The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (46 page)

“But not all.”

“Not all. No,” I agreed.

Ted went on to say, “You know, look at yourself, nobody’s consistent. They don’t do everything the same every time. Why he would do something to one victim as opposed to another—sometimes it may be baffling, maybe even to him. If it’s a him.”

The way Ted ended this response led to a broader question—who was the Riverman? Was he one man? Were there two people acting in concert? Ted covered all his bases by saying, “You know, when you say something like that, it raises the possibility of maybe two people. Like one guy buries them; the other guy just drops
them off. You asked me earlier if I thought it was one or two and I—or even women or anybody—I mean, I certainly wouldn’t want to limit my own possibilities there. I mean, my guess is it’s one, but when you start finding variations like one buried, one not, or some of the bodies mutilated in ways that others aren’t, then you have to start thinking about more than one, I guess. But I’d say that if he’s just raking stuff over some of them and burying others, that may be just the fact that he just happened to have a shovel in the car this time. And the other times he forgot it. I mean, you might say, ‘Well, this guy is more competent than that.’ Perhaps. But perhaps not. I think that the last thing that he’s thinking when he leaves the house is, ‘Is a shovel in the trunk?’ Maybe he doesn’t like carrying the shovel in the trunk because it looks dirty, or only puts the shovel and the pick in the trunk when, you know, he really got his head together when he was leaving the house.”

Ted had read the material published by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit about buried victims having some emotional attachment to the killer. So I pressed him. “How about any compassion and emotion for the particular victim that was buried?”

Ted replied, “I see what you mean. I don’t know. I’m not saying that a person is devoid of compassion or might have more compassion for one victim or the other. But I think, my guess is when it comes to disposing of the victims, he’s doing the best he can to dispose of them as unattractively as he can. Given what he knows about, which is rudimentary, he learns by trial and error. And, you know, sure, there may be some ritualistic significance by burying that one body, but my guess is there is no more ritualistic significance than the past. He just happened to decide to bury that one that day as opposed to not burying the others. But in all cases, it’s obvious he’s trying to hide them. And, you know, I bet you, if he’s started burying them all, a lot less of them would have been found. You know, if he had been burying them properly. So, this is just one man’s opinion. Right? And I’d say anything is possible, but my guess is it’s just an exception to the rule. One of those nagging inconsistencies that I’m sure, you know, keep you awake at night. Right?” Ted chuckled.

Knowing that some killers keep their victims for a period of time before disposing of them, I asked Ted, “Is he keeping one? Do you think he’s keeping them for any length of time at all?”

Finally, I had struck a real nerve with Ted. Instead of just cooperating with us from the perspective of an expert, things suddenly got personal. Ted himself had kept victims in his possession for different lengths of time after he had killed them, and talking about this subject suddenly invigorated and excited him. He responded, “Good question, and I have asked that throughout my notes. You know, I felt when I got this data you sent me the other day that I might get some handle on or some feeling about how long he is keeping them. And my guess is, considering the fact you see these burial sites all over the place, a concentration of burial sites in the Kent valley between I-5 and Star Lake and that area, he’s doing a lot of hunting around. His victims disappear Sunday through Saturday, like I said. My guess is he doesn’t have a family, like probably, in many cases, your typical serial killer. He has a lot of time on his hands without worrying about who’s asking where he is. And … I kind of lost track of where I was. Excuse me. Oh, as far as … So, I said there’s a good possibility, let’s say he lives alone, that he could well take them home. Right?”

When Ted would get excited about what he was talking about, he frequently lost track of what he was saying. It was almost like Ted was talking about himself and then was thrown off his line of thought when he realized he was talking to us.

Ted continued, “And keep them for a while. And perhaps some of your evidence would show that. In fact, the girl disappeared definitely at this particular time and place, and her body was found seven days later, and she’d only been dead for two days. Now, it doesn’t look like you have very many fresh bodies that can be analyzed like that. You have a few in the Green River that are close and the Christensen girl was close, between five days. Between the time she disappears and the time her body is found. Right? Well, that gives you something to work with. But when I started looking at where the girls are being found and where they disappeared
from, my feeling is generally he’s killing them shortly after. You know, he’s not taking them a great distance. That is, he’s not taking them home.”

“You think he’s probably doing it in his car, then?” Dave asked.

“I would guess that whole thing is taking place in a car. He’s picking up in the car, [then] they’re being killed in a few hours in the car, and dumped. You know, the most efficient way he knows of and as quickly as he can. And he’s not lugging them all over, either dead or alive, and keeping them for a few days. There may be exceptions. There are always exceptions to the rule. I’d say you can’t count on this guy doing it the same way every time. I’d say the pattern that showed itself to me, here, where the bodies are found so close to where they disappeared and even there up along Interstate Ninety, just indicated to me that once he’s killed them, that he’s getting rid of them. And let’s say every once in a while he may just—if he has someplace he can take them, if he lives alone in a house or in a private apartment that he has a private entrance—he may take them home. But it doesn’t look like it to me.” We don’t know if this was indeed what the Riverman did, but we did know that Ted had just explained what he himself did with his victims.

According to Ted’s description, the Riverman had used the river and then the woods, farther south and southeast, as disposal grounds for his victims. But I wanted Ted to discuss whether the Riverman had entered a residence to attack victims, as he had done. Would the Riverman have begun his series by breaking into someone’s house in the middle of the night and strangling her? There were unsolved murders involving females who were attacked in their own houses, apartments, and condos in the years preceding the first river victim we had located. Would the Riverman enter a building or would he think it was too risky?

Eagerly, Ted asked, “And their bodies were left there?”

I responded, “Yes.”

Ted’s expression indicated his perplexity as he said, “Were they prostitutes?”

I clarified that the women had questionable morals. “They go to bars and get themselves picked up for a one-night stand.”

Speaking as someone as efficient in different modi operandi as the Riverman, Ted said, “Well, he did not start with either Agisheff or Coffield. I feel that very strongly. He didn’t just work up to committing four or five murders a month without extensive practice.” Ted likened it to “somebody who is looking for the right hole to fish in. And he was fishing here and there and maybe not catching much, but taking too much of a risk in the meantime. And it very well could be that someone like this would break into a house and kill a woman—you can’t rule it out—and then subsequently find it so risky, unnerving, and difficult, quite frankly, that he would look for something that was maybe perhaps easier. And then when he smartened up, he just sort of blossomed with all those younger women on the streets, if you will. He became much more active. That’s one scenario.” That was Ted’s own scenario. Having done everything from entering and removing Lynda Healy’s body from her rooming house at the University of Washington and bludgeoning the coeds inside the Chi Omega Sorority House at Florida State University, Ted knew that a very active serial killer was capable of performing any type of murder, inside or outside a building. Therefore, not surprisingly, Ted said that if he were us he would definitely consider that murders indoors might also be part of the Green River series.

Trying to raise Ted’s dignity and confirm his proclamation that he was “the only person with a Ph.D. in serial murder,” I asked a question that was meant to focus on a type of murder that was more exhilarating for a killer: “How about the hunt, though? Is the fact that he would kill someone in a residence more of a thrill for him versus, you know, just picking up a hooker on the street?”

Bundy said, with a throaty voice, “Oh, yeah.”

I knew that this line of questioning suited Ted because entering a residence was one of Ted’s methods of operation. The more our questions about the Riverman’s modus operandi resembled Bundy’s own methods, the more likely Bundy was to tell us more about himself.

To keep Ted talking, I fed him information on the Green River killings that he didn’t previously have. This was a boost to his ego and made Ted feel privileged and respected. I said, “You know, possibly taking a girl back to her residence or conceivably knocking
on the door and when she opens the door,
boom,
a blitz attack occurred—we had that very experience in one of our cases. Is that part of the thrill that you equate with approaching the prostitute?”

At this point in our conversation, Ted was ready to bring out his vast knowledge of the Boston Strangler cases as an example for us to think about. He said, “Well, to be able to track a woman from a bar, let’s say, to her home is not a random act, and knocking on doors is. The main question is, did he select this woman before-hand or is he just like Albert deSalvo, choosing his victim by just knocking on doors randomly? It makes a difference. But still, there’s hunting involved in either case. A certain amount of expertise is necessary. And sort of feeling out the area, you know, apartment complexes, and looking at names on mailboxes, are things of art. I would imagine if you talked to Albert deSalvo or could talk to his spirit, you would find out that there’s something of an art to it. But if in fact he tracked a woman from a bar, that’s a little bit more sophisticated.”

I didn’t want to offend Ted by questioning him on his claim that serial murder was an art form. Actually, it really didn’t surprise me that Bundy would consider murder a form of art, as repulsive as that thought was. Bundy thought about murder 24 hours a day and considered himself an accomplished artist. Ted possessed a visible arrogance and an elitist attitude about his main avocation. Every time Ted spoke, his feelings of superiority over the Riverman would show. The Leonardo da Vinci of serial murder was Theodore Robert Bundy’s perception of himself. I wondered whether I would ever get the chance to see this ego of Ted’s rupture and collapse. I hoped so.

With all of this running through my mind, I managed to maintain a poker face as Ted continued. “You certainly can’t rule out anything like that. If you have unsolved murders involving young women in the Pacific Northwest, in terms of violent murder, which occurred prior to Coffield, or for that matter, even recently, you got to think about the Riverman, because he hasn’t stopped and didn’t just start with Coffield.” Now Ted revealed for the first time a sub-classification of murder, which he called “violent murder.” Ted would elaborate on his perception of murder classification in interviews we would have with him years later. In Ted’s mind, there was a kind of morality to murder. Some people, he would tell me shortly before he was executed in 1989, deserved to be sadistically
murdered and raped. It was a concept that would be difficult for anyone to grasp, especially me. I had been investigating murders for 10 years, and it never crossed my mind that it was “okay” to murder and mutilate any human being. What kind of detective would have real empathy toward a killer who did believe in such a thing?

As I choked on the implication of Ted’s words, Dave continued the questioning. “How soon before Coffield do you think he started? Ten years? Fifteen years?”

Unless a convicted serial killer confesses truthfully to his complete series of murders, the first one he committed is almost impossible to identify as such. Usually by the time the police discover that a serial killer is in operation, he has already had a number of victims. Ted realized, because he understood that serial murderers like himself improved with practice, that the first or last murder of the series contained the most information about a killer. Discovering where the killer was in the series might help police trace his changing modus operandi and what his next step might be.

On this subject, Ted backed off from his previous statement that the Riverman had been killing for a long time. “If he’d been as active as he was between July of eighty-two and October of eighty-three, sooner or later, it’s got to catch up with him. And my initial impression is that he’d not been
that
active before Coffield. I said
that
active. Not that he hadn’t been trying to work up to it and not that he hadn’t killed anyone before, but I just get the impression that’s too much of work. He may have moved in from another area, and unless he’s extremely shrewd and is just moving around the country, not exactly in Henry Lucas style, but maybe moving in, hanging around for a while, and then moving on. Imagine what it takes to be able to do seven a month or four in July of eighty-two and five in August of eighty-two. That’s a lot of work, especially attempting to avoid detection, too. If he’d done all thirty-five by just driving up to the street corner, then I’d think that you’d have a pretty good line on him by now. But he’s more careful than that. Obviously, he’s very, very wary. You see that not just in how he
picks up the victims, but how he disposes of them. He may not be as effective until we say ‘Well, he could have hidden them better, but he’s doing his best and learning.’ And he has learned. But you have a good point, he knows the area. He’s looking for a good place to park his car. He’s waiting for the right time to approach them. He doesn’t want anybody around. He doesn’t want anybody to over-hear what he says to the girls. He doesn’t want anybody to see him, if that is at all possible. And he certainly doesn’t want anybody to see him getting into his car. So all those cautions are one part. That’s the actual approach. What he’s actually saying, whether it’s a straight offer of sex or whether it’s something more sophisticated, is another question.” In other words, the killer, like Bundy, simply approached on foot and brought his willing victim to his car. He lured them and trapped them one on one rather than in a drive-by. Therefore, if police on surveillance were looking for a guy in a car, they’d miss the killer if he walked right by the front of the police car, chatted up a girl, and walked off with her.