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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  After pausing for a while as if he were meditating, Bundy announced, “My feelings are this! There’s no question in my mind, if he’s straightened up, he’s changed his victim class just a little, dealing with runaways, generally, rather than prostitutes specifically. He broadened out a little bit more just to deal with runaways and delinquents, was more careful in the way that he disposed of their bodies, and there’s no question that this explains the apparent drop-off.” As it turned out, Bundy was correct on this assumption as well. Gary Ridg-way was targeting younger victims, runaways, and delinquents, many of whom were cocaine addicts desperate for money for their score.

  “And I’ve thought of it every way that I could—days of the week, frequency by month, any intense periods, more intense than other—things like this. And you were still finding people when he was still killing. For instance, he appears, and there’s no guarantee of course, to have begun in July of eighty-two, and you’ve gone over this a thousand times, but forgive me if I’m boring you!”

  Early Victims

  Ted was on a roll of redundancy. A casual look in another direction and a well-placed yawn caught Ted’s eye. He needed, frantically, to continue his message as Dr. Berberich had said he would. I showed Ted, through deliberate body language, that what he was saying was unimportant to me, and he tried even harder to please by providing even more information. Ted now had to impart that the first victim in a series known to the police was generally not the first victim killed by a serial killer. As Ted had killed many before the police had located his “first” victim, the Riverman probably started killing long before our file on him had come into existence.

  He continued aggressively, “It’s a good chance Agisheff or Coffield is not his number-one victim. Coffield is fascinating. And not only in terms of the geographic area.” Coffield disappeared from Ted’s home territory and Ted continually stressed that any references to the Tacoma or Pierce County area were important. It was as if the Riverman had been created in Ted’s mirror image, in that he began his homicide career in Tacoma, Washington, Ted’s home.

  Reichert pressed on. “Why is she fascinating?”

  “Well,” Ted answered, “ ’cause she disappeared from Tacoma. At least, it appears that she was last seen in Tacoma. Now, she may have migrated up to Pacific Highway South. Who knows? And you may know something about that, that I don’t.

  “But it’s a little bit odd, for instance, if you consider Agisheff your number one on this particular Green River list, if in fact—and that’s a big if—she disappeared on the seventh of July, and then Coffield—and back on the seventh to downtown Seattle. Agisheff’s body was found up by North Bend near I-ninety. Less than twenty-four hours later, this guy has dumped a body and he’s gone to all this trouble late on the seventh. He runs up to North Bend and drops off Agisheff and then goes down the next day to Tacoma and drops Coffield off in a river—there’s something here.

  “And there are age differences that kind of startle me, too,” Ted went on. “Agisheff is thirty-six; Coffield is sixteen. That’s a little bit weird. All the running around within one day, a twenty-four-hour period, more or less. I don’t know how much we want to check on these places and dates, probably not a great deal, but they’re all you got to work with.”

  I suggested, “Well, actually, the times might be screwed up, but the date—”

  And Ted interrupted, “The dates are more reliable than the time.”

  Ted seemed fascinated by our mentions of the dates and times of the crimes on the reference list of victims we sent to him. He questioned the reliability of dates and times because he knew from experience that the dates police assigned to events sometimes bore little relation to when the events actually took place. Therefore, the issue of the reliability of dates and times was important to Ted. Unfortunately, in some cases, the time was more reliable than the date because some of the victim’s pimps recalled the time better than what day of the week it was, mainly because they knew what time they usually sent their ladies out to hook. Their memories were affected not only by their reluctance to talk with the police but also by the passage of time from when they last saw their prostitutes to when investigators interviewed them. We also surmised that because of the extensive use of drugs on the Sea-Tac strip, many recollections of potential witnesses were clouded by their drug use as well as by alcohol use or by the aberrant behavior that governed their daily routines.

  Reichert flattered Ted and deliberately bolstered his feelings of self-importance by asking, “You said something that interested me. You said that it was weird, the difference in age, thirty-six to six-teen. Why is that weird?” Bundy was always in search of what was going on in the Riverman’s head. I suspected that Ted thought it might give him a clue to what was driving him as well.

  Ted thought for a second and answered, “Oh, what does this guy got going on in his head? What’s he looking for? And it’s hard to say. You have some variation here, with one of the black victims being thirty-one, but most of them are sixteen to twenty. Agisheff may have looked younger. I don’t know. It’s just the age and then the geographic differences and the closeness in the time and the difference in where he dumped her. Why would he dump one up in the mountains and another one in the Green River the next day? Why? I mean, you can ask that question if you get him, if you ever find him. But it seems to me those circumstances, but not necessarily, eliminate Agisheff as a victim of the Riverman. You know that Coffield is a part of it because of all these other people found in the Green River. But Agisheff is up in North Bend. You notice that all of the victims along I-ninety, near North Bend, were last seen or hooking in Seattle. Where did Yates disappear? Downtown Seattle, right?”

  Dump Site Patterns

  Ted believed that he had plotted the abduction locations and body discovery sites correctly and made a prediction about the killer. “You notice all the North Bend victims are from Seattle. And opposed to those in the Green River area, in fact, all of those in there, are Pacific Highway South victim—except Delores Williams.” He became even more emphatic. “In fact, he took all the Seattle victims either east or south, where his Pacific Highway South victims are right near Sea-Tac Airport, Star Lake Road, and the Green River.”

  Ted went on, “Delores Williams, a black girl out of downtown Seattle, very well could have hopped a bus and been on the street down on Pacific Highway South. I don’t know. But if she disappeared from Seattle, she is an anomaly because her body is the only body at these four major dump sites that did not disappear from Pacific Highway South or that general area. All the other Seattle victims went east, south, or southeast—way away. That’s what I notice.

  “I’ll bet you your bones twenty-five and fifteen that were found east of Seattle—still unidentified—will probably turn out to have disappeared from Seattle,” Ted firmly predicted. “For some reason, he’s running off, abducting and dumping the Seattle victims in a much different way than he was the Pacific Highway South victims.”

  Dave and I learned quickly that questions framed with particular words allowed Ted to expound more openly without the immediate fear that he was revealing information about himself. Words like “would you speculate” or “why do you think” were intentionally part of our interview strategy because they enabled him to believe that he was distancing himself from self-incriminating statements. Because Dave and I knew that Bundy’s basis for speculation and hypothesis came from his own feelings and his similar crimes in the exact same areas, we knew that in reality Ted was talking about his own behavior. Reichert pointedly asked, “Do you have any speculation as to why he may be doing that?”

  Now behaving as if he had become our mentor, Ted said, “Well, first of all, he’s trying to dispose of the bodies where they won’t be found. This guy doesn’t want to get caught. Neither does he want any of his bodies found. I think it’s clear that, over time, you can see him trying to improve his dump sites. He’s trying to get better at disposing of those bodies.”

&n
bsp; We were watching a classic performance of a serial killer’s bravado. Ted had eluded us for years in King County and he believed he would have gotten away with the Colorado and Utah murders had he not been stopped by the trooper. He had beaten us at our own game and now we had come to his cell to learn from him. Thus, he could be almost professorial in his explanation of why not only the Riverman was eluding us, but how he did it as well, albeit without confessing to a single incident. Ted would change back and forth from first person to third person continuously throughout our conversations to emphasize his point. With his ego swelling almost to a point of explosion, Ted was obliging, but critical, in his assessment of the Riverman’s ability to learn from one murder to the next.

  “Generally speaking, looking at them all, I’d say, ‘Well, he’s really clumsy. I would not have done it that way.’ But who knows. With his mental apparatu—you’re given what he thinks is effective and what isn’t. But I think as far as the downtown Seattle victims went, there was obviously no close-by place to dump them. Along Pacific High-way South, he’s got all this stuff within, you know, short driving distance. It appears to me that they’re killed shortly after he picks them up because he’s not going far with them. That’s just a real right-off-the-cuff guess.” Ted smiled coyly as if the word guess was a modest expression of fact from the mouth of the only authority. Cocksure, he felt that he had opened the Riverman’s mind for us. But what Ted did not know, nor did we, was that the Green River Killer was taking a large number of his victims back to his very own house.

  Easy Victims

  While Ted was on a roll, I wanted to continue with the idea that the Riverman picked on easy victims, knowing that Ted thought that, too. And, once again, I knew I was feeding his ego even more when I suggested that, unlike Ted’s ruses and lures with coeds on campuses and ski resorts, the Riverman’s picking up streetwalkers by car didn’t take much skill. “Almost all of them,” I said, setting up Ted, “were exclusively cardate prostitutes. They’re not the type that have a motel room they take somebody back to. So they’re all eligible for the car.”

  Not wanting simply to agree with me, Ted responded, “That’s what I was going to ask. Were they plying their trade on the streets or inside establishments? Were they standing on the street?”

  “Standing,” I said.

  Ted answered, “He’s not taking their car.” Thus, Ted reinforced his own ego and our own belief that the Riverman’s pickups couldn’t have been any easier. He took the most vulnerable, most available victim—people who wouldn’t be missed until days or weeks after their disappearance. Furthermore, he took them to the nearest dump site he could find after spending as little time with them as possible.

  Now that Dave and I had stroked Ted’s ego and had him speaking very comfortably about the Riverman, it was time to get him psychologically closer to his own murders. We began with caution by asking, “Why do you think that he’d picked up two in one day?” I reminded him, “He had a couple of them at the same time.”

  Ted didn’t appear to suspect my motive. He gave my question some thought and listed the possibilities of the Riverman’s thinking processes. “I thought about that for a long time,” he said. “He got Agisheff and Coffield, who were close in time. He got Hinds and Mills on the eleventh and twelfth of August. And then you had Pitsor and Gabbert snatched on April 17. And Bush and Summers. This guy gets hot, he gets hot—I guess. It’s possible he picked them up both at the same time, and all you have is a discrepancy in date.”

  Then he conjectured about the racial makeup of the victim list. “You know, you have a black victim and a white victim here, then another black victim, I believe. Lee is white, but they’re one day apart from each other. And Bush and Summers are both black, I believe. So they may have been together. You know, I don’t know how they take care of business, but maybe he just put himself in a position of picking up two at the same time. It might not be because he wanted to, but because he just got locked into a situation where he was so driven he had to. He saw one, and to get one he had to get two, and took two.”

  Ted was putting himself right into the mind of the killer on the street, and there was a validity to what he was saying. Maybe the killer couldn’t isolate a single victim from time to time. He was cruising, saw a particularly vulnerable-looking streetwalker, but she was not alone. He would have rather had the one, but had to take the other just to make the pickup. It made sense once you put yourself—like Ted, who had obviously been there—into the mind of the Riverman driving along the strip.

  Ted continued. “But it does seem to confound the general pattern where he goes for one, you know. One person is easier to control than two, unless he has a very good technique. And no one has escaped from this guy, and, obviously, he has a very good technique once he makes the move. But it’s clear he gets very intense. And, it could be that he did come back one day and then another. But when you get in with two blacks together here and two blacks together, maybe he just had to take two to get one. Or maybe, he was so ‘hot,’ he was so driven, that he had to go one day and come back the next, although it doesn’t fit the general pattern. My guess would be he had to pick up two to get one.”

  Living Victims

  Bundy and other serial killers, such as John Wayne Gacy and Wayne Williams, had living victims or witnesses who eventually came forward to testify against them. Thus, we assumed, there were living victims of the Green River Killer. And we were right, as it turned out. We wanted to pursue with Ted this very possibility to see how he would react, especially in light of Carol DaRonch’s escape from him and her subsequent testimony.

  Dave Reichert sneaked up on this question, asking, “Would there be anything unusual that he might do that maybe our officers have not asked living prostitutes about? Because we interviewed prostitutes out there, of course, in the areas where prostitution occurs. Is there anything that you can think of that our officers might be asking these girls that this person displayed in his contact?”

  Ted knew exactly what Reichert was referring to—living victim—and he offered his own opinion eagerly. “I think there’s an excellent chance that he has picked up a number of prostitutes who he’s later released, for any number of reasons. Perhaps he just felt an unusual wave of compassion. Maybe he was surprised at some point and felt it’s too risky to kill that particular individual. Maybe somebody saw him at some point in time after he had made contact with her, or maybe it’s just entirely too risky to go through with it. But I think he’s doing it fairly quickly—he’s probably killing them fairly quickly. At least most of them, maybe not all of them.”

  Trying to make Bundy think and work in order to give us something to use that we hadn’t already thought of, Reichert clarified the question by asking, “I guess what I’m getting at—is there anything this guy would say to the ones that he let go? Is there anything that he would do to maybe tip them off? ‘I think I left a killer’? He released them, but they don’t call us, and we end up interviewing them later. Maybe we’re not asking the right questions to get the information that we need.”

  Patiently, like a mentor to his attentive students, Ted continued with, “Well, what I’ve outlined before is nobody has gotten away from him, once he’s made his move, that I know of.” Ted momentarily avoided this issue by asking his own question. “Is this true? I mean, he’s not tried to, you don’t have anybody who’s pulled a gun on somebody or tried to tie them up or whatever, do you?”

  “No,” said Reichert reluctantly as if not wanting to admit it. Dave had searched high and low for anyone who had escaped the Riverman and could have revealed what was behind his mask. In November 1984, however, Rebecca Gande Guay would tell the Task Force that she was a living victim of the Green River Killer, but Ridgway would be able to explain her complaint away by saying that she bit him and he reacted in self-defense when he choked her.

  Noticing that Dave was beginning to wear his feelings of frustration with the Green River cases, I interrupted with, “
We’ve had all kinds of kinky incidents happen with prostitutes out there.”

  Ted reassured us. “Sure. That’s the problem.”

  I continued. “So we more than likely have identified those type of people. We’ve followed up on those incidents and discovered that they were not associated with the Green River Killer, but that’s different. We don’t have anybody—we feel anyway—that’s escaped from him.”

  After a minute of reflection, Ted sat up in his chair and his eyes positively gleamed with the light of revelation. “Sure,” he said. “I see what you mean. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it very effectively. I mean, he’s done three dozen at least and nobody’s gotten away from him. That’s very impressive. Sometimes, it looks like he might have two at a time. It’s hard to tell. What I’m saying is, my guess is he’s driving to a location he feels very safe in, where he can make a move. Okay? And if there’s trouble, nobody will hear or see any kind of struggle or whatever he ends up doing effectively to take control of his victims. And so I don’t know how these prostitutes conduct their business once they get in the car, but I guess it is fairly standard procedure to go somewhere where they won’t be observed. But this guy is going to go somewhere, at least initially. My guess would be that he makes a move and there’s no question in his mind. If there is trouble or some kind of problem, they won’t be seen or witnessed by anybody passing by.”

  Ted knew he was on the right track. “One of the questions I would ask, that comes just off the top of my head, is ‘Have any of your clients taken you to locations that were particularly remote or secluded?’ See what I’m saying? As far as him saying something—‘You got away from me this time’—something obvious. You know, like you say, you’re going to have men, clients of these women, who are fairly bizarre in their relationships with women for one reason or another. And if they say something out of the ordinary, I don’t know that it would be significant. My guess is that he’s making his move really quickly, and he’s doing it in locations he’s very confident in making a move in.