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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Clearing his throat as though he was shocked by the nature of a question that seemed to be so close to the core of his own fantasies, Ted cautioned, “I would say it’s not necessary. Certainly, that’s not to say that people don’t have their fetishes, don’t collect things, and maybe clean house every once in a while. But I don’t think it’s necessary. Every guy is different. And when you finally run up on your man, and if you found a houseful of stuff, then you’ve really got it. If you don’t find it, that doesn’t mean he’s not your suspect. Just ’cause he doesn’t have anything may, in fact, mean that as it appears here, he’s somewhat fastidious. At least as fastidious as he can be. But he could easily have a fetish with underwear or stockings or shoes. I mean, that’s something of a true wild guess.

  “We’re dealing with such a unique individual, who knows what it is that sets him off, specifically? Generally, what sets him off are the young teenage prostitutes. But beyond that, whether he likes to keep a photograph of them or collect newspaper clippings, whether he gets off by going back to the sites and molesting corpses or whatever, any number of different things that it might be part of the pattern, I’d say it’s a ritual. I only mean that in the most general sense, nothing religious necessarily, but part of his syndrome that he’s caught up in, which is evolving over time, too. I mean, changing as he changes. Everybody changes. But it may be a fetish, it may be necrophilia or any number of peculiar things. More importantly, is there any indication that the man is, has been back to the sites we’ve found whole bodies to see if the bodies have been disturbed postmortem?”

  Control Fetish

  “The reason I ask is this guy is responsible for twenty or thirty or more deaths at least, and there’s a certain aspect of possessiveness in that. I think that’s one way of describing it in rather bland terms, a possessiveness where the corpse could easily be as important as the live victim, in some respects. I mean, it’s that physical possession and ownership, a taking, if you will, that is just part of the syndrome. I think that sense of power and ownership is one of the reasons why I think in certain cases—not all, certainly—is why I think he might be individually intending to return to the scene to either view his victim or, in fact, even interact with the body in some way.”

  Stunned that Ted would suggest that a killer would want to phys-ically possess and “interact” with a dead body, Dave stammered when he asked, “And you’re saying that this would occur before we find them?”

  Ted continued by slightly changing the subject. He stated, “Generally speaking, yeah. But I thought about it last night and you definitely have a good point. There are the arsonists who just burn down buildings and run off, and then there are the arsonists who like to watch the fire department put out the fire. And, who knows, there might be a side to the Riverman’s character where he gets off seeing you guys’ cars parked beside the road, and, you know, crawling on your hands and knees in the bushes or something.” Then, clearly tracking my expressions, Ted asked pointedly, “You seem troubled. Am I boring you?”

  Ted fell for my staged body language just as I had hoped he would. Dr. Berberich was proved right once again. He had advised that when Ted got off the track, yawn and look in another direction. Try to make him think, without saying it, that you were bored. Most psychopaths constantly try to keep your attention by involving you in their fantasies. One way to get them back on track is to look bored and, with that, they will be more specific as they try to draw you back into their world. At this point, Ted was treading on thin ice. He wanted desperately to talk about necrophilia, but was afraid that in doing so we would discover too much about him. Sensing he had no choice, I pressed him, saying, “I was just thinking about postmortem activities. You seemed absolutely sure that he’s not going to come back once we’ve found the body. Our capability of monitoring a dump site long afterwards is really possible.”

  Eagerly, trying to please, Ted said, “Yes.”

  Previously, Ted had elaborated on his favorite method to catch the killer, staking out the body recovery site. I felt we probably had more capability to stake out a site long after the body was recovered. So I asked, “And I just wonder how fruitful you thought that would be?”

  “Let me understand what you just said. Monitor it afterwards?” Ted asked, trying to define my question.

  Monitoring Dump Sites

  I gave him an example of what I meant. “We discovered a site along a roadside. We have been there, processing the area, and then we leave. That’s a different concept than staking the body out and him driving by while we’re there. What are the odds of his coming back in this area, several months later, thinking we’re not there?”

  Ted reminded us, “And, of course, there’s a good chance in some of these areas that you haven’t found everyone. I mean, it’s obvious you haven’t found everyone. And there’s a good chance that where you’ve found only one that there are probably more than one. And you said yesterday that you found one buried where the others were aboveground. It may be very well that the reason you haven’t found some of the others is because they, in fact, are buried. And it’s more difficult, obviously, to find them, but if the animals haven’t dug them up, it’ll be more difficult to find. He might want to come back to an area. So I would look at your list and see where the most likely sites are that might have somebody there you haven’t discovered. For instance, it occurred to me, and I don’t know why, I was just looking at the maps and I saw what would have been the site where Naon and Meehan and an unidentified individual were found. They were all pretty close together. But there’s a good chance there are some more down by Star Lake and maybe, even better, down by Auburn, where you only found one. So it would be a matter of just picking a site that you felt had some potential, where you just didn’t want to spend days on your hands and knees trying to find something else, and monitoring it. I think there’s a fairly good chance that if there’s somebody left, he would be back. If there’s somebody left and you’re long gone, as opposed to actually trying to get in your face while you’re at the site, there are some people who get off on doing that, but I don’t think this guy would.”

  Pursuing the thought, I asked, “How about if we hadn’t found them all up along 410?”

  Anxiously, as if he were actually in the Riverman’s mind as he tried to play Battleship with people looking for the guy’s kills, Ted continued, “Oh, yeah. Right now, it appears he’s spread them out up there. They’re not all in one place. For instance, it’s not that he won’t return to an area once it’s been discovered. You found Lovvorn in September of eighty-two, and yet he came back just about ten blocks away to dump three more. No telling he won’t come back to an area, but the exact same spot—that might be something else again. You got ski season coming up, so you’re going to have a lot of traffic along Highway 410 in the not-too-distant future. It’s going to be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, let alone those folks going up there skiing.

  “But your fellow might not be so smooth as to put the skis on top of the car. The thing is if he puts his skis on top of the car and drives by at seven in the morning and comes back down at nine, he’s not going to hang around up at Green River or wherever for the next ten hours just to come down and see what you are doing. He’s going to get cold. He’s not a skier, and he wants to get back to business. Your people might see him pass at seven or eight and come back at nine or ten that same morning. Even with the skis on his car, that would look a little bit weird. And if you start to see that same car do that over a period of a couple of months, then you might have something. But it’ll take a little bit of work.”

  Flaunting his knowledge of the area, Ted explained, “I think the sites east of Enumclaw have the most potential for that kind of proactive technique because there are more bodies out there. They may be all between Enumclaw and Greenwater. There’s a lot of space up there, but not so much you can’t handle, because the road-way is between the river and the mountains on the left (as you’re going up). And
there’s not a lot of room to move around except off the side roads. Some of them have gates across them, don’t they? And some of them don’t. Like up past the town of Greenwater, there used to be a section where there were summer homes. And the mountainsides are honeycombed with second-growth timber when I was last up there. It may be ready to harvest by now, I don’t know. But there are lots of side roads up north of Greenwater.”

  Ted was aware that one of the main problems in serial-murder investigations was how to link bodies found as murders committed by the same person. How far back in time or far away in distance did one go to find cases that might be related? Could a woman found raped and stabbed in a county 60 miles away over nine years previous be a case related to the Green River murders? Better, could a case that might have been one of Bundy’s own crimes bring him closer to the Green River Killer and get him talking about his own cases?

  I had previously spoken to Drs. Berberich and Liebert about showing Bundy a crime scene photo as a method of attraction to keep him talking whenever I believed his enthusiasm or attention was flagging. Both predicted Bundy would be invigorated by the photo and think, by explaining to us precisely what’s in it, that we were participating in his fantasies. It was hard to believe seeing one photograph could fuel his long-interrupted lust for dead females. But, at this point in our interview, I believed it was worth a try.

  The Case of Kathy Devine

  Rather than pick just any case as an example to discuss with Ted, we purposely chose the case of Kathy Devine, who was murdered in December 1973. Her murder was never solved, but the case was one in which Ted himself was a great suspect. Devine was last seen getting into a green pickup truck driven by a white male with a beard near 90th and Aurora avenues in north Seattle. At that time Ted owned a green pickup in addition to his Volkswagen bug, and was sporting a full beard. Devine’s body was found near a camp-ground in southern Thurston County about 15 miles south of Olympia, the capital of Washington, where Bundy worked. I obtained permission from Lieutenant Mark Curtis of the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department to use photos from the Devine case since it had not been under active investigation for years. Certainly, Bundy’s facial expressions and psychological reaction to evidence from this case would help us assess whether our hunch that Ted was a good suspect in her murder was correct.

  I had to approach this phase of our talks in a way that didn’t alert Ted to the fact that we were carefully observing his body language and the manner in which he was answering our questions. Even though the temptation was there, I couldn’t immediately plop down Devine’s crime scene photo and ask him if it could have been committed by the Riverman. This might have signaled to Bundy that I had just violated his request not to discuss crimes for which he was under investigation. So I started out talking about a different subject and drew Ted into a position of wanting to see the photograph.

  A curious aspect of serial-murder investigations was whether the killer had come into any type of contact with the police before his arrest. Many experienced detectives believe that information about the killer they are seeking is somewhere in their files, but they just don’t see it. It was a topic I knew Bundy would talk about. It was close to Ted’s heart because he had said on previous occasions that some police officers had mistreated him. I carefully chose my next words to conceal my real intent. I commented, “Seems inconceivable to me that the Riverman, who was very familiar with the strip area, wouldn’t have been hassled, rousted, or something by the local uniformed patrol officers.”

  “Field-carded?” Bundy asked. This was Ted’s phrase for field interrogation or interview report. Patrol officers completed those reports when suspicious behavior that did not lead to an arrest was recorded in police files for future reference. “Sure. Check the field cards for what kind of behavior? Lurking behavior? Which is ex-actly what he’d be doing if you’d be field-carding in the area. Maybe he’d look out of place. I’m not saying he’d be peeking in windows or anything. He’s more than likely gone far beyond that stage.

  “We’re talking about a patrolman, out in the field and is a hot dog, and he doesn’t like anybody hanging around his area that he doesn’t know. He’ll field-card them just for spitting on the sidewalk. And sometimes those contacts by police officers are the most valuable. Someone will catch this guy entirely by surprise,” Bundy explained like a man of vast experience.

  “But if he’s just lurking around and trying to observe the behavior of these women, it’s not like him to be doing anything illegal unless he’s hiding in the shadows. The Riverman certainly uses shadows, you know, from time to time. So check your field cards for single males with suspicious behavior, suspected prowler, burglar, or whatever. A young man, twenty to thirty, hanging around Pacific Highway South and field-carded. And that is a little bit far out. I’m sure you checked all your arrests for indecent exposure or prowling or window peeping and all that kind of stuff, right?”

  Bundy had just given a list of what a serial killer would have been stopped for when searching for victims. Ted continued by asking, “Do you have names? You have your computer running, right? It’s possible your man is going to appear on more than one list. There’s an excellent chance your guy has already been reported, too. But where do you start? You know how I feel. So, if you can start developing alternative lists and matching them and working through a computer to find him, then you start to have something: field card here, arrested there, reported over here, car license plate number shows up over here. You know, the kind of stuff like you’re talking about, things that contain people’s names—maybe a little bit more sophisticated.”

  It was ironic how Ted went right to the very way the task force had identified him from the thousands of names in our computer. I don’t think he ever realized how close we were to him even before the Utah arrest, even though he knew what the typical methods of police investigation were. But now, no matter how fruitful this line of questioning was, it was time to redirect Ted. As I placed a black-and-white photograph upside down in front of Ted, I said, “Whenever we’ve gone through our records, we found cases similar in nature to the Riverman’s.” Ted obviously understood that the photo was turned so he couldn’t see it, and he didn’t hesitate to grasp and rotate it until he was looking at the photo correctly.

  Immediately, the contortions of Ted’s face told us that he was morbidly transfixed by the Devine scene. His jaw protruded, and his pupils were hideously dilated. His pulse bulged and radiated through his carotid artery like a huge water bump in a garden hose. I felt suddenly as if he were alone with his thoughts, replaying an internal video of his murder, even with us there.

  In a droning voice, Dave reported the facts of the case while Ted stared down. My guess from his reaction was that Ted didn’t need the explanation. He patiently waited while Dave explained what he already knew. “She was actually found in Camp Margaret McKinney. Later in nineteen seventy-four another girl, Brenda Baker, was found nearby in Millersylvania State Park. And you’re kind of aware what our M.O. is. We’ve got prostitutes, some in the river and some on land. And I just picked out a few photographs that were taken back there in seventy-three of this young lady. And that’s one of the reasons I asked you the question about whether or not he could have started putting these bodies on land, then the river, as far back as nineteen seventy-three.”

  “Ummm,” Ted said, licking his lips while searching for the relevance of that particular photograph to the Riverman and not himself. Groping for some quick relationship to the Green River cases, I said, “We’re interested in her case because Ninetieth and Aurora is an area frequented by prostitutes.”

  Coyly, Ted reminisced with himself and kept the photo in front of him. He asked, “Now, where was this body located?”

  “She’s about ten miles southwest of Olympia. Five miles west of I-Five,” Dave answered.

  Ted interrupted as if he wanted to take over the description of the locale for us and came tantalizingly close to a confession of a deta
il only the killer could have known. “Off a dirt road,” he said in a voice that seemed to indicate that a deep memory had been evoked. But he caught himself and desperately tried to revert to a third-person narrative. He asked, “How far off the road?”

  “Found near the parking area at the park,” Dave quickly responded. “He didn’t have to carry her too far. She was within about ten feet of the parking lot.”

  Ted regressed quickly back to his first-person version, “But there’s no attempt to conceal the body. And there are clues, there’s clothing here. Pretty strong individual to be able to rip those—or cut, possibly cut—those jeans like that.”

  I was astonished by Ted’s observations since I could hardly decipher from the photo what condition the clothing was in, let alone how the jeans were cut. He had to have been there. He was there, right then, in his memory.

  Reading my mind, Ted denied any connection to the photo. “Ummm, I don’t think I’ve even been there—that is, to the park. When I was a kid my parents used to go there all the time. Found a picture of that area once, Millersylvania State Park.”

  “Well, Devine was found in Camp Margaret McKinney, southwest of Olympia, not Millersylvania Park,” Dave reminded him. “She was picked up in Seattle. That’s where she was last seen.”

  “That would have—that was seventy-three?” Ted responded, like he knew nothing about the case and was avoiding any reference that he might have murdered Brenda Baker, too. Ted mixed up the facts of his murders.