The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (16 page)

We would have checked Ted’s bank records and would have found even more surprises. Bundy’s checking account records showed that he had cashed checks at the Safeway food store at 47th and Brooklyn in the heart of the U-district only eight blocks from Lynda Healy’s residence on the date that she disappeared. We were also checking Healy’s bank records because we were pursuing her murder as if it were a separate crime. In so doing, we found that she had cashed a check at the very same Safeway store on the very same day and at the very same time as did Ted. We contacted the clerk whose initials were on the check and asked her to tell us how long she worked that day. Only four hours, she told us, so the window of opportunity for Ted was very small. If they were both in the same store at the same time, could Ted Bundy have actually been stalking Lynda Healy that very day, keeping her in sight from food aisle to food aisle or standing behind her in a checkout line, dogging her footsteps from a safe distance along streets crowded with students and waiting for the right opportunity to abduct her?

What exactly was the connection between Bundy and Healy? We knew they were in the same classes. We knew that they were in the same store cashing checks at the same time on the day she disappeared.
How long had Bundy been interested in Lynda Healy? Our search through the Bundy file would have continued, especially as it related to his connection to Healy. We would have discovered from the list of Bundy’s acquaintances that his cousin had been a roommate of Lynda Healy’s housemate, part of an extended tribe of friends and housemates that are typical of relationships in a large college town like Seattle. We would have realized that, of course, Ted knew Lynda Healy. They’d attended the same classes, sat in the same independent study sections, and had probably been at parties together. They would have encountered each other time and again as their paths kept on crossing. Unfortunately, Lynda didn’t know that the Ted who might or might not have said hello to her as they met outside a classroom or in the Safeway wasn’t really a casual acquaintance but a stalker—she was his intended victim. We don’t even know now how long Ted thought about Lynda before he decided to break into her basement apartment, knock her unconscious as they struggled against the wall of her bed, carefully undress her as she lay there in a pool of blood, and hang her nightgown neatly in her closet, wash her hair, dress her in her ski jacket and pants, and then take her with him into the night. No matter what we discovered about the other missing-and-murdered-coed cases, it would have been clear that in the Lynda Healy case, Ted was by far the most viable suspect we had. We would have pursued the investigation aggressively while letting the Utah and Colorado authorities continue their observation of Bundy. The net would have begun to close.

The leads Liz Kendall gave us in the folder would have required another interview with her for background information. She would describe Ted’s behavior on July 14, 1974, the Sunday when Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappeared from Lake Sammamish. Liz and Ted had fought that morning and Ted had gone home. But when Ted had returned to her place at six in the evening, the first thing he had done was to move a ski rack that was on his VW Beetle to her VW Beetle. This detail would have interested us because Ted had originally moved the ski rack from her car to his so that he could carry his bike with him on a trip to Eastern Washington weeks earlier. How convenient! This meant that Ted already knew how to strap a bike to the ski rack with little trouble. If we had had any lingering questions about what happened to Janice Ott’s 10-speed
bike on the day of her abduction from the park, this detail would have gone a long way to resolve them.

Liz would have told us about Ted’s mood on the night of the fourteenth. He was a moody person, she said, despite his personable demeanor. Liz would have said that they had planned to go out for dinner, but when Ted showed up, he was bristling with hostility. He announced that he wasn’t taking Liz and her daughter out to dinner. Then he had relented and driven them out for burgers. He had been angry about something, but he had been trying to get over it. It was part of his typical behavior, which ran hot and cold. It was as mysterious as the crutches Liz would have told us that she found in his room in May or June, 1974. She had also seen the plaster of Paris and would have told us about his ability to get medical supplies from the company he worked for. He delivered prosthetic devices to their clients. It was circumstantial, at best, but these medical devices were also the implements our killer used for camouflage and were key in the ruses he used to lure his victims.

And then there was the bag of women’s underwear that Liz discovered in Ted’s room in 1973. We had not been called in yet and the Ted task force was a year away from its inception. The Seattle police weren’t even investigating missing or murdered women at that time. So whose clothing was in that bag? Were these the souvenirs from nameless women whom Ted had taken from places other than Seattle? Were there still scores of unsolved missing-persons cases from jurisdictions that we didn’t even know about? If Ted was already a serial killer in 1973, was this his bag of totems that he pulled from the bodies of his dead victims? Liz hadn’t known what she’d discovered, but by the time she reported it to the task force, it would have been enough for us to build a real case against Ted Bundy.

Liz provided another vital piece of the Ted Bundy puzzle for us when she linked Ted’s travels to Central Washington State College and the disappearance of Susan Rancourt. She told us that Ted had a friend who attended Central. We very quickly made contact with that friend, who told us that about a week before Rancourt was reported missing, Ted was in Ellensburg visiting him. At that same time, the first woman was approached in front of the school’s library and ran away when the Ted she was helping dropped his keys in the dirt beside his VW.

Within days of the Kendall interview and our follow-up on her leads, we would have been very encouraged by the Ted Bundy file. Not only could Ted be placed at Ellensburg, but he was clearly crossing paths with Lynda Healy to the point where he could have been stalking her. In this way, all of our separate investigations into the Washington State activities of Ted Bundy would have intersected. Moreover, he was in Utah and Colorado at just the right times, and nothing in his gasoline credit card records put him in a spot where he would not have been able to commit any of our homicides. In a circumstantial case such as this, suspects who were purely coincidental would have been eliminated by this point, as the previous six had been. For
all
paths to have led to a suspect, even if they were circumstantial, that suspect had to have a very high probability as the prime suspect. We knew that Ted was our man; we just had to make the case.

Since Ted was attending the University of Utah School of Law, our next strategy was to contact those agencies that had open cases of murders of females in both Utah and Colorado. It would have taken very little convincing to get Salt Lake to assemble an informal multistate task force on their dime and to have covertly staked out Bundy. Ideally, they would have wanted to gather firsthand information about his movements, and observe him as he rehearsed his crime or stalked his prospective victim. Maybe they’d even catch him with the evidence, as police had caught the Freeway Killer—Randy Kraft—in Southern California with a body in his car. In any event, his predatory travels could have been monitored—speculating on the basis of Ted’s propensity to drive and return to his crime scenes—and he might have actually led police to the body of a murdered female decomposing at one of his burial sites.

Even if the surreptitious surveillance would have failed to catch him in the act of a crime, the mounting circumstantial evidence already available would have provided the probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant for his apartment and VW Beetle. They would have served the search warrant without any prior warning. Ted Bundy would have had no chance to prepare by removing evidence from his apartment or by scouring out the inside of his car. Searchers would have most certainly found an abundance of forensic evidence in the car that had been used to transport over 25 victims from pick-up locations to dump sites for at least two years.

Using the same circumstantial evidence that provided them with
the probable cause for a search of Bundy’s car, investigators would have searched Bundy’s apartment, where they would have found more than a map of Colorado and the ski brochure with the circled name of the Wildwood Inn. They would probably have found much more. Because Ted sometimes took a whole corpse home with him, instead of just the heads as he did in Washington, the police might have discovered an entire body in his apartment. In a Jeffrey Dahmer-like police seizure of human remains, the evidence would have sealed Bundy’s fate right on the spot. Not even the bravado-driven Bundy would have been able to bluff his way out of that kind of discovery.

At the point of the search of his apartment, Bundy would have been interviewed by the Utah police. At first, Bundy would exert complete control with as much boldness as he could muster. Bundy was a blowhard and, as he always did when challenged, he would try to bully his way out of any confrontation. By the time of the interview, Bundy would have been well aware that he was a suspect in some sort of investigation, and he would assume that the police had connected him to the murders in Utah. However, the police would have the advantage of surprise with respect to the Colorado murders, especially in light of the discovery of Caryn Campbell’s hair in the trunk of Ted’s VW. But Bundy had great self-confidence as a killer and he would have resisted all attempts to get him to confess.

The police would have confronted him with their strongest circumstantial evidence. He would have provided them with alibis. They would have confronted him with the handcuff key they discovered in the Bountiful parking lot. He would have denied any knowledge of the handcuff key even though they fit the handcuffs in his car. Standard handcuffs and standard locks, Bundy would have said, don’t automatically make a matched set. This would have gone back and forth until the police brought Bundy in for a line-up. Carol DaRonch would have identified him and Bundy would have been arrested. At the same time I would have presented my evidence against Bundy to the prosecutor and would have gotten a charge for murder in the first degree in the case of Lynda Healy. I would have sought additional indictments in the cases of Susan Rancourt, Janice Ott, and Denise Naslund even though I would have had weaker cases. But nonetheless, my indictments and the indictments in Utah and Colorado as a result of a multistate
task force investigation on kidnap and murder charges would have been enough to have kept Bundy behind bars the entire time.

Whether Bundy would have been able to escape from the Colorado courthouse and flee across the country, as he did in reality, is a matter of pure conjecture. But with the information on Ted’s movements I had gathered from the Lynda Healy investigation, I believe we could have mounted a stronger case against him in the other jurisdictions as well. Therefore, who can say what might have happened had Bundy not been caught by the Utah state trooper? Can it be argued that, arrested unaware and caught off guard, he most likely would have never escaped custody in Colorado? Can the case actually be made that, had Ted Bundy managed to escape the trooper that night, no phone calls would have been made between Utah and Seattle and, perhaps with Ted sitting in a Seattle jail instead of a lockup near Aspen, his escape to Florida would never have happened and Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberly Leach might still be alive today? It is all pure speculation.

As it turned out, Ted Bundy was tried and convicted in Utah in 1976 for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch and in July was sent to a Utah state prison. That should have taken care of him for a long time, but his troubles with other agencies weren’t over yet. In October of 1976, he was charged with the murder of Caryn Campbell at the Wildwood Inn in Aspen, Colorado. In January 1977, Bundy was taken into custody by Mike Fisher from Colorado and transported to the Glenwood Springs jail, where he would be held during his trial in Aspen. Ted escaped from the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen in June, was recaptured within the week, and escaped again six months later on New Year’s Eve. This time, Bundy made his break through a hole that he had sawed in the ceiling of his cell. He made it out of the jailhouse, stole an old MG, which broke down, got a ride to Vail, took a bus from Vail to Denver, and then caught an early flight from Denver to Chicago. Bundy had propped up clothing under a blanket to make it seem as if he were still on his cot and thus managed to fool his guards until noon on January 1, 1978. Then the news of his escape was flashed
to major cities. Ted saw the television bulletin of his escape while he was staying at the Ann Arbor, Michigan, YMCA. He was running out of money and was getting desperate, so he stole a car and headed south for warm weather.

Bundy wound up in Atlanta, where he discarded the car and caught a bus for Tallahassee, Florida. He rented a room at a rooming house called The Oaks near the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. On January 15, at about two in the morning, just two weeks after his escape from Colorado, Bundy snuck into the Chi Omega house and bludgeoned Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman to death and injured Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner. Ted was spotted by sorority member Nita Neary as he was coming down the stairs, club in hand. Two and a half hours later and five blocks away, Bundy attacked again. He broke into Cheryl Thomas’s house but fled before he could kill her. For the next two or so weeks, he went on a rampage of stealing credit cards, cash, and cars, and driving around Florida in a desperate attempt to elude the police.

Then, on the morning of February 9, 1978, he spotted a 12-yearold girl walking behind a building at her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. At about five minutes to nine, paramedics passing by spotted a man leading a young girl away by the arm. Later, they would identify the man as Bundy and the girl as Kimberly Leach. It was the last time anyone would see Kimberly alive. She would be discovered in April 1978 at a dump site Bundy used 32 miles out of Lake City.