Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  On June 11 at the University of Washington, eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins disappeared. She lived in a sorority house on the campus and was visiting friends in various other houses on the campus complex. It was around midnight, but on the warm June night, the campus was full of students socializing outside. Friends escorted Georgann back to her house and saw her get within fifty feet of her door. Another friend leaned out the window of a nearby fraternity house and briefly spoke to Georgann. That was the last she was seen. Later the police investigation found a report of a young man on crutches with a broken leg asking several young women if they would help him carry some books to a Volkswagen parked nearby.

  Shortly before he was executed, Bundy revealed what he had done to Georgann. He confessed that he had parked his Volkswagen in the shadows near some bushes by the fraternity houses. He laid a crowbar and some handcuffs on the ground near the rear of the car. Hobbling around on his crutches, he asked numerous women to help him carry his books to his car until Georgann agreed to do so. They chatted amiably as they made their way to the car. As Georgann approached the cute little “love bug” Volkswagen to deposit the books through the passenger door, Bundy scooped up the crowbar from the ground and knocked her unconscious from behind. He handcuffed her and dragged her into the Volkswagen, laying her on the floor in the space from which he had removed the passenger seat.

  Bundy drove out into the countryside with the unconscious Georgann on the floor. At some point during the trip she regained consciousness and according to Bundy began to speak about a Spanish test she was supposedly taking the next day—she was obviously raving. Bundy drove out onto a dirt road, dragged her out of the car into a clearing, and struck her unconscious again with the crowbar. He then took a length of cord he kept in his car and strangled her to death. He dragged her body some thirty feet away from the car into a small grove of trees, and there he carefully undressed her. Fifteen years later, on the eve of his execution, he remembered undoing a pin that had kept her pants closed—a detail police had kept confidential. He then had sex with Georgann’s corpse until dawn.

  In the morning Bundy drove away from the site, throwing out along the way various items of Georgann’s clothing and his killing tools. By the afternoon he realized that he had made a mistake. He returned to the murder site and, retracing his route, he recovered most of the items that he had thrown from his car. One thing perplexed Bundy: He could not find one of Georgann’s shoes. To his horror, Bundy realized that they might be back at the location where he kidnapped her. Fearing that police were searching the area and might have a description of a Volkwagen parked there last night, Bundy rode a bike back to the kidnap site. There he discovered Georgann’s other shoe and an earring that had come off when he struck her. He took away the remaining clues to Georgann’s fate before police could find them.

  Three days later, Bundy returned to where he had left Georgann and had sex with her decomposing corpse one more time. Then he severed her head with a hacksaw and buried it in the ground about fifty feet away. Police never learned any of this until the last days prior to Bundy’s execution.

  Ted Bundy had failed his first year of law school, but cleverly he decided to repeat the year at Salt Lake City, where he was admitted the year before. Without telling them he had attended school for a year in Tacoma, Bundy wrote that he had sufficiently recovered from his “car accident” and was ready to start. He was admitted into the first year and scheduled to start in September.

  While Ted waited for school to begin in the autumn, he went to work that summer at the Department of Emergency Services (DES), whose function was to respond to disasters and coordinate search and rescue efforts. The summer of 1974 was the year that the OPEC oil embargo hit the United States, and the DES was responsible for allocating the dwindling fuel supplies in Washington State. Bundy was assigned to calculate a special project budget for the DES by the end of the summer.

  Bundy’s arrival at the DES attracted a lot of attention. The women thought he was very attractive and the men were impressed with his political connections and knowledge of how to get things done with the state bureaucracy.

  One former employee at the DES, Larry Diamond, remembered feeling jealous of Bundy and how everybody, including the males, was taken with him. While most men talked about women in the context of fantasy, Bundy did not. It was as if Bundy “compartmentalized” them, according to Diamond. Eventually Diamond concluded that perhaps Bundy had one major flaw: He was too perfect. Diamond explained, “Ted was almost one-dimensional if I think about it. It’s like there’s a very beautiful storefront that’s attractive and lures you in. But when you get inside to see the merchandise, it is sparse to say the least.”92

  Larry Diamond’s perception was very acute and his metaphor of a beautiful storefront an apt one—except that it was not a scarcity of merchandise that waited behind the beautiful exterior, but horrific death. It is hard to say whether Diamond was more perceptive than others in the past, or whether Bundy, in the middle of his series of brutal rapes and homicides, was losing his grip on his carefully composed mask of sanity.

  Bundy was about to get strange on his girlfriend, Liz. On the weekend of July 6 they went river rafting. They drank a few beers and were quietly drifting along the river enjoying the peaceful and sunny day. Suddenly Bundy lunged at Liz and pushed her under the water. When she came up shouting at him, he simply would not respond, which deeply unnerved her. He was becoming a total stranger to her. Later he said to her, “Can’t you take a joke?”

  The following Saturday, Liz phoned Ted at his parents’ house in Tacoma and asked if he was free on Sunday. Ted told her he’d be busy. The next morning, July 14, as she was getting ready to go to church, Ted unexpectedly appeared at her house and wanted to know what she was going to be doing that day. She told him the name of a small park she was going to, hoping that he would join her there. He never showed up.

  Fifteen miles east of Seattle lies Lake Sammamish State Park, a paradise of lakes, forests, rivers, and recreational facilities. It is a popular destination for picnickers, swimmers, and sunbathers. That weekend a local brewery was sponsoring a beer party at “Lake Sam,” as locals knew it. At the other end of the park was the annual Seattle Police Department picnic. There were some 40,000 visitors that day at Lake Sam.

  Janice Graham later told police that a man approached her with a broken arm at about noon that Sunday. He was dressed all in white—white T-shirt, socks, tennis shoes, and shorts. He asked her if she would help him load his small sailboat onto the roof of his car. She agreed and began to walk with him. She said he was very friendly, polite, and charming. He told her he injured his arm playing racquetball and they chatted the entire route. When they got to his car, a bronze-colored Volkswagen, Janice saw no boat or trailer. “It’s at my parents’ house, just at the top of the hill,” the stranger said, asking her to get into his car.

  Janice refused because some friends were waiting for her. He should have told her, she said, that the boat was at his parents’ house. The stranger was not at all upset, he apologized and walked back with her from the parking lot. Janice later told the police, “He was very polite at all times. Very sincere. Easy to talk to. He was real friendly and he had a nice smile.”

  In an interview, Bundy talked about encountering his victims in his third person manner:

  BUNDY: Conversation, to remove himself from the personal aspects of the encounter, the interchange. Chattering and flattering and entertaining, as if seen through a motion picture screen. He would be engaging in the patter just for the purpose of making the whole encounter seem legitimate and to keep her at ease. He didn’t want this girl to get second thoughts about going with him to his place. And, also, he was afraid if he started thinking about what he was going to do he’d become more nervous or lose his concentration or in some way betray himself.

  QUESTION: So there’s a very delicate balance between being cool and the excitement?

  BUNDY: Well, it’s a
critical balance, not a delicate balance. It became almost like acting a role. It wasn’t difficult. The more an actor acts in a role, the better he becomes at it, the more he is apt to feel comfortable in it, to be able to do things spontaneously. And get better, as it were, in his role.93

  Shortly after meeting her friends, Janice Graham saw that the stranger had found somebody else to help him. He was walking back toward his car next to a young woman with a bicycle. Janice wondered where she was going to put her bicycle for the trip to get the man’s boat.

  Twenty-three-year old Jan Ott, a Seattle probation officer, bicycled that day to Lake Sammamish for some sunbathing and swimming. She found a spot on the edge of the lake, not too far from several couples who were enjoying the sun, and spread out her towel. One couple testified that she was there for about half an hour when a handsome young man approached her. He was dressed entirely in white and his left arm was in a sling, encased in a cast from his wrist to past his elbow. He spoke with a slight English accent. He asked Jan if she could help him load his boat. Just to show how fast serial killers learn and adapt, this time Bundy told Ott that the boat was at his “parents’ house.” She did not leave immediately with him and they talked for about ten minutes. Witnesses overheard him introducing himself as “Ted.” Eventually Jan got up and left with the handsome stranger. Several couples testified that they overheard him telling her that there was room in his car for her bike and talking about how easy it would be for him to teach her how to sail in a single afternoon. Jan Ott was reported missing the next day by her roommate. Her bike was never found.

  It wasn’t over yet. About two hours after Ott walked off with the stranger, several women reported being approached near the park washrooms by a man dressed in white with a broken arm needing help with his sailboat. One woman turned him down because he grabbed at her while asking for help with his boat. Another saw him watching her before he approached her with his request and practically ran from him. Bundy was like some kind of killing animal loose in a herd of prey.

  Nineteen-year-old Denise Naslund and her boyfriend, Kenny Little, were sunning themselves in the park. At one point Denise got up to go to the washroom. Kenny fell asleep. When he woke up, Denise still had not returned—her purse lay nearby where she had left it. Kenny attempted to report Denise’s disappearance to the park police, but was told that only family could file a missing person report. He drove back to her parents’ house and they called the police. Witnesses later recalled seeing Denise in the washrooms, but afterward there was nothing.

  Liz remembers Ted phoning her that Sunday late in the afternoon—about an hour after Denise’s boyfriend discovered that she had disappeared. Ted invited Liz out to dinner—he was starving, he told her. He arrived about ten minutes later and they drove to a bowling alley reputed to serve some of the best hamburgers in Seattle. Liz was amazed to see Ted gobble down two hamburgers. He looked like he was under stress, she said. His eyes were all puffed up and when she asked him about it, he said he had a cold and was tired. Nonetheless, he insisted on driving back to Liz’s house and transferring a ski rack that he had borrowed from his car to hers.

  By this time, the various police agencies had met and although they had little tangible evidence, they had good reason to suspect that the kidnappings were committed by the same individual. The police had identified distinct similarities in the student victims:

  Long hair, parted down the middle

  Caucasian, fair-complexioned

  Above-average intelligence

  Slender, attractive, highly talented

  Each had vanished within a week of midterm or final exams at local colleges

  Loving and stable families

  Vanished at night

  Each girl was single

  Each girl was wearing jeans or pants when she disappeared

  Construction work was going on at each campus where a girl disappeared

  No physical evidence in any of the disappearances

  The police reviewed the witness statements and isolated the reports of a man wearing a cast and driving a Volkswagen. The disappearances at Lake Sammamish now gave them a name: Ted. But that was all they had, and the police did not agree among themselves that the same man had committed the crimes.

  Using witness descriptions from the Lake Sammamish disappearances, newspapers published police sketches of the suspect and the information that he was driving a Volkswagen and might be called Ted. A lot of people ribbed Bundy about the fact that he had a Volkswagen, was called Ted, and looked like the individual in the sketches. Everyone felt safe kidding Bundy about it, because few believed that he could even be remotely capable of committing those kinds of crimes.

  That summer, Ann Rule was among the first to call the police with Ted Bundy’s name. She remembers that she did not know whether Ted had bought a car since she had seen him last, but it appeared to her that Ted resembled the police sketches published in the papers. She had a friend on the police force run Bundy’s name through vehicle registration records and was shocked to find out that “her” Ted also drove a Volkswagen.

  Liz was also seeing the resemblance and could not shake the memory of finding the box of medical cast material. She made an anonymous call to the police. But neither Ann Rule nor Liz Kendall, despite their suspicions, was convinced that Ted was a killer. Rule continued her friendship with Bundy, and Liz continued working on marriage plans with him.

  The police meanwhile, filed Bundy’s name with the other 3,000 names reported to them as possible suspects.

  On August 2, in Vancouver, Washington, twenty-year-old Carol Valenzuela vanished, but it was thought that she left on her own and no alarm was raised about her disappearance.

  Ted Bundy, in the meantime, at the end of the month packed his things and moved to Salt Lake City in Utah to attend law school there. No further disappearances were reported in the State of Washington.

  On September 7, in the Issaquah hills about a mile from Lake Sammamish, hunters discovered the remains of Jan Ott and Denise Naslund. There was not much to find—their bodies had been torn apart by coyotes, rodents, and possibly bears. Their flesh was mostly stripped away, and bones and tufts of hair were scattered all over the area. It took the police days to assemble enough bones to identify the women. Worse yet, the police anthropologists discovered extra female bones—there was a third victim. To this day, her identity remains unknown but it could have been Georgann Hawkins, whose body was never officially found.

  Then in October the body of Carol Valenzuela was discovered near Olympia, Washington, in the rugged territory close to the Oregon border. She too had been consumed by animals. Lying near her, the police found the body of another woman believed to be aged between eighteen and twenty-two. Her identity has never been established either.

  In the Salt Lake City area, young women began disappearing on October 2. The first was sixteen-year-old Nancy Wilcox, who on a night when she had argued with her parents was seen getting into a Volkswagen bug. She was listed as a runaway at first. Her body was never found. Salt Lake City is some seven hundred miles south of Seattle, and nobody in Utah even remotely thought of making a connection between the Volkswagen and the crimes in the north, nor was there any national database like VICAP today to make that link.

  On October 18, Melissa Smith, age seventeen, the daughter of a police chief of a small town near Salt Lake City, vanished. She went out around 9:00 P.M. to eat a pizza with a friend. Afterward she was seen at a few teen hangouts around the town and was reported at one point to be seen hitchhiking.

  Her body was found ten days later, the first of the series of victims to be found reasonably intact enough to perform an autopsy. Her skull had been fractured by a heavy blow, and she had been strangled by one of her knee-high socks tightly wrapped around her throat. Her head and shoulders showed multiple bruises and lacerations. She had been raped and sodomized, and afterward sticks had been pushed into her vagina. Her makeup was completely undisturbed and her long fing
ernails were undamaged. This led the police to believe that the killer may have kept her in an unconscious state for several days, applying her makeup himself and repeatedly raping her before finally strangling her.

  On October 31, Halloween night, seventeen-year-old Laura Aime disappeared. She was at a party, got bored, and decided to hitchhike downtown to get some cigarettes. Her body was found the next month in a canyon. Her jaw had been broken and her skull was fractured. She had been raped and sodomized, and one of her stockings was wrapped tightly around her throat. There were vaginal puncture wounds from a sharp instrument, believed to be an ice pick, thrust into her genitals. The one thing that immediately struck the police was that her hair was freshly shampooed and free of blood from her cranial wounds. Again, as with Melissa Smith, it appeared that the killer had kept the teenager in an unconscious state, shampooing her hair, raping her, and then strangling her.

  On November 8, Carol DaRonch was approached in a shopping mall by Ted Bundy posing as a police officer and lured into his car. As he attempted to put a pair of handcuffs on her, she managed kick free of him and flee. DaRonch is the only known victim of Ted Bundy’s to escape.

  Later that same night, at an evening performance by a high school drama club, young women and girls were approached by an impeccably dressed man and asked to come into the parking lot and identify a car, or help him start a car. The request made no sense and the man appeared very nervous and would not look the women in the eye. Everybody refused the stranger’s request. His actions attracted the attention of a few people among the audience of 1,500 and they kept an eye on him that evening. During the intermission they saw him leave, and were happy to see that he did not return when the play began again. However, when the play ended and the lights went up, they were surprised to see that he was back in the auditorium, although now his shirttail was hanging out and his hair seemed somewhat disordered.