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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Brooks had called to ask for my support for a national serial-murder tracking program, later called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), and currently housed within the Behavioral Sciences Unit (BSU) of the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia. Brooks described his early attempts to find murders that might have been committed by a murderer he was investigating. He told of his painstaking effort to leaf through the archives of newspaper morgues to read reports of murder cases in other jurisdictions, desperately trying to identify a similar case. In lieu of the newspaper-search method and our haphazard hunt for similar murders in the Bundy cases, Brooks proposed a nationwide centralized repository of homicide information where investigators could request a search for cases with similar characteristics with the help of a computer. That was the inception of the VICAP project.

  Brooks defined VICAP as a centralized information and crime analysis system designed to collect, collate, and relate all aspects of the investigations of similar-pattern multiple murders throughout the nation regardless of location or the number of police agencies involved. He reasoned that if a detective was investigating a murder, one with or without an apparent motive, the officer could request that analysts at a national center query their computer for murders in other jurisdictions that contained similar characteristics. Then, if a match or matches were found, the national center would alert the agencies that they were probably pursuing the same traveling killer, thereby helping the police investigators communicate more effectively, solve cases sooner, and prevent further murders. He planned to have the unit housed at a central location, such as Colorado Springs, Colorado. This location was his favorite because the police chief there offered free office space. The unit would be staffed with experienced civilian homicide investigators and crime analysts.

  The entire concept sounded great to me and I told him so. But I could feel what he really wanted was the name of Ted Bundy, an internationally notorious, headline-grabbing serial killer, associated with his endeavor, and I would be his Bundy link. I was more than willing to help. A project associated with Ted Bundy’s name would assist in convincing the politicians in charge of the purse strings that the program was indispensable. I figured Brooks would want to pitch the VICAP idea as an investigative aid as well as a preventive tool against future violence. Brooks asked, “If VICAP were operational ten years ago, would it have helped in the Bundy cases?” I leaped at the chance to explain.

  I told Brooks that Roger Dunn and I had searched in vain for similar murders in other places because we felt the Ted suspect had not limited himself to the boundaries of King County or Washington State. We had Kathy Parks, who was last seen 265 miles from Seattle in Corvallis, Oregon, and dumped on Taylor Mountain in rural King County. There was no reason why Ted couldn’t have abducted a girl from another state and dumped that same victim’s body someplace else. At that time, there was no central homicide information center to contact with questions regarding similar murders. Our efforts in this vein were restricted to use of the teletype, telephone, and letters written to police and sheriff’s departments. Even though over time, some of those murderers were eventually located and identified, traditional tracking techniques were far from adequate and not systematically effective. If VICAP had existed as Brooks described it to me, we would have discovered that Utah and Colorado authorities were the only states that reported the bludgeoning and strangulation murders of college-age females after our murders had apparently stopped. A quick scan of our records would have revealed that there was only one suspect in our files who had left Washington and traveled to Utah—theodore Robert Bundy. An analysis by experts from a national serial-murder tracking program that provided the necessary links to Salt Lake City cases would have enabled us to focus on Bundy much sooner, probably as early as October 1974, instead of August 1975. How many murders would have been prevented? Brooks’s voice crackled. Such fervent support of his proposal was unexpected. Noting my gold mine of supportive examples of VICAP’s potential value, he invited me to become a consultant to the national planning group, which was established to examine the feasibility of tracking the victims of traveling killers.

  A little more than six months later, in July 1983, I attended my first VICAP planning meeting, the Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Children and National Missing÷Abducted Children and Serial Murder Tracking and Prevention Program. It was held at the Criminal Justice Center at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Red brick by red brick, the center’s huge structure had been built with the sweat of prisoners from nearby Huntsville State Penitentiary. It was at this meeting that I would learn about the Michigan child murders and share with the story’s narrator my own frustration at how serial killers could elude police.

  The long title for the VICAP planning workshop encompassed the broad spectrum of experiences of the people in attendance. Even though we were exploring the feasibility of tracking all ages of murder victims, the group focused heavily on missing, abducted, and murdered children because the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention initially funded the planning committee meetings. I was extremely impressed by the dedication of those around me. Represented at the meeting were homicide investigators, crime analysts, computer experts, investigators of child pornography, child abuse, and missing children, members of the BSU of the FBI, personnel from the Office of Juvenile Justice, and university criminal justice faculty. Much to my surprise, the meetings were not led by Pierce Brooks, but by Robert Heck, an administrator at the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and Dr. Doug Moore, a professor with the Criminal Justice Program at Sam Houston State University. The VICAP concept was Pierce Brooks’s idea, and the others jumped on his bandwagon when they saw an extremely innovative and useful method of homicide investigation. Years later, there are still some people who try to lay claim to Brooks’s original idea.

  At one particular session we discussed the contents of the VICAP form, a vehicle to collect homicide information. Based on their vast experience, the attending homicide investigators were to determine what information was necessary to link cases. The notion was for local homicide investigators to fill out forms on their unsolveds and submit them to VICAP crime analysts. Then the analysts would query the computer and identify those cases that had similar characteristics. The entire process of question selection and interpretation was quite intriguing because I was able to see, first-hand, what experienced homicide investigators focused on to make associations between cases. What struck me initially was how those detectives confirmed that investigators must look for progressive changes in a killer’s method of operation from one murder to the next, instead of looking for only those characteristics that were exactly the same. For instance, perhaps a traveling killer strangled his first victim and then stabbed the next one in his series because his strangulation method didn’t work. The Son of Sam Killer in New York stabbed his first murder victim, resulting in a bloody mess, and he didn’t like it. So he changed his modus operandi, and his subsequent victims were shot from a distance. Murderers change their modus operandi out of necessity and convenience. A repetitive killer’s method of operation changes, as he develops experience over time, from one crime to the next. Predictably, the modus operandi changes in dynamic fashion from one murder to the next because the killer learns from previous mistakes and resorts to actions that are comfortable and convenient for him.

  In the old days, cases were cleared only by exact modus operandi matches, such as a number of house burglaries attributed to one burglar who used a pipe wrench on all the front door knobs. Short of a confession, would another burglary in the same area be connected if the burglar forgot his pipe wrench and kicked in the front door? Probably not, because the modus operandi was not exactly the same.

  With different modus operandi characteristics noted from one murder to another, what doesn’t change is the killer’s signature or calling card. It consists of acts performed that reach beyond what is necessary to commit the murder. Th
ey must be acted out each time in the same manner. Does the killer redress the victim after the murder? Is an increasing length of time spent with each victim after death because the killer performs his basic necrophilic ritual? For instance, one such killer posed his first female victim in a sexually degrading position with her legs spread and braced up against a wall, and openly displayed her in order to shock the finder. His subsequent victims were also found posed spread-eagled in various ways and openly displayed. Therefore, the questions on the VICAP form needed to capture information in a way that demonstrated changes in modus operandi as well as a killer’s signature in the form of additional postmortem behavior from one case to the next.

  During the first session on VICAP forms, I met Captain Robbie Robertson of the Michigan State Police, a seasoned homicide investigator and supervisor. He had the presence of a university provost and commanded more respect in the discussions than anyone else, even more than Pierce Brooks. He was definitely outspoken and his own man. I hovered around him like a drone near a queen. His superior homicide investigation intelligence was unchallenged throughout the workshop. He became a wonderful mentor for me during the formation of VICAP.

  Even though we came from different regions of the country and had never met, I felt an extreme professional closeness to Robertson. When he and I talked, I didn’t want the conversations to end. I was absorbing everything he said. Unsolved murder cases wore heavily on his pride. One particular series was very special to him. It was the Michigan child murders, a series of murders in the Oakland Corridor that continued from October 1975 through March 1977, when they appeared to stop. They remain unsolved to this day and were his lifelong obsession.

  The Michigan Child Murders

  One night, after a long day of discussing the brutal elements of murder, Robertson and I sat in the quiet of the Criminal Justice Center’s cocktail lounge. Captain Robertson told me, in detail, about the Michigan child murders. His description of the child murders and what they meant to him had a lasting effect on me. During this discussion, Robertson illustrated that he possessed a mental toughness and that he would never quit the fight to catch killers. Notwithstanding the Ted Bundy cases, the thought of investigating a long-term series of unsolved murders of small children was gut-wrenching. Based on my knowledge of problems associated with previous serial-murder investigations, after what Captain Robertson told me, I was even more determined to discover as much about the serial-murder phenomenon as possible so that others could learn from our successful investigations as well as from our mistakes.

  In the quiet, dimly lit surroundings of the lounge, as Captain Robertson described his investigation of the Michigan child murders, my memories of our inadequate pursuit of the Ted killer immediately came to mind. Even though each series was different in nature and unprecedented for our respective departments, they started in the same reactive way. Each case began as investigators responded to a dead-body call, identified the victim, interviewed the parents—a most unenviable task—and waited for the next dead-body call.

  Mark Stebbins

  Like most long-haul homicide detectives who assemble the bits and pieces surrounding the deaths of innocent children, Robertson was soft-spoken and almost melancholy. It was almost as though he were telling a story about his own dead children. The first victim he talked about was Mark Stebbins, a 12-year-old boy. Stebbins was noted as missing on the afternoon of February 15, 1976, after leaving the American Legion Hall in Ferndale, Michigan. He supposedly was headed to his home, also in Ferndale, to watch a movie on television. Just prior to leaving the Legion hall, his mother spoke to him. When he didn’t return home by eleven P.M., she called police, informing a police dispatcher that she was concerned because he had never done anything like this before. How many times do police officers hear that same story and the child turns up alive and well, much to everyone’s relief? Unfortunately, that is not what happened this time. Stebbins’s mother provided a detailed description of her son: he was 4 feet 8 inches tall, 100 pounds, with reddish blond hair and blue eyes. He was wearing a blue hooded parka, blue jeans, a red sweatshirt, and black rubber boots. A stranger would later describe the same clothing to police four days later when he discovered a dead body.

  At 11:45 A.M., on February 19, Stebbins’s body was found by a businessman who had left his office in Southfield, Michigan, to walk over to a drugstore at a nearby shopping mall. In a corner of the parking lot that the man crossed on his way to the mall, he discovered what he thought was a mannequin or dummy dressed in a blue jacket and jeans. As he went closer, he saw that it was the body of a small boy. Stebbins, the forensic team later reported, had died from asphyxia due to smothering. He had sustained two crusted lacerations of the scalp on the left rear of his head. Discolorations of his wrists and ankles indicated that he was possibly tied up with rope or a similarly shaped binding device. Obvious evidence of sexual assault was discovered in the form of superficial lacerations in his widely distended anus.

  A witness who worked in the same business complex as the person who found Stebbins’s body provided investigators with evidence that Stebbins’s body was placed at the scene after 9:30 A.M. on the day it was discovered. The witness stated that he had walked his dog in the same area at about 9:30 that morning, and the body had not been there. That information led investigators to believe that Stebbins’s body was held at another location for a period of days and was not immediately dumped in the parking lot after his disappearance. A major question was, why would the killer not conceal the body to prevent it from being found? The Stebbins murder was the first of four related killings of children in the Woodward Corridor.

  Ten months after the murder of Mark Stebbins, the bloody shot-gun slaying of Jill Robinson was discovered. There was such a disparity from the Stebbins murder in murder weapon used and victim profile that no one related the Stebbins and the Robinson cases to each other. At that time, male and female victims were not linked routinely in the same series of murders unless there was a preexisting relationship between the victims.

  Jill Robinson

  It was late in the afternoon of December 22, 1976, when 12-year-old Jill Robinson had an argument with her mother over household chores she had not done. In the heat of the dispute, Jill’s mother ordered her out of the house. Jill packed some clothes and a blue-and-green plaid blanket into her denim backpack. She walked out the door of her home in Royal Oak, Michigan, wearing blue jeans, a shirt, snow boots, a bright orange winter jacket, and a blue knit cap with a yellow design on its border. Jill was not seen alive again.

  The day after Christmas her body was found dumped alongside Interstate 75, just north of Sixteen Mile Road in Troy, Michigan. Astonishingly, her killer had placed her on her back on the snowy shoulder of the road in plain sight of anyone driving by. Bloodstain evidence revealed that the top of her head was blown off by a blast from a 12-gauge shotgun while she was lying supine in the very position in which she was found. The following day, a neighborhood boy found Jill’s bicycle behind an office building in Royal Oak. It was a mystery whether Jill rode the bicycle there on December 22 or it was placed there sometime later.

  Captain Robertson freely admitted that the Stebbins and Robinson murders were not immediately connected by police authorities because the gender and cause of death for each victim were different. The police did not consider the fact that they were both held as living captives for a period of time and then dumped in plain sight where they would be discovered enough cause to attribute both deaths to the same killer. A disturbing similarity between the cases was that police investigators had no viable suspects in either murder.

  Kristine Mihelich

  However, within one month another child was found dead and detectives in Oakland County realized that they were dealing with a serial killer. On January 2, 1977, 10-year-old Kristine Mihelich left her home at three P.M. to go to a nearby 7-Eleven store. Her mother reported her missing at six P.M. that same day. By noon the following day, all police depa
rtments in the area were alerted to her disappearance and were given photographs of Kristine to distribute. Investigators believed that she was seen at the 7-Eleven store because the clerk remembered that a girl who tentatively matched the description of Kristine had purchased a teenage movie magazine. The Detroit-area radio and television stations broadcasted information about Kristine’s disappearance. Over the next two weeks, police investigators chased many tips from the public, all to no avail. A temporary red herring in the investigation was calls from a 14-year-old girl pretending to be Kristine Mihelich. Fortunately, the impostor was quickly exposed.

  Blatantly challenging the investigators as if to say “catch me if you can,” the killer discarded the body of Kristine Mihelich in plain view in the snow-filled ditch alongside a dead-end road in Franklin Village on January 20. At about 11:45 A.M. on January 21, a mail carrier discovered her half-frozen body. The police investigators determined from body temperature that she had been there less than 24 hours. Forensics also concluded that she had been smothered, just like Mark Stebbins. According to Robertson, the autopsy physician did not find any evidence of sexual molestation, but claimed to have found sperm in her vagina and rectum. However, state police laboratory technicians had examined the doctor’s tissue slides and were unable to detect any sperm. The doctor tried to account for his finding by a theory based on the forcefulness of ejaculation. The police lab technicians concluded that the doctor’s determination was incorrect and that, like Jill Robinson, Kristine had not been penetrated.