I found the file full of unworked leads as if Hergesheimer had taken the information and simply not followed it up. The information from each caller had been recorded, but the nature of the call itself seemed not to have piqued the interest of the officers who had taken the call. What had gone wrong? Had Hergesheimer simply misjudged the importance of the calls, which was not typically his wont, or was there something else at work? As I looked more closely at the file, I realized that if this case file had not made it onto our top-100-Teds-of-all-time list, I might well have passed it by myself, because at first glance the callers’ information didn’t seem that vital. One thing was certain: had Hergy been made aware of the connections between Taylor Mountain and Issaquah, he would have jumped all over the information he’d received. But by the time he’d gotten the information in October 1974, no one had even thought to connect the seven cases.
Four photos of Ted Bundy were in the file. The only way I knew they were Ted Bundy was because the captions read TED BUNDY. At first glance, the photos could have been of four different people. He was a real chameleon, this guy, whoever he was. We had no current photos of Bundy, so I couldn’t immediately rely on showing his picture to the witnesses at Lake Sammamish. Two of the snapshots were taken by his girlfriend in 1972, and he was wearing a beard in a 1973 shot. His driver’s license photo depicted a much older-looking man.
The information in Ted Bundy’s file came from three primary sources. The first, probably only because it was already in the file before his fiancée’s lead, was from an anonymous person who reported Ted’s license tag, Ida-Boy-Henry-Six-Twenty-One. I could see that someone had worked this tip after the initial call came in. He ran the tags through the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to get the name Ted Bundy, the make on his car, and his address at the time. Then he ran the name Ted Bundy through the Department of Licensing to get a date of birth. Hergy had gotten the driver’s license photo himself even though the handwriting on the tip sheet belonged to someone else. The unknown officer who worked this information soon broke off his follow-up because that tip, by itself, didn’t merit a high priority. There were hundreds of registered owners of VW Beetles who were named Ted.
The second Ted Bundy tip source came from one of Bundy’s psychology teaching assistants, Joel Kast, whose call proved to be a critical lead. Kast called initially to report spotting a police composite sketch Ted look-alike. A Ted Bundy, one of his former students, looked remarkably like the police sketch that had appeared in the papers. Kast said that his Ted was a good student, personable, had a possible accent, and had taken a class in abnormal psychology. Although Kast had no way of predicting Ted Bundy’s violent tendencies, his tip put one immediate fact in the file that struck a resonant chord in my memory. One of the living witnesses to the Lake Sammamish abductions reported that the Ted who had chatted her up spoke with what seemed like a British accent. And it was from the Lake Sammamish descriptions that we developed the police composite sketch. This would have been an important lead to follow in our investigation of Ted #7.
Following just that lead, I would have checked with the university registrar for a printout of all of Ted #7’s classes. I would have routinely cross-checked this list with the lists of classes that the coed victims at the University of Washington had taken and, to my amazement, I would have found that Bundy, our Ted #7, and Lynda Healy had shared several psychology classes together. A Ted victim and a top 100 Ted in a class at the same time—that’s where their paths surely would have crossed initially. Thus, from that information alone, Bundy would have become my prime suspect. We would have found Bundy’s name and Healy’s name on other class lists, and suddenly one of the basic theories of homicide would come into play—that people are usually murdered by someone they knew.
Other pieces would fall into place immediately, too. For example, Lynda Healy was the “first” victim, according to our investigative model. We were already following up her homicide as if it were a routine murder case on its own. Thus, the fact that she was in the same class with someone whose description matched a police composite of a suspect in other murders would have brought us to Ted via her case and not just through the case file folders sitting in the task force office. Also, as we pursued her list of acquaintances, we would have found other items that brought her into Bundy’s circle of acquaintances. We would have considered the crossing of their paths much more than mere coincidence as we pursued our leads.
The third source in Bundy’s file was his girlfriend Liz Kendall. Her call and subsequent persistence led Randy Hergesheimer to notify Utah authorities because Liz knew Ted had moved to Salt Lake City to go to law school at the same time that surrounding jurisdictions were reporting a string of female murder cases. She believed that these cases shared aspects of the King County cases. What Liz didn’t know was that we had already exchanged information with Utah and Colorado detectives and knew about all the female murders, especially the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen on January 12, 1975. But Liz provided us help with a valuable lead in this homicide investigation as well.
We had already used store credit card and gasoline credit card purchases as a method of eliminating other suspects, so it would have been logical to assume that we would have used Bundy’s credit purchase records in the same way. Liz Kendall would tell us about Ted’s Chevron and Nordstrom’s credit cards and we would have retrieved his records. From Chevron security, we would learn quickly that Ted made prolific use of his credit card because he was forever buying gas. We would note that Ted seemed extremely paranoid about running out of gas. In fact, his record showed that he had always been topping off his tank with purchases as small as $1.88 on the very days surrounding the murders in Washington State. I would have noticed that there were numerous instances when Ted charged his gasoline on many of the days the women were killed, the days before they were abducted, and the days immediately after the murders. One conspicuous purchase, I would have noticed, took place at a gas station only minutes from Aspen in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on January 12, 1975—the exact day and precise location of the Campbell murder. Bundy’s credit records also placed him right near the ski resort at Vail on March 15, 1975, when Julie Cunningham disappeared. During a lifetime of police investigations you learn that these coincidences just don’t happen. Our Ted #7 had been all of these places for a reason.
The search through Bundy’s credit records would have been quick and invisible. Ted would never have known that we had pulled copies of his credit transactions because we would not have been required to notify him. Liz Kendall certainly would not have told her boyfriend that she had snitched him off to the King County task force and the Utah authorities. Utah investigators would have regarded him as a viable suspect because not only did his credit records not eliminate him from any of the Washington murders, they actually placed him near the scenes of the Utah and Colorado murders on or near the days they were committed. However, because Ted was already in their jurisdiction and would have been unaware of all the police activity surrounding him, he probably would not have acted defensively and might have actually done something to incriminate himself—like trying to abduct someone like Carol DaRonch. Therefore, believing that any aggressive move on their part might have spooked someone against whom a homicide case was being constructed in three states, the Utah police would not have wanted to move too quickly against Ted and would have probably put him under surveillance.
We would have checked Ted’s bank records and would have found even more surprises. Bundy’s checking account records showed that he had cashed checks at the Safeway food store at 47th and Brooklyn in the heart of the U-district only eight blocks from Lynda Healy’s residence on the date that she disappeared. We were also checking Healy’s bank records because we were pursuing her murder as if it were a separate crime. In so doing, we found that she had cashed a check at the very same Safeway store on the very same day and at the very same time as did Ted. We contacted the clerk whose initials were on the check an
d asked her to tell us how long she worked that day. Only four hours, she told us, so the window of opportunity for Ted was very small. If they were both in the same store at the same time, could Ted Bundy have actually been stalking Lynda Healy that very day, keeping her in sight from food aisle to food aisle or standing behind her in a checkout line, dogging her footsteps from a safe distance along streets crowded with students and waiting for the right opportunity to abduct her?
What exactly was the connection between Bundy and Healy? We knew they were in the same classes. We knew that they were in the same store cashing checks at the same time on the day she disappeared. How long had Bundy been interested in Lynda Healy? Our search through the Bundy file would have continued, especially as it related to his connection to Healy. We would have discovered from the list of Bundy’s acquaintances that his cousin had been a roommate of Lynda Healy’s housemate, part of an extended tribe of friends and housemates that are typical of relationships in a large college town like Seattle. We would have realized that, of course, Ted knew Lynda Healy. They’d attended the same classes, sat in the same independent study sections, and had probably been at parties together. They would have encountered each other time and again as their paths kept on crossing. Unfortunately, Lynda didn’t know that the Ted who might or might not have said hello to her as they met outside a classroom or in the Safeway wasn’t really a casual acquaintance but a stalker—she was his intended victim. We don’t even know now how long Ted thought about Lynda before he decided to break into her basement apartment, knock her unconscious as they struggled against the wall of her bed, carefully undress her as she lay there in a pool of blood, and hang her nightgown neatly in her closet, wash her hair, dress her in her ski jacket and pants, and then take her with him into the night. No matter what we discovered about the other missing-and-murdered-coed cases, it would have been clear that in the Lynda Healy case, Ted was by far the most viable suspect we had. We would have pursued the investigation aggressively while letting the Utah and Colorado authorities continue their observation of Bundy. The net would have begun to close.
The leads Liz Kendall gave us in the folder would have required another interview with her for background information. She would describe Ted’s behavior on July 14, 1974, the Sunday when Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappeared from Lake Sammamish. Liz and Ted had fought that morning and Ted had gone home. But when Ted had returned to her place at six in the evening, the first thing he had done was to move a ski rack that was on his VW Beetle to her VW Beetle. This detail would have interested us because Ted had originally moved the ski rack from her car to his so that he could carry his bike with him on a trip to Eastern Washington weeks earlier. How convenient! This meant that Ted already knew how to strap a bike to the ski rack with little trouble. If we had had any lingering questions about what happened to Janice Ott’s 10-speed bike on the day of her abduction from the park, this detail would have gone a long way to resolve them.
Liz would have told us about Ted’s mood on the night of the fourteenth. He was a moody person, she said, despite his personable demeanor. Liz would have said that they had planned to go out for dinner, but when Ted showed up, he was bristling with hostility. He announced that he wasn’t taking Liz and her daughter out to dinner. Then he had relented and driven them out for burgers. He had been angry about something, but he had been trying to get over it. It was part of his typical behavior, which ran hot and cold. It was as mysterious as the crutches Liz would have told us that she found in his room in May or June, 1974. She had also seen the plaster of Paris and would have told us about his ability to get medical supplies from the company he worked for. He delivered prosthetic devices to their clients. It was circumstantial, at best, but these medical devices were also the implements our killer used for camouflage and were key in the ruses he used to lure his victims.
And then there was the bag of women’s underwear that Liz discovered in Ted’s room in 1973. We had not been called in yet and the Ted task force was a year away from its inception. The Seattle police weren’t even investigating missing or murdered women at that time. So whose clothing was in that bag? Were these the souvenirs from nameless women whom Ted had taken from places other than Seattle? Were there still scores of unsolved missing-persons cases from jurisdictions that we didn’t even know about? If Ted was already a serial killer in 1973, was this his bag of totems that he pulled from the bodies of his dead victims? Liz hadn’t known what she’d discovered, but by the time she reported it to the task force, it would have been enough for us to build a real case against Ted Bundy.
Liz provided another vital piece of the Ted Bundy puzzle for us when she linked Ted’s travels to Central Washington State College and the disappearance of Susan Rancourt. She told us that Ted had a friend who attended Central. We very quickly made contact with that friend, who told us that about a week before Rancourt was reported missing, Ted was in Ellensburg visiting him. At that same time, the first woman was approached in front of the school’s library and ran away when the Ted she was helping dropped his keys in the dirt beside his VW.
Within days of the Kendall interview and our follow-up on her leads, we would have been very encouraged by the Ted Bundy file. Not only could Ted be placed at Ellensburg, but he was clearly crossing paths with Lynda Healy to the point where he could have been stalking her. In this way, all of our separate investigations into the Washington State activities of Ted Bundy would have intersected. Moreover, he was in Utah and Colorado at just the right times, and nothing in his gasoline credit card records put him in a spot where he would not have been able to commit any of our homicides. In a circumstantial case such as this, suspects who were purely coincidental would have been eliminated by this point, as the previous six had been. For all paths to have led to a suspect, even if they were circumstantial, that suspect had to have a very high probability as the prime suspect. We knew that Ted was our man; we just had to make the case.
Since Ted was attending the University of Utah School of Law, our next strategy was to contact those agencies that had open cases of murders of females in both Utah and Colorado. It would have taken very little convincing to get Salt Lake to assemble an informal multistate task force on their dime and to have covertly staked out Bundy. Ideally, they would have wanted to gather firsthand information about his movements, and observe him as he rehearsed his crime or stalked his prospective victim. Maybe they’d even catch him with the evidence, as police had caught the Freeway Killer—Randy Kraft—in Southern California with a body in his car. In any event, his predatory travels could have been monitored—speculating on the basis of Ted’s propensity to drive and return to his crime scenes—and he might have actually led police to the body of a murdered female decomposing at one of his burial sites.
Even if the surreptitious surveillance would have failed to catch him in the act of a crime, the mounting circumstantial evidence already available would have provided the probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant for his apartment and VW Beetle. They would have served the search warrant without any prior warning. Ted Bundy would have had no chance to prepare by removing evidence from his apartment or by scouring out the inside of his car. Searchers would have most certainly found an abundance of forensic evidence in the car that had been used to transport over 25 victims from pick-up locations to dump sites for at least two years.
Using the same circumstantial evidence that provided them with the probable cause for a search of Bundy’s car, investigators would have searched Bundy’s apartment, where they would have found more than a map of Colorado and the ski brochure with the circled name of the Wildwood Inn. They would probably have found much more. Because Ted sometimes took a whole corpse home with him, instead of just the heads as he did in Washington, the police might have discovered an entire body in his apartment. In a Jeffrey Dahmer-like police seizure of human remains, the evidence would have sealed Bundy’s fate right on the spot. Not even the bravado-driven Bundy would have been able to
bluff his way out of that kind of discovery.
At the point of the search of his apartment, Bundy would have been interviewed by the Utah police. At first, Bundy would exert complete control with as much boldness as he could muster. Bundy was a blowhard and, as he always did when challenged, he would try to bully his way out of any confrontation. By the time of the interview, Bundy would have been well aware that he was a suspect in some sort of investigation, and he would assume that the police had connected him to the murders in Utah. However, the police would have the advantage of surprise with respect to the Colorado murders, especially in light of the discovery of Caryn Campbell’s hair in the trunk of Ted’s VW. But Bundy had great self-confidence as a killer and he would have resisted all attempts to get him to confess.
The police would have confronted him with their strongest circumstantial evidence. He would have provided them with alibis. They would have confronted him with the handcuff key they discovered in the Bountiful parking lot. He would have denied any knowledge of the handcuff key even though they fit the handcuffs in his car. Standard handcuffs and standard locks, Bundy would have said, don’t automatically make a matched set. This would have gone back and forth until the police brought Bundy in for a line-up. Carol DaRonch would have identified him and Bundy would have been arrested. At the same time I would have presented my evidence against Bundy to the prosecutor and would have gotten a charge for murder in the first degree in the case of Lynda Healy. I would have sought additional indictments in the cases of Susan Rancourt, Janice Ott, and Denise Naslund even though I would have had weaker cases. But nonetheless, my indictments and the indictments in Utah and Colorado as a result of a multistate task force investigation on kidnap and murder charges would have been enough to have kept Bundy behind bars the entire time.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 12