The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (41 page)

“And hope to draw him out,” Ted offered. Ted pushed his previous discussion of staking out fresh crime scenes as a preferred proactive method, rather than struggling with one he had not considered. “I don’t remember that proactive technique that you mentioned. I wouldn’t want to say that wouldn’t work. I don’t know. That’s an interesting idea. I do know that I can say that the other thing would work. And that a person is just as likely to come back to the site that hasn’t been discovered, especially a fresh one, as he is to one that has been found. In fact, if you have somebody who’s clever and as vigorous as the Riverman is at attempting to avoid detection and apprehension, it makes sense to me that he’s going to do what he can to avoid coming in contact with law enforcement. And, yes, the dump sites where the bodies were left are significant. There’s no underestimating that. In fact, that’s really all you have right now. All you have are the burial sites. You don’t have anything else. The only places you know of for sure that the Riverman and the victims were at were those sites. There may be some other evidence, but these are certainties, no question that the victim and the guy were there. That’s a tremendous advantage. That’s where I would focus. Someone sitting where I’m sitting, that’s where I would focus my investigation. Not all of it, but certainly a significant portion of it. Perhaps there would be some curiosity on a murderer’s part once it’s been discovered. But what if it isn’t? What if he doesn’t come back to a fresh site because it’s under surveillance? Well, it’s a risky take. But I think they’re good risks, considering what you’re up against.”

Another proactive measure recommended by the FBI was creating a supercop image, somebody coming into the investigation who’s going to crack the case. And then, it was hoped, the suspect
would communicate in some way with him. “What do you think of that?” I asked.

“Ummm, well,” muttered Ted, as though the supercop technique was absurd. “What dummy would fall for it? In terms of a good understanding of what’s going on, this is what I would start with. And what I see here is when you formed your task force and most of the bodies had been found. I’m not saying he stopped, but it would be fair to say that he’s not as obvious as he was in eighty-two and eighty-three. You’re not finding them the way you were, anyway. That’s not to say he’s not putting them out there, but it doesn’t look like it to me, unless there’s something going on beyond the scenes and you are in fact in contact with somebody who sounds like he’s taunting you or getting off on something.”

“Boy, we can tell you about the cabdriver who was a suspect. Have you read any of the articles about him? This guy has been in the news. He calls Channel Seven all the time, and they interview him,” I said.

Ted said he heard something about a cabdriver. He said, “You don’t have any fibers? No. It’s no question to ask, but you must not have much because I’m sure you’ve done what you can to pin him down. It sounds like he’s a little weird.”

Sooner or later we were bound to get to the subject of the polygraph. It seemed like a good time, since the Green River investigators had used it on several suspects. I asked, “What do you think about the polygraph? Do you think that a guy like the Riverman could pass a polygraph? Could a guy flunk a polygraph that wasn’t the killer or, conversely, could a guy who was a suspect pass?”

Ted’s polygraph experience was limited. For his responses to those questions, one could surmise that he had been given a polygraph about his murders at one point and flunked. He said, “I used to watch the F. Lee Bailey program. It’s on late at night. And I know a little bit about polygraphs. You can have experts coming out of the woodwork, but I can tell you, if it’s properly administered, I don’t think they can be beaten. But they tell me innocent people can flunk. But Bailey’s theory is if you have a good person,
they should be able to figure that out. And that’s probably the bottom line. If your man is good enough, I don’t think that the person who’s killed all these people will pass.”

Ted mentioned on more than one occasion that the Riverman might have stopped, moved, was hiding bodies better, got sick, died, or got himself locked up for something else. I asked him, “If he’s locked up, what’s he locked up for?”

Surprisingly, Ted said, “Unrelated or something that only went so far but didn’t end. I mean, like burglary. Or car theft. That’s just a wild guess. He could be locked up for something else.”

Additionally, I inquired, “Is there another reason he could stop, such as [being] born again?”

Emphatically, Ted replied, “No. As far as the radical personality change, whether it be a religious experience or a moral reformation or whatever you want to call it, it’s not out of the question, but highly unlikely, to the point of being impossible that he stopped of his own accord.”

While Ted was making notes, I saw that he wrote down to check out the triangle of Bellingham, Spokane, and Portland, cities over 300 miles apart. I asked him if he saw some special significance in that.

Ted explained, “If I was in that position, compelled to range further because I felt that things had just gotten too hot close to home, then I would go to areas further away like Portland, Spokane, Bellingham, Everett, or the nearest metropolitan areas of any size. He’s still focusing on the same types of victims, so that was the only reason I mentioned those three. Going all the way to Spokane might be a little bit out of the question. That’s a several-hundred-mile drive. And this guy might not have the time or the money to be doing that very much. Spokane’s out of his territory. And I think he’s successful in Seattle and Pacific Highway South because he just knows it. He’s been up there enough that he knows it and has a feel for it. When he starts to range far afield, he’s more likely to make mistakes because he doesn’t have that sensitivity to what’s going on, to the scene, to the presence of police, and who’s supposed to be where. And so if he goes to Portland, he hasn’t the experience of being in the area.”

I told Ted, “If you want to compare prostitute areas, Spokane is nothing like Portland. Portland is rivaling Seattle as does Ponders Corner in Tacoma or the downtown area in Tacoma of Pierce County.”

With a high degree of certainty, Ted made a prediction. “Well, I think the Pierce County people are missing a bet. I just get the feeling the guy is working out of Pierce County. Don’t ask me why. It’s the pattern of where the bodies are. South King County is like north Pierce County. Somebody should look over their shoulder, because this guy could very well be working out of Tacoma and just coming up to an area which is so notorious as Pacific Highway South. Even though he’s trying to stay out of his own backyard, I’ll bet you from time to time he can’t help himself. Just a matter of circumstances might prevent him from some period of time getting up to Seattle or up to Sea-Tac. He might see a situation in his own area that he can’t ignore, that he can’t overlook, something too good to refuse. What perplexed me about the Green River list is, there’s only one from Pierce County, Wendy Coffield. I had the feeling that there should be more.”

Ted focused heavily on the body recovery sites, so I asked him what creative things we might do at the pick-up points. He said, “I think Pacific Highway South is pretty well played out. Sometime in the near future he’s going to move, like you say, to Ponders Corner, maybe even Portland, if he feels like he’s played out the Seattle area. So you might want to look into cooperation with other agencies. You might want to do the obvious things. There are decoys. I don’t know what else you could do. And I doubt that simple surveillance, writing down the license plate numbers of every weirdo which stops and pulls out a pair of binoculars would be an effective proactive technique.

“If he’s coming into an area, he’s coming in there often, even though he may not be taking anybody out. He is conditioning himself to be very familiar with the place. He’s working with what he’s up against, and he’s looking for surveillance. He’s looking for cops. He’s looking for plainclothes. He’s looking for anybody who
seems to be out of place or is hanging around. He doesn’t want anybody watching him.”

Rewards for any information leading to the capture of a killer are one way for the public to participate in the investigation. I wondered what Ted thought about rewards. So I asked, “How about the significance of a reward fund? How do you feel about something like that?”

Almost too obligingly, Ted said, “Well, it gets you a lot of information. I don’t think this guy’s talked to anybody. It’s unhealthy, if he’s talked to anybody. So you would get a lot more of what you got already, a lot of people whose boyfriends or guys they picked up in bars did something weird to them, talked weird to them, looked strange. They call in about
Hustler
centerfolds hung up in the bathroom. I’m sure you cannot underrate the value of having citizens calling in and expressing their fears to you about different individuals, because, of the five, ten, or twenty thousand reports you get, one of them might be your man. But how do you know that? Well, what I’m saying is the reward fund by itself wouldn’t give you what you want. I think you’re going to get the same stuff you’re getting already. If somebody’s going to talk to you, they’re going to talk to you. This is not a situation where anybody knows something and is holding it back for money or waiting to come forward. The reason no one has come forward is because nobody knows. And, sure, it will get you more stuff, but it gets you so much more stuff, would you really be ahead of the game? It gets you more people calling. You don’t need that. You might get lucky, and maybe it’s the politically wise thing to do. I wouldn’t overlook it, though. My opinion is it’s not going to give you a better quality of information than what you’re getting already. Just like anything else, it wouldn’t hurt.”

In the case of Canadian serial killer Clifford Olson, Olson’s own family was paid $10,000 for every victim that Olson confessed to killing. This prompted Dave to ask, “Do you think if the reward was high enough, this kind of person might come forward and say, “ ‘Okay, I’ll take the money as long as my family gets it.’”

Ted eagerly clarified what he’d just said. “That’s a horse of a different
color. You said ‘reward’; I thought you would have meant rewards for somebody other than the man to come forward. That might be a proactive technique of a different kind. It might not get him to come forward, but it might get him thinking. It would put the pressure on him of a different kind. It would get him wondering that you think he might be weak enough or disposed towards doing something like that. I think that would be answered.”

Troubled, Dave inquired, “Would that make him mad?”

“I think it might insult his intelligence or his own opinion of himself for someone who goes out of his way to not get caught. And if the police are saying, ‘Call and turn yourself in, we’ll give you some money.’”

Then Ted moved into a new area of proactive strategies. “I think the more you can disturb this guy—well, I have two opinions of it. On the one hand, it sounds kind of callous, but maybe the best thing that could be done is to get this guy to start killing again, at least openly. And you start finding something. I know that’s hard, but if he goes underground, you’re really up a creek. So, it depends on the kind of guy he is. Now, if he’s the kind of guy who loves for things to be quiet, he doesn’t like any publicity. He wants things to quiet down. Then the lack of publicity over a period of time would quiet his nerves and bolden him to the point where he would start killing again. I think the publicity and the activity of the task force does intimidate him. On the other hand, he may be just unstable enough where if you fuck with his mind, either with proactive techniques you mentioned about the supercop or some other things, or something like a reward, you could make him more disordered, make him less capable of covering his tracks, and make him more nervous. Because a nervous man is going to make mistakes, a complacent man is going to make mistakes.”

Dave was interested in how Ted would put pressure on the Riverman to make a mistake that would lead to his capture. He asked, “Do you have any suggestions on how to make him more nervous?”

Ted thought before answering. “Well, publicity makes him nervous, but perhaps in a way that you don’t like. It makes him inactive.
Or he may change. I was thinking last night—I had a note to myself, trying to think of some way to manipulate him. I guess you guys got to be honest with him. But what could you put in the paper, if you’re going to put anything, that would make this guy react in some way that you could exploit or detect?

“I haven’t given that a lot of thought yet. And I’m going to put a note down on my list of notes to think about that some. Because I know publicity has a powerful effect on somebody in that situation. He wants to know what you know. But, on the other hand, he may assume that if there’s no publicity, it means you don’t know anything, things are cooling down, and people are forgetting about the cases. Everything is cool.”

I reminded Ted, “One of the things that we talked about before was the fact that the bodies in the river didn’t work. He went on to land. But they had worked before in other cases. Do you think that probably he has dumped in the river before someplace?”

Confidently, Ted said, “My answer to that is yes. I think there’s a good chance he has. It’s not a novel way of disposing of a body, but, like I’d say, anybody who follows the search-and-rescue news over the summers in the Pacific Northwest, when people are searching for hunters, fishermen, and rafters and such who’ve been swept away in a river, knows that there are times when they don’t find those bodies. And he dumped them in there for a reason. He dumped Coffield and company in there because he didn’t think they’d be found. He must have had some reason for believing that. Maybe if he dumped them up north of Enumclaw, in that stretch of water, there was a better chance they wouldn’t have turned up. I’d only be guessing there. But I think it’s either something he either heard of somebody else doing, or he did it himself and was successful. My impression was since he did it five times, and did it four times even after one had been discovered, he was evidencing some kind of belief that that kind of disposal technique worked. And that indicates to me that he’d done it before and it worked. Sometimes, the rivers will swallow people up.”