Read The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer Online
Authors: Robert Keppel
Tags: #True Crime, #General
The King County detectives learned that Stergion had been beaten, and stabbed more than twenty times.
Identifying the most likely suspect wasn’t difficult. The 6-foot-6-inch-tall teenager who had rolled into Enumclaw the day before had frequently been seen around local businesses. Patrol units quickly spotted James Lee Slade walking along a road heading out of town.
Bob Keppel would interrogate Slade. Twenty years later, when I reread that interview, I can see that Keppel’s inherent skill at verbal jousting was already in place. That didn’t surprise me; he was good then and he’s only gotten better over the years. What did surprise me was how jarringly familiar the details of the conversation were.
Jim Slade first told Keppel that he hadn’t even
been
in Enumclaw that night—he’d hitched a ride to another town, and he’d left his blanket roll in the victim’s truck.
Keppel had learned that the suspect had been wearing black leather gloves ever since he got to town and was quick to notice that he wasn’t wearing them anymore. Keppel also noticed that Slade had a cut on his right index finger and another on his little finger.
Bob Keppel quietly asked him where his gloves were now.
“They made my hands hot and sweaty, so I took them off and left them in a truck. When I went back for them, they were gone.”
“It seems a little strange,” Keppel said, “for someone who likes his gloves as much as you seemed to, to put them in a parked truck. Why didn’t you just put them in your pocket?”
“They wouldn’t fit.”
Slade’s body language showed that he was becoming more and more nervous. His Adam’s apple jumped wildly as he gulped frequently, and he drank cups of black coffee.
But he didn’t want to talk.
James Slade first demanded an attorney, but when he was alone with Bob Keppel, he suddenly asked, “Is the old man dead?”
“Yes.”
“All right. I want to tell you about it.”
And Keppel wanted to hear. But first Keppel warned Slade not once but twice that whatever he said could be used against him in court, repeating the familiar phrases of the Miranda Warning.
“I still want to tell you.”
It would be the first of scores of confessions Bob Keppel would hear. It was a tragically simple story. Slade, wanting money, had broken into Chris Stergion’s office. When Stergion caught him at the cash register, Slade told Keppel that he had stabbed him with some calipers he’d picked up.
“I don’t know what came over me. I saw a light flash. He had asked me who I was, saying, ‘The cops are coming.’ I just kept hitting and hitting him with the calipers.”
When detectives found James Slade’s black leather gloves in a warehouse where he had tossed them in his flight from the crime scene, they had their own story to tell. The right glove had a jagged cut on the right index finger and the lining was soaked with blood.
Three days later, Bob Keppel was plunged into the “Ted Murders,” a real baptism of fire into the world of an entirely different kind of killer. And in the ensuing years, he has probably investigated or advised investigators in more serial murder cases than almost any detective in America.
Bob Keppel and I share a common hero, a common mentor: Pierce Brooks. Pierce Brooks was the Captain of the Homicide Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department for a dozen years, and Chief of Police in cities in both Colorado and Oregon after his retirement from the LAPD. It was Brooks who first recognized the very existence of the phenomenon we have come to know as “a serial killer.” He was also the first to insist that the only way to track and trap this kind of elusive criminal was through the establishment of a central information system on victims and suspects that could be contributed to and shared by law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Pierce Brooks began building his own files by poring over out-of-town newspapers and looking for cases similar to those he was investigating—way back in the late 1950s. Bob Keppel, as you will
read in the pages ahead, conceived the efficacy of using computers—still a newfangled gimmick in the mid-seventies—to track criminals long before most investigators had thought of such a possibility.
Today, the HITS program that Bob Keppel oversees in the Washington State Attorney General’s Office is one of the best tools we have in the Northwest to solve homicides.
I didn’t have to be asked twice to read the manuscript of
The Riverman.
One of the things that makes Bob Keppel a superior detective is that he is inscrutable; he never tells
anyone
what is not ready to be told. It is also one of his most maddening traits. For years, he had known things about Ted Bundy that no one else knew. My natural curiosity about those “things” has been difficult to live with, but I have always known better than to ask Bob Keppel for information before he was ready to give it. Now all my questions have been answered.
The Riverman
will fill a long-vacant spot on the bookshelves of both professionals and laypeople who have searched for a definitive study of serial murder. There are hundreds of pages of heretofore unpublished information—not only on the Ted Bundy cases but on the Atlanta Child Killer, the Michigan Child Murders, the Son of Sam, and Washington’s Green River Murders.
Bob Keppel never claimed to be a diplomat, and he is bound to ruffle some feathers as he points out the sometimes-catastrophic errors made in the investigation of serial murders. Many mistakes were made out of inexperience, some were the result of inefficiency, and more were probably made because of turf wars and scrambling for political advantage.
Bob Keppel pulls no punches. What will make
The Riverman
a bible for working investigators
is
this searing dissection of what went wrong,
coupled
with brilliant insights into successful investigations of crimes that were almost impossible to untangle.
I don’t think Bob Keppel ever set out to become an expert on serial murder. There are less frustrating and more pleasant roads to follow. In the early 1980s, we talked for hours on our way to a VICAP Task Force conference in Huntsville, Texas—extra hours because our plane was grounded in Denver in a blizzard. The thing I remember most is hearing Bob Keppel say, “I
know
this for sure.
I never want to get involved in the boiler-room pressure of working another serial murder task force. Once is enough.”
He was talking, of course, about the Ted Bundy investigation … an investigation that he would never really be finished with.
Even now.
I had to smile when I read
The Riverman.
I don’t think it was a year after our flight through the blizzard before Bob Keppel was up to his elbows in work with the Green River Task Force. So much for no more boiler-room pressure. But as his career unfolded, it became obvious that there was no way Bob could not go back.
And back. And back again.
Reading
The Riverman
brought back many memories to me—some good, some horrendous. The toe-dancing and the conflicts that marked some of our VICAP conferences are all here, as they should be. The interpersonal conflicts in various police agencies and the turf wars that slowed—or stopped—forward progress are noted. I am gratified to see Pierce Brooks receive the credit that he so richly deserves. If I’m to be completely honest, I’m probably just as gratified to see that some of the popinjays have been deflated.
I lived through the Bundy years in a different dimension than Bob Keppel did. I knew the man who wore the mask, and it was a very long time before I saw the monster exposed. It hasn’t been easy for me to read the explicit confessions that Ted made to Bob Keppel. It will not be easy for any reader, no matter how hardened he—or she—may be to the psychopathology of the sadistic sociopath. But the details are necessary for us to understand what made Ted Bundy tick. Outside of police files and psychiatric reports—which are usually classified—I have never read the actual words and thoughts of a brilliantly twisted killer as they appear in
The Riverman.
We may not
like
what Ted Bundy had to say to Bob Keppel, but we will learn a great deal from it.
In January of 1989, when Bob Keppel journeyed to Starke, Florida, to spend some of Ted Bundy’s last hours on earth with him, he was like a finely trained athlete (which he, in fact,
is
). He knew all the facts; he knew when to speak, when to keep
quiet, when to show approval, when to show disdain, and he was ready.
Bob Keppel heard, at last, the answers to horrific questions.
I am honored to write this foreword. There have been many Bundy books—including my own—but the whole story has never been told until now.
It’s the year 2003, and since Ted Bundy’s execution in 1989 and the reduction of the Green River murders investigation to a single detective, Tom Jenson, new information about both sets of cases has since come to light.
Regarding Ted Bundy, his confession to the warden of the Florida State Penitentiary about the one last murder is now a matter of public record, as are his confessions to Vail Police Department detective Matt Lindvall about the murder of Julie Cunningham. Regarding some of the homicides grouped under the Green River investigation, in November 2001 King County homicide detectives arrested Gary Leon Ridgway, who was subsequently charged with the murders of Carol Christensen, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, and Marcia Chapman. Ridgway subsequently pled guilty to 48 homicides, in October 2003, new names were added to the Green River list of victims, and Ridgway will spend the rest of his life in prison.
As for myself, after I retired from the Washington State Attorney General’s office in 1999, I continued to teach at the University of Washington. In 2003, I became an Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. Also under a grant from the Bureau of Justice Administration, developed the ideas for a homicide investigation database—ideas that first
began germinating in my mind back in 1975 during the Ted Missing and Murdered Women investigation—into a full-blown computer database program.
My old Green River Murders Task Force colleague, Dave Reichert, also took his own path during the twenty years since two boys riding their bikes over the Peck Bridge discovered the first bodies floating in the Green River. Dave, even after the investigation shrank to a single investigator, never gave up, believing as I believed that a piece of evidence the task force gathered back in 1987 would eventually lead to a suspect in some of the homicides. Dave’s beliefs kept him inside the King County Sheriff’s Department, moving up through the ranks from detective to captain to major—and eventually into politics when he ran for sheriff of King County. He never gave up on the search and was on the job when Tom Jenson told him that there was a DNA match in the Green River case.
What Bundy never knew during Dave’s and my interviews with him over the years, when he attempted to provide us with a model of what the Green River Killer’s behavior might be, was that an individual had been under police scrutiny (as the publicly released affidavits from King County investigators show) ever since 1983. Bundy could not know that because it was not information that was made public at the time.
Even as the task force interviewed witnesses and sexual companions of the person who was ultimately arrested for the Christensen, Mills, Hinds, and Chapman murders—as well as the suspect himself—the police proceeded so as to compromise neither the suspect’s constitutional rights nor the investigation itself. And it was only when forensic biological evidence, developed because of advances in DNA amplification and testing technology, indicated that there was a match between crime-scene DNA and the suspect’s DNA that an arrest was made. The story of that investigation and the arrest is also contained in the affidavit sworn by Detective Sue Peters and subsequently made public by the King County District Attorney, along with the prosecutor’s summary of evidence and Gary Ridgway’s written confessions and admissions.
For the present, the confessions Bundy made to Mike Fisher and Matt Lindvall about his Colorado murders in the previous chapter and to the warden at Florida State Penitentiary are his final words as he faced his ultimate punishment. They are revealing, particularly
his confession to Lindvall, in that they show Bundy trying to hang on to his last bit of dignity, which itself was only his delusion about himself. Bundy confesses that he lived in hell as he trolled for his victims across the four states that we know about and that what was consuming his victims was also consuming him. How much of those statements are self-serving and how much of those are true can only be judged by those who read them.
5 The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Story of the Michigan Child Murders