The Riverman Is Not an Oddball
Bundy tried to adopt the camouflage of normalcy in every aspect of his dealing with people, so he assumed that his Riverman would have done the same. Bundy practiced his approach to women and was confident enough of his ability to modify his demeanor that even when he was rebuffed at Lake Sammamish, he was able to bounce back and pick up Janice Ott after Mary Osmer had slipped out of his grasp. His approach was so confident that he didn’t appear needy or strange at all. After Mary Osmer had declined to go with him because he hadn’t told her that the sailboat he needed to load onto his car was at his parents’ house, Bundy modified his approach to Janice Ott thirty minutes later, explaining that he needed help loading a sailboat that was at his parents’ house. Ott agreed and became one of his victims. Osmer declined to go with him and lived to tell the police about it.
So it was with almost all of the witnesses who told their stories to the Green River Murders Task Force. Although Dawn White described the stranger she encountered as weird, he wasn’t enough of an oddball to turn her off. In fact, she felt so guilty about having to break their date that she called the man to set up another date.
Marcia Winslow said that although she first met her future husband when he stopped her in a “police-like” way, she always thought of him as nice, even though she described an incident to police in which Ridgway had placed her in a police-type choke hold and applied pressure. But, she said, she attributed her husband’s behavior in that particular incident, to their having had too much to drink at a party.
The Riverman Introduces Himself by Asking Victims About Their Friends
As a method of introduction, Bundy predicted, his Riverman might ask a potential victim about one of her friends, a person the Riverman knew, or even one of his own victims. It would be a way to start a conversation, to break the ice, particularly at a time when news might have been spreading within the victim pool about missing women.
In her statement to the task force, Paige Miley explained that one of the elements of her conversation with the stranger along Pacific Highway South was his mention of her friend Kim Nelson, who was a missing person. Miley was in the process, she said, of arranging a date with this stranger when his mention of Kim Nelson, with whom she had only turned tricks once, made her nervous. Nelson had disappeared on the one and only day she and Miley had been out together, and Miley became suspicious.
If, in fact, Bundy’s prediction was accurate about his Riverman’s using friends’ names to further a conversation, in this one instance it turned out to be the factor that caused Paige Miley to report to the task force, even though she admitted that both she and Kim Nelson had been out soliciting dates.
The Riverman Lived Alone
Bundy believed that because of the time that had elapsed between the disappearance of the victims and the recovery of their bodies, his Riverman didn’t need to dispose of his victims immediately. Accordingly, Bundy believed, his Riverman lived alone.
Rose Hahn, a tenant who rented Gary Ridgway’s house, gave a statement to Green River Murders Task Force detectives in which she described how her landlord shared the kitchen and bathroom facilities in the main house with them, but lived alone in the garage. “While they lived in the house,” the affidavit states, referring to Rose Hahn and her husband, “Ridgway lived in the garage that had been converted into living quarters…. She said Ridgway rarely ate at home, if ever. Ridgway shared the kitchen and bathroom with her family so she had first-hand knowledge of his use of these facilities. Hahn said Ridgway was usually not at home in the evenings, and that if he was, he stayed in his room or outside.”
Marcia Winslow’s statement contained in the Green River Murders Task Force affidavit says, “Ridgway informed Marcia that the garage area was his private place and for her to stay away from it…. Ridgway would often be gone during the evenings for long periods of time, often returning to the house dirty or wet. He explained his condition by saying his vehicle broke down while he was out driving. Marcia said that during the latter years of their marriage, Ridgway began coming home later and later without any logical explanation.”
Ridgway told police that when he lived alone, he brought victims back to his house, where he killed them.
Riverman’s Working Hours
Bundy believed that his Riverman had a stable job with a regular Monday-to-Friday work schedule. In fact, the affidavit states that for thirty years Gary Ridgway held a job as a painter at Kenworth Trucking, and that he had a Monday-to-Friday schedule, working a shift that began at 3:40 P.M. and lasted until 12:10 A.M. On those days when Green River victims disappeared, Ridgway was off work.
The Riverman’s Religious Conversion
Something changed in the Riverman’s life, Bundy said. He noted the patterns of body recovery and hypothesized that his Riverman might have gone through significant life changes that altered the way he seemed to operate. He hypothesized that the Riverman might have gotten “filled with the Holy Spirit.”
In her interview with detectives that appears in the King County affidavit, Marcia Winslow says that after she married Ridgway and their son, Matthew, was born, “they began attending a Southern Baptist Church. She said Ridgway became ‘fanatical’ about religion. They later started going to a Pentecostal church, and Ridgway made the transition to his new church. Marcia said they had participated in going door to door, and that Ridgway would get angry when people would close their doors on them…. Marcia remembered that Ridgway would sit at night watching TV with an open Bible in his lap. Marcia also said that Ridgway would frequently cry during or after the church service.” Perhaps he tried to refocus his anger or use religion to exorcise it, but Bundy was correct about Ridgway’s religious conversion.
One of Bundy’s most accurate observations was that his Riverman did not kill thirty-six-year-old Amina Agisheff. The Task Force had considered her one of the Green River Killer’s victims for years, but Bundy told me that he was very skeptical about that. Ted believed that her age—she was twenty years older than some of Ridgway’s younger victims—should have clued the Task Force that she did not fit the Riverman’s typical victim profile. He was after teenagers and younger women. And during Ridgway’s interviews with detectives after he was arrested, he not only refused to admit to having killed Agisheff, he most vociferously denied it. He wouldn’t cop to it, he said, “Because I have pride in … what I do. I don’t wanna take it from anybody else.”
Given the requirements of Ridgway’s plea bargain deal in which his full, complete, and honest confessions were the only way he could save himself from the death penalty, one would think that he would seek to err on the side of caution and plead out to every crime the prosecutors could possibly throw at him. And indeed, Ridgway mentioned crimes that the police didn’t even know about. So why would he deny a crime that detectives put onto the Green River list? Again, Bundy seemed to have pointed to a reason without realizing that he was describing something about serial killers in general.
When Bundy asked me to believe, really believe, that some murders were okay, and to treat his statement in a nonjudgmental way, he was also telling me to look beyond the immediacy of the crime into what the victim might have meant to the killer. Thus, he was predicting something that Ridgway was hinting at in his denial of the Agisheff murder. Ridgway needed to have sex with his victims, and, as he told police, he sometimes returned to their burial sites to have sex with their corpses. He was graphic in his descriptions of his sexual murders, explaining why he liked younger victims, why they were easier to control and manipulate, why he liked to hear them beg for their lives, and why he liked to wrap his legs around them while he was choking them to death. These teenage victims were his unwilling sexual partners. Thus, it is my guess, and probably Bundy’s experience, that Agisheff was not just outside of Ridgway’s victim pool, she was repellant to him because of her age. Why?
Marcia Winslow Ridgway’s description of Gary Ridgway’s mother to Task Force detectives,
as described in the Sue Peters affidavit, as “wearing a lot of makeup and tight clothes” so that she would “look like a prostitute,” and her asserting herself around the house and breaking a plate over Ridgway’s father’s head is very telling and may provide an answer. So is Ridgway’s revelation to police that he had violent sexual fantasies about his mother as well as sexual feelings and fantasized about “sewing up her vagina.” Were Ridgway’s sexual conflicts about his mother somehow a fuel for his sexual fury? If so, it would make sense that Agisheff, because of her age, not only repelled Ridgway, she frightened him as well and, if we take him at his word, would not have been one of his victims.
Ridgway’s overreaction to being asked about Agisheff might be only the tip of the iceberg of Ridgway’s feelings of violence towards prostitutes in general. Was his attraction to young girls and teenagers his way of deflecting his real feelings of hatred toward his mother, his real target victim? Teenaged prostitutes were easy prey for the older Ridgway, he admitted to police. But they well might have been surrogate victims. Only time and further interviews with Ridgway might reveal his deeper feelings about his victims. But for the present, Bundy was not only clearly right about Agisheff, he seems to have given an example of how, in his mind, some murders could be okay.
Bundy wasn’t psychic when it came to the Green River killings. He was simply creating a profile of the person he believed could commit these crimes based on his knowledge of himself, his knowledge of the area, and his knowledge of what it took to operate in the Green River Killer’s areas, abducting prostitutes as his victims. But profiles are also wrong in many key areas and sometimes lead police astray. For example, there were things that Bundy believed about the Riverman that were dead wrong. His biggest mistake was that he suggested that the Riverman was from Tacoma. Bundy based his opinion on where some of the bodies had been dumped, at least one of which was in Pierce County. Since Bundy was from Tacoma and knew the body dump sites, he figured, projecting himself into the position of the Riverman, that the Riverman, too, had to be from Tacoma. Actually, that wasn’t the case. According to the King County affidavit, the individual they had under surveillance, Gary Ridgway, had a residence in Renton and was also from Auburn.
We can’t be sure about whether Bundy was correct or not in his assertion that the Riverman simply could not stop killing. Bundy said that there had to be more killings after March 1984, but the affidavit submitted to the court does not account for any new crimes after that date. Perhaps there were more crimes. But until there is further investigation into what crimes might have been committed after March 1984, we really won’t know whether Bundy was correct or not.
I still believe that much of Ted Bundy’s Riverman hypothesis was a projection of himself. Certainly there was more to learn about Bundy, about the emotional processes that drove him from crime to crime, about the secrets he shared with the bodies of his victims during his private moments at their gravesites. These were the secrets that Bundy wouldn’t allow himself to share with Detective Matt Linvall, even though he acknowledged that it was a secret he had shared with Julie Cunningham. It was one of the things, Bundy said about serial killers, that many of them would not talk about, even though they would talk about their crimes.
As the clock on Bundy’s life ticked down, the pressure to get him to talk about a wide variety of crimes only increased. There were scheduling arrangements to be made as each of the final minutes of his life increased in value to those who needed information about open cases. Just how many secrets did Bundy retain as he walked those final steps to the execution chamber amid the growing clamor outside the prison gates for the news that America’s most infamous serial killer was dead?
Only the prison warden would find out, and that would be on the final night of Bundy’s life.
19
Bundy’s Last Night
The crowds had been gathering outside the prison for days once the news got out that Bundy’s execution had finally been set, that a tiny piece of history was about to take place. They were an assortment of people milling outside the prison gates, setting up their soap-boxes for the cameras and lights, and taking ownership of Bundy’s execution for their own purposes. There were the anti-death penalty protesters with candles and signs, ready to stand their vigil; the pro-death penalty advocates, equally adamant, demanding an eye for an eye; perhaps friends or relatives of some of the victims across four states, wanting to be nearby when the switch was thrown; those people seeking both vengeance and the opportunity for a tailgate party, setting up outdoor grills and breaking open coolers to celebrate Bundy’s execution.
Then there were the lookie-loos, the rubberneckers, the people wanting to be a part of the moment when the nation’s most infamous serial killer walked the last few steps down death row to the electric chair. And there were the news vans, their satellite dishes reaching to the sky, recording the people outside the prison, waiting for the hearse to carry Ted Bundy’s corpse to wherever he would be interred. It was an eerie twilight party atmosphere, anti-climactic really, and almost apocalyptic. It was as if these same people would be milling around outside dressed in their shorts and Hawaiian shirts on the evening before the midnight when the world came to an end.
For each group outside the prison, Bundy meant something different. For the anti-death penalty people, he was their poster boy. Why should he be executed when he held the key to so many cases that could be resolved with just a few words from him? The pro-death group saw Bundy as a monster incarnate, a description with which he, in his own words, had already concurred. He was a human predator whose career stretched across the four states we know about and maybe even more that he wouldn’t talk about. Considering what he did to his victims and the terror that someone like Julie Cunningham must have endured during the ride from Vail, even Florida’s electric chair was too quick and easy a punishment for the man. Those seeking vengeance and retribution were there to celebrate that final day.
For the others who were there to be a part of history, Bundy had become history. He realized it, tried to manipulate the moments even up to the end, but whether he ever understood what was happening, I may never know. As evil as Bundy’s crimes were, he represented something at the very end of the human spectrum. His case made so many headlines that Bundy became transformed toward the end of his life into something he never was in real life. There were Bundy souvenirs, Bundy fan clubs, Bundy memorabilia, and a whole Bundy mystique. In fact, one of the souvenirs being passed around were bumper stickers that said: “I’ll buckle up when Ted does.” Yet for all the mythos surrounding Ted Bundy, he always remained a cowardly individual who could not even muster the courage at the end of his life to accept total responsibility for what he had done even though he tried to make himself as significant as possible by holding out the hope that he knew how to resolve even more unsolved cases. It was a pathetic attempt, but it was all he could do. Thus, Bundy probably didn’t understand what his case had become to the nation, that he himself had become kind of an icon embodying a special kind of malevolence, even as he settled in before the tape recorder’s microphone to contemplate his execution the following morning.
Bundy knew that people were gathering even before he sat down with the warden on his final night. It was his last chance to open up, to clear up cases that still lingered for hopeful investigators in different states. Had Bundy murdered women in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California? There were unsolveds from all over the country and cold case homicide detectives looking for a break. Maybe Bundy had stopped in one of their cities overnight, passed through on his way from Colorado to Michigan to Florida. Maybe one of their cases was his.
Again, fidgeting with a map of locations in different states where some his victims might have been buried and talking with the warden of Florida State Penitentiary, Bundy, as if he were an insurance claims processor working through a form, methodically began to go down the list of inquiries from investigators in different states that were fed to him by the
warden.
“January 24, 1989,” Bundy began. “For the Utah detective named ‘Couch,’ there’s one more we didn’t have time for. It’s going to be hard. Between Price and Green River, about ten miles south of Price, a road going south out of Price, maybe five or ten miles, there is a side road to the left going toward the mountains, going east. A quarter mile in there’s a dirt road to the left. This is not going to work too well,” Bundy said, referring to the map he was looking at, “but I’ll try to do something with it. A hundred to two hundred yards in on the dirt road, stop and to the left off the dirt road, maybe fifty yards in, there’s the remains of a young woman who disappeared from Brigham Young University, June of 1975. That’s as close as I can get it from the map that we have here.”
“Do you know her name?” the warden asked.
“No, I don’t,” Bundy answered. She was a nameless victim.
“Is that it?” the warden asked again.
“To Mike Fisher and the Colorado detectives, the last woman they wanted to talk about, Denise Oliverson, I believe. Referring again to Denise Oliverson, or whoever it was out of Grand Junction that Mike Fisher wanted to discuss, I believe the date was in April 1975. The young woman’s body would have been placed in the Colorado River about five miles west of Grand Junction. It was not buried. That’s all the ones that I can help you with. That’s all the ones that I know about. There are no missing ones outstanding that we haven’t talked about.”
“That’s all of ’em, Ted?” the warden wanted to know.
The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Page 61