The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Later that afternoon, Ted’s paranoia about discovery took over his personality in waves. Like a robot mechanically acting out its program, Bundy returned to check out the dump site to make sure nothing of his or hers had been left there. Strangely, he had the feeling—and half expected—that it had all been a dream, that Georgann Hawkins herself might not even be there.

  Retracing his route, Ted recovered most of the items he had thrown away except for one of her shoes. Might it still be in the parking lot where he clubbed Georgann and stuffed her into his car? He had to return to the crime scene to check and retrieve anything that might be found to connect him to the crime. Knowing, however, that police would be looking for someone in a car, Ted got on his bicycle and rode back to that parking lot in the U-district. Ted felt he was completely camouflaged now as he pedaled onto the lot, and that gave him the boost of confidence he needed to conduct his search in broad daylight. Nobody would know him. Nobody would recognize him. But he was in for a surprise, because there were Seattle police cars all over the campus by the time he got there. Just the sight of police in uniform walking around made him nervous, even though no one seemed to notice his presence and there were no police in the parking lot. He blended right into the group of people watching the police and surreptitiously scanned the site for any evidence. Amazingly enough he had become almost invisible, because the police were too busy looking over the layout of campus streets to pay attention to casual passersby, especially an all-American type on a bike. Now Ted had the advantage. He knew almost exactly where he had abducted his victim. The police didn’t even know there had been a violent abduction at the site. Ted was able to walk right to the spot where he’d parked, locate Georgann’s pierced earrings and the shoe on the ground, gather them up while no one was looking, and ride off. By securing for himself all the remaining evidence of the abduction, Ted had guaranteed that no one would connect him forensically to the scene. It was a feat so brazen that it astonishes police even today.

  But the incident still wasn’t over for Ted. Needing to satisfy his aching fascination with death, to feed his need for necrophilia that surged over him in chemical tidal waves like a craving for a narcotic, Ted returned to the Issaquah hillside three days later. This time he brought more tools for use when he had finished having sex with the corpse of Georgann Hawkins. Because he was still unconvinced that he was totally in the clear, he took the hacksaw he had brought and methodically sawed through the corpse’s neck just below the base of the skull. When he had severed the dried and bloodless skull completely from the victim’s torso, he carried it 50 feet up the roadway, where he buried it in the dirt and hoped that he had concealed forever her most identifiable characteristics—her teeth.

  As he had done with the arm-in-a-sling routine at Lake Sam, Bundy had again succeeded by feigning an injury, asking for help, killing his victim, and burying her body where no one would find it until he was long gone. Georgann Hawkins had been the ideal victim for Ted. She was in a perfectly secure setting only steps from her sorority house on a campus. Ted’s presentation was flawless. There were no witnesses. He had complete control of the crime scene. Nobody even knew a homicide had taken place until almost a year later. Ted had left Seattle by then and was in Utah, and there was no way to connect him to the crime, or so he thought. He had killed efficiently and thoroughly in the throes of his feral savagery and he had gotten away with it. Had that been his only crime, it might have been the “perfect” homicide.

  Taylor Mountain

  The rotary-dial telephone on my desk had an obnoxious ring, as if every incoming call were trumpeting its singular importance. This call happened to warrant its jarring alarm. It was the radio-room operator and he was very explicit. “You have a found skull off Highway 18. Two citizens will meet you where the power lines cross, four miles south of I-90.” What Roger and I had predicted about the Ted investigation was coming true: there was another significant skeletal remains discovery in a different location. We had a strong premonition that that would be the case, but we couldn’t prove why. We just had a feeling that the Issaquah site was only the beginning. There were missing girls and women from all over the Pacific Northwest who should have been discovered—dead or alive—by now. Our team’s major fear was that the expected body recovery site would be in another jurisdiction, leaving us no control over the crime scene processing and keeping key clues to the investigation out of our hands. We knew from prior experience that another agency’s investigators would pick up the surface remains and leave. Our team had developed a unique approach to this investigation, and unless our methods were followed, we were afraid we’d never catch this killer. It was becoming more clear that this killer couldn’t stop. He kept on killing and had to leave the bodies somewhere. The question was where. It turned out that some of them were on the slopes of Taylor Mountain.

  No ordinary police officer would understand the detail and on-scene planning that had been necessary for the recovery of evidence and body parts at the Issaquah scene. It had been King County’s first experience with such a site and our handling of it was somewhat flawed. Were we to have another body dump site to cover, we would be far better prepared to gather evidence. We had learned from Issaquah that there was a pattern established by small animals when they carry remains along animal trails away from the original dump site where the major decomposition takes place. Animals that tugged away a decomposing skull pulled at the remains as the skull was being dragged along the ground. At Issaquah, some teeth and a mandible, as well as the mass of hair, were dislodged and fell off along the trail. We learned that if we searched in logical directions along known animal trails after the discovery of the skull, we would discover the dislodged parts. We also had discovered that it was important to sift through the dirt along the animal trails for teeth, bullets, fingernails, and jewelry that had been dislodged from body parts. Human beings are more than stray bits of fingernail, matted hair, and gnawed-upon bones, and no one took pleasure in this search to reassemble the victims of the mysterious Ted. However, it had to be done if we were going to find the culprit, and this time we were prepared for Ted’s next site.

  It was March 2, 1975, a typical foggy and rainy Seattle day, and Roger Dunn and I were eastbound on I-90 past the Issaquah site. Eleven miles east of the city of Issaquah was the Highway 18 cut-off to the south, a major Seattle bypass to Tacoma. Because we were rising in elevation toward the gray, dismal clouds, the rain was pounding down hard on the hood of our car. Going south on Highway 18, it is desolate, bordered by woods on both sides; there are no houses, gas stations, or any other buildings, for that matter.

  The forestry students from Green River Community College who had found the bones while marking trees for a class project greeted us at the power line road in a fever of anticipation. They led us through a web of wet, slippery branches of vine maple. With every footfall, my still-degenerating knee burned with pain as the branches cracked beneath my steps and snapped back into the soles of my shoes. The foresters had tied red fluorescent tape to tree branches to mark our path. My first thought was that no person would carry a dead body in this far—the remains were over a thousand feet from the road. After what seemed like a never-ending trek through brush, we reached the area where the skull was resting. It was definitely human; no animal teeth had ever had the gleam of shiny dental work that this skull did. The skull lay on its left side, exposing a massive fracture to the right side of the cranium. At least an eight- by four-inch piece of skull bone was missing. As I looked at it, I thought the crack could have been caused by the teeth of gnawing, hungry animals. Soon I was to learn that no animal could have done this kind of damage to a human skull. Aside from this skull, we found no other bones in the immediate area.

  I could tell that the foresters had not touched the skull. The previous autumn’s fall of maple leaves filled the cranium and a spider’s web stretched over the jagged hole. It was lying quietly in a depression in the leafy surface of the ground. No body tissue s
eemed to be left. I didn’t need a forensic anthropologist to tell me that the skull had been there over five months.

  The dentition of the skull contained a pattern of silver fillings that were familiar to me. Since September 7, we had gathered all the missing-person reports of females throughout Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. With those records we had requested the dental charts of each victim. I had memorized the dental work detailed on over 15 of these charts and easily recognized the jawless expression of Brenda Carol Ball. My crude on-site identification was to be confirmed by a forensic odontologist three days later.

  We photographed the cranium from all angles and measured its position to two temporary triangulation stakes, which we set into the ground to mark the skull’s precise location as it would appear on a land survey. We carefully picked up the skull and preserved it in the position in which it was resting. Roger Dunn and I also collected the leaves and dirt that had been in the depression underneath the skull, hoping that if the skull had decomposed there, crime laboratory technicians would discover trace evidence, such as foreign hairs and fibers, that might belong to the killer. Since dusk was setting in, we decided to wait until the next day to resume our search for the remainder of the skeleton.

  With the identification of Brenda Ball’s skull, we did not immediately believe that we had made the first major skeletal discovery we had been hoping to find. Brenda’s disappearance was thought to be an isolated event that did not fit the mold of abductions such as those of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund or the other five coeds who had disappeared from the University of Washington and Oregon State University. Ball, white, 22 years old, 5 feet 3 inches tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, was last seen on May 31, 1974, at the Flame Tavern, five miles south of Seattle. She was wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck top with long sleeves, a shirt-style jacket, and brown cloglike wedge-heeled shoes. The Flame Tavern was a topless bar, known for the crowd of outlaw bikers it drew. Brenda, a hitchhiker and occasional drug user, was known to have dated male customers from the Flame on previous occasions.

  Everyone thought that Brenda had just taken off for a few days. Her mother would dispel that idea 16 days after her disappearance by claiming that she had never been absent for so long without calling home collect. Even so, no one believed that Brenda’s disappearance was connected to the deaths of Ott and Naslund or to the other missing coeds from the area. Months later, a subsequent investigation revealed that on the night of her disappearance Brenda had been dancing at the Flame Tavern and had left with a Ted look-alike who matched our description of him from Lake Sam, right down to the sling on his arm.

  The day after the initial discovery of Ball’s cranium, six German shepherd search dogs, their handlers, and I combed the Taylor Mountain site, hoping to find more bones. We met at the intersection of the power line road and Highway 18. Our first mission was to find the marked location of Ball’s skull and spread out from there, searching for the rest of her skeleton. I thought I’d be able to walk directly to the site. Unfortunately, a day earlier, I hadn’t paid much attention to the markers placed on trees by the foresters. Their red tags were too far apart, and the density of the forest made it difficult to determine where the next one would be. Suddenly, I was lost. The forest was a blizzard of vine maple branches dripping water from a recent rainfall, and we quickly became soaked to the skin. The dog handlers and I decided to split up. We all headed out in different directions, and whoever found the path first was to call out to the others.

  I had just walked down into a narrow hollow between two hillsides when I heard a handler yell that he had found the marked location about 25 yards away. The darkened forest was so thick that I couldn’t see him from where I was standing. As I began to stumble toward the sound of his voice, an unforgiving maple branch smacked my legs out from under me and down I went, face to the ground. With my hands firmly pushing against the wet, slimy leaves, I pushed myself up as far as my knees. By this time, I was reeling at the pain in my knee again and wishing I had never played basketball. My contact lenses were a blur. As fate would have it, 4 feet from my squinting eyes sat another cranium, obviously sunbleached and clean from exposure to the elements. It had been there a long time—a branch had grown through the opening in the facial bones of the skull. A 6-inch radial fracture extended up the center of the skull from its base. Without hesitation, I recognized the brilliant-white bridgework of Susan Elaine Rancourt, a coed missing since April 17, 1974, from Central Washington State College, which was over 150 miles away to the east.

  With embarrassing glee, I yelled to the others that I had found a cranium. I was sickened at the thought of how joyful I was. However, the evidence of another major skeletal discovery was unfolding, and I felt the weight of the world settle on my shoulders at the thought of finding more clues that would help me track this killer. The extent of this killer’s crimes was growing as more of the pieces of the puzzle came together.

  As the handlers rushed toward me with their eager search dogs sniffing the ground ahead of them, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t want them anywhere near this cranium. Dogs don’t care where they put their paws. Crucial evidence could be destroyed or altered if the dogs ran through this site. A basic tenet of Criminal Investigation 101 was racing through my head: protect the scene. But it was too late. Almost on cue, and certainly by accident, a dog’s paw struck the ground and a human jawbone erupted through the leafy surface. I yelled for everyone to stay back, but within a few seconds another dog walked across the leaves and dislodged another human jawbone. Then another dog stepped on another mandible. In stunned amazement, we all realized that a detailed search of the mountainside was required. At the very least, we had just discovered the remains of two people.

  While I drove to a telephone to break the news to Captain Nick Mackie, an ESAR dog handler specifically marked the area by running a string line due north of the quarter-sectional marker at the intersection of the power line road and Highway 18. Eleven hundred feet from the corner, the string line bisected the area of the bone find. Measuring at 90-degree angles off the string line, the remains were easily positioned on a diagram:

  Bone find #1, cranium (Ball’s), 1,010 feet in, 90 degrees west off string line number one, 65 feet

  Bone find #2, cranium (Rancourt’s), 1,105 feet in, 90 degrees east off string line number one, 22 feet

  Bone find #3, mandible, 1,098 feet in, 90 degrees offstring line number one, 20 feet, and so on

  We had begun to lay out the master search diagram of bones and other pieces of evidence.

  I informed Captain Mackie of the find. Naturally, he was surprised and not a little irritated that his lieutenant and sergeant had informed him that the initial discovery of bones was just an isolated incident and that nothing else would be found.

  Since it was late afternoon, Roger Dunn and I planned to meet ESAR personnel at the intersection the next morning to begin excavating Taylor Mountain for further evidence. On the following day, this once-quiet and obscure forest was alive with the sounds of ESAR commands and the growl of chain saws our search teams used to prune the ultra-dense forest. We had to get beneath the surface of the last leaf fall because that was where valuable evidence would be located. ESAR personnel raked through each ounce of soil for even the most minute traces of physical evidence. Each branch was evaluated for its forensic value. A meticulous shoulder-to-shoulder, hands-and-knees search of the mountainside, similar to that conducted at Issaquah, was under way. The searchers would sift through over 2,000 ounces of soil per day for five days. Since the Issaquah crime scene search techniques were a model for other searchers to follow, we had prearranged that ESAR supervisors would inform their other teams statewide of them, so that all ESAR personnel would become experienced at these evidence search techniques. By now, the local ESAR kids were more dedicated to and proficient at carefully brushing an area for evidence than a group of excited archaeologists.

  Detective Ted Forester was assigned to assis
t in evidence collection. Several weeks before, he had been investigating the double murder of an elderly couple. When he arrived at their home, he found the house in flames and, with the assistance of a firefighter, pushed the victims’ pickup to safety. Unfortunately, the processing of that arson scene ended after a long day and Forester had forgotten about the pickup truck and didn’t search it for evidence. Several days later, a newspaper reporter covering the story discovered the considerable amount of blood inside the pickup that Forester had overlooked. Detective Forester was sentenced to five days on the mountain with me not only as punishment but as a harsh lesson in what it takes to unearth evidence. Forester was a welcome addition to our team, since he was an accomplished woodsman and an expert with a chain saw.

  After the discovery of the skulls and mandibles our search finds were few and far between. The only human remains we discovered were on the only animal trail that ran along a small creek that meandered down the gentle slopes of Taylor Mountain. About 50 feet from the nearest vehicle access, we found the shattered mandible of Susan Rancourt, over 800 feet from her skull. We surmised that some animal must have dragged her skull into the dense forest, since the terrain was virtually impassable by any human being. About 10 feet from her mandible, ESAR kids found a small clump of blond hair. It was a miracle that this portion of the full hair mass was discovered at all, since the area was full of densely intertwined vine maples and blackberry bushes.

  At two P.M. on the third day, searchers who had begun walking slowly at three-foot intervals on a hillside adjacent to the one where we were finding most of the remains froze in their tracks. They had come upon a live explosive charge. As I approached the explosive, I could see another group of unexploded large ammunition rounds and rockets. The ESAR team had uncovered a dumping field created by a nearby explosives plant at the end of the dirt power line road that extended to the east from Highway 18. Employees at the plant had used the forest for their testing grounds. They had been informed we were conducting a ground search in hazardous territory but had failed to offer one word of warning. I was so infuriated that I closed access to the plant until the bomb squad cleared their pyrotechnic litter and our search was completed several days later. The dud rounds were very dangerous and been strewn over thousands of feet of hillside. The last thing I needed was for an ESAR kid to blow off a foot while searching. As if our job wasn’t difficult enough, now it was highly dangerous, too.