The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (6 page)

Behind Greek Row, where Georgann was talking to her friend, was an alley that led to an unlit parking lot in which was parked a solitary VW Beetle. A franseria shrub blocked the view of the VW to passersby crossing the alley. Under the cover of darkness the VW’s driver, Ted Bundy, silently placed a crowbar and handcuffs on the ground near the rear of the car. This was to be the performance for which Ted had rehearsed two weeks earlier. Then, he had approached another pretty woman in front of the same sorority house where Georgann now stood. Upon his request, the first young woman walked Ted all the way to his car in the same parking lot, where he said “thanks,” turned, and left for his house only five blocks away. His furtive movements that night were the dress rehearsal for the murder of Georgann Hawkins.

As Georgann was saying good night to her friend in the window, Ted was moving north up the alley, carrying a briefcase full of books, navigating his way through the darkness on crutches and feigning difficulty. Ted saw the young woman round the north end of the block, pause for a moment, and then walk toward him. Georgann
was only 60 feet from the rear door of her sorority house when Ted approached her out of the shadows. Georgann Hawkins smiled at the young man hobbling toward her—she always smiled when she had the chance to help others in need, her friends reported when questioned after her disappearance. At precisely the right distance, the well-practiced Ted dropped the briefcase as he limped closer and asked her if she would pitch in and carry it for him since he was having so much trouble managing it alone. She obliged, almost without thinking, and said, “They call me George.” They walked up the alley, across the street and toward the dark parking lot where the Volkswagen was waiting.

They were at the car when Georgann, unsuspecting, turned her back to Ted. He quickly picked up the crowbar he had hidden and—in a single motion—delivered one perfectly placed blow to the back of her head. Georgann’s knees buckled and she dropped to the dirt, unconscious. As she lay there perfectly still beside the wheel of his car, Ted grabbed his handcuffs and secured them around her limp wrists. The harsh clicking noises of the locking manacles echoed in the darkness. Then Ted scooped up the petite Georgann, loaded her in the passenger side of his car, swung into the driver’s seat beside her body, and drove away. Knowing he would be committing murder that night, Ted had already removed the passenger seat before he had left home. He did it so that the body of his captive prey would lie unseen and motionless on the floorboard next to him. No one looking at him stopped at a traffic light would have known that the handsome young man behind the wheel was actually transporting a helpless victim who would soon die.

Noticing every light and car around him, Ted put-putted the car out of the university district to southbound I-5 in his little VW. Traveling via the I-90 cutoff, he drove onto the old floating bridge, proceeded across Mercer Island, and past the city of Issaquah about one mile. Making sure there were no police about, Ted made an illegal left-hand turn across the two westbound lanes of I-90 onto a dirt road that crossed some railroad tracks and twisted up into the security of the woods. His entire trip from the parking lot at the university to this secluded site covered about 20 miles and took around 30 minutes. That quickly he was out of the thousand eyes of the U-district and into a private wooded area known only to experienced hikers and hunters in the Northwest. As he was driving,
Georgann, lying next to him, was slowly beginning to stir. Suddenly, her eyes opened up like headlights and she spoke. He was frightened by her sudden torrent of babbling. As if she were awakening from a dream, Georgann began talking about her Spanish test the next day. She asked Ted questions, believing he had come to tutor her for her exam.
This is unreal,
Ted thought to himself. He was on the edge of panic. She had awakened while he was in his most predatory and private state. He was almost sick at the thought of exposure, especially to his victim. He could not let this go on, but he could not stop the car. He had to keep on driving to reach his killing site. Ted steered his VW about a hundred yards north of I-90 toward a grassy clearing adjacent to the dirt road, where he parked.

Ted turned off the engine, carried the wiggling body of Georgann Hawkins out of the car, and laid her down on the hard ground. She was still talking as if in a half-delirium. He raised the crowbar over his head and knocked her out again. The babbling stopped.

Ted didn’t pause for a moment; he immediately reached inside his black bag—the murder kit he carried in his car—and pulled out a small piece of rope. He wound it around Georgann’s neck and twisted it tighter and tighter until her slow breathing stopped. Then Ted dragged the body about 10 yards from the car into a small grove of trees, where he carefully undressed her, undoing the pin holding the top of her slacks together. There, behind the trees on the hard dirt ground, amid the brambles and shrubs, he stayed with Georgann Hawkins’s naked body until dawn. Finally, when the first rays of sun filtered through the branches above and illuminated the cyanotic lips of the dead girl in his arms, Ted pulled back in panic. The shock and horror of what he had done came upon him as if he were taken with a seizure, and he broke out in a wild sweat. He left the body where it was and threw everything else into the car. Then he drove down the road, tossing everything—the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothing, and the tools—right out the window. He was in a complete state of psychotic flight as he drove east on I-90 and then south on Highway 18. It was there that he pulled over to the side of the road again and threw more articles of clothing out the window. He rid himself of every item that might possibly remind him of the incident. He didn’t want to take anything home.

Later that afternoon, Ted’s paranoia about discovery took over
his personality in waves. Like a robot mechanically acting out its program, Bundy returned to check out the dump site to make sure nothing of his or hers had been left there. Strangely, he had the feeling—and half expected—that it had all been a dream, that Georgann Hawkins herself might not even be there.

Retracing his route, Ted recovered most of the items he had thrown away except for one of her shoes. Might it still be in the parking lot where he clubbed Georgann and stuffed her into his car? He had to return to the crime scene to check and retrieve anything that might be found to connect him to the crime. Knowing, however, that police would be looking for someone in a car, Ted got on his bicycle and rode back to that parking lot in the U-district. Ted felt he was completely camouflaged now as he pedaled onto the lot, and that gave him the boost of confidence he needed to conduct his search in broad daylight. Nobody would know him. Nobody would recognize him. But he was in for a surprise, because there were Seattle police cars all over the campus by the time he got there. Just the sight of police in uniform walking around made him nervous, even though no one seemed to notice his presence and there were no police in the parking lot. He blended right into the group of people watching the police and surreptitiously scanned the site for any evidence. Amazingly enough he had become almost invisible, because the police were too busy looking over the layout of campus streets to pay attention to casual passersby, especially an all-American type on a bike. Now Ted had the advantage. He knew almost exactly where he had abducted his victim. The police didn’t even know there had been a violent abduction at the site. Ted was able to walk right to the spot where he’d parked, locate Georgann’s pierced earrings and the shoe on the ground, gather them up while no one was looking, and ride off. By securing for himself all the remaining evidence of the abduction, Ted had guaranteed that no one would connect him forensically to the scene. It was a feat so brazen that it astonishes police even today.

But the incident still wasn’t over for Ted. Needing to satisfy his aching fascination with death, to feed his need for necrophilia that surged over him in chemical tidal waves like a craving for a narcotic, Ted returned to the Issaquah hillside three days later. This time he brought more tools for use when he had finished having sex
with the corpse of Georgann Hawkins. Because he was still unconvinced that he was totally in the clear, he took the hacksaw he had brought and methodically sawed through the corpse’s neck just below the base of the skull. When he had severed the dried and bloodless skull completely from the victim’s torso, he carried it 50 feet up the roadway, where he buried it in the dirt and hoped that he had concealed forever her most identifiable characteristics—her teeth.

As he had done with the arm-in-a-sling routine at Lake Sam, Bundy had again succeeded by feigning an injury, asking for help, killing his victim, and burying her body where no one would find it until he was long gone. Georgann Hawkins had been the ideal victim for Ted. She was in a perfectly secure setting only steps from her sorority house on a campus. Ted’s presentation was flawless. There were no witnesses. He had complete control of the crime scene. Nobody even knew a homicide had taken place until almost a year later. Ted had left Seattle by then and was in Utah, and there was no way to connect him to the crime, or so he thought. He had killed efficiently and thoroughly in the throes of his feral savagery and he had gotten away with it. Had that been his only crime, it might have been the “perfect” homicide.

The rotary-dial telephone on my desk had an obnoxious ring, as if every incoming call were trumpeting its singular importance. This call happened to warrant its jarring alarm. It was the radio-room operator and he was very explicit. “You have a found skull off Highway 18. Two citizens will meet you where the power lines cross, four miles south of I-90.” What Roger and I had predicted about the Ted investigation was coming true: there was another significant skeletal remains discovery in a different location. We had a strong premonition that that would be the case, but we couldn’t prove why. We just had a feeling that the Issaquah site was only the beginning. There were missing girls and women from all over the Pacific Northwest who should have been discovered—dead or alive—by now. Our team’s major fear was that the expected body recovery site would be in another jurisdiction, leaving us no control
over the crime scene processing and keeping key clues to the investigation out of our hands. We knew from prior experience that another agency’s investigators would pick up the surface remains and leave. Our team had developed a unique approach to this investigation, and unless our methods were followed, we were afraid we’d never catch this killer. It was becoming more clear that this killer couldn’t stop. He kept on killing and had to leave the bodies somewhere. The question was where. It turned out that some of them were on the slopes of Taylor Mountain.

No ordinary police officer would understand the detail and on-scene planning that had been necessary for the recovery of evidence and body parts at the Issaquah scene. It had been King County’s first experience with such a site and our handling of it was somewhat flawed. Were we to have another body dump site to cover, we would be far better prepared to gather evidence. We had learned from Issaquah that there was a pattern established by small animals when they carry remains along animal trails away from the original dump site where the major decomposition takes place. Animals that tugged away a decomposing skull pulled at the remains as the skull was being dragged along the ground. At Issaquah, some teeth and a mandible, as well as the mass of hair, were dislodged and fell off along the trail. We learned that if we searched in logical directions along known animal trails after the discovery of the skull, we would discover the dislodged parts. We also had discovered that it was important to sift through the dirt along the animal trails for teeth, bullets, fingernails, and jewelry that had been dislodged from body parts. Human beings are more than stray bits of fingernail, matted hair, and gnawed-upon bones, and no one took pleasure in this search to reassemble the victims of the mysterious Ted. However, it had to be done if we were going to find the culprit, and this time we were prepared for Ted’s next site.

It was March 2, 1975, a typical foggy and rainy Seattle day, and Roger Dunn and I were eastbound on I-90 past the Issaquah site. Eleven miles east of the city of Issaquah was the Highway 18 cut-off to the south, a major Seattle bypass to Tacoma. Because we were rising in elevation toward the gray, dismal clouds, the rain was pounding down hard on the hood of our car. Going south on Highway 18, it is desolate, bordered by woods on both sides; there are no houses, gas stations, or any other buildings, for that matter.

The forestry students from Green River Community College who had found the bones while marking trees for a class project greeted us at the power line road in a fever of anticipation. They led us through a web of wet, slippery branches of vine maple. With every footfall, my still-degenerating knee burned with pain as the branches cracked beneath my steps and snapped back into the soles of my shoes. The foresters had tied red fluorescent tape to tree branches to mark our path. My first thought was that no person would carry a dead body in this far—the remains were over a thousand feet from the road. After what seemed like a never-ending trek through brush, we reached the area where the skull was resting. It was definitely human; no animal teeth had ever had the gleam of shiny dental work that this skull did. The skull lay on its left side, exposing a massive fracture to the right side of the cranium. At least an eight- by four-inch piece of skull bone was missing. As I looked at it, I thought the crack could have been caused by the teeth of gnawing, hungry animals. Soon I was to learn that no animal could have done this kind of damage to a human skull. Aside from this skull, we found no other bones in the immediate area.

I could tell that the foresters had not touched the skull. The previous autumn’s fall of maple leaves filled the cranium and a spider’s web stretched over the jagged hole. It was lying quietly in a depression in the leafy surface of the ground. No body tissue seemed to be left. I didn’t need a forensic anthropologist to tell me that the skull had been there over five months.