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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Bang! The loud sound that startled us was Dave’s tape recorder hitting the floor. Dave had not noticed where the recorder was sitting and, in astonishment at what Ted had very seriously proposed, had swung his arm around and swept the thing right off the table. Breaking up the serious atmosphere of the room, Dave said, “We’re still alive.”

  The Slasher Film Festival Strategy

  Ted laughed, but continued in all seriousness, “I’m trying to tell you something here that you might think is a little bit odd, but I really can tell you I don’t think it is. Let’s say that there’s a film in a can somewhere that hasn’t been distributed or released in the Pacific Northwest, and it’s a particularly violent film that appeals to Friday the 13th or Halloween followers, that deals with death and young women, a violent murderer and young women.

  “There have even been a few out recently that dealt with the death of young prostitutes. I don’t know if you have kept up with that kind of stuff. Hopefully going to all the trouble and not being too obvious about having five or ten of these movies playing all at once somewhere, I thought, ‘What would I do if I was trying to narrow down and bring this guy to me?’ I would try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie that’s out there in a can which has never been broadcast or shown in the Pacific Northwest. I would pick two theaters, one in Seattle and one in the Tacoma area, outside of the general vicinity where these girls have been disappearing. I’d find a certain theater that was out and away from other activities so that people who came to the theater would have to park right in front of it. You know what I mean? As opposed to a downtown theater, where they’d park away. I’d get the cooperation of the theater owner and the film distributor. I would see if I could find a really vivid, lurid sex murder kind of flick. There are some pretty good choices out there, if you looked around for them.

  “For a couple of weeks or so, I would assure that the film was well publicized in the Seattle/Tacoma newspapers, with the most lurid photos in the film section depicting the girls being held with a knife to their throat and the whole thing. Kind of the glitzy, guaranteed to arouse those kinds of passions, which, quite frankly, are unfortunately very unhealthy to arouse in people. I mean in the kind of sex and violence tendencies.

  “Then for a period of a couple of weeks, I would photograph everybody that came in and out of those theaters. Now, I know this sounds weird, but believe me, it isn’t. I’d photograph every male that came in there, and I’d try to correlate the guy’s photograph with the license plate number of his car. Once he got out of the car, you’d have people in the lot. That’s a lot of work, but just follow me and do what you want.

  “You have people in the lot, and they would be writing down makes and models of cars as they arrive. Basically, as they were coming in, they’d be filmed, maybe even videotaped, coming in singly. Have them come through a turnstile or something. And later on, go back and correlate the photographs with the car evidence. I think you could correlate the photographs with the automobile, because that would be the only way you could link a face with something concrete which you could follow up on later, see? And that way you would have some way to follow up. And, quite frankly, I really believe if you have the resources to do this, and any eyewitnesses at all, or if you in the future have any eyewitnesses, you would have them look at photographs that you took of these people coming in. You would put them in a mug book of the males that were coming in the theater. After a couple weeks of film showing in Seattle and Tacoma, you would have a collection of individuals that I would think would truly amaze your Crimes Against Persons detectives. Not just you as a task force, but I think you could take that book of photographs and show it to victims in unsolved cases of assaults against women, and you would have people coming out of the woodwork.

  “Men who, generally speaking, are as normal as the day is long, who really are highly controlled individuals, but who indulge their violent fantasies, not only in acting out but vicariously through the media. Their names are on no computer, their fingerprints are in no files, and the only time you ever see them come out in public is to view some of these movies, a way for them to get off. There’s no other way you can reach them. There’s no other way you could find them. It’d be like, you know, bees to honey.”

  Ted repeated himself to emphasize his point. “And what you would have after a couple of weeks is a pile of photographs, and hopefully you could correlate the photographs with the particular car or vehicles. You would have also a whole pile of suspect vehicles or you could go through and see if you have any suspect vehicles you’re interested in. Are any of these showing up in the lots? If you have any potential eyewitnesses, are any of these showing up?

  “Have a way of sorting the license plates of the vehicles showing up and see if any come from particularly a long distance away. If a guy drives from Auburn to Bellevue to see this kind of a movie, what does it say about him? It says he’s really into sex and violence. And, hey, there’s no better indicator of whether a man is capable of this kind of act, of killing all these women, than if he has that interest and goes out of his way to indulge that interest. That is, if there’s any hook out there that predicts whether a person is capable or is disposed toward killing in the way the Green River man kills, it’s whether or not he is interested in sitting down and viewing all of these gruesome movies. I know that’s a generalization. But I can’t think of a better way to tap into a whole reservoir of potential suspects who are interested, obviously, in sex and in violent sex and murder when it comes to young women than that.”

  “He may even have a VCR at home and rent those kinds of movies,” I added.

  “That’s quite possible,” Ted said. “I mean that’s another excellent idea, if he’s that well off. One of my feelings was this guy is staying, was active so long in the same area, and perhaps one of the reasons was because he didn’t have enough money to go further. Maybe he was stuck to a low-paying job and didn’t have the bucks to range further. I don’t know. But he might be well off enough to have a VCR, and he might, in fact, indulge his fantasy in that way. I know if I was in a Crimes Against Persons unit in any law enforcement agency, I’d love to be able to know the name and I.D. of every male that would creep into this building. You know, the porn bookstores and peep shows. I would love to have their photographs in my mug book. Because I know that the first persons I would show that mug book to would be the cases where I had an eyewitness of some sort, but I didn’t have any suspects.”

  “You don’t think he’d go to any type of pornographic film? You want graphic sex murder, right?” I asked to clarify.

  All the while Ted was talking about his strategy, he was becoming intensely excited, so we let him go on and didn’t suggest that what he was proposing was entirely illegal. Even if we did learn who the killer might be, we’d lose our ability to deal with him because we’d have no probable cause to pursue the investigation based on the killer’s attendance at a slasher film festival.

  Ted spoke faster and became more articulate. Emphatically, he replied, “Sure. Get right down to his basic instincts. It doesn’t have to be prostitutes. This guy is not going to go to the Deep Throat type of thing. He may or may not vacillate, but the clear link in this case is that he’s going to be on whatever kinky sexual thing he has; if he has anything peculiar, [it] has gone way beyond just sex. There’s that fatal link between sex and violence. The key is here. And so, the kind of stuff he’s interested in is not just a skin flick, but he’s more into vicariously experiencing what he loves to do, whatever he can do, and that’s go out and kill young women. And, quite frankly, the closer the movie, the book, or whatever it is comes to that, the more interested he’s going to be in it.”

  Sexual Totems

  Following up on Ted’s theory that a serial killer would attend his sex-slasher film festival, I asked Ted about some of the unusual items we’d found in the secluded and wooded areas of King County. “We have found clothing all the time where some sex freak has gone out in
the woods and used specially cut pantyhose or wears female clothes and discards them. It’s all over. You can pick out any turnaround and it’s there. There’s also, at periodic points, pornographic literature. In fact, there’s a possibility that there’s been someone with literature in close proximity of a couple of our finds. And it’s not your sex murder-type pornography. It’s just regular scenes of people fucking or whatever, you know, people doing their thing. Is this something that would interest this guy?”

  “It could be,” he said, and once again I suspected that Ted was talking more about himself than about the Green River Killer. “I mean, I’m not saying that this guy is one-dimensional. Sexually speaking, there are probably many levels on which this man relates to women. We hope several, anyway. And, quite frankly, it’s possible that he has normal relationships or at least has had something that approaches normal relationships with women. You can’t rule anything out. In fact, he may be a loner and hates women or he may not be. He may be single, he may be married. And I wouldn’t rule anything out for sure.

  “Therefore, he may get off on regular, say, mainstream pornography, whether it’s Playboy or whatever. But I think obviously he’s gone beyond that. He’s gone beyond that here. It’s obvious to me that it’s an ingredient of violent death. It’s indispensable now to his fantasy, to his acting out. And so while you may have found clothing, pornography, or soft pornography in the area where some of these bodies were found, I don’t think it means that he was drawn to those areas because he found that stuff there, necessarily. You know that you find lots of stuff dumped, because people dump stuff. You know, go around in those locations, the turnarounds and back roads. I guess there’s some people that think that is a good place to dump. It’s just garbage. No, I don’t think that finding that kind of material would necessarily mean anything to me, unless I found it right on top of the victims. Then it would have been important, certainly.”

  Important? Why? Was Ted revealing something about his own private necrophilic fantasies? Trying to get Ted to focus on this, I asked, “What is significant about finding things on top of victims?”

  Avoiding that question entirely, Ted replied, “I don’t know. It depends on what they are. If they were left there by the guy who killed the women, then you’d have to determine what it was he left there.”

  Necrophilic Fantasies

  I proposed to Ted a slightly different approach to the same question. “Say you had a lot of bodies where you don’t find or can’t tell that anything is left, but you have one where there is obviously something left behind intentionally. And it’s meant to be there such as—‘look what I left for you’-type attitude.”

  As if he were turning that image over in his mind, Ted slowly began thinking aloud. “Ummm. May have not left it for you, but left it for himself. If it’s something that you think is significant, he may have left it there because he got off on that and came back to find it there.”

  “Do you see any religious aspect in this whole thing?” Dave Reichert asked. Maybe Ted had some false altruism that drove him or maybe he could fathom something in the Riverman’s fascination with prostitutes, street hustlers, and runaways.

  Ted suggested that he once wondered if the Riverman was the “Charles Bronson type, getting rid of prostitutes for the good of the community. I don’t think so, quite frankly. I don’t think that he might be doing the Lord’s work. Is this one possibility?”

  “That’s one thing that I’m trying to get at, yes,” muttered Dave.

  Ted tended to lecture, but in so doing revealed that he was a seasoned sexual thrill-killer who understood the motivations behind the mutilated victims he had left for us. He seemed to understand that we realized he had sexually manipulated his victims after he had killed them. It was chilling just how much he did comprehend and accept without any apparent remorse. The Riverman seemed to be Ted’s objective correlative for describing his own fascination with his kills.

  “In examining some of those bodies,” he said, “if you find that they have been sexually mutilated in any way, he was not doing the Lord’s work. If he was altruistic, he’d just go out there and knock them off and dump their bodies somewhere. But those murders are more than that. It’s part of getting away with it, not limiting him [from] having fulfilled his fantasies at the scene.”

  “What would you say about mutilation?” Dave inquired, unaware, because he had not investigated him, that Ted was the supreme mutilator. I knew, more than anyone else except Ted, about the level of sexual perversion that Bundy wallowed in, and thus I sat there transfixed by the scenario that Ted unfolded.

  “Well, if he’s in fact sexually assaulting the victims and mutilating them in some way, I doubt that he has any religious motives,” Ted said, repeating himself to make sure that we understood what he was explaining to us. “Motivations here, they’re seriously complicated with some sexual and violent motivations, and you wouldn’t see him as one primarily motivated by religious drive. My guess is if he’s not picked these victims because he knows they’re accessible, easily picked up, and difficult to investigate as far as law enforcement is concerned, he’s picking them because he has some particular grudge against them and a real hang-up, you know, beyond viewing them as young women. And I sense in this [that] it’s not a venting of religious anger or moral outrage, but a desire to kill and to harm these people. He will be doing that and probably continue to do it. I can’t imagine him stopping.”

  Dave seemed to take the questioning deep into a speculative vein when he suggested, “It’s been mentioned as a theory that the victims are put in the river for some form of baptism.” But in reality he was probing Bundy from a different angle.

  Ted seemed to have taken the bait when he shook his head in comic disbelief and replied, “No. Well, okay. My opinion is that this guy is a straightforward individual who gets off on graphically killing and sexually assaulting his victims, involving himself completely. For whatever reason, who knows? Perhaps. I mean, anything is possible. My opinion [is] he was dumping the bodies in the Green River because he thought that they wouldn’t turn up, and they did, so he changed. It’s as simple as that.”

  Serial Killer Diaries

  Some killers were known to have kept a diary of their misdeeds. Dave asked Ted if he thought the Riverman kept a log of who he killed and where.

  Reflecting for a while, Ted answered, “I see what you’re saying. Yeah. Over the years I’ve had an opportunity [that] I’m sure you’ve had, to read about cases where a man accused of mass murders had his belongings examined. Some of them had the effort, you know, newspaper articles on the wall and everything. The Riverman is not flamboyant in the way that the Son of Sam types are. I mean, he’s not trying to be sensational. He’s low-key, not only in the kind of victim he’s going after—and this is my own opinion—but not disposing of them in a way to arouse sensation. He’s not going about looking for victims that would be a particular sensation. He seems to be going to great lengths to avoid detection, and, quite frankly, even may have some mementos or photographs of his victims. I’m sure he’s keeping that to a minimum, if he’s keeping anything at all. I wouldn’t. But my guess is the time between when he picks up the girl and the time he kills her is fairly short. Relatively speaking, there may be exceptions.

  “He doesn’t have an opportunity to collect a lot of stuff. He gets their clothing. I think he may or may not have the ability to photograph them or get some other kind of information, which is another idea I have. Looking at some of the victims on your sheet there, I began to wonder if he might be interrogating some of them before he disposes them, to find names of other prostitutes. That may be why, for instance, I’m moving away from that question.”

  Knowing Ted was now embarking on a subject we had previously discussed among task force members, Dave encouraged Ted to proceed.

  So Ted continued. “That may be why you have a situation where you have a Cynthia Hinds taken on one day and Opal Mills the next. He may have inter
rogated Hinds before he killed her and found out the names of several other girls in the area. That may account for his success in hunting down prostitutes aside from just taking whoever was available. But anyway, getting back to your question, I would tend to doubt that he would keep much in the way of elaborate things around, because he might get caught. So much of this is pure supposition. And it’s interesting to speculate. My strong feeling is, from your point of view, you want to catch him, and there are all sorts of speculation that doesn’t get you any closer.

  “What I tried to think about were the possibilities you had with those sites, perhaps ones you’ve already located. Maybe he will be drawn back to those. But any you locate in the future, you know, I can’t urge you more strongly to devise a technique of securing those sites and keeping them under surveillance some way. I know it’s tough. But boy, I’m just absolutely certain that if you have an opportunity, in terms of a good site, that the man will turn up.”

  Categorizing Serial Killers

  Picking up a previous reference Ted had made, I decided to confront him and press him about what he meant. I said, “You mentioned a while ago a typical serial murderer. What are you talking about when you say that?”