“I got to think about what you can give law enforcement between now and Tuesday,” I reminded him.
Ted struggled to move his lips, saying very quietly, “Uh huh.”
At this point, I decided to feed him a dose of the truth to reestablish my credibility. I said, “And if it’s pieces, it’s pieces—or nothing. I don’t know which. But I’m not going to give you any advice. I’m sure not going to tell everybody you’re a liar, that’s for sure. And if they ask me, I’m just going to tell them the truth, that you did tell me some things and that I thought you were cooperating. Time is a problem.”
Looking like a whipped puppy, Bundy repeated himself, saying, “I know.”
Leaving no other route for him to pursue, I told him, “And there’s no way I can leave here today, gather up these people, and come up with some plan of action about the interview with Ted Bundy. All I could ever expect when I heard I had two and a half hours … you know, out of fifteen years, two and a half hours is nothing.”
“Sure,” said Ted, realizing for the first time that he had made a huge mistake. He needed more time with me first to set up a strategy to establish his credibility, but it was too late.
Feeling that the interview was about to end, I said, “So one of the things that I wanted to do is at least find out the scope of your murders. You’ve helped me with that a little bit. I would like to know about the other three that we’re talking about because I really don’t have any clue about when, where, and how they occurred.”
“Let me ask you this, again. I know the position you’re in. But law enforcement in the past has been somewhat—they’ve not been shy. I remember years ago about holding conferences, getting together, and swapping ideas. The officers speculated about what is Ted Bundy really like, drawing diagrams on the wall, and coming out with statements to the press about what they think Bundy’s about. You know, law enforcement has an interest here. Society has an interest, families have an interest, et cetera. Are the politics such that it’s just not possible for you and others in a similar position to sit down this weekend—somehow sit down this weekend together with a cross section of interested parties, and try to get everybody in the same room? You know how this stuff goes. It’s a Tower of Babel right now. Everybody talking it over, through the news media, and over the telephone. Nobody even getting together to find out, well, what do we really stand to gain, what do we lose—I mean, what’s going on here. And see if a consensus of some kind can be hammered out without anybody having to stand out there alone, without Bob Keppel risking the wrath of his boss or anybody else. Or, everybody standing together and saying, ‘You know, we’re not for Ted Bundy, the son of a bitch, you know, or whatever, but we are for finding out. We think it’s not unreasonable that this will come to pass because we have received some strong indications that he’s opened up in a way he never has before.’ Do you hear what I’m saying?” Ted pleaded in his most sincere fashion.
I muttered, “Uh huh,” knowing he wasn’t finished with his point.
“There’s going to be a lot of police. Whether I call them in here or not, most of them would be here, don’t you think? A lot of them would be here, waiting in the wings. I know they have before. If you can get everybody in a room and you say, ‘This is what I know; I mean, I’m not Ted Bundy’s advocate, I’m an advocate of Washington State’s interest. I’m an advocate of Colorado’s interest. I’m an advocate of the attorney general of Florida’s interest. And this is what we think. What’s at stake? What are we looking at? Is he trying to bullshit us? Is he, you know, trying to manipulate us? Or is he serious? Will he give us what we want? And can we justify this politically by saying we’re getting this, and we’re still going to be able to execute him anyway?’ And coming up, again, with the kind of consensus that the public and the politicians respect. Because you say, ‘Well, what do politicians have to gain?’ I mean, in this law and order atmosphere. Well, part of the calling card of today’s politicians, today’s compassionate politicians, is their deep respect for families, okay? I would sound hypocritical if I were to say anything about the families of these individuals, even all the years I haven’t said anything. But the fact of the matter is they still do count. They’re still out there. They still deserve to find their people. They can find their people. I can tell them how to find their people, and it’s up to the politicians to give me a chance. And that’s the bottom line. And if they don’t give me the chance, which I will take advantage of if I am given it, they will be able to help those families they so righteously talk about all the time, and still get me. Well, it sounds to me like, you know, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Think about the predicament. Again, I know that it’s going to occur to you, and I know the accusation’s been made that I’m manipulating families, but the reality is they’re out there. They’re there. If we didn’t talk about them, they’d still be there. There are a handful, several dozen, probably, mothers, you know, you’ve seen it firsthand, and I’m sure you probably don’t like me talking about it, but I’m going to talk about it. I will tell you and your fellow law enforcement officers everything I can to locate the remains of a number of people in your state and elsewhere. And I can do that. And that can be done. There are some of these people who don’t even know that I’m involved. That is, these family members. If I’m killed, they’re doubly deprived. They don’t even get the sense of satisfaction; they executed the guy who did it to their child,” Ted said, with constant hand motions.
Ted, in a way, was preaching to the choir. But his effort to get me to hold a Ted Bundy summit was one more ploy to grandstand in his situation. Instead, he should have quietly and with humility started to tell his story. He chose instead to mess with us one more time, and I wasn’t about to participate. I responded with the idea he was still going to push his cause. “Uh huh.”
“This way they get both the knowledge, the remains of their loved ones, and that satisfaction of some justice being done,” Ted restated as though he thought all the parents and relatives had compassion for his dilemma. “That’s what it comes down to, really. I put myself in this position. Agh, but that’s where we’re at. That’s one of the places we’re at. We’re also at a juncture where you as a law enforcement officer want something. You want facts, which you’re entitled to, which you need, and I recognize that. But there’s more involved, and you know that, too. And while I don’t expect you to be a spokesman for me or for social science, let’s get down to the practicalities of what can be done. I know that you as a law enforcement person, as a human being, are interested in families. You’re interested in solving crimes, you’re interested in preventing future crimes, and what I have to say goes to a lot of that. And I don’t think I need to tell you that. But can’t we get people in the same room and talk about the stuff, rationally, instead of taking rhetorical stands in [the] news media? They’re going to be here. Think about it.”
Ted tried to use the concerns of the family members to influence me to hold his summit conference. In his most clever psychopathic posturing, Ted attempted to convince me that he really was remorseful. It’s typical of the conniving sociopath to have the resourcefulness to use remorse as a ploy to get sympathy, a feeling contrary to a psychopath’s inner motivations, but he was still able to exploit the concept with other people. When Ted bargained for his life, he was really searching for whether he had any value.
The final Ted that I saw was Ted the victim, denigrated, confused, and powerless. This kind of personality sometimes appears in the final appellate stages of high-profile death-penalty cases where the issues surrounding the case become more important than the life of the convicted killer. The individual—in this case, Ted—becomes subordinated to the needs of lawyers, ministers, publicists, and even journalists, all of whom have their own causes to promote. So it was with Ted, who lost his sense of direction amid conflicting strategies and agendas and finally admitted to his own pathological fears, surrendered his bravado, and gave up control. Ted allo
wed himself to become a public display item for the anti—death penalty movement, the antipornography movement, and all the psychologists who wanted to use him to prove their theories. He’d listened to their advice and trusted in them. But when he discovered that they weren’t interested in saving his life but in using him as an issue, he realized that his trust had been violated, and he broke.
On his own, Ted had survived by listening to his instincts. He knew when the coast was clear and he knew when to run. But in 1989, in part because he had allowed his own instincts to be influenced by others, he was without resources and without the precious time that he believed would run on forever. I saw how his strategy of playing information for time was doomed to fail because, as the U.S. Supreme Court said, “The world had had enough of Ted Bundy.” And, in an oblique way, it pained me to watch it. Even his dramatic news-release strategy—dribbling out his confessions to tantalize judges, lawyers, and investigators and buy himself months or even years while he talked about his crimes one by one—was a failure. When his people in Florida broke the news to the press that Bundy was confessing to his murders, it was perceived as a very ill-timed and desperate announcement that was just another example of Ted’s self-serving, last-minute strategies to save his life.
As a result of Ted’s prolonged method of confession, the press commentators wrote that Bundy was simply holding the families of his murder victims hostage as he bargained for his life. If the U.S. Supreme Court justices and the governor of Florida hadn’t made up their minds already about not granting Bundy a stay of execution, the withering press reaction to Bundy’s slow confessions helped them do just that. The press announcement and the national reaction seemed to convince them that Ted Bundy’s games were over.
At our final interview, Ted was a defeated man. It was then that Ted told me about his most bizarre murder. The fact that he chose to reveal the details of that murder two days before his execution convinced me that he could have told a lot more if it wasn’t for bad timing and poor choices. Ted was a dead duck, and he and his attorneys refused to embrace this reality.
The essence of Ted’s plea to be spared was his insincere attempt to benefit mankind, the altruism he never understood; he hopelessly tried to give his last four days a greater meaning for which he was desperately searching. The governor of Florida sustained his greatest fear: that he would die being ignored. No interference on my part could have saved Ted from his fate.
In Ted’s last moments he ignored the black forces that festered in his head and dealt with the geographics of his crimes. He went to his grave after giving the warden one last location where the remains of a murdered woman might be found, a symbol of his effort to maintain his significance and keep his personality from imploding.
The fragmented personality of Theodore Robert Bundy was best expressed by his own closing: Peace, ted. Bundy used the lowercase “t” as a constant reminder to himself that he was a truly insignificant creature.
17
The Arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway
On November 30, 2001, at 3 P.M., the end of his shift as a truck painter at Kenworth Trucking in Renton, Washington, Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested by detectives from the King County police in connection with the murders of Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, Cynthia Hinds, and Carol Christensen, the first victims discovered by police almost twenty years earlier in the Green River murders case. Ridgway, who had served in the navy from 1969 to 1971, had worked at Kenworth for more than thirty years and had been under scrutiny by the police since 1983, when he was contacted by Detective Fox of the Des Moines, Washington, police department in connection with the disappearance of a prostitute named Marie Malvar, whose murder he ultimately confessed to after he led police to her body and the bodies of his other victims. On November 5, 2003, Ridgway pled guilty to 48 murders in the Green River series.
Suspect Gary Leon Ridgway
On May 4, 1983, according to a King County Sheriff’s Department November 2001 affidavit sworn out by Detective Sue Peters of the major crimes unit in support of a search warrant, Gary Ridgway first came to the attention of the Green River Murders Task Force because of Marie Malvar, who disappeared on April 30, 1983, from South 216th and Pacific Highway South in King County. Malvar’s remains weren’t recovered until October 2003. Her pimp, Robert Woods, saw her get into a dark colored pickup truck at a bus stop near a 7-Eleven. After Malvar got into the truck, it traveled northbound on Pacific Highway South for approximately five blocks before pulling into a motel parking lot. After stopping for a few moments, the driver turned the truck around and headed southbound on Pacific Highway South, turning left, eastbound, onto South 216th. Woods, who was following the truck in his own car, lost sight of the truck at the intersection. He described the truck as dark with a primer spot by the passenger side wheel well. The truck did not have a canopy over the bed, and Woods described the driver as a dark-haired male in his late thirties or forties.
Woods was quoted as saying that what made him suspicious about the pickup truck that stopped for Marie Malvar was the way the driver sped up to the bus stop; most johns slowly coast by to pick up a prostitute. And then when Malvar got in, the truck sped away. That was why Woods followed it. He said that when he managed to catch up to the truck, he thought he could see Malvar struggling with the driver, but he couldn’t see much else. So when he lost the truck, he went searching the neighborhoods where he had last seen it and found it in the driveway at 21859 32nd Place South. He then contacted the Des Moines Police Department, and the police contacted Gary Ridgway because the address Woods had given them was Ridgway’s.
Ridgway was interviewed by Detective Fox of the Des Moines police; He denied any contact with Marie Malvar, but readily admitted having been arrested during the previous year on charges of offering and agreeing to engage in a sexual act for money, a sexual solicitation of prostitutes offense. Fox turned Ridgway’s name over to the Green River Task Force, and Ridgway was interviewed by task force detective Larry Gross on November 16, 1983.
Just over two months later—on February 3, 1984—Dawn White, identified as a prostitute, contacted the Green River Task Force and reported Gary Ridgway as the Green River suspect. Detective Randy Mullinax conducted a subsequent investigation as a result of the tip and discovered that Ridgway had been arrested for offering and agreeing to an act of sex in exchange for money with an undercover King County police officer on May 11, 1982. At the time of this arrest, Ridgway had been driving his 1975 maroon Dodge pickup with the canopy on and was wearing a dark plaid shirt and brown pants. Mullinax also discovered that Ridgway had been interviewed by Green River Murders Task Force detective Larry Gross in 1983 as a result of the Des Moines police contact by Detective Fox.
On April 12, 1984, Mullinax interviewed Gary Ridgway at King County Police Precinct #4, where he took a tape-recorded statement in which Ridgway admitted “dating”—a euphemism for sex in exchange for money—missing person Keli McGinness and seeing victim Kim Nelson at South 146th and Pacific Highway South by the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. Ridgway had identified both McGinness and Nelson after viewing their photographs.
Ridgway said that he met Keli McGinness in July 1983 by the Spruce Motel on Pacific Highway South. McGinness, who was alone at the time, he said, was standing by the bus stop in front of a barbershop. After making a “date,” they went to the area of Sunset Junior High School Field, at 1801 South 140th, where they began what Ridgway described as their date. However, they were interrupted by the Port of Seattle Police. After a short exchange with the police, during which McGinness provided them with an alias of Jennifer Kaufman, they returned to the Spruce Motel, where they completed the date in McGinness’s room. Subsequently, according to Port of Seattle Police records, it was confirmed that the contact Ridgway described actually occurred on February 23, 1983, at South 140th and 22nd South and that Ridgway and McGinness were in Ridgway’s 1975 Dodge pickup.
Ridgway also told Mullinax during the April 12, 1984, interview that he h
ad seen Kim Nelson near the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant at South 144th and Pacific Highway South, but that he had not spoken to her. He said that later he had talked to Nelson’s roommate, later identified by police as Paige Miley, who told him that Nelson was missing and that she thought the Green River Killer had gotten her. Miley told police that she had been with Nelson on the day Nelson disappeared and that that was the only time they had been on Pacific Highway South together. Miley also picked Ridgway out of a photomontage as the man who approached her on Pacific Highway South and made a reference to her roommate, Kim Nelson.
During the interview, Ridgway also told the police that he had dated five to ten women from Pacific Highway South and had caught venereal diseases at least three times. During this time he was driving his maroon Dodge pickup, which had a black canopy over the bed, but the truck was not operational during March, April, and May of 1983, he said, so he used his father’s 1978 brown-and-tan pickup one or two times. Ridgway explained that he dated mostly during the day and that most of the dates were “car dates,” although he said he used the Spruce, Airporter, and Ben Carol motels, and one other motel that was located at South 140th and Pacific Highway South.
Ridgway told his interviewer that he preferred dating white women and that he’d dated one girl from the Laundromat at 100th and Aurora Avenue North. That girl, who, he said, was white, took him to a motel during the day. He also mentioned having dated a hairdresser from Portland, whose first name was Kathy, and said that Kathy came to Seattle on weekends to make extra money. He only dated her one time. Ridgway did tell police that he had driven on Star Lake Road and that he was currently driving a 1977 brown Ford pickup with an eight-foot camper on it and owned a brown 1973 Plymouth Satellite four-door as well.
On May 7, 1984, Ridgway took a polygraph examination administered by Norm Matzke of the King County Police Department, who reported to Detective Mullinax that Ridgway had successfully passed the test. Based on both Detective Mullinax’s follow-up investigation through May 1984 and the results of the polygraph, Ridgway was considered to be cleared as a possible Green River suspect.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 55