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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  “Is that because he wasn’t doing anything out of town?” I asked.

  “No, hell no,” Ted said. “These were periods of time when, see, Gerry, I’m not trying to psychoanalyze him, but I know Gerry to the extent that he’s got a poor self-image. He covers it over with a lot of joviality, but he has a poor self-image that was aggravated by alcohol abuse. He could never finish school. He couldn’t hold a job.

  “During that whole seven-year period he lived in his parents’ home or in homes owned by his parents, or for a short time with his wife in a trailer. He never held anything more than part-time menial jobs, drinking heavily, driving around, getting money from his parents. And in the period following the separation from his wife, where he lost his job with his father-in-law, [he] had to live in his parents’ home, was kicked out of his own trailer by this woman he was married to, a period of time when I know damn well he was angry and hostile and probably was feeling as bad about himself as he had ever felt—and had more time on his hands than he’d probably had for years—there’s nothing there for twelve months?”

  I know from experience, though, that despite concerns raised by police and the media, time delays within a series of murders are fully explainable, sometimes for the most mundane reasons. Even Bundy said that the same things that happen to “normal” people happen to serial killers. Shit happens to serial killers, too. They get sick, hospitalized, fearful of detection, go to jail, or die. Some series have had apparently inexplicable delays, such as the span of over 140 days between murders in the Atlanta child murders in 1979-81, for which Wayne Williams was convicted. But Bundy was emphatic: “If a killer is out there, he’s doing stuff. The police have not found them.

  “I know damn well that he was out there doing stuff. There’s just no question. Some of the other things he’s told the police are true about what happened in seventy-three and seventy-four. If that’s true, then there’s a lot more, and they just didn’t know how to get it out of him. And it’s a shame now because Gerry’s been polarized, and the rare opportunity to really find out what was going on in his mind or what he really knows may have passed. The only disturbing thing about Gerry’s revelations to the police is I don’t know that he ever turned up any bodies, any remains. And—that doesn’t necessarily say he’s not telling the truth, but I don’t know how much more he has.”

  Some news reports claimed that Stano had confessed to 41 murders. Ted wanted to set the record straight. “In fact, the presentence report, which is very detailed and goes into great length about his confessions, shows that he confessed to eleven murders where he’s been charged and given a sentence of some sort, whether death sentence or life sentence. And ten more murders where they haven’t yet got around to charging him for one reason or another. That’s twenty-one. Now, there may be others they suspect him of or whatever, but that’s—the report’s fairly comprehensive and it pinpoints twenty-one specific cases. And I’ve charted them out, integrated them with what Gerry’s told me, with what I know, and what the presentence report says, and there are huge, enormous gaps at very critical times when he was clearly in a state of mind, based upon my knowledge of how these things go, where he would—more likely drink and engage in that kind of behavior.

  “Now, I think that’s the problem that investigators face even when they get somebody that they think has been involved in a series … just finding this out, just how extensive his activities have been. And not just settling for the easy conviction or two and locking the guy away. For whatever reason, the prosecuting attorneys have reached the point or threshold where they weren’t willing to wait anymore to find out. It was more important to them to give him a death sentence than it was for them to find out what he really knew. I think they just reached that point where they said, ‘We’ve had enough of this fellow. We can’t give him any more life sentences. We’ve got to—that’s it.’”

  Ironically enough, the state of Florida felt the same way about Ted. All the information that Ted felt should have been covered with Gerry consisted of the same, seemingly useless pieces of information that Ted tried to use to convince the state of Florida not to execute him. They were some of the same things I would have to dig out of the Green River Killer in order to put his puzzle together. But because both Stano and Ted had been “mishandled,” according to Ted, I could not mishandle the Green River Killer. I also could not miss the opportunity to get out of Ted what other investigators had tried to get but failed. Ted was giving me my chance.

  Ted wanted to emphasize one final, fatal point. “And despite the fact of these glaring inadequacies in how he was interrogated, and these big gaps, unexplainable gaps in his stories—and I say that not to condemn Gerry, and I certainly wouldn’t reveal anything specific that he told me—it’s always just appalled me just how badly that specific case was handled, how badly Gerry was handled. It would be a good case study for anyone wanting to know how not to approach somebody accused of a series of crimes. ’Cause he was lost. I mean, either they’re going to kill him and undoubtedly will—I don’t know how that’s going to end up there.”

  Ted’s Legal Maneuvers

  In talking about Gerald Stano, Ted’s face was etched with frustration. Why kill somebody when they have so much to tell? When Ted emphasized Stano’s plight, he was also talking about his own dilemma. Should he confess now or wait? Ted was really close to opening up, it seemed. He was moving, fidgeting in his chair like I had never seen him do. Unbeknownst to me, the previous day, Ted’s appellate attorney had convinced Ted not to confess to me. It was just not in his best interest during the appeal process, the attorney said. Ted told me later that he had wanted to begin talking at that time. That was why he was so intent on setting the stage with how to get a killer’s confession; this was his show. My impression was that there was something wrong with Ted; his appearance was different; it was almost like he was talking about himself all this time—how he wanted to be interviewed. I was flipping back and forth between Ted and the Green River Killer. Now that I had Ted on the line, I wanted to reel him in. I wanted him, after all those years, to talk about himself. But I played for time, even when I knew there was no time. That was the only way I could play it. He had to come to me.

  I said, “I’m kind of getting the feeling that whatever the efforts of the police, if a certain time span has gone by and a person has learned to deal with their own thoughts and problems for quite a while, the efforts to somehow understand or reveal the story in somebody during the interview process would almost totally be controlled by the person that’s being interviewed. Whatever the police do or say, their presence really doesn’t make any difference.” I wanted Ted to tell me how to get his confession without really saying it.

  He was fidgeting. He said, “Yes. If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you, and if he doesn’t, he won’t. We’re talking, again, about somebody who has been out there for years and years. I mean, he’s had this integrated so thoroughly into his consciousness, into his daily life, into his way of being and living and has become so familiar with how to deal with what people commonly refer to as guilt, remorse, or whatever … deal with it and/or do away with it. And it’s become these thoughts and memories that constitute the crimes. He’s adapted so well to them and kept them so close, because he knows the consequences of giving them up. It’s not likely that anybody is going to trick him into talking about it or pressure him into talking about it.”

  It was time for Ted to be specific. I asked him, “How does an investigator visualize what’s been integrated into this guy’s mind for so long? Time? Patience?”

  Maybe I opened the sluice gate for Ted. He said, “Yes. Time and patience. I think those are two good words. You can’t hope to drag it out of a guy overnight, okay? And you can’t get frustrated if he doesn’t give it to you all at once, in one piece. Because you have to be content with slowly learning about what kind of person is this. What demands is he responding to within himself? And they may be very particular, very subtle, and
very difficult to find out. Like for instance, this fellow I was telling you about who would tell you at the drop of a hat about all the people he killed, except he just couldn’t bring himself to tell anybody how he killed his girlfriend and where he put her body. He just couldn’t because his view of the world was, these other killings were good, but killing somebody you know is bad. And he was afraid if he told, people would—he had this vision in his mind that if he admitted to killing his girlfriend and told them where the body was, then people would see him as a bad person. That’s pretty bizarre, but that’s how he was thinking. And it didn’t occur to me until after we talked about it for a while.

  “And so I think the more you take time to know somebody, preferably the suspect—if you have a chance to get all of the information you could beforehand, before he was brought in, know as much about him as possible before he was brought in, and then maybe even to talk to friends and relatives about him once he’s in. Now of course, once he’s in custody, he’s in custody. But you get a feeling for the guy as much as you can without talking to the guy.

  “And then once you start talking to him you just use your own gut reaction. Just to start, patiently probing without pushing, without being judgmental, taking it a step at a time, the third person, maybe doing it without dates and places and making it an abstract kind of thing. When I’m faced with somebody and I want to learn about the case, certainly what I want to learn, my perspective, is different from yours. But still I have to respond to what that guy gives me. And I often know less than you would probably know about someone. My advantage is, we know he’s been convicted of some kind of murder, anyway. So, that’s certainly the starting point—and he trusts me to one degree or another. Still, if you can—if an investigator can somehow inspire trust and confidence and come off as being nonjudgmental and be patient and probe and get to know how this guy’s mind works—I know this is pretty general kinds of things, but—that’s how I’d approach somebody who’d been out there, who you suspect for a number of years or is involved in serial murder.

  “Somebody who’d only been at it for a short time would be more vulnerable, more unstable, more confused, more guilt-ridden, more susceptible to coercion, you know. Remember that classic case—you’ve probably run across it—where they bring this guy into an interrogation room and ask if he wants to take a polygraph and tell him to put his hand on this mat or something like this. And every time he gives an answer to a question, the investigator presses a button and a light goes on and said you’re lying—and thoroughly convinced this guy that they knew he was lying about these key questions and he finally confessed. Of course, it wasn’t hooked up to a polygraph at all. But that kind of ploy, as crude as it was, will work. Once in a while it will probably work on those guys who haven’t been at it very long, haven’t been through the system, criminal justice system, haven’t been imprisoned or jailed. And the whole thing about being in police custody is terrifying for [them]. And everything, their whole identity, everything they know about themselves, is shaping them. And they begin responding to unconscious cues, one of them being that they’ve always been taught, probably, to cooperate with the police, even when it comes to confessing some pretty horrible things.”

  Ted on Ted

  Up to this point, Ted’s interview had been filled with the key qualities that any skilled investigator was supposed to be capable of demonstrating: trust, confidence, understanding, real empathy, and patience. For me, the last one, patience, was running out. I decided to ask him a third-person type of question, one that he knew was for him, “Ted, the convicted serial killer.” I carefully asked, “How would you approach a convicted murderer that you know is in prison for murder and is responsible for cases that are technically unsolved? How would you approach an offender like that? I mean, they obviously know the system. They’ve been tried and convicted, maybe sentenced to death. Then all of a sudden, there are some unresolved matters of the past where this person is a suspect in those matters. How would you approach somebody like that?”

  Ted was quiet for a very long time. “Well, I don’t—again, each case is going to be different. I think generally you’ve got to—it depends—it’s just an entirely different set of circumstances than you’re going to have with somebody who’s never been through the system, who’s not convicted. And I guess that you’d have to be able to give him something. I don’t know. Let’s say that you had the Green River guy locked up here—you had somebody locked up you thought was the Green River guy. May have been locked up for assault or something and he’s in Walla Walla [penitentiary]. I mean, how would you go to him? I mean, how could you approach such a person who’s familiar with the system, who’s locked up for ten or twenty years to confess to something which obviously carried some pretty heavy penalties and resulted in being a very notorious guy in prison?”

  I said, “I mean, he may be under the death sentence, you know, for crimes he committed now, but what happened in the past there’s no death sentence for. I mean, the penalty is not as great for those.”

  Ted was very pensive.

  I let him—and me—off the hook for the moment by saying, “Seems like a pretty impossible situation that where there’s still answers to questions that could be resolved—you’ve talked a lot about how you’ve approached these people and the development of an appreciation of what was done. And I would expect that a detective in that situation would have to be the same, absolutely with the same criteria to develop some sort of appreciation for what somebody has done and with real understanding…. We have several crimes where the circumstantial evidence is pretty well focusing on one person, yet the opportunity to go interview them is not right, and we virtually do not know how to operate that type of interview.”

  Ted regained his composure and said, “Well, in that kind of circumstance, you see, everything is complicated by the demands of the criminal justice system, of the way everyone is more or less required to play the game. And a guy who’s in prison or whether he’s on death row or wherever, he has appeals, and he would simply be foolish to talk to the police about anything as long as his appeals are intact. Because the system, as it stands now, is not really geared to getting at the truth so much as it gets at portions of the truth. It gets at approximations of the truth. Whether it be a trial—and as long as a guy goes to trial, all you’re getting is what the witnesses say, you know. And that’s only part of the story, probably. The same is true on appeal. The guy who’s been convicted is bound to try to maintain his position, and he can’t say anything, is not in a position to say anything.”

  At this point, since a killer will not want to speak directly, would that type of person be inclined to speak in the abstract? Is that what Ted was doing all along, especially in the interviews he gave? Were these backhanded, wimped-out confessions? Is this what I would have to look forward to if I ever interviewed the Green River Killer?

  Ted began to get defensive. He said, “I don’t know what [purpose] that would serve. Remember you told me that didn’t totally serve any purpose to the investigators as long as it was so vague that they couldn’t really pinpoint anything. Well, I don’t know. It depends on how general they are. But I think you know … the old Miranda warning: ‘anything you say can and will be held against you.’ And I—it doesn’t necessarily even have to mean in a court of law. But I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. The way things are set up, I don’t see how someone could say that, like you’re talking about Walla Walla prison, where they have any incentive to talk to you. I mean, first, on the one hand, he’s got his appeals, and so there are disincentives—clearly disincentives—to talking to you. On the other hand, what motivations would there be for someone in that position to talk to you about anything?”

  I pressed on. “How about someone like yourself who is obviously astute, by your own admissions several times, that you really like talking to other people about this stuff? You like thinking about crime scenes and seeing pictures. And you like reading everything you can g
et your hands on about the subject. You obviously like talking to me about it, or otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it. Is there something about that atmosphere that is appealing?”

  Ted was interested again and said, “Well, with me, I do enjoy it; and yet that interest ebbs and flows. There’s some times I’m more interested in talking about it than others. Like right now, I’m sort of ambivalent about it. I mean, it’s interesting; I find it interesting. I know a lot about the subject. It’s hard to put it in words in the abstract. I mean, to me, it’s more interesting to have specific things to deal with—you know, specific cases. I don’t like to generalize because, like I say, the guy who’s responsible for the Green River Killer is not a profile, he’s not a computer program. He’s a very unique human being. So I don’t want to generalize, but I do like to talk about it, and I like to read about it. And yet I can take it or leave it most of the time. I mean, it’s certainly not something that I would rather do than anything else. Like, right now, if I had a choice, I’d rather be outside running around in the sunshine. Sometimes I’m more motivated to talk or read about this stuff than others. But I don’t get off on it. I mean, that is, I don’t get a thrill out of talking to you about it, in the abstract. I mean, I’m not trying to, I won’t try to make myself out to be a good guy, but I do have motivations, and generally would genuinely like to see this questionnaire, for example, of your work.” He was referring to our HITS (Homicide Investigation and Tracking System) form.