The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (28 page)

There were two decisive factors affecting a continuing police investigation
of him. First of all, detectives located a female associate and street person who claimed to have talked with him prior to any public announcement about the identities of the last three victims. She told police that he told her the names of Chapman, Hinds, and Mills before their identities appeared in the newspapers or on television. The bad part was that she was interviewed after the victims were identified, so her recollection of the time the suspect told her their names might have been mistaken.

Second, the prime suspect’s lifestyle and personal characteristics fit the psychological profile of the Green River killer done by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. It was in that suspect’s packet that I found the actual report documenting the psychological profile of the Green River Killer. Its characteristics of the killer, along with the street person’s version of her contact with the prime suspect, were used as the basis for a search warrant affidavit for his person, home, and vehicles. I also noted that the prime suspect was overly cooperative with police investigators. They probably didn’t need the warrant, because he consented to everything, including polygraph examinations. Unfortunately for those investigators, he drew an in-ordinate amount of attention to himself by conducting numerous interviews with members of the news media about what the detectives had told him or were doing with him. That behavior to me was inconsistent with my impressions of what the Green River Killer was like. I felt the last thing the Green River Killer would want was any public attention. It was obvious from a lack of eyewitness information that he had diligently avoided apprehension by intentionally concealing his approach to and disposal of his victims.

The profile was a real piece of work. On the one hand, it attempted to give investigators some idea of what a prostitute killer might be like, but it also described most of the male population engaging in illicit activity along the Sea-Tac strip. I believed the profile to be a major distraction for the investigators because, since it was too general, it forced police to focus on tweaking the profile to the killer instead of investigating the known facts of the case. The profile, like too many serial-killer profiles, winds up becoming the be-all and end-all for investigators instead of the means of solving the crime. Quite frequently, administrators have used it to fend off press inquiries about the status of the investigation, saying, “We’re waiting for the profile.”

In some cases, profiles can be valuable if the offender is an arsonist
or a completely disorganized and mentally disturbed killer. More is known about the personalities and crime scenes of those types of offenders than is known about the repetitive, evasive, and experienced serial killer. The proactive tactics recommended by the FBI behavioral scientists for capturing arsonists and disorganized killers have frequently worked, but recommendations about detecting the identity of an unnamed serial killer have yet to be proven.

The disclaimer at the beginning of that profile report, and of every profile report I have seen since, should have been the first hint of its utility in the Green River investigation: “The final analysis is based upon probabilities, noting, however, that no two criminal acts or criminal personalities are exactly alike and therefore the offender at times may not always fit the profile in every category.” But with the Green River profile, the characteristics of the offender were
not
exclusive to the point where most males along Pacific Highway South could be eliminated. In fact, the profile was more inclusive than exclusive and fuzzed the investigation to the point where it almost became useless. In fact, as we eventually learned, even Ted Bundy corrected the profile, pointing out that one of the murders of a 36-year-old female should
not
have been on the Green River list. In 2003 the killer himself confirmed Bundy’s observation. The killer also revealed how flawed the FBI profile was. In addition, and probably more crucial to the value of the profile, the very nature of a prostitute killer may be the reason for the more general profile, along with insufficient crime scene information left by the killer. But a flexible and astute homicide investigator, willing to consider input from all sources, must be wary of the sometimes overconfident attitude of an FBI profile, for it is not necessarily reliable.

Years later, what surprised me was that much of the same terminology and descriptions used in the report, which I believed to have been unique to the Green River Killer, appeared as the routine characteristics of sexual homicide offenders in the book
Sexual Homicide,
written by John Douglas and Robert Ressler of the FBI’s BSU and Ann Burgess. My concern today is, has the profiling effort in serial-murder cases by the FBI been only a superficial guess about the background of killers in any series of cases? They have consistently avoided any academic scrutiny of their research into serial killers while exploiting those of us who have so faithfully given cases to them for examination over the years.

Carefully examining the FBI’s profile in the Green River files and desperately looking for those unique features that would assist investigators, I found a paragraph in which profilers interpreted the phraseology of the medical examiner who performed the post-mortem examination on Marcia Chapman’s body. It read: “ulceration consistent with anthropophagy was located over the right nipple. With these findings, we can now categorize this subject as a lust-murderer.” I was shocked and excited by that discovery, so I immediately called Dave Reichert. I inquired, “How come you never told me that the killer had left his bite marks on Chapman?”

“It’s news to me, too,” he said, surprisingly interested in the prospect. What that meant to the case was that it was the only known physical evidence in any of the murders that could be linked directly to the killer, should he be identified.

I told Dave, “If there truly was a bite mark, I didn’t see any evidence forms in the file that reflected the collection of bite mark evidence.” Routinely, the King County medical examiner, Dr. Don Reay, ran an efficient office. If there was bite mark evidence present on any homicide victim, he would have called in a forensic odontologist to take the necessary photographs, measurements, and casts of the teeth marks.

I checked the autopsy report on Chapman, and, sure enough, the sentence was there. I was quick to find out from Dr. Reay that
anthropophagy
was used to refer, in general, to bite marks of any species from the animal kingdom, not specifically human bite marks. So, in the case of Chapman, the wound was nothing more than a fish bite. End of excitement! Perhaps the FBI should use a dictionary—or at the very least, verify questionable statements. By this time, my curiosity had been piqued. Would the FBI dramatically change their profile with that amended information? I called John Douglas with the correct information. He said the absence of a human bite mark didn’t change his views about the Green River killer being a lust-murderer. I didn’t see anything else in the profile report that was usable. In fact, I was hopeful that the prime suspect was not the Green River Killer, because if anything was found that would have linked him to the murders, a search warrant affidavit based on the FBI’s nonspecific profile would never have survived the probable-cause test of an evidence-suppression hearing.

I continued to fight the urge to investigate the cases myself. It was
highly likely that the prime suspect was more than just a casual acquaintance of some of the victims. Interestingly, if he was the murderer, it would have been an unusual instance wherein, like Ted Bundy, a repetitive lust-killer had already acquainted himself with his victims. It would have shot down the FBI’s premise that the killer was a stranger to his victims, but then the FBI hadn’t really been aware of Bundy’s stalking Lynda Healy until well after the fact.

I was also surprised to find a critical deficiency in the investigation of the prime suspect: not one friend, family member, or acquaintance of any Green River victim was contacted regarding their knowledge of the prime suspect. The timing of the discovery of that omission was unfortunate. I realized that, owing to the publicity that followed the suspect, care had to be taken in the approach to those potential witnesses to assure that they neither claimed knowledge just for the sake of convenience nor sought to embellish their statements.

There was also insufficient information in the files about physical evidence and the results of its examination in the Green River murders. Because of that, I could not do a meaningful assessment of the evidence. I suggested that the construction of a chart listing physical evidence by victim, cross-referenced by trace evidence found and the likely comparison against suspect trace evidence, was essential. Investigators could not search for evidence in a suspect’s house or car without knowing what they were to look for and what had already been discovered by laboratory personnel. I found several references to laboratory examinations that stated “nothing matches.” What was the “nothing” that they were referring to? The items checked were not listed in a specific lab report contained in the Green River files. Investigators needed that information to know what to search for. It wasn’t the fault of laboratory personnel that the reports were not in the files. It was up to the detectives to get them and examine them for usefulness to their ongoing investigation.

Up to this point, I had focused on general investigative problems with the investigation. Fifteen pages of my 33-page report on the Green River investigation covered a detailed description of questions to ask various witnesses in each murder investigation. The
specific details were necessary because there were so many unanswered questions about the murders. I supposed that the most obvious reason for the seeming lack of follow-up was that any inquiry about a particular prime suspect almost always set the investigation back and took valuable time away from interviewing others who might have had important information to supply. Given the limited manpower available and the tremendous scope of the investigation, it was in some ways remarkable that the investigators had made the progress they had.

Up to that point in my preliminary analysis, I had been able to review from reports that had been forwarded to me. Now, however, I was at a point in my review where I was compelled to abandon that method and to trust my gut instincts once more and provide my recommendations on what should be done with the Green River investigations.

First of all, I wanted to give my own disclaimer. My review was not all-inclusive. I felt an investigator or administrator familiar with the cases could have undoubtedly discovered more potential leads to follow up and assure the thoroughness of the investigation. What was eerie was that my assumptions about the Green River killer eventually came true.

The killer demonstrated his zeal to conceal the bodies of his victims even though he was unsuccessful. Wendy Coffield, the initial victim, was found floating on the surface of the river. Subsequent victims were found in the river even though they had been weighted or anchored to the bottom, but Lovvorn, the second in the series, was not in a river. That change indicated the killer’s ability to be flexible and to use those disposal areas that were convenient to him. The delay in finding Lovvorn’s body might have suggested to the suspect that he utilize similarly remote areas away from the river for disposal of bodies in the future, I suggested in my report. I also said that the Green River dump site had become too well known an area to dump a body in, and thus it was likely that the killer’s flexibility would lead him to more remote areas, where he would feel comfortable.

Information we had gathered up to that point from FBI profilers, psychologists, and psychiatrists formed a consensus that the killer wouldn’t stop as long as he felt he was successful. Every clean abduction and murder, every getaway, every body disposal that went unnoticed
by the police until after the victim was discovered was a boost to the Green River Killer’s ego and an encouragement for him to go on. He was demonstrating his control—sexual control—over his victims, over the tribe of hookers on the Sea-Tac strip, over the police, and over the press. Killers such as Ted Bundy, Wayne Williams, John Wayne Gacy, and Gerald Stano didn’t stop until they were caught. They would not give up their power as long as they walked free. I predicted in my report that the five or six victims we had linked to the Green River killer was just a good start, or merely the continuation of a long chain of murders. I surmised that the organizational complexities of the continuing investigation would only mount.

My overall recommendations were just the opposite of what King County administrators probably wanted to hear. Instead of suggesting that they pare down the force of detectives, I recommended that they beef up the task force and pursue the investigation as aggressively as possible. I based these recommendations on the fact that no serial-murder case, to my knowledge, had ever been solved using the time and abilities of just one or two investigators. To give this case even the slightest chance of being solved, an immediate formation of a full-time Green River team of detectives was necessary. How many detectives? I left that up to the administration.

Eliminating duplication of effort was a priority. In my report, I went on to point out that check-and-balance procedures in the follow-up investigation among cases must be implemented to share information among different detectives, in order to prevent the duplication of interviews and the overaccumulation of information. I suggested that those detectives familiar with the cases should synthesize the information gained and assure that each member of the task force be assigned so that all leads were followed up on and reported back to a central processing desk.

Because so much information would be generated by a full-time investigative team, it would be necessary to designate one person on the team through whom all information would initially flow. That person could not be assigned field duties because his or her assignment would primarily involve case organization and assignment. What was characteristic of previous serial-murder investigations was that large amounts of information and leads flowed through many hands, resulting not only in duplication, but in an almost total lack of coordination and direction.