And Bundy confirmed it by saying, “That’s why.” He always had to be right. “Because in every case where a woman was buried, there’s no body to be found.”
“Are there any other people buried in Colorado by you?” Lindvall asked him directly.
“Well, yeah,” Bundy answered, but he was suddenly aware that he’d been walked into an admission he might not have been prepared to make. “Well, you know, but it’s not a large number. The question, yeah, well, that’s something else.”
Then, when Lindvall suggested that Bundy’s behavior had deviated from what he did normally, Bundy explained, “Well, there is, this is something that I think we can all learn from. I mean, I’m still learning about myself and about this, this, I mean even though these events are remote in time, every time I’ve had an opportunity to go over this and I’ve only gone over it in the abstract with people, I’ve always worked around the edges. I’ve never told anybody the hardcore stuff before. But I’ve gone over it in my own mind, trying to understand it. What is ordinary? There is nothing ordinary about any of this.”
Lindvall was still perplexed about why Bundy had driven from Utah to Colorado to visit and bury Julie Cunningham’s body. It was a very risky thing for him to do, and it seemed that beneath Bundy’s explanations there was still something he wasn’t revealing. The underlying question was still: Why had Bundy gone back to the body?
In the case of the Washington dump sites, Bundy said, “I went back to that scene a day later, two days later, and I don’t know how much, how familiar you are, well, about crime scenes. I mean, after a day or two, the body is relatively fresh, after, depending on the climate, animals, humidity, time of year, you name it. Depends on the decomposition cycle.”
In Julie Cunningham’s case, however, six to eight weeks after Bundy had left her in the open, “I would describe it as being mummified,” he said. “I had never seen somebody who’d been out that long who was not either eaten, I mean consumed by insects in some way. But the body was basically untouched, but, you know, obviously very different looking than someone who is either alive or just freshly killed.”
But why had Bundy gone back? He said it wasn’t particularly the condition of the body that he wanted to see. “That’s not the reason I went back. The reason I went back was twofold. Primarily, for the burial, and secondly, to check the scene to make sure that nothing had been left there.”
“Why did you choose to bury her?” Lindvall asked. “You could have just left and reduced the risk greatly.”
“My frame of mind at the time,” Bundy answered. “It just seemed, well, it just seemed like the thing to do. My motivations were twofold, but primarily to conceal.”
Lindvall reminded Bundy that he hadn’t concealed his victims’ bodies in either the Aspen murder or in Utah, which sent Bundy into an explanation of his modus operandi and how it tended to vary because “I was never an automaton. I would do things differently over time.”
Bundy reiterated that on the night of the murder, he hit Julie with the crowbar, an off-the-shelf crowbar you could get in any hardware store or Sears; and when he reached the dump site and hit her again, she was unconscious, half inside and half outside the car. He laid her on the ground, strangled her, removed her clothes, and carried her into the woods, but, “There are details I am not entirely clear about there.” He added, first, in answer to a question, that he did nothing whatsoever to the body and, next, asked whether Lindvall meant in the woods or by the car.
“I’m not really clear on that. This is something I would like to reserve until we can talk in more depth about it,” Bundy said, arguing instead that they should simply search for the body in the location where he said they’d find it and worry about events at the crime scene later. Obviously, he was concealing something: his behavior, his activity at the crime scene that first night, and the reasons he returned to the crime scene six weeks later. Even though Bundy had told me about his activities with Georgann Hawkins’s body, he was holding back with Lindvall about his activities with Julie Cunningham. He even admitted it.
So Lindvall proceeded along a different track. He referred to other cases in Colorado, cases that weren’t necessarily Vail PD’s, to create a context in which Bundy could talk about why he buried Julie and what he might have done with her body both times he was at the dump site.
“I’m gonna ask you,” Lindvall began. “You abducted a girl from Grand Junction. Did you bury her?”
Bundy said he only wanted to focus on Lindvall’s case, Julie Cunningham.
“But you know we are focusing on that. But I am verifying, and that’s the only way I can verify what you’ve told me. The only way is by verifying something like that.”
Bundy again demurred, saying that he could only verify what he was asked. He wasn’t asked to talk about cases other than the Julie Cunningham case from Vail.
“Can you tell me,” Lindvall began again, this time referring to the other Colorado cases that Bundy seemed to be alluding to, “if they’re buried or not?”
Bundy hesitated again and then finally said, “There are other buried remains in Colorado.” And, in a backdoor admission, Ted revealed that there might actually be a dump site with other bodies.
“In Colorado?” Lindvall asked.
“Right,” Bundy answered.
“And associated with that Grand Junction situation and then buried in the same place?” Lindvall continued.
“No, no. Okay, okay,” Bundy finally said. “Well, we’ll get, is there somebody out there we can call to have them stop by the …?”
But no one in Colorado law enforcement would consider it, Lindvall told him, because of the late date and the vagueness of the location. So they had to work on it together, Bundy told him. Bundy would work on it and Lindvall would work on getting maps that Bundy could use to pinpoint the locations of body dump sites for them. And they did this until Lindvall maneuvered Bundy back to Julie’s burial site, when he tried, yet again, to get Bundy to talk about his activities at the site.
“How deep was the grave?” the detective asked.
“Two to three feet, at least, maybe three.”
“What was the diameter of it?”
“Just enough for the body,” Bundy answered.
“How did you place the body?”
“On its back. Yeah, on the back.”
“Did you put the body in there whole, or was it folded?”
“No, it was laid out,” Bundy said.
“Like normal?”
“Yeah,” Bundy continued. “Like fully extended.”
“Fully extended, arms at the side? Arms above?”
“No,” Bundy corrected. “At the side.”
“Ted,” Lindvall said. “This is really important to know if the body was placed in whole.”
“Okay,” Bundy answered. “Fine, well, I’m telling you it’s all in one place. It’s all there. I mean, it was at one time. At that time.”
“And was there any damage to the body other than strangulation?”
“No,” Bundy answered. “There was, I think you’ll see from, well, when you locate it that it should all be intact.” And it would be a skeleton by now, he and Lindvall agreed, and it would have no clothing and no possessions or items from the victim.
Matt Lindvall kept on encouraging Bundy not to hold back about what had happened at Julie’s gravesite on the first night Bundy left her there. Bundy, trying to back away from answering the question, kept telling Lindvall to talk to me, presumably about what Bundy did to his victims’ corpses, but Lindvall wasn’t buying it. “I know it’s difficult. Can’t imagine too much being more difficult than that,” Lindvall said. “I don’t want you to hold back. I think you’ll feel better about yourself.”
“We’ve both covered a lot of ground today,” Bundy replied, still searching for cover as he was pressed to answer about his activities at the crime scene.
“You know,” Lindvall said. “I mean you don’t tell everything.”
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br /> “I could have told you, if I had wanted, we’re talking about being dishonest. Just, hey, this is all that happened, period.”
“But that’s not all that happened,” Lindvall said.
“And yet I didn’t bullshit you,” Bundy continued. “And yet I won’t bullshit you now. I’m just having a hard time talking about that one segment of this rather prolonged incident.”
Lindvall acknowledged what Bundy was telling him.
“And I could just say that I’ve known guys”—guys was Bundy’s term for other serial killers, particularly the ones he’d met on Florida’s death row—“who’ve just bullshitted their way through this part of it and said, oh, nothing. I’m not going to bullshit you through it. I’m telling you that’s a point we’re going to, in my case, we will talk about.” He tacitly admitted to Lindvall what Lindvall had suspected about what Bundy might have done with the body, acts performed on the body. “But not today.”
“Mike [Fisher] and I want to be able to say at a point in time in the future that you cooperated with us fully,” Lindvall said, perhaps trying to get Bundy to think of himself as a part of history, his words still resonating long after he was executed. “And that’s what you want us to be able to say. Well, that’s why I’m getting the last, should we say, roadblock out of the way and then I’m going to want to excuse myself. I want to thank you, knowing that I know everything about the situation that you know and remember.”
He reminded Bundy that there was another burial site in Colorado that he needed to cover with him as well as get as much details as possible in the Cunningham case; it would not only help Bundy, but it would add “validity to the scene of the burial.” In other words, what Bundy said about what he did would have to comport with what forensics reported after Julie’s remains were recovered from the burial site that Bundy had told Lindvall about.
“I don’t like what happened,” Bundy said at the close of the interview, referring not only generally to the crimes he had committed, but specifically to the murder of Julie Cunningham. “I mean, notwithstanding any speculation about the kind of personality that I might be. I, it’s not gratuitous for me to say that I feel horrible about it. And not that, sadly enough, won’t bring her back, but I do. And it’s not enough to say it’s an atrocity because it was. And not that anybody cares, but if it should ever occur to you to relate this to anybody, you can tell them that I get no secret joy or pleasure out of it. That my own special kind of hell and madness that I lived in ten, twenty years ago was as wrong and as terrible as it could be. And I’m sorry.”
Was Bundy being gratuitous in his final interview with the Colorado authorities or was he truly recounting what must have been the cowardly hell he walked through most of his entire life? Not only was he a chickenshit who coldcocked his victims before he carted them away and strangled them, he was a necrophile who sexually aroused himself with their remains as he spent time with them at their resting places, even as they were decomposing into skeletal shadows of what they once were.
But this interview was still not the last the world would hear from Ted Bundy.
16
Peace, ted
Theodore Robert Bundy, like George Russell, John Wayne Gacy, and other serial killers, was a public danger. There are empty bedrooms, lonely people, and broken hearts scattered from Washington to Florida as a result of his murders. Without their families’ voices screaming for investigation, some victims are easily forgotten—out of sight, out of mind. But there will be more like them in the future and we must be ready to find their killers. Examining Bundy’s carnage and understanding how he thought and acted helps us investigate and deal more effectively with people like him. I had listened to and thought about every one of Ted’s words. He never spoke hastily when reflecting upon the Riverman’s habits. Even though Ted’s analysis of the Riverman was therapeutic for him, enabling him to relive his fantasies, it also revealed to me many of his own previously unknown behaviors, and those of others like him. Ted’s reflections about the Riverman were such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive faculties that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal that was still hidden from me.
Partly through the luck of the draw and partly because I just happened to be around, I was assigned to the job of investigating the disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in 1974 from Lake Sammamish State Park. At that time, I had no idea how to investigate missing-persons cases. I now have a much better idea, and so at the end of over twenty-five years of investigative work and because Ted Bundy is dead, I can supply those missing links in the personality of Ted Bundy, which turned out to be remarkably gruesome. Detective work is of interest itself, but that interest was nothing to me compared to the string of Bundy’s murders, which gave me the greatest shock and surprise throughout my long career as a cop. Even now, after the long interval since Bundy’s execution, I find myself struggling as I think of the Bundy case, and feeling once more that sudden flood of grief, pressure, and incredulity that utterly overran my mind at times during this investigation. During the years dealing with Ted Bundy, while denying to colleagues and the media that I was doing so, I became something of a Bundy victim and a member of his coterie of investigators. Let me say to fellow police detectives and the public at large, which has shown some interest in this remarkably horrible man, that they are not to blame me for not having shared my knowledge with them before this time. I should have considered it my first duty to do so and would have told what only I knew if I had not been barred by an emphatic prohibition from Ted’s own lips.
Even though every murderer is different in nature, Bundy shared certain characteristics with other serial killers. Ted was a loner. Inside, he was extremely insecure. While striving for security, he made life miserable for the rest of us. His relationships with others were very superficial. He was a fellow who could not stick with anyone. His relatives and acquaintances may have tried very hard to have contact with him, thus feeling that they were very close to him. Many of his friends, both old and new, were starved for love and affection. They felt what Ted wanted them to feel because he was able to detect and exploit people’s needs. In a way, he made victims of all who knew him.
What added to Ted’s convincing nature was that he was intelligent, attractive, and charming—he had traits that were pleasing to most of his admirers. His reputation was that of an aspiring lawyer and a bright young man who was dutiful to family. But when Ted murmured gratitude, his words came from an empty heart. He would cast off friends without a thought, and once alienated, he could reel them back in like bloated trout. There was always something about Ted that they liked and kept coming back to. His efforts to maintain friendships were nothing more than attempts to preserve control over those very people he used for his own purposes. Ted Bundy was an almost complete sociopath who made no distinction between what he wanted and what belonged to someone else. Ted had absolutely no sense of boundaries and sought to exercise his control over anyone who crossed his path.
Because of Ted’s appearance of having a winning, good-guy bravado, his friends thought that he was the last person who would have murdered anyone. Over the years, anytime I saw news stories in which friends of a suspected killer said, “He was such a nice boy, he couldn’t have done it,” I thought of Ted and said to myself that the police had the right guy.
The Black Hole
Hervey Cleckley’s “mask of sanity” was the ultimate description of Ted Bundy as well as of the Riverman and other long-term serial killers. One of my fellow detectives best described Ted as an “empty suit.” Ted’s mask was more convincing than that of others. What lay beneath the surface was Ted’s fatally crippled personality, a dreadfully dark side, a black hole that no one could truly penetrate but that exercised control over others like a gravitational pull. Ted sucked everyone into that black hole—certainly his murder victims, people who supported him, and even the police interrogators who tried to pull information out of him. Ted perceived other kil
lers as black holes also and could talk to them because he understood them. Luckily for us, black holes like Ted have unique attributes that make them stand out to police. Ted was attracted to other black holes, and that’s why he said he could help find the Riverman by entering what he perceived to be his psyche. Ted understood how black-hole personalities think and react and thus was able to retrace their footsteps or see through their eyes.
Now and then, Ted would gravitate toward normalcy, seeking harmless contact with others. But the rare occasion out with friends was tempered by the realization that when the social hour was over, he would eventually return to his life of despair. Most of the time, Ted was alone, spending his private moments engrossed in murder, rehearsing murder, and fantasizing about murder. I never saw a man with more pain in his face. You had only to get a glimpse of his eyes to see it.
The most obvious of Ted’s characteristic behaviors was his high degree of mobility. Ted had a compulsion to travel, usually in a vehicle—prowling, hunting, cruising, and searching for victims. He became, especially when he was acting out the behaviors leading up to an abduction and murder, like the walking dead. There was no emotion except for the compulsion to possess someone else, to inflict upon her a crippling blow that would deliver her into his control. He was chilling in his single-mindedness to kill.
Ted, like other serial killers, who are all rootless creatures, had access to more than one vehicle, which allowed him to always be in transit and throw those who were searching for him off his trail. His tan Volkswagen Beetle was his primary mode of transportation for visiting his dump sites and trolling for victims. Also, he had a green pickup truck and, occasionally, drove his girlfriend’s light-blue VW. His use of different vehicles made detection difficult, since we were looking for a metallic brown VW Beetle.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 52