The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (24 page)

As Michigan investigators tried to crack these crimes, they were faced with two major questions. Was the Stebbins murder the beginning of the series? And had the murderer struck in other locations, either inside or outside the Oakland Corridor? There were three additional murders of juveniles along the Oakland Corridor during the same time period. Was the same killer responsible for these, too?

In the early morning hours of January 16, 1976, the nude body of 16-year-old Cynthia Cadieux was found by the side of the road
in Bloomfield Township. She suffered from a fractured skull caused by impact from a blunt object. Cynthia had been sexually assaulted and sodomized. Cadieux was last seen on January 15 at about 8:30
P.M.
in Roseville, Michigan, her hometown. Informants heavily influenced the police investigation, since the only information police developed was speculation from those sources that she had been abducted, raped, and murdered by four hoodlums. Supposedly, third- and fourth-hand information revealed that her clothing was once in the possession of one of the slayer’s girlfriends. Her clothing has never been located, and none of the information originally given to police about the four hoodlums could be confirmed by the original source when investigators looked into the case again later.

The murder of Sheila Srock, a heavyset 14-year-old, was also never officially linked to the Michigan child murders. Srock was babysitting at a house in an affluent community in the north end of the Oakland Corridor on the night of January 19, 1976. Much to the horror of a neighbor who was shoveling snow and watching from a nearby roof, an assailant sadistically raped and sodomized Srock. With brutal finality, he executed her with a rapid-fire barrage of gunshots from his small-caliber semiautomatic pistol. The neighbor described the killer as a thin, white male, 18 to 25 years old, 5 feet 10 inches to 6 feet tall, with a sparse beard, prominent nose, and pointed chin. This was a slightly different description than the police had received for the abductor of Timothy King.

After murdering Srock, the killer stole a .38 revolver, some jewelry, and some other loot. Following his burglary-murder, the intruder mingled with the crowd that assembled after hearing the shots. Like a curious observer, the slayer calmly asked several people what was happening, listened to their responses, and then got into his 1967 Cadillac parked nearby, and drove away. Though investigators had a clear description of the assailant and his car, they were never able to solve Srock’s murder.

Not wanting to rule out any possibilities, Robertson cautiously included the murder of Jane Allan on the list of those deaths loosely linked to the four child murders he was investigating. To other homicide investigators, the linkage of Allan by members of the news media to the series of crimes was erroneous. Allan, a 14-year-old frequent hitchhiker, was last seen on August 7, 1976. That afternoon, she hitchhiked from her Royal Oak home to see her boyfriend in Auburn Heights, Michigan. He scolded her for hitchhiking, after which she left his home. Four days later, her decomposed body was found floating in the Miami River. The coroner believed that she was dead before she was dumped in the river near Miamisburg, Ohio. Owing to her state of decomposition, it was impossible to tell if she had been assaulted, but it was noted that she died possibly from carbon monoxide poisoning. A river disposal was thought by police to be too different a modus operandi for this killing to be included in the series of murders of young children. Another difference between this and the other cases was that the victim’s hands had been bound behind her back with pieces of a white T-shirt.

Police informants linked Allan with the Dayton Outlaws motorcycle gang. However, the police had no evidence that connected her killing to the outlaw gang. Even though there was proof of Allan’s association with the gang, police still openly theorized that she was picked up hitchhiking.

The murders of Cadieux, Srock, and Allan remained unsolved and were not conclusively linked by investigators to the series of child murders. The existence of those three murders in the midst of the child murders series exemplified the problems that investigators will always have when trying to determine which murders to include in a series. These three deaths were reasonably close in proximity and time and possessed somewhat similar characteristics in modus operandi to the other child murders, yet they were different. Robertson knew the question of whether they should have been included in the series would be second-guessed until the murders were solved. The fact that Robertson didn’t arbitrarily rule out any murder was just another reason for me to admire him as an investigator.

The police authorities reacted to and investigated the Michigan child murders in a very predictable manner. Not unlike the Ted investigation, a small task force was formed initially to investigate the first two murders that officially were linked as a series. They were totally unaware of the enormity of the investigations to come. But unlike the Ted cases, over 200 detectives eventually worked on the four murders as more and more leads piled up. The Timothy King case brought forth the first potential suspect information from a witness who observed King talking with the suspected killer. The description of the man and his car was widely publicized and resulted in the accumulation of over 11,000 tips. Just like the Ted Murders Task Force, the Michigan Child Murders Task Force members were forced to create a tip sheet of their own. To handle all the incoming information, they stored the tips in a computer. Computer database programs enabled investigators to improve handling procedures, prevent duplication of effort, and provide for clear and organized recordkeeping. Strangely enough, most serial killer investigations that I have reviewed had adopted, out of necessity and without the knowledge of what was done in any other similar investigation, some form of lead, tip, or clue sheet to handle the mountains of incoming leads. By using the tip sheet, investigative supervisors could better evaluate and prioritize what was crucial to investigate immediately.

In keeping with their trailblazing nature, Michigan’s police authorities were the first serial murder force to apply for federal assistance in the form of a $600,000 grant from the now-defunct Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The grant money was needed to cover a steadily increasing heavy burden on the budgets of many police departments. The only string attached to the grant was that the police force that received it would have to continue funding the task force so they could continue to search for the killer. Altruistically, the grantor and Robert Heck, program manager and VICAP committee chairman, performed a retrospective analysis into the investigative activities of the Michigan experience that he hoped would serve as a guide and be a benefit to future serial-murder investigative efforts. That formal evaluation process remains unique to the Michigan child murders case. Unfortunately, previous serial-murder investigations were buried like their victims, because they were too frustrating, stressful, and embarrassingly inept for investigators and members of their departments to
participate in a meaningful critique of their work. Most supervisors of those cases would just as soon have forgotten what went on in the past, even though clues from those investigations could help solve future serial-murder cases.

Similar to the beliefs of investigators on the Atlanta Child Murders Task Force, Captain Robertson was convinced that the Michigan Child Killer was right in front of their noses all along, that they had probably even talked to him. In his sadder moments during our conversation that night, Captain Robertson said that he fantasized that the killer probably laughed to himself in the shadows as the Michigan Child Murders Task Force’s own life expired.

As our conversation came to an end, the darkened lounge emptied out, leaving us alone with our mutual frustrations, brought on by unresolved serial-murder investigations. We were thankful that at times, the roaring laughter from police officers across the room responding to one war story after another had interrupted us during the evening. But what happiness there was around us disappeared when those people left the lounge. The preceding hours of discussion had left their mark on Robertson. I sensed his seriousness, stress, and intensity in his constantly changing body movements and his carefully chosen words. At least I knew who committed the Ted murders, even though Ted was still beyond my reach. Robertson hadn’t had the same kind of closure; the unsolved child murders wore heavily on him. Even with all his frustrations and the embarrassment of never catching the killer, he was clear in his resolve to air the problems confronted by the Michigan child murders investigation so that other dedicated investigators would not suffer similar experiences. In any serial-killer workshops, Robertson was the most vocal and strong-willed of any of the participants. When it appeared that the wheels of the federal bureaucracy were not moving fast enough toward establishing a serial-murder tracking program for him, he started one of his own in Michigan, independent of VICAP. He—and I, too—felt that those slow wheels meant more of our children murdered at the hands of serial killers.

By the end of our working groups, two FBI agents, Robert Ressler and Roger Depue, were noticeably quiet. There were the
meetings for the workers, namely us, and then there were meetings for the “administrators,” who included Ressler and Depue. Keppel and Robertson were not invited. Something secret, which always accompanied any FBI involvement, was going on behind closed doors, not meant for the entire group’s ears.

My next and last VICAP workshop was in November 1983. We had returned with over 30 murder cases that had been entered on the draft VICAP crime report. The data was entered into a Xerox computer. The Xerox folks were courting the VICAP administrative staff in hopes of landing a megabucks deal with the federal government. The crime analysts, Ken Hanfland, Jim Howlett, and Charlie Hill, were to experiment by analyzing the 30 cases and demonstrating their similarities to the workshop participants. The attempt at computer analysis was a failure since the database program was ill suited for crime analysis, so they compared the cases manually. The rudimentary analysis worked partially, because some cases were very similar to each other, but the sample was far too small to claim a resounding success, even though it was portrayed so in the media.

At this workshop, I met Sergeant Frank Salerno of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for the first time. He was the primary investigator in the Hillside Strangler cases and pursued Kenneth Bianchi to Washington State. No doubt about it, he was one of best serial-murder detectives I have ever met. He and his partner, Gil Carillo, were to gain notoriety later as principal investigators in the Nightstalker cases, which frightened the citizens of Los Angeles and the surrounding communities for several months until Richard Ramirez was caught. Salerno, like Robertson, was not afraid to air the problems he experienced in order to help other investigators avoid them. Salerno, Robertson, and I hung fairly close together during the meetings.

The mood of the workshop was ominous because there was a basic division in philosophy about where to house the VICAP unit. Also, the agenda at this workshop seemed to be staged. It included a presentation by Bob Ressler and Roger Depue on criminal personality profiling, later referred to as crime scene assessment. It was always interesting to hear a presentation on profiling murderers because it contained graphic slides of the most bizarre and sexually sadistic murders, but I didn’t see the point for its inclusion at
this meeting. We weren’t at a training seminar. We were there to figure out how to make VICAP work. Toward the end of their presentation, Roger Depue revealed the apparent ulterior motive behind their presence. The FBI was making a strong bid to have VICAP as part of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. He was quite convincing since they intended to hire civilian homicide investigative experts as personnel in the unit in hopes of satisfying local law enforcement officials. They hoped even to entice investigators by proposing to appoint Pierce Brooks as the first VICAP manager. Their thinking was that having the FBI’s manpower and budget behind the VICAP effort would enhance its chances of success.

Salerno, Robertson, and I knew that housing the VICAP unit within the FBI meant a certain death of the program. First of all, promises of financial backing are just that, promises. After all the hoopla about VICAP died down, would the FBI’s commitment and resources dry up? Furthermore, civilian police investigators would not systematically submit murder cases to an FBI VICAP unit because distrust of the FBI had been long institutionalized. In some quarters, there was flat-out refusal from local police departments to cooperate in any fashion with the FBI. Information sharing between the FBI and local police agencies has long been perceived as a one-way street; the locals shared their information with the FBI, but the FBI never reciprocated. Why should we expect anything different from the VICAP unit if it was housed in the FBI? What would the FBI do if no one sent any cases to them? We were shocked at the idea and objected to the FBI’s plan, but, unbeknownst to us, the decision had already been made behind the scenes. Apparently, the administrators of the VICAP planning group had already bought the idea of placing VICAP within the FBI. They didn’t offer a proposal for us to ratify, but still wanted our support for the Department of Justice fait accompli.

Far away from Washington, California, and Michigan, and within the secure confines of the FBI Academy, a one-day VICAP workshop was held in November 1984. Most of the participants at previous workshops were present, except for three homicide investigators—salerno, Robertson, and Keppel, persona non grata. We weren’t invited. During the last two hours of that workshop Robert Ressler and Roger Depue introduced the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC). The three components of
NCAVC were the Criminal Personality Profiling Unit, the Violent Crime Research Unit, and VICAP, all to be housed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. They announced that VICAP would officially open its doors in June 1985. I felt slightly exploited, but because to me the program was so important no matter where it was housed, I told Pierce Brooks that I would do everything I could to help him succeed.