He was talking, of course, about the Ted Bundy investigation … an investigation that he would never really be finished with.
Even now.
I had to smile when I read The Riverman. I don’t think it was a year after our flight through the blizzard before Bob Keppel was up to his elbows in work with the Green River Task Force. So much for no more boiler-room pressure. But as his career unfolded, it became obvious that there was no way Bob could not go back.
And back. And back again.
Reading The Riverman brought back many memories to me—some good, some horrendous. The toe-dancing and the conflicts that marked some of our VICAP conferences are all here, as they should be. The interpersonal conflicts in various police agencies and the turf wars that slowed—or stopped—forward progress are noted. I am gratified to see Pierce Brooks receive the credit that he so richly deserves. If I’m to be completely honest, I’m probably just as gratified to see that some of the popinjays have been deflated.
I lived through the Bundy years in a different dimension than Bob Keppel did. I knew the man who wore the mask, and it was a very long time before I saw the monster exposed. It hasn’t been easy for me to read the explicit confessions that Ted made to Bob Keppel. It will not be easy for any reader, no matter how hardened he—or she—may be to the psychopathology of the sadistic sociopath. But the details are necessary for us to understand what made Ted Bundy tick. Outside of police files and psychiatric reports—which are usually classified—I have never read the actual words and thoughts of a brilliantly twisted killer as they appear in The Riverman. We may not like what Ted Bundy had to say to Bob Keppel, but we will learn a great deal from it.
In January of 1989, when Bob Keppel journeyed to Starke, Florida, to spend some of Ted Bundy’s last hours on earth with him, he was like a finely trained athlete (which he, in fact, is). He knew all the facts; he knew when to speak, when to keep quiet, when to show approval, when to show disdain, and he was ready.
Bob Keppel heard, at last, the answers to horrific questions.
I am honored to write this foreword. There have been many Bundy books—including my own—but the whole story has never been told until now.
Introduction to the 2004 Edition
It’s the year 2003, and since Ted Bundy’s execution in 1989 and the reduction of the Green River murders investigation to a single detective, Tom Jenson, new information about both sets of cases has since come to light.
Regarding Ted Bundy, his confession to the warden of the Florida State Penitentiary about the one last murder is now a matter of public record, as are his confessions to Vail Police Department detective Matt Lindvall about the murder of Julie Cunningham. Regarding some of the homicides grouped under the Green River investigation, in November 2001 King County homicide detectives arrested Gary Leon Ridgway, who was subsequently charged with the murders of Carol Christensen, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Marcia Chapman. Ridgway subsequently pled guilty to 48 homicides, in October 2003, new names were added to the Green River list of victims, and Ridgway will spend the rest of his life in prison.
As for myself, after I retired from the Washington State Attorney General’s office in 1999, I continued to teach at the University of Washington. In 2003, I became an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Also under a grant from the Bureau of Justice Administration, developed the ideas for a homicide investigation database—ideas that first began germinating in my mind back in 1975 during the Ted Missing and Murdered Women investigation—into a full-blown computer database program.
My old Green River Murders Task Force colleague, Dave Reichert, also took his own path during the twenty years since two boys riding their bikes over the Peck Bridge discovered the first bodies floating in the Green River. Dave, even after the investigation shrank to a single investigator, never gave up, believing as I believed that a piece of evidence the task force gathered back in 1987 would eventually lead to a suspect in some of the homicides. Dave’s beliefs kept him inside the King County Sheriff’s Department, moving up through the ranks from detective to captain to major—and eventually into politics when he ran for sheriff of King County. He never gave up on the search and was on the job when Tom Jenson told him that there was a DNA match in the Green River case.
What Bundy never knew during Dave’s and my interviews with him over the years, when he attempted to provide us with a model of what the Green River Killer’s behavior might be, was that an individual had been under police scrutiny (as the publicly released affidavits from King County investigators show) ever since 1983. Bundy could not know that because it was not information that was made public at the time.
Even as the task force interviewed witnesses and sexual companions of the person who was ultimately arrested for the Christensen, Mills, Hinds, and Chapman murders—as well as the suspect himself—the police proceeded so as to compromise neither the suspect’s constitutional rights nor the investigation itself. And it was only when forensic biological evidence, developed because of advances in DNA amplification and testing technology, indicated that there was a match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect’s DNA that an arrest was made. The story of that investigation and the arrest is also contained in the affidavit sworn by Detective Sue Peters and subsequently made public by the King County District Attorney, along with the prosecutor’s summary of evidence and Gary Ridgway’s written confessions and admissions.
For the present, the confessions Bundy made to Mike Fisher and Matt Lindvall about his Colorado murders in the previous chapter and to the warden at Florida State Penitentiary are his final words as he faced his ultimate punishment. They are revealing, particularly his confession to Lindvall, in that they show Bundy trying to hang on to his last bit of dignity, which itself was only his delusion about himself. Bundy confesses that he lived in hell as he trolled for his victims across the four states that we know about and that what was consuming his victims was also consuming him. How much of those statements are self-serving and how much of those are true can only be judged by those who read them.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1995 Foreword by Ann Rule
Introduction to the 2004 Edition
1 Too Many Bodies
2 Grisly Business Unit: In Pursuit of a Killer
3 Ted #7
4 The Splash Heard ’Round the World
5 The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Story of the Michigan Child Murders
6 The Green River Murders
7 Ted Versus the Riverman
8 Innocent Victims
9 Hunting the Killer
10 “The River Was His Friend”
11 “Some Murders Are Okay!”
12 The Signature of Murder
13 Suspects
14 Final Confessions
15 Bundy’s 1989 Colorado Confessions
16 Peace, Ted
17 The Arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway
18 Was Bundy Right?: Ted Bundy’s “Riverman” and Ridgway’s Confessions
19 Bundy’s Last Night
20 Gary Ridgway in Court
21 Gary Ridgway and His Victims
Conclusion: The Politics of Serial Murder
1
Too Many Bodies
Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.
—Sherlock Holmes
One can only surmise what the great detective Sherlock Holmes would have gleaned from private conversations with Ted Bundy or the hunt through the dense, wet underbrush of rural King County and brassy strip joints along Seattle’s red-light Sea-Tac district for the Green River Killer, whom Ted Bundy called the Riverman. But Holmes and his amanuensis, Dr. Watson, were fictional, and anyone who works in the day-to-day world of law enforcement knows that
cases do not resolve themselves neatly as they do at the end of a story. The Green River murders investigation, which began in 1982, continued until 2003, when Gary Leon Ridgway, who was arrested for four of the murders in the series, confessed to forty-eight of the murders. The clues to the killer’s identity lay for years in the cyberspace of lists of names, contact reports, and tip sheets. We know that somewhere among the hundreds of thousands of leads, along the hundreds of miles of Mylar tape, the name of the Green River killer and all the evidence that would incriminate him awaited us. I had a few guesses as to who the killer was, although I let the computer assemble the information for my probable cause—a hasty accusation can invalidate years and years of investigative work. Ted Bundy and his guys on death row in Starke, Florida, taught me how serial killers think and what will encourage them to give up their secrets. It’s all a waiting game, unless you catch them with their hands dripping red with the blood of their victims. I learned that to bring the suspect in, you must advance your investigation in orderly phases, corner the suspect, and carefully conduct the interrogation in order to gain his confidence. But first you must break down the barriers within your own department, among your own colleagues, and within a command structure that will usually deny the existence of a serial killer at large and all the trouble it brings.
Ted Bundy was speaking to me.
“I just said that the Hawkins girl’s head was severed and taken up the road about twenty-five to fifty yards and buried in a location about ten yards west of the road on a rocky hillside. Did you hear that?”
Hear it? I was stunned!
The squeaky, chipped metal folding chair that I was sitting on suddenly shrank; I felt oversized upon it. The prison walls closed in around me and became covered with dancing, bloodstained apparitions of murdered college coeds and young girls ripped away from life in the first blossom of their beauty. I had slipped into a light hallucination in reaction to the horrifying confession I had just heard. The infamous Ted Bundy, my personal nemesis, was confessing to murder, confessing in his own name for the very first time. As the words tumbled out of his mouth, my mind was sucked into the past, swirling through a deep, dark funnel of time. Details, follow-up facts, the material from the 15-year investigation of Ted and my pursuit of him, which had been fixed rigidly in my memory, began falling away like little chunks of calcium sediment from the walls of a cave. It was almost too much to comprehend. After my 15 years of searching for the missing pieces of the Ted Bundy puzzle, it was January 1989 and Ted himself was almost casually confessing to the murders our baling-wire computer program had assigned to him. And now, in this small prison interrogation room, I was gripping the edge of my chair, waiting for him to divulge the specific facts about the murders, mutilations, decapitations, necrophilia, and burials he had carried out at the Issaquah body dump site, all of which we had uncovered years before anyone even knew there was a Ted Bundy. Now Bundy and I were face-to-face and he was in Florida’s maximum-security penitentiary. All those memories came back to me as I began probing Ted for details.
I remember the day the name Ted first came into my life—little did I know the number of years I would spend tracking the man with that name or the number of deaths to which that name would eventually be linked. But here that day was, coming back to me amid the claustrophobic atmosphere of death row.
The Lake
Lake Sammamish is the nearest thing to an outdoor shrine for many of the college-age men and women who live in and around Seattle. It was particularly crowded on the Sunday afternoon of July 14, 1974, because several large companies, including Rainier Beer and Lockheed Shipyards, were having their employee picnics. Over 50,000 people had come to spend a day at the state park. Throughout the elaborate mating dance that took place in the 90-degree sunshine that afternoon, who would have noticed the appearance of another Volkswagen bug with a light-haired pretty-boy smiling from behind the wheel? Who would have been afraid of such a person?
Certainly not Janice Ott, who had ridden to the lake on her yellow Tiger 10-speed bike for a day of sunning. Janice was a pretty young lady—dainty and slight, about 5 feet tall—who had long blond hair that hung straight down to the middle of her back. She was dressed for a perfect day in the sun: short denim cutoffs and a midriff shirt. She peeled these off to reveal her black bikini as soon as she reached the sandy beach, and lay down on her towel, which she’d had stashed in her blue nylon knapsack.
Janice sunned herself, unaware of the fate that awaited her and the danger working its way toward her in the guise of a seemingly average guy. At that moment in another part of the park, a blond 25-year-old man about 5 feet 10 inches tall, of medium build and wearing a beige sling on his left arm, approached Mary Osmer on the grassy area near the bandstand where Rainier Brewery was sponsoring races. He was described, by people who saw him later that afternoon, as a good-looking all-American type wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. The young stranger asked Mary, who was clad in a very short backless, halter-type dress, if she would help him load his sailboat onto his car. She agreed with a perky “sure.” He asked her what she was doing and she replied that she was waiting for her husband and parents. He quickly changed the conversation by saying, “This is out of sight; there are so many people.” As they walked toward the parking lot, he stopped three times to clasp his left arm as if he were in pain, explaining that he had hurt it playing racquetball. He tried to engage Mary in conversation by asking if she had ever played the game.
When she didn’t respond, the young man changed the topic, asking, “Do you live around here?”
She said, “Bellevue, and I work at Boeing.”
The man led Mary to a metallic brown VW bug. Mary didn’t see a sailboat and asked where it was. The man said, “It’s at my folks’ house; it’s just up the hill.” He motioned to the side door as if to open it for her. Mary told him she couldn’t go because she had to meet her folks. She asked him what time it was, and he replied, “It is 12:20.” She said she was already late because she was to meet them at 12:15. Almost apologetically, he said, “Oh, that’s okay, I should have told you it wasn’t in the parking lot. Thanks for bothering to come up to the car.” He walked Osmer about halfway back and repeated himself: “Thanks for coming with me. I should have told you it was not in the parking lot.”
When Mary Osmer later told us her story, her eyes glistened with guilt. To her, the stranger seemed friendly, sincere, very polite, and easy to talk to. He had a nice smile and didn’t get upset when she told him she wouldn’t go with him. She was pretty, 22 years old, newly married, and almost overwhelmed by the dangerous excitement of the mere thought of infidelity that she had had when she was approached by this attractive stranger. She wasn’t your average vague eyewitness, but gave us a detailed physical description of him when questioned. She had paid attention to every move he made because she was sizing him up for the thrill of it—the thrill of flirting with him and maybe even the thought of doing more than that. She remembered him perfectly, it turned out, and we were able to assemble the stranger’s physical description, his gait, the car he drove, his leisure activities, and the way he talked. Mary had listened to him so well, we even had a handle on his conversational style. But Mary was one of the lucky ones. This predatory stranger had had a harmless brush with her, but quickly moved on to find his next victim, leaving Mary unaware of the danger she had escaped.
When he and Mary parted, the stranger wandered away from his car again and approached the beach, where several people were sunning, among them Janice Ott. Several other sunbathers had seen Janice arrive. One of them was Jim Stanton, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was always happy to take in the pleasurable sight of a good-looking young woman willing to take off most of her clothing in front of him. Stanton watched as Janice applied cocoa butter to her skin and positioned herself on her towel, facing the sun. Cynthia Baker also watched the newcomer arrive. She and two of her girlfriends were lying two feet away from Ott. Another witness, Glori
a Samuelson, was 10 feet away from where Janice Ott was sunning.
Ott had been lying on the beach for about half an hour when a white male, this time described by witnesses as dressed in white tennis shorts, white T-shirt, and white tennis shoes, approached her and asked, “Excuse me, could you help me put my sailboat onto my car? I can’t do it by myself because I broke my arm.” Stanton, who had been watching Ott, heard the stranger’s line and thought to himself what a shame it was that he had just been aced out by this guy with his left arm in a sling.
Cynthia Baker, the witness sitting closest to Janice’s towel, also heard the stranger’s opening line and Ott’s response: “Sit down, let’s talk about it.” Stanton, however, having lost his shot with this woman, quickly lost interest, and tuned out.
The stranger said, “It’s up at my parents’ house in Issaquah.” When we compared witnesses’ comments, we noted that the good-looking injured man had apparently learned his lesson quickly and changed his strategy to address the concerns of the first person he tried to pick up. His experience with Mary Osmer had taught him that he must relay to his unsuspecting prey that they would have to leave the park. This man was a very quick study.
Janice Ott established common ground with the stranger quickly by saying, “Oh really? I live in Issaquah. Well, okay.” Then, as Janice put on her cutoffs and shirt, she said, “Under one condition, that I get a ride in the sailboat.”
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 2