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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  First Meeting with Ted

  That day, Dave and I made our first visit to the prison. As we pulled up, the lime-green state penitentiary was an impressive sight, rising austerely and dramatically above the surrounding landscape. The guard tower stood next to the main gate, and the fence that bordered the penitentiary and grounds was constructed of three separate coils of razor-sharp, 10-foot-high concertina wire. The grass between the wire rolls was neatly manicured. The sally port entry to the prison, like a hatchway on a naval vessel guarded by sentries, blocked our entry. After undergoing a search of our possessions, we were taken to Assistant Warden Pete Turner’s office. He had approved our visit before we arrived. With the savvy of a man who had dealt with hardened cons, he warned us of Bundy’s constant game-playing. “Try not to get used by him; he always has an agenda,” he warned. It was basic advice we wouldn’t forget. Turner led us to a small, drab, cream-colored interview room. A creaky wooden table and three metal chairs filled the room, and one wall had a barred window that was a constant reminder of restricted freedom.

  Ted, adorned in interwoven chains around his waist, wrists, and arms, looking much like Houdini being led to the water tank, was escorted by a burly prison guard. His figure was hunched as he said sheepishly, “Hello, I’m Ted.” His reach for my hand was slow, weighted as it was by the chains of death row. The touch of his hand was sticky wet. Was the great Ted Bundy nervous? As I looked directly into his eyes, they quickly turned away. Ted’s face was pale, his cheeks hollowed, his eyes lusterless, and his voice feeble. He was almost feral in our presence, like an animal just out of his cave.

  Apologetic about his appearance, Ted expressed reservations about our interview, claiming that he was presumptuous to think he could be of assistance. Ted was setting the hook convincingly, in a way, we would come to discover, that only he could. What were we supposed to do, get up and leave? He had a captive audience and all of us knew it. His phony self-effacing attitude and feigned weakness were part of a preconceived act, a method to sucker us in. Sure, he was partly debilitated, caged together with other murderers on Florida’s death row, but he was also acting out a weakened state of health as a crutch, just like the arm-in-a-sling ruse he had used so cleverly in the past. Bundy was working on our sympathy, getting us to drop our guard in order to accept his view of reality. That was how he had lured his victims years earlier, and that was going to be his approach to us now.

  But Ted also desperately wanted some form of validation from us. I was to realize years later that we were part of his grand scheme not only to extend his life, but to restart it by giving him an investiture as a homicide consultant. As bizarre as this sounds, it was almost as though he had found new meaning to life right there in the interrogation room on death row. Every body gesture, every aspect of his speech and phraseology, was keyed to convincing us of his expertise in the field of serial murder. Yet he was also dependent upon our approval that he was not the hapless person, the outcast of society, that we all knew him to be. Reichert looked at me while Ted settled into his persona for this first interview. I looked back at him. None of this was going to be easy.

  Victim Types

  From my point of view, we started with something simple—how the killer approached his victims. Serial killers have been known to approach their victims at the most opportune moment, when there was the least possibility of detection. People who became victims of a serial killer were involved in activities that were either high or low risk. Some victims were looking for dates in a bar, were hitching rides from strangers, or hooking in bars or along the strips of red-light district—all high-risk activities. Those activities made the women easily accessible, not requiring the sophisticated approach of a predatory and seasoned killer. However, other murder victims were doing things that did not take them out of the sphere of normal everyday life. They were sleeping in their beds, working at convenience stores, shopping at a mall, or just walking home. Those low-risk activities were common for most people and required the killer to use premeditated abduction routines in order to attack his victims. In either case, the killer chose victims who were vulnerable and easy to control. Frequently, victims were small-framed males and females, the elderly, or children.

  Ted believed that the Riverman picked the ideal victim class: the cardate prostitute. These prostitutes had a vested interest in getting into a car quickly and surreptitiously with any nonthreatening person who appeared to have the necessary cash. But Ted was very cautious about classifying all the Riverman’s victims as prostitutes. He wanted confirmation that all of the Green River victims were prostitutes at the time they disappeared. “Were they?” he asked. “All of them?”

  “We’re pretty safe in saying that they were all prostitutes,” Reichert told Ted. “If there’s no arrest record filed, we have associates who say that the victim was known to do a trick here and there. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that each one of these victims had an arrest record,” Dave went on.

  The fact that some of the victims were not prostitutes was significant to Ted because, in Ted’s experience, those were times when mistakes occurred. Since Ted had deviated from his own victim class by picking up Brenda Ball at a topless dance tavern frequented by bikers, we felt that Ted knew the Riverman also approached victims with different lifestyles. Therefore, we knew that Ted was trying to substantiate in his own mind the reason why the Riverman would pick up women who were not prostitutes. But Ted also warned that those victims not fitting the mold could have been killed by someone other than the Riverman.

  Whether Amina Agisheff, the first victim on the Green River list, was a prostitute was questionable, we explained to Ted. She was known to hang out at First Avenue and Pike Street, a vice area in downtown Seattle, but she had no record of prostitution arrests. She could have been mistaken for a street person. On the night she disappeared, she was last seen going to a bus stop and was expected home by her three children.

  Ted explained that for a lot of reasons Agisheff didn’t seem to fit the Riverman’s prototypical victim personality. And “that’s something you guys have to deal with, the ones that don’t fit. The ones that aren’t prostitutes would be the ones that I would say ‘why?’ How were they approached? If they’re just sort of hanging out, it’s one thing for a guy to focus on prostitutes. He has a certain M.O., a way of approaching his women. If it’s just a matter of driving up somewhat carefully and picking a girl standing on the street corner, well, that doesn’t speak to a very sophisticated method of approach.”

  Whereas on the one hand, Ted was intrigued with the Riverman and his apparent elusiveness, Ted also criticized the killer’s lack of a calculating and more distinguished approach to his victims. Dave and I knew, and Ted knew also, that the Riverman’s repertoire of victim lures was limited. His victims were in high-risk environments and were therefore low-risk victims who needed to go with strange men in order to make money. Technically, a client could “abduct” a prostitute for a couple of hours for the right amount of money. Anyone, even Ted, could abduct prostitutes, but Ted believed that the Riverman did not rise to his own level of sophistication because the Riverman didn’t venture out into victim communities where a killer had to use more elaborate techniques to lure the victims away from their safety zones. To serial killers, this was all part of the cunning and bravado. Ted perceived himself to be the master and, therefore, able to critique others.

  But, Ted said, if the Riverman had a “method that’s more generalized to pick up anybody he select—if he’s just selecting prostitutes, now, that’s one thing—but maybe later he’s going to start selecting runaways or juvenile delinquents or girls that hang out in bars. They are the kinds of people who you don’t identify as directly falling into your profile. Let’s say he chose those who were not cardate prostitutes, but who are delinquents and runaway—he just shifted his approach to victims a notch to the right. He’s not going for prostitutes but prostitute-types, who dress or act or look to him like prostitutes. If y
ou haven’t found them yet, he’s just disposing of them very well or it would be my guess he may have moved and [is] no longer operating in the King County area.”

  The prospect that the Riverman approached and killed victims other than prostitutes was just one of several fascinations Ted had with the Green River cases. Probably the largest attraction for Ted was his belief that the Green River list of victims was incomplete and should have included more victims from Pierce County, Ted’s childhood home. Ted would emphasize throughout our interviews that long-term serial killers, like the Riverman, often have more bodies hidden elsewhere that police haven’t discovered. We suspected, of course, that Ted was also alluding to himself, holding out the possibility that if interviewers were smart enough and willing to follow Ted down the psychological trail he blazed, we would find the location of his most private dump sites, which still remained undisturbed. Ted was already, even in that first interview, inhabiting the mind of the Green River Killer.

  Where Was the Riverman From?

  “There are people who don’t appear on your list,” Ted pointed out, “and your statement about possible victims in Pierce County fascinates me. I don’t know why. And I just offer it for pure speculation. I think the man’s out of Pierce County. I don’t know why. I just get a strong feeling he’s out somewhere between the cities of Auburn and Tacoma. I don’t know why. That’s why I was so fascinated; I just had a strong feeling the guy’s out of Pierce County and that intrigued me. I said, ‘Whoa. I’d like to find out more about him.’”

  Ted had good reasons why he thought the Riverman was a fellow Tacoman. “I feel that way because all the victims are moving south from where they were last seen to where their bodies were discovered. And that could be a deliberate attempt by him to set you off. All the victims, except for the ones moving west, have moved south from the point where they were last seen, some distance south; it was significant that he went north of Tacoma. Except for the Tacoma victim, Wendy Coffield, that you put on your list, they’re all moving south, and my guess is it’s not a mistake. I think he’s going south—home.

  “And he knows the mountain—he’s just saying, ‘Well, I’m going to try this, this time.’ But you notice the ones east of Enum-claw; Enumclaw is really northeast Pierce County, southeast King County. And probably in terms of access to his homing area, one of the nearest mountain-pass areas to Tacoma, Puyallup, and Auburn area, in terms of getting up to the mountains. And I know that Enumclaw, the area east of Enumclaw, like the back of my hand, and that is an area—probably what this guy’s looking for. There should be a number of the victims’ bodies up there, considering you have already found three bodies. When I saw two, I said, ‘There’s more up there.’ I said, ‘There’s at least five more up there.’ Looking at your list, there’s surely more than three. The river, like you say, isn’t the only thing that matters to him, something like, you know, a needle in a haystack. If you look at your turn-arounds, places to pull off the road, and look at your sites on dirt roads, you might get lucky and find more bodies, it seems to me.

  “What I’m saying is that you guys saw some trends, like the trend to take Seattle victims west and up toward the mountains or way south, or the trend to get better as time went along, or the trend to go east of Enumclaw after September and October of eighty-three. You know, that interested me. And I felt from the beginning, though, from what little I knew, selecting these sites with some care, that he’s going back probably a number of times to bring bodies in the area or to come back and check on a body or check out the area.”

  Ted picked up on what seemed to be the Green River Killer’s pattern of lining up his abduction sites with his body dump sites. Ted hypothesized that the killer wanted to spend as little time on the road with the victim as possible, probably because he was afraid, and therefore had come up with specific sites for victim pick-up locations before he struck. In 1984, before we interviewed Ted in Florida, his idea would have made a workable theory because we still hadn’t uncovered the extent of the killer’s movements. However, by 1985, we had realized that the Green River Killer was traveling over 50 miles between pick-up and dump sites. Nevertheless, even in 1984, the Riverman’s trolling patterns were intriguing to investigators pursuing a long, cold trail. We used what Ted gave us, however, and tried to get him to help us build something of a miniprofile.

  Ted’s Profile of the Green River Killer

  With all the traveling that the Riverman appeared to be doing between Seattle and the remote areas of King and Pierce counties, Dave Reichert asked Ted, “Has his selection of sites given you any impression at all as to what type of work this guy does? Or what his interests are?”

  Ted answered, “If this guy works, he works at odd hours because he’s Monday through Friday on the victims.” Ted plotted on a map those victims who were missing and those who were found, and had an almost even distribution Sunday through Saturday with a slight emphasis on Sunday, if the dates were right. “That’s a big if. Of the found victims, the emphasis is clearly on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Only one disappeared on Friday and one on Saturday, interestingly enough. But all of them together, it looks like it’s fairly even,” Ted continued, looking at his modus operandi chart. “Those who were missing and not found and those who were missing and found. It’s hard to say in terms of day of the week. He doesn’t have any particular preference. That’s kind of odd. I mean, I think it is the lack of a pattern that strikes me here. If you see something different, tell me. But I looked at the days of the week and that’s what I saw.” In other words, we understood Ted to say, the pattern was that there was no real pattern that police could use to set up surveillance.

  As he spoke to us, I could see that Ted was projecting himself into each Green River murder as if he were the killer making decisions on the spot. Whom to lure? How to lure? Where to drive? This made sense because Ted had the actual experience of scouting victims and making his getaway to a preselected dump site. Therefore, in any description of the Riverman, there should have been a personal description of Ted. And inasmuch as the Ted cases in Seattle were open just like the Riverman’s, I was after Ted at the same time I was after the Riverman. I hoped to catch one by catching the other.

  In Ted’s description of the Riverman I was listening for any clue I could find about Ted’s behavior. Could Ted’s disbelief about the lack of a pattern have revealed something about himself? Either Ted had a discernible pattern to his crimes, known only to himself (we never detected one), or he was amazed that another killer would have the foresight to assure that a pattern was not detectable. Whatever the reason for Bundy’s fascination with the Riverman’s pattern, it revealed something about Ted’s thinking.

  Traditionally, investigators have looked for patterns in a series of crimes because it offers the possibility of catching the perpetrator in the act by staking out the next predictable location at the time he is expected to strike. This procedure is most effective for apprehending suspects who rob fast-food stores or burglarize homes. And, because it is an effective method for catching some criminals, it is a frequently used procedure in multiple-murder investigations, probably for the lack of anything better to try. But in all fairness, using pattern identification to predict the time to stakeout certain locations has been successful in a few serial-murder investigations. The most famous and successful stakeout of a serial killer was for the Atlanta child murders investigation. Our investigation had borne out what Ted said.

  At several points in our conversation, Ted justified his answers by stating, “Let me say, first of all, I have a lot of preconceptions based on nothing, just based upon feeling, intuition. And then I got your list of victims’ bodies and their locations, and it reshaped a lot of my feelings about looking at what you actually had here—in terms of when your victims disappeared, when and where they were found. It’s kind of fascinating watching some of this unfold, assuming they’re all related, and I’d say there’s a good chance that they are. I mean, obv
iously, they’re closely related. And so I sat down and I started taking notes. And I don’t know where to start. I guess what confounds me is the fact that even though—as you correctly pointed out—you’re dealing with a class of victims who are hard to trace and are hard to investigate, who disappear without being reported, whose movements are hard to trace, whose friends are difficult to run down.”

  The Green River Murders Task Force had two detectives who were exclusively devoted to following up missing-persons investigations. It was an endless task since Washington’s police agencies did not prioritize missing-persons investigations unless there was an obvious indication of foul play. Even more neglected were the runaway-juvenile reports. So the task force detectives ended up with mountains of names on many lists that they had to verify with missing-persons lists. In many cases, nobody had cleared the missing person’s name from the police computer when he or she returned, which further complicated the task. Ted was very aware of this problem. Ted’s surmised that the Riverman had figured out this police shortcoming by now as well.

  Ted went on to say, “Still, quite significant to me is that after October 1983, it dropped off like it did. Nobody has turned up yet. And I’m not saying he’s stopped. Like you said, that’s no guarantee he stopped. But he’s gotten a lot smarter, somehow. Something has changed around October of eighty-three, because he may not have moved. He may not have been struck by lightning.”

  Up to this point, we had found no victims or had any reports of missing persons that would indicate that the killer operated after late 1983. So, displaying just normal curiosity, Reichert asked Ted if he thought it was possible for the killer to stop.

  The gleaming smirk on Ted’s face was his answer. “No! Not unless he was born again and got filled with the Holy Spirit in a very real way.” And, indeed, Ridgway had become a Pentacostal Christian for a time. “He’s either moved, he’s dead, or he’s doing something very different.” The prospect that the Riverman was murdering in a different way was frightening. What would he be doing differently? I thought.