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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  The modus operandi of a killer is only the combination of those actions that are necessary to commit the murder. Because it can change, simply saying that the homicides can’t be related because there are different modi operandi in a number of cases otherwise related by time, place, or area is foolishness. That’s what kept the police in the Atlanta child murders and the Arthur Shawcross murders in Rochester, New York, chasing phantoms for so long. However, there are other crime scene indicators that relate murders even when the modus operandi changes. Many sexually sadistic repetitive killers, for example, go beyond the actions necessary to commit a murder. They are not satisfied with just committing the murder, but have a compulsion to demonstrate their own personal expression. The killer’s personal expression is commonly referred to as his “signature” or “calling card”; it is an imprint he leaves at the scene, and in Ted Bundy’s lingo, is whatever the killer “gets his rocks off on.”

  The core of a killer’s imprint will never change. Unlike the characteristics of an offender’s modus operandi, the core remains constant. However, a signature may evolve over time in cases where a sexually sadistic killer performs more postmortem mutilation from one murder to the next. The FBI’s behavioral scientists have said that the elements of the original personal expression become more fully developed. Unfortunately, a signature is not always recognized at the crime scene because of decomposition of the body or interruptions in the killer’s routine, like the presence of unexpected witnesses.

  John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit has described the etiology of the signature as the person’s violent fantasies, which are progressive in nature and which contribute to thoughts of committing extremely violent acts. As a person dreams and thinks of his fantasies over time, he develops a need to express those violent fantasies. Most serial killers have been living with their fantasies for years before they finally bubble to the surface and are translated into deeds. When the killer finally acts out, some aspect of the murder will demonstrate his unique personal expression, which has been replayed in his fantasies over and over again. It’s not enough just to consummate the murder; the killer must act out his fantasies in some manner over and beyond inflicting death-producing injuries. For example, some lust-killers have a need to bludgeon excessively, carve on the body, or leave messages written in blood. They rearrange the position of the victim, performing postmortem activities that suit their own personal desires, and in essence, leave their psychopathological calling card. That’s what happened in the case of George Russell.

  The Story of George Russell

  George Russell, the man who was ultimately convicted for the three murders on the basis of evidence and a pattern-murder profile, was a living example of the changing face of serial murder. He was truly a serial killer of the ’90s: a black man from an educated middle-class family who grew up in a white neighborhood and socialized easily in the Seattle yuppie singles community. Russell recognized no racial barriers and therefore was not restricted by them. Like other serial killers who live in the community where they pick up their victims, Russell frequented singles bars and restaurants, dated and lived with young women from different racial backgrounds, and had a practice of robbing his friends. It is likely that his first murder—the imprinting or pattern murder—was a sexual assault/robbery gone awry.

  George Russell was born in Florida to an unwed mother. His father probably abandoned his mother before Russell was born. Later, Russell lived in Washington, D.C., and, so people around him have said, his mother left him with family and friends from time to time. While in middle school, he lived with his mother and stepfather on Mercer Island, Washington, an affluent, exclusive upper-middle-class suburban Seattle community. Mercer Island is a five-minute trip across the East Channel Bridge and north up Interstate 405 to downtown Bellevue.

  His mother wasn’t living on Mercer Island long before she moved out and left George in his stepfather’s care. But George roamed the streets at will. George never finished high school, although he lived through his teenage years on the island, where the beat cops got to know him well. Many times they responded to burglary calls in the community to see George walking away from the scene. He was never carrying any stolen goods or property and was not picked up by the police. After a while, police suspected that he was ditching stolen items before they could arrive. He was always around when something bad was happening. George’s rap sheet was littered with entries for criminal trespass, evading the police, and the possession of stolen property. Authorities could never pin a burglary charge on him, so he never spent time in prison; however, he had numerous short jail stays, but none for any sexual offense.

  When he was 17, George left Mercer Island for Bellevue, where he lived a transient’s lifestyle from the time he first arrived. He boarded with anyone who would take him in, and he could talk himself in anywhere. Most of his acquaintances thought that he always had a job—even though we could never find any records of long-term employment—because he always seemed to have enough money to get by. Police could locate only two employers; he was with each of them for less than two months. Two jobs in 15 years, yet the man always had money. That’s why the police thought he must have been one of the best cat burglars in the area. But why did he start murdering?

  Russell became a suspect in the three murders in Bellevue after an alert Seattle police detective, Rick Buckland, discovered that the residence burglary about which he was questioning Russell regarding possession of stolen property was close to the murder scene of Andrea Levine. Russell first came to Buckland’s attention in May, 1990, after police responded to a call of a fight that had broken out between two men in downtown Seattle. As uniformed officers arrived, a black male who had posed as a police officer to the combatants was in the process of breaking up the fight. The officers were immediately suspicious of him because he seemed to be hiding something. There was a deviousness about him, so they questioned him further and patted him down. That was when they found the pistol he had concealed. He was arrested for impersonating an officer and taken into custody. The pistol was seized as evidence, traced on the computer by its serial number, and found to be stolen property taken in a burglary in the Totem Lake area north of where Andrea Levine lived. They booked him under the Bellevue name of George Russell.

  After Buckland confirmed that the stolen property in Russell’s possession came from a Bellevue burglary near a murder site, he contacted Bellevue detectives Marv Skeen and Dale Foote. They, along with King County police Detective Larry Peterson, began winding a tight web of physical evidence around Russell while they hoped they could find another reason to take him into custody and hold him. They were not disappointed because Russell’s murder spree was still under way. The start-stop sequence to the three murders had appeared arbitrary, but it was not. The killer wanted to strike again. At the same time, Bellevue police were actively searching for some way to catch Russell in the act. They were on the hunt for the man they believed to be their serial killer. Their only question was whether they would catch Russell in the act or have another murder on their hands first.

  On September 7, 1990, two weeks after the murder of Levine, Bellevue police flooded a residential area when a prowler call was sounded. Just as he had done years ago on Mercer Island, George Russell was walking slowly away when police spotted him nearby. Russell identified himself, as if he weren’t doing anything wrong and had nothing to hide, but the police arrested him on a misde-meanor commitment warrant.

  The police discovered that the complaining party was a female who was an acquaintance of George Russell, just like Andrea Levine had been. There was no doubt about it. Russell was stopped in the act of stalking his next victim’s house. His setup was interrupted by an alert potential victim who called the police and became a living witness. Just like Carol DaRonch and Nita Neary had identified Ted Bundy, this woman had identified George Russell and perhaps saved the lives of many other potential victims.

  Then the police pushed their
investigation full steam ahead. First, they linked Russell to Pohlreich through a DNA analysis of Russell’s semen that was found inside Pohlreich’s body. Then, when detectives interviewed Russell’s friends, they discovered that Russell had borrowed a friend’s pickup on the night of the Pohlreich murder. Russell returned the truck with a foul smell inside the next morning. He gave his friend money to have the truck cleaned. Even though the truck had been detailed twice, the detectives found Pohlreich’s blood on the inside of the seat cushions of the truck. Detectives also found hair in some underwear discovered on Beethe’s bedroom floor. That hair was “microscopically indistinguishable,” the lab report said, from the head hair of George Russell.

  In the Beethe and Levine cases, the physical evidence was not as conclusive as in the Pohlreich case, which made the signature testimony that much more crucial to the linking of all the cases. It remained to be determined, in linking the murders in the series, why Russell had changed his modus operandi even though his signature had not changed at all.

  The Pohlreich murder, we theorized, was more like an experiment at first—a sexual assault or robbery gone awry because the victim fought off Russell too hard. Russell might have been surprised by what happened and by what he did. Thus, the actual murder itself might have even been a mistake because what Russell ended up doing was not what he set out to do. But it gratified him nonetheless. In wanting to control Pohlreich for his own sexual gratification, Russell misjudged her ability to resist his attacks. He hadn’t planned on this. After all, he was a quintessential cat burglar, a thief of the night, and confronting someone in an outdoor, nonresidential situation with witnesses who could come around the corner at any moment was way out of his league. But Russell was nothing if not adaptable and quickly learned from his mistake. He also learned that control of the dead body was pleasurable. So he changed his method of operation while reserving for himself the pleasure of posing, fondling, having sex with, and controlling the victim after death. He resumed his old method of breaking into homes in darkness to find his victims.

  During the course of the murders, Russell stole rings belonging to Beethe and Levine. The theft of the rings was interesting to me since most serial killers steal items belonging to victims. Frequently, family members or acquaintances of the killers unknowingly end up with those items as the killer circulates them among his group to get rid of potential evidence, while at the same time keeping them in sight. It’s a way of reviving the thrill without storing potentially incriminating evidence in your own closet. Detectives Skeen and Foote tracked Beethe’s ring to a friend whom Russell had tried to convince to buy it. Larry Peterson recovered Levine’s ring, which had passed through several people all the way to Florida.

  Russell knew that the police would search his apartment. In a final act of bravado, he called his female roommates and had them present to police, upon their arrival, a 1973 FBI evidence handbook. This was Russell’s way of announcing his invincibility by implying, “you’re not going to find anything because I know your business, too.” Russell was still trying to assert control, to maintain his sense of significance even though he knew the police were hot on his trail. But Russell was wrong. This was 1990, not 1973. His edition of the evidence handbook didn’t include DNA analysis, nor did he anticipate the thoroughness of the detectives’ search for evidence. At Russell’s apartment, a gym bag he always carried was recovered, and inside it was human head hair belonging to Andrea Levine.

  In the subsequent murder trial of George Russell, my testimony was simple: the killer’s personal expression was permanently etched on the bodies of Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine. When I analyzed the murders by type and frequency of injuries and other unique characteristics from the first murder to the third, I drew only one conclusion: they were all committed by the same person.

  I recognized the distinctive aspects of the killer’s imprint. First, all three victims were intentionally left so someone would find them. They were not concealed or hidden but were placed in locations where they would be discovered quickly. The killer left them openly displayed, knowing that whoever found them would be shocked, both physically and psychologically.

  Second, they were posed in a sexually degrading positions. The killer got a thrill out of demonstrating their vulnerability after death. Moreover, only implements that the killer found at the scene were used for their portraits. He did this consistently in all three murders. For example, he used a pinecone with Pohlreich, Beethe’s red shoes, and Levine’s book about sex.

  Third, the killer used foreign objects in sexual orifices as part of his protocol. The actual object was absent in the Pohlreich case. The act of sexually inserting foreign objects and leaving them in their cavities evolved from the first murder through the third. It became more of a need for the killer to demonstrate his personal expression by leaving a rifle in Beethe and a dildo in Levine’s mouth.

  Fourth, the presence of all three of those relatively rare characteristics in each of the three murders was a very extraordinary occurrence. Notwithstanding the fact that the murders were committed in a small geographical area, the chain of those unique characteristics was the fundamental aspect of the killer’s signature.

  Fifth, the strength of the defense each victim was allowed to put up decreased from the first murder through the third murder. Pohlreich had multiple defense wounds, Beethe had two small defense wounds, and Levine did not have any defense wounds. The state of mind of the killer was influenced by the struggle put up by the first victim, so subsequent victims were not allowed any chance to fight back.

  Sixth, the killer spent an increasing amount of time with each victim after death, rearranging their bodies in their final death poses. Remaining for any amount of time behind the Black Angus Restaurant and at the outdoor scene of Pohlreich’s killing was very risky, since someone could come upon the scene and interrupt the killer. Therefore, very little time was spent arranging Pohlreich’s body. The killer was with Beethe, injuring and arranging her body, for a longer period of time than he was with Pohlreich. With Beethe’s bedroom door closed, the presence of her sleeping children in the house posed no immediate threat of discovery to the killer. Levine’s apartment was conducive to taking even more time since she lived alone. Assaulting Levine with those fatal strokes, carefully cutting her over 230 times, and dutifully arranging her body probably took a considerable amount of time, at least more than it took to pose Pohlreich and Beethe.

  Seventh, the number of injuries sustained by each victim increased from the Pohlreich murder through the Levine murder. Pohlreich sustained just enough injuries to cause her death. Beethe was beaten severely, more than what was necessary to kill her. Levine was also beaten excessively and cut extensively. The increasing number of injuries reflected the killer’s need to exercise absolute possession by creatively defiling their bodies.

  I summarized that the gradual increases and decreases in certain acts—inflicting an increasing number of injuries in each case, spending more and more time after death with each victim, and reducing the participation on the part of a live victim from the first case to the last—in conjunction with open display, posing, and sexual insertion of foreign objects were the specific factors that identified the signature of the killer in the Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine murders, leading to the conclusion that they were all killed by the same person.

  George Russell was a lot like Ted Bundy. The most obvious similarity was the considerable amount of time he spent with his victims after death. But George’s murders were ultimately flawed by his passion, his need to display his hatred, and his need to display his bodies in hopes that they would be found quickly to preserve the element of shock and surprise. George had to be in control, but he misunderstood control and thereby created the conditions for his own capture. Bundy, on the other hand, covered his signature by assuring that not only would his early victims not be found right away, but that when they were discovered, there would be nothing left but bones. His signature was buried
along with his victims, and any physical evidence directly linking him to the crimes was buried as well.

  The inception and development of HITS helped catch George Russell even though he broke all the rules of serial murder that Ted had laid down during our years of discourse. Russell didn’t simply attack prostitutes on the street like the Green River Killer did. He broke into people’s homes in the night, killed them in their beds, sexually violated their corpses in the most gruesome ways, and then displayed them like trophies for people to find the next day. He degraded his victims by posing them in their full sexual vulnerability. In death, they displayed the helplessness of the final moments of their lives, when Russell was beating them until the bones in their skulls shattered. But even the beating was part of his need to control. Serial murderers kill out of a need to control people because they can’t control anything else in life. In those moments just before and after the death of their victim, their need to control is gratified the most. And very, very few of these killers know how to cover up their signatures completely once they’ve expended their lust on a lifeless victim. Not even Bundy could cover up all his tracks; neither could the Green River Killer.

  13

  Suspects

  The “My Case” Syndrome

  When there are an extraordinary number of murders occurring within a certain geographical area, especially if they are in different jurisdictions, there seems to be a resistance or hesitancy, political or otherwise, to approach those murders as if they were committed by the same person. Why?