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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Troubled, Dave inquired, “Would that make him mad?”

  “I think it might insult his intelligence or his own opinion of himself for someone who goes out of his way to not get caught. And if the police are saying, ‘Call and turn yourself in, we’ll give you some money.’”

  Pressuring the Killer to Kill

  Then Ted moved into a new area of proactive strategies. “I think the more you can disturb this guy—well, I have two opinions of it. On the one hand, it sounds kind of callous, but maybe the best thing that could be done is to get this guy to start killing again, at least openly. And you start finding something. I know that’s hard, but if he goes underground, you’re really up a creek. So, it depends on the kind of guy he is. Now, if he’s the kind of guy who loves for things to be quiet, he doesn’t like any publicity. He wants things to quiet down. Then the lack of publicity over a period of time would quiet his nerves and bolden him to the point where he would start killing again. I think the publicity and the activity of the task force does intimidate him. On the other hand, he may be just unstable enough where if you fuck with his mind, either with proactive techniques you mentioned about the supercop or some other things, or something like a reward, you could make him more disordered, make him less capable of covering his tracks, and make him more nervous. Because a nervous man is going to make mistakes, a complacent man is going to make mistakes.”

  Dave was interested in how Ted would put pressure on the Riverman to make a mistake that would lead to his capture. He asked, “Do you have any suggestions on how to make him more nervous?”

  Ted thought before answering. “Well, publicity makes him nervous, but perhaps in a way that you don’t like. It makes him inactive. Or he may change. I was thinking last night—I had a note to myself, trying to think of some way to manipulate him. I guess you guys got to be honest with him. But what could you put in the paper, if you’re going to put anything, that would make this guy react in some way that you could exploit or detect?

  “I haven’t given that a lot of thought yet. And I’m going to put a note down on my list of notes to think about that some. Because I know publicity has a powerful effect on somebody in that situation. He wants to know what you know. But, on the other hand, he may assume that if there’s no publicity, it means you don’t know anything, things are cooling down, and people are forgetting about the cases. Everything is cool.”

  I reminded Ted, “One of the things that we talked about before was the fact that the bodies in the river didn’t work. He went on to land. But they had worked before in other cases. Do you think that probably he has dumped in the river before someplace?”

  Confidently, Ted said, “My answer to that is yes. I think there’s a good chance he has. It’s not a novel way of disposing of a body, but, like I’d say, anybody who follows the search-and-rescue news over the summers in the Pacific Northwest, when people are searching for hunters, fishermen, and rafters and such who’ve been swept away in a river, knows that there are times when they don’t find those bodies. And he dumped them in there for a reason. He dumped Coffield and company in there because he didn’t think they’d be found. He must have had some reason for believing that. Maybe if he dumped them up north of Enumclaw, in that stretch of water, there was a better chance they wouldn’t have turned up. I’d only be guessing there. But I think it’s either something he either heard of somebody else doing, or he did it himself and was successful. My impression was since he did it five times, and did it four times even after one had been discovered, he was evidencing some kind of belief that that kind of disposal technique worked. And that indicates to me that he’d done it before and it worked. Sometimes, the rivers will swallow people up.”

  Frequently, Ted mentioned that the Riverman was from a city south of Seattle. I said, “You keep mentioning south. Do you think he could have started farther south, like Olympia? Does it look like he’s heading in a direction?”

  “He could have started anywhere in the Pacific Northwest,” Ted claimed, “anywhere between Olympia and Bellingham, or even Portland. It’s hard to say. But because he shows a preference to range in such a restricted area, and because it’s quite possible he didn’t just start with Wendy Coffield, then, sure, any kind of related disappearances of young women prior to Coffield. If the guy had school or work, Olympia is an easy drive. Bellingham is even an easy drive. Portland’s a little far.”

  Serial Killers in the Pacific Northwest

  I saw that Ted made a note that serial murderers are active in the Pacific Northwest, even without the Riverman. “Which ones do you know of?” I asked.

  At first, Ted rambled on, but then he became very informative by saying, “That’s an unsupported supposition on my part, based mainly on the fact that over the years when I receive newspapers or clippings from the Pacific Northwest, I read of the bodies of young women turning up with relative frequency. And I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m paying so much attention to the Pacific Northwest or if there’s something about the Pacific Northwest that seems to encourage this kind of activity, because I know it doesn’t seem to be as frequent down in this part of Florida as it is up in Seattle÷Tacoma. The mountains of Washington offer some excellent terrain for hiding bodies. So you’re not finding a large number of the bodies. That statement of mine about there being other serial murders is just something intuitive. I just sense it. I know about how difficult it is sometimes to detect a serial murder. And how some serial murderers tend to be very aware of how to cover their tracks, change their M.O. They’re studying things all the time. So you might find one victim in one place and another victim in another kind and another way in another place.

  “By varying an M.O., a highly controlled, intelligent, and alert serial murderer can go on for years and years. And he might only get two or three a year. Or there are others, like the Riverman, who just go hog wild. You cannot go for long doing four or five murders a month without drawing attention. It’s just a sense of the whole problem of serial murders or multiple murders. There are a whole mess of serial murderers out there who are undetected because the way they go about it is so low-key, and they’re not frequently exposed. And as in your case, a number of anomalies, a number of exceptions, people who were clearly killed by other individuals. Some of them you know and some of them you don’t know who the perpetrator was. I just made that statement from my own judgment, just off the top, because I feel like you’ve got more up there than just the Riverman.”

  How to Profile a Killer

  Bundy had studied all of the information available to him on this serial-killer case and had thought a lot about what the Riverman was like. He said he believed that an understanding of what type of personality the Riverman has may lead to avenues that would reveal his identity. In addition, Ted had read all of the literature produced by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit and their methods of profiling an offender based on crime scene dynamics. Because he had a special perspective to bring to a profiling effort, namely that of an experienced killer, Ted fashioned himself as the only expert profiler of murderers. Realizing that Ted relished just such a spotlight, I asked, “What do you think that the profile of a serial killer should include? What are profilable items? What are the real categories—tangible things—about the killer that are not just general subjects or psychological bullshit, but things that are going to tell us who he is?”

  It was obvious from his detailed answer that Ted had prepared himself for this question in advance, even though he started his response by complaining about his lack of information. Completely understanding the question, he confidently said, “Oh, yeah. Of course, I’m working with so little, but even, like you say, you might have a room full of information, but a lot of it is reduced right down to this: when they were last seen, where they were last seen, where their bodies were found, and some of the characteristics of the victims themselves.

  “My opinion about the Riverman hasn’t changed a lot. Some of my im
pressions of this case have changed quite dramatically since I got this little bit of information that you sent me. My initial impression was this guy is young. He is more or less in the same socioeconomic strata that these young women are associated with—lower-middle class, let’s say. He’s between twenty and thirty, probably closer to twenty. He’s young. He probably has a low-paying job that restricts his movement. He doesn’t have a lot of money. He can’t move around.”

  “What race is he?” Dave inquired.

  Without pausing to contemplate Dave’s question, Ted said, “White. These are just impressions. Just impressions, just impressions.”

  “How young is young?” I asked, trying to pin Ted down to a more specific age.

  Ted provided a fairly good account of why he thought the Riverman was “Twenty, twenty-five. That’s only because he is not much older than the girls. My gut reaction is these girls are being approached by somebody who really puts them at ease. And they don’t trust anybody over thirty.

  “Have you ever sat down and asked these girls, ‘What kind of person do you think the Green River guy is? What does he look like? How old is he?’ Have them give you their profile. I’ll bet you the guy would turn out to be old, maybe wearing a business suit or with an unshaven face, staring out of tunnels, you know, the Henry Lee Lucas type. But I bet you the last person they would expect to be the killer would be one of their own peers.”

  “What do you think some of his habits are?” Dave grilled.

  With seasoned assurance, Ted resumed. “I think he’s into, you know, pornography. He’s into violence. That is, I don’t think he may have beaten his ex-wife or his girlfriend or assaulted his teachers or anything, but I think he’s into violence media. You probably would find that from time to time, like I say, in the pornographic bookshops, some of the more violent flicks.”

  “What about smoking, drinking, drugs?” Dave asked.

  “That’s something I don’t know. I don’t get any feeling for it. You know, drugs might be one of his hooks. Drugs might be one of his things he uses with these women. That fascinates me that once he gets ahold of them, he doesn’t let go. He doesn’t lose them. You’re talking about young women who are streetwise. We’ve even talked about some young black women who must know the streets and who probably beat the crap out of a lot of white guys who try to do anything to them. So he’s throwing down on them real good. And it could be he’s using drugs to sort of take the edge off of some of that retaliation. I’m sure you’ve looked at their autopsies to determine that. But even that’s not conclusive, I’m sure. Agh, you know, he lives alone. Not married,” Ted predicted.

  “Does he have girlfriends?” Dave asked.

  “Possibly. But when he’s as active as he is, it’s certainly going to put a strain on any relationship he’s trying to maintain. And there are probably times when he doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  Dave asked, “Do you think that his girlfriend might be able to detect the strain and wonder what’s bothering this person? Or is he so well controlled that he’s utilized that?”

  Clearly lamenting his own plight in his relationship with Liz Kendall, whose report to our Ted task force ultimately led to the exchange of phone calls between Salt Lake’s Ben Forbes and Kathy McChesney, Ted said, “Well, it’s possible that he’s been hiding it all his life. It’s just become part of his nature to conceal what he can from the people around him, as much of that as he can. Certainly, someone around him might notice that he’s not showing up for work, or he’s tired or restless. He doesn’t make appointments that he tells people he’s going to make. He doesn’t seem to have any money. He’s always working on his car ’cause he’s using it so much. As far as bizarre behavior is concerned, if he’s acting out toward his girlfriend in any aggressive way, well, I’m sure you have a whole pile of reports from suspicious people who say that their boyfriend or somebody has mistreated them.”

  “Do you think he’s athletic?” Dave asked cautiously, aware that Ted might think we were talking about him because he was such a skiing enthusiast.

  Ted responded as though he didn’t notice that Dave asked a question that was intended for him. “Well, that could explain his ability to overpower or otherwise subdue these girls. I’d imagine that he has to have something more than just physical strength, because somebody might think they’re fighting for their lives. They will produce a kind of strength that he might not be able to handle. I almost think he has to have some kind of weapon to throw down on them with. Let’s talk about girls like Williams, Antosh, Naon, and McGuinness, who disappeared in mid-eighty-three. Now, they should have known that there was somebody out there hunting them. And at some point in time, they knew he was right there. They were in the hot seat. They were going to fight for their lives, and yet they didn’t get away. So even though he may not be killing them with a weapon, he’s got to use something to intimidate them pretty effectively. Or has some kind of vehicle that they can’t get out of, you know. It might be interesting to check that out someday. Any guy whose passenger door does not unlock at any time, you might want to check that.”

  Dave and I wanted to move the conversation in a new direction from here, and discuss the kind of control certain serial killers wielded over investigators. One way for them to do that was to insert themselves directly into the investigation. Ted knew very well that some guys like him sustained control of their need for continuing the excitement of the murder by taunting the police or trying to throw them off the track. By pursuing that concept, we would get some idea whether Ted ever actively involved himself in the investigation of his murders. So I asked Ted if he thought there was any chance that people like the Riverman would offer information on their own case.

  Without hesitation, Ted answered, “Yes. Sure there is. It’s hard to figure, unless he felt like somebody was getting close. That’s the only thing I can imagine. If this man has been active in the area since 1973, and then all of a sudden he takes off with Coffield and company, doing three, four, five a month, that shows such an intense drive. To control it over that period of time and then just unleash it and then control it again, it would be an extraordinary individual you’re dealing with. It’s unbelievable to be so controlled and avoid detection for ten or twelve years at least and as intense as the person who did the Green River case was and then shut it down again. It certainly would be very, very unusual.”

  Since Ted had examined the possibility that a suspect like the cab-driver would have been around since 1973, nine years prior to the beginning of the Green River cases, Dave followed up by asking, “Do you think that this guy could have started as early as seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four, by placing the bodies of his victims on land and then gone to water and then back to land again? I noticed in your notes last night when Bob and I were going over them, you indicated that you were pretty sure he used the river once before. It worked for him or at least somebody had told him about it, and he thought it’d be a good idea, it’d probably work. But do you think as early as seventy-three or seventy-four he could have used the land?”

  Clarifying his notes, Ted explained, “Oh, sure. For some reason he started with the river because he’d heard about it or tried it as a variation of something he read about. Yeah. All through the years, he’d have to be pretty good to survive that long and be very well controlled. But the guy in the Green River case just explodes sometimes. That’s not to say that people with that kind of acting-out behavior don’t go through changes over time—periods where they’re more intense than others—because they do. But, you know, we’re talking over several years.

  “Well, if the cabdriver is the Riverman, he’s been doing it for a number of years, and so it’s quite clear that he’s pretty good at it if he’s been doing it for that length of time. But what I see with the Green River man is somebody who’s experimenting. I mean, you’d think that the cabdriver would have it down after ten years or so. Who knows. But by trial and error, if he survived that long he’s got to
have a good technique, and he’s got to have a good way of disposing of the bodies. And after ten years he should have had a favorite technique or two.”

  Ted just eliminated the cabdriver as a suspect by emphasizing that the cabdriver should have been a more efficient killer after so long. Showing his frustration at not being able to conclusively eliminate the cabdriver, Dave was eager to suspend the investigation of the cabdriver, and supported Bundy’s statements by saying, “He should have known with Coffield, Bonner, Mills, and Hinds to go out in the woods and dump them, rather than throw them in the river right there in the middle of Kent.”

  Ted agreed, “Right in the middle of Kent, where, you know, I’m sure that over the years, it may have occurred to him to dispose of a body in the river. And maybe it worked. But he should have known, being so close to civilization, that it was a good chance the bodies would be found in the river.”

  Killer’s Souvenirs

  Another personality quirk found in some killers was to collect some item of the victim’s clothing and keep it as a souvenir. Some killers used an item as a way to engage their fantasies. They seemed to transfer the sexual thrill of the hunt, the kill, and the activity with the corpse into the item itself as if it were a totem. To others, these items were trophies representing the ultimate possession of their victim. Ted knew that his girlfriend told us she found a paper bag that contained women’s underwear that was not hers. Therefore, we had to be careful how we asked about the subject. Instead of asking about underwear, I inquired, “Is he a collector, like a shoe fetish guy? There was Jerry Brutos in Oregon, who collected not only many shoes but also his victim’s feet. Does the Riverman knock them over, take their shoes, murder and rape them, and then weight them down in the river? Is that a necessary part of his framework?”