Ted’s response was flattering. He felt the urge to compliment us on our thoroughness so that he could set his hook into us, to get us to continue our conversations. The great Ted Bundy was impressed with our work. He patronized us by saying, “You guys know these cases. I’m impressed. You’ve been working on these cases long and hard, and I’m still impressed you know them this well. Sure. You said it before I said it. The second thing that he might be doing is simply throwing the shit out the window of the car as he’s driving along. That might sound a little bit weird. That’s one way to do it. There are any number of ways to dispose of clothing. He could be burying it. He could be burning it at home if he has a fireplace or burning barrel. He might not. If my sense of him is right, he’s going for the quick disposal. He doesn’t want to have much around at all. He doesn’t want to have the body around. He doesn’t want to have the body in his car very long. And if he has that kind of mentality, he might be jettisoning the belongings out the window as he drives along. That’s not a particularly bad way of getting rid of such things because there’s trash along the highway all the time that’s collected. In these areas where you found the bodies, have you ever conducted any routine searches along the highways for any distance? Looking for clothing?”
Dave parried, “Oh, yeah, but there’s still a lot of distances that we haven’t covered yet.”
“There are any number of places he could throw it out the window. My guess is you found the I.D. card because he threw it out the window, not because they were struggling. And if he’s doing that, it’s a very sound indicator that he’s employing that method to get rid of the stuff by simply throwing it out the window. Maybe he stops someplace and throws it down an embankment. But he might be of a frame of mind that he wants to get rid of all this stuff as efficiently as possible, but as quickly as possible, too. That means not taking any stuff home. Maybe not always, but most of the time he’s getting rid of it quickly. But it might be just stopping and putting it in a Dumpster somewhere or throwing it out,” Ted explained.
Dave reminded Ted, “He doesn’t know that we’ve found that stuff; I don’t think he considers it to be a mistake.”
Ted followed up with “That’s a good point. Have your people search up and down the roadways in the Enumclaw area where three bodies have been found. It’s not unreasonable to find some things up there because I’m sure that there are a number of more victims up there. I had a feeling last night about that question that you asked. I was thinking about did he keep the stuff or would he keep the stuff or not. And on the one hand I don’t know how much difference it makes on one level, because either he’s going to have it when you throw down on him or he isn’t. If you have a suspect, and just because he doesn’t have anything, doesn’t mean he isn’t a good suspect.”
Most of the bodies near Sea-Tac Airport were found in cul-de-sacs where houses had been removed owing to jet noise. “Here’s the Naon site south of the airport,” I explained as I showed Ted the map.
Ted said, “That’s good hiding territory.”
“You can see how she was discovered with her foot out of the ground,” I said as I showed him a picture.
Ted’s curiosity was piqued. He asked, “What kind of soil is that? Does it need a pick?”
“Pretty well packed,” Dave explained with authority, since he processed most of the body recovery sites.
“What? So the guy’s carrying around a pick and shovel or that kind of thing in the car?” Ted quizzed us.
“Bet he used just a shovel,” Dave said.
“But this is the only one he did this with. It’s an anomaly event,” Ted proclaimed. He had had “anomaly victims,” too.
It was clear to Dave and me that Ted and the Riverman shared a great many methods and characteristics as killers. The common ground they occupied mentally was underscored by Ted’s tendency to speak in the first person and his obvious excitement when discussing the Riverman’s actions and motivations. We learned a great deal about the unknown Green River Killer from Ted, and that information turned out to be extremely prescient when the killer was caught and was questioned. Ridgway, in his note to the task force before he was identified, referred to himself as “the Green Riverman,” an eerie confluence with Bundy’s monicker. But the final questions we asked Ted in our 1984 interviews were a subtle transition from a focus on the Green River Killer to Ted and his own practices. When these talks with Ted came to an end, I thought he had given us a great deal of information. I didn’t know at that point that my relationship with Ted would continue for years to come and result in the kind of confessions I had only dreamed of.
11
“Some Murders Are Okay!”
Someday, Gary Ridgway, the self-described Green Riverman, may write me a letter, just as Ted Bundy did, because he will want to talk about his crimes. He will be in search of someone who “understands,” someone he can brag about his crimes to, someone he believes he can control with his stories, someone who will make the commitment to listen to the agony bubbling out of his fragmented personality. He may even be frustrated at the efforts of the police officers who investigated him for his murders but who missed the larger point of his crimes. Even serial killers want to tell some version of the truth as they see it, even if it turns out to be just another lie. So he may call me in because he knows I’ll hear him out and help tell his whole story. I expect he’ll even know that Ted Bundy taught me how to do that.
Ted Bundy helped me rewrite the book on interrogating killers—this revision would contain a much truer picture of serial killers. In four years of letters, phone calls, and jail-cell conferences under the guise of helping solve the Green River murders, Bundy gave me a look inside the mind of a serial killer. He showed me just how to talk to a person who has eluded the police for years, but who now may be willing to tell his story. This particular function is unlike that of any other interrogation.
Interviewing a Serial Killer
Interviewing a prisoner you suspect of committing a series of murders is much different than interviewing a killer who has just committed a “routine” murder. In fact, few interview techniques work at all. There are no manuals, no police handbooks, and no empirical research whatsoever to help you pick your way through the interrogation over the suspect’s psychological land mines that can explode in your face and ruin your chances of getting a confession. I know plenty of detectives who are great interviewers, but rarely have they had the opportunity to sharpen their skills against a serial killer. Unless the incriminating physical evidence was overwhelming or they actually managed to catch the perpetrator in the act, detectives usually need the suspect to confess in order to get resolution to all murders in a series. In most cases the killer is the only living witness and the interrogator may have to gain the killer’s cooperation at all costs in order to make a case. Ted Bundy recommended that the most effective approach is to get a suspect’s trust by showing him you understand what he’s been going through.
We already know from experience that there are two basic types of killers: (1) those who give self-incriminating statements because the evidence at the scene or in their car or from eyewitnesses is so overwhelming that they need you to acknowledge they are being cooperative, and (2) those who refuse to confess even though you might be shoving what you call evidence right into their faces. It is this latter category that can be the most frustrating. These killers know, like Ted Bundy and the Riverman knew that without their help you can’t find the bodies they dumped, the weapons they used, the cars they drove, or even the names of many undiscovered victims that they have killed. Without their cooperation, you might have nothing more than suspects who look promising on the basis of circumstantial evidence, but against whom the physical evidence is lacking. You have to get your suspect to work for you.
Bundy showed us ways we could get a serial killer to cooperate by sharing valuable information. Most of the long-term killers have led investigators around for years while the trail turned cold behin
d them. Like Bundy, they successfully escaped detection by police while sometimes dropping victims right in the middle of heavily guarded dump sites. Like the Riverman, who operated right under our noses, they picked up victims on highly patrolled streets. They probably lived in the communities where they killed and sat just two or three seats down from patrol officers at a local doughnut shop where they listened in on cops talking about the case. Serial killers know they’re invisible. What would induce people like this to talk with the police and eventually confess?
Bundy demonstrated that most killers of his type, killers like the Riverman, prided themselves on getting victims under their power. Because these killers perceive themselves as powerless, their ego trips involved spinning a net of power so broad that entire communities and police forces would be entrapped. It’s a terror tactic as well as a power trip. Many of them love to follow their crimes in the newspapers and laugh at the experts who psychoanalyze their actions and create elaborate personality profiles. Serial killers know profiles often fall well short of the target and do more to satisfy the profilers than catch the killers. Municipalities spend millions of dollars in an attempt to foil killers’ plans with elaborate surveillance techniques. All the killer has to do to avoid being seen is to park his car in a nearby parking lot, walk the streets of his contact sites, find a likely victim, smooth-talk that victim into walking him to his car, knock her unconscious, and scoop her into the car. By the time he closes the passenger door and drives away, the trap’s been sprung. The killer has rehearsed this act so many times it’s like second nature to him. Techniques like these are so simple and yet they’re capable of foiling the most elaborate surveillance procedures, and that is probably how the Riverman has slipped through our net so many times. We were only looking for a driver, but Ridgway parked his truck in a nearby lot and ran counterintelligence to make sure the coast was clear before he approached his teenaged victim.
The killer is also so well rehearsed that he can bounce off a potential victim who resists him and move on to the next without so much as a ripple in the fabric of the moment. Bundy even bragged about his ability to do this and demonstrated his skill at pulling victims right out of a crowd in broad daylight at Lake Sammamish. This type of long-term killer has become an accomplished practitioner at killing and covering it up. Do you think he’s going to break down under our accusations? Certainly not!
Ted Bundy explained and demonstrated that someone like the Green River Killer needs to exercise his power over people. He needs to, as Bundy did, have the police under his control. He needs victims. Without victims, serial killers can’t survive. If a killer is in custody, his interrogators, the psychiatrists, prison guards, and other visitors close to him will become his victims. A victim, according to Bundy’s definition, was anyone the serial killer was able to get into his power.
I even let myself become Bundy’s victim by suspending my judgment and playing Bundy’s game. I let him teach me how to interview serial killers by interviewing him the way he wanted to be interviewed. Bundy was the teacher; I was the pupil. I put myself in his power by playing his game. But that was the only way I could get any information out of him if I wanted him to help me figure out the mind-set, motives, and movements of the Riverman. It was the only way I could get him to help me catch the Riverman.
Bundy’s first lesson was that long-term serial killers are unlike any other types of criminal suspects. They are battle-hardened, reinforced by their own denial, and can stand up in the face of interrogators looking for the quick confession. They also know more about serial murder than almost all detectives do. They have the advantage because they know who the police are and spend all their time eluding them. Detectives don’t know who the serial murderers are and, because serial killers are rarely arrested for murder, are often shocked to discover they have one in their custody. Usually, serial killers are picked up for crimes indirectly related to their murder spree. Most investigators, therefore, confront the killer never having interviewed one previously. Most do not know what to expect and have no experience with interview techniques that actually work.
For example, when the authorities in Pensacola, Florida, arrested Ted Bundy, they faced a criminal type they’d never seen before—a fugitive on the FBI’s most-wanted list and a suspect in over 25 especially brutal murders. Bundy was captured after being on the run from murder charges in Colorado. He had committed at least three murders in Florida but, at the time of his capture, was not the main suspect in any of those murders. He had even been shot at by the arresting officer while trying to escape apprehension for a multitude of charges, none of which was murder. Now, at last, he was in custody as a fugitive. While steadfastly denying his involvement in any murders for years, after his capture and during the early hours of his detention, Bundy was especially vulnerable, open, and willing to talk. Investigators had a small window of opportunity for an interview that would have elicited incriminating statements.
At first, Bundy refused to identify himself, and investigators didn’t realize who they had just arrested. Their prisoner had been drinking while on the run and was physically and emotionally exhausted. He was weak and more capable of making incriminating statements than he had been at any time in his life up to that point. As his bravado failed him, Bundy did things that were very uncharacteristic. During one of the breaks in this interview and before he was identified, Ted called his former girlfriend in Seattle and all but confessed that he was the person that everyone suspected he was. He also came perilously close to giving incriminating statements to the detectives. One officer was trying to get a better understanding of the parameters of what Bundy was stalling about and Bundy muttered, “three figures.” In other words, Bundy was alluding to having murdered over 100 women, but the Pensacola police authorities had no idea what he was talking about.
The investigators didn’t convince Bundy to confess, but they were close. I asked him about this interview, fascinated because I knew that I could be in the very same situation with a suspect in the Green River murders. Bundy actually complimented the detectives who were holding him for sustaining the interview. Their strategy, if it was one, of platooning the interviewers—rotating in a fresh team every so often to maintain the interview process—was good because Bundy wanted to keep talking. They had a way of keeping him going even though they were getting tired. They didn’t give up on getting more information and on encouraging their suspect to cooperate so that he would feel better because he was finally telling the truth about himself to the police. This was working for him. Bundy felt that they were patient over the long haul and probed very carefully. They didn’t really know what they were looking for and therefore experienced no obvious frustration.
Would detectives familiar with Bundy’s cases have been as effective? Would they have been as laid-back and persistent? I doubt it. Bundy said he would have refused to talk to certain detectives, such as Mike Fisher from Colorado and Ben Forbes from Utah. Those two detectives had dogged him so well that he had built up a resentment for them, so any questions on their part would have been ineffective. But he did say years later that he respected them because they were very thorough investigators. In Florida, it was the last time that any law enforcement officer would have the chance to speak with Bundy at length until Bundy contacted me in October 1984.
The 1988 Interview—Confessing to Murder
Now it was 1988, four years after Ted, Dave Reichert, and I first talked together in Starke, Florida. By the time Ted and I had settled in for the 1988 interviews, the Green River case was six years old and Bundy and I had become something more than pen pals. I was down here at his request because the last of his appeals was running out and his life was being measured in months, if not weeks. I believed that the topic matter of our interview in 1988 was impromptu, but it wasn’t. Ted wanted to teach me how to interview serial killers so I could master the techniques to get his own confessions. It was part of a master plan that Ted had to keep face while getting me to l
earn how to interview him with respect and not disdain. This would be his ultimate attempt at control.
Getting Ted Bundy to talk about interviewing serial killers was a prearranged strategy on my part as well as his. My plan was to talk with him at length about how he would interview serial killers and eventually inquire about the preferred circumstances under which a convicted murderer, like himself, would talk about his crimes. How would he interview the Riverman? But it was also an act. Previous experience dictated that Bundy would talk around the various elements of murder and its investigation, but he would carefully avoid any references to his own murders. This very method was also his way of developing rapport and confidence with the interviewer. Bundy’s suggestions about interviewing serial killers were pieces of valuable information for homicide investigators to consider in future cases.
First of all, Bundy emphasized the urgency of immediately interviewing any suspected serial killer upon the arrest. Any delay would allow the killer’s denial to harden and ultimately jeopardize any prospect of a meaningful relationship between the killer and the detective. I asked him how he would get the killer to talk if he were the detective who had just had picked up the Riverman.
“Detective” Bundy
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 37