Bundy said, “Well, good question! I’ve thought about this, using my own experiences over the years; I’ve run across many people who have talked to the police and many who haven’t. And I’ve seen what’s happened. And I’ve seen guys who were handled properly from the standpoint of law enforcement, in my opinion, and those who weren’t.”
“Legally?” I asked. “According to the Miranda warnings, or in terms of getting information out of them?”
Ted wanted to speak only in terms of getting information out of them, whether the police are giving accurate information or whether they turned the guy off, intimidated him, threatened him, or otherwise caused him not to talk. Ted reminded me that he had lived in the prison environment for over 10 years and that it was sort of an avocation with him to hear guys’ stories about what happened to them when they were arrested. Ted was very curious about why some murderers confessed and why some didn’t. Ted was even more interested in what they told the police and what they held back. That kind of game fascinated him because he thought it might have been a power issue. Ted felt that he got a version from his fellow killers that was different from what the police could get. Bundy did acknowledge that he might not be hearing the facts, saying, “I may not be getting the straight dope, either.”
Not getting the straight story is a real problem for the police, and Bundy appreciated it. The killer has the advantage because only he knows all the facts of the murder. The interviewer is limited by knowing only those facts that have been discovered in the investigation, possibly not having enough information to refute the killer’s version. Thus, the savvy serial killer knows when the police are fishing for details and need him to make their case. In this kind of situation, the police can’t bullshit the guy into confessing. That’s why Bundy approached killers differently than the police could. Bundy had a real interest in knowing about the case. He said, “Not because I want to tell anybody, for just my own personal information.” Obviously, it is impossible for police investigators to open an interview with a killer using the same premise.
Ted could express genuine interest owing to his fascination with guys like him. Ted said, “Some guy comes in and he’s been convicted of x number of murders; I’m just kind of fascinated by what happened. How and why did he start? I honestly have that kind of an interest. I have approached maybe as many as ten different persons accused of serial murder over the years, just to find out what was going on in their minds and how they did what they did and how they got caught.”
Bundy struggled daily with his own inadequacies and compared them to the other inmates’. His fascination with the other prisoners’ murders was really genuine. He had to know. As eager as a guy was to talk to him about murder, Ted was more than equally interested in listening for his own therapeutic, perverted satisfaction. Talking with other killers about their exploits also relieved the intense stress that Bundy was experiencing, because he was consumed with his compulsion to commit murder. If he couldn’t do it with his own hands, he had to hear about it—experience it vicariously through others. It was like a drug. Even in our interviews, it was difficult to make small talk, such as about the University of Washington football team. It wouldn’t be long before he would drift right back to the subject at hand—murder. Therefore, when interviewing someone like Bundy, it is important to display an active interest in or a fascination for murder. That can be difficult for someone who’s not a killer but who needs to get a confession out of one fast. Accordingly, due to inexperience, interviewers may alert the murderer to the fact that they are concerned only with facts pertinent to the case rather than being sincerely interested in and having compassion for the killer. This difference in approach can blow an investigator’s entire interview and only harden the suspect’s attitude and resolve to keep his story to himself.
Bundy as Interviewer
Bundy advised me that many killers have been reluctant to talk after they’ve been caught. He told me to expect this in the Riverman. In order to open up the killers he talked to in jail, Bundy presented a very convincing fascination with what they did. He explained, “This is not because I want to tell anybody, it’s because it fascinates me; it honest to God fascinates me, and you probably picked that up perhaps from time to time in my letters.” Bundy blew away his fellow killers with his expression of interest and created an air of expertise difficult for the unsuspecting killer to overcome. Bundy told me, “I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder. Over the years I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about it. The subject fascinates me. So when I’m confronted personally—not as a law enforcement guy, not as a detective, I’m not playing that role—I’m playing the role of me intrigued about what they did and wanting to know every last detail about it.”
Getting guys to open up about their murders was something Ted was proud of. Sometimes, he explained, they’re not forthcoming or they don’t know how to open up to him, and so “I have to help them tell me the kind of stuff that I want to know.” These were the killer’s grisly details not softened or adulterated with expressions of remorse. Ted continued, “I suppose the first thing that helps a guy open up that I’ve used is for him to tell me all the gruesome details of his murders; but he felt absolutely no remorse. He would tell it to me in graphic detail, but there’s one [murder] he just couldn’t tell; he was holding back on this one situation. But he said his story was that this girl just walked away, and nobody saw her again. And it didn’t sound right to me. I knew she didn’t walk away, okay? I just knew she didn’t walk away, but I couldn’t figure out why. I could tell, the way he was telling me, he wasn’t opening up to me. He was telling me without hesitation about all these other cases but not this one.”
Ted knew how to confront this killer without accusing him. He could say that he knew what really happened to her and just told him “he was bullshitting me.” Ted had the authority to say to them, “Well, listen, this is what I think, why I think people don’t believe you when you tell them this.” Ted’s approach on a case like this was “people don’t believe you when you tell them this …” It was a nonthreatening way Ted used to explain that he didn’t believe the killer’s story without telling him he was lying. Ted told me that by handling the killer this way, my own judgments and feelings would not be reflecting my doubts, that I should instead simply refer to what “other people” didn’t believe.
Ted could be convincing in an almost grandfatherly way. He could get to a level of understanding that no one else could. Ted knew firsthand that there were some murders that a killer just could not talk about. He understood what was going through the killer’s mind. He told me that he would say to his guy, “‘This is what I think happened. Look at all these other crimes that occurred, and yet you want people to believe this girl walked away, and she never showed up, nobody ever saw her again. Now, I could understand maybe why you’re holding back on that one; I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, man, I can understand it.’ And he started talking about it, more or less.”
The killer wouldn’t be under any pressure from Ted, he said, because “I understood why he was holding back: he had a relationship. All these other women were strangers. But this one woman he knew. And he felt justified in killing strangers. He did not feel justified in killing people he knew. He felt these were okay murders; this one was bad. And he could not talk about it.” But that’s typically the case that can break the killer’s back, open the guy up to a confession. Ted said that “that’s the one that he still hasn’t told anybody about. He’s talked to me about it, in the third person.” Maybe this killer reminded Ted of himself. Ted said frequently that there are some victims that killers just cannot talk about, because the victim might be someone with whom the killer had a kind of relationship, even if it was only in his own mind or if the victim saw something human or intimate in the killer through their association. Maybe it was someone the killer actually thought he liked. Of course, Ted was not known to have killed every woman with whom he had a relationship shorter tha
n 10 minutes’ duration, but to hear him talk, it would seem it was almost every woman.
The victim might also be too young; it’s not safe to be labeled a confessed child-killer in prison. Not only will the guards hate you, Ted admitted, but other prisoners will too. Finally, the victim might be too close to family or might be one of the killer’s own family members. For example, even though Ted knew that he was a prime suspect in the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl who lived near his home in Tacoma when he was 14 years old, he steadfastly did not want to talk about this case, and every denial he made was unconvincing.
Ted continued his discussion on questioning techniques by saying he found it useful to get murderers to talk about themselves. Ted said that while he talked to one killer in particular, “he finally started asking me questions. He said, ‘Well, what would happen if they found a body that was like this and like that, what do you think people would think?’ He was worried about what people would think of him. And this is a curious thing that you may have run into, that each individual can’t be approached like in an FBI profile. He can’t be approached as a collection of disorganized characteristics. This guy had unique needs. When I was trying to figure out what happened to this girl, again not as an investigator, just as a curious individual, I had to find out what those needs were.
“And for him, his own view of the world was that certain murders are okay and certain ones aren’t. And I had to find out why wouldn’t he tell me about this one. Why wouldn’t he give me the details on this one? And it took us a while at first, talking generally about, you know, how our minds work, and how I could understand why he might think this was the case. ‘But listen,’ I said, ‘you’ve already admitted to all these others. Why hold back on that one?’ Then he says, ‘Yeah, but people would think I’m a really bad person if I told them about that one.’ So we had to work through all this guilt he had about this one versus all the others, thinking that people would view him more negatively, believe it or not, for this one murder than for these other twelve or thirteen. And this is something he held, like a secret locked away in his chest. And it was logically a foolish kind of reservation on his part, because no one would think he was any more horrible than they already thought he was. But in his own mind, that was what was holding him back.
“And this is what I found in a lot of guys that I’ve talked to. There are some things they’ll talk about and some things they won’t. And they have a particular view of the world that you have to discover. Why are they holding back? Why does this one guy, for example, not want to talk about the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds he killed—and he may have killed a dozen—but he’ll talk about all the prostitutes he killed. Because in his own mind, killing all the young girls that he got at roller-skating rinks was bad. The prostitutes off the street corner he’ll tell you about in a minute, okay? He had his particular morality of murder, if you will; it was such that he could talk about some but not others. He could tell you the truth about some but not others.”
The Morality of Murder
I was almost in shock at this point. How could I carry on an interview in an atmosphere that held that “some murders are okay”? Was that what I was supposed to say to the Riverman—“It’s okay to kill prostitutes”? How do you get the killer to believe that you are truly sincere? When you confront your suspect for the very first time, should you automatically expect that this guy who’s murdered any number of people is going to have guilt or shame about one, two, or several of his victims? And how do you use that information to get more confessions out of a killer?
Bundy referred to these emotional attachments to victims as the killer’s soft spots. He said, “Every guy has soft spots. Some of those victims, he wouldn’t have a feeling for in the world. And others, he probably feels bad about. It’s hard to say. I’m guessing. It’d be easier for him to talk about others and harder to talk about some. It’s hard for me to imagine what the particular thought patterns are that he’s responding to, what needs he has in terms of just relating to what he’s done. But that can become fairly obvious to you over a period of time.”
Ted Bundy had the “luxury” of living with these guys. He was in prison with Bobby Joe Long, a killer who was arrested in November 1984 for murdering 11 women—some of them prostitutes—in Tampa, Florida, during a period of less than a year. Ted claimed to be fascinated with the murders committed by Bobby Long. He said, “I wanted to find out all about what Bobby Long did; I wanted to know exactly what he did, even though he’d already told the police. And so if you live with a guy for a few weeks I can figure out what’s going on in his head. And he knew where I was coming from, also.”
Ted relished being able to get into a guy’s head. When he’d talk about it, he would puff up his chest like a big toad, exulting in his superiority. Ted bragged, “a lot of people who come to me have read about Ted Bundy, so they know what—you know, they have an image or an impression of what I’m about. That may help them open up some, too.”
Ted criticized the facts gathered in interviews of serial killers by FBI agents. They listened to people like Edmund Kemper give details of his murders that occurred in Santa Cruz, California, in the early 1970s. Ted said, “There’s no question in my mind, he’s lying, too.” He did not tell the whole truth about his own murders. “It’s curious that someone would admit to that kind of conduct, and yet over the years, for whatever reason, whatever psychological need they have to fabricate or embellish the story of the account, it happens. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve talked to guys who have come to me over the years and, you know, for whatever reason, they’ll try to speculate. But they’ll say, ‘Hey, let me tell you about this.’ And they told me some things and I know they’re bullshitting me.”
I directed my next question squarely at Ted’s ego. “Do you challenge them?” He responded on cue. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I know how to—I mean, I can see through a guy very quickly. It’s fascinating when somebody comes to me. I know when they’re bullshitting me and I know when they’re not. I know when what they’re telling me is for real and when what they’re telling me is a fantasy. And I’ve had a guy do both with me. It’s a curious, curious situation. I had a guy sit down and just tell me stories. I knew he was telling me stories. And yet, I also know that, essentially, he’d done what they said he did, but he had a need to tell it a different way so he looked different, he looked better. In his own mind, okay? He wasn’t a savage, lust-filled killer, but he was this guy who just—he just got mad. The bitch made him mad. So it’s very curious how guys—some men who committed a series of murders over the years, in their own mind, will rewrite history to satisfy their needs. And they will lie. To themselves, perhaps. I mean, one person in particular. Fascinating.” And he knows Bobby Joe Long did a lot more than the police say he did.
Ted claimed that Bobby Joe Long freely admitted a couple dozen murders to the police, many of which he didn’t do. “He confessed to murders he didn’t do and didn’t confess to murders he did do. He was so messed up. And he did it in such a way that his confessions were expressing his inner needs, reflections of his inner self, which were somewhat juvenile. And also there’s a need for approval. And he wanted people to say, ‘You’re doing good; you’re a good guy. You’re doing a good thing.’ But anyway, I don’t want to get too lost on this, but it’s fascinating to see how people will embellish on their accounts, under the best of conditions. So you don’t know what the FBI is getting.”
Ted had just rambled on about exposing one of his comrades when he was lying, while at the same time fearing that I could tell when he was bullshitting. This conversation revealed one of the many flaws in Bundy’s personality that he constantly struggled with: his fear of not being believed or, worse yet, of being ignored because I would be able to detect that he was not telling the truth. Lying was a major factor in Bundy’s relationships with other people. He lied to everyone: his girlfriends, parents, friends, cellmates, and lawyers. Of course, Ted knew that his murderous friends
would lie, because that’s all that they—and Ted—did in their relationships with other people. For Ted’s upcoming confessions, his real dilemma was providing certain information about his murders that would convince me that he was telling the truth, and at the same time, knowing that his proven credibility, by his own admission, was less than zero.
After having just struggled with his own inadequacies, Ted had to be reeled in and his ego elevated. When we did that, he was hooked. He loved talking about murder, which was nothing more than a glorification of himself. He needed to be told “you’re doing well, keep going.” So I asked him about all the books that have been written about him. “Have a lot of them read these dime novels that have been written about you?”
With this comment, I successfully stoked Ted’s fires. He said, “They all have, as a matter of fact, to one extent or another. And that kind of gives them a sense—at least an impression of—let’s face it, of camaraderie, and that may not be the right word, but you know what I’m getting at.”
He continued, “This guy will understand. Or sharing, like a kid, like a cat that brings the mouse home, you know. Sharing those experiences which he could probably never share with anybody. And I’ve had people tell me things. They said, ‘Listen, nobody could understand this. I’ve never run across anybody I felt I could tell this to without feeling like they’d turn me in.’ One thing they know about me is they can trust me, because there’s nobody the state of Florida wants more than me. So they know I’m not about to turn them in. And of course, in reality, I wouldn’t turn them in if they told me about what they did and told me about things that the police didn’t know about.” But cops knew Ted thought much the same thing would save his neck.
“A second thing: one in particular felt the need to tell me because he—it was a burden. He’d never been able to talk to anybody about it for fear they’d turn him in. Or they wouldn’t understand or they would judge him. But when he talked to me, he didn’t feel like I would judge him. He was right. I wouldn’t. And he felt like I would understand, and he was right. I did.”
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 38