The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (66 page)

“When and where was your first murder?” I asked, knowing that my time was up.

“One more question, right?” Ted laughed.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” His majesty had just shut me off.

He clicked the tape recorder off and handed it back to me. I put it away and stood up to go. As I left, I shook his hand, knowing I would never see him again. It was time for at least one moment of laser-beam honesty. I told him that he had orchestrated the past few days very poorly. Ted just looked at me.

“You just killed yourself,” I said. And that was the last thing I ever said to Ted Bundy.

15
 
Bundy’s 1989 Colorado Confessions

Colorado detectives Mike Fisher and Matt Lindvall fussed with their recording device in the tiny interview room on Florida’s death row as a nervous Ted Bundy, in handcuffs in his own tiny chamber, watched them set it up. Bundy knew Mike Fisher from his homicide arrest in Aspen. I met Fisher when he was following up leads in the Caryn Campbell murder in Pitkin County. Campbell had disappeared from the Snowmass Lodge in Colorado ski country.

Fisher, who had tracked Bundy after he broke out of a Colorado jail, reminded me of a dog with a sock, always pursuing, analyzing, and never letting go. So the sound of his voice on my phone when he called to say “The son of a bitch escaped again” is something I still remember.

Bundy had fled from his Colorado jail across the country, up to Michigan, then to Florida, where, after the Chi Omega sorority-house murders and the murder of Kimberly Leach, he was finally arrested driving a stolen van. It was in Florida that Bundy would eventually be put to death in the electric chair. The U.S. Supreme Court had denied Bundy’s final appeal and the governor of Florida was steadfastly refusing to grant him a stay. His hour had come.

Bundy still saw an endgame strategy in the final weeks, however. Maybe he could garner enough interest in the confessions he was
making, he thought, or maybe he could convince somebody—the governor, perhaps—that he was more valuable alive than dead. Maybe he could convince Mike Fisher, Matt Lindvall, the FBI, or me. Fat chance of that, but Bundy and his attorney scratched out the final hours, dribbling out bits and pieces of confessions to homicides and describing the locations of the bodies of missing women. But in the midst of the fencing back and forth about what information he might or might not give up, and while Bundy was still trying to keep a throne of information from shortly becoming an electric chair, very revealing aspects emerged about what takes place in the mind of a serial killer during, after, and, still later, upon reflection of his crimes.

My jousting with Bundy occurred shortly before Fisher and Lindvall interviewed him. During my interview, it became noticeable that Bundy was stalling so that he could talk to an investigator from the Colorado Attorney General’s office, who was on his way down to Stark. Bundy had received a message from his appellate attorneys to the effect that if he was to tell the AG’s investigator the truth, the governor and attorney general of Colorado would speak on his behalf to the governor of Florida. I was unimpressed with Bundy’s new strategy to wait for that investigator when Fisher and Lindvall were in the corridor waiting their turn with him. So I got in his face a little about the futility of waiting when Fisher and Lindvall were outside thinking they were next.

I told him that with this kind of gamesmanship, the public and the government officials deciding Bundy’s fate would only think that this new found strategy was just another one of his insincere ploys. I pushed him on this, and Bundy agreed to speak with Fisher and Lindvall. As I passed Fisher on his way into the interview area, I said to him, “Don’t be swayed by any of Ted’s tears. They are all fake.”

That was what preceded Mike Fisher and Matt Lindvall’s setting up of the tape-recording device to pick up what would be Bundy’s Colorado confessions.

“It would have been on the east side of town on the eastern end of the main downtown shopping area,” Bundy began, explaining where he met Vail, Colorado, victim Julie Cunningham. “There was, I think, there was streets, which are pedestrian streets mainly. And around that core mainly, and around that core is a loop of some sort. And it’s on the eastern loop of that by a bridge.”

He contacted her using the same ruse he’d used in the Georgann
Hawkins disappearance. “I was again using a pair of crutches and a boot bag, a boot tree, and she offered to help me with it, and we walked from that location to the parking lot, which was maybe a distance of one-half to three-quarters of a mile. It was after dark, early evening. We had to climb, actually, to the location where the car was parked, had to climb a rather steep snowbank and descend down into the parking lot where the car was.”

At the car, Bundy also did what he had done countless times before, particularly when he abducted Georgann Hawkins from Fraternity Row at the University of Washington on June 11, 1974.

“We just walked right along,” he told Detective Matt Lindvall, until they got to his VW Beetle, at which point, using a metal crowbar, “I knocked her unconscious.” He had secreted the crowbar by the rear of the car, alongside and resting against the engine. He snatched it up when Julie reached the car and used a single blow to the back of her head to knock her out. She went down immediately, he told Lindvall. Then he handcuffed her while she was on the ground, lifted her into the VW—alongside him on the floor of his car, from which he’d removed the passenger seat—and drove out of Vail.

“We drove,” he said. “I drove, got on the highway, freeway, I don’t know if it’s a freeway, it was dark, quite frankly, and you know I hadn’t traveled that area a lot, so I can’t say what the roads were exactly like as everything was pretty much a blur. I was, uh, impaired. The fact is that I think I was intoxicated. I’m pretty sure I was pretty well intoxicated at the time and then under these circumstances, there’s a high degree of stress that kind of distorts my memory somewhat.”

Bundy was unsure about how much time he spent driving with Julie beside him or exactly how far he drove that night as he fled the scene of his assault. “It’s hard to explain at this point in time. Prior to an incident like this for me things can be pretty clear. Once it gets rolling, everything starts becoming kind of a high-pitched kind of blur. You lose track of time, so it’s how far, how long, I don’t remember. I do remember, all I remember, is how bright the lights were in the rearview mirror, and all of a sudden we were in or near Glenwood Springs.”

At some point, also like Georgann Hawkins, Bundy’s victim started to come to. But unlike Georgann, who remained disoriented throughout and believed that Bundy was her Spanish tutor,
Julie tried to engage her assailant and captor in conversation.

“She began talking,” Bundy said. “I remember conversation, but I have a hard time coming up with exact words…. She was just asking who I was and all. You know, where I was from. That kind of thing.”

On they drove, into the night and toward some spot in the woods where Bundy, unsure of where he was and not knowing the area as well as he did Issaquah and Taylor Mountain, was looking for a spot to dump his still-living victim. “It’s dark, but it’s not overcast. There’s stars in the sky, I think, even at this point. I mean there’s not much traffic on the road. It’s gotten quite a bit later. I’ve lost track of time. I’m not thinking clearly, and that’s an understatement. I’m looking for a side road of some sort off the main highway. I’m confused about where I am, really.”

Disoriented and paying more attention to his victim than to where he was going, Bundy described a level of panic and frenzy that was driving him to unload his victim somewhere, anywhere, and then head out of the area. Again, much like his murder of Georgann Hawkins, Bundy was desperate to get away from his victim. “I was driving and yet my ability to perceive surroundings was somewhat limited. I was paying attention to what was going on inside the car and was still under the influence. It was kind of like I was in a panic, frightened state, not knowing where I was. Now I was looking, after I got through that populated area, I was looking for another turnoff, a side road, a dirt road, or something. And it just didn’t seem to be anything, and I was also getting concerned about houses in the area ’cause I knew it was getting late and I didn’t want to turn into somebody’s driveway.”

After a few minutes, however, he found a spot. “It couldn’t have been that long, we’re talking minutes probably, I found a side road, a dirt road, and turned off onto it and drove maybe a quarter-mile off the road to the right. And I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what was around me. It was pitch-black. It was very disorienting under ordinary circumstances. I mean it was very disorienting for me in particular, so I didn’t know where I was and I was somewhere.” Then he stopped the car. Julie had completely regained consciousness by now as she lay beside him in his VW.

Asked what happened next after he stopped the car at the spot, Bundy said, struggling to answer because of what he was obviously trying to hide, “See if I can work it this way. At some point, she’d
been asking me to loosen the handcuffs. And I did so. I got out of the car and tried to figure out where things were. Walked from the car and apparently she’d slipped out of the handcuffs and began to exit the car. Of course, she didn’t know, obviously, she didn’t know any more where we were than I did, maybe less so. And I couldn’t, even now or then, assess what injuries she had. But I imagine that she wasn’t entirely fully physically able, I mean, after being knocked unconscious. But anyway, I noticed her opening the door and getting out of the car. And trying to put it, everything becomes such a blur for not completely … I’d mislead you to say I’d blacked out or anything. All I remember is basically, clearly, I can tell you, it’s a struggle and knocking her unconscious again.”

Bundy explained that he had had the crowbar right inside the door of the car and “probably sometime during the course of the struggle I got ahold of it.” He hit her with the crowbar and she fell backward, half in and half out of the car. She survived the blow, Bundy believed, and then he reached back inside the car for the murder weapon.

“I had some links of cord in the car, among other things, obviously. At that time I was thoroughly panicked and in, ah, it’s hard to say, it’s hard to describe. I won’t say. It’s just that the sense of urgency, sense of panic, urgency, being in a hurry to get it over with and get away from there. All that happening at once and more, and I used a link of that cord, a length of that cord was used to strangle her.”

She was lying on the ground at this point; Bundy was not sure whether she was faceup or facedown. And years after that night, when he was on death row facing his interrogators from Colorado, he was not able to describe fully the sequence of events that followed. “I know some of what took place,” he said. “All I can tell you, of course, that’s all I can tell you. And I’m having a hard time even articulating what I remember. Well, I, just to be able to find the words, I’m going to want you to note this in your mind or whatever so we can come back to it, ’cause, I think in the context of everything that’s happened it’s important. And I’m not denying it in the sense that I’m trying to forget it and tell you that nothing happened. I mean I could tell you I dragged her up into the woods and left it there, but that’s not what happened. But I’m having a hard time talking about it. Basically, what ended up happening was I carried her up into some wooded area. It’s hard to describe again because of the darkness at the time. It was hard to describe what
kind of area it was except there were trees of some sort. And I left. Just like that.”

Bundy removed all of his victim’s clothes, her suede coat, her boots, her jewelry, and all her other possessions and left her on the ground amid the wooded area. He told police that, aside from hitting her twice with the metal bar and strangling her with the cord, she was not injured in any other way while she was still alive.

“How about after she died?” Detective Lindvall asked.

“We didn’t get into that” was Bundy’s only answer, but he said that he had a better memory of where he left her because he returned to the dump site six to eight weeks later. Bundy said he sped away from the dump site that night with all of her clothing and possessions in his car. He deposited her clothing in a Goodwill container in Salt Lake City and then, weeks later, returned to the body he’d left in the open air.

Because it had been dark when Bundy dropped Julie Cunningham’s body out in the open, he didn’t easily remember the place when he returned. “Even when I saw it, I didn’t recognize it. But I was matter-of-fact. I’d gone to a half a dozen different places before I found that one. So that looks like it. But seeing it in the day-time was just totally different. I was trying to recreate what it looked like at night. But after the better part of a half a day and getting out of my car a half a dozen times, I did locate what seemed to appear to be the spot. And parked my car, left my car down the road off a turnoff area, off a paved roadway, walked across the road and up, it was up the side of this hillside. I mean up the hillside, and this is some scrub trees at the base of a rock, a rocky area, a rocky cliff some fifty, thirty-three to fifty feet high. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. And below that little rocky ridge in this little clump of scrub trees was the young woman’s body, Julie’s body.