The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (13 page)

From an investigative standpoint, the computer task we wanted
to accomplish was simple—give each list an alphabetical letter, A, B, C, and so on; enter every name on that list under “A” in the computer, and run a cross-check to come up with the list of names that appeared on the greatest number of independent lists. This was the “weighted” list of the likeliest candidates for further investigation. Thus, the manifest of lists was born:

1. 3,500 suspect names gathered through June 1975
   

2. 5,000 mental patients released, 1964-74
   

3. 41,000 registered owners of Volkswagens
   

4. 300 campus vendors at the University of Washington
   

5. 2,162 guests at the Mar Si Motel in Issaquah
   

6. 4,000 classmates of Lynda Healy
   

7. 1,500 transfer students among all the universities
   

8. 600 participants in the Rainier Brewery picnic
   

When the alphabet had been exhausted, the coding format continued with AA, AB, AC … BA, BB, BC, until we came to the end of our groupings. This scheme provided for the addition of an infinite number of lists. In the course of one month, our categories for names expanded enormously, identifying over 30 separate lists, containing more than 300,000 names.

Those lists of names related directly to the activities and surroundings where victims had disappeared and where their bodies were recovered. An examination of those sites proved to be quite useful in discovering possible sources that would help us obtain the names of people who were associated with those locations. We also analyzed the routes to and from both the murder and dumping sites. For example, Susan Elaine Rancourt disappeared after a meeting at the main library at Central Washington State College on April 17, 1974. After analyzing her disappearance site, we identified several sources of names—her address book, fellow students and instructors, people who attended the meeting on the night she disappeared, those people registered for library privileges, traffic citations issued in the Ellensburg area one week prior and up to her disappearance, campus vendors, registered owners of VW Beetles who lived in the Ellensburg area, and transfer students from Central to the University of Washington, University of Washington to Central, Evergreen State to Central, Central to Evergreen, Oregon
State to Central, and Central to Oregon State. We compiled similar lists for all the other victims.

Then—it seemed almost too easy—we simply asked the computer programmers to print out each suspect with the most alphabetical letters behind his name. For example, the computer readout should have produced “John Q. Citizen: A, C, and F,” who was on the suspect, Volkswagen owners, and Healy classmates lists.

Apart from the normal costs of doing county business, such as those incurred by holding meetings between departments, this project would also, under the conditions at the time, have to be allowed unlimited funding. No one really knew how much the project would cost.

The creation of the computer’s manifest of murder, on such a scale, was received by our critics as nothing more than dubious make-believe. To them the information we had gathered and organized appeared to be beyond the powers of county resources and truly a folly.

The realistic problems for System Services personnel were enormous: programming the computer to meet our needs and, worst of all, keypunching into the computer over 300,000 names on their individual punch cards. Unlike computer technology of the ’80s and ’90s, the county’s hardware consisted of conveyer belts of rolling ball-bearings carrying punch cards to be sorted into their properly located bins. The entire process took over a month to complete, periodically delaying county employees’ pay-checks for a few hours.

The process was awkward, but the results were stunning. The first command completed by the computer experts was “identify the names with two or more alphabetical letters by their name.” Simple request but with a very slow response time of one week. The results were 1,807 names with two letters by each name. The total number of suspects was too many for the three of us to investigate. After the first question, the computer people had already anticipated the subsequent questions and had the answers. How many names had three or more letters with their names? The unruly number of 622 was a smaller number than 1,807, but still far too many for us to pursue on a person-by-person basis. And the last question—how many names had four or more letters associated with their name? The number of names identified was 25, a more workable number of persons whom we would try to investigate within the next year.

Incredibly, and almost with the mathematical probability of two people having the same fingerprint, the computer program identified “Theodore Robert Bundy: A, C, F, and Q.” He was one of 25 persons who appeared on at least four or more lists. He was an A, A, A because he was in the suspect file three times, a C because he was a registered owner of a Volkswagen bug, an F, F, F because he was in three of Lynda Healy’s psychology classes at the University of Washington, and, finally, a Q because he was observed by an anonymous citizen driving a Volkswagen bug near where two women disappeared.

The total cost of the project was $10,000, a small price to pay for such enormous success. Even today such a project can undoubtedly be counted on to produce high results, notwithstanding the inhibitions of long-standing rigidity toward an enlightened investigation that employs all of the latest technology. The programming time is at most two days and, with a high-quality database, the retrieval time is negligible, only seconds. The real cost today is paying for the legwork involved in gathering all of the names.

The computer run was completed one week prior to August 19, 1975, the date of the call from Detective Ben Forbes from Salt Lake City, Utah. The computer results, which we did not actually see until after the phone call from Salt Lake, caused a shudder of excitement the likes of which I had never before experienced. The entire task force squad room froze stone cold as the name Theodore Robert Bundy came up on the computer record.

3
 
Ted #7

U
ntil the weekend when Ted was pulled over by the Utah state trooper, the course our small Ted task force in King County was following was steady, productive, and continued to bolster our collective mood. The paperwork was tedious and daunting, but we believed we would eventually find our Ted. Therefore, instead of fatigue setting in as a result of our following too many dead-end leads, our strategy was energizing us. Detectives Dunn, McChesney, and I were chasing down good Ted suspects like retrievers after shot ducks. Every time we left the office we returned with one suspect after another in tow. The parade turned heads in the bullpen with each walkthrough. Other people in the building knew something had changed on floor 1A as the tiny Ted task force churned on like a machine. Those detectives who had grown tired of peeking in to check on us suddenly popped in with renewed interest. Even the veterans could sense the growing intensity as our search progressed.

With the elimination of one possible Ted after another, the pile of 100 good suspects was slowly dwindling. The expectation was that eventually we would unmask the real Ted lurking somewhere in the stack. Maybe he was at the bottom. Maybe he was hiding there in the middle. Or maybe he was right on top waiting to be turned over. Wherever his case jacket was sitting, we knew he was
there. Our confidence was high because we believed our killer had to have left a trail. He was no phantom. Our gut instinct would be correct.

August 19, 1975 began as did every other day, with Officer Kevin O’Shaughnessy manning the phone lines. Kevin had been reassigned to the task force because his injuries required him to be placed on light duty. But to us his duty was far from light—he was the first in line for all incoming information on the investigation. His responsibility encompassed answering the phones and obtaining as much information from the caller as possible so we could assess the importance of the new data. In addition to taking the calls, Kevin filled out 3- × 5-inch index cards that cross-referenced names of suspects, names of callers, and license numbers of all vehicles. This system quickly became the backbone of our investigation because it was the quick-reference index to calls and tips. Fortunately for us, Kevin’s mind for detail was as exceptional as it was reliable. It was Kevin O’Shaughnessy who took the routine call on August 19 that refocused our entire investigation and brought us squarely to the suspect whose case jacket was sitting right on top of our file: Theodore Bundy.

It was three days earlier, Saturday, August 16, 1975, at two
A.M.,
when an off-duty Utah state trooper on his way home in his patrol car spotted the shadow of a car streak by him. The car had no headlights on. It was late and he was tired, but the trooper couldn’t let this one go by. The state police officer pulled a U-turn in his quiet subdivision and followed the mysterious VW as it snaked its way through the dark streets. Then the trooper pulled up to the VW’s tail and flooded the inside of the VW with his colored lights. But the driver didn’t pull over. Instead, the VW kept on going and the trooper thought he saw the driver dumping marijuana out the window in a frenzy.

Then, the driver simply pulled over to the curb, stopped the car, and waited. The trooper, not knowing what he was going to find, approached the car cautiously. The driver had tried to evade him and had ignored his instructions to stop. Now the trooper had probable cause that a crime had been committed and was going to detain the driver and make a search of the vehicle. First, poking his
head inside the window to get a look at the driver, the trooper asked for the driver’s consent to search. When the driver agreed, the trooper made a cursory eyeball search. He looked around and noticed that the driver had an overnight bag of tools alongside the front seat and that the passenger seat had been removed. Trooper Hayward searched the bag and found a large ice pick, pieces of rope, a pry bar, insulated electric wire, pantyhose with two eye holes and a nose hole cut in them, a full-face knit ski mask, and a pair of made-in-Spain handcuffs. These, thought the trooper, were burglary tools, and based on that assessment, he arrested the driver, who identified himself as Ted Bundy. Ted was brought to the Salt Lake County jail, charged, booked, and released on bail the following day. The next Tuesday, Detective Ben Forbes of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department made the call to the King County Ted Task Force that changed the nature of our investigation and started a media firestorm in Seattle. It was the morning of August 19, 1975.

Kevin O’Shaughnessy answered Ben Forbes’s call, following the same routine he did for every other call. He methodically entered the important data on the tip sheet: Forbes’s name, telephone number, agency name, Bundy’s full name, date of birth, vehicle type, and license number. He thanked Forbes for his promise to send him Bundy’s booking photo. Underlying his dispassionate telephone demeanor on this call, O’Shaughnessy was crazy with curiosity. Why did Ben Forbes from Salt Lake County call us about Bundy?

“You asked for it,” Forbes told him.

O’Shaughnessy was stunned into speechlessness. He had no idea what Forbes was talking about.

The Salt Lake sheriff had received a telephone call back in October 1974 from Detective Randy Hergesheimer of the King County Department of Public Safety, Forbes explained. This was long before O’Shaughnessy had joined the task force and explained why he was unaware of it. At that time, Randy Hergesheimer had taken a call from Ted Bundy’s girlfriend, Liz Kendall, who reported that Ted had moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City, where he was going to law school. She’d read the stories of the missing and murdered young women in Salt Lake—a pattern similar, if not identical, to the pattern in King County—and wanted to alert the police in Utah. She had previously reported her suspicions about Ted to our task
force, as had other people, including one of his college professors. From these leads we compiled a case jacket on Ted Bundy, who then was just another one of the 3,500 suspects. Randy Hergesheimer had forwarded Kendall’s tip to Ben Forbes, an information pack rat who fixed the notes he took onto a spindle sitting on top of his desk. There they sat for almost an entire year.

On August 19, 1975, Forbes reviewed a case assigned to him via the Utah state troopers concerning the arrest of Theodore Robert Bundy for evading police and the investigation into the burglary tools found in his VW during the ensuing search after he was stopped. Theodore Robert Bundy! A light went on somewhere deep in Forbes’s brain. He fingered through the slips of paper on the spindle and found the note he had written 10 months before still sitting right where he had left it. It was no accident that he found it. Like most great detectives, Forbes retained every bit of information he ever received.

After Ben Forbes hung up the phone, Kevin O’Shaughnessey scrambled for the file cabinet to pull the Bundy folder. It wasn’t there. He looked around quickly, but couldn’t locate the folder. Coincidentally, Kathy McChesney had the file in her wire basket. It was the next up, the seventh of 100 alphabetically organized folders from our cross-referenced list, to be investigated fully. Kathy McChesney was ready to begin the systematic evaluation of suspect Ted Bundy because our plan was to subject each of the top 100 suspects to a thorough investigation of their lives, their whereabouts during the period when the King County—area victims were first reported missing, their relationships with any of the victims, and their whereabouts since bodies had stopped turning up in King County. Ted Bundy might have been just another name that had been buried in our files for almost a year, but our computer picked him out from all of our lists and all of the logged tip sheets, and placed him among the top candidates. Only we didn’t know it until Ben Forbes called Kevin O’Shaughnessy to report Bundy’s arrest.