Terrible Secrets

by Robert D Keppel

  The lawyer was overwhelmed by her client’s confession. “It was the absolute misogyny of his crime that stunned me, his manifest rages against women, that left me no place to retreat to,” she writes. “He had no compassion for this victim at all. It wasn’t that Ted took sadistic pleasure in telling his story, it was just that he was totally engrossed in the details. His murders were his life’s accomplishments. To him, each recollection was a profound illustration of his skill, his willingness to go forward, his good luck. There had been no guarantees — to Ted, each completed murder seemed like a small miracle.”

  ***

  In July, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals sustained Judge Sharp’s decision. In November, Nelson and Coleman petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the circuit court’s ruling. Legally, this was Bundy’s last gasp. If the high court refused to intervene, his life was forfeit.

  The justices didn’t tarry. On Tuesday, January 17, 1989, they refused to grant a writ of certiorari, effectively closing the door on any further legal maneuvers. By noon that day, Governor Martinez signed Ted’s last death warrant. Bundy had a week to live. In a macabre coincidence, his execution would nearly coincide with yet another Super Bowl, 11 years after he ran amok upstairs at Chi Omega.

  The Supreme Court’s ruling apparently came as no surprise among the lawyers. The day before it was made public — the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday — Diana Weiner called me in Seattle to ask if, in the event that her client lost his appeal, would I be interested in flying down to the prison for a “debriefing” with Ted on Friday, January 20?

  Next day, the question became an invitation: Would I come down on Friday to interview Bundy? Weiner also went to Governor Martinez with Ted’s proposal. Late Wednesday, in Tallahassee, Martinez vehemently rejected their offer. “We are not going to have the system manipulated,” the governor fumed. “For him to be negotiating for his life over the bodies of others is despicable.”

  My notes from speaking with Diana Weiner before heading to Florida to “debrief” Bundy in 1989. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

  ———

  Besides Ted and Weiner, the only other person I knew who thought it was a good idea to spare his life was my mentor and friend, Dr. Liebert, who even went on television to suggest Bundy be shipped to the Washington state prison at Walla Walla, where Liebert and colleagues could pull on their hip boots and wade around in Ted’s inner swamp. Had Bundy accepted the plea bargain deal that Larry Simpson and Bob Dekle offered him 10 years earlier, no date with Old Sparky would have been imminent, and such an in-depth research project might well have been possible. But feelings ran high against Ted in 1989, and the voice of science proved unpersuasive.

  There were, as well, two more reasons Bundy’s plan wouldn’t work. After so many years of peddling falsehoods, Ted had deep credibility issues. Understanding that, he planned initially to give up cases in which there seemed to be a chance at recovering his victim’s remains. This strategy excluded, for example, any of the murdered women previously identified at Issaquah or Taylor Mountain.

  The problem was that after 15 years, the earth around his dump sites had in some cases shifted dramatically, displacing the bones, dispersing them or burying them deep below the surface. Then there was the time of year to consider. In January, the high country Bundy usually chose for victim disposal typically was frozen hard and/or buried under ice and snow. No victims would be recovered between Friday, when Bundy started talking, and Tuesday morning, the appointed hour of his execution. Nor have any since been found.

  ***

  I had hopes for our encounter, but no expectations. After I refused to make any representations on Ted’s behalf to Governor Martinez but also agreed, immediately, to keep the content of our conversation private for the duration of the current crisis, we began to talk on Friday the 20th.

  Unlike the calm of the hours I’d spent with Ted in 1984 and 1988, the stress in the room felt like a train wreck about to happen. Bundy insisted that Diana Weiner be on hand, so under prison rules we couldn’t meet around a table but only across a Plexiglas barrier. Weiner and Bill Hagmaier sat with me; on the other side was Ted with a couple of officers at his back.

  For reasons he’d repeatedly articulated in our meetings past, Ted couldn’t just start talking. Afraid of being overheard — as he’d earlier acknowledged, this was not rational — he took my tape recorder and pushed it and his mouth against the speaking hole, and our conversation began. When he got to the more sensitive material he feared the officers might overhear, he scribbled it on a piece of paper for me to read and whispered low into my machine.

  The painstaking and detailed interview prepping of the previous year was now just another artifact of our relationship, a memory. There’d be no time to gradually extract the story from him. Missing, too, was the vast audience Ted believed had raptly awaited his disclosures. After a decade and more, few people, including survivors, actually cared what he had to say. I did, because I was a cop. Just about everyone else had moved on. Only Ted had not.

  Still, it was the defining moment in my long history with Bundy when he whispered “Georgann Hawkins” through the voice hole, wrote down her name, and said “the Hawkins girl’s head was severed and taken up the road about 25 to 50 feet yards and buried in a location about 10 yards west of the road on a rocky hillside.”

  A map of the Issaquah crime scene that Bundy drew for me at the prison. (From the filesof Robert D. Keppel)

  ———

  “Where is the rest of her?” I asked.

  “Where the others are.”

  The Issaquah crime scene. Bundy described the railroad tracks (foreground), and a “grassy” area, just beyond the tracks on the left. (Courtesy of the King County archives)

  ———

  Although we had long assumed that the third victim – actually the first victim – dumped on the Issaquah hillside was the pretty coed who’d disappeared from behind her University of Washington sorority house in June of 1974, for Ted to unequivocally, if briefly, confirm it was she, and that he had killed as well as “the others,” Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, was a profound breakthrough. It was the first time Bundy had ever openly shared his terrible secrets. Suddenly he was no longer an alleged or suspected serial killer, but a confessed one, and just as suddenly three of my longest-pending cases were solved.

  I felt joy, relief and amazement but dared not betray anything. After taking a moment to regain my equilibrium, I asked how Hawkins was killed.

  Ted describes the moment he placed Hawkins in the car. (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:58).

  “Well,” he replied, “we can go through it stepbystep.”

  “Okay, why don’t we take Hawkins and go through it stepbystep?” I answered, remembering my lessons from Dr. Liebert.

  Ted closed his eyes and kept them closed until his story was told.

  He described how he’d been out with his crutches and a briefcase about one o’clock in the morning, moving along an alley when Hawkins came into view, walking toward him. He asked her if she’d help him get the briefcase to his car; she agreed, so they walked on together until they reached the Volkswagen, parked in an unlit dirt lot. Positioned on the ground, just behind the right rear tire, were a tire iron and a pair of handcuffs.

  As they approached the VW, Ted said, he reached for the tire iron, slammed it down onto her head, then pushed Hawkins’ unconscious body into the car, handcuffed her and quickly drove away to the Issaquah hillside. The route took him south on Interstate 5 from the university to the I-90 intersection, where he headed east. His destination was on the north side of the freeway, but instead of taking the next exit and doubling back, Bundy said he risked arrest by cutting across several lanes of traffic and then disappeared up into the wooded hillside.

  His dazed and bleeding victim gradually was regaining consciousness.

  “One of the things that makes it a little bit hard,” he told me
, “is that at this point she was quite lucid, talking about things. It’s not funny, but it’s odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances. And she said that she had a Spanish test the next day, and she said she thought I had taken her to help tutor her for her Spanish test. It’s kind of an odd thing to say.”

  He sighed, eyes still tightly closed.

  “The long and short of it,” he continued, “was that I again knocked her unconscious, strangled her and drug her about 10 yards into the small grove of trees that were there.”

  “What did you strangle her with?” I asked.

  “Cord.”

  “Cord?”

  “An old piece of rope.”

  “Is this something you brought there with you?”

  “Yeah, something that was in my car.”

  “Okay. Then what happened?”

  “Then I packed up my car. By this time it was almost dawn.”

  Whoa! Ted had skipped about six hours there. I called him on it.

  “Well, I skipped over some stuff there,” he said, “and we’ll just have to get back to it sometime. It’s just too hard for me to talk about it right now.”

  Of course we didn’t get back to it, although I tried several times. Ted obviously feared that if what he’d done to Georgann Hawkins’ corpse somehow became publicly known, he surely wouldn’t survive past Tuesday morning. So the details of his long night in the woods with the dead girl will remain for all time among his terrible secrets.

  I’d read in The Only Living Witness that Ted often recoiled in the aftermath of a murder, not so much in disgust at his own degeneracy, but out of amazement at his risk taking and fear of detection. The Hawkins homicide was such a case, he said.

  “I was just absolutely kind of scared to death,” he said, “shocked, horrified. I went down the road throwing everything that I had: the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothes, just tossing them out the window. I was in a sheer state of panic. It’s like you break out in a fever, or something.”

  “Did you throw away some of your own stuff?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” he answered. “I threw away the briefcase and the crutches and all that stuff. And the crowbar, everything. The handcuffs. I’d get mad at myself a few weeks later because I’d have to go out and buy another pair. I mean, that’s not comical, but that’s what would happen.”

  Bundy said that much of his fear stemmed from the fact that less than two weeks before, he’d prowled the same University District neighborhood late at night, using the same ruse.

  “I was drunk,” he explained, “and I was just babbling on. I told her I worked in Olympia, that I lived in a rooming house. I reached all the way to the car and just [thought] No, I don’t want to do it. I said, ‘Thank you. See you later,’ and she walked away.

  “After the Hawkins thing I was just paranoid as hell that this girl would say, ‘You know, something weird happened to me a couple of weeks ago. This guy came along with crutches and asked me to help him. He took me to a Volkswagen and said he worked in Olympia and lived here in the University District.’

  “How many people could that apply to?”

  The afternoon after he abducted Hawkins, Ted returned on his bicycle to the University District parking lot where he’d positioned his VW the night before. He hadn’t been able to locate one of Hawkins’ shoes and wanted to see if it had fallen off as he assaulted her with the tire iron. The area was swarming with cops, he said.

  “I’d seen whole streams of them driving around all over the place,” he remembered, “but they were concentrating in places like the nearby park.”

  Bundy found the shoe, a white patent leather clog, in the parking lot, as well as her pair of white hoop earrings. “So I surreptitiously gathered them up,” he said, “and rode off.”

  He said he also returned to the Issaquah hillside that day, and then twice again.

  “Were you going back to that scene to commit sex acts?” I asked.

  “Well,” he replied, “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

  His third visit to the dump site came two weeks after the murder.

  “What for?” I asked.

  Ted gave me one of the creepiest answers I’ve ever heard in an interview.

  “Just to see what was going on,” he said, hesitantly. “You know, there’s a lot of psychological stuff going on here that we just don’t have time for. I mean, we could spend days explaining it. I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, the aftereffects. This is why I’m so keen on the staking out of crime scenes of this type afterwards. Fascination with death, necrophilia, all that. But of course you know in June, after a week, what with all the local wildlife, there’s not much left.”

  ***

  Bundy told me that he hadn’t intended to discuss any specifics with me that day and resisted when I asked for details of Donna Gail Manson’s fate. For the time being, all he would say was “she’s up in the mountains,” the encounter with her was “nightmarish,” and “I have trouble piecing it together.”

  According to Ted, his victim total in Washington state was 11, including Kathy Parks. Now that he’d acknowledged the Manson homicide, I knew of eight victims. Who were the other three? Bundy wasn’t saying — he had trouble remembering any of his victims’ names — but did indicate his anonymous victims all had been buried, which accounted for the fact we knew nothing of them. One of the three was buried in King County, he said. They all remain anonymous today. Their graves have never been found.

  Bundy said he began killing in 1972 and then quickly said no, it was 1974. I went down a list of possible victims with him, including Kathy Devine and Ann Marie Burr. He denied responsibility for either. I had long suspected Ted was responsible for the 1966 attack on two stewardesses who lived in the Queen Anne section of Seattle. One of the women survived her injuries; the other didn’t. Ted insisted he knew nothing about the crimes.

  The only topic Ted really wanted to discuss was whether I would speak out in favor of suspending his execution in order to learn more from, and about, him. I told him that my boss, Washington state Attorney General Ken Eikenberry — and one of Ted’s old acquaintances — had announced he firmly opposed any deal to extend Bundy’s life. I added that for my part, keeping him alive a while to fully debrief him was an appealing notion, but that I was a cop and not a policymaker. I dealt with situations as I found them, not how I wished they might be.

  There was fear in his eyes, and he began to cry.

  “I’m not asking for clemency.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:27).

  “I’m not asking for clemency,” he said between sobs. “I’m not asking to get off. I’m not asking for sympathy. But I draw the line. We need a period of time: 60, 90 days, a few months, systematically going over with everybody, bottom to top, everything I can think of. Get it all down. You can use it as you see fit. But that’s how it is.”

  The antagonism his deal proposal had provoked in Florida and Washington and elsewhere, plus my implacable neutrality on the issue, had put panic in his heart. He almost pleaded with me.

  “Bob,” he said, “they’re going to get me sooner or later. You don’t need to worry about that. But you’ve been after this for 15 years. A couple of months is not going to make any difference.”

  “Bob, they’re going to get me.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:20).

  Next day, Saturday, the newspapers reported that Ted had cleared 11 cases with investigators. They didn’t get their news from me.

  On Sunday, he gave up eight murders in Utah to Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office. Before Bundy spent his half-hour with Couch, the Utah cops were pretty certain of three murder victims: Melissa Smith, Debra Kent, and Laura Aime. Bundy told Couch that he’d also killed 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox on October 2, 1974, and 15-year-old Susan Curtis in late June of 1975. The other three victims are unknown. Smith and Aimee are the only two U
tah victims whose bodies have been recovered.

  ***

  Mike Fisher brought with him Matt Lindvall, an investigator for the Vail Police Department, to interrogate Ted about the disappearance of Julie Cunningham, a pretty, 26-year-old ski instructor who vanished from the streets of Vail late on the afternoon of March 15, 1975. By chance, Lindvall had known Cunningham. He had also been the night manager at the Vail Holiday Inn on the night of January 30, 1977, when the fugitive Bundy had canvassed the motel’s lobby, looking for a ride into Denver.