We had just begun our own independent investigation into Ted Bundy’s background when the Seattle newspapers ran a front-page story implicitly linking the Utah Ted with the King County Ted. Whereas the Seattle police denied, for the record, that they were investigating Ted Bundy as a suspect in the King County abductions, Captain Mackie of the King County Sheriff’s Department refused to eliminate Bundy from consideration. Actually, we had been much further along in our piecing together the Ted puzzle than either Captain Mackie or anyone on the task force was willing to reveal. In fact, we were so interested in the connections among the Utah, Colorado, and Washington cases that Kathy McChesney, Roger Dunn, and I immediately began separate inquiries into tips and information from these different locations that were in Bundy’s file.
Liz Kendall
Within a week after the call from Ben Forbes, Kathy McChesney had made contact with Liz Kendall. Kendall called after Kathy had spoken with Bundy’s former landlady. By 10:15 that same morning, Kendall sat across from Kathy in the task force office and began to unfold her story. She explained her general misgivings about Bundy and then went into detail. As Kendall described Bundy’s movements from Seattle to Utah and between Seattle and Colorado, it became obvious to McChesney why Kendall had first reported her fiancé to Randy Hergesheimer. It was also obvious why Hergesheimer had followed up the lead with Ben Forbes in Utah.
Liz Kendall told Detective McChesney that she and Ted had met at the Sandpiper Tavern in the U-district during a damp September six years ago, in 1969. Since then, they had broken up once for a couple of weeks while he was dating another girl he had met at a mental health center where he was working at the time, but they had gotten back together.
Kendall went on to say that Ted had held a number of jobs, including one at a medical supply firm called Pedline. Liz remembered that she’d been concerned about some plaster of Paris that she saw in his room during July of the previous year when the papers reported a guy in a cast who had been seen at Lake Sammamish at about the time two women were abducted. Liz Kendall told Kathy that she knew Ted had been to Lake Sammamish at that time. He had shown up at her house dressed in a T-shirt on Sunday, July 14, while she was getting ready to go to church. They had gotten into a fight and Ted went home. When Ted returned to her house that evening, he was wearing a gray turtleneck and long pants and complained to her that he wasn’t feeling well. In spite of that fact, however, Ted took the ski rack off his VW and put it back on her VW before taking her out to dinner.
Liz said she also remembered seeing a stolen television in Bundy’s apartment and stolen stereo equipment around that time as well. She also saw a pair of crutches, Ace bandages, and medical plaster. All of these things aroused her suspicions about Ted, especially after the series of abductions and murders had been reported in the Salt Lake City area shortly after he went to Utah to attend law school.
For the next few weeks Liz Kendall’s conversation with Kathy McChesney continued and the task force investigation into Bundy’s movements became more intense. He was our number-one suspect. We were in contact not only with Salt Lake City on an almost daily basis as they pursued their leads into the missing women’s cases in Utah, but also with Colorado authorities who were investigating the homicide in Aspen. In addition, we were following up leads that showed that one of Bundy’s acquaintances in the Ellenburg, Washington, area had been registered in a jogging class with the missing Susan Rancourt. It was all circumstantial, but, for the first time in over a year, the leads were there for us to follow.
Three months into our investigation of Ted Bundy, we had encountered nothing in Ted’s history or the pattern of his whereabouts that would have derailed our efforts, so the case was still on track. We were working 16-hour days, following every lead and tip that had been compiled. The web of circumstances identifying Ted case file #7 as the prime suspect closed tighter and tighter around Bundy. At every juncture and with each new piece of information, he became a stronger suspect. There was nothing we turned up that eliminated him from consideration, and the only negatives—people who failed to identify him—eventually turned out to be positives. For every one of his friends who had only laudatory things to say about Ted, we found three acquaintances who questioned his every move. As we inched forward in the shadows of the Utah and Colorado cases, an outsider would have thought we would have been exuberant. Yet we were still frustrated and our patience was wearing thin because even with mounting evidence, we had not made contact with Bundy. Both the extensive news media coverage of Bundy—they had linked Ted to the Seattle cases in their stories—and Bundy’s lawyer in Utah kept us away from Bundy himself even though contact with a prime suspect is routine protocol for homicide investigators. Then the Utah case broke open.
On October 15, 1975, after he had been arrested in the Carol DaRonch kidnapping, the Utah police searched Ted’s VW and found a piece of hair. This discovery became for us another ironic twist of luck that we couldn’t have planned for. Ted had expected the search, of course, because he knew what the police procedure would be if he was caught. Therefore, he had carefully cleaned the inside of his car as thoroughly as any car had ever been cleaned. His shock can only be imagined when he learned four months later that the one area of the car that he’d forgotten about—the long, spindly stick-shift lever of his VW—had wrapped around it a pubic hair from Utah murder victim Melissa Smith, Police Chief Smith’s daughter. And in the trunk of the VW, police located and forensics identified a hair from the head of Colorado murder victim Caryn Campbell. How many other clues had been scoured away by the meticulous Ted Bundy? We’ll never know, but the presence of Campbell’s hair formed the basis for the eventual murder charges in Colorado.
We were still very wary of contacting Ted and his attorney, John O’Connell, because of their aggressiveness in defending the Utah kidnapping charge that had been filed. We didn’t make formal contact with Ted right away when he was in Seattle after his release on bail because of the presence of the news media. As soon as Ted showed his face in public, camera-laden journalists were right there to record it. There were actually two primary reasons for our not pursuing Bundy publicly with this kind of press attention. First, there was precious little we could do to get Ted to focus on our questions while defending himself against reporters’ questions about the Utah case. Second, Captain Mackie had already gone on record dismissing Bundy as a suspect in the King County Ted cases.
Encounter with Ted
The Seattle Police Department’s quick October 1975 denial of the task force’s interest in Ted was a clear, although technically accurate, example of public disinformation, but it had a good purpose. On the one hand, Captain Nick Mackie didn’t want to give the media a suspect to pursue until that suspect was the prime one. As far as Captain Mackie was concerned, Ted wasn’t the prime suspect until the task force named him. We weren’t about to name him too soon and blow our whole investigation. Thus, Bundy simply remained Ted #7 until we had all the loose ends tied up. Furthermore, had Mackie mentioned Ted’s name as a possibility, Ted might have been far more defensive about his dealings in Seattle than he actually had been. We needed an over-confident Ted, not a defensive Ted, because overconfidence breeds mistakes, and that’s just what we needed our Ted to make in order catch him.
As it turned out, disinformation is probably the best way to lure a serial killer out into the open, because serial killers carefully read the newspaper accounts of their crimes. Going public with our suspicions about Bundy would have focused media attention on us. We would have had to have fed the media constantly to keep their hunger for news satisfied, and that would have tipped Bundy to what leads we had and where we were getting them from. Even more important, I was to find out years later, was that in our reluctance to pursue Ted aggressively in the first weeks after he was picked out of a Salt Lake City line-up, we had inadvertently established a level of trust with Bundy that would remain until his execution took place years later in Florida. Because of Utah Det
ective Ben Forbes’s aggressive pursuit of Bundy and the perseverance of Colorado’s Mike Fisher, Bundy was determined to give neither man the satisfaction of full face-to-face “deathbed” confessions to all the crimes he was suspected of having committed. He felt these men hounded him and that he was superior to them because he had escaped their custody. However, he did confess to the Caryn Campbell murder in Aspen and to the Julie Cunningham disappearance from Vail, Colorado, to Mike Fisher and Vail Detective Matt Lindvall. He confessed to Detective Dennis Couch the eight murders he committed in Utah.
But our relationship with Bundy was different. We were laid-back, because we always assumed that after Utah and Colorado our time with Bundy would come. We had more background information on Bundy than the Colorado and Utah police did and our investigation actually held the key answers to the entire Bundy case. In fact, even by mid-November 1975 we were confident that we had our man. But whereas we were convinced, proving his guilt in court and convincing a skeptical press would be a different matter. In successive news stories, Ted Bundy was portrayed as the good-looking, aspiring law student and friend to Republican politicos around Washington State. Every time I read that another of his acquaintances couldn’t believe he was a brutal killer and that the police definitely had the wrong guy, my stomach turned. If only they knew what I knew.
Finally, the time came when I telephoned Bundy’s attorney, John O’Connell. We had to talk. I asked to speak with Bundy so he could help us eliminate him as a suspect in our cases and thus end the media mob still pursuing him and asking about his activities in Seattle. This would be more like housekeeping, I told him, just get this mess cleaned up so he and his client could concentrate on their Utah case. I told him that it would help us, too, by getting the media off our backs. Mr. O’Connell was courteous, cautious, and interested. I wanted to know, I said, whether Ted had an alibi for any of the times when our young victims were missing. O’Connell, a skillful attorney, said he understood and requested that I write a letter with the important dates listed. Then, maybe, he suggested, Ted could “intelligently” reply. Impatient as I was, I thought his request for a letter to Ted from me was just a stall tactic and that Ted would never answer it. By law, he didn’t have to provide answers to anything that he thought might incriminate him. Therefore, I kept my hand facedown as well. Fortunately, O’Connell had no knowledge of the mountains of circumstantial evidence that we had accumulated against Bundy.
After a month of waiting for a return letter to my request, I called O’Connell. “Did you receive my letter?” I asked him. He said yes. “Did Ted have an alibi for any of the dates?”
He answered by saying, “Ted can’t.”
I was stunned by his answer. “You mean he didn’t do anything or he can’t give an answer for any of those dates?” I asked. I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing.
“He just can’t answer your questions about those days,” the cautious attorney said, leaving any interpretations regarding the nature of our conversation entirely up to me.
I could tell by the tenseness of O’Connell’s voice on the phone and by listening to his interviews on television that he, too, risked becoming one of Ted’s many psychological victims—people who wanted to believe what Ted was saying even though they had doubts about his story. But even he couldn’t get Ted off the hook with us because Ted never had an alibi. Ted Bundy was the only suspect of the entire list of 3,500 that we could not eliminate. Every other one was alibied.
In December we found out that the judge in Utah was permitting Ted Bundy to travel to Seattle while he was out on bail. We made immediate plans to put Bundy under 24-hour surveillance. By now we were certain that Bundy was our Ted, and there was no way we would allow him to snatch a female while in our county again. At first, our stakeouts were covert, but that didn’t last long. Ted easily recognized the people following him and stopped to make conversation. After a while there was no point in continuing the charade. Many of our crews either transported Bundy wherever he wanted to go or followed closely behind him. Bundy knew that we were looking for some indication that he was guilty, some behavior that would have tipped us off to his fear that we were getting too close, but he played the game well and gave us nothing.
On one particular occasion, Roger and I were in different cars. We were following Ted while he was driving a green VW Beetle that belonged to one of his attorney friends. Ted led us back to his apartment. Roger had been thinking that the time was right for us to confront Ted to see if he would talk to us. It was close to Christmas and the time of his Utah trial was drawing near. Maybe he would confess or give us a clue that would lead us somewhere. I had agreed with Roger and we took the opportunity on this particular day to confront Ted in the apartment where he was staying. Ted was already inside when Roger and I pulled up in our separate cars. Roger went in first. I was just coming up the stairs when Roger knocked and I heard the front door open. I reached the floor just in time to hear Bundy say sheepishly, “I can’t talk to you guys right now.”
“We do want to talk to you someday about our cases,” Roger said.
“Yes, but now is not the time,” Ted answered.
At that, Roger gave him his business card and we turned and left the apartment. Roger and I thought later that it was odd for Ted not to have proclaimed his innocence like the other defendants we had spoken to. He was trying to tell us something. He would want to talk someday to his pursuers, but we just didn’t realize how long we’d have to wait or under what circumstances that discussion would take place. Unfortunately, his answers to my questions came many, many years after that encounter in the hallway of the apartment building just before Bundy went back to Utah, where he would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail.
The Ted #7 Scenario
In the history of the Ted Bundy investigation, the phone call from Ben Forbes has always been thought of as the keystone to the entire case. It was fate, many of the newspapers said, that Bundy was driving along without his lights, was flagged down by a trooper whom he tried to evade, was stopped, searched, and arrested. It was fate that the call to our task force from Utah intersected with our routine follow-up of case files at a time when Bundy could be flagged. Had Bundy not crossed paths with the trooper, he would never have been picked up and the Utah and Colorado murders would have possibly gone unsolved. But for that fate, Bundy would have slipped through our net and our missing and murdered women’s cases would never have been solved. Bundy would never have escaped from the Colorado courthouse where he was being tried and he never would have fled to Florida. But for fate, Bundy might still be alive today, invisible and menacing. It was fate, they say, that caught up with Bundy on that night in a Salt Lake City suburb.
It’s true that although the phone call from Ben Forbes was indeed vital to our case, the big question actually was: would we have identified Ted Bundy as the Ted killer without the phone call? I’ve often speculated about that, and here’s what would have happened, inasmuch as the Bundy file was next on our “to be investigated” list, had there been no phone call from Salt Lake City. Call it the Twilight Zone scenario.
We were struggling with an investigation with many murder suspects and without much firm evidence on any of them. Each investigation of a suspect followed its own unique course with each individual. Each of the suspects’ willingness to cooperate with the task force provided us with the specific details or alibis that put them in the precise places where the killer could not have been at the critical times when crimes were being committed. However, while we were eliminating suspects one by one through our investigation, the same process also told us that the real killer had to have a trail that we would eventually cross. If every other suspect had left a path, the real killer could not possibly have been a phantom. At the same time, with the closure of each new file, the intensity of the investigation also diminished. We had gotten to the point where we were accumulating just enough information to take another suspect off the list. One suspect would look
good for a while, then, as Roger Dunn liked to put it, “he’d look just like shit in a handbasket.”
The routine of following up 100 suspects, one after the other, over the long term was almost like a mind-numbing disease. If you weren’t careful, the monotony was debilitating; you could easily miss a key element to the entire investigation. It was also tempting to take the easy way out: minimal work, tell yourself you’d done enough to close the folder, and move on to the next file. There was no inspector’s manual for dealing with these things. You just had to navigate into the fog by dead reckoning and hope that you found the right markers before they slipped by you in the night.
Ted Bundy’s case file was #7. It was sitting in Kathy McChesney’s to-do basket when I walked into the task force office on August 19. On the Saturday night before, unbeknownst to any of us, Ted Bundy drove by a Utah state trooper who, by the time he made his U-turn, lost the VW after it turned onto one of the side streets of the subdivision. The trooper was tired, and after a fruitless search down three or four streets, decided his quarry had disappeared and headed home. Bundy drove back to his apartment and went to bed. There was no phone call from Ben Forbes by the time I walked into the office and noticed the file marked BUNDY and picked it up.
I looked down at the legal-size case file in the wire basket and opened it. The contents of Ted’s manila folder had the appearance of severe disorder: several tattered tip sheets, handwritten notes on small pieces of torn paper, and photographs in small envelopes stashed inside. Initially Hergy had been tipped off by this Ted’s girlfriend, Liz Kendall, and a few other callers. I now had to follow up on Hergy’s investigation, to trace the steps he took, to see whether those steps could eliminate Ted #7, Theodore Robert Bundy.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 11