The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (53 page)

“That’s as close as he came to being caught. And, again, only part of the story is known of Gerry. And Gerry—as often as I try to get Gerry to open up to me, he wouldn’t. He would always try to bullshit me. And the thing that bothered Gerry to no end was that I had this extremely detailed report that someone else had given me. See, Gerry had allegedly confessed to a murder that somebody else on death row is convicted of committing. And so that person managed to get ahold of this report on Gerry. And so I had this report.

“Gerry is a pathological liar. And one of the sweetest, nicest, most generous guys you’ll ever run across. You put him in a three-piece suit, and he’d look like an economist, a frumpy-haired college economist. And one of the most harmless, nice, happy-going, ‘good old Uncle Gerry’ guys you’d ever want to run across. And so getting to know Gerry was fascinating, ’cause he’d tell me stories about things that happened, and then I’d read that something else had happened in the police report.”

I thought to myself as Ted finished,
Can you imagine that type of guy—a college professor type—turning on a prostitute that he had under his control and killing her and then killing others for a seven-year period? Can you imagine this person, who obviously hates women with a vicious fury, being arrested by a
female
vice officer?
That must have been part of his worst nightmare. Yet he knuckled right under to the law, which is what he had to do, took his punishment, and then drove across an entire state to go right back to killing. How many prostitutes paid for what Stano thought that female cop did to him?

I told Ted that I had met that detective who’d interviewed Stano
at a seminar in Atlanta. I said to him, “Gee, I don’t know why I’m up here talking. You should be up here telling your story.” And the detective said, “Look at me!” I didn’t know what he meant. It took me a while to figure out what he was talking about and why he was devastated. Evidently, he was considered an outcast by his department for what he’d done in the Stano case. Instead of learning from it and being able to profit from that experience, his department blamed him for not tying it all up in a pretty bow. I know that’s impossible to do most of the time when you have a killer you have to get information out of bit by bit, month after month. To make your case, you have to go after what you can get and try for the most cooperation you can. Most police commanders don’t realize that and think all murderers are alike.

Ted summed it up even better. “Well, it was a mess. He may have been subjected to all kinds of pressures, I’m sure. But the way Gerry was handled was just a mess. They didn’t call anybody who really knew what they were doing. And they were just talking to him haphazardly and piecemeal and running around the state and showing him all kinds of stuff. And so this thoroughly distorted and contaminated everything Gerry said, and it’s hard to say what Gerry’s responsible for now. And then end up giving—I mean, after being patient with him, while across the course of two and a half years, finally, the prosecuting authorities just got fed up with him. Instead of giving him these life sentences, they gave him three death sentences, and Gerry just stopped talking.

“He wasn’t finished talking, believe me. I mean, he wasn’t finished giving and telling them all he knew, not by a long shot. They just had not thoroughly been able to sit him down and figure out how do we get this guy to tell us all he knows and make sure he’s telling us the truth. I mean, there are still a lot of question marks in my mind. But, I’ve always felt this.

“If Gerry was telling the truth about the early murders that occurred in seventy-three, and there’s a lot more probably that he’s involved with, if he was telling the truth when he said he killed those two girls, two hitchhikers in seventy-three, then I know for a fact that he did a lot more than he’s talking about. Because there are huge gaps of twelve months where there’s nothing there. He’s told the police—and I can just look at his patterns and tell, you know, knowing what I know about Gerry and looking at his crime patterns,
I mean, sometimes three or four a month, and then there’s periods of twelve, eighteen months in that seven-year period where there’s just nothing. Big blanks. Nothing he’s told the police. Nothing that the police got around to asking him about.”

“Is that because he wasn’t doing anything out of town?” I asked.

“No, hell no,” Ted said. “These were periods of time when, see, Gerry, I’m not trying to psychoanalyze him, but I know Gerry to the extent that he’s got a poor self-image. He covers it over with a lot of joviality, but he has a poor self-image that was aggravated by alcohol abuse. He could never finish school. He couldn’t hold a job.

“During that whole seven-year period he lived in his parents’ home or in homes owned by his parents, or for a short time with his wife in a trailer. He never held anything more than part-time menial jobs, drinking heavily, driving around, getting money from his parents. And in the period following the separation from his wife, where he lost his job with his father-in-law, [he] had to live in his parents’ home, was kicked out of his own trailer by this woman he was married to, a period of time when I know damn well he was angry and hostile and probably was feeling as bad about himself as he had ever felt—and had more time on his hands than he’d probably had for years—there’s nothing there for twelve months?”

I know from experience, though, that despite concerns raised by police and the media, time delays within a series of murders are fully explainable, sometimes for the most mundane reasons. Even Bundy said that the same things that happen to “normal” people happen to serial killers. Shit happens to serial killers, too. They get sick, hospitalized, fearful of detection, go to jail, or die. Some series have had apparently inexplicable delays, such as the span of over 140 days between murders in the Atlanta child murders in 1979-81, for which Wayne Williams was convicted. But Bundy was emphatic: “If a killer is out there, he’s doing stuff. The police have not found them.

“I know damn well that he was out there doing stuff. There’s just no question. Some of the other things he’s told the police are true about what happened in seventy-three and seventy-four. If that’s true, then there’s a lot more, and they just didn’t know how to get it out of him. And it’s a shame now because Gerry’s been polarized, and the rare opportunity to really find out what was going on in his mind or what he really knows may have passed. The only disturbing thing about Gerry’s revelations to the police is I don’t know
that he ever turned up any bodies, any remains. And—that doesn’t necessarily say he’s not telling the truth, but I don’t know how much more he has.”

Some news reports claimed that Stano had confessed to 41 murders. Ted wanted to set the record straight. “In fact, the presentence report, which is very detailed and goes into great length about his confessions, shows that he confessed to eleven murders where he’s been charged and given a sentence of some sort, whether death sentence or life sentence. And ten more murders where they haven’t yet got around to charging him for one reason or another. That’s twenty-one. Now, there may be others they suspect him of or whatever, but that’s—the report’s fairly comprehensive and it pinpoints twenty-one specific cases. And I’ve charted them out, integrated them with what Gerry’s told me, with what I know, and what the presentence report says, and there are huge, enormous gaps at very critical times when he was clearly in a state of mind, based upon my knowledge of how these things go, where he would—more likely drink and engage in that kind of behavior.

“Now, I think that’s the problem that investigators face even when they get somebody that they think has been involved in a series … just finding this out, just how extensive his activities have been. And not just settling for the easy conviction or two and locking the guy away. For whatever reason, the prosecuting attorneys have reached the point or threshold where they weren’t willing to wait anymore to find out. It was more important to them to give him a death sentence than it was for them to find out what he really knew. I think they just reached that point where they said, ‘We’ve had enough of this fellow. We can’t give him any more life sentences. We’ve got to—that’s it.’”

Ironically enough, the state of Florida felt the same way about Ted. All the information that Ted felt should have been covered with Gerry consisted of the same, seemingly useless pieces of information that Ted tried to use to convince the state of Florida not to execute him. They were some of the same things I would have to dig out of the Green River Killer in order to put his puzzle together. But because both Stano and Ted had been “mishandled,” according to Ted, I could not mishandle the Green River Killer. I also could not miss the opportunity to get out of Ted what other investigators had tried to get but failed. Ted was giving me my chance.

Ted wanted to emphasize one final, fatal point. “And despite the fact of these glaring inadequacies in how he was interrogated, and these big gaps, unexplainable gaps in his stories—and I say that not to condemn Gerry, and I certainly wouldn’t reveal anything specific that he told me—it’s always just appalled me just how badly that specific case was handled, how badly Gerry was handled. It would be a good case study for anyone wanting to know how
not
to approach somebody accused of a series of crimes. ’Cause he was lost. I mean, either they’re going to kill him and undoubtedly will—I don’t know how that’s going to end up there.”

In talking about Gerald Stano, Ted’s face was etched with frustration. Why kill somebody when they have so much to tell? When Ted emphasized Stano’s plight, he was also talking about his own dilemma. Should he confess now or wait? Ted was really close to opening up, it seemed. He was moving, fidgeting in his chair like I had never seen him do. Unbeknownst to me, the previous day, Ted’s appellate attorney had convinced Ted not to confess to me. It was just not in his best interest during the appeal process, the attorney said. Ted told me later that he had wanted to begin talking at that time. That was why he was so intent on setting the stage with how to get a killer’s confession; this was his show. My impression was that there was something wrong with Ted; his appearance was different; it was almost like he was talking about himself all this time—how he wanted to be interviewed. I was flipping back and forth between Ted and the Green River Killer. Now that I had Ted on the line, I wanted to reel him in. I wanted him, after all those years, to talk about himself. But I played for time, even when I knew there was no time. That was the only way I could play it. He had to come to me.

I said, “I’m kind of getting the feeling that whatever the efforts of the police, if a certain time span has gone by and a person has learned to deal with their own thoughts and problems for quite a while, the efforts to somehow understand or reveal the story in somebody during the interview process would almost totally be controlled by the person that’s being interviewed. Whatever the police do or
say, their presence really doesn’t make any difference.” I wanted Ted to tell me how to get his confession without really saying it.

He was fidgeting. He said, “Yes. If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you, and if he doesn’t, he won’t. We’re talking, again, about somebody who has been out there for years and years. I mean, he’s had this integrated so thoroughly into his consciousness, into his daily life, into his way of being and living and has become so familiar with how to deal with what people commonly refer to as guilt, remorse, or whatever … deal with it and/or do away with it. And it’s become these thoughts and memories that constitute the crimes. He’s adapted so well to them and kept them so close, because he knows the consequences of giving them up. It’s not likely that anybody is going to trick him into talking about it or pressure him into talking about it.”

It was time for Ted to be specific. I asked him, “How does an investigator visualize what’s been integrated into this guy’s mind for so long? Time? Patience?”

Maybe I opened the sluice gate for Ted. He said, “Yes. Time and patience. I think those are two good words. You can’t hope to drag it out of a guy overnight, okay? And you can’t get frustrated if he doesn’t give it to you all at once, in one piece. Because you have to be content with slowly learning about what kind of person is this. What demands is he responding to within himself? And they may be very particular, very subtle, and very difficult to find out. Like for instance, this fellow I was telling you about who would tell you at the drop of a hat about all the people he killed, except he just couldn’t bring himself to tell anybody how he killed his girlfriend and where he put her body. He just couldn’t because his view of the world was, these other killings were good, but killing somebody you know is bad. And he was afraid if he told, people would—he had this vision in his mind that if he admitted to killing his girlfriend and told them where the body was, then people would see him as a bad person. That’s pretty bizarre, but that’s how he was thinking. And it didn’t occur to me until after we talked about it for a while.

“And so I think the more you take time to know somebody, preferably the suspect—if you have a chance to get all of the information you could beforehand, before he was brought in, know as much about him as possible before he was brought in, and then
maybe even to talk to friends and relatives about him once he’s in. Now of course, once he’s in custody, he’s in custody. But you get a feeling for the guy as much as you can without talking to the guy.

“And then once you start talking to him you just use your own gut reaction. Just to start, patiently probing without pushing, without being judgmental, taking it a step at a time, the third person, maybe doing it without dates and places and making it an abstract kind of thing. When I’m faced with somebody and I want to learn about the case, certainly what
I
want to learn, my perspective, is different from yours. But still I have to respond to what that guy gives me. And I often know less than you would probably know about someone. My advantage is, we know he’s been convicted of some kind of murder, anyway. So, that’s certainly the starting point—and he trusts me to one degree or another. Still, if you can—if an investigator can somehow inspire trust and confidence and come off as being nonjudgmental and be patient and probe and get to know how this guy’s mind works—I know this is pretty general kinds of things, but—that’s how I’d approach somebody who’d been out there, who you suspect for a number of years or is involved in serial murder.