Obviously, Ted didn’t want to get into the Lake Sammamish murders because their remains had already been found. Describing their murders wasn’t on his short agenda. He was more interested in talking about the murders that had gone undiscovered over the years. But he said, “We’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but I will say this much: no. Well, wait a minute. Now, that’s a good question. Not similar things, not exactly. I don’t want to beg the question, but they were different. Certainly not as extensive in those two instances as opposed to the Hawkins girl.”
Impatiently, I asked, “Okay, what weapons did you use on the Hawkins girl?”
Ted wrote his answer on his pad of paper. He held it up for me to see. “Hacksaw.”
Was Ted only going to recount where he buried a skull? Were we going to be left in the dark about how he had kidnapped Hawkins or any other woman?
Ted sensed that I wanted him to talk about how he had abducted Hawkins. The perplexed look on my face gave me away. Was he ready to reveal his long-held secrets? Ted said, “Well, we can go through it, step by step.”
“Why don’t we take Hawkins and go through it step by step,” I suggested. Repeating Ted’s own words back to him was a pre-planned interviewing technique I used once again to make Ted comfortable talking about things that he found difficult to discuss. He behaved as I hoped he would.
“Okay. Again, I wasn’t specifically prepared to talk about this today,” he admitted. “I’m just going to give you whatever comes to mind, and I’m sure that it’s not everything.”
Making Ted feel that his information was totally authoritative, as only information coming directly from the murderer’s mouth can be, I suggested, “The elements of Hawkins, then we can get on to the others. I just want to hear, specifically, the events that happened with the Hawkins girl.” Ted smiled as I continued. “The facts I have are basically what’s in the newspaper. Tell me about how she was taken. What were the circumstances at the time? How did you get out there? What was the time period between the events of her abduction and murder?”
Ted closed his eyes once again. During his entire explanation, his eyes seemed shut tighter than the trap door that hid his thoughts. He said, “Okay, let me give it a moment’s reflection here. Yeah. I’ll talk real low to you. You can still hear me? Can you hear me, Bill? You can’t?”
“Pull the recorder over a little,” I instructed.
“I can’t remember what night of the week it was—Thursday night, I believe. I don’t know, eleven to twelve. Probably closer to twelve o’clock on a warm, Seattle May night. I think it was clear. The weather had been fairly good. At about midnight that day, I was in the alleyway behind the sorority and fraternity houses that would have been Forty-fifth, Forty-sixth, Forty-seventh Street, somewhere in there. In back of the houses across the alley and across the other side of the block, there was the Congregational Church, I believe, and some parking lots in back of the sorority and fraternity houses. I was moving up the alley, using a briefcase and some crutches, and the young woman walked down. I saw her round the north end of the block into the alley and stop for a moment and then keep on walking down the alley toward me. And about halfway down the block I encountered her and asked her to help me carry the briefcase, which she did, and we walked back up the alley, across the street, turned right on the sidewalk in front of the fraternity house on the corner there, and rounded the corner to the left going north of Forty-seventh.
“Well, midway in the block there used to be one of those parking lots they used to make out of burned-down houses in that area. The university would turn them into instant parking lots. There was a parking lot, dirt surface, no lights, and my car was parked there.”
The tape recorder stopped with a loud click—of all the times for the tape to run out!
I felt the break might disturb Ted’s concentration, but he changed the side of the tape and continued. It seemed he was going to confess, no matter what. With resolve, he continued, “We were to the car. All right, basically when we reached the car, what happened was, I knocked her unconscious with the crowbar.”
I asked, “Where did you have that?”
Ted answered as though I should have anticipated that he had his weapons well stationed and readily accessible. “By the car.”
“Outside?” I questioned in disbelief that he had laid the crowbar near the car.
“Outside, in back of the car,” Ted verified.
Wondering how he leaned down and got it without alerting Hawkins, I asked, “Did she see it?”
“No, and then there were some handcuffs there, along with the crowbar,” Ted whispered. “And I handcuffed her and put her in the passenger’s side of the car and drove away.”
Now it was becoming clear how Ted could have gotten an apparently intelligent woman into his car when the passenger-side seat was missing. He didn’t have to convince them at all; he cold-cocked them from behind. They never knew what hit them and had no chance to resist. There was no verbal interplay here with the victim that Ted could hold over the head of the Green River Killer. Bundy did all his convincing from the business end of a crowbar while his victim’s back was turned. He was not the phantom prince that crime writers and reporters had portrayed him to be for over 10 years, but a creep, a spineless, chicken-shit killer.
I asked, “Was she alive or dead then?”
Leaving no question unanswered, Ted said, “Oh no. No, she was unconscious, but she was very much alive.”
I probed further. “Okay, what happened next?”
Ted was alerted by the footsteps of an approaching guard. Ted was entitled to a telephone call every hour from his appellate attorneys, and they were on the phone waiting to tell him the status of his appeals.
Ted returned in about five minutes and continued. “We drove down the alley to Fiftieth, I believe, Northeast Fiftieth or, you know, the street going east and west, and turned left. Went to the freeway. Five, is it? It’s been a long time. Anyway, and then [we] went south on the freeway to turn off on the old floating bridge, I-Ninety. She was conscious at this time. I mean, she had regained consciousness at this time, basically. Well, there’s a lot of incidental things that I’m just not getting into, you know, not talking about, ’cause they are just incidental anyway. We went across the bridge, across Mercer Island, east past Issaquah, up the hill, down the road, and up to the grassy area.”
So far, Ted told his story in a way that I couldn’t refute. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but somehow I had to test his mettle. Realizing that I couldn’t challenge him too much and risk shutting him up, I used a harmless question, designed not to scare him off. In 1974, the I-90 freeway did not have a barricade separating the westbound lanes from the eastbound lanes. I knew that he turned left across the westbound lanes to get to the dirt road as he had previously stated. But I defied his explanation by saying that it was impossible for him to have turned left because of a cement barricade blocking anyone’s turn. “How did you get across I-90? There’s a barricade in the middle of that road.”
Defiantly, Ted asserted, “Not then there wasn’t.” Ted’s words came much faster, and his voice was rising in pitch.
He continued, “Like I told you, at that time, you could make a left-hand turn, illegal as it may have been because of the double yellow line. Talk about craziness. I mean, if there had been a state patrolman, he’d probably [have] arrested me. Right?”
Without waiting for my nod of approval, he hurriedly and emphatically went on. “Nevertheless, at that time there was no divider running down the middle of that road at that point. I know. I mean, you’re right. That would have been pretty damn hard to do if it were there. But all you had to do was just make an illegal left-hand turn all the way across the two westbound lanes of 90 and right into that side road that ran parallel to 90.”
Convinced I could now recognize Ted’s body language and style of speech when he was defending the truth, I asked, “Okay, what happened after that?”
&nb
sp; A sudden defense of the truth was stressful for Ted, who lied his whole life. In fact, the momentary interruption caused Ted to become confused about his facts. He said, “Well, I parked, took her out of the van and took the handcuffs off her and—”
“Took her out of what?” I interrupted, knowing that Ted had a VW bug at the time, not a van. He was thinking about his last murder victim, Kimberly Leach.
“Took her out of the car,” he said.
“And you’re driving what?”
“A Volkswagen.”
“Okay. You said ‘van.’”
Apologizing, Ted said, “Well, no I didn’t—I’m sorry if I said van; it wasn’t a van.”
At this point, Ted’s attorney accused me of badgering Ted and I explained to her that Ted had said “van,” and she thought I was putting words in Ted’s mouth.
Ted reclaimed the interview by saying, “Well, okay. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Volkswagen, and [I] took her out of the car. I think I said I took the handcuffs off. Maybe that sounded like ‘van.’Anyway. And, gee, this is probably the hardest part.”
Ted shut off the recorder. He regained his composure for a moment and turned it back on. “I don’t know. I don’t know, we’re talking sort of abstract, not abstractly before, but, well, we’re getting right down to it. And I will talk about it. I hope you understand it’s not something I find easy to talk about after all this time.”
Ted took a big sigh and said, “One of the things that makes it a little bit difficult is that at this point she was quite lucid, talking about things. It’s not funny, but it’s odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances. And she said that she had a Spanish test the next day, and she thought that I had taken her to help tutor her for her Spanish test. It’s kind of an odd thing to say. Anyway.”
Ted paused for what seemed like minutes but was only about 30 seconds. Another sigh, and then he approached the subject by saying, “The long and short of it, I mean, I’m going to try and get there by degrees. The long and short of it was that I again knocked her unconscious, strangled her, and drug her about ten yards into the small grove of trees that were there.”
“What did you strangle her with?”
“Cord.”
“Cord?”
Softly, like he was embarrassed, Ted said, “An old piece of rope.”
Knowing that the rope was part of Ted’s kit, I asked, “Is this something you brought there with you?”
“Yeah. Something that was in the car,” Ted verified.
Expecting the gory details to follow, I asked, “Okay, then what happened?”
Ted changed course. His narration left out the time between one A.M. until dawn. He picked up with “Then I packed the car up. By this time, it was almost dawn. The sun was coming up. And I went through my usual routine. On this particular morning, I went through a frequent routine where I was just absolutely shocked, kind of scared to death, and horrified. I went down the road throwing everything that I’d had—the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothes—just tossing them out the window. I was in a sheer state of panic. Just absolute horror, you know. At that point in time, the consciousness of what has really happened is like you break out of a fever or something. I drove east on I-90 at some point, throwing articles out the window as I went, articles of clothing, shoes, et cetera.”
Since Ted neglected to describe when he removed her clothing, I asked, “When did you remove those?”
“What?” Ted said.
“The shoes, clothing?” I said.
“Well, after we got out of the car, initially. I skipped over some stuff there, and we’ll have to get back to it sometime, but it’s just too hard for me to talk about it right now.”
For a short time, Ted went into his denial stage. He wasn’t going to tell all just yet. He was saving the goriest of details until his execution was formally delayed. Gently, I inquired, “Do you remember what clothes she was wearing that night?”
Ted took time to gasp for air, then said, “Yup. A pair of white patent-leather clogs, blue slacks, some kind of halter top of which she had a shirt tied in a knot.” Bingo. Ted just described her clothing without the benefit of any notes. For the first time, he said something that possibly only the real killer would have known. Still, I needed more.
“Okay. And where were these deposited?”
“Along the roadside. I mean, not right along I-90. I went east to the infamous Taylor Mountain Road. What highway is that?”
“Eighteen.”
“At 18, turn right. Went south again and at some point, south of Taylor Mountain a lot of that stuff went out of the car. Down the embankments and what have you.”
“Embankments?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you have to pull over to do it or …?”
“I would stop, pull over to the side of the road. At this time, it was pretty light out, and just tossed it out. There were sometimes I would do that and sometimes I wouldn’t. At this point in time I was so frantic, so panicked, so whatever, about what had happened that I just had to get every reminder of that incident out of the car as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to take it home, didn’t want it to be around,” Ted lamented. That part of Ted’s modus operandi bordered on the disorganized edge of his personality. By his careless dumping of Hawkins’s clothing and the implements of his murder, Ted was providing evidence that might bring him dangerously close to getting caught, and he knew it. The only problem was that no police officer was close by to observe him in action. Suddenly, Ted was not the clever and charming killer—he was showing his weaknesses. During the hours after his murders he was extremely vulnerable to detection. Possibly, other killers like Ted were equally vulnerable to capture during that time period.
“Did you throw away some of your own stuff?” I said in disbelief.
“Oh, sure. I threw away the briefcase and the crutches, all that stuff. And the crowbar, everything. The handcuffs, everything. I’d get mad at myself a few weeks later because I’d have to go out and buy another pair. I mean, it’s not comical but that’s what would happen,” a smiling Ted admitted.
A flashback of the Issaquah crime scene began scrolling across my memory. I remembered one ESAR searcher finding an old rusty tire iron, and several people suggested that we just leave it. Not me—something told me to take it. There was no rational excuse for that tire iron being found in the woods along the Issaquah hillside. Certainly, no one would have been changing a tire out there. But murderous Ted Bundy had a reason to use it at that location.
Under the strain of the moment, Ted was beginning to become weary of talking without some positive support. Even he knew he could talk all day, but who would believe him? He needed to provide details that only the killer and the police would know. With that in mind, I posed a question to him. “Now that you’ve had a while to think about Georgann Hawkins, is there something you can tell me about her that probably only you know and we know?”
“Well …”
“I mean, the Spanish test is pretty darn good, if you ask me,” I admitted.
“That’s what she said, unless she was hallucinating. She said everybody called her George. Or how about that she used a safety pin to pin her blue slacks because apparently they were a bit too big.”
Silently, I relished what he had just said. The safety-pin information was absolute confirmation. I tried not to let on what I knew. Aha.
“Or, that’s about all I know. I’m sure there are bits and pieces that will come back to me, but there wasn’t a lot, obviously, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. But that’s what comes to mind.” Ted sighed as though there were no more convincing details he could supply.
“Okay, how about the other two sets of remains in that area?” I asked, forgetting that Ted refused to talk about the Ott and Naslund murders. There was a long silence. I could see that Ted was pondering whether to continue or deviate from his preplanned strategy. The longer the silence, the more I knew I had to ask him anoth
er question about Hawkins, so I could keep him talking. Grasping at anything, I said, “Oh, one other thing.”
“Hmmm,” Ted said as though it was about time I came up with a meaningful question.
Tapping on my clipboard with my pen and pointing to the word sever, I asked, “Oh, one other thing about Georgann Hawkins. When did that happen?”
“When?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, May of …” Ted stammered.
“I know when she disappeared,” I said quickly. “On June twelfth.”
“Oh. June?” Ted chuckled. It seemed he was confused. He had murdered Roberta Parks and Brenda Ball in May of 1974, so the facts of another murder in June must have just run together in his mind with the other two. Ted frequently mixed the facts of his murders. After 15 years and so many victims, it was no wonder.
“The severing, when did that happen?” I continued.
“Oh, oh, oh, oh, that. Oh, excuse me. I was thinking of May, see? Ah, my memory. Oh, let’s see. I’d say about three days later,” Ted stated, opening his eyes and looking at me as if to see if I was believing his bullshit.
“Three days later?” I responded in astonishment. I felt Ted wasn’t telling the whole truth. He didn’t want to tell me that he removed her head the first day and took it home with him, as I suspected from the skulls without bodies I found on Taylor Mountain. I anticipated that he would come up with some feeble excuse why he removed it “three days later.”
“Had you gone back there before that time?” I asked, trying to get him to explain his actions.
“Uh huh. The next day,” Ted declared.
“The next day. What did you do the next day?” I asked sarcastically, knowing he wouldn’t tell me about his necrophilic activities now.
Unconvincingly, Ted stammered, “Just went back to check out the site, make sure nothing had been left there. See, you know, the feeling is, I reached the point and half expected that she might not even be there. That somehow, I hadn’t even killed her, if you will.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 47