I told him that with this kind of gamesmanship, the public and the government officials deciding Bundy’s fate would only think that this new found strategy was just another one of his insincere ploys. I pushed him on this, and Bundy agreed to speak with Fisher and Lindvall. As I passed Fisher on his way into the interview area, I said to him, “Don’t be swayed by any of Ted’s tears. They are all fake.”
That was what preceded Mike Fisher and Matt Lindvall’s setting up of the tape-recording device to pick up what would be Bundy’s Colorado confessions.
“It would have been on the east side of town on the eastern end of the main downtown shopping area,” Bundy began, explaining where he met Vail, Colorado, victim Julie Cunningham. “There was, I think, there was streets, which are pedestrian streets mainly. And around that core mainly, and around that core is a loop of some sort. And it’s on the eastern loop of that by a bridge.”
He contacted her using the same ruse he’d used in the Georgann Hawkins disappearance. “I was again using a pair of crutches and a boot bag, a boot tree, and she offered to help me with it, and we walked from that location to the parking lot, which was maybe a distance of one-half to three-quarters of a mile. It was after dark, early evening. We had to climb, actually, to the location where the car was parked, had to climb a rather steep snowbank and descend down into the parking lot where the car was.”
At the car, Bundy also did what he had done countless times before, particularly when he abducted Georgann Hawkins from Fraternity Row at the University of Washington on June 11, 1974.
“We just walked right along,” he told Detective Matt Lindvall, until they got to his VW Beetle, at which point, using a metal crowbar, “I knocked her unconscious.” He had secreted the crowbar by the rear of the car, alongside and resting against the engine. He snatched it up when Julie reached the car and used a single blow to the back of her head to knock her out. She went down immediately, he told Lindvall. Then he handcuffed her while she was on the ground, lifted her into the VW—alongside him on the floor of his car, from which he’d removed the passenger seat—and drove out of Vail.
“We drove,” he said. “I drove, got on the highway, freeway, I don’t know if it’s a freeway, it was dark, quite frankly, and you know I hadn’t traveled that area a lot, so I can’t say what the roads were exactly like as everything was pretty much a blur. I was, uh, impaired. The fact is that I think I was intoxicated. I’m pretty sure I was pretty well intoxicated at the time and then under these circumstances, there’s a high degree of stress that kind of distorts my memory somewhat.”
Bundy was unsure about how much time he spent driving with Julie beside him or exactly how far he drove that night as he fled the scene of his assault. “It’s hard to explain at this point in time. Prior to an incident like this for me things can be pretty clear. Once it gets rolling, everything starts becoming kind of a high-pitched kind of blur. You lose track of time, so it’s how far, how long, I don’t remember. I do remember, all I remember, is how bright the lights were in the rearview mirror, and all of a sudden we were in or near Glenwood Springs.”
At some point, also like Georgann Hawkins, Bundy’s victim started to come to. But unlike Georgann, who remained disoriented throughout and believed that Bundy was her Spanish tutor, Julie tried to engage her assailant and captor in conversation.
“She began talking,” Bundy said. “I remember conversation, but I have a hard time coming up with exact words…. She was just asking who I was and all. You know, where I was from. That kind of thing.”
On they drove, into the night and toward some spot in the woods where Bundy, unsure of where he was and not knowing the area as well as he did Issaquah and Taylor Mountain, was looking for a spot to dump his still-living victim. “It’s dark, but it’s not overcast. There’s stars in the sky, I think, even at this point. I mean there’s not much traffic on the road. It’s gotten quite a bit later. I’ve lost track of time. I’m not thinking clearly, and that’s an understatement. I’m looking for a side road of some sort off the main highway. I’m confused about where I am, really.”
Disoriented and paying more attention to his victim than to where he was going, Bundy described a level of panic and frenzy that was driving him to unload his victim somewhere, anywhere, and then head out of the area. Again, much like his murder of Georgann Hawkins, Bundy was desperate to get away from his victim. “I was driving and yet my ability to perceive surroundings was somewhat limited. I was paying attention to what was going on inside the car and was still under the influence. It was kind of like I was in a panic, frightened state, not knowing where I was. Now I was looking, after I got through that populated area, I was looking for another turnoff, a side road, a dirt road, or something. And it just didn’t seem to be anything, and I was also getting concerned about houses in the area ’cause I knew it was getting late and I didn’t want to turn into somebody’s driveway.”
After a few minutes, however, he found a spot. “It couldn’t have been that long, we’re talking minutes probably, I found a side road, a dirt road, and turned off onto it and drove maybe a quarter-mile off the road to the right. And I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what was around me. It was pitch-black. It was very disorienting under ordinary circumstances. I mean it was very disorienting for me in particular, so I didn’t know where I was and I was somewhere.” Then he stopped the car. Julie had completely regained consciousness by now as she lay beside him in his VW.
Asked what happened next after he stopped the car at the spot, Bundy said, struggling to answer because of what he was obviously trying to hide, “See if I can work it this way. At some point, she’d been asking me to loosen the handcuffs. And I did so. I got out of the car and tried to figure out where things were. Walked from the car and apparently she’d slipped out of the handcuffs and began to exit the car. Of course, she didn’t know, obviously, she didn’t know any more where we were than I did, maybe less so. And I couldn’t, even now or then, assess what injuries she had. But I imagine that she wasn’t entirely fully physically able, I mean, after being knocked unconscious. But anyway, I noticed her opening the door and getting out of the car. And trying to put it, everything becomes such a blur for not completely … I’d mislead you to say I’d blacked out or anything. All I remember is basically, clearly, I can tell you, it’s a struggle and knocking her unconscious again.”
Bundy explained that he had had the crowbar right inside the door of the car and “probably sometime during the course of the struggle I got ahold of it.” He hit her with the crowbar and she fell backward, half in and half out of the car. She survived the blow, Bundy believed, and then he reached back inside the car for the murder weapon.
“I had some links of cord in the car, among other things, obviously. At that time I was thoroughly panicked and in, ah, it’s hard to say, it’s hard to describe. I won’t say. It’s just that the sense of urgency, sense of panic, urgency, being in a hurry to get it over with and get away from there. All that happening at once and more, and I used a link of that cord, a length of that cord was used to strangle her.”
She was lying on the ground at this point; Bundy was not sure whether she was faceup or facedown. And years after that night, when he was on death row facing his interrogators from Colorado, he was not able to describe fully the sequence of events that followed. “I know some of what took place,” he said. “All I can tell you, of course, that’s all I can tell you. And I’m having a hard time even articulating what I remember. Well, I, just to be able to find the words, I’m going to want you to note this in your mind or whatever so we can come back to it, ’cause, I think in the context of everything that’s happened it’s important. And I’m not denying it in the sense that I’m trying to forget it and tell you that nothing happened. I mean I could tell you I dragged her up into the woods and left it there, but that’s not what happened. But I’m having a hard time talking about it. Basically, what ended up happening was I carried her up into some wooded a
rea. It’s hard to describe again because of the darkness at the time. It was hard to describe what kind of area it was except there were trees of some sort. And I left. Just like that.”
Bundy removed all of his victim’s clothes, her suede coat, her boots, her jewelry, and all her other possessions and left her on the ground amid the wooded area. He told police that, aside from hitting her twice with the metal bar and strangling her with the cord, she was not injured in any other way while she was still alive.
“How about after she died?” Detective Lindvall asked.
“We didn’t get into that” was Bundy’s only answer, but he said that he had a better memory of where he left her because he returned to the dump site six to eight weeks later. Bundy said he sped away from the dump site that night with all of her clothing and possessions in his car. He deposited her clothing in a Goodwill container in Salt Lake City and then, weeks later, returned to the body he’d left in the open air.
Because it had been dark when Bundy dropped Julie Cunningham’s body out in the open, he didn’t easily remember the place when he returned. “Even when I saw it, I didn’t recognize it. But I was matter-of-fact. I’d gone to a half a dozen different places before I found that one. So that looks like it. But seeing it in the day-time was just totally different. I was trying to recreate what it looked like at night. But after the better part of a half a day and getting out of my car a half a dozen times, I did locate what seemed to appear to be the spot. And parked my car, left my car down the road off a turnoff area, off a paved roadway, walked across the road and up, it was up the side of this hillside. I mean up the hillside, and this is some scrub trees at the base of a rock, a rocky area, a rocky cliff some fifty, thirty-three to fifty feet high. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. And below that little rocky ridge in this little clump of scrub trees was the young woman’s body, Julie’s body.
“She was on her back, faceup. But the dry weather and all, it sort of, I don’t know what the term would be, ‘mummified’ her remains. Anyway, I’d gone back to bury her, which is why I had a shovel, a small shovel. And which is what I did.”
He buried her two to three feet down in the soft soil, on her back, arms extended along her sides to her feet, and covered the burial site with heavy rocks and tree branches that he dragged over. He did it, he said, to prevent any animals from getting to it. And it took him about forty-five minutes to complete the burial.
But Matt Lindvall still wasn’t happy with the story of what happened between Bundy and his victim the first night at the burial site. It was difficult to talk about, Bundy said, but Lindvall pressed him until Bundy tried to explain, just as he once tried to explain to me, what it was like to live within a camouflage that you’re too afraid to release, even at the point of your own execution when there’s nothing more to be gained. What had Bundy done with his victim at the dump site after he had killed her? Now, in front of Lindvall, he struggled for an answer. But he had explained to me years earlier that there are some things a serial killer will do that he will never talk about, even when he believes his interviewer is not being judgmental, like a cop.
“I know you are and you’ve seen things, I’m sure,” Bundy said. “But it’s still an experience. I’m not asking for sympathy, but just that you understand that this has been something, this is the kind of memory that I’ve held so closely for so long that, um, ’course years ago I couldn’t have under any circumstances talked about it. Couldn’t have psychologically. There are many reasons. I’m not saying that’s the only reason, but the kind of identity that I’d created or was created, and I’m not talking about multiple personalities, but identity that was related to what happened to Julie Cunningham more or less thrived on a kind of secrecy that formed the identity and to give us that secrecy was a kind of … it felt like a kind of death.”
As he floated back to the memories of the night he met his victim, he told Lindvall about the actual conversation he had with her in the moments before he struck her, while they were walking to the car and she thought Bundy was just another guy she’d met up with, not a killer. “She mentioned that she had been on her way to have either dinner or drinks or both with a friend of hers, I believe a woman friend, but I’m not absolutely certain. But she said she wouldn’t, it wouldn’t matter if she was a little late, something to that effect. Also, I believe, she posted some letters. She stopped and ran over to a post office or a mailbox.
“I know there was some casual conversation,” Bundy said. “But that involved some aspects of her life, you know, not intimate, just general kind of conversation. I know it was more of that, but it’s, I can’t recall specifically right now. It’s something I could probably focus on, who knows?”
I remembered, during the visits I made to Florida to interview Bundy, how his moods seemed to change. At one point he was the center of attention, the egomaniacal wannabe lawyer who believed he could defend himself against the most heinous of charges the state had filed against him. Bundy failed at that, and when the sentence of death was pronounced, he seemed to collapse into himself. Then the long process of appeals began as Bundy worked the system to his advantage, hanging on until the end of 1988, when it became apparent that he had run out of time. Even then, when there was no more hope left and it was obvious that his own lawyers had led him astray, he tried to cobble together an ego to confront the police, who were lining up to get their scheduled days with him. But he failed at that, too, and there was nothing left of him at the end.
I always wondered about the different aspects of Bundy’s personality and how they probably manifested themselves while he was committing murders and during the periods between homicides. Bundy was never really as smart as he thought he was, or as careful. For example, he told Matt Lindvall, who had asked him about the crowbar and the ropes he kept in his car, about the group of implements discovered by the Salt Lake City cop who had stopped Bundy for driving without lights in Salt Lake City. It was that arrest that proved Bundy’s ultimate undoing because it had led to the search of his car, which recovered the telltale strand of hair wound around the stick shift, implicating him in the Utah murder of Melissa Smith.
“The items that were recovered in Salt Lake,” Lindvall asked, “or the Utah area from your automobile, were these the items that were involved in the abduction and death in Vail, the crowbar, the ropes?”
“That’s a good question,” Bundy answered. “It could well have been, but they may have been changed. I went through these fits of despair where I throw everything away. And then I have to get more stuff.”
“Did you clean your car between these situations?” Lindvall asked.
“Well, that’s an understatement,” Bundy answered. “But when the police finally in Salt Lake got hold of the car, it had a new interior in it. I mean and the thing was steam cleaned inside and out, which is why I find it almost humorous why they found so-called hairs in there because, I mean, you couldn’t have found one of my hairs in there when I got done with that thing. But anyway, yeah, the inside of that car, the carpets, the seats, the rubber mats. I just went to a junkyard, got the stuff out of Volkswagens, you know, junk Volkswagens, took out everything, replaced the seats, some of the seats, backseats, all the upholstery, that is, all the rugs, all the stuff in there. And I did it myself. Painted it.”
Matt Lindvall pressed Bundy to determine how he had managed to connect with Julie Cunningham on the night he killed her. Did Bundy know Vail? Had he been surveilling it, looking for victims? Had he visited it before? Or was Julie Cunningham simply in the wrong place when Ted Bundy drove through?
“Did you plan this in Vail because it was Vail or did it just happen?” Lindvall asked.
“It was just there,” Bundy said, reiterating that he did not know Julie Cunningham, had never met her before, and only walked with her straight from the covered bridge, where he had introduced himself and asked for help to the parking lot.
Bundy had spent four hours driving and then wandering around Vail. He s
aid he got stuck in a snowbank behind an apartment complex for a couple of hours and had to dig himself out. Then he left his VW in a parking lot and wandered around on foot until it got dark. After dark, he returned to his car and got his crutches and paraphernalia, then took the crowbar out of the car and propped it up by the engine, thus setting up the trap for the next victim who would cross his path.
Even Bundy himself professed not to understand his own behavior. He’d implied as much to me during our interviews, always talking around the crime and trying to avoid as much as possible the admission that he himself had committed the homicides. You had to pin Bundy down to the facts without being judgmental, get him to open the door a little so that you could peek inside. But although he was not remorseful, he did evidence shame when he refused to talk about what he called the “hardcore” aspects to his crimes. When Matt Lindvall asked him about why he returned to the spot to bury Julie Cunningham and what else might have taken place when Bundy saw her remains still looking fresh, laid out in exactly the same spot where he’d left her, he demurred. What was there about Bundy’s returning to the spot?
“Why did you take that risk?” Lindvall asked. “Why did you decide to bury her? You hadn’t buried anybody else to that point, had you?”
“Oh, yes, I had,” Bundy said. Then he caught himself as if he’d given something away that he hadn’t meant to. But he was committed to the answer. “Yes, uh, you know, it was, well, it was….”
“Only you know everything,” Lindvall said, and wondered aloud why there had been no discoveries of any of Bundy’s buried victims. “I’m trying to think. I don’t know of any cases where that has been the situation.” But Lindvall had heard the hint of an admission that there were other Colorado victims out there, buried in unknown places that only Bundy knew about.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 51