The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (21 page)

On May 22, 1981, the day we left Atlanta, a four-man surveillance team, stationed at the James Jackson Parkway Bridge, reported an encounter with a suspect. The stakeout team consisted of an FBI agent and an Atlanta police officer, both plainclothes, at each end of the bridge in unmarked cars. Two Atlanta police recruits were positioned at the foot of the west bank of the river. The team members, from where they stood on the bridge, could see headlights from cars approaching the bridge. Also, cars driving at over 10 miles an hour across that bridge always tended to make a loud noise when they passed over an expansion joint in the road-way toward the middle of the span.

Early in the predawn darkness, at about three
A.M.,
a loud splash was heard directly beneath the bridge where two recruits were on surveillance duty along the bank. One officer thought the splash sounded like a human body hitting the water below the bridge. Up to that time, no lights had been observed on the bridge and the characteristic sound of a car moving over the expansion joint had not been heard. There was light traffic at that time, and at least 10 minutes transpired between the time the last car was seen on the bridge and when the splash was heard. Shortly after the splash, a car’s lights appeared directly above where the splash had occurred. The officers observed a white Chevrolet station wagon close to the edge of the bridge traveling at an estimated speed of three to four miles per hour. The car exited the bridge at one end and turned around in a parking lot. It proceeded back across the bridge at a speed of about 35 to 40 miles per hour. No other vehicles passed over the bridge during that time. The police pursued the station wagon back to the highway.

A short time later, on I-285, the driver of the station wagon, Wayne

B. Williams, was stopped by the bridge officers and detained for 90 minutes while they interviewed him and, with his permission,
searched the station wagon. The officers found dog hairs inside the car and discovered a nylon cord and a paper bag containing men’s clothes. They subsequently released Williams at the scene of the stop.

Weeks later, I learned that the reason for the apprehension and frustration in the faces of the Atlanta brass on our last day of consultation was that they were not informed until eight hours later of the incident. Their plan to mobilize the officers with the river nets was appreciably delayed. They couldn’t catch the body they had heard fall, which would have brought to an end the riverman’s reign of terror. Their notification plan had failed.

On May 21, 1981, Nathaniel Cater, a 28-year-old black male, was last seen holding hands with Wayne Williams outside a theater in the city of Atlanta at about 9:15
P.M.
Three days later, on May 24, 1981, his nude body was found in the Chattahoochee River, 200 yards downstream from the I-285 overpass and near the Jackson Parkway Bridge. He had died of asphyxiation, probably by a chokehold. A crime laboratory expert found five fibers on Cater’s body that were consistent with the environment of Wayne Williams. Animal hairs from Williams’s dog were also identified on Cater’s body. Two witnesses had spotted Cater in the company of Williams the week before and had noted a German shepherd dog sitting in Williams’s white station wagon. At the very least, the bridge officers had gotten Williams’s name and a description and had put him at the scene of a body disposal. Now, at last, they could pursue a solid lead in their case.

The investigation of the Atlanta Child Killer, Wayne Williams, began to unfold. Williams was charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Further investigation revealed that Payne disappeared on April 21, 1981, and had been seen with Wayne Williams on April 22, 1981, on Highway 78, approximately one mile from the Chattahoochee River near a parked white station wagon. Even though Williams dumped Payne’s body in the river to prevent fibers from being found, six fibers associated with Williams’s environment and animal hairs from his dog were located on Payne’s remains. The river had not been as thorough as Williams might have wished.

The evidence of 10 other murders, extrinsic offenses, were used against Williams to prove a common scheme or plan that was part of the crimes. The earliest victim in the series used against
Williams was Alfred Evans, who was found on Niskey Lake Drive. His body was clad only in slacks, but three fibers consistent with Williams’s environment and animal hairs from his dog were found on Evans. The bodies of Eric Middlebrooks, Charles Stephens, and Patrick Baltazar contained fiber associations consistent with Williams’s surroundings and animal hairs from his dog. There were no sightings of Williams with these boys prior to their murders, however.

The Terry Pue murder case revealed the narcissistic characteristics of Williams’s personality. In addition to fibers and animal hairs similar to those from Williams’s home and dog being found on Pue’s body, a witness saw Williams with Pue about a week before the witness learned that Pue’s body had been discovered. With a sense of bravado, Williams arrived at the crime scene where Pue’s body was recovered and offered to shoot crime scene photos. The officer did not suspect the photographer might be the killer at that time, although now we know that serial killers sometimes do return to the crime scenes, especially in the presence of the police. It gives them a high and boosts their bravado to know that they are standing next to a person they have killed and are still invisible to the police. Additionally, and in keeping with the theory of serial-killer bravado, witnesses observed Williams driving his white station wagon at Pue’s funeral. Those bold appearances were evidence that Williams did not fear getting caught. The closer he got to the police, the more superior he felt. He was acting as though his armor could not be penetrated.

In the case of Lubie Geter, Williams was seen with him on the very day he disappeared. The witness recognized Williams from a previous contact of his own with Williams. The same man who was driving the car that Geter got into picked up the 15-year-old witness in the same area the previous August and offered him a job. Williams fondled him as they drove around. The teenager escaped when Williams stopped and got out, saying he needed something from the trunk. That same juvenile witness saw Williams at Geter’s funeral, but at the time, he didn’t report Williams to the police.

A female witness in the Larry Rogers case actually saw Rogers in Williams’s green station wagon—which Williams owned in addition to the white station wagon. Rogers was seen with Williams three times in one day. The female spoke to Rogers, who was
slumped over and didn’t reply. Incredibly, no report was made to the police. Williams also attended Rogers’s funeral.

The case of John Porter, a 28-year-old black male, was never presented to us by the Atlanta task force command. Porter was last seen getting into Williams’s station wagon. Another witness got a ride from Williams when Porter was in the car. Porter’s body was found on April 12, 1981, near Capitol Avenue, one mile from I-20 and three miles from I-85. Porter was fully clothed; he died from some type of neck manipulation. Fibers from Williams’s environment were located on Porter, but no animal hairs were discovered.

After Williams was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder, I spoke with Chief Morris Redding. He very candidly admitted that Williams had been right in front of their noses and they hadn’t seen him. While officers were walking up to elementary schools to give safety and crime prevention talks to children, Williams was walking out after having just photographed them for their school pictures. Williams was highly integrated into community affairs. The Williams cases were classic. Our profile was right on point in an uncanny way. Not only were we correct in our prediction that the killer hung around or was a vendor at elementary schools, but also Williams had applied for work as a photographer at the local medical examiner’s office. His willingness to volunteer to take crime scene photos proved his lack of fear of getting caught. On one occasion, he was even a volunteer searcher who assisted the police in the hunt for another victim of the Atlanta Child Killer. Williams was uncommonly familiar with the places where victims were last seen, the dump sites, and the routes to and from the body recovery sites. The theory of a white supremacist responsible for the murders was soundly eliminated. Our profile was correct and the strategy for surveillance of the bridges was extremely successful. The experience of being a consultant for the Atlanta task force helped me focus my career. From then on I was committed to finding out as much as I could about the investigation of serial murders. I wanted to be prepared to assist others with those very difficult investigations.

5
 
The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program and the Story of the Michigan Child Murders

B
y midsummer 1982, there were still only a few homicide investigators around the country who had had encounters with serial killers in their jurisdictions, but serial murders were on the increase. Typically, the serial killers struck and then moved on. Their extreme mobility and compulsive driving habits permitted them to reach a wide pool of victims, often breaking over county lines into different jurisdictions. But the strategies and tactics common to murder investigations were almost always very traditional and restricted most detectives’ abilities to keep pace with the increasing incidence of “traveling murderers.” These killers routinely desecrated the remains of their many victims, eluded the police, and were popularized in lurid news headlines with such monikers as the Hillside Strangler, the Freeway Killer, the Trailside Killer, the Trash Bag Killer, and the Zodiac Killer. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that it was the largest growing part of the country and still had vast rural areas, the Pacific Northwest attracted more than its fair share of those slugs.

Despite a growing awareness among metropolitan-area homicide investigators of the serial killer-type crimes popping up in different jurisdictions across the nation, there was still a basic flaw in our approach. We were mainly reactive in our responses, and the cases were usually resolved by some serendipitous occurrence
even though we had a sense of the killer’s identity. For example, the foul odor rising from John Wayne Gacy’s basement gave him away; Atlanta police belatedly discovered a witness who put Wayne Williams with a victim at a crime scene; and a Florida police officer noticed the stolen plates on Ted Bundy’s van. All of these killers were caught long after they had begun their skein of murders. However, in each case, the traditional methods of investigation were ineffective for apprehending the upstart serial killer. Even in the Ted investigation, where traditional methods actually did identify the Ted suspect himself, it would have done us no good without our computer-generated “top 100” list of suspects.

As a case first unfolded, those killers were pursued much like the suspects in a routine murder in which someone killed an acquaintance and the police eventually eliminated, one by one, the victim’s circle of friends and relatives. But once the investigations of the circle of acquaintances were exhausted, the cases stalled. That dead-end trail, coupled with the reluctance of investigators to pursue leads outside their own jurisdictional boundaries, characterized serial-murder cases as all but impossible to solve. The lack of new, creative, and useful investigative avenues contributed to the practical reality that the police were far from knowing the killer’s identity or even understanding his criminal intent. By the time the police started tracking them, the killer’s tracks were so faint that catching the killer was, at best, a very remote possibility. It wasn’t that police were reluctant to expend time and resources to follow a very cold trail; they were, in fact, stumbling along in the dark with no trail at all.

Maps with red pins marking the locations of the murder scenes and yellow pins highlighting where each victim was last seen dotted the squad-room walls of detective units in those areas where a serial killer was on the prowl. In some cases, maps of one state were connected to its neighboring state’s map to indicate that the killer had crossed state lines. The dilemma facing each investigation was that there was no easy way to locate similar murders in other jurisdictions, and the need for a way to do that was growing stronger by the day. While one investigator’s case might lack any viable suspect information, perhaps a similar case in another unknown jurisdiction would help provide some missing pieces. Likewise, maybe the killer one department was tracking was arrested in a subsequent case somewhere else. But without any formal method
of sharing information between departments, the lack of that knowledge caused a lot of wheel-spinning and wasted hours of investigative time. The communication process among police agencies was not systematic, causing each investigator to do the same labor-intensive search for cases as we did in the Ted murders. Because there were no clear limits as to how far killers traveled around a specific locus to search for victims, the task of finding them was often next to impossible. What was needed was a kind of national coordinating committee to gather data on homicide cases and cross-match suspect profiles in different jurisdictions. But no one local or state agency could undertake that task on its own. Ultimately, I would be a factor in bringing into being a system that would help remedy this problem.