The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (63 page)

The “big bang” was about to occur. Ted hinted all over the place. I didn’t believe for a minute that he went back after a couple days to bury Hawkins’s skull. Her head was someplace else. I knew the area he described had been scoured thoroughly by our searchers. We had dug in that area deeper than he could ever get with his entrenching tool. Her head wasn’t there, just as Janice Ott’s head wasn’t there. I didn’t know why yet, but I was to get a hint in a couple of days. He was returning to the Issaquah hillside to satisfy his perverted sexual fantasies. He was warped, but he wanted time to explain it. That’s why he had conceived his shortsighted plan to save his neck. Give the authorities just enough to get them to speak in his behalf, so the governor of Florida would stay his execution. Play us along with tidbits of information, bread crumbs along the path to the final truth, which would be so tempting that of course the state of Florida would stay his execution to allow him to tell his whole story. But it was also a form of blackmail that would never end because there would always be other jurisdictions that had unsolved cases with which Bundy could draw out his life. Hadn’t Henry Lee Lucas strung along the state of Texas and other jurisdictions in much the same way? And in the end it was all just a pack of
lies to keep him from going under the executioner’s needle. That’s why I knew that Bundy’s plan wouldn’t work. He was fucking with all of us, just like he had done to his victims. I was on the edge. Should I blow his cover now and ruin the chance of my fellow detectives getting information from him, or should I just sit and kiss the little zit’s ass and listen to his story? Then I suddenly realized that he needed me to verify that he was somewhat truthful, telling us where we might find remains, while at the same time giving us part of the story. No matter what I asked, I couldn’t alienate him. Both he and the other detectives needed me to act civilly.

With the resolve that I had some of what I came for, I bluntly asked, “Were you going back to that scene to commit sex acts?”

Ted, stuttering, muttered, “Well, I don’t want to talk about that right now. We will talk about it someday, but I don’t have—we don’t—not really—have enough to give you the background on that. I want us to work into that.”

Now, it was pretty clear what Ted did when he returned to those scenes and what the Riverman might be doing when he returned. We might catch the Riverman, literally, with his pants down, if we staked out a fresh site at Ted’s recommendation.

Needing to get onto a different issue to keep him talking about his murders, I quickly said, “Okay, all right. Now, did you always carry the little hacksaw with you?”

Apparently willing to go on, Ted replied, “Oh, it was in the tool kit. I had a metal tool kit in the front trunk, such as it is, in the Volkswagen. It had everything in there. I mean, you know, all the tools you need to repair Volkswagens, just like any tool kit, metric stuff.”

“Uh huh?” I said. Somehow Ted’s tool kit was much different than the rest of ours. Whose car tool kit contains a hacksaw, a crowbar, a shovel, rope, handcuffs, plastic bags, strips of a bedsheet, a pantyhose mask, and a knit ski mask, such as Ted’s did?

“And in there was a hacksaw. And also a little shovel, little army shovel,” Ted continued as though everyone carried such items in their cars.

“Did you ever bury anybody?” I asked, knowing what his answer would be.

“Oh, yes. Yeah, in, you might say, my more coherent—not coherent—when I was really going all out and took my time, yeah, I did. I mean, it’s quite clear. I mean, there’s no question—almost
without question, those who have been found were not, and those who haven’t been found were buried.”

“Uh huh,” I said while thinking about all those who were missing, with no trace of their remains.

“It’s that simple,” he proclaimed.

“How many people do you figure are buried in the state of Washington?” I asked.

“A couple. Just a couple.”

“Do you know who?” I prodded.

Avoiding a clear answer, Ted stammered, “Well, I remember the name of—you know, I can’t remember names, most of the names I don’t remember. A couple, like the one we were just talking about, the name comes back to me. But—let me think. One, two—that’s all. Two. Yeah. I don’t remember the name on the other one. I included in the two Hawkins, only because it was a partial kind of thing. Plus one other.”

Wanting to see how far I could push, I asked, “Who was the other one?”

Ted wasn’t prepared to talk during this session about Donna Manson, a woman who had been reported missing from Evergreen State College campus, a murder we had tied to him as well.

“I don’t remember the name and I don’t want to—I mean, you know, I don’t want to guess,” Ted lied.

“Is it one during that period of time, from say January through—”

“This would have been in early seventy-four,” Ted said eagerly, surprising me with his interruption.

“Early seventy-four? A girl from Olympia? How about the Evergreen College girl?” I suggested.

Ted was smirking. There seemed to be some dark secret about Manson that Ted wanted to save for later.

Laughing surely to himself, Ted said, “Oh, yeah. That’s right, yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is she?” I asked, sensing that Ted would deflect any of my advances about Manson.

“Well, she’s up in the mountains,” he said, generalizing.

“What mountains?” I questioned.

“Up in the Cascades, you know.”

No, I didn’t know, so I pressed on. “And she’s actually buried in the ground?”

Ted approached his response slowly and said, “Well—how did that work? This is something that happened piece by piece, strange as this may sound. I’m trying to remember exactly where it all happened. That’s something we’re going to have to talk about in the future. I don’t know that I was ever more incoherent. And I mean, that night is like some kind of dream, you know, very blurry area, nightmarish, and I have trouble piecing it together. But it’s going to take me a while to work on that one.”

“Okay.”

Ted continued, “As I sometimes had a bottle of wine in the car and was just, among other things, extremely drunk.”

After spending about an hour and a half with Ted, I was eager to hear about the extent of his murders in Washington State. If I knew the numbers he was willing to talk about over the next few days, it would be a barometer of what I might get from him. I knew that in the beginning of our conversation he didn’t want to talk numbers. So I asked cautiously, “Just so I can get an idea about timing as far as in the next hour, can we get some sort of feeling, if you can’t remember names, maybe timing or events or something that will give me an idea of how many people we need to talk about, so I can get an idea of the scope?”

Obligingly, Ted said, “Uh huh. Let’s see. Yeah. In Washington?”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ve got the one from Oregon up there, and that’s our case too.”

“Well, let’s see. I think it’s—I think it’ll be eleven.”

Shocked at Ted’s answer, I wanted clarification. “Eleven altogether?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, okay. Which areas? Which jurisdictions or which disappearance sites or—do you remember any names of anybody?” I muttered.

“Well, sure. I remember a lot of it,” Ted reassured me.

“Give me an idea of which ones you’re talking about.”

There was a long silence. Ted had worked himself into a corner and needed desperately to get out. The original number of Ted cases known to law enforcement authorities was 8, not 11 as Ted had just announced. That, just for openers, was a shocker that put Ted on the hook for three more homicides than the ones we knew about. However, since he’d said that the additional three were pre-1974, he held out the possibility that there were more crimes to which he could confess. But I suspected he wanted to save those confessions to pre-1974 homicides until after his execution was delayed, so as to give him more bargaining power. Why play all your cards until you have to? It was the pre-1974 time period he wanted to stay away from at this debriefing. But by announcing that he had 11 cases within the scope of his confessions, he’d just opened the door to the three more cases. Now he started to talk himself out of trouble.

He nervously continued, “Well, I could—give you probably most of the names, or some names and some locations.”

“All right.” I eagerly awaited the information.

Ted regained his composure and reverted to his mission. He said, “Okay, but this is basically what I want to avoid, putting myself into a position where we more or less run through the standard litany of victims and without the depth of information and the precedent and antecedent stuff, what happened before, during, and after, what was going on in my mind. And that’s why I feel that I’d like to clothe these names in some kind of reality, even though it be a distorted reality. And I’m worried that—I won’t bullshit you—I’m worried that I—that we just run through it like this, and I can understand your curiosity, believe me, but we run through it like this, and we leave ourselves open to the temptation to leave it at that.”

“Right. One of the things that I’m concerned about is time,” I said, stroking his ego.

“I know.”

“And you haven’t finished everything about Georgann Hawkins, either,” I reminded him.

“No.”

“So we’ve got ten more to go,” I announced.

“That’s right,” Ted said.

I realized that from this point on Ted was finished confessing to any more of his murders at our Friday meeting. The cat was partially out of the bag—only partially. In looking over Ted’s handwritten itinerary for the next few days, I saw no more time devoted to me, which seemed unreasonable since I had the highest number of murders to cover with him. But technically, it was his show. So, in the time remaining, I decided to put some pressure on him and force him to focus on the scope of his murders. He was trying to handle his last days like some kind of high-level summit negotiation, but he had planned it poorly. I treaded carefully, explaining, “I’m thinking about areas, time, and whether I need to stay with the rest of that Issaquah site. Or whether I need to move on to a different murder I don’t even know about. I might be able to corroborate facts in the next couple of days. I know the basic six. Now I know about seven, one that was missing that we didn’t know was there. The missing Donna Manson—the girl from Thurston County—we haven’t covered where she is. That’s all I know about so far from you. Now I need to know what other murders you’re talking about. Are there murders in other jurisdictions in Washington? I want to get some perspective because, eventually, I’d like to get as many details on each one that I can. I don’t want to go for two hours and say, ‘Well, I have no idea what the scope is.’ ’Cause if anybody asks me what the scope is,” I said, now deliberately fucking with the very thing Ted was most worried about, “somebody of importance—like the governor of Florida—I’d like to know what it is.”

Ted said, “Yeah. I don’t blame you.”

“You and I have talked for two hours already, not counting the other visits I’ve had [with] you and your letters to me. But what I need to know is if I have to fight for more time. What do I have to fight about? I know the details of things that are here, but maybe some other people don’t have as much to talk about as I do. I don’t know. It depends on what they have. So I know about those eight. And you’re talking about three others. How far back in time? You got January seventy-four through July of seventy-four. Are there more within that time frame that I don’t know about in the state of Washington?”

“Yes, there are,” Ted proclaimed. “I hear you, Bob. What I’m trying to do, for my own self, is to demonstrate that I am serious about this. You have a legitimate need to know it all. And you want, of course, to start with what is most obvious, that is, the identities, numbers, dates, and that’s important. There’s a lot more important stuff. And I’ve never spoken to anybody about this and, for me, it was an important first confession of its kind. I’m not asking for any kind of public-service awards, but the reality is that’s what it was for me.”

Seeking further clarification on the extent of his murders, I said, “I guess what I need is, rather than me throwing out stuff for you to say, you know, this is what we need to talk about or not, like the August second murders in Clark County. If there’s only eleven, then that’s fine. I don’t want to guess. I’m curious about murdered girls at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, in 1971 and the two stewardesses on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.”

Ted relented by saying, “Yeah, we can do it that way if you’d like, too. And maybe in some ways that’s easier. I can tell you what I’m not involved in, you know, if you have a list of that type in your head.”

“There’s the gal up in Bellingham in the river, strangled in 1970,” I said, without giving her name.

Abruptly, Ted said, “No.”

“There’s a gal in 1971, Thurston County,” I continued.

“No,” he blurted out.

Ted was giving a sharp, generic no at the mention of each victim, just to avoid the subject. He was so intent on not cooperating at this point, I could have asked him if he killed Janice Ott and he would have said no. What he didn’t realize was that I wasn’t interested in whether he would say yes or no. Each question I asked contained a year in it for a reason. It was the year I was looking for, not whether he could tell me the name of the victim. I was observing his body language. What shocked me was that Ted should have asked for a name or asked for clarification of the question,
like any normal person would do who was just playing a police in terrogation game.

“Not that far back. Nothing that far back?” I carefully asked.

“Nineteen seventy-two,” said Ted, unaware of my intent. Falling for my trap, he claimed two years prior to 1974 when he committed a murder.