Experience in serial-murder cases has shown that highest investigative priority must be given to isolating, as accurately as possible, the dates and times victims were last seen and to delineating their activity patterns up to the time of their disappearances. Proper questioning of suspects about their whereabouts at the time of the murder required focusing on those important areas. It appeared, from the file, that while patrol officers, likely inexperienced in follow-up investigations in homicide cases, were doing those high-priority interviews, many statements gained were vague and incomplete. For example, “When was the last time you saw the victim?” was rarely asked or, if it was, the crucial information about exact time and date was not recorded. When pimps and prostitutes recalled dates and times, they were seldom asked to corroborate their recollection. Thus, the resulting information was questionable. Unfortunately, the only solution to this mess was to recontact the witnesses, which would add even more work to an investigation already bogged down with an enormous amount of follow-up.
During the first month of review, I turned the facts over in my mind, trying to develop some theory that would reconcile the cases. With each file line I reviewed, I could see more and more faults evident in the interview process. I discovered, for example, that statements taken from more than one witness on the same case regarding disappearance times and potential acquaintances were often confusing and conflicting. Therefore, there was more than one set of “facts” per victim. It often appeared that statements taken by one officer were not reviewed before other statements were taken. That created even more conflicting information. In fact, I could hit upon nothing that would bring together all the disparate elements.
There was a considerable effort in the initial months of the Green River case on gathering information, and it was clear that all officers were directed to obtain specific statements from certain people. However, it wasn’t clear from the files who was responsible for examining and synthesizing the content of those statements into potential lead follow-up. That job, which is a major part of any homicide case, still needed to be done. Thus, the task still ahead was huge. A major part of my synthesizing process was to reduce the discrepancies in the witness statements in the case files.
The number of leads collected on tip sheets and developed through detective work was enormous, and, as in most cases, leads were assigned for follow-up. Unfortunately, the investigation into the Green River murders had followed the traditional course of most serial-murder investigations: when there is massive input, investigators become so overwhelmed with the data that they are unable to complete their assigned tasks. As a result, the case quickly dissolved into chaos and the clues that might have led to the identity of the murderer were buried under increasing amounts of paperwork. The only solution was for someone to step forward and assume a role in organizing an overview.
I followed the course of the investigation through the paperwork by randomly checking about 10 of the over 200 suspect packets that had been filled with information. I observed that the entire investigation’s ebb and flow depended on the intensity of the investigation of any one suspect at a given time. The major portion of the investigation activities slowed down to a crawl when a hot suspect was being pursued. In other words, a number of investigators were working on a top suspect, and the other arms of the investigation didn’t seem to be moving. Acquaintances of some victims were recontacted and shown photographic montages of some suspects; this wasn’t done for other victims. There was no clear, discernible priority system that was set up for the active pursuit of quality suspects. Accordingly, only a quarter of the suspects had been eliminated by police investigators.
After viewing the course of the task force’s work from the perspective of the victim pick-up sites, I turned to the dump sites, the places where the killer chose to dispose of his victims. What was there about them that was important to the evasive killer? Viewing photographs and reading police reports describing the scenes weren’t sufficient. I had Dave Reichert take me out to the body recovery sites.
The day we chose to go was dull, foggy, and drizzly. The ground was saturated not only with rain, but with spring-melted snow from the Cascades. The nearby foothills and treetops were banked in with rolling clouds, which rose now and then to show the dreary curves of the desolate forest. The Green River was unusually high that season, churning mightily with the winter runoff of melting snow.
The first thing I noticed about Frager Road at the point where the three remains were found was how isolated the location really was. Even though it was less than 10 minutes from the honking airport traffic along Pacific Highway South, the killer could quickly be in solitude with his victim. Right above the recovery site was a small pull-off, conveniently concealed by high grass, offering the killer all the camouflage he needed to do whatever he wanted with his victims. In the summertime, a driver would not be aware of the pull-off until he was right on top of it, nor could he see any vehicle parked there from any distance away. Conversely, a cautious murderer could easily be alerted by the sound of any approaching vehicle or, at night, by the headlight beams filtering through the leaves. But despite the ideal site nearby—mostly because the local television coverage had handed the killer our game plan for the investigation—the Green River had exhausted its usefulness as a dumping spot for him. The area was now too well known, a tourist spot even for a curious outsider. But the Green River Killer was still lurking out there somewhere, and both Dave and I felt that he would retreat to even more remote areas. The big question was where. The bigger question was what was the relationship of the Green River to the other possible dump sites.
The River
For any serious homicide investigator, the historical understanding of the significance of the Green River as a dump site for bodies should have been essential to his pursuit of the case. It was not clear from the reports if any other deaths in the area had ever been investigated prior to the discovery of the Green River victims, or if they had been, whether the deaths had been classified as natural, homicide, suicide, accidental, or undetermined. This was a step that should have been taken at the outset. For example, when the Atlanta task force looked into their child killings, they found previous possible victims of the Atlanta killer in the Chattahoochee River, but those deaths were initially classified as accidental or undetermined. Reclassifying those deaths as homicides connected with the Atlanta Child Killer might have provided more possible leads for investigators to follow.
If there were possible victims from previous cases around the Green River, as there had been in Atlanta, anyone involved in those cases could have been a suspect in the Green River murders. Additionally, field interview reports, suspicious circumstance reports, police case reports, officers’ notebook entries, Department of Fisheries officers’ reports or notes, and any other creative resources relating to activities along the Green River should have been investigated for potential suspect behavior. Questioning of suspects and witnesses should have focused on their access to, knowledge of, and visitations to the Green River area in a specific time frame when the deaths occurred.
The Lovvorn case was initially investigated by detectives who had not been involved in the Green River investigation. Many felt there was no connection. But Lovvorn’s dump site was as handy to the killer as the Green River. That wooded area had long since been abandoned by residents who moved away because of the noise of low-flying jetliners on their approach to the Sea-Tac Airport. Houses had been demolished and carted away and only empty, overgrown cul-de-sacs remained, perfect for the consummation of tricks and quick returns to the highway, only seconds away. A john driving his “date” to the cul-de-sac area would not have alarmed any prostitute since they themselves frequently directed their out-of-town johns to those areas and considered them safe streets.
On the night Dave Reichert and I explored the body dump site, the atmosphere was melancholy outside and in. Through narrow spaces between trees to the northwest, I could see the eerie silvery lumines
cence of the airport runway lights. To the east, I could see the alternating glow of neon lights of the topless bars along the Sea-Tac strip. The wooded area around the Lovvorn recovery site was a vast thicket with many intertwining roads that, just as often as not, twisted off into dead ends. It was a perfect location for quiet but quick sexual interludes in a vehicle. Little did Dave and I realize that a quarter of a mile away, several other prostitutes would be discovered dead—more victims of the Green River killer.
Suspect Profiles
With the body disposal sites permanently etched in my memory, I returned to the case files. Very prominently mentioned throughout each one was the name of one prime suspect. Of all the potential suspects in the case, he definitely was the prime suspect at one time based on all the follow-up work that was documented in police reports. He was an unemployed cabdriver and definitely part of the Seattle area “street” scene. When first contacted by police, he admitted that he knew several of the victims and had difficulty accounting for his whereabouts during the time the murders took place.
There were two decisive factors affecting a continuing police investigation of him. First of all, detectives located a female associate and street person who claimed to have talked with him prior to any public announcement about the identities of the last three victims. She told police that he told her the names of Chapman, Hinds, and Mills before their identities appeared in the newspapers or on television. The bad part was that she was interviewed after the victims were identified, so her recollection of the time the suspect told her their names might have been mistaken.
Second, the prime suspect’s lifestyle and personal characteristics fit the psychological profile of the Green River killer done by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. It was in that suspect’s packet that I found the actual report documenting the psychological profile of the Green River Killer. Its characteristics of the killer, along with the street person’s version of her contact with the prime suspect, were used as the basis for a search warrant affidavit for his person, home, and vehicles. I also noted that the prime suspect was overly cooperative with police investigators. They probably didn’t need the warrant, because he consented to everything, including polygraph examinations. Unfortunately for those investigators, he drew an in-ordinate amount of attention to himself by conducting numerous interviews with members of the news media about what the detectives had told him or were doing with him. That behavior to me was inconsistent with my impressions of what the Green River Killer was like. I felt the last thing the Green River Killer would want was any public attention. It was obvious from a lack of eyewitness information that he had diligently avoided apprehension by intentionally concealing his approach to and disposal of his victims.
The profile was a real piece of work. On the one hand, it attempted to give investigators some idea of what a prostitute killer might be like, but it also described most of the male population engaging in illicit activity along the Sea-Tac strip. I believed the profile to be a major distraction for the investigators because, since it was too general, it forced police to focus on tweaking the profile to the killer instead of investigating the known facts of the case. The profile, like too many serial-killer profiles, winds up becoming the be-all and end-all for investigators instead of the means of solving the crime. Quite frequently, administrators have used it to fend off press inquiries about the status of the investigation, saying, “We’re waiting for the profile.”
In some cases, profiles can be valuable if the offender is an arsonist or a completely disorganized and mentally disturbed killer. More is known about the personalities and crime scenes of those types of offenders than is known about the repetitive, evasive, and experienced serial killer. The proactive tactics recommended by the FBI behavioral scientists for capturing arsonists and disorganized killers have frequently worked, but recommendations about detecting the identity of an unnamed serial killer have yet to be proven.
The disclaimer at the beginning of that profile report, and of every profile report I have seen since, should have been the first hint of its utility in the Green River investigation: “The final analysis is based upon probabilities, noting, however, that no two criminal acts or criminal personalities are exactly alike and therefore the offender at times may not always fit the profile in every category.” But with the Green River profile, the characteristics of the offender were not exclusive to the point where most males along Pacific Highway South could be eliminated. In fact, the profile was more inclusive than exclusive and fuzzed the investigation to the point where it almost became useless. In fact, as we eventually learned, even Ted Bundy corrected the profile, pointing out that one of the murders of a 36-year-old female should not have been on the Green River list. In 2003 the killer himself confirmed Bundy’s observation. The killer also revealed how flawed the FBI profile was. In addition, and probably more crucial to the value of the profile, the very nature of a prostitute killer may be the reason for the more general profile, along with insufficient crime scene information left by the killer. But a flexible and astute homicide investigator, willing to consider input from all sources, must be wary of the sometimes overconfident attitude of an FBI profile, for it is not necessarily reliable.
Years later, what surprised me was that much of the same terminology and descriptions used in the report, which I believed to have been unique to the Green River Killer, appeared as the routine characteristics of sexual homicide offenders in the book Sexual Homicide, written by John Douglas and Robert Ressler of the FBI’s BSU and Ann Burgess. My concern today is, has the profiling effort in serial-murder cases by the FBI been only a superficial guess about the background of killers in any series of cases? They have consistently avoided any academic scrutiny of their research into serial killers while exploiting those of us who have so faithfully given cases to them for examination over the years.
Carefully examining the FBI’s profile in the Green River files and desperately looking for those unique features that would assist investigators, I found a paragraph in which profilers interpreted the phraseology of the medical examiner who performed the post-mortem examination on Marcia Chapman’s body. It read: “ulceration consistent with anthropophagy was located over the right nipple. With these findings, we can now categorize this subject as a lust-murderer.” I was shocked and excited by that discovery, so I immediately called Dave Reichert. I inquired, “How come you never told me that the killer had left his bite marks on Chapman?”
“It’s news to me, too,” he said, surprisingly interested in the prospect. What that meant to the case was that it was the only known physical evidence in any of the murders that could be linked directly to the killer, should he be identified.
I told Dave, “If there truly was a bite mark, I didn’t see any evidence forms in the file that reflected the collection of bite mark evidence.” Routinely, the King County medical examiner, Dr. Don Reay, ran an efficient office. If there was bite mark evidence present on any homicide victim, he would have called in a forensic odontologist to take the necessary photographs, measurements, and casts of the teeth marks.
I checked the autopsy report on Chapman, and, sure enough, the sentence was there. I was quick to find out from Dr. Reay that anthropophagy was used to refer, in general, to bite marks of any species from the animal kingdom, not specifically human bite marks. So, in the case of Chapman, the wound was nothing more than a fish bite. End of excitement! Perhaps the FBI should use a dictionary—or at the very least, verify questionable statements. By this time, my curiosity had been piqued. Would the FBI dramatically change their profile with that amended information? I called John Douglas with the correct information. He said the absence of a human bite mark didn’t change his views about the Green River killer being a lust-murderer. I didn’t see anything else in the profile report that was usable. In fact, I was hopeful that the prime suspect was not the Green River Killer, because if anything was found that would have linked him to the murders, a search warrant affidavit based o
n the FBI’s nonspecific profile would never have survived the probable-cause test of an evidence-suppression hearing.
I continued to fight the urge to investigate the cases myself. It was highly likely that the prime suspect was more than just a casual acquaintance of some of the victims. Interestingly, if he was the murderer, it would have been an unusual instance wherein, like Ted Bundy, a repetitive lust-killer had already acquainted himself with his victims. It would have shot down the FBI’s premise that the killer was a stranger to his victims, but then the FBI hadn’t really been aware of Bundy’s stalking Lynda Healy until well after the fact.
I was also surprised to find a critical deficiency in the investigation of the prime suspect: not one friend, family member, or acquaintance of any Green River victim was contacted regarding their knowledge of the prime suspect. The timing of the discovery of that omission was unfortunate. I realized that, owing to the publicity that followed the suspect, care had to be taken in the approach to those potential witnesses to assure that they neither claimed knowledge just for the sake of convenience nor sought to embellish their statements.
There was also insufficient information in the files about physical evidence and the results of its examination in the Green River murders. Because of that, I could not do a meaningful assessment of the evidence. I suggested that the construction of a chart listing physical evidence by victim, cross-referenced by trace evidence found and the likely comparison against suspect trace evidence, was essential. Investigators could not search for evidence in a suspect’s house or car without knowing what they were to look for and what had already been discovered by laboratory personnel. I found several references to laboratory examinations that stated “nothing matches.” What was the “nothing” that they were referring to? The items checked were not listed in a specific lab report contained in the Green River files. Investigators needed that information to know what to search for. It wasn’t the fault of laboratory personnel that the reports were not in the files. It was up to the detectives to get them and examine them for usefulness to their ongoing investigation.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 21