one, but one after another.
“What has impressed me about the people I’ve talked to is they have a need to be understood, to share these burdensome secrets they’ve kept so long. But they don’t want to share them with just anybody. They want to talk about them with somebody who is not going to judge them, who’s going to understand this bewildering experience that they’ve been going through. It’s an awesome thing for a guy to confront.”
How to interview (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:07).
I pointed out that very few detectives have the kind of knowledge and experience with serial killers that Ted was describing. Nor will police investigators usually encounter their interview subject as a convicted felon already locked up in a prison. More likely he’ll be a suspect whom they may not have sufficient probable cause to detain, legally.
“That’s a different prescriptive entirely,” Bundy agreed. But in such a situation, he said, “nothing will turn me off, [or] the people that I know of, more than a detective that comes on too hard. Implicit [in that approach] is a lot of judgmental stuff that would generally tend to put a guy off. I’d say from my own experience that if the detective comes off just willing to talk, just willing not to come on real strong, that’s more likely the context where he can use his skills as a questioner to develop certain kinds of information that he wants.”
***
Bundy then yanked the conversation away from interview issues back to his favorite subject, dump sites, and allowed himself to drift onto another plane. I knew that he was afflicted with multiple paraphilia. Now he’d reveal his affinity for the paranormal.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that [a dump site] is the only place an investigator can put his feet right there on the ground, or wherever it is, and say, ‘I know that the guy I’m looking for has been right here. I may not know he’s been anywhere else, but I know he’s been right here.
“‘And why here?’ Try to put yourself in the mind of the man who chose that spot. If it’s a house, it’s the victim’s bedroom. But if it’s Star Lake [one of Riverman’s dump sites], why Star Lake? Imagine the guy driving there with the body. Imagine looking for this place in the dark. What’s going through his mind? What’s he looking for? Is he taking any precautions? Is he drunk? Is he high? Is he agitated? Maybe it doesn’t appeal to you as an investigator to try to get the feel, even if it’s completely fictitious, for the guy picking up that prostitute near the airport.”
Ted was off in the ether, but since it was unclear where he was going with these reveries, I decided to be patient, as he had advised me, at least until I figured out which planet Spaceship Bundywas headed for.
“I think any good investigator approaches every crime scene like that,” I said, “even the least experienced guy. I remember when I first started, you’re always asking the other guy that’s there, ‘What do you think of this? What significance does this have? Why did this happen this way? Where can we find this guy if he was just here an hour and a half ago?’ I think those types of things are highly necessary.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out to the middle of Star Lake Road and just stood there and watched and looked into the trees and down the road, noticing how quiet it is. And the pullout where one body was found. It was obvious to me why that pullout was important to him. He could hear everything coming and going for a mile down the road and a mile up the hill. Either direction.”
What I didn’t get was how a police detective was supposed to commune with some scattered bones out in the wilderness, and I told Bundy so.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Well,” I replied, “having a fresh body at a scene is a whole hell of a lot different than having bone sites, where the guy’s been gone for months.”
Ted emerged from out of the void to seamlessly field the question and in the process offer me another glimpse into his twisted psyche. “Do you videotape these scenes?” he asked me. “Have you taken various shots up and down the road and so on?”
I indicated that we had.
“I think that would be a potent tool,” he said. “I’m not sure how to use it, but for the person who did it to see these sites on videotape might loosen them up.”
Ted’s violent interest in the crime scene photo of Kathy Devine we’d shown him in 1984 came immediately to mind.
“It would be something that would start to get his mind in the groove, seeing scenes and sights that maybe he hadn’t seen for a long time. It would bring back to
memory, vividly, these sights and sounds and smells and sensations that he had had at the time he was disposing of the victim’s body. Believe me, these are extremely powerful recollections for him.”
I still wanted an answer to my question. “How do you get a feeling for a killer at a bone site?” I asked again.
It turned out that you required a gift for conjuring the devil, which I’d just as soon not possess.
“I guess it has a lot to do with what you take there in your mind,” he said. “To me, it wouldn’t make a difference if it were a day or a month or six months. If somebody would tell me the bones were found where I was standing, I [could] stand there and try to re-create how he drove in and what he was looking for and how it’d be and what was he paying attention to, what he was seeing. Just try to get a feel for all that going on inside a guy’s head, to be able to get this feel of this man in a way that maybe other people who are less sensitive to what was going on there couldn’t. What was his state of mind as he picked up this dead body and began to carry her, drag it? Get all those feelings.”
Ted wasn’t taking me anywhere useful.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve probably stood, or sat, at 50 bone sites in my time. Most of the time I felt the killer was remote in my mind. I had the feeling we were way behind in the investigation, that the murders were most clear to the person who committed them.”
“This is true,” he answered, afraid once more that I was discounting his contribution. “I’m not saying that you can magically put yourself in this guy’s mind and see things through this guy’s eyes, and come up with his identity or even some really good clues of some sort.
“Getting back to one of my favorite topics, again, I’m telling you that if I were an investigator I would love to stake out that site, especially if it’s fresh. I still believe it’s a very powerful inducement for a man to go back to the scene.”
***
“What do you feel that police do wrong in serial-murder investigations?” I asked.
“The thing that constantly comes to mind is the way the crime scene is treated,” he said. “But [also] from what I’ve seen, the police often release too much information or talk too much about the case. In either case, if the perpetrator is paying any attention to what’s going on, he is going to know how to make his next move. I mean, if you get the sense that the police don’t know anything, or if an investigator gives an interview where he infers the police know something they don’t, or don’t have something that they do – sending false signals to the guy they’re looking for – that’s pretty dangerous. If he knows you don’t know anything, or you think you know something that you don’t, he’s emboldened. He’s going to feel more confident. So I think, except in rare circumstances, the less said the better.”
“How,” I asked, “would you structure information releases?”
“It would seem to me,” he answered, “that if the police felt they had a really good description of somebody and they released it that probably would do some good. However, if they’re wrong, they’re definitely barking up the wrong tree.”
I asked if a serial killer who has committed multiple offenses over the years can remember them all.
“My feeling is that they remember,” he said. “Whether or not they’re going to tell me exactly what happened is another question. I certainly haven’t encountered enough guys to run across, let’s say, a split personality type. I don’t run across anybody who professes to have amnesia, or blackouts, or anything like that. I’ve run across guys whose memories may be justifiably vague for reasons such as they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or, I think, the fear, the panic, the violence that went on there, [which] would somehow cloud their memories.”
“How do you verify that they’re telling you the truth?”
“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just knowing when they tell you something, whether it’s authentic or not. Let’s face it, killing someone is not a common experience. You can read all the murder mysteries you want, and you know that as graphic as some of these detective novels may try to be, you just know they’re not for real because you can tell the guy’s never been there. He’s just making it up. Whether you watch some of these slasher films, or whatever. You know that’s just Hollywood. This doesn’t really happen that way. You just know. So if a guy’s making it up, or if he’s just read about it, I just have a sense that he’s not being straight with me.”
I said his strategy was not practical for the police, who need to know times and dates and places to establish accountability.
Ted agreed but countered that his approach was “a way of opening someone up. If a guy has insulated himself from the reality of what he did but can discuss it in the third person or, better yet, in the first person, without getting specific, you’re gradually getting closer to the truth. I mean, everything he knows.”
In the short while we had left, I needed Ted to paint a clearer picture of how his confessions, should he willingly offer them up, would best proceed from his point of view.
“I guess that you have to be able to give him something,” he said, neatly articulating the core of the matter, at least from his perspective. Then he turned the question around. “Let’s say you have the Green River guy locked up for assault or something. How would you go to him? I mean, how could you approach such a person to confess to something which obviously carried some pretty heavy penalties?”
“Seems like a pretty impossible situation,” I said. Then I offered a hypothetical case that exactly paralleled Ted’s. “We [want to talk to] a guy that’s been under a death sentence for a while, but we’re faced with this situation. We have several crimes where the circumstantial evidence is pretty well focused on the guy, [but we don’t know] how to operate that type of interview.”
“You see,” Ted said, “everything is complicated by the demands of the criminal justice system; everyone is more or less required to play the game. If the guy on Death Row has appeals, he’d simply be foolish to talk. The system is not really geared to getting at the truth. It gets at approximations of the truth.”
There wasn’t much more to say. Bundy had groomed me on how to pull information from him in the event that he did decide to give up his terrible secrets, for which he expected “something” in return. I’d explicitly told him that I could be no part of any such deal. We filled the remaining minutes in an unfocused discussion of several topics – Ted took the opportunity to denounce pornography, as he often did, as a pernicious evil responsible, at least in part, for shaping his behavior – then I left him to pursue his desperate endgame, which I knew was doomed to fail.
Chapter Eleven
Terrible Secrets
A new Bob occupied the Florida governor’s mansion by the spring of 1988, Republican Bob Martinez, who understood as well as Democrat Bob Graham had that executing Ted Bundy would be an overwhelmingly popular act among his constituents. It was a nonpartisan issue. All that Martinez required was the opportunity to make it happen.
Ted wrote his appeals attorneys a letter, outlining his plan to offer Martinez a deal — full confessions for an extended stay of execution. Polly Nelson flew at once from Washington, D.C., to Florida and the prison, where, as she put it, “I needed to hear what a confession would sound like.”
Bundy began by refusing to discuss either of his Florida cases, because, he told her, “I owe that to the people who believe in my innocence,” by which he probably meant that his wife, Carole Boone, was still useful to him and there was no reason as yet for her to learn how she’d been cruelly used.
Nelson asked him if stories that he’d killed a hundred or more victims were true. “He actually chuckled and shook his head at the naiveté of non-murderers,” she reports. “’They have no idea what it takes to do one, what it takes out of you’.”
Nelson then asked if 35, a number she’d also seen in print, was an accurate victim count. “He finally nodded and mumbled, ‘Yes,’ ” she says in her book.
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br /> Ted told her of driving through the Idaho countryside, scouting for good spots to be alone with a victim, when he came upon a hitchhiker of about 15. Though he had not been actively hunting, he decided not to pass up this opportunity. After glancing in the rearview mirror for traffic, he pulled up and let her in.
She tried to begin a conversation. “He had to act fast,” says Nelson. “He did not like his victims to talk, he did not want to get to know them, he did not want to know they were real. He reached back for his tire iron and hit her over the head. She slumped in the seat, but awoke soon afterward, moaning. He knocked her out again.”
The teenager apparently regained consciousness once more. Ted told Nelson that he drove her to a remote site with which he already was familiar. There, he ordered her to undress and get down on all fours so he could take Polaroids of her.
“Then he got behind her, slung a noose around her neck, and strangled her as he raped her,” according to Nelson. “He continued to reassure her he would let her go, and she had seemed to believe him. He said he’d felt a little sad that he could not let her go, but she would be able to identify him, of course. Afterward, he pulled her body deeper into the woods and, the next day, drove back to take more pictures and to cut her body into pieces.”
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