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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Ted said, “Yeah. I don’t blame you.”

  “You and I have talked for two hours already, not counting the other visits I’ve had [with] you and your letters to me. But what I need to know is if I have to fight for more time. What do I have to fight about? I know the details of things that are here, but maybe some other people don’t have as much to talk about as I do. I don’t know. It depends on what they have. So I know about those eight. And you’re talking about three others. How far back in time? You got January seventy-four through July of seventy-four. Are there more within that time frame that I don’t know about in the state of Washington?”

  “Yes, there are,” Ted proclaimed. “I hear you, Bob. What I’m trying to do, for my own self, is to demonstrate that I am serious about this. You have a legitimate need to know it all. And you want, of course, to start with what is most obvious, that is, the identities, numbers, dates, and that’s important. There’s a lot more important stuff. And I’ve never spoken to anybody about this and, for me, it was an important first confession of its kind. I’m not asking for any kind of public-service awards, but the reality is that’s what it was for me.”

  Unsolved Cases

  Seeking further clarification on the extent of his murders, I said, “I guess what I need is, rather than me throwing out stuff for you to say, you know, this is what we need to talk about or not, like the August second murders in Clark County. If there’s only eleven, then that’s fine. I don’t want to guess. I’m curious about murdered girls at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, in 1971 and the two stewardesses on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.”

  Ted relented by saying, “Yeah, we can do it that way if you’d like, too. And maybe in some ways that’s easier. I can tell you what I’m not involved in, you know, if you have a list of that type in your head.”

  “There’s the gal up in Bellingham in the river, strangled in 1970,” I said, without giving her name.

  Abruptly, Ted said, “No.”

  “There’s a gal in 1971, Thurston County,” I continued.

  “No,” he blurted out.

  Ted was giving a sharp, generic no at the mention of each victim, just to avoid the subject. He was so intent on not cooperating at this point, I could have asked him if he killed Janice Ott and he would have said no. What he didn’t realize was that I wasn’t interested in whether he would say yes or no. Each question I asked contained a year in it for a reason. It was the year I was looking for, not whether he could tell me the name of the victim. I was observing his body language. What shocked me was that Ted should have asked for a name or asked for clarification of the question, like any normal person would do who was just playing a police in terrogation game.

  “Not that far back. Nothing that far back?” I carefully asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-two,” said Ted, unaware of my intent. Falling for my trap, he claimed two years prior to 1974 when he committed a murder.

  Quickly, I jumped to the Brenda Baker and Kathy Devine cases, two women I believed he murdered after 1972. I said, “Two girls in Millersylvania State Park in 1973.”

  “Yeah, I think you once showed me that. No. No, no,” he said with a smile, as if he could say no to anything in the next 45 minutes because he had already told me about the only murder he seemed prepared to discuss.

  I went immediately to possibly his first murder when I said, “There’s a little girl in Tacoma.”

  “Which one?” he inquired with an astonished look on his face.

  “Ann Marie Burr,” I stated with a straight face.

  It was time for Ted to go into an attitude of total denial. He emphatically said, “No. Absolutely not. It’s important for me. It’s important for my credibility because there’s so much question about my credibility. You know, I would like to be polygraphed, have a polygraph examination if that can be done in these kinds of things. Do something to enhance the credibility. Not just, you know, specifics—I mean, the specifics, of course, but of my overall account of these things. ’Cause I want it to be believable. I don’t want to get into a Henry Lee Lucas kind of deal. I have precious little going for me now, but what I do have is I’ve got to build some credibility.”

  Ted’s argument to convince me that he was not responsible for the Burr murder was weak. He attempted to defend his credibility by suggesting a polygraph he knew he didn’t have time to take. He also hinted that his polygraph should not be specific but test his overall account of things. It should be remembered that Ted took a polygraph in the past, and, judging by his previous explanation about the value of the polygraph, he flunked miserably. So he suggested here that he be tested about his overall account, something he thought he could beat.

  I changed the subject quickly, since I was interested in what his reaction would be to knowing that I also suspected him in the murder and assault on two stewardesses in the late 1960s. At the time, Ted was living right across the Fremont Bridge from Queen Anne Hill, one of the five hills that make up the city of Seattle. He was working at a Safeway store near an apartment house where two stewardesses lived. Both were bludgeoned, à la Chi Omega. I had examined that case carefully. Seattle detectives’ favorite suspect was the apartment owner’s son, since he committed suicide and had a newspaper article about the murder in his belongings. But as I got to know Ted better over time, Ted became a good suspect to me.

  Wanting to hear what Ted would say, I said, “Okay, now, up on Queen Anne Hill …”

  “But, yeah, I must—so, umm …” Ted said in a revealing slip, a bewildered look on his face. He wasn’t expecting me to ask about this one.

  Smiling, I said, “You don’t know anything about those?”

  Exasperated, Ted exclaimed, “No!”

  “Absolutely not,” I replied.

  Ted was shaking and confused. He had worked himself into a box, knowing all along that I didn’t believe him, and so he desperately tried to recover, stammering and doing verbal backflips. “No. No. I have no hesitation about talking about things that I have done, no hesitation about telling you about what I haven’t done, okay? So if I tell you something—I may not tell you something—I might not tell you something right now or every single detail right now, but if I tell you something, you can rely on it. And when I say, yes I did it or no I didn’t do something, that’s the way it is.”

  Now Ted was expecting me to be satisfied with his one-word answers. One-word answers to this line of questioning were too easy a way out for Ted. It allowed him to say no without an explanation. Good interrogators ask short questions that demand long answers.

  “You never lied to me—no reason,” I myself lied.

  “No. No reason to start now,” said the clever psychopath.

  Knowing I had less than 45 minutes, I decided to put a little more pressure on Ted, who perceived himself to be in total control. He wouldn’t have it any other way. I said, “I have to corroborate a lot of what you say. And you’ve already given me corroboration on one.”

  “Sure. I could give you corroboration on—Listen, I know what you’re pushing for and I don’t blame you.” Ted read me perfectly. “You sort through your litany of cases. I don’t want to get in a position of telling you, but pick one more case, other than the Issaquah—the other two Issaquah cases—that you want to know about, and we’ll talk about it. You want some corroboration and I’ll give you one more. I mean, we can talk about one more if that’s—if you feel comfortable about doing that. I don’t know.”

  Wedging him into my corner, talking about numbers, I asked, “Have we got the time frame down of when things started in Washington?”

  “Yup,” he said quickly.

  “The time frame is when?” I inquired.

  “Seventy-four,” he claimed.

  “Nineteen seventy-four?” I questioned, smiling and looking sarcastically at him as though he were lying through his teeth.

  “Right. Well, yeah, I mean the actual. There were several attempts leading up to that, in seventy-three, sevent
y-two. But no murders,” he lied, trying to avoid that fact that he had just spoken earlier about murders he committed back as far as 1972.

  “The public’s order of things and your order are obviously something different, because there’s some in here that we don’t know about that is in your order someplace. And we’re talking about one girl that lived—Karen Sparks—just a couple blocks away from where you lived. I don’t know if that’s the one you want me to talk about,” I said, attempting to entice him into talking about any murder himself.

  “Well, is that the one you want to talk about?” Ted asked.

  “Okay, ’cause the order of things are kind of like Healy, Manson, Rancourt, Ball, Hawkins, Ott, and Naslund. That’s eight [counting Sparks]. Plus Parks is nine. Are you counting her as one of your eleven?”

  “No. No. She’s not in that. See, I didn’t—that’s not one. No,” Ted exclaimed, leaving the living victim out of his count.

  “So now you’re talking about probably three others that I am not familiar with?” I asked, knowing I had him talking about three more murders he didn’t want to get into at that time.

  “Yup. Yeah,” Ted said with assurance.

  “Are they in King County jurisdiction?” I asked, attempting to narrow the scope.

  “Well, let’s see. Ummm … one is and the others aren’t. That’s the way it is. Yeah,” he said, giving the appearance that he was trying to convince himself that what he just said was the whole truth. But with Ted, there was never the whole truth.

  The weather in northern Florida wasn’t what I expected. The steady rain reminded me of Seattle, but the high winds were like a monsoon in Vietnam, better left avoided. The carpet in my Jacksonville Beach hotel room was soaked from water that had leaked through the sliding-glass door. I was staying in a hotel on the beach and had never felt the sand. Each day, I had come and gone in the dark.

  On Saturday, I awoke to the voice of one of Ted’s advisors on national television, announcing that Bundy had confessed to Bob Keppel and was totally honest and cooperating with the investigators. I’d never heard anything further from the truth. I felt like I’d been had. Bundy and Weiner had made me promise not to say anything to the media before Bundy’s Monday press conference but here was Bundy with an immediate announcement so they wouldn’t be upstaged by anyone and could do it in their own way. After that, I felt no obligation to delay speaking to the Seattle press folks, who were anxiously awaiting any news from me. Bundy and Weiner’s actions were clear evidence that Bundy and company were not going to be forthright with me.

  All day Saturday, I waited inside the prison for a chance to talk once again with Bundy. By now, pressure was being applied by Bill Hagmaier for Ted to give me more time, possibly on Sunday night.

  Last Conversation

  Sunday, January 22, 1989, would be my last talk with Ted. He had promised to speak with each state’s investigators for half an hour each, beginning at nine o’clock at night. This time we got to interview Bundy without Diana Weiner present. The only other person with Bundy was Bill Hagmaier. Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department was first and went over for about five minutes, so I interrupted.

  I wasn’t in the room one minute before Ted complained that he had heard that the Seattle papers were saying all sorts of outrageous things that he’d been telling me.

  “Really?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  Ted explained that they said that “we went over eight, nine cases and—I don’t know. I guess I should ask you flat out. You didn’t mention specific cases to anybody in the media, did you?”

  Defensively, I said, “Specific ones? No, no.”

  “I think they’re guessing,” Ted offered.

  I explained, putting more of the blame on his own people, “I told them that you confirmed what our suspicions were, and that was what Diana wanted me to do too.”

  Preferring not to argue about that, Ted said, “Well, I hear you. I was just curious. I wasn’t accusing you.”

  I explained further, “I told them also that there was one victim we talked in detail about, but I didn’t say anything about the details. After that, I contacted each of the victims’ relatives and talked to them. I told them how sincere you were, how open you were about talking of your murders, and that it was a difficult process to go through. And, you know, they wished me luck.”

  Ted realized that the blitz by the news media was his own doing. So he changed the subject and asked, “How about the one in particular, Georgann Hawkins? Is there going to be any attempt to go over that crime scene again?”

  Somehow, Ted didn’t realize his plan was shortsighted. It had escaped him that there was presently over a foot of snow on the ground at the location where he said he buried Hawkins’s head. There was no way a search could take place before his Tuesday date with the executioner. Part of Ted’s plan to save his own neck was to give details about where we might find remains, then we would conduct a search of that area, find the bones, and, presto, Ted would have proven that he was credible, telling the truth, and worthy of a stay in his execution. The very places in Utah and Colorado where he buried remains were under six feet of snow. Had his advisors discussed this with him or were they familiar only with Florida’s terrain and weather patterns, not the mountains of Washington, Colorado, and Utah?

  Wanting to refocus Ted from the Hawkins murder to Donna Manson and keep him from wasting the time remaining, I said, “The only thing that we could possibly cover that may explain some unanswered questions is the location of Donna Manson’s body, because she’s the one that’s missing. We never found any bones that we thought were hers. Plus, we’ve never found the skeletons that went with the skulls on Taylor Mountain, either. We’ve found only skull parts. On another subject, we also never found Janice Ott’s bicycle. All we found of Janice Ott was her lower jawbone. We didn’t find her skull. We found Naslund’s skull. We found what we think was Ott’s backbone. You know, those animals, they just walk around out there and do their thing.”

  “They sure do, yeah,” Ted said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the wall. The effects of his last remaining days were taking a heavy toll. He was physically drained and mentally exhausted by late Sunday night. The realization that his debriefing sessions weren’t accomplishing the goals that he set, coupled with the letdown from his grandiose euphoria over the public attention he was getting because of his confessions, was causing extreme fatigue. For the first time, I saw him in a state of absolute vulnerability. He was weak, and if we had the time, the opportunity was at hand to get the greater truth from him. But it still was his show, and no matter how hard I tried, his perception was that there just wasn’t enough time to begin the real debriefing.

  I woke Ted up with a loud request. “I’d like to know where the Taylor Mountain bodies were placed, because I’m sure if the bodies were dumped there, we would have found at least one other bone. All we found was hair, skull, skull, jawbone, jawbone, and a jawbone. We never found any other bones. Now, are those bodies buried out there someplace? Or are they someplace else where no one’s ever found their bones? Are you going to give me a hint where the rest of those bodies are?”

  Ted pleaded, “I don’t know. To be honest with you, I honestly can’t tell you.”

  “Were they dumped there?” I pressured him while he was half asleep.

  Ted explained that the reason we didn’t find anything was because the “very poor little creatures out there just take them. I don’t know why they leave the skulls the way they do—maybe it’s just because they’re so hard to break up. If the bodies aren’t there, it’s because the animals took everything. And where they took them, God only knows. They must have just chewed them up.”

  In order to keep Ted talking, I agreed with him. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Because, in fact, if they were severed or hacksawed, we would have found some vertebrae, the little piece that fits right in the skull holding the skull together. I found every one of those
on all the other cases, except these. And on the Green River cases, we find all those. So we know that the animals don’t chew those all the way up, all right? And with thirty-seven skeletons in Green River we know a lot about animal behavior, right?”

  “Oh, sure you do. Yeah, I forgot all about that,” Ted said. Any mention of the Green River cases brought only a momentary spark to Ted’s eye. At this point, Ted was exhausted, and his favorite subject, the Riverman, could not bring him around.

  So I asked a few short yet very pointed questions. “Were those heads severed, like Georgann Hawkins?”

  “Yeah,” Ted said affirmatively, with a smirk on his face.