The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (3 page)

17 The Arrest of Gary Leon Ridgway

18 Was Bundy Right?: Ted Bundy’s “Riverman” and Ridgway’s Confessions

19 Bundy’s Last Night

20 Gary Ridgway in Court

21 Gary Ridgway and His Victims

Conclusion: The Politics of Serial Murder

1
 
Too Many Bodies

Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.

—Sherlock Holmes

O
ne can only surmise what the great detective Sherlock Holmes would have gleaned from private conversations with Ted Bundy or the hunt through the dense, wet underbrush of rural King County and brassy strip joints along Seattle’s red-light Sea-Tac district for the Green River Killer, whom Ted Bundy called the Riverman. But Holmes and his amanuensis, Dr. Watson, were fictional, and anyone who works in the day-to-day world of law enforcement knows that cases do not resolve themselves neatly as they do at the end of a story. The Green River murders investigation, which began in 1982, continued until 2003, when Gary Leon Ridgway, who was arrested for four of the murders in the series, confessed to forty-eight of the murders. The clues to the killer’s identity lay for years in the cyberspace of lists of names, contact reports, and tip sheets. We know that somewhere among the hundreds of thousands of leads, along the hundreds of miles of Mylar tape, the name of the Green River killer and all the evidence that would incriminate him awaited us. I had a few guesses as to who the killer was, although I let the computer assemble the information for my probable cause—a hasty accusation can invalidate years and years of investigative work. Ted Bundy and his guys on death row in Starke, Florida, taught me how serial killers think and what will encourage them to give up their secrets. It’s all a
waiting game, unless you catch them with their hands dripping red with the blood of their victims. I learned that to bring the suspect in, you must advance your investigation in orderly phases, corner the suspect, and carefully conduct the interrogation in order to gain his confidence. But first you must break down the barriers within your own department, among your own colleagues, and within a command structure that will usually deny the existence of a serial killer at large and all the trouble it brings.

Ted Bundy was speaking to me.

“I just said that the Hawkins girl’s head was severed and taken up the road about twenty-five to fifty yards and buried in a location about ten yards west of the road on a rocky hillside. Did you hear that?”

Hear it? I was stunned!

The squeaky, chipped metal folding chair that I was sitting on suddenly shrank; I felt oversized upon it. The prison walls closed in around me and became covered with dancing, bloodstained apparitions of murdered college coeds and young girls ripped away from life in the first blossom of their beauty. I had slipped into a light hallucination in reaction to the horrifying confession I had just heard. The infamous Ted Bundy, my personal nemesis, was confessing to murder, confessing in his own name for the very first time. As the words tumbled out of his mouth, my mind was sucked into the past, swirling through a deep, dark funnel of time. Details, follow-up facts, the material from the 15-year investigation of Ted and my pursuit of him, which had been fixed rigidly in my memory, began falling away like little chunks of calcium sediment from the walls of a cave. It was almost too much to comprehend. After my 15 years of searching for the missing pieces of the Ted Bundy puzzle, it was January 1989 and Ted himself was almost casually confessing to the murders our baling-wire computer program had assigned to him. And now, in this small prison interrogation room, I was gripping the edge of my chair, waiting for him to divulge the specific facts about the murders, mutilations, decapitations, necrophilia, and burials he had carried out at the Issaquah body dump site, all of which we had uncovered years before anyone even knew there was a Ted Bundy. Now Bundy and I were face-to-face and he was in Florida’s maximum-security penitentiary. All those memories came back to me as I began probing Ted for details.

I remember the day the name Ted first came into my life—little did I know the number of years I would spend tracking the man with that name or the number of deaths to which that name would eventually be linked. But here that day was, coming back to me amid the claustrophobic atmosphere of death row.

Lake Sammamish is the nearest thing to an outdoor shrine for many of the college-age men and women who live in and around Seattle. It was particularly crowded on the Sunday afternoon of July 14, 1974, because several large companies, including Rainier Beer and Lockheed Shipyards, were having their employee picnics. Over 50,000 people had come to spend a day at the state park. Throughout the elaborate mating dance that took place in the 90-degree sunshine that afternoon, who would have noticed the appearance of another Volkswagen bug with a light-haired pretty-boy smiling from behind the wheel? Who would have been afraid of such a person?

Certainly not Janice Ott, who had ridden to the lake on her yellow Tiger 10-speed bike for a day of sunning. Janice was a pretty young lady—dainty and slight, about 5 feet tall—who had long blond hair that hung straight down to the middle of her back. She was dressed for a perfect day in the sun: short denim cutoffs and a midriff shirt. She peeled these off to reveal her black bikini as soon as she reached the sandy beach, and lay down on her towel, which she’d had stashed in her blue nylon knapsack.

Janice sunned herself, unaware of the fate that awaited her and the danger working its way toward her in the guise of a seemingly average guy. At that moment in another part of the park, a blond 25-year-old man about 5 feet 10 inches tall, of medium build and wearing a beige sling on his left arm, approached Mary Osmer on the grassy area near the bandstand where Rainier Brewery was sponsoring races. He was described, by people who saw him later that afternoon, as a good-looking all-American type wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. The young stranger asked Mary, who was clad in a very short backless, halter-type dress, if she would help him load his sailboat onto his car. She agreed with a perky “sure.” He asked her what she was doing and she replied that she was waiting
for her husband and parents. He quickly changed the conversation by saying, “This is out of sight; there are so many people.” As they walked toward the parking lot, he stopped three times to clasp his left arm as if he were in pain, explaining that he had hurt it playing racquetball. He tried to engage Mary in conversation by asking if she had ever played the game.

When she didn’t respond, the young man changed the topic, asking, “Do you live around here?”

She said, “Bellevue, and I work at Boeing.”

The man led Mary to a metallic brown VW bug. Mary didn’t see a sailboat and asked where it was. The man said, “It’s at my folks’ house; it’s just up the hill.” He motioned to the side door as if to open it for her. Mary told him she couldn’t go because she had to meet her folks. She asked him what time it was, and he replied, “It is 12:20.” She said she was already late because she was to meet them at 12:15. Almost apologetically, he said, “Oh, that’s okay, I should have told you it wasn’t in the parking lot. Thanks for bothering to come up to the car.” He walked Osmer about halfway back and repeated himself: “Thanks for coming with me. I should have told you it was not in the parking lot.”

When Mary Osmer later told us her story, her eyes glistened with guilt. To her, the stranger seemed friendly, sincere, very polite, and easy to talk to. He had a nice smile and didn’t get upset when she told him she wouldn’t go with him. She was pretty, 22 years old, newly married, and almost overwhelmed by the dangerous excitement of the mere thought of infidelity that she had had when she was approached by this attractive stranger. She wasn’t your average vague eyewitness, but gave us a detailed physical description of him when questioned. She had paid attention to every move he made because she was sizing him up for the thrill of it—the thrill of flirting with him and maybe even the thought of doing more than that. She remembered him perfectly, it turned out, and we were able to assemble the stranger’s physical description, his gait, the car he drove, his leisure activities, and the way he talked. Mary had listened to him so well, we even had a handle on his conversational style. But Mary was one of the lucky ones. This predatory stranger had had a harmless brush with her, but quickly moved on to find his next victim, leaving Mary unaware of the danger she had escaped.

When he and Mary parted, the stranger wandered away from his
car again and approached the beach, where several people were sunning, among them Janice Ott. Several other sunbathers had seen Janice arrive. One of them was Jim Stanton, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who was always happy to take in the pleasurable sight of a good-looking young woman willing to take off most of her clothing in front of him. Stanton watched as Janice applied cocoa butter to her skin and positioned herself on her towel, facing the sun. Cynthia Baker also watched the newcomer arrive. She and two of her girlfriends were lying two feet away from Ott. Another witness, Gloria Samuelson, was 10 feet away from where Janice Ott was sunning.

Ott had been lying on the beach for about half an hour when a white male, this time described by witnesses as dressed in white tennis shorts, white T-shirt, and white tennis shoes, approached her and asked, “Excuse me, could you help me put my sailboat onto my car? I can’t do it by myself because I broke my arm.” Stanton, who had been watching Ott, heard the stranger’s line and thought to himself what a shame it was that he had just been aced out by this guy with his left arm in a sling.

Cynthia Baker, the witness sitting closest to Janice’s towel, also heard the stranger’s opening line and Ott’s response: “Sit down, let’s talk about it.” Stanton, however, having lost his shot with this woman, quickly lost interest, and tuned out.

The stranger said, “It’s up at my parents’ house in Issaquah.” When we compared witnesses’ comments, we noted that the good-looking injured man had apparently learned his lesson quickly and changed his strategy to address the concerns of the first person he tried to pick up. His experience with Mary Osmer had taught him that he must relay to his unsuspecting prey that they would have to leave the park. This man was a very quick study.

Janice Ott established common ground with the stranger quickly by saying, “Oh really? I live in Issaquah. Well, okay.” Then, as Janice put on her cutoffs and shirt, she said, “Under one condition, that I get a ride in the sailboat.”

Gloria Samuelson heard Ott say, “I don’t know how to sail.”

Then she heard the eager stranger answer, “It will be easy for me to teach you.”

Janice asked, “Is there room in the car for my bike?”

The man quickly assured her by saying, “It will fit in my trunk, and my car is in the parking lot.”

“I’m Jan,” Ott said.

The stranger said, “I’m Ted.”

As the couple set out, walking toward the parking lot, Cynthia Baker heard Ott say aimlessly, “Well, I get to meet your parents, then.”

As Ted and Janice walked out of earshot, the last words Baker heard Ted say to Janice Ott were “Who do you know in Issaquah?”

Mary Osmer recalled that it was about 12:30 when she saw her handsome stranger walking with an attractive woman toward the parking lot. She didn’t know Janice Ott, but thought to herself about the stranger’s pretty companion,
Boy, it didn’t take him long to find someone else.
Mary Osmer remembered Ott’s 10-speed bike with curved handlebars and wondered where he was going to put the bike.

Janice Ott would never be seen or heard from again, and her disappearance would haunt me forever.

Around one o’clock that same afternoon, Denise Naslund, her boyfriend, and two other friends pulled up to the beach at Lake Sammamish in Denise’s Chevrolet. They joined the other sunbathers about 220 yards in front of the east restroom. Denise was a beautiful young woman, strikingly similar in appearance to Janice Ott. The main difference was that while Janice had long golden hair, Denise’s was long and black. She, like Janice, was also dressed in the uniform of the day: blue denim cutoffs and a dark blue halter top.

At about three o’clock, Diane Watson was close to the concession stand, where she saw Denise simply waiting there alone. As Watson approached the stand, she noticed a man nearby just staring at her with an intense expression. It made her nervous. He was tracking her with his eyes. She walked faster and became extra cautious as he followed her, never pulling his gaze away from her. He caught up with her, in spite of her increased pace, and asked, “I need to ask a really big favor. Will you help me load my sailboat? I normally wouldn’t ask this favor, but my brother is busy and unable to help.” She remembered that he sounded embarrassed and a little out of breath. He pointed in the direction of the parking lot with the elbow of his sling as he explained his situation.