The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (60 page)

The last tip in the taxonomy of logic about serial murder investigations is that law enforcement officers must be careful about what they release to the press. Bundy’s words constantly rang in my head as if said yesterday: “The police say far too much to the press.” There was a cold reality to his warning. In the throes of a high-profile
case, police officials find themselves constantly in a corner, obligated to say something new every day. The feature stories are almost predictable. At first, the columns cover the known facts in the case. As much as media folks think they are covering a story that the public has a right to know, they must realize that the public includes the only person who knows the whole story—the killer. With each new tidbit of information leaked or given to the media, the killer pieces together exactly how close the authorities are to him and changes his habits or works harder to cover his tracks.

When interesting facts dwindle, it’s as if someone tosses a match into a volatile mixture. Reporters look for other angles, and they begin to write stories criticizing the investigative effort. If the police stop giving details of the investigation, it’s a double-edged sword. The killer won’t know what they’re doing, which is the good side, but then the public may get the perception from the media that nothing is being done, or that the police are incompetent. Renewed funding concerns for a questionable investigative effort also arise when little information about the investigation is released.

The course of news stories in a serial investigation can almost be predicted. First, the press focuses on life histories of the victims. Then, profiles of leaders of the inquiry or crucial investigators appear regularly to keep the story hot. And, ultimately, editorials criticizing an apparent lack of effort on the part of police authorities cap off the coverage.

My reasons for talking to Bundy were simple. First, I knew there were other “Bundys” out there. His information about their habits and haunts would have a practical application in catching and convicting them in the future. Second, since we had an immediate serial-killer problem in Seattle, I wanted Ted to shed light on the behavior of the Green River Killer, from a killer’s perspective. Just maybe we could gain some clue about how to identify the Riverman. And last, someday I wanted Bundy’s unbridled confessions.

I
never underestimated the strength of Ted Bundy’s manipulative powers; he demonstrated them even when he sat on death row. Every so often I read a newspaper article in which a legal analyst covered Ted’s options if the U.S. Supreme Court were to refuse his latest appeal. But having seen Ted cleverly avoid the chair for over 10 years, I didn’t pay too much attention to these pieces. I always leaned toward the belief that Ted would somehow have the proceedings delayed, no matter how many times the state tried to press forward. Numerous dates of execution passed. Though the signing of death warrant after death warrant was an often-repeated ritual for the governor of Florida, Ted had avoided being marched down the row to the electric chair. It was January 1989, and I was almost positive Ted would succeed in avoiding his sentence yet again.

It was not unusual for the telephone to ring in my office about once every 15 minutes with a detective on the other end of the line calling about a murder case. But the call I received in the second week of January 1989 was not one of those calls. It was Diana
Weiner, Ted Bundy’s civil attorney. Her voice was firm and professional, as always, but underneath her perfunctory manner, I detected an element of doubt when we discussed whether Ted would win his latest appeal. She asked me if I would be willing to participate in a “debriefing” of Ted beginning the Friday before his latest scheduled execution date, should the Supreme Court deny Ted’s latest appeal. Debriefing? What in the world did that mean, I wondered. Would Ted be willing to confess if the end were surely near?

I shrugged my shoulders and I grunted something close to a yes as Diana hurriedly tried to explain Ted’s latest strategy for survival. My reception was ungracious; being part of a serial killer’s scheme to avoid justice made my skin crawl. Bundy’s plan was to give detailed information to me regarding the location of the remains of preselected missing women, so that detectives armed with this information would locate remains and “prove” his sincerity. Then other detectives and the family members of victims still missing would speak on Ted’s behalf to the governor of Florida, who would delay the execution in order for Ted to confess, in detail, to the rest of the murders he’d committed and provide the locations of the bodies. This seemed to me to be an elegant form of extortion.

Ted’s strategy was simple and direct, but there was one big obstacle to its success. There was no way detectives could mount a massive search party through the wilderness in the middle of winter to verify what Bundy had said; any bodies still to be discovered in Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho were currently under three to six feet of snow. And, as we would discover later when we searched the areas for the remains that Bundy had indicated we’d find, there were shifts in the land that had taken place in the 15 years since he’d disposed of the bodies. For example, the road up the hill in Issaquah had moved at least 30 feet, and what used to be a rocky area near the Naslund and Ott bone finds was now covered with over 10 feet of dirt. Whether it was the natural changes in the land or not, the fact remains that no one ever found bodies in any of the areas where Bundy said he’d left them.

After Weiner’s phone call I sat silently, thinking,
Leave it to Ted to come up with a wild scheme to once again horrify the family members of his victims by involving them in his vivid fantasy life.
Was this a cruel attempt by Ted to victimize those whom he had already left devastated by his carnage?

The next day Weiner called back and said that Ted’s appeal had been denied and that she needed me in Florida on Friday. Still suspicious of being a part of Ted’s end-game strategy, I contacted Pete Turner, the assistant warden in the Florida State Penitentiary, to verify with Ted that he wanted me there. Turner gave me the okay. I made the trip and scheduled the behind-bars meeting with my old nemesis.

The conditions for these debriefings were very different from the relaxed, almost casual air of my earlier conversations with Ted. Now the partitions between the cubicles in the debriefing area, instead of being wide enough for two people on one side, as is usual in most prison interview rooms, had barely enough elbow room for one person. The air was also very heavy because of the cramped conditions and the continual presence of the death-row prison guards. As Ted entered the interview area, he recognized FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier standing behind me. Their right hands met each other at the same place on both sides of the glass windows, oddly like lovers greeting each other in visitation areas. I was struck by the friendly gesture between the nation’s most notorious serial killer and the FBI agent who represented his pursuers. Ted seated himself on his side of the glass and I on the other, with Bill seated to my right rear and Diana Weiner to my left rear. Because Ted wanted Weiner present, we had to have a noncontact visit—those were the rules when attorneys oversaw their clients’ conversations with police. Ted’s guards were stationed within shouting distance of where we sat.

I was interviewing Ted as a matter of record, no longer to solve the Green River murders per se. The Green River Killer himself had become history. The Green River task force was doing more archeology and record keeping than crime solving and in fact was about to fade away into history itself. It had been a good idea for Ted to join the Green River task force on an ad hoc basis, but his time was now past and he was looking at the reality of the electric chair. However, the time for Ted’s confessions had come. His first-person account of his murders was what everyone anticipated and what I was now prepared to get. Still, there was some doubt about whether Ted would actually go through with this. He had gone for so long and built up such strong resistance against revealing anything self-incriminating that any discussion of his own activities would be incredibly stressful for him. As far as I knew, he had
never admitted to any law enforcement officer the details of and personal motives behind his murders. Was he just playing another game? This time the game involved his life. I was the one person he had chosen to speak to and trust to relay to others the credibility he so desperately wanted to establish. He had coached me through our conversations and letters for four years. Now Ted had only three more days to live. The time had come and I was ready.

Ted was a man with an encephalitic head, a clear hairless face, a long thin nose, and a rather confident jutting jaw. The sight of him after all these years was still quite an experience. Ted rearranged his position on the other side of the glass. He left his chair and sat on the shelf so he could talk through the speaker hole for my ears only. Lifting the tape recorder to his mouth while engaging the
RECORD
switch, he began to speak.

“Okay, all right. Well, let’s just do one here. I mean, let’s start. Obviously, we have to start somewhere. It’s pretty much a long shot, but you might be able to get something out of it, at least some of that so-called tangible evidence that might be of value not only to you but to others. Even if you don’t find anything else, it might be of some value to families,” Ted said, trying to play on the emotions of his victims’ families in order for them to support his one great cause—staying alive through another set of appeals.

“Yes,” I said, agreeing with just about anything he said just to keep him going.

“I understand that at the Issaquah site there were remains of three individuals found, two identified and one not, because the kinds of remains that were found were so few and unidentifiable. Okay, what do you want? Description of the site first? How to get there? I mean, you just don’t make this up, right?” Ted said confidently.

I said, “I want to know what the site is.”

Ted described the Issaquah site like he was replaying a videotape in his mind. With his eyes closed, he continued, “Well, old Highway 90, which is no longer there, not like it used to be, rose up out of Issaquah into the foothills. You rounded a bend about a mile and a half, two miles beyond that bend. This is fifteen-year-old stuff, so
be mindful of it. It was not a divided highway at that time, so you could turn left clear across the highway as you are going east, at the risk of getting a ticket. There’s a small dirt side road there. You could turn left going east, enter the side road, go over a ravine that was between the side road and the highway, turn sort of, go left again, and go back down toward Issaquah. Traveling on the side road you pass underneath some power transmission lines. There was a creek down in the ravine between I-Ninety and the side road. Maybe a quarter of a mile down this little side road, it would join Ninety again. But if you turned just about the time it reached Ninety again, there’s another little dirt road to the right that went up a hill and across some railroad tracks. Just on the other side of the railroad tracks about twenty yards up, there’s a little grassy area, some scrub growth and old alders. There is a little path that ran parallel to the railroad tracks and up into the woods, running sort of west. The dirt road went past this grassy area I just mentioned, and went up the hill maybe half a mile. It sort of meandered up the side of the hilly area. Also, in the area, maybe fifty yards to the east, down into another ravine, was an old abandoned cabin. Ring a bell?”

For a moment or two I was breathless and hardly able to believe my ears. This was the voice of the killer playing in my brain, the description, firsthand, of a site that only the killer had known. I was hearing it described through his eyes. My senses and my voice slowly came back to me. Now at last I could confirm that Ted really was the killer we had thought he was. There’s nothing like a first-hand account. Ted had been on that hillside so often to relive his fantasies that he could never forget the surroundings.

Still somewhat stunned and momentarily searching my mind for any pertinent question, I asked, “Where should we have found the bodies?”

“Lord knows where and what the little creatures up there did. Well, let me start with one,” Ted offered, a little bit unnerved by the presence of the officers who were standing behind him. He didn’t want them to overhear that he was confessing. So he decided to whisper and write down any names. “Some of this stuff I don’t mind talking about, because they wouldn’t know them from Adam. I just don’t want the police getting any kind of names at this point. I’ll just write the name down for you. All right? Okay, did you see
that? The name that I just wrote down was Georgann Hawkins,” Ted whispered gently, nervously looking over his shoulder.

“Ummm … she’s up that dirt road, beyond the grassy area. I’ll try to trace it here on a piece of paper. How about that? That might help a little. I’m working from some pretty old memories.”

At this point, I gave Ted an aerial photograph of the area as it appeared in March 1974. The photo was taken because there was a property dispute and it was needed for a possible civil suit. Eagerly, Ted said, “Oh, yeah, great. Let me try to orient myself here. Jeeze. Is it still relatively undisturbed? In their construction of the freeway, did they disturb up the hillside much?”

“There’s some of that hillside left,” I explained.

“This is where I get a little bit antsy, not about you, but it’s just the chance of being overheard. There’s some of this stuff that gets pretty tough. I can write it down, whisper it. I have no problem with that. I have to draw the line somewhere with being overheard at this point,” Ted said.

I suggested, “Why don’t you pull the mike closer to your mouth and try that?”