The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (61 page)

Ted was trying to write and hold the tape recorder, too. He continued by whispering what he just wrote, “Okay, I just wrote that the Hawkins girl’s head was severed and taken up the road about twenty-five to fifty yards and buried in a location about ten yards west of the road on a rocky hillside. Did you hear that?”

How could I not? It was one of those dramatic moments for which Bundy existed. It would be an understatement to say that I was shocked by his amazing announcement. I detected a tinge of cruelty in his singular expression, and undoubtedly, he was callous from such a long period of denial. Yet, even though his emotions were dulled, his clinical account was exceedingly accurate.

Temporarily, my mind went blank. No one had guessed that Ted had decapitated victims and was a perverse mutilator. This news would shock his loyal Washington State friends and supporters. Fumbling for a question, I asked, “Where is the rest of her at?”

“Down where the others were. I gave you that because I felt that
it might be worthwhile to start there because that one hadn’t been discovered before,” he said, unaware he had just unequivocally admitted to the Ott and Naslund murders, something that he had not done up to now. “That was more or less a question mark to a point. We all knew what the suspicions were, but basically the Hawkins family might be able to have information about those separate, unidentified remains. But in any case, I think that was a good place to start.”

Little did Ted know that the family didn’t want the remains. He wasn’t doing Hawkins’s relatives any favors. They had already told me that they didn’t want them back. They had psychologically buried Georgann’s soul long ago.

I was ready to hear the gory details. I inquired, “What was the damage to those remains? What instrument did you use?”

Ted answered as though he did not hear my question. He seemed to ignore me at certain times, perhaps to concentrate on whatever atrocity he was fantasizing about. “But not anything you would have found that I know of. If you’d found it, probably you’d have found damage to the head; the jaw in particular probably broken. But if you’d found that, you’d have known who it was. Is there any reason you asked me that question?”

The fractured crania and mandibles I picked up 15 years ago came to vivid life; their images raised themselves back into my consciousness and were as clear in my mind as if I had just come from the site. I responded, “What I wondered was, were similar things done to Ott and Naslund?”

Obviously, Ted didn’t want to get into the Lake Sammamish murders because their remains had already been found. Describing their murders wasn’t on his short agenda. He was more interested in talking about the murders that had gone undiscovered over the years. But he said, “We’re getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, but I will say this much: no. Well, wait a minute. Now, that’s a good question. Not similar things, not exactly. I don’t want to beg the question, but they were different. Certainly not as extensive in those two instances as opposed to the Hawkins girl.”

Impatiently, I asked, “Okay, what weapons did you use on the Hawkins girl?”

Ted wrote his answer on his pad of paper. He held it up for me to see. “Hacksaw.”

Was Ted only going to recount where he buried a skull? Were we going to be left in the dark about how he had kidnapped Hawkins or any other woman?

Ted sensed that I wanted him to talk about how he had abducted Hawkins. The perplexed look on my face gave me away. Was he ready to reveal his long-held secrets? Ted said, “Well, we can go through it, step by step.”

“Why don’t we take Hawkins and go through it step by step,” I suggested. Repeating Ted’s own words back to him was a pre-planned interviewing technique I used once again to make Ted comfortable talking about things that he found difficult to discuss. He behaved as I hoped he would.

“Okay. Again, I wasn’t specifically prepared to talk about this today,” he admitted. “I’m just going to give you whatever comes to mind, and I’m sure that it’s not everything.”

Making Ted feel that his information was totally authoritative, as only information coming directly from the murderer’s mouth can be, I suggested, “The elements of Hawkins, then we can get on to the others. I just want to hear, specifically, the events that happened with the Hawkins girl.” Ted smiled as I continued. “The facts I have are basically what’s in the newspaper. Tell me about how she was taken. What were the circumstances at the time? How did you get out there? What was the time period between the events of her abduction and murder?”

Ted closed his eyes once again. During his entire explanation, his eyes seemed shut tighter than the trap door that hid his thoughts. He said, “Okay, let me give it a moment’s reflection here. Yeah. I’ll talk real low to you. You can still hear me? Can you hear me, Bill? You can’t?”

“Pull the recorder over a little,” I instructed.

“I can’t remember what night of the week it was—Thursday night, I believe. I don’t know, eleven to twelve. Probably closer to twelve o’clock on a warm, Seattle May night. I think it was clear. The weather had been fairly good. At about midnight that day, I was in the alleyway behind the sorority and fraternity houses that would have been Forty-fifth, Forty-sixth, Forty-seventh Street, somewhere in there. In back of the houses across the alley and across the other side of the block, there was the Congregational Church, I believe, and some parking lots in back of the sorority and
fraternity houses. I was moving up the alley, using a briefcase and some crutches, and the young woman walked down. I saw her round the north end of the block into the alley and stop for a moment and then keep on walking down the alley toward me. And about halfway down the block I encountered her and asked her to help me carry the briefcase, which she did, and we walked back up the alley, across the street, turned right on the sidewalk in front of the fraternity house on the corner there, and rounded the corner to the left going north of Forty-seventh.

“Well, midway in the block there used to be one of those parking lots they used to make out of burned-down houses in that area. The university would turn them into instant parking lots. There was a parking lot, dirt surface, no lights, and my car was parked there.”

The tape recorder stopped with a loud click—of all the times for the tape to run out!

I felt the break might disturb Ted’s concentration, but he changed the side of the tape and continued. It seemed he was going to confess, no matter what. With resolve, he continued, “We were to the car. All right, basically when we reached the car, what happened was, I knocked her unconscious with the crowbar.”

I asked, “Where did you have that?”

Ted answered as though I should have anticipated that he had his weapons well stationed and readily accessible. “By the car.”

“Outside?” I questioned in disbelief that he had laid the crowbar near the car.

“Outside, in back of the car,” Ted verified.

Wondering how he leaned down and got it without alerting Hawkins, I asked, “Did she see it?”

“No, and then there were some handcuffs there, along with the crowbar,” Ted whispered. “And I handcuffed her and put her in the passenger’s side of the car and drove away.”

Now it was becoming clear how Ted could have gotten an apparently intelligent woman into his car when the passenger-side seat was missing. He didn’t have to convince them at all; he cold-cocked them from behind. They never knew what hit them and had no chance to resist. There was no verbal interplay here with the victim that Ted could hold over the head of the Green River Killer. Bundy did all his convincing from the business end of a crowbar while his victim’s back was turned. He was not the phantom prince
that crime writers and reporters had portrayed him to be for over 10 years, but a creep, a spineless, chicken-shit killer.

I asked, “Was she alive or dead then?”

Leaving no question unanswered, Ted said, “Oh no. No, she was unconscious, but she was very much alive.”

I probed further. “Okay, what happened next?”

Ted was alerted by the footsteps of an approaching guard. Ted was entitled to a telephone call every hour from his appellate attorneys, and they were on the phone waiting to tell him the status of his appeals.

Ted returned in about five minutes and continued. “We drove down the alley to Fiftieth, I believe, Northeast Fiftieth or, you know, the street going east and west, and turned left. Went to the freeway. Five, is it? It’s been a long time. Anyway, and then [we] went south on the freeway to turn off on the old floating bridge, I-Ninety. She was conscious at this time. I mean, she had regained consciousness at this time, basically. Well, there’s a lot of incidental things that I’m just not getting into, you know, not talking about, ’cause they are just incidental anyway. We went across the bridge, across Mercer Island, east past Issaquah, up the hill, down the road, and up to the grassy area.”

So far, Ted told his story in a way that I couldn’t refute. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but somehow I had to test his mettle. Realizing that I couldn’t challenge him too much and risk shutting him up, I used a harmless question, designed not to scare him off. In 1974, the I-90 freeway did not have a barricade separating the westbound lanes from the eastbound lanes. I knew that he turned left across the westbound lanes to get to the dirt road as he had previously stated. But I defied his explanation by saying that it was impossible for him to have turned left because of a cement barricade blocking anyone’s turn. “How did you get across I-90? There’s a barricade in the middle of that road.”

Defiantly, Ted asserted, “Not then there wasn’t.” Ted’s words came much faster, and his voice was rising in pitch.

He continued, “Like I told you, at that time, you could make a left-hand turn, illegal as it may have been because of the double yellow line. Talk about craziness. I mean, if there had been a state patrolman, he’d probably [have] arrested me. Right?”

Without waiting for my nod of approval, he hurriedly and emphatically went on. “Nevertheless, at that time there was no divider
running down the middle of that road at that point. I know. I mean, you’re right. That would have been pretty damn hard to do if it were there. But all you had to do was just make an illegal left-hand turn all the way across the two westbound lanes of 90 and right into that side road that ran parallel to 90.”

Convinced I could now recognize Ted’s body language and style of speech when he was defending the truth, I asked, “Okay, what happened after that?”

A sudden defense of the truth was stressful for Ted, who lied his whole life. In fact, the momentary interruption caused Ted to become confused about his facts. He said, “Well, I parked, took her out of the van and took the handcuffs off her and—”

“Took her out of what?” I interrupted, knowing that Ted had a VW bug at the time, not a van. He was thinking about his last murder victim, Kimberly Leach.

“Took her out of the car,” he said.

“And you’re driving what?”

“A Volkswagen.”

“Okay. You said ‘van.’”

Apologizing, Ted said, “Well, no I didn’t—I’m sorry if I said van; it wasn’t a van.”

At this point, Ted’s attorney accused me of badgering Ted and I explained to her that Ted had said “van,” and she thought I was putting words in Ted’s mouth.

Ted reclaimed the interview by saying, “Well, okay. Well, it wasn’t. It was a Volkswagen, and [I] took her out of the car. I think I said I took the handcuffs off. Maybe that sounded like ‘van.’Anyway. And, gee, this is probably the hardest part.”

Ted shut off the recorder. He regained his composure for a moment and turned it back on. “I don’t know. I don’t know, we’re talking sort of abstract, not abstractly before, but, well, we’re getting right down to it. And I will talk about it. I hope you understand it’s not something I find easy to talk about after all this time.”

Ted took a big sigh and said, “One of the things that makes it a little bit difficult is that at this point she was quite lucid, talking about things. It’s not funny, but it’s odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances. And she said that she had a Spanish test the next day, and she thought that I had taken her to
help tutor her for her Spanish test. It’s kind of an odd thing to say. Anyway.”

Ted paused for what seemed like minutes but was only about 30 seconds. Another sigh, and then he approached the subject by saying, “The long and short of it, I mean, I’m going to try and get there by degrees. The long and short of it was that I again knocked her unconscious, strangled her, and drug her about ten yards into the small grove of trees that were there.”

“What did you strangle her with?”

“Cord.”

“Cord?”

Softly, like he was embarrassed, Ted said, “An old piece of rope.”

Knowing that the rope was part of Ted’s kit, I asked, “Is this something you brought there with you?”

“Yeah. Something that was in the car,” Ted verified.

Expecting the gory details to follow, I asked, “Okay, then what happened?”

Ted changed course. His narration left out the time between one
A.M.
until dawn. He picked up with “Then I packed the car up. By this time, it was almost dawn. The sun was coming up. And I went through my usual routine. On this particular morning, I went through a frequent routine where I was just absolutely shocked, kind of scared to death, and horrified. I went down the road throwing everything that I’d had—the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothes—just tossing them out the window. I was in a sheer state of panic. Just absolute horror, you know. At that point in time, the consciousness of what has really happened is like you break out of a fever or something. I drove east on I-90 at some point, throwing articles out the window as I went, articles of clothing, shoes, et cetera.”

Since Ted neglected to describe when he removed her clothing, I asked, “When did you remove those?”

“What?” Ted said.

“The shoes, clothing?” I said.

“Well, after we got out of the car, initially. I skipped over some stuff there, and we’ll have to get back to it sometime, but it’s just too hard for me to talk about it right now.”