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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  The George Russell Case

  One of the most significant cases in which information gathered by HITS staff put a killer behind bars was that of George Russell, who was convicted of three especially brutal murders. The murders took place in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb east of Seattle, in 1990. HITS personnel contributed two types of assistance. Initially, HITS staff advised Bellevue detectives that the first murder was unique—there was nothing else like it in their database. HITS went on to recognize the second murder in the series by comparing characteristics of it with the first and observing certain similarities between the two. Testimony from HITS staff at the trial revealed that all three murders in the series were definitely committed by the same person.

  The series of murders began in the city of Bellevue, a model central business district and shopping mall that is surrounded by middle-income apartments and condominiums. It is a singles paradise with bars, restaurants, and clubs that cater to a young, lively crowd. Many of the men and women who live there have jobs by day and cruise for company at night. Any Friday or Saturday evening, the local mating rituals can be observed in bars at the El Torito, Black Angus, Papagayo’s, or Cucina Cucina restaurants. This setting was the perfect location for a gregarious, smooth-talking serial killer to strike successfully.

  The Mary Ann Pohlreich Murder

  This case began with the startling discovery of a body in an alleyway behind the busy Black Angus. On June 23, 1990, just after 7:30 A.M., an employee of the McDonald’s located adjacent to the Black Angus found the murdered female.

  The crime scene photographs centered on the single grim, motionless female stretched upon the pavement. Her body was clearly posed; there was no question that whoever committed this terrible atrocity didn’t mind spending a considerable amount of time with the victim after death. The body was displayed in a busy area—the killer obviously wanted his work to be discovered quickly—nude and arranged to send an unmistakable message of sexual degradation. The victim was left lying on her back, with her left foot crossed over the instep of her right ankle. Her head was turned to the left and a Frito-Lay dip container lid rested ominously on top of her right occipital orbit. Her arms were bent at the elbow and crossed over her abdomen with her hands gently touching, one inside the other. In one hand, detectives found a startling piece of evidence: a Douglas fir cone. What did this clue represent? Only her dreadful slayer knew.

  The victim’s gold watch on her left wrist and her gold choker chain with a crescent-shaped white pendant around her neck were the only personal items left on the otherwise nude corpse. Noting that the especially aggressive predator was careful to remove all of the victim’s clothing, I figured that he was either too pressed for time to strip her of her jewelry or he didn’t see any value in the pieces and deliberately left them as adornments to the body.

  The surface of the garbage area, uncommonly clean, was a cement rectangle bordered by the asphalt pavement of the parking lot. A pile of debris was within three feet of the victim’s head and two brooms were leaning up against the wooden fence that enclosed the area on three sides. The body was discovered near the unfenced side. In front of the trash compactor, several bloodstains and chips of fingernail polish from the victim were found. It could be assumed from this evidence that the killer had taken the victim deep into the trash area, as if he was going to deposit her in the Dumpster but then decided to display the body prominently back toward the opening, where it could be clearly seen.

  The victim had wounds indicative of strangulation; severe blows to the right eye, nose, and mouth; and abrasions—received after death—to the right arm, right breast, both hips, knees, and feet. These postmortem injuries were produced when the killer dragged the body about 20 feet along the parking lot surface inside the fenced garbage area. The injuries Pohlreich had received before death looked like defense wounds, suggesting that she had put up a struggle when attacked.

  The medical examiner had determined that death took place between 2:30 and 5:20 A.M. A latenight Black Angus worker who had dumped garbage at 3:15 A.M. said the body was not there at that time. Since the body was discovered within four to five hours after death, we concluded that the woman was probably killed someplace else and brought to the Dumpster.

  The autopsy examination revealed blunt impact injuries to the head that produced a fracture to the right base of the skull and similar marks on the abdomen that caused a laceration of the liver. The medical examiner found the victim’s stomach empty and her toxicological screen showed a blood alcohol level of .14. The victim had been raped, her anus had been severely lacerated with a foreign object, and sperm was detected in her vagina.

  On June 27, 1990, the victim was positively identified through dental records as Mary Ann Pohlreich. Her identity was revealed after a search of local police missing-persons reports. Mary Ann Pohlreich was white, 27 years old, 5 feet 7 inches tall, 150 pounds, with light brown shoulder-length slightly curly hair and blue-gray eyes. She was last seen alive on Friday, June 22, 1990, at about 10 P.M. at Papagayo’s Cantina, a popular singles bar and dance spot. Papagayo’s is located about one mile northwest of the Black Angus Restaurant. Pohlreich’s 1984 Chevrolet Camaro sat undisturbed in Papagayo’s parking lot. Her purse, which contained her car keys, was found later in the lost-and-found property at Papagayo’s.

  Detectives surmised that Pohlreich had met someone at Papagayo’s with whom she left after 10 P.M., intending to return and retrieve her purse and car. She was assaulted and murdered at an unknown location nearby and placed behind the Black Angus after 3:15 A.M.

  Evidence from the murder suggested that it had been a sexual confrontation gone bad. The circumstances surrounding the victim’s disappearance support the theory that Pohlreich left the bar with a date, intending to return. Judging by the number of defense wounds and the blunt-force injuries inflicted by the killer, Pohlreich put up quite a struggle prior to death and left her mark on him. Undoubtedly, the killer had to wash her blood from himself.

  The rape-murderer rarely gets any sexual pleasure from the actual killing of the victim. But in this case it seemed the killer derived great satisfaction from his postmortem sexually sadistic activities. He must have spent a considerable amount of time with his dead victim behind the Black Angus. He took the time to carefully arrange her body in its final pose even though the macabre ritual greatly increased the risk that someone might see him with his victim. This after-death victim—offender contact demonstrated the complete possessiveness and ultimate degradation of the female victim by the killer, a modus operandi typical of Ted Bundy. Pohlreich, therefore, was not killed by some common rape-murderer, because the signature of the crime belonged to someone fitting the necrophilic profile of a serial killer.

  The Pohlreich homicide was an analyst’s ideal case because it contained many distinctive query features that could be fed into the HITS computer for a search for a match of similar features. The Pohlreich murder had three unique, significant characteristics that when taken collectively did not appear in any of the 2,000 murders in the HITS database.

  First, posing a murder victim’s body was very rare. The analysis of murder victims revealed that there were only six instances—two tenths of one percent of the total cases—of murder in which a victim’s body was posed. In one case of posing, a deranged killer repositioned mutilated and amputated body parts back in their correct anatomical positions. Posing is not to be confused with staging, which refers to manipulation of the scene around the body. In 1974, convicted murderer Tony Fernandez killed his wife and staged the death scene. To cover up her murder, Fernandez placed her body behind the steering wheel of their motor home and pushed it over an embankment, hoping to make the murder look like an accident. Both staging and posing require that the killer spend extensive time after his victim’s death arranging things in a certain way.

  The second unique component of Pohlreich’s murder case was the disposal of her body. There are only three notable methods that a killer
uses to dispose of a victim’s body. With the most common method, employed by murderers 58 percent of the time, the body is left in a position that reflects that the killer is unconcerned about whether the body is found. That usually occurs in domestic violence and argument murders, when the body is left where it fell at the moment of death. A second method of disposal, used 10 percent of the time, is deliberate concealment of the body. Common methods of concealment include burying the body, placing the body in a crawl space of a house, or putting leaves or branches over the body in the woods, much like the Riverman had done. Leaving the body in a specific location where the body is guaranteed to be found, the third method of disposal—also used 10 percent of the time—is commonly referred to as “open and displayed” and is similar to the method used in the Pohlreich case.

  The third significant characteristic of murder in the Pohlreich case was sexual insertion of a foreign object into a cavity of the body. HITS analysis revealed that there were 19 cases recorded in their system that involved a foreign object inserted into a body cavity. Examples included cases in which a zucchini was found in the anus of one victim and a dildo was found in the vagina of another. Only 1 percent of 2,000 murders in the HITS database had any evidence of sexual insertion of foreign objects.

  Through June 1990, there were no murder victims listed in the HITS system that had all three characteristics of the Pohlreich murder—posing, sexual insertion of a foreign object, and open display of the body—present simultaneously in the same case. To find all three of those crucial factors was indeed a remarkable and horrifying occurrence. Unfortunately, experience led me to believe that Pohlreich’s killer would strike again.

  The Carol Ann Beethe Murder

  On August 9, 1990, 47 days after Pohlreich’s body was discovered, a relative found Carol Ann Beethe’s dead body in the bedroom of her ranch-style one-story house. Beethe’s home was located in a typical middle-class suburban bedroom community and was bordered on each side by neighboring houses. Within the city limits of Bellevue, Beethe’s residence was less than two miles from the Black Angus Restaurant where Mary Ann Pohlreich was found murdered. A dime on a Thomas Brothers’ street map covered both scenes.

  Carol Beethe was the single mother of two daughters, ages 9 and 13, who were asleep in their shared bedroom only 15 feet from the entrance of Carol’s bedroom on the night of her murder. Beethe was white, with collar-length light blond hair, 5 feet 2 inches tall, and weighed 108 pounds. She was last seen entering her home alone by a neighbor who was out walking by himself at 2:30 A.M. on August 9, 1990. Beethe had been visiting a bartender friend of hers at Bellevue’s Keg Restaurant, another singles hangout. Beethe herself was a bartender at Cucina Cucina Restaurant in Bellevue.

  Deliberately arranged by the killer, the crime scene was a ghastly sight. Beethe was carefully positioned in open display on top of her bed. She was naked, lying on her back, with a pair of red high heels on her feet. Her limbs were completely splayed and her exposed groin was facing the doorway of the bedroom. Inserted in her vagina was the barrel of an over-and-under rifleshotgun combination, with its stock resting across her shoes. The weapon belonged to the victim. Detectives thought for a while that a pillow covering Beethe’s face was used to smother her until they carefully lifted it and found that her head was wrapped in a plastic dry-cleaning bag after she died. Was the intruder readying Beethe’s body for removal from her house by placing her battered head in a plastic bag before he changed his mind and left her in her own bed? We wondered.

  Carol Beethe was savagely beaten—much more than was needed to kill her—with an unidentified blunt object that left forked or Y-shaped impressions all over her head. She had two defense wounds, one on each hand. Police determined that the gun and shoes were placed in and on the victim after death. The bedroom had not been ransacked, although jewelry and cash were taken. The house door to the victim’s bedroom was closed and locked; the murderer had come and gone through an open sliding-glass door to her bedroom. The murder weapon was not found.

  Beethe’s murder, like Pohlreich’s, was extremely unusual. To the inexperienced observer, they were quite different. But HITS analysts discovered the three similarities between the Pohlreich and Beethe murders. Based on the extremely rare occurrence of posing, insertion of a foreign object into the body, and openly displayed bodies in two murders within 50 days of each other in Bellevue, investigators should have concluded that both murders were the work of the same person. These were the signature of one killer in particular.

  Unfortunately, Bellevue investigators had drawn different conclusions. They focused their investigation on Beethe’s boyfriend. The boyfriend had an alibi for the time of Pohlreich’s murder, and at least one police investigator was initially reluctant to accept any theory that Beethe was killed by the same person who killed Pohlreich.

  The Andrea Levine Murder

  The body of Andrea Levine was discovered in her ground-level apartment in Kirkland, Washington, on September 3, 1990, 24 days after the murder of Carol Ann Beethe. Her apartment was within five miles to the north of the Bellevue Black Angus where Pohlreich’s body was found.

  Andrea Levine was white, with collar-length dark-red hair. She was 24 years old, 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighed about 120 pounds. She was last seen alive around midnight at the Maple Gardens Restaurant in Kirkland on August 30, 1990. She was at the restaurant with her friends. Like Pohlreich and Beethe, Levine was known to frequent singles nightspots in the Bellevue area.

  The display and postmortem mutilation of Levine’s body confirmed that a sexually deviant serial killer was on the loose in the Bellevue area. Upon the discovery of this third murder, Beethe’s boyfriend was dismissed as a suspect. The real killer would definitely have gone underground after being the central focus of the Beethe investigation. The boyfriend was too closely scrutinized to have continued a killing spree with the murder of Levine. The killer had not yet been under police surveillance and was still exercising his opportunity to kill.

  Levine’s nude body was left supine on top of her bed. A pillow covered her bloody cranium. Like Pohlreich and Beethe, the killer clearly posed his victim. Her legs were spread, a dildo was inserted in her mouth, and the book More Joy of Sex was cradled in her left arm. She had been bludgeoned about the head violently and repeatedly and she had sustained more than 230 small cuts over the entire surface of her body, including the bottom of her feet. The cuts were all made after Levine had been killed. It appeared that a ring Levine was wearing and all the knives in the house had been taken by the killer; the murder weapon was not found. Her pickup truck was parked in its normal spot outside and there were no signs of forced entry into the apartment.

  The Killer’s Signature

  In her prosecution of George Russell, the suspect arrested and tried for the crimes, Rebecca Roe, senior deputy prosecuting attorney for King County, wanted me to consider the following question, independent of any facts connecting George Russell to any of the murders. Was there evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine were murdered by the same person(s)? She provided me with all the case materials for an expert opinion. In most cases, I have few clues on which to base my analysis of murder investigations, and therefore it is often very difficult to determine the behavioral characteristics of the killer. But the Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine cases were so rich in detail, my answer to her question was a clear-cut yes.

  First of all, the Bellevue and Kirkland vicinity of King County had averaged only one murder per year for the preceding 10 years. Then, surprisingly, within 67 days, the locale experienced three atypical murders within a five-mile radius of one another. Were these the only crimes in the area? Was there any other activity that should have alerted police to the presence of violence in the community? At the very least, law enforcement officials should have realized that there was a murder problem beyond normal proportions. Crimes of this magnitude just don’t take place in a vacuum. Ted Bundy’s murders were part of a pat
tern of missing women, all of them Ted’s victims. We knew that something was going on because of all the missing-persons reports. The Green River case involved a macabre circus of bodies popping up in the woods and out of the river. Those murders, too, coincided with a plethora of missing-persons reports, most of which turned out to be about victims of the Green River Killer. Therefore, in Bellevue there should have been some other turbulence that would have been a pointer to the three murdered women. In fact, that’s exactly what did happen, but the homicide detectives wouldn’t realize it until after the killer was already in jail on other charges.

  Instead, the detectives focused their attention directly on the crimes in front of them and tried to see whether the three murders could be related. They began with the modus operandi. For purposes of comparing cases, police investigators traditionally have searched for characteristics that were similar—the modus operandi (method of operation) of the killer. Strictly interpreted, the way a murder is committed is controlled by the actions of the killer, based to some extent on the victim’s response to the situation. For example, if the murderer in one case easily controls the victim, the killer will not change the modus operandi in the next case unless he/she has trouble controlling the victim. A killer might use strangulation in the first case, and in a subsequent case, to accommodate resistance by the victim, use a firearm because the strangling method was unsuccessful. Therefore, the killer’s modus operandi can change over time as the killer discovers that some things he/she does are more effective than others. Going from the outdoor scene in the Pohlreich murder to the confines of Beethe’s bedroom indoors is one example of a modus operandi change in the same series of cases. Also, sneaking into a bedroom while Beethe and Levine quietly slept instead of approaching them in a dating situation, as was done with Pohlreich, was another major change in modus operandi for the adaptable slayer. The killer felt more comfortable indoors.