The Healy Investigation
Roger, Kathy, and I began by turning over every stone in the Healy investigation, starting from day one of the original case. We treated this as if we were the primary detectives on a call that had just come in. The first solid clue we found was the arrest of Gary Addison Taylor for murder in Houston, Texas. He had lived across the street from Vonnie Stuth, who disappeared while apparently cooking dinner in November of 1974 and was thought to have been one of our Ted victims. Vonnie lingered on the newspaper’s list of Ted victims until Taylor told police where to find her body on a property that he owned in Enumclaw, Washington, 45 miles southeast of Seattle. Taylor had shot Stuth in the head with a 9-mm automatic pistol. The cause of death was markedly different than in the Ted cases and thus set Vonnie apart from the rest of the victims.
In spite of the differences of this murder from the other suspected Ted killings, Taylor interested us as a suspect since he had killed more than one female. At the time of his arrest, he had many keys in his pocket. He didn’t explain where they were from. We immediately contacted Lynda’s parents and the owner of the U-district house from which she had disappeared. His name was also Taylor. Was Gary Taylor related? Just one of the many coincidences of this case that was just that, only a coincidence. We retrieved the house keys, car keys, and keys to other locks belonging to Lynda. They did not match the keys in Taylor’s possession. Roger eventually eliminated Taylor as a suspect by placing him out of state at the time of our murders. But the investigation into Gary Taylor still held some value.
The matching of a victim’s keys to keys found on a possible suspect was an angle into the case that had not previously been considered, and it opened up a new path in the investigation. It gave us the idea to collect duplicates of all the keys that each of the victims would have had in their possession at the time of their disappearances.
Kathy McChesney’s first job was to interview Karen Sparks, a woman who had been almost fatally bludgeoned and was in a coma for six months. On January 6, 1974, she was asleep in her bed when the attack occurred. Her memory had been impaired by the blows and she could remember only what happened on the previous day. She didn’t recall seeing her attacker. Her address at the time was 4325 8th Avenue NE in the U-district, a stone’s throw from 4143 12th Avenue NE, Ted Bundy’s residence at the time of the assault. We visited Sparks’s residence and noted the floor plan of the house. After seeing it and comparing it to Lynda Healy’s residence at 5517 12th Avenue NE, we felt that Sparks was a living victim of the neighborhood killer.
While Kathy and Roger began contacting the former roommates and friends of Lynda Healy, I contacted the Seattle police evidence room to look at the items in evidence that were collected at the time of Healy’s disappearance. I signed a temporary evidence removal form for 74-5953, Healy’s missing-person case number. Much to my disbelief, I was informed by a stuttering evidence clerk that all of the material taken from the Healy residence had been destroyed. He said that if an owner could not be found and a case was not labeled HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION or marked for court, the evidence was routinely destroyed after six months. Big mistake! I was pissed! I asked if anyone had tried to contact the owner. If so, who? Who authorized the destruction? But I was getting no answers. The file tracking on that evidence was marked DESTRUCTION APPROVED. The authorization signature was indecipherable. Good thing I couldn’t find him. This time I was ready to kill. Maybe the clerk felt the need to look for a new job because I threatened to go directly to the chief of police unless I learned who had approved the destruction of evidence for an active, open homicide investigation.
As I cooled off, I understood totally how such a thing could happen. The police officers who oversaw investigations were people after all and were bound to make mistakes. I turned and walked away from the counter, extremely disconsolate. Crime laboratory technicians would not get the opportunity to examine the only case with possible physical evidence that could be linked to the killer. Would any of the fibers, hairs, and other trace evidence on Healy’s bedding have similar characteristics to anything we found at Issaquah and Taylor Mountain? We would never know.
As I reached the outer door, I saw a pile of plastic and paper evidence bags heaped next to it with a sign above them that read ITEMS FOR DESTRUCTION. I thought to myself that this was probably where Healy’s former belongings sat before they left the department for good. To this day, I don’t know what prompted me, but I walked over to the pile. Case number 74-5953 flashed at me like a neon sign. I reached down and pulled out bags containing Healy’s nightgown, sheet, and pillow. As soon as the evidence clerk realized that I had discovered the treasure, he rushed over and laid claim to it. He said he would have to get an authorization slip signed by Homicide for me to take the goods. Give me a break! Five minutes before, the evidence had been destroyed, as far as he was concerned. Now he had to get approval for me to take out the trash?
Eventually, after checking out the items in evidence according to department procedure, I delivered Healy’s belongings and the photographs of her room to Kay Sweeney, our crime lab expert. Sweeney suggested that we retrieve as many items that were in Healy’s room at the time of her murder as we could. Maybe someone had packed up all her stuff and hadn’t touched it since the crime. We noticed in the crime scene photographs that her photos had been pinned on the wall above the headboard of her bed. It appeared as though some were askew and, from the empty spaces, that some were missing from their place on the wall. We figured they might have been dislodged and fallen down between the wall and the bed during the assault. If so, we wanted to process those for latent fingerprints. The crime scene photos didn’t show the floor, so we didn’t know if there was a rug, which is often a magnet for the kind of physical evidence—hair or fibers—we were in search of. As it turned out, there was a rug.
Healy’s friends and relatives were now the focus of intense investigation. We hoped they’d provide information about suspects as well as some physical evidence from the crime scene. Understandably, the family members were suspicious of our queries, since no one had been that interested during the initial investigation. They thought we had something since we were asking probing questions. We didn’t. We were fishing for that all-important tip, the one that would lead us to the solution to the case.
Healy’s housemates were an untapped gold mine of information. One roommate who had let Lynda borrow the rug had retrieved it from Healy’s apartment after the crime and had given it to her father. He had rolled it up and placed it in a storage closet. Lucky for us, he had never bothered to clean it. So when we asked him for it, he simply turned it over in the same condition it was right after the crime, and Kay Sweeney quickly figured out which part had been underneath Healy’s bed. We found several light brown human hairs in the rug that did not belong to Lynda or her friends. We couldn’t wait to compare them to control samples from the likely suspect. We felt empowered at finally having the possibility of placing a live offender in Lynda’s room.
A different roommate told us that Lynda was not having her period at the time of the assault. This was a key point of information since the investigators handling the initial interview over a year before led her to think that they believed the blood found on Lynda’s bed was menstrual blood. If so, it might have explained the apparent police disinterest in Lynda’s possible abduction. Because they assumed Lynda Healy was possibly having her period at the time of her disappearance, they couldn’t figure out why anyone would kidnap her—they assumed no kidnapper would want to have sex with her. This, as it turned out, was a false assumption and no excuse at all for their failure to pursue the matter.
This same former roommate eventually provided very enlightening testimony after Bundy was publicized as the Ted killer. She had been a roommate of Bundy’s cousin, who was friendly with Lynda Healy. Thus, there was a connection between Bundy and Healy that meant that her murder might not have been a “stranger murder” but a murder committed by someone actu
ally stalking a victim he knew. The possibility of a close association between Bundy and Healy was so strong that it could well have provided the means to catch Bundy even if he had not been identified in Utah or a suspect in the Colorado murder cases.
The friends of Lynda Healy whom we were able to contact were also very cooperative. They had not been pressed for details about Lynda by the Seattle homicide cops and had a lot of helpful information they were willing to pass on to us. But it was a struggle at this late date to locate transient students who had been friends and neighbors, because many had long since left the university. Even though these students were difficult to locate, they were easy to eliminate as suspects since they accounted for their time and cooperated fully with our investigation.
We also interviewed Healy’s professors. We found that she was in classes with as many as 400 students. We subpoenaed university records for her transcripts and ultimately obtained the rosters of students from each one of her classes. We followed this same procedure for the investigations of all of the missing college coeds. Those lists of students became part of the lists of names we entered into the county’s computer and used to narrow down our list of suspects.
Healy’s class rosters became instrumental in connecting her to Ted Bundy because his name appeared with hers on three separate class rosters, two of which were independent study classes with the same advisor. So close and yet so far. At the time we obtained these we didn’t notice the coincidence. Bundy was only one of thousands of names in our files.
Next, I arranged for an appointment to meet Lynda’s parents at their home. The Healys were extremely cooperative, yet cautious. They were wondering why there should be all the fuss now about Lynda’s disappearance and they were suspicious just as Lynda’s friends had been. Once we explained that the Seattle police had turned the Healy investigation over to us since Lynda’s remains were found in King County, they were more than willing to answer our questions. We explained to them that we were starting all over again as if the crime had just been committed.
The Healys let me go through Lynda’s belongings from her university basement room. I checked the photographs that were in the police photograph of the wall in Lynda’s room. I placed them in their exact position, replicating the mosaic pattern on the wall as they appeared in the crime scene photos. Finding the photos the police had retrieved from the floor after the crime, I processed them for latent fingerprints and found none. We examined each of Lynda’s written records, noting dates and times she was in certain places. For instance, her checking-account records revealed that on the day she was last seen she had cashed a check for groceries at the U-district Safeway store. Much later, after our investigation focused on Bundy, we found that he also had cashed a check at the same store on the very day Lynda disappeared. This raised many questions in my mind. Could he have followed her home from the store? Might he have been silently stalking her for months on the campus as their paths crisscrossed? Might she have become an object of deadly passion for him from the time that his cousin was her roommate? How many parties had they attended together? How many times had he looked across at her during a large lecture or seen her coming and going from their independent study classes? How much and for how long was the image of the beautiful Lynda Healy burning into Bundy’s brain? Had they been at all friendly? Had he tried to date her? Had he been rebuffed? Our Healy investigation had helped us out immensely just by raising these new questions about our killer. Undoubtedly, when we received the call that Bundy was a suspect in murders of females in Utah, the investigation of Healy’s case would pay even greater dividends and make part one of our investigative strategy a success.
The 100 Best Ted Suspects
Our second strategy for the overall Ted investigation was to review the investigative files of about 3,500 suspects and prioritize the top 100 for further inquiry. We felt that within a one-year time frame three detectives could investigate and eliminate 100 suspects. The first criterion used as a basis to determine who qualified for the top 100 was the physical description of the suspect and VW Beetle at Lake Sam and Ellensburg. If a particular suspect and the cars available to him didn’t match, he was deprioritized. The next criterion used was a psychological profile of the offender assembled by a team of two psychologists and a psychiatrist. Their profile suggested that our suspect was most likely a white male who was not psychotic. So if someone snitched off a someone who was psychotic, that person was also placed on the back burner. The last criterion was for us to inspect the specific reasons why a particular person was eliminated. If the elimination procedures were conclusive, such as if the person was in prison during the murders, the person would not be investigated again. However, if the elimination of a name was weak, then the name was brought back for further examination. This was a catchall category that allowed us to sift through the list one more time to make sure that we included all the names of possible suspects.
The inadequate organization of our case files made the review of all our suspects next to impossible. Traditional detective follow-up reports were written in chronological narratives. If this method was followed it would mean that in a 50-page report, any investigation of one person could be scattered throughout the document. One detective might have investigated 40 different suspects, intermingling separate entries about all of them in the same report. We defeated this problem by cutting and pasting all activities associated with one suspect into its very own case jacket. Our offices soon looked like a first-grade classroom, with paper clippings everywhere. But after a week of reorganization, we were able to reconstruct the logic of the suspect entries and assess each suspect’s file.
Alphabetically, the file marked THEODORE ROBERT BUNDY was seventh, and when we opened it for the first time since assembling it, the contents were a real surprise to all of us. No one had ever heard of any of the other investigators or the media talking about him. He was initially investigated by Detective Randy Hergesheimer, who had reported that Bundy had first come to the police’s attention when his Seattle girlfriend called the police in October of 1974 after she read in her hometown newspaper that female murders were occurring in the state of Utah. She reported that her boyfriend, Ted, had left Seattle to attend the University of Utah School of Law and that she had noticed several other similarities between her Ted and the suspect killer’s profile. Ted had a tan VW bug, and she specifically remembered that on July 14 he returned to her house in a bad mood, angrily switching her ski rack from his VW to hers. She recalled this day specifically because they were supposed to go out for a nice dinner and he begged off. He finally relented and took her and her daughter for a hamburger. To convince the police that her story was credible, she claimed to have found a sack containing female underwear in his apartment. She said he was mad when she confronted him with it. Trying to further interest investigators, she said that Ted left Seattle at the same time the murders stopped there. She finally came to the office and turned over three pictures of Ted, which demonstrated the chameleon that he really was. None of the witnesses could pick him out of a photo display of suspects. However, Hergy appeased Ted’s girlfriend by calling the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department and providing Ted Bundy’s name to them as a suspect. It would be 10 months before Detective Ben Forbes’s record of Hergy’s call would prove crucial in identifying Ted Bundy as the Ted killer.
Within Ted Bundy’s case jacket was a record of his former psychology professor reporting him as a Ted suspect look-alike in September 1974. Another significant hit! This same professor was Lynda Healy’s mentor. Also, an anonymous caller provided Bundy’s license number to his VW as a possible suspect vehicle. Judging from the age of the anonymous caller’s record, the call came in sometime in July 1974, along with several thousand other calls. Thus, three separate individuals thought it important to call in a report of Ted Bundy for some reason. The information contained in our Bundy file qualified him as one of our top 100 candidates for further investigation.
When the cal
l came in from Utah, Ted Bundy’s packet was second in the basket, ready to be pursued. To have painstakingly sorted through every paper in over 3,500 files, prioritized the top 100 suspects, and have Ted Bundy in the group told us our second strategy for investigation had worked.
Computer-Assisted Investigation
To some degree, the third strategy, sorting our lists of suspects with the help of a computer, was totally experimental. Numerous lists of names had been gathered at various stages of the investigation. The reasons for obtaining a particular list evolved from one aspect or another of the investigation. For example, a police administrator once believed that the killer must have been incarcerated in a mental institution and had just recently been released. This particular administrator surmised from the horrible crimes that only someone who was crazy would commit them. Therefore, he ordered a detective to retrieve names of all the persons who had been released from Washington State mental wards over the last 10 years. The detective returned with a computer printout of over 5,000 names. We didn’t believe in this theory at all; therefore, we used the list to eliminate someone who was reported as a suspect. Anyone who was on the list was not immediately investigated because we didn’t believe that our killer had a recorded history of mental problems. To have supported such a theory would have undermined our fundamental premise that a card-carrying psycho could not have smooth-talked Ott and Naslund out of their lives. In the amount of time that the psycho would have spent with them, both would have noticed his unusual demeanor and would have picked up that he was not functioning with both oars in the water. In any event, the mental patient list was one of many false lists.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 9