The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (65 page)

I could tell there was something so grotesque about the Manson murder that Ted didn’t want to discuss it. Also, I realized Ted was stalling because he had told me specifically on Friday, “What you have found is aboveground, and what you haven’t found is buried.” He must have buried the bodies of Healy, Parks, Rancourt, and Ball, but refused to talk about where they were buried. He blamed the animals for eating them all up. I knew that was bullshit. Bill Hagmaier had told me that Bundy told him some time ago that he had as many as four heads at home with him at one time. Hagmaier didn’t have the specific knowledge of the Ted murders to know which ones he was referring to. They must have been the Taylor Mountain women.

Cautiously, I changed the subject to a safer subject that wouldn’t embarrass him. I would return to the Manson murder later.

I inquired, “Okay, how about Janice Ott’s bicycle?”

Eagerly, as though he was more receptive, Ted asked, “Okay, do
you have any maps of Seattle? Show me the Arboretum.” Ted explained that he hid Ott’s bicycle under some leaves in the Arboretum near the University of Washington. While Ted looked at the map, he joked, “No, that’s not it. I think I have a little orientation problem. Shouldn’t take me more than a couple days to figure it out. No, let’s see. This is kind of mind-boggling. I used to know that place like the back of my hand. Well, it was concealed with leaves and branches.”

After about five minutes of Ted trying to locate the Arboretum on the map, I pressed Ted again about Donna Manson. “Okay, how about Donna Manson? Gal from Thurston County, Olympia. Where’s she?”

Ted reacted quickly. “Where is she? That was different. That was different.”

“What was different about it? You told me before that she might be buried,” I asked, having Ted’s attention.

He smiled like a little boy with a secret. Ted stuttered like he was about to tell a lie, offering that Manson was buried farther up the power line road and slightly inside the tree cover. When I told him that we could probably find her if he was more certain of her location, Ted confessed, “I won’t beat around the bush with you anymore, because I’m just tired, and I just want to get back and go to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, waiting impatiently for his next words.

“So let me just tell you. I know that part of her is buried up there, but nothing identifiable, probably just literally bones. The head, however, the skull, wouldn’t be there,” Ted said with some relief.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“It’s nowhere,” he stated as though it had fallen into a black hole.

“It’s nowhere?” I asked in disbelief, sensing that he was about to say something horrible.

“Well, I’m not trying to be flippant. It’s just nowhere. It’s in a category by itself. Now, I’d just as soon this is something that you just kept. I can see the headlines now. But—”

I reassured him. “Ted, there’s not going to be any details. What
you told me about Georgann Hawkins isn’t going to be known. And I have parents out there that don’t even want to know the details.” I pointed to Hagmaier and said, “He wants to know, and I want to know for my own good.”

“Well, it was incinerated. It was just an exception. A strange exception, but it was incinerated,” he announced.

“Where did you incinerate it?” I asked, with shock setting in.

Laughing, Ted said, “Ahh.”

I pleaded, “Come on, partner. These are things I don’t know about you.”

Ted proudly proclaimed, “Yeah, this is probably the disposal method of preference among those who get away with it. It’s the most bizarre nature I’ve ever been associated with, and I’ve been associated with some bizarre shit.”

Incredulous, I said, “Right. It’s incinerated.”

“It’s incinerated,” Ted repeated.

“Tell me about it. What the hell happened?” I said anxiously, noticing that Ted’s repulsive juices began to flow while talking about it.

“Well, I don’t know the address of the place. I never wanted to tell this—I promised myself I’d never tell this, because of all the things I did to this woman, this is probably the one she was least likely to forgive me for. Poor Liz.” He was referring to Elizabeth Kendall, his former fiancée. “In her fireplace. That’s not really that humorous, but, I mean, the fireplace at that house,” Ted said with sinister, satisfied laughter in his voice.

“Burn it all up?” I asked, still in disbelief.

“Down to the last ash, and in a fit of—you know—paranoia and cleanliness, what have you, just vacuumed down all the ashes. That’s the twist. It’s a twist. And it’s a lot of work and certainly very risky, under the circumstances. I mean, the kids come home from school, there’s a roaring fire in the fireplace, and it’s warm outside,” Ted said with finality.

It was nearing the end of our short interview. Since Ted had broached the subject previously, I wanted him to focus on the three Ted murders I didn’t know about, so I said, “Okay, you mentioned
the eight before and you gave me three more. And I don’t know what three you’re talking about. Can you help me a little bit with those?”

“Which three? I was trying to figure that out myself,” answered Ted, honestly trying to remember.

“And what did you come up with?” I asked.

“This is what I came up with. It was an earlier one. Nineteen seventy-three,” Ted admitted.

“Okay,” I said, attempting to hide my glee at the fact that even though he had mentioned earlier that he would only talk about 1974 and nothing more, he had now ventured into 1973, which was a year I expected to be as deadly as 1974.

“Seventy-three. Well, it was earlier than anything. Time confuses me. Time of year: it’s—May. I’m not sure,” Ted continued, frowning as though he wanted to tell but knew he had said too much already.

“Okay, where was she missing from?” I asked.

“Tumwater area,” Ted answered. I knew that Ted refused to admit that he killed Kathy Devine, who was in the photograph I had shown him in 1984. She was depicted in her death pose, a sight that momentarily excited Ted. Ted was talking about 1973 in the Olympia area, a place where he worked and also near the dump sites of Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker, two victims who were killed in 1973. He was the prime suspect in both cases, as far as I was concerned.

“Tumwater area. That’s where she was missing from?” I asked, acting interested in what he was about to say. I knew he was stalling so that he wouldn’t have to talk about the 1973 murders.

“Well, no, not the area, I mean, Tumwater÷Olympia. I’m always bad about where one starts and the other stops. That whole area has always disoriented me. That’s the problem. There’s a maze. I call it a maze of back roads. It’s not a maze, I guess, but there’s something about the area that I have a hard time keeping track of the back road system there,” said Ted, trying to avoid the question by talking about something other than the actual murder.

I probed further by asking, “Is it a found body? Do you know that?”

“No,” Ted replied.

“It’s not found,” I stated.

“No,” Ted said, without his usual long explanation.

“It’s a missing girl from the Tumwater area?” I posed.

“Well, I don’t know if she was from there.” Ted was carefully backtracking.

“Or that’s where you picked her up?” I inquired, thinking he was more likely talking about the murder of Brenda Baker.

“She was hitchhiking. Yeah, I never heard anything more about her. But it’s hard to explain, Bob. The person I used to be would get into a fit and just drive. And people have trouble relating to that. You sort of lose orientation. You sort of lose track of where you’ve been. You just get lost. It can be in broad daylight and so panicky, so disoriented. Anyway—I mean, I believe this is where you’re going—I can’t even remember the road system anymore. The highway goes off and you get to the bottom of Capitol Hill. The highway goes off—one freeway goes off to the left and the other goes off to the right. Used to know what that was. It goes to the ocean. And there’s a whole bunch of roads that turn to the right and then just meander. Without really paying as much attention to where you’re going, just looking for some place,” Ted said while I was nodding my head with approval. Ted had just nailed one of the key attributes of the serial-killer mentality and explained it, first person. Serial killers drive; they troll back and forth to lose themselves in the jumble of their own inability to relate to reality and they start to wander. If a victim crosses a killer’s path when he’s in this state, the victim’s as good as dead.

“I was halfway familiar with those kinds of roads because one of my hobbies, before I started doing this, was I liked places to go where people dumped stuff—literally dumped stuff like clothing, paper, boards, boxes, couches, and things.”

“That’s where she’s off, one of those roads someplace?” I inquired.

Ted was now in his I-can’t-tell-you-exactly-where-it-was mode. He was wasting time talking about an area I knew he knew better than the inside of his prison cell. The location he was talking about was a stone’s throw from Evergreen State College, where Ted abducted Donna Manson. Could he have mixed up his victims? He tried to explain his mix-up with the number of Washington victims. “Okay, the other two I don’t know, Bob. I was thinking about it. You know, you threw out a number and I think what happened is a number lodged in my head, and you said eight. I thought eleven. You know, we didn’t sit down and say, okay, one is --------, two is -------, three is ---------, four is …” Ted complained. Funny, he
wouldn’t previously talk about numbers, and now that’s what he was complaining about. Fine fix he’d gotten me into. “For some reason I’d been thinking—I hadn’t really stopped myself and for some reason I was thinking the number in Washington was eleven. I don’t know how many individuals,” Ted finally said. Even though the transcripts and tape were made available to the FBI and the news media, everyone still says that Ted admitted to murdering 11 in Washington State, but in reality, he withdrew his estimate. He claimed not to remember how many individuals he had killed. He withdrew his estimate of 11 because he and I both knew that he had murdered a lot more women in Washington State than 11.

Finally, I had one last thing to show Ted that he didn’t know we had. It was a black-and-white photograph taken on July 14, 1974, at Lake Sammamish State Park. It depicted a Volkswagen bug with someone behind the wheel. It was parked underneath the same tree to which Ted walked with the first woman he approached. She was the only witness to see Ted’s Volkswagen Beetle. Also in the picture were numerous police officers escorting some rowdy bikers from the park. If the vehicle license plate had been in the picture and not blocked out by a police car, Ted Bundy would have been a suspect in those murders much sooner.

“I’d like to ask one last question,” I said, knowing that Ted was eager to end our session. He was stressed-out.

“Oh, boy,” Ted said, mocking me and wanting to get some rest.

I threw down the photograph on the table and asked, “Is that you? It’s Lake Sammamish State Park, 1974, the tree. Cops roll in to take care of the bikers.”

“Lawbreakers,” Ted immediately said with recognition. He knew exactly what was in the picture. It was him, trapped until the police moved their cars—an embarrassing moment for the great Ted Bundy. But would he admit that it was him? Knowing Ted had not assessed the possibility of us actually having real evidence demonstrating that he was Washington’s Ted killer, I knew he would not directly comment about it.

“Well, I mean, we’re in the ballpark” was as close as Ted would admit. He avoided the issue again, stuttering, “Well, you say there’s a person in there. I mean, it appears to be this other person in there, right? I’m not trying to bait the question. I think as you no doubt
discovered, there are a lot of light-colored Volkswagens. And I don’t mean to burst your bubble. That is an interesting coincidence. But God, I was—you would have never seen me in Lake Sammamish State Park again with all that heat. That’s a lot of heat there,” Ted answered with guilty, nervous laughter and with the private knowledge that he had never returned to Lake Sammamish State Park again. If it was possible to raise his stress level at that point, I could tell the photograph did. He attacked the evidence like the attorney he had always wanted to be.

Even though Ted was near the point of exhaustion, he was still fighting for his survival on this one issue. He pointed out, “That would have been fairly memorable. No, that … that couldn’t be me. And besides, at that time, I think you notice, on the back of the car was missing a piece of the ski rack.” Thank you, Ted, your attention to detail is astounding.

“A thousand people have asked me to ask you this,” I cautiously proceeded.

“Oh God, aspirin, right? Go ahead,” Ted said with the kind of sarcasm that only he could display.

“About Ann Marie Burr,” I said, knowing what his response would be at this late hour.

“Okay, well, right. That’s one that’s easy. No. Absolutely not. That’s one of the few I wish that people would believe. They believe everything else except my answer, which is no—on that one, you know, and that’s very sad. But it’s also so ludicrous because I don’t know if you ever looked at it in the course of your studies. It’s all the way across town, really, from where I—as a kid—hung out and had my paper route. The inference was, for instance, my paper route came close to or included the Burr home. Well, my understanding is it’s, you know, for a kid, where the Burrs lived, as it relates to where I lived, it was in a different part of the world. That was a pretty long ways away. Different schools, different high schools. Never went to that area. Never had any occasion to go there. It was just, just another part of the forest. And—agh—I was only like thirteen, fourteen years old, or less,” Ted pleaded.

I didn’t believe any of his explanation. Ted was a lifelong liar, and he was lying about this. Ted’s world was different from the one that normal persons lived in, very different. His explanation didn’t hold water, and he knew it. He had told me last year that there were
some murders that people like him would never talk about. They were murders committed too close to home, too close to family, and of victims who were very young. Ann Marie Burr fit all three. At this point, Ted still held on to some hope for a stay of his execution, so he didn’t want the rap in prison of being a baby-killer. The other prisoners don’t like those types.