The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (4 page)

“I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry to go,” she told him.

He said apologetically, “That’s okay.”

Watson could feel his eyes bore into her back as she walked
away. She was sure his gaze was still following her as she disappeared into the crowd of sunbathers. Her description of the man who stared at her was strikingly similar to the one that other witnesses had given of the good-looking stranger who kept approaching women in the park that sunny day.

At four o’clock that same afternoon, Laurie Adams was walking back from the restroom when the man with sandy brown hair and his arm in a sling struck again. He reached out to her as she walked by and almost belligerently demanded, “Excuse me, young lady, could you help me launch my sailboat?” He tugged on her arm—she pulled away and said, “Sorry.” Laurie Adams, Mary Osmer, Diane Watson, and Janice Ott were so similar in appearance—with their long hair, bright Pepsodent smiles, and cheerleader features—that they all might well have been sisters. This was a type of physical appearance that all of Ted’s victims shared, but we wouldn’t understand that until much later.

The stranger persisted. If he had been simply a lonely guy trying to find just the right line to pick up a girl, he would have been pitiable except for his one score. But he was a predator stalking victims, and on that Sunday at Lake Sammamish, he popped into view just long enough to become a blip on our police records. The clues he left on that day would remain, waiting for us over the months and years it took to track him down and put them together.

When we questioned witnesses, it became obvious that the stranger had approached one woman after another all afternoon. Denise Naslund was the last. At 5 feet 4 inches tall with a slender build, the 18-year-old was more than pretty. She was the girl in the yearbook upon whose face your eyes lingered. On this day, she was last seen wearing a pair of cut-off jeans, a dark blue halter top, and brown Mexican-style sandals. Shortly before 4:30, Denise Naslund and her boyfriend got into an argument with each other. Denise got up off the blanket, left her boyfriend sitting there, and went off in a huff to the east restroom, where a Seattle Police Department employee saw her. The stranger calling himself Ted crossed her path as she left the bathroom and led her away. She vanished, leaving her friends, purse, keys, and car behind.

The stranger known only as Ted had taken two victims from Lake Sammamish that day. Five had escaped. Each woman who
walked away from Ted and certain death got away for different reasons, but three escaped because they noticed something vaguely dangerous about the man who suddenly appeared out of nowhere, asking for help. Mary’s reluctance to go to a stranger’s house, Diane’s wariness at being followed and approached by a stranger, and Laurie’s suspiciousness about the nervous young man who spoke rapidly and seemed very intent on getting her to his car kept each of them from being abducted. These three women picked up subtle signals that Bundy was sending off. When questioned, they said that he seemed too intent on what he was after and was uncomfortably nervous. Furthermore, they said he had spoken rapidly as if he were reading a script and he acted as if he had had a hidden agenda. Of the five different women who were approached by the stranger that day but didn’t go with him, two would later become severely psychologically traumatized when the truth about “Ted” came out, at the thought that they could have become a murder victim.

It had been hot all day in Seattle on September 7, 1974. Roger Dunn, my partner in the homicide unit of the King County Police Department, and I were talking about the upcoming operation on my knee, which I had blown out playing recreation-league basketball. We were bouncing around, thanks to the worn shocks of Dunn’s pickup, tooling north on Interstate 5 toward Seattle. We were returning from Tacoma after loading over 20 railroad ties for the landscaping we both needed around our homes. The loose cartilage in my knee was burning because I’d been lifting the ties—it felt like the joint was actually on fire. Dunn’s radio was scratchy and the reception almost indecipherable. Voices of news announcers were drifting in and out amid the static and crackle. Despite the fuzzy reception, we caught the edge of a familiar name and we tried to tune the station in a little clearer. Just barely audible over the rasping of Roger’s ancient tuner we heard, “King County police are investigating the discovery of skeletal remains, just east of Issaquah.”

We looked at each other without saying a word and knew we were thinking the same thing—could this be it, the end of an intense
investigation into the disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974? Lake Sam was one mile from where the bones had been discovered. We spotted a phone booth near the interstate and pulled off to call the squad room. If dispatch wanted us to respond to the scene, it would be over an hour before I could get there and two hours before Roger could, since he lived 25 miles farther from the site than me. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Len Randall, our sergeant, relayed via radio for just me to respond to the call. My partner would be off the hook, at least for that afternoon. But we had to shake a leg—we still had to get the ties off the pickup bed before I could report to the newly found bone yard.

We pulled the truck up to my place and unloaded 10 ties. By the end of that chore, I was reeking of creosote and slimy with sweat. But I had to get to where the bones had been discovered as soon as possible. This was the first break in a missing-women case that had been tearing up the Seattle and King County area and making the police look like fools for months. With this thought burning in my mind, I didn’t even think about niceties. Without saying goodbye to anyone, I jumped into my unmarked car, slammed it into gear, and backed out, stopping only for a loud snapping sound that came from under the rear wheel. I opened the door and looked out. In my haste I hadn’t noticed anything in the driveway—but I had just demolished my son David’s plastic Hot Wheels car and, as if in instant retribution, my left rear tire blew out. I felt terrible. This all-important call-out wasn’t going right from the get-go, but I couldn’t be held up. I changed the tire and was on my way.

By the time I neared the crime scene I was smelling like a ripe hobo and looked slovenly and dissolute. I made a left-hand turn across two westbound lanes onto an unused road that intersected with Interstate 90 to the north. The road was blocked by a prowl car and a flock of reporters. The officer overseeing the entrance to the site did a double take when he saw me because I probably didn’t look like any cop he’d ever seen. As I walked by, I could hear a “who’s he?” from a crowd of reporters complaining about the officer refusing to let them up to the scene while permitting someone who looked like a bum to pass the barricade.

As I walked up the dirt road and across the railroad tracks, the pain in my knee opened up again and shot through my entire leg. I
was in agony, but I kept walking. I was sure this was the break all of us had been waiting for. However, my high hopes were quickly dashed. I was stunned when I saw Sergeant Len Randall, who told me straight out that the skeleton they’d found was not the remains of victims Janice Ott or Denise Naslund, the missing women from Lake Sammamish who seemed simply to have vanished into thin air along with the mysterious Ted. I was more than a bit annoyed; I started wondering why I had been called to the crime scene. Then I found out that Lieutenant Dick Kraske had just told the press and Naslund’s mother, Eleanor Rose, that Denise’s remains had not been found. I wondered how Kraske was able to come to his conclusion so quickly. He wasn’t an expert in dental identification, nor had he studied the dental charts as I had. No clothing, wallets, or jewelry—items commonly used for preliminary identification—had been found on the site. I quickly surmised that he really didn’t know anything for sure, and I was suddenly depressed and wearied by the realization that he had released a statement to the press that hadn’t been confirmed by a forensic report. On top of it all, my knee was exploding with pain, and every step over this terrain only made it worse. My earlier premonition that this call just wasn’t going to turn out to be a good one was proving correct. The next words out of the commanding officer’s mouth assured me that my luck wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

Sergeant Randall ordered me to return the next day with Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR) personnel to scour the area for any additional bones. It was pickup work. The more senior investigators had obviously thought it was a shit detail for the rookie homicide detective. Even my colleague, Detective Rolf Grunden, chuckled and commented—with a snobbishly superior attitude—that I probably wouldn’t find anything. He said they had already searched the hillside and had found nothing but bones.

Randall showed me the location where two grouse hunters had stumbled over the remains that morning. The hunters were walking along the hillside, following what seemed to be animal trails. About 50 feet west of the dirt road that ran over the hillside was the site of their first discovery, a skull. The entire hillside was engulfed in nettles and blackberry bushes intertwined with thick grass and ferns. About 30 feet downhill from the skull, the hunters had found a backbone with some ribs that had been gnawed on by animals but
were still intact. By looking at where the footpaths were and where the dense overgrowth of vegetation obscured the ground completely, it wasn’t hard to figure out that the search Detective Grunden had led was through only those areas where a human could walk. He had conducted a traditional walkthrough that could not replace a thorough search of the area. In that hunt, the only thing these investigating officers found was a matted mass of black hair that had been hidden under leaves about 15 feet midway between the locations of the skull and the rib cage. The officers had removed the remains from the scene and taken them to the medical examiner’s office before I had had a chance to see what they looked like. I had never seen a human bone before, and if the bones were not those of the missing women, why did I have to search the next day? That task should have been one for the assigned detective. My assignment didn’t make much sense, but it would soon prove to be a defining moment in my career as a homicide detective.

I returned to the Issaquah hillside discovery site the following morning before dawn, when the air hung wet and still with the fragrance of late summer. I scanned the ground I was to search—it was a wooded area of about 130,000 square feet of fir and cedar trees. The terrain was inhospitable and wild, divided only by narrow, inter-woven animal paths that twisted and turned. To the east of the hillside was a narrow dirt road that climbed up and over the hill’s crest. The road was covered with off-white round rocks that contrasted strikingly with the deep-green foliage that bordered it. The surrounding tree cover was so dense that even in daylight the forest floor was very dark, like the mysterious landscape in a fairy tale, and only occasional sunbursts escaped through small openings in the thick canopy of leaves. The pebble-covered road was the only route near the crime scene that was traveled by people, usually on horses or dirt bikes. The multitude of smaller trails through the nettles and bushes were carved by scavengers such as coyotes, wild dogs, porcupines, bears, and rodents, the types of animals that, in a final irony, had left their teeth marks on the human bones. An owl hooted through the darkness.

I was first at the scene at five
A.M.,
not expecting the rest of the searchers until eight. I wanted the solitude and the privacy to look around by myself before I had to manage a teenaged crew of ESAR personnel. I also wanted to half mourn, half ruminate over the remains of these victims amid the desolate atmosphere of the place
where they had been buried. The young patrol officer who had been ordered to secure the crime scene overnight seemed to have been truly frightened during his lonely vigil and was relieved to see another human being. His thoughts having gone in and out of dreams, rendering him barely able to distinguish reality from nightmare, he described his sentry duty as something out of Edgar Allan Poe. He’d lurched at every sound, he said, and the hours had been full of them as animals scrabbled across the hard ground, following the scent of dead things. I didn’t ask him whether he’d fired his revolver—the acrid odor of burned powder hanging heavy in the forest dew made it clear.

It was just before dawn, and the silence on the hillside was ominous. No birds were chirping, no animal paws were crunching the underbrush, and no insects were buzzing. It was desolate and lonely, as if all living things had abandoned the hillside, leaving nothing but the physical signs of death and decomposition.

Miles away at King County police headquarters, someone keyed a mike, and the sudden burst of static over my police radio interrupted my thoughts. Dispatch ordered me to go to landline—the nearest telephone—for important information. I was making plans for the search my COs (commanding officers) had ordered me to run, and now I felt they were jerking me around again at the last minute.

“How ya doin’, Slick?” Sergeant Randall began. I knew this tone of voice. It was the way he always delivered news you didn’t want to hear. Then, he paused. He had my attention. He began, cautious as he always was when on the phone, explaining that despite yesterday’s press release, the skull they’d found had positively been identified by dental comparisons as Denise Naslund, the woman abducted from Lake Sammamish. My first thoughts were of Eleanor Rose, Denise’s mother. What must she think now of the King County Police Department announcement the previous day? The news release was just one example of how poorly we were prepared to handle a case of this magnitude and to deal with the feelings of grieving parents and living victims that accompanied it.

I could have complained about this yesterday, but now there could be no complaints. This was my case. In spite of the missteps the day before, I was eager and in excellent spirits at the thought of finally closing this missing-persons case. I didn’t know then how my mood of optimism would soon alternate with gut-wrenching disgust, revulsion, and horror at each new discovery I was about to
make. This missing-persons case that I was expecting to close was really a case of multiple murders so savage that it would shake each of us who worked on it to the core of our psyches and would not release me from its grip for another 15 years.