“So I went back—oh, yeah. Removed things like the rope. I—no, no, I had already done that. Can’t remember if I found anything there or not. But I wanted to make sure. Oh, that’s what it was. Talk about details coming back. I couldn’t find one of the shoes, so I thought it was there. But it wasn’t. So I went back—this was the next day—got on my bicycle, and rode back to that little parking lot. I knew there were police all over the place by that time, but I was kind of nervous—and I’ll tell you why in a minute. ’Cause I’d left and my car had been parked there. Somebody may have seen it. Now, if something was found there, it might connect me. So I went back to that parking lot at about five o’clock in the afternoon and found both pierced earrings and the shoe, laying in the parking lot. So I surreptitiously gathered them up and rode off.”
Ted’s postoffense behavior was an effort to cover his tracks and evidence of his otherwise organized nature. His disorganized behavior immediately after the murder of Hawkins, shown in his throwing away her clothing and his implements haphazardly, frightened Ted in his lucid moments because he couldn’t deal with his own panic. This duality, this bipolarity between the panic at having touched something deep and terrible inside himself during the murder and necrophilic sex and the anal retentiveness of cleaning up every scrap of evidence at the contact and murder sites, might seem like some kind of split personality, but it wasn’t. This was almost typical of control-type serial killers who allow themselves gratification with a corpse, only to be repelled by their own behavior in the hours immediately afterward. When the waves of panic subside, they become organized again and return to remove any signs of their presence. It’s almost as though his organized self was knowingly protecting his disorganized self.
Ted believed that someone might connect Hawkins’s belongings to him if they found them in the parking lot the next day. I found it difficult to understand why Ted was afraid of that, but it was part of his modus operandi, so I pursued it. “After the police had checked that area?” I asked, not to imply that the police had done a poor canvass, but to lead Ted along on his favorite subject, criticizing police investigations.
“Well, you can tell me. I’d seen whole streams of them driving around all over the place, but they were concentrating on places like the nearby parks. I bet you they couldn’t have looked in that parking lot and missed the white patent-leather clog and two white pierced earrings—little hoops.”
“That was discovered by you the next day?” I asked in amazement.
“Yeah. Around five o’clock, six o’clock,” Ted proudly stated.
My curiosity took over. If Ted drove by Taylor Mountain in the early morning hours after he killed Hawkins, why didn’t he take her up there initially or take the same power line road off Highway 18, where he had previously dumped Healy, Ball, Rancourt, and Parks, and dispose of Hawkins or her clothing in the same previously successful manner? So I said, “Okay, excuse me. After you left the Issaquah scene that night and went toward Taylor Mountain, did you go back to Taylor Mountain, knowing what was there?”
Before Ted even answered, I experienced a sinking and incredibly horrible sensation. The chills and goose bumps formed on the back of my neck; my stomach turned while I squinted at Ted, readying myself for his answer. A warning bell had just sounded loudly in my head. I had assumed there was a certain order to his murders: abduct, kill, and dump, then abduct, kill, and dump again. And when a previous dump site was not discovered, it could be used successfully again. The theory was that he abducted Healy on January 31, killed her, and dumped her on Taylor Mountain. Then Ran-court was abducted on April 17, killed, and her remains dumped on Taylor Mountain, and so on with the remainder of the women. The site had not been discovered, so he used it again and again. I had been dead wrong. Taylor Mountain was not the original dump site for those four young women, it was only where Ted had left their heads. But you try never to make a mistake with Ted, unless it’s part of your plan, because you lose his confidence in your expertise.
Ted casually verified my realization by saying, “No. No, I wasn’t going back. I just drove by there. That’s all. It was along the highway. I didn’t even slow down. Yeah, that was really not on my mind at that time.”
Not really on his mind at that time. What a shocking statement. Taylor Mountain wasn’t on his mind as a dump site at that time because their heads were someplace else—Taylor Mountain wasn’t a dump site until much later. I would eventually learn that Ted had four heads at his rooming house, all stored together. I had realized that I had made a critically wrong assumption that all things happen in a certain predictable order. This is not the case with serial killers.
Other Murder Attempts in the U-District
Ready for something less traumatic, I asked, “Okay, so what happened in the next couple days?”
“Well, again, and this might be something you could plug into, if that’s what you want to do. The reason I was so nervous about anything like that being found in that parking lot was that no more than two weeks before, I had been using the same modus operandi in the same neighborhood. In front, now, of the same sorority house that Georgann Hawkins disappeared from, I encountered a girl going out the door and asked her to help me. I walked her all the way to that lot, eleven o’clock on a Friday night. And I was drunk, and I was just babbling on. I told her I worked in Olympia, that I lived in a rooming house. I mean, I was just horrified later on.”
“Were you drunk when you got Hawkins?” I asked, again in disbelief, this time because it seemed that his apparently frequent drunken states did not impede his ability to avoid detection.
“Yes, more or less, but yes. That was basically part of the M.O. at that time. Yeah. But I reached all the way to the car—and this would happen sometimes—and just said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it.’ I said, ‘Thank you. See you later.’ And she walked away. But after the Hawkins thing, I was just paranoid as hell that this girl would say, ‘You know, something weird happened to me a couple weeks ago. This guy came along with crutches and asked me to help him. He took me to a Volkswagen and said he worked in Olympia and lived here in the university district.’ How many people could that apply to? So, there you are.”
It was hard to listen to Ted describe incriminating evidence that would have led us to him if we had seen the case for what it was from the very start. Unfortunately, I knew this woman had not come forward, or at least if she did come forward, the facts as Ted recounted were not in police reports. I now realized in retrospect that all the leads about a guy on crutches in the U-district seeking help for changing a tire, which were received after the Lake Sammamish murders, were probably Ted Bundy practicing his routines. What fools we were! The evidence was there all the time. What had we missed on Green River? The answers were all there, locked up in small memories in Ted’s brain, while time was running out on both of us.
“Okay, how about getting back to—going back to that scene?” I asked, wondering if he would actually get into his aberrant sexual perversions.
“Okay. Well, I went back the next day, and I went back about three days later to do that business we talked about earlier and went up the roadway with it.” Ted was talking about the removal of Georgann Hawkins’s head, which we had talked about earlier. “It was sort of a crude attempt to disguise the identity—or avoid, I mean—the identification of the remains as such. I don’t know. In retrospect, it sounds pretty incoherent, but that’s what was motivating it at the time. And then maybe about a week to two weeks later, I went back for a third time. Yeah.”
“What for?” I asked. Weren’t the other times enough?
“Again, just to see what was going on. You know, there’s a lot of psychological stuff going on here that we just don’t have time for. I mean, we could spend days explaining it. I mean, there is an aspect here of, you know, the possessiveness I’m sure you’re familiar with, the aftereffects. This is why I’m so keen on the staking out crime scenes of this type afterwards, fascination with death, necrophilia
, all that. But, of course, you know, in June after a week, what with all the local wildlife, that there’s not much left.”
Necrophilia
The “big bang” was about to occur. Ted hinted all over the place. I didn’t believe for a minute that he went back after a couple days to bury Hawkins’s skull. Her head was someplace else. I knew the area he described had been scoured thoroughly by our searchers. We had dug in that area deeper than he could ever get with his entrenching tool. Her head wasn’t there, just as Janice Ott’s head wasn’t there. I didn’t know why yet, but I was to get a hint in a couple of days. He was returning to the Issaquah hillside to satisfy his perverted sexual fantasies. He was warped, but he wanted time to explain it. That’s why he had conceived his shortsighted plan to save his neck. Give the authorities just enough to get them to speak in his behalf, so the governor of Florida would stay his execution. Play us along with tidbits of information, bread crumbs along the path to the final truth, which would be so tempting that of course the state of Florida would stay his execution to allow him to tell his whole story. But it was also a form of blackmail that would never end because there would always be other jurisdictions that had unsolved cases with which Bundy could draw out his life. Hadn’t Henry Lee Lucas strung along the state of Texas and other jurisdictions in much the same way? And in the end it was all just a pack of lies to keep him from going under the executioner’s needle. That’s why I knew that Bundy’s plan wouldn’t work. He was fucking with all of us, just like he had done to his victims. I was on the edge. Should I blow his cover now and ruin the chance of my fellow detectives getting information from him, or should I just sit and kiss the little zit’s ass and listen to his story? Then I suddenly realized that he needed me to verify that he was somewhat truthful, telling us where we might find remains, while at the same time giving us part of the story. No matter what I asked, I couldn’t alienate him. Both he and the other detectives needed me to act civilly.
With the resolve that I had some of what I came for, I bluntly asked, “Were you going back to that scene to commit sex acts?”
Ted, stuttering, muttered, “Well, I don’t want to talk about that right now. We will talk about it someday, but I don’t have—we don’t—not really—have enough to give you the background on that. I want us to work into that.”
Now, it was pretty clear what Ted did when he returned to those scenes and what the Riverman might be doing when he returned. We might catch the Riverman, literally, with his pants down, if we staked out a fresh site at Ted’s recommendation.
Needing to get onto a different issue to keep him talking about his murders, I quickly said, “Okay, all right. Now, did you always carry the little hacksaw with you?”
Apparently willing to go on, Ted replied, “Oh, it was in the tool kit. I had a metal tool kit in the front trunk, such as it is, in the Volkswagen. It had everything in there. I mean, you know, all the tools you need to repair Volkswagens, just like any tool kit, metric stuff.”
“Uh huh?” I said. Somehow Ted’s tool kit was much different than the rest of ours. Whose car tool kit contains a hacksaw, a crowbar, a shovel, rope, handcuffs, plastic bags, strips of a bedsheet, a pantyhose mask, and a knit ski mask, such as Ted’s did?
“And in there was a hacksaw. And also a little shovel, little army shovel,” Ted continued as though everyone carried such items in their cars.
“Did you ever bury anybody?” I asked, knowing what his answer would be.
“Oh, yes. Yeah, in, you might say, my more coherent—not coherent—when I was really going all out and took my time, yeah, I did. I mean, it’s quite clear. I mean, there’s no question—almost without question, those who have been found were not, and those who haven’t been found were buried.”
“Uh huh,” I said while thinking about all those who were missing, with no trace of their remains.
“It’s that simple,” he proclaimed.
“How many people do you figure are buried in the state of Washington?” I asked.
“A couple. Just a couple.”
“Do you know who?” I prodded.
Avoiding a clear answer, Ted stammered, “Well, I remember the name of—you know, I can’t remember names, most of the names I don’t remember. A couple, like the one we were just talking about, the name comes back to me. But—let me think. One, two—that’s all. Two. Yeah. I don’t remember the name on the other one. I included in the two Hawkins, only because it was a partial kind of thing. Plus one other.”
Wanting to see how far I could push, I asked, “Who was the other one?”
Other Victims
Ted wasn’t prepared to talk during this session about Donna Manson, a woman who had been reported missing from Evergreen State College campus, a murder we had tied to him as well.
“I don’t remember the name and I don’t want to—I mean, you know, I don’t want to guess,” Ted lied.
“Is it one during that period of time, from say January through—”
“This would have been in early seventy-four,” Ted said eagerly, surprising me with his interruption.
“Early seventy-four? A girl from Olympia? How about the Evergreen College girl?” I suggested.
Ted was smirking. There seemed to be some dark secret about Manson that Ted wanted to save for later.
Laughing surely to himself, Ted said, “Oh, yeah. That’s right, yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Where is she?” I asked, sensing that Ted would deflect any of my advances about Manson.
“Well, she’s up in the mountains,” he said, generalizing.
“What mountains?” I questioned.
“Up in the Cascades, you know.”
No, I didn’t know, so I pressed on. “And she’s actually buried in the ground?”
Ted approached his response slowly and said, “Well—how did that work? This is something that happened piece by piece, strange as this may sound. I’m trying to remember exactly where it all happened. That’s something we’re going to have to talk about in the future. I don’t know that I was ever more incoherent. And I mean, that night is like some kind of dream, you know, very blurry area, nightmarish, and I have trouble piecing it together. But it’s going to take me a while to work on that one.”
“Okay.”
Ted continued, “As I sometimes had a bottle of wine in the car and was just, among other things, extremely drunk.”
After spending about an hour and a half with Ted, I was eager to hear about the extent of his murders in Washington State. If I knew the numbers he was willing to talk about over the next few days, it would be a barometer of what I might get from him. I knew that in the beginning of our conversation he didn’t want to talk numbers. So I asked cautiously, “Just so I can get an idea about timing as far as in the next hour, can we get some sort of feeling, if you can’t remember names, maybe timing or events or something that will give me an idea of how many people we need to talk about, so I can get an idea of the scope?”
Obligingly, Ted said, “Uh huh. Let’s see. Yeah. In Washington?”
“Right.”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got the one from Oregon up there, and that’s our case too.”
“Well, let’s see. I think it’s—I think it’ll be eleven.”
Shocked at Ted’s answer, I wanted clarification. “Eleven altogether?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, okay. Which areas? Which jurisdictions or which disappearance sites or—do you remember any names of anybody?” I muttered.
“Well, sure. I remember a lot of it,” Ted reassured me.
“Give me an idea of which ones you’re talking about.”
There was a long silence. Ted had worked himself into a corner and needed desperately to get out. The original number of Ted cases known to law enforcement authorities was 8, not 11 as Ted had just announced. That, just for openers, was a shocker that put Ted on the hook for three more homicides than the ones we k
new about. However, since he’d said that the additional three were pre-1974, he held out the possibility that there were more crimes to which he could confess. But I suspected he wanted to save those confessions to pre-1974 homicides until after his execution was delayed, so as to give him more bargaining power. Why play all your cards until you have to? It was the pre-1974 time period he wanted to stay away from at this debriefing. But by announcing that he had 11 cases within the scope of his confessions, he’d just opened the door to the three more cases. Now he started to talk himself out of trouble.
He nervously continued, “Well, I could—give you probably most of the names, or some names and some locations.”
“All right.” I eagerly awaited the information.
Ted regained his composure and reverted to his mission. He said, “Okay, but this is basically what I want to avoid, putting myself into a position where we more or less run through the standard litany of victims and without the depth of information and the precedent and antecedent stuff, what happened before, during, and after, what was going on in my mind. And that’s why I feel that I’d like to clothe these names in some kind of reality, even though it be a distorted reality. And I’m worried that—I won’t bullshit you—I’m worried that I—that we just run through it like this, and I can understand your curiosity, believe me, but we run through it like this, and we leave ourselves open to the temptation to leave it at that.”
“Right. One of the things that I’m concerned about is time,” I said, stroking his ego.
“I know.”
“And you haven’t finished everything about Georgann Hawkins, either,” I reminded him.
“No.”
“So we’ve got ten more to go,” I announced.
“That’s right,” Ted said.
Playing for Time
I realized that from this point on Ted was finished confessing to any more of his murders at our Friday meeting. The cat was partially out of the bag—only partially. In looking over Ted’s handwritten itinerary for the next few days, I saw no more time devoted to me, which seemed unreasonable since I had the highest number of murders to cover with him. But technically, it was his show. So, in the time remaining, I decided to put some pressure on him and force him to focus on the scope of his murders. He was trying to handle his last days like some kind of high-level summit negotiation, but he had planned it poorly. I treaded carefully, explaining, “I’m thinking about areas, time, and whether I need to stay with the rest of that Issaquah site. Or whether I need to move on to a different murder I don’t even know about. I might be able to corroborate facts in the next couple of days. I know the basic six. Now I know about seven, one that was missing that we didn’t know was there. The missing Donna Manson—the girl from Thurston County—we haven’t covered where she is. That’s all I know about so far from you. Now I need to know what other murders you’re talking about. Are there murders in other jurisdictions in Washington? I want to get some perspective because, eventually, I’d like to get as many details on each one that I can. I don’t want to go for two hours and say, ‘Well, I have no idea what the scope is.’ ’Cause if anybody asks me what the scope is,” I said, now deliberately fucking with the very thing Ted was most worried about, “somebody of importance—like the governor of Florida—I’d like to know what it is.”
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 48