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

by Robert Keppel; William J. Birnes; Ann Rule

  Quickly, I asked, “[Are] there any Washington cases that are like that? You mentioned Manson as a possibility—buried.”

  “Yeah. I think there may be only one, though,” Ted replied.

  “Only one that’s actually buried?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Ted.

  “You want to talk about that one?” I asked, knowing that his answer was no.

  “No,” Ted said with a sigh of relief that time was running out with me.

  “How about the location?” I continued, as though I didn’t hear him.

  “Well, all this—all this must come out and will come out. What I need is a chance to do it,” Ted began to plead.

  Confirming to Ted that if he told me where something was, I had the resources to search, I said, “We’re a hell of a lot better at searching today than we were fourteen years ago. That’s for sure. And we’ve got the auspices of the Green River task force to search in the most professional way possible, and that’s about all I can offer, if we know a location where you think we can find something.”

  “Uh huh,” Ted said, listening intently to me.

  “But to my knowledge, you know, Hawkins and Manson were the only two that disappeared who we knew were possibly associated with you. We may have had the missing-person mistake, which is entirely possible, but those are the only two. The reason I asked you if you ever buried anybody—the chances of finding remains that have been left aboveground over a long period of time are slim to none,” I said, referring to the 14-year time span since his murders.

  “That’s right. That’s exactly true,” Ted said. “Oh, nothing. Nothing. I mean, I could tell you exactly where some clothing was thrown, but you’re not going to find anything. Not after all that time. Not along I-Ninety or anywhere else.”

  Aware that Ted would become incensed that I didn’t really care about why he committed his murders, I ventured into dangerous territory with him by saying, “And from a factual standpoint—you know, the reasons why. To me, the why never caught anybody. So cops, with their mentality, think of what, where, when, and who. And so we’re kind of stuck with you wanting to explain why and maybe the occasion with William [Hagmaier] here will help that out a lot more than the one with me. But I’m not interested in the why.”

  Ted took my statement calmly, because he felt the whole world wanted to know why. He continued as though he respected my opinion. Unshaken, he said, “Well, I’m not trying to convince you, Bob, that you should be interested in the why if you’re not. I think there are a lot of people that are. I know I am. And I think a lot of people are interested in why. People constantly come up to me and they will ask me why. I mean, it baffles people. And they’re not law enforcement folks. And I don’t think you mean that the why never caught anybody, because understanding the people you’re after is sometimes ninety percent of finding them, okay? That’s what you’re trying to do with the Green River guy. And more power to you, but I think why is important to a certain degree. I’m not saying we’re going to make any tremendous breakthrough here that I’m some kind of different creature, but I think I have the ability to articulate what was going on inside me a lot better than a lot of other people in a way that maybe people can understand. But again, it may or may not benefit you to put it together into how this evolved, year by year, to the first incident, to the second, to the third, what happened before, during, after, in my own mind, what was inflaming me, what was inciting me, what was terrifying me. I mean, all those things. This is not by any means an attempt to gain sympathy. It’s simply an attempt to understand. And it would help me. It would help, most importantly, my family. It’s not worth it to me, really, to in the short run reawaken all these bad feelings and all this hurt and all this anger in a firestorm of publicity, which would hurt my family, without any kind of compensating ability to help them understand. And that’s a major consideration for me. I mean, my feeling is we do it right—I do it right—or I don’t do it, really, at all.”

  Since I had just received the Ted Bundy 101 lecture about the importance of why he did what he did, wasting more of my valuable time, I snapped back, “Okay, how is right for you, then? What do you want to do? I mean, we’ve got forty-five minutes.”

  “Well, we’ve got forty-five minutes left. We’ve got forty-five minutes left. And also, I haven’t spoken to Bill at all,” proclaimed Ted.

  Not fully comprehending the rapport Bill Hagmaier had built up with Ted and what Ted was going to cover with Bill, I responded, “Well, Bill’s got a time with you tomorrow, and I don’t.”

  Ted explained, “Okay, all right. Well, I need the opportunity to go over all the cases with you and with others who are experts in the field of serial homicide and to piece it together. The hard data, the crime scenes, the psychological stuff, everything. And we can’t do that in forty-five minutes and we can’t do that in two days, ’cause there’s more people involved than just you. There’s more obviously than you. More states, more jurisdictions. And so, we don’t have everybody scheduled right now, so for me to give them a demonstration of good faith, we only really have tomorrow and Sunday. Monday is basically just going to be for family. It could be the last day. So …”

  Feeling that Ted should rewrite his agenda, I asked, “What do you want to do with the two days that we have here? ’Cause they’re going to be asking the very same questions that I am, the other people coming in, wanting to know time and events.”

  Ted knew that the attorney general of Washington was not going to speak on his behalf to the governor of Florida. Now the real story about why Ted was stalling was about to come out. Ted explained, “I know. Sure they are. Well, let me give you an example. I won’t give you specifics right now. Well—I—a representative of the attorney general’s office in one of the states got in touch with a friend of mine. And he said, ‘Listen, we know that Bundy has a lot of things to talk about that happened in our state. We know we don’t have enough time to really get into all that before Tuesday. Give us one thing, one tangible thing and our attorney general and our governor will do what they can to convince Florida to give us time to do it right, to develop this information, to find whatever needs to be found. And they’re committed to that. And they’re not asking for everything. We just want a demonstration of good faith. One hard thing to go on.’And that’s basically my thinking at this point.”

  “So that state’s not Washington. It’s Colorado. And the hard thing is that you need to locate the bodies,” I said.

  “Well, that was the thinking, that was what came off the top there. It’s not just Colorado. It’s Utah and Idaho and other places,” said Ted, not realizing that the locations of his victims in those states were under six feet of snow, and there wasn’t time to dig for them before Tuesday. If Ted didn’t understand this, I surely wasn’t going to tell him.

  “Well, how do you want to treat the time here with me now?” I asked. “We’re not scheduled here. I’ve asked about nighttime visits. I don’t know what the policy is here,” I reminded Ted.

  It was an appropriate time for the tape on the recorder to expire, so when Ted began again, his mood had changed to the wheeler-dealer, grandiose psychopath. He sarcastically asked, “What’s the attorney general of Washington willing to do?”

  “Willing to do?” I repeated.

  “Anything? Who is the attorney general these days?” Ted asked in his swashbuckling tone.

  “Ken Eikenberry,” I responded, not knowing where Ted was going with this.

  “Good old Ken Eikenberry,” Ted said as if he were back on the committee of young Republicans being solicited for his support by one of the candidates.

  “He’s a Republican. You can imagine what he said already. He said we’re not going to stop the execution, not for any reason. So, a lot of law enforcement agencies in our state are waiting to hear back from me,” I said with a confident voice.

  “Just a second,” Ted said, looking at a guard approaching to remind Ted of the time.

 
I continued. “We’ve been discussing the fact that you’ve been focusing mainly, at least in your reactions—I mean, you went thoroughly through one particular case, fairly well.”

  “Yup,” Ted said.

  “And although there’s some extra little things that are tough for you to talk about, the reality is that once we get to talking about another one, you’re thinking more about the Colorado cases,” I vehemently protested.

  “No, I’m not,” Ted said, defending himself.

  “And what’s behind your stalling rather than dealing with me?” I responded with force.

  Protecting his backside by lying, Ted stammered, “No, I’m not. I’m telling you, I’m not, I’m not treating you—wouldn’t treat you—any differently. And I’m not holding you hostage, Bob.”

  I responded tersely, as though Ted should have begun the day in a different fashion, “It sounds like, from what you’ve explained all through the past couple hours, is that maybe we should start with yourself—way back whenever you wanted to start off life, and start talking up through it. And maybe we might get to nineteen seventy-four and seventy-five, but your main interest is in making sure that people and humanity and those who deal with this know about the reasons for this activity and what goes on, the physical things that people can pick up on when somebody’s life’s going astray. And maybe that’s probably the most important thing to society, more so than the cops.”

  “I know,” Ted said.

  “But if that sequence happens to lead through some cases as we go along through the history of your life, maybe that’s the type of atmosphere that you’d rather be in,” I offered.

  Quickly, Ted replied, “That’s the kind of atmosphere where I would be able to give it to you, at least in a verbal form like it was. Not bits and pieces. What we have been doing is taking stuff out of context. And I know you have narrow focuses. You have a narrow focus given your law enforcement perspective. And that’s important for what you do. It’s important that those questions be answered. But it’s important for me that those questions be answered in context, for any number of reasons, but perhaps the most important reason is for my own family, so that they understand. But if they’re only getting part of the story, they’re only getting the worst stuff. You know what’s going to happen if and when all this stuff goes public, if all we did was just hit the whos and the whens and the body count. It’s going to be bad enough as it is.”

  I continued, “We’re only here to represent one factor of the body count or whatever it is. You know, I personally, police, and law enforcement, we have an interest in knowing about the historical background.”

  Agreeing, Ted said, “Right.”

  I counseled Ted. “And you have talked on the other side of the wall to more cops than I have. My thinking is that the way things are confirmed with cops is just to tell the goddamn truth about the facts.”

  Moving his head back slightly, like I might come through the glass at him, he said, “That’s right.”

  “Get it over with and you know when you got it. That’s what they understand,” I said.

  “That’s the way it is,” Ted answered.

  “The manner in which these interviews are organized, it’s all cop-oriented.” I was scolding Ted for not preparing himself better.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Ted said, bowing his head.

  “One detective’s turn, somebody else’s turn, and then your time’s up. Maybe you didn’t organize this properly,” I said, showing Ted that his strategy wasn’t working as he’d hoped.

  “Good point,” Ted said.

  I really pushed Ted to the limits by suggesting that he and his advisors planned poorly because they invited Idaho authorities, who had no idea to which murders Ted was referring. So I asked, “What are you going to tell the guy from Idaho that comes in? He wasn’t even aware that there was a murder there.”

  Stuttering, Ted said, “Yeah. I don’t think—do we have that set up yet?”

  I explained, “When I called him first to tell him to come, I said, you know this might be a surprise to you, but he wants you down there. The guy from Idaho was totally unaware. You’re going to have to tell him. He doesn’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  Ted said, “Yeah. All right, we’ve got twenty minutes. We’ve accomplished something here, but I don’t feel like we’ve really joined heads on this thing. I don’t know what you want to do. I know you’ve been on this case—so to speak, the Bundy case—for a long time. I know that you must have some deep-seated feelings about it. I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but here’s what it comes down to me. I want the truth, the truth that’s going to be helpful to you, but the broader truth that has a wider application. That’s my bottom line. There’s just no way it can be done in these circumstances with this amount of time, and that’s the way it is. I’m not holding you hostage. If you don’t want to do anything with it, you’re free to walk away. If you can put your heads together with these other law enforcement people and think of any way, I’m not asking for clemency, I’m not asking to get off. I’m not asking for sympathy, but I … I draw the line. We need a period of time, sixty, ninety days, a few months, systematically going over with everybody, bottom to top, everything I can think of. Get it all down. You can use it as you see fit. But—that’s how it is. Now, if you can see a way … I know you’re limited in what you can do. You’ve got your job and your political considerations and all that. Your boss apparently has taken a position against this, but all I can tell you is when you go out and talk to those other people, you can tell them this. Yes, I’m only going to give you part of it. I’ll give you something substantial, right now, to show you that my head is in the right place. I will not put myself in a position of giving it all away and not getting the kind of result that I think is best for my people, and I think for society in general. But I don’t want to sound like I’m too altruistic here—that is a consideration—but I am concerned about my own people. Bob, they’re going to get me sooner or later. Ahhh, you don’t need to worry about that, but you’ve been after this for fifteen years. A couple months is not going to make any difference. That’s what I have to say,” Ted said, his voice gradually becoming quieter and softer. His eyes teared up, and he began to weep. Comparing notes later with two detectives, I found out that this little episode was a staged event. He did the same thing to foster sympathy and as a stall tactic with the other detectives.

  After waiting a few seconds for Ted to recover from his apparent sobbing spell, I lied. “I think essentially you’re right. As a person, okay, knowing what I know today, I’d like to keep you alive forever so we could really go over the whole thing together. That’s what I’d like to do as a person inside me.”

  “Yeah,” Ted said, encouraged.

  “The reality is that I’m a cop, a professional. I don’t get upset because somebody didn’t get the death penalty and should have,” I obligingly told Ted.

  “Yup,” he said nervously.

  I lectured him. “I want to just understand and learn about the process of investigation. We talked about this before. The fact that you’re dead or alive makes no difference. If I got hung up on the fact that you were dead or alive, I may as well just go up in the mountains and just kill myself.”

  Struggling for the right thing to say, Ted said, “Okay, well, I’m not saying necessarily that you are, but you have got some interest in justice, I suppose, whatever your definition of that is. All I’m saying is if there is any worry on anybody’s part, what I would like to help people understand is, if it’s justice, whatever that means, they can get a lot more justice in a couple months than they can right now. And they can help a lot more people in a couple months than they’re going to help right now. And they’re not going to be doing a thing for me other than giving me a chance to tell the story. I’m repeating myself, but I’ve no one but myself to blame. I realize that.”

  “I was about ready to bring that up,” I said, rubbing it in that he h
ad run the show so far.

  Unlike in the Confessions of Job, Bundy declared, “And I take full responsibility for it. I’ve procrastinated, I’ve waited too long, and I don’t want to go into a long rationale or story about, you know, all the things that put me in a position of waiting this long. Believe me, on many occasions prior to today, I had seriously asked for people who represent me to take this approach, long before this warrant was signed, and they steadfastly opposed it and all but demanded that we stick with the conventional legal approach. And perhaps last February when I virtually begged them to go this way, maybe we wouldn’t be in the position—we wouldn’t be in the position we are today, I’m pretty sure. Yeah, I realize, Bob, I am whistling against the wind right now; the politics are pretty heavy-duty out there. And folks have made up their minds, the people in power, a lot of them. And I don’t know if this is going to work. And if it doesn’t, it’s going to be too bad. Everybody loses.”

  Somewhat stunned, I just realized why, in February 1988, Bundy had talked to me about how to interview a serial killer. What I hadn’t discerned then was that he really wanted to confess at that time. I felt he was hinky about something, but I didn’t know what it was. I kept the conversation going by saying, “You are talking about a system oriented toward the chance to kill Ted Bundy. What sound politician wouldn’t want the ax to fall right now? The governor doesn’t care anything about you. All he’s talking about is law and order. Here’s this famous murderer that he has a chance to say, ‘No, we’re not going to support.’ And, as a police investigator, I have to assume that you’re going to die Tuesday.”

  Hanging his head in shame, Ted uttered quietly, “I know.”