The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (31 page)

At the moment that I opened his letter, I couldn’t begin to determine what that was.

Did Ted believe that we would take his advice, whatever that was, and catch the killer, and somehow news of his assistance would help his appeals? Other killers had tried to trade their help or information with law enforcement as a means of convincing reluctant courts that they were worth more to society alive than dead. Was Ted going to use the Green River cases as a forum to tell us about his murders? Or did he want to become involved just for his own perverse satisfaction? After all, Ted had been locked up for a long time—his pent-up fantasies might well be ready to explode. Or was he up to some trick? Was he planning a way to get us in a position of confidence, thereby catching correction officers with their guard down and escaping? Whatever Ted was up to, I was sure his motives weren’t at all altruistic.

Breaking the ice with us slowly, Ted first claimed to have occasionally read about the Green River murders and complained that the coverage in Florida was sensational, superficial, and sporadic. He did not have any special or exceptional reaction to the news of the Green River cases beyond what most other people in that part of the country had, except that by being from the Seattle÷Tacoma area, his interest was, perhaps, keener than most. Ted wrote that his daily access to media coverage increased when he began receiving a subscription to the
Tacoma News Tribune.
It was at that point that he developed what he believed were valuable insights into the Green River murders. His interest was piqued by the discovery of the body of a woman in a remote area of Pierce County, his home territory. He explained that the descriptions of the scene in a
News Tribune
article, general though they must have been, were far more detailed and evocative than any he had read before. Apparently, CNN’s accounts of the latest possible Green River murder site aroused in Ted some vivid impressions about the behavior of the person or persons responsible for the series of murders. Did Ted see the Riverman, which is what he called the Green River Killer, as a mirror image of himself? Or did Ted so envy the Riverman, who could fulfill his violent sexual fantasies and go undetected, that he had to experience the Riverman’s crimes vicariously and then take part in the hunt for him?

Setting his hook slowly, Ted claimed that it was presumptuous of him to believe that we would be interested in anything he could
provide. We may have already developed impressions, observations, and hunches similar to the ones he had. Justifying the inadequacy of his own theories, Ted was quick to point out that we had access to an enormous amount of information on the case that he didn’t. However, in spite of this, Ted suggested that an investigator be sent to talk to him only about the Green River matter. Any investigator we sent would have his hands full with the task of interviewing this “expert.”

Before the dust had settled on Ted’s first letter, another came rolling in, this time through John Henry Brown, a Seattle attorney whom Ted trusted. It was similar to the first in content, but in this one, Ted was more humble. Not claiming some noble, civic-minded motivation for offering his help, he simply stated that the Green River cases really intrigued him. He went on to say that he was sure the series of killings probably interested a lot of people, but the difference was that he had knowledge and a point of view that no one else did. Quite candidly, he admitted that he had something productive to offer. Imagine, a brutal killer like Ted Bundy desiring to be a helpful citizen.

Ted’s offer of assistance in the Green River murders rekindled the hope I had held since investigating his case of speaking to him someday about the murders he had committed. Captain Adamson felt Ted couldn’t help the Green River investigation much, but agreed that it couldn’t hurt to talk with him. Maybe Ted wouldn’t help with this case, but he could confess to murders that we hadn’t nailed him for yet.

Before we contacted Ted, I wanted to get in touch with Dr. John Berberich, a clinical psychologist, and Dr. John Liebert, a psychiatrist. Both of them were vital in producing a profile of the Ted killer in 1974. We had spoken extensively in the past of Ted Bundy’s rare personality type. Now it was time to devise a strategy to deal with the real Ted Bundy, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a confession to his murders.

First of all, we decided that any written correspondence back to Ted must be short and contain phrases similar to the ones he used in his letters so he wouldn’t misconstrue our intent. We had to
agree with everything he said. If anything, our words must mirror his; otherwise, he might become suspicious of our motives for speaking to him. On the other hand, we had to play somewhat hard to get. After all, we just couldn’t run down there at his first request. If we did, he’d have the upper hand psychologically—he’d know he had us hooked from the beginning. The strategy of the day was to make him squirm a little, make him really want us.

I wrote to him:

Dear Ted:

This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter to the Green River Task Force dated October 1, 1984. Your request that any communications we may have be kept in “strictest of confidence” is absolutely honored. I, too, am concerned that any comments made by you could be detrimental to the Green River Investigation.

I am interested in what information you have that could prove useful in apprehending the person(s) responsible for the Green River murders. In order to assess the immediacy of your assistance, could you provide just some facts about the nature of your help? I could, tentatively, visit Florida in the middle of November in conjunction with other investigative duties. I have made inquiry to your local FBI to arrange a possible visit. You may hear from them. The sensitivity of this matter was emphasized.

I respect your statement of “playing no games,” and, frankly, playing games with you is presumptuous on my part and a waste of my time. I am interested in what is useful in resolving the Green River killings and what your contribution is. We will communicate at your request only about the Green River murders and “nothing else.”

In less than two weeks, Ted responded with a 22-page letter. I didn’t expect him to write so soon, and certainly not at length as he did. By being so informative, Ted gave me the chance to analyze his effort at assistance and plan questions for our future meeting.

Ted was starved for our questions and wanted to be sure we knew that he would answer them fully. Ted immediately clarified that he had no desire to play detective. It was not a role he felt capable of playing, he said. I guess he thought we might characterize his help in that way, but he was wrong. We saw him as someone with a different and highly practical point of view.

With the seriousness of a counselor, Ted sensed he had strong insights into and feeling for what was going on in the mind of the man responsible for placing the bodies in the locations the “Riverman” had. Ted was convinced that those sites offered the best opportunity for apprehending the man. For purposes of brevity, Ted used the name Riverman to refer to the Green River Killer.

There was much more that the Riverman was doing at these dump sites than disposing of his victims’ bodies and Ted knew it. How, where, and when the Riverman hunted for, approached, made contact with, lured, and eventually abducted his victims were clues to his frame of mind and his personal motives for killing the women he did. All of this intrigued Ted. As a killer who meticulously practiced each of those things, Ted intimately knew the importance of them to our killer. However, Ted believed that this psychological aspect of the investigation, the police guesswork about the killer’s mind, was a puzzling, time-consuming, complex, and highly speculative exercise that would be less likely to lead us to our man than the kind of hard-core evidence that police dig up from good investigative work.

Ted made the disconcerting point that even if we had some firm answers to how, when, and where the Riverman abducted his victims, those answers could easily have left us a long way from finding our suspect. So what if we found out what turned the killer on? Ted suggested that we still wouldn’t know who the killer was. Unfortunately, that kind of speculation was the part of the investigation that was heavily dwelt upon, resulting in endless lines of inquiry that focused on countless leads that needed to be checked out regardless of the outcome. Ted thought if we got lucky and actually found the killer in this way, it would be called good police work. If not, it was just another wild-goose chase.

Ted revealed that his preferred strategy for catching the Riverman would be to put a newly discovered dump site under surveillance. But before getting into detail about his strategy, Ted asked a lot of his questions about the Green River cases and approached
each one of them with the acumen of a skilled researcher. Initially, Ted wanted to know what kind of “scene” the victims were into. He had heard the Green River victims characterized as teenage prostitutes. Ted asked if we thought there were exceptions. He felt that some might have been called prostitutes because they had “reputations,” were party girls, runaways, school dropouts, or delinquents. Perceptively, Ted had drawn the same conclusion about the victim class that we had—it was broader than just prostitutes.

Acknowledging the Riverman’s study of his victims, Ted emphasized that the Riverman had a sensitivity to and knowledge of the “scene”: the lifestyle, habits, movements, hangouts, and likes and dislikes of the women he was hunting from the time he started pursuing his victims. Ted didn’t know how the Riverman obtained such knowledge and understanding, but there was a good possibility that he was very much a part of that “scene” or at least on the fringes of it. Ted was sure that the Riverman’s understanding of this set could only have increased over the past couple of years.

Ted went on to say that the “scene” was more accurately described as a subcultural milieu that included prostitutes, delinquents, runaways, party girls, and their friends and peers who hung out at arcades, malls, and taverns, and who were also into drugs and partying and, generally, whose members were free-spirited and mobile. His point was that somehow the Riverman came to know his class of victims and their lifestyles in an intimate way that allowed him to manipulate and lure them to him. Ted felt that the better we understood the whole scene where the murderer was preying, the better we would understand how the Riverman works and who he is. Frequently, Ted found himself speaking from the Riverman’s frame of reference. From the Riverman’s point of view, that class of victim he chose could not be better; from law enforcement’s vantage point, it could not be worse.

Appreciating the difficulty of our investigation, Ted reiterated the litany of reasons why the Green River murders were hard to follow up on. First, the disappearances were usually not reported until days or weeks after the victims were last seen. Second, their movements were hard to trace. Third, a comprehensive list of their friends and associates was difficult to compile. And fourth, in the beginning, neither the news media nor the police paid the disappearances much attention. All these conditions were ideal for the
Riverman, who probably wanted attention as much as he wanted to get caught.

What made the police investigation almost impossible was one of the primary reasons the Riverman continued to operate in the very face of an intense police presence and publicity: his victim pool continued to provide him with ample candidates. Ted described the group of victims as extremely vulnerable because it seemed to be comprised of young women who are, in some respects, bolder, harder to intimidate and control, and more mobile than most people, as well as being inclined to adopt the it-can’t-happen-to-me attitude. Ted’s conclusion was that the Riverman continued to work his territory in part because he was confident of his abilities. He knew the police weren’t close—he might not have had the time or money to go elsewhere, but more important, he still had ready access to his potential victims.

Next, Ted spoke about the different ways the Riverman was approaching and abducting his victims. Ted emphasized the simplicity of his technique. Ted speculated that he could have played the role of a cop, like Bianchi and his cousin had, stalked, and physically carried off his victims. Hadn’t Bundy himself posed as a cop in Utah when he tried to abduct Carol DaRonch in his VW? It’s easy to purchase a police badge, stick it in your wallet, and demand that a streetwalker come along with you for questioning. Once she’s in your car, you can take her to an isolated place where you can talk. By then, it’s too late for her to escape. This process was so simple, we would probably have said, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

However, Ted’s initial sense was that the victims, like the public, were looking for the stereotypical murderer, the Henry Lee Lucas/Ottis Toole type straight out of a B horror movie: the grizzled, older drifter type with sunken eyeballs, salivating lips, and a lewd demeanor. Overall, the Green River victims took steps to avoid such people and any other males they considered strange. And for a matter of weeks or months, they were confident they had been successful in coming up with defenses adequate to the threat of the Riverman, until they met the Riverman, who fit none of their preconceptions.

Ted described the characteristics of the Riverman, and in doing so he could have been describing himself. For the victims, the Riverman didn’t fit their image of a killer and he was able to place them at ease. In spite of what people thought, he was one of the crowd, maybe a peer, maybe a pimp, maybe a john, which was why
he was so effective and hard to find. He didn’t do anything out of the ordinary that would help people remember him. His best qualities were that he didn’t stand out or come on strong in a heavy, intense, or threatening manner. Quite possibly, lots of girls he never abducted were approached by him, and he drifted alongside, scoped them out, engaged them in a conversation, dangled a lure or two in front of them, and when they didn’t bite, he casually faded out. Ted’s self-concept was that he and the Riverman were nice guy—easygoing—and looked like many of the men they hung out safely with every day. There was nothing memorable, threatening, or unusual about them; they were just other faces in the crowd. While we thought that Ted was probably right on the money, his comments didn’t really get us that much closer to our man.