Julie Cunningham’s missing person poster. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
———
Ted told Fisher and Lindvall how he’d used his crutches ploy to lure Cunningham to his VW in a Vail parking lot. As usual, the Bug’s front passenger-side seat had been removed. He clubbed her on the head with his tire iron and started driving west with Cunningham’s handcuffed figure slumped on the floorboards to his right, the same way he’d transported Georgann Hawkins to his Issaquah dump site in June of the previous year.
As seemed to happen fairly frequently with Ted’s victims, Cunningham regained consciousness along the way.
“I can’t say exactly what the roads were like,” Bundy told the Colorado lawmen, “as everything was pretty much a blur. I think I was intoxicated. Under these circumstances there’s a high degree of stress, kind of distorts my memory somewhat. That and the passage of time, so everything is not crystal clear.
Ted was asked what Cunningham said as she came to.
“I have a hard time coming up with exact words,” he said. “I can remember among other things that she was just asking me who I was and all. You know, where I was from, that kind of thing."
He drove Cunningham west about 90 miles on Interstate 70 to the little community of Rifle, Colorado, where he turned north on State 13, until he found a dirt turnoff that afforded him the privacy he required.
“What happened when you stopped the car?”
Ted went silent for a few moments.
“I’m not pausing for melodramatic effects,” he explained. “This is the hard part. After talking with Bob Keppel yesterday I felt I’d been about nine rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s opening up stuff that I’m certainly not proud of, to say the least, but it’s more distressing and disturbing than I can do justice to . . . See if I can work at this way.
“She’d been asking me to loosen these handcuffs. And I did so. I got out of the car to try to figure where things were. Walked away from the car and apparently she’d slipped out of the handcuffs and begun to exit the car. Of course she didn’t know any more than I where we were, maybe less. I couldn’t even now or then assess [her] injuries, but I imagine she wasn’t fully able; I mean, after being knocked unconscious.
“But anyway, I noticed her opening the door and getting out of the car…It becomes such a blur. I can tell you it was a struggle, and [I] knocked her unconscious again.”
“What happened after you knocked her unconscious on this occasion?” Lindvall asked. “Is that where it ended?”
Bundy interrupted the interview with a question of his own. Did Lindvall know Cunningham? “I got the feeling that you did,” Ted said.
Lindvall confirmed that he did know Cunningham. At one time they had lived in the same apartment complex.
“It hit him hard,” Lindvall recalls. “Ted slid right out of his chair. It gave him a kind of strange bond with me.”
“I just, I could sense the emotion,” Bundy said.
“Well,” replied Lindvall. “It’s emotional pain whether I would have known her or not.”
“Sure,” Ted replied. “I mean, nevertheless.”
It was a peculiarly awkward moment for both men.
“Please,” said Lindvall, “don’t let that affect how you feel I may feel towards you. Because I told you I have no problem with our discussion.”
“Sure, well,” said Bundy.
“I wasn’t a police officer at the time. Did she survive that second blow?”
“I believe she probably did,” Ted answered. “I’m pretty sure she did, but I can’t say for certain.”
“And then what?”
Bundy said he used one of his several lengths of cord to strangle Julie Cunningham to death.
“Was she on the ground?”
“Yes.”
“Was she face down or face up?”
“It’s so pitch black. I mean, some of these visions and images are not clear…. I’m having a hard time even articulating what I remember. I just want to be able to find the words. I want you to note this in your mind, so we can come back to it. I’m not denying it in the sense that I’m trying to forget it and tell you that nothing happened. I mean, I could tell you I dragged her up into the woods and left it there, but that’s not what happened. So why don’t we jump forward a little bit, and then we can come back?”
As with Georgann Hawkins, Ted would never finish the story of what he did to Julie Cunningham. All he would add was that he left her, naked, on the ground, and took away her clothes and personal effects, which he later deposited in a Salt Lake City Goodwill bin. Bundy also said he revisited the dump site approximately six weeks later to bury her. It took him half a day of searching to relocate it. He said he found Cunningham as he’d left her, partially mummified by the cold, dry weather, and surprisingly undisturbed by the animals.
“What took place before you buried her?”
“Nothing.”
The burial required about 45 minutes, Ted said, then he covered the grave with heavy rocks and some branches and drove away, never to return, according to Ted.
***
Easily most surprised among the homicide detectives Bundy summoned to the Florida State Prison that weekend was Russ Reneau, chief investigator for the Idaho state attorney general. Until I called Reneau, relaying Ted’s invitation to come talk to him about murders in his state, Reneau had no clue that Bundy had victimized Idaho, too.
Ted had two cases for him. The first was a white female hitchhiker he said he picked up, murdered and dumped into a river. He had no name for this victim but said he believed she was an Idahoan.
The second was a young girl he’d picked up outside her school in Pocatello in May of 1975. He took her to his room at a Holiday Inn, Ted said, where he murdered her in the bathtub. Then he drove her body north of the city and put it into a river. Bundy was able to supply a sufficient amount of detail — particularly facts from what the girl had told him about herself and her family — for Reneau to established that she was 12-year-old Lynette Culver of Pocatello.
As part of his confession, Ted recalled how in Pocatello the night before he killed Culver, he’d sneaked into the upper floors of a college dormitory and was discovered and escorted out of the building. He didn’t share with Reneau what he had hoped to do in the dorm, had he not been interrupted. Less than two years later in Tallahassee, upstairs in the Chi O house, he’d rampage room to room with a club and his panty-hose ligatures. Then he picked up another 12-year-old child, Kim Leach, and murdered her.
***
On Sunday, the 22nd, I was given another half-hour with Ted, our last encounter, as it turned out. He had been on a steady high for days and now was drained, resigned, and, he told me, more interested in getting some rest than anything else. It was after nine in the evening. With the Big Sleep looming just 34 hours away, I would have thought Ted would try to savor every second left to him, tired or not.
I was aware he’d considered suicide, as well as faking mental illness so his lawyers could claim he was incompetent to be executed. Three state psychiatrists were brought to the prison to examine him just in case. Maybe he still was contemplating such desperate measures, but the Ted I confronted for the last time seemed to have abandoned all hope. I know he later did some praying and talked to Bill Hagmaier about what might become of his soul.
I had a more temporal agenda.
Taylor Mountain. “Are you going to give me a hint where the rest of those bodies are?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “To be honest with you, I honestly can’t tell you.”
“Were they dumped there?”
“If the bodies aren’t there it’s because, I think, the animals took everything.”
I’m certain he was lying. By this time, Bill Hagmaier had relayed to me Bundy’s admission that he’d kept four of his victims’ heads at his rooming house. I think he decapitated his dead victims, buried their bodies, and kept their skulls as trophies, or talismans, or w
hatever.
I asked about Janice Ott’s bicycle. He said he left it in a poor neighborhood of Seattle and that undoubtedly some child had appropriated it long ago.
“How about Donna Manson?” I asked. “Where’s she?”
Bundy said her body was buried further up Taylor Mountain but that her head was not.
“Where is it?” I wanted to know.
“It’s nowhere.”
“It’s nowhere?”
“Well, I’m not trying to be flippant. It’s just nowhere. It’s in a category by itself.”
He stopped then said, “I can see the headlines now.”
I motioned toward Bill Hagmaier. “He wants to know,” I said, “and I want to know for my own good.”
“Well, it was incinerated,” Bundy finally admitted. “It was just an exception, a strange exception, but it was incinerated.”
“Where did you incinerate it?”
“Ah,” Ted responded. He laughed a little laugh.
“C’mon partner,” I said. “These are things I don’t know about you.”
“This is probably the disposal method of preference among those who get away with it,” he said, adding that it was the most bizarre thing he’d ever done, “and I’ve been associated with some bizarre shit.”
“Tell me about it. What the hell happened?”
“Well, I promised myself I would never tell this, because, I thought, of all the things I did to this poor woman, this is probably the one she is least likely to forgive. Poor Liz.”
“Where?”
“In her fireplace.”
“Burn it all up?” I asked, straining to comprehend something so grotesque.
“Down to the last ash,” he confirmed, “and in a fit of paranoia and cleanliness, you know, just vacuumed down all the ashes.”
I’ll never know if Ted could top that story. We spent the remaining few minutes going back over his Washington state killing career. This time, he said he murdered his first victim, a hitchhiker, near Olympia, in May of 1973, as best he could recall, consistent with what he’d told Bill Hagmaier. But he shared no further details. If he was telling the truth, this young woman died anonymously and remained that way. “I never heard anything more about her,” he offered.
Once more I asked about Ann Marie Burr, and once more he vehemently, but unconvincingly, denied responsibility.
I had overspent my allotted 30 minutes, and Mike Fisher, irate, was standing outside ready to ask his last set of questions about Caryn Campbell.
So I just blurted, “When and where was your first murder?”
“One more question, right?” Ted said.
“I was just curious.”
“Well,” he said in his final words to me, “we’ll have to bring that up, do that some other time, you know, if there is another time.”
Chapter Twelve
Aftermath
Following Bundy’s execution early Tuesday morning, January 24, 1989, the FBI convoked a conference at its Quantico training facility, where local and state law enforcement officials with an interest in the case met to share information, ask and answer questions, and try to address outstanding issues.
The meeting hit a bump when Bill Hagmaier of the BSU disclosed that Bundy had told him he’d kept a stash of souvenir victims’ photos at his rooming house in Salt Lake City. He told Hagmaier that the pictures were hidden in a utility area when Jerry Thompson had come with a warrant to search the residence, essentially the same story Ted had given his lawyer, Polly Nelson, in confidence.
Thompson and Mike Fisher were angered to hear of this so long after the fact. Hagmaier protested his innocence. “I’m not trying to keep anything from anybody,” he said, explaining that he hadn’t felt any urgency in sharing the story and in any event he believed he should first tell the interested jurisdiction, Salt Lake County, and that is what he did.
A page of my notes from the post-execution FBI conference on Bundy. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
———
Late on Sunday night, the 20th, after I and then Mike Fisher concluded our last interviews with Bundy, Hagmaier had conducted a state-by-state victim review with Ted. Here is the list of killings Ted acknowledged to Bill:
Washington: Eleven, including Kathy Parks. Three victims were unnamed and remain so.
Utah: Eight, with three still unidentified. Among the Utah victims, only Melissa Smith and Laura Aime have been found.
Colorado: Three. In a last-minute taped conversation with prison warden Jim Barton, Bundy gave up 25-year-old Denise Oliverson of Grand Junction, whom he said he murdered on the 6th of April, 1975. Ted told Barton he put Oliverson’s dead body in the Colorado River.
Oregon: Two. Both unidentified.
Idaho: Two. One, the hitchhiker, unidentified.
California: One. Unidentified.
Florida: Three.
The total, then, that Ted conceded to law enforcement officials was 30, 10 of whom are still complete mysteries to us. In his taped conversation with Barton, Bundy also denied killing anyone in the several states where he was a suspect in unsolved killings. These were: Illinois, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont.
None of us, of course, were going to take Bundy’s word for anything. Thirty seems to be a floor figure for his number of homicides, and I believe he probably was good for a substantial number more. However, and despite a lot of suspicions, in more than two decades since his execution no one has conclusively connected Ted with any further homicides anywhere.
***
In 1992, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Washington. My examining committee included Charles Lee Smith, chief justice of the Washington state supreme court; Dr. Reay, the King County medical examiner; Daris Swindler, who had identified Janice Ott and Denise Naslund for us; and Elizabeth Loftis, an expert in eyewitness testimony at the University of Washington, who, coincidentally, had been a defense expert at Bundy’s 1976 Utah trial for kidnapping Carol DaRonch.
I was now a Doctor of Murder.
Seven years later, after 17 years as the attorney general’s chief investigator, I retired from active law enforcement and entered the academic phase of my career. Besides publishing, consulting widely on serial-murder investigations, and giving the occasional lecture, I accepted a number of teaching appointments over the years, beginning with the auxiliary faculty of the School of Sociology at the University of Washington; then the criminal justice department at Seattle University; Sam Houston State College in Huntsville, Texas; and, most recently, the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science at the University of New Haven. For a number of years I also delivered an annual paper at the Centre International De Sciences Criminelles Et Penales in Paris.
***
On November 30, 2001, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert was pleased to learn from his detectives that at about three that afternoon they’d arrested Gary Leon Ridgway, 51, at his workplace, Kenworth Truck Company in Renton, where Ridgway was a painter, in connection with the murders of the first four victims believed killed by the Riverman. The crucial connection was microscopic bits of paint that connected the victims to Kenworth and thus to Ridgway.
He ultimately confessed to 48 murders and is thought to be responsible for at least that number more. Unlike Bundy, when Ridgway was offered life in prison in exchange for full confessions, he grabbed the deal. He’s now in permanent residence at the Washington state penitentiary in Walla Walla, where John Liebert once had hoped Ted would be sent.
Ted’s scorecard as a Green River killings consultant was mixed. He’d guessed that the killer was in his early 20s back in 1984; Ridgway was already 35. On the other hand, Ted was right when he inferred that Riverman was picking up not only prostitutes, but also runaways, and that he had developed approaches that work equally well with both groups to put them at ease. Ridgway’s secret weapon was a photo of his son.
Bob Keppel on the scene, circa 1978. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)<
br />
———
Keppel on the set of “The Riverman,” a made-for-television film about the Green River murders that first aired on A&E in 2004. He is shown on location in Nova Scotia. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel)
———
And, yes, as Ted knew, the Green River killer was a necrophile. “That would be a good day,” Ridgway told the police, “an evening or after I got off work and go have sex with her. And that’d last for one or two days…till the flies came. And I’d bury ’em and cover ’em up.”
Terrible Secrets Page 16