While it seemed practical at the time, assembling a team of one sergeant and two detectives from the Seattle Police Homicide/Robbery Unit and the contingent from King County was very counter-productive and short-lived. No one was ever clearly in charge and there were constantly conflicting opinions concerning the order of daily business. The task force eventually broke itself into two different groups—the Seattle police, who followed up the Healy and Hawkins investigative leads, and Roger and I, who covered the rest. That might have worked, except that none of us could get away from the incoming telephone calls long enough to investigate anything.
With the discovery of the remains on Taylor Mountain, information about the Ted investigation was the news media’s main focus. In response to this increased coverage, over 500 private citizens called each day of the first weeks of the task force’s existence to provide information about possible Ted suspects and suspicious circumstances. We were accomplishing less work that would lead to finding the killer because 99 percent of the telephone calls we received had nothing to do with Ted Bundy—unbeknownst to us, all the calls referring to Ted Bundy had been received by October 1974 and had long since been submerged under an ocean of paperwork. In retrospect, we would discover later in the investigation that there was nothing we were doing at that time that would get us closer to Ted Bundy.
By April 1, 1975, less than one month after the beginning of the task force, the Seattle police contingent was reassigned to their old duties, leaving the investigation of the Healy case in our hands. King County reassigned 2 more detectives to bring the total to 10 officers on the task force. This reorganization would ultimately help the task force do the job it had been formed to do.
However, when the reorganization took place, we were still floundering. Our archives of files had expanded, spilling out of our filing cabinets and across the desks. The mounting tip sheets and other police reports had become too clumsy to be useful and were indicative of a creeping crisis that would soon overwhelm the task force detectives. Given the thousands of pages of files and the confused memories of detectives from which most of the meaningful details had long since evaporated, it became impossible to find anything quickly. Sergeant Schmitz continued to organize our files as if he were driven by inner voices, but he was constantly in danger of falling behind. Many investigators had contributed all kinds of paperwork, none of which was indexed for easy retrieval. It was nearly impossible to find out if someone else was working on a particular suspect without leafing through piles of investigative files.
Eventually, Schmitz provided priceless assistance by devising a master indexing system that enabled investigators to find certain types of information quickly. He took all the tip sheets and information about suspects and filed it, alphabetically, by the person’s name who provided the information. He created a file for tips that were turned in anonymously and were indexed by the suspect’s name. Additionally, he made out 3- × 5-inch index cards and filed them by the name of a suspect, cross-referencing the card with the name of the caller on the bottom.
Now, for the first time, if a detective wanted further information about a suspect, he looked at the caller’s name on the bottom of the card and checked that name in the tip sheet file. Schmitz’s filing system immediately uncovered a critical time and paper management problem that would continue to bedevil most subsequent serial murder investigations—too many people calling in and providing useless information. One such person called in over 600 times. If we had employed Schmitz’s system from the beginning, we would have caught this joker by the second call, preventing him from interrupting our investigation further.
Even though we finally felt organized, we still had volumes of paperwork to analyze. However, the dilemma of how to deal with thousands of names collected during the investigation fired Schmitz’s imagination. By mid-April 1975, he had sat in his airless corner monotonously filling out over 3,000 filing cards when an idea struck him. He created what became known as the computer name-matching program. His idea arose out of a gnawing resentment of the futility of the investigative procedures employed to date. We were collecting names, but we had no meaningful way to analyze the weight and significance of the names we had. Thus, Schmitz became fascinated by the prospect of categorizing the numerous lists of suspect names into various aspects that were important to the investigation.
This system gained supporters soon after Schmitz checked it with the county’s computer experts and got their approval on it. The computer guys welcomed the challenge of developing an untried application for the computer in the field of criminal investigation. Schmitz then convinced Captain Mackie to assign Sergeant Bill Murphy to the task force to act as our liaison with System Services.
Unfortunately, Sergeant Schmitz had not yet reckoned with the stolidly unresponsive nature of the King County police’s administrative bureaucracy. He soon discovered that at least in Mackie’s view, organizing the files was not the only duty he had been given. Even though he was doing useful things for our investigation, his perception of his role on the task force conflicted with Captain Mackie’s. The captain said he originally assigned Schmitz to supervise the investigation, not just organize the files. Clerks organize, sergeants supervise, and captains rule. So, by May 29, Schmitz had to content himself with an administrative transfer to the Communications Center. He would not be around to see the results of this project to which he had contributed so much. Schmitz would always remain one of my favorite associates since the nature of his contribution to the investigation far surpassed what police sergeants are normally expected to do. Even today, only a few people realize exactly what Sergeant Schmitz accomplished.
The Northwest Missing andMurdered Women Conference
By May 1975, there was a sense among task force members that our Ted killer had moved on to a new location, because we had not had any similar disappearances in the King County area since July 1974, 10 months earlier. We also believed, based on our premise that Ted was a traveler, that our murder cases were probably related to similar murders in other jurisdictions. So we decided to examine the murder cases in other jurisdictions, hoping to glean suspect information from them that might have a bearing upon our investigations. Maybe one of the locations we investigated would hold Ted’s signature multiple-body dump site.
With this aim in mind, Roger Dunn attended a conference in May 1975 in Boise, Idaho, that highlighted missing and murdered females from seven western states and British Columbia. All the investigators were faced with a number of extraordinary and still-unsolved cases of murdered females. Fortunately for us, there were attendees from Colorado and Utah who were investigating single, not multiple, murder cases that had occurred in October 1974—the cases of Laura Aime and Melissa Smith—and, from January 1975, the Caryn Campbell case. Those murders would eventually be tied to Ted Bundy, even though a firm connection had not been made at that time owing to the extreme difficulty of comparing the aged and significantly decomposed skeletal remains in Washington to the fresh discoveries in Utah and Colorado. Time and nature are great levelers and make most forensic comparisons like the ones that confronted us close to impossible.
What was most interesting and troubling about all of the cases described at the conference was that there was only one instance in which a signature multiple-body recovery site was located, like those at Taylor Mountain and Issaquah. It was 700 miles away from King County in rural Sonoma County, California. From December 1971 through March 1972, Sonoma County authorities recovered the bodies of four nude females, ages 12 to 19, at this one site located beside a steep precipice that bordered a country road that wound into the woods of rural Sonoma far away from any towns or villages. Two were skeletal remains from which the cause of death had been wiped away by time, and two were recent kills who had been strangled. It seemed all of the bodies were dumped from a vehicle onto the same hillside from the side of the remote county road. Then another nude female victim was found at the same location in July 1973. This surprised t
he investigators, because the killer had returned to a previously discovered dump site. On the strength of modus operandi alone, the Sonoma series appeared strikingly similar to the Ted cases, but we could not find any common suspect whom we could link to Seattle and Sonoma County. So, frustrating as it was, we had to be content simply with monitoring each other’s cases and nothing more.
Lieutenant Bill Baldridge and Detective Mike Fisher, who were investigating the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen, Colorado, stayed in close contact with our task force. Their gut feeling, which would ultimately prove true, was that their murder was connected to the Ted cases. Therefore, anytime they discovered a suspect who had ties to Seattle they called us. When we started using our computer tracking system in the investigation, we included in the lists of names all those people who were registered guests at the Snow-mass Inn in Aspen, where Campbell was last seen. While we were communicating and sharing valuable information with Colorado at the detective level, there was never a movement at the administrative level to begin a multistate investigation team prior to Bundy’s arrest in Utah. This made it difficult for us, because at the investigator level everything was required to stay informal—and nothing was funded. Had we begun a formal multistate investigation, the money would have been there to allow us to travel and to set up joint facilities to pursue the case.
Meanwhile, through June 1975 Roger looked into the many murders in the Northwest, trying to uncover those with any similarity to the Ted cases. He collected 94 homicide reports on unsolved murders of females between January 1969 and May 1975. Entry after entry on his follow-up report read the same—a gruesome account of carnage like what befell Beverly Jenkins: age 16, 5′6″, 125 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, last seen 5-25-72 at 0300 hours in Springfield, Oregon, found 6-5-72 alongside roadway in Douglas County, Oregon, asphyxiated, throat slit, nude, with branches over the body. The body count of murdered females during this time was incomprehensible by rational standards. What was out there killing these young women? The police reports offered little help. Each investigation was as shallow as it was inconclusive—there was no common suspect among them. There was no suspect, period.
Too Many Teds
While Roger was busy collecting cases involving murdered females at outdoor locations, I was assisting other detectives in the investigations of a steady stream of white males who wanted nothing more than to be eliminated from the suspect list for the Ted killer. It was difficult then for any male in his early twenties, 5 feet 10 inches tall, medium build, with dark blond or light brown hair, who drove a VW bug, and whose first name was Ted to have any social life whatsoever. Those same men were getting dubious looks while at work and anywhere else they chose to go. There were hundreds of Teds out there, too many to count. Every Ted suspect we contacted cooperated and opened up their lives to us. Some even called us first because they wanted to be officially eliminated from the active Ted list. They gladly handed over checking account records, credit card receipts, employment records, medical records, vacation travel vouchers, and anything else that accounted for their time. One by one, suspected Teds from the master list accounted for their whereabouts on the critical days when the victims were abducted and were eliminated as the possible murderer. There was only one Ted we were after, and he still remained at large and invisible to our investigators.
While the true Ted hid, Ted serial killer impersonators popped right out of the woodwork. I will never forget the morning I arrived at the office to find five strange men sitting on the benches in the reception area of the Detective Division. There was nothing outstanding about them. All had varying shades of hair color, one was 6 feet 6 inches, and another was 5 feet 1. As I passed by the receptionist, she released the electronic door lock and motioned for me to come around so she could talk to me. She informed me that all five were waiting to see me. Unbelievably, they had each confessed to the receptionist that they were the famous Ted killer.
I invited them all in to a large interview room together and had each one introduce himself to the others. I told them when they decided among themselves which one was really the Ted suspect to knock on the door and I would return to book him in jail. The five Teds each replied that they would return to their therapists for treatment. Their respective psychotherapists, for whatever reasons, had told each of them to confess to the police as part of their treatment programs. This was really great, I thought; not only were we trying to identify the real Ted, we were assisting in the therapy of the entire Seattle psychiatric-patient community. As I looked on the calendar, I noticed that it was five days before the full moon, the monthly astronomical marker that indeed signals psychics, psychos, and those self-ordained with extrasensory perception to contribute clutter and unusable information in the case files. The unusual occurrence was the talk of the task force. I probably just should have booked them all and been done with the whole case.
As months dragged by, the investigation into the Ted cases was pared down. It was simply costing too much for the county to fund the task force, so it was cut back even at the risk of slowing down efficiency of the investigation. The Grisly Business Unit, as we were referred to by the department, was reduced to only a fraction of its former size and was disbanded by June 1, 1975. This left the county’s sustained commitment to the case at less than one year. Shortly thereafter, even its former members stopped talking about it.
Roger and I were left alone to carry the flag; even so, we were determined to make progress in the investigation. Captain Mackie assigned us two additional police officers who had been ordered to light duty—one had a broken leg and the other had a cast on his little finger. They were to man our telephones. I was designated the case coordinator or supervisor, but my official rank, for pay purposes, was only detective. Captain Mackie had become so disappointed with the lack of progress by every supervisor he had assigned to the case, he chose not to put a certified sergeant or lieutenant in charge. Relatively little administrative control was needed in the resulting scale-down to a small investigative team, he believed. We reported directly to Captain Mackie anyway, putting him in the ultimate role of supervisor, which was what he probably wanted.
At first, we conducted a weeklong examination of the circumstances within each Ted murder case, as tradition dictated. But that served only to complicate the entire investigation. Realizing this, we changed our methods and began to approach the overall investigation as a united process. Instead of eight separate cases, we had one case that consisted of eight crimes. Now, we asked, what could be done for the investigation as a whole? This, it turned out, would be the only way we would ever get to the bottom of the Ted murders.
Our strategy was threefold and it was roughly based on what two full-time detectives could be expected to accomplish in one year. First, the Lynda Healy murder case was the apparent beginning of our series, and after looking through the case file again, we realized that the initial investigation into her disappearance had been inadequate. In light of this, we decided to start with day one of her case and exhaust every possible lead, just as if we were starting from scratch on a case that had never been investigated. There was the possibility that the Healy case was the murderer’s first and that he may have made some mistakes not previously uncovered, like killing an acquaintance and thus making himself traceable.
Second, 3,500 persons were snitched off or investigated as suspects during the course of 11 months. Some subjects had apparently merited packets containing extensive follow-up investigations, while others had seemingly warranted only minor criminal records checks. We examined every file for each suspect to determine if he had been thoroughly investigated. In addition, we decided that those who had been eliminated as suspects would be reinspected to assure ourselves that conclusive elimination procedures were used. It was our gut feeling that the killer was already in our files hiding beneath all of the paperwork. We would later find out that this instinct was right.
Finally, our third strategy, albeit nontraditional, was to con
tinue the effort started by Sergeant Bob Schmitz to use King County’s computer to cross-check names from one list of suspects against another. During the investigation, many lists of potential suspects were gathered from various sources. We had over 30 lists, with one list containing over 41,000 names and many others with well over 1,000. Manually cross-checking the lists was now virtually impossible because of the amount of information we had.
This action plan impressed Captain Mackie because never before had anyone offered him a logical, absolutely reasonable course of action for these cases. Until this time, we had conducted the investigation somewhat haphazardly. Owing to the volumes of leads on the multiple cases, we had meandered, wandering aimlessly from case to suspect with no overall direction. What we had now was a method he could understand and for which he could expect weekly progress reports. He was so enamored of our proposal that he authorized us to select a detective willing to join us in our search for the phantom we had nicknamed the “angel of decay.” We soon found our prospects limited by our own requirements for the person who would hold the post. We wanted someone interested in the case, but most of the detectives in the department had been turned off by the nit-picking aspects of following up on a killer who had already left the area. Only one person really showed any interest in the job—Detective Kathleen McChesney.
McChesney had been frustrated at being assigned only jobs that the male police executives in the department felt a woman could handle. They had assigned her to the check unit, a paper-shuffling experience at best, and she wanted out in the worst way. Luckily for us, Kathy was no average detective by any means. Her zest for detective work was unending, and she eventually earned a Ph.D. and went on to get a job as the FBI’s top female agent. Her ability to handle the small details and enthusiasm for a difficult investigation helped us solve the Bundy cases.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 8