The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (78 page)

Your affiant knows through training and experience that trace evidence such as hairs, fibers, and stains were likely to be transferred from the victims to their killer and vice versa. Trace evidence in the form of fibers, hairs, blood stains, or body fluid evidence can remain at a site for many years, particularly if such evidence has seeped through carpet or is in an area inaccessible to routine cleaning. Trace evidence such as
fibers, hairs, blood stains, and body fluid evidence may still be found in residences and vehicles formerly used by Ridgway. For example, in the Hinds case, a light blue paint chip was recovered from the scene blanket that was used to transport Hinds’ body to the morgue. In the Christensen case, a few small fibers were recovered from her fingernail clippings, including a blue cotton fiber and a green acrylic fiber. It is possible that matching paint chips and/or fibers will be found in the residences and/or vehicles used by Ridgway. Your affiant also knows it is important to collect papers and documents associated to Ridgway to assist detectives in developing an accurate timeline on his whereabouts. Further, your affiant knows, through training and experience, that deliberate repeat “killers” have been known to record or photograph their victims for the same reasons such persons keep “trophies,” to be able to relive the event. It is important for detectives to collect photographs and videotapes to review the possibility they contain this type of evidence. Detectives are also requesting permission to obtain blood, hair, and saliva samples from Ridgway for future crime laboratory analysis.

Subsequent to the filing of the affidavits by the King County Sheriff’s Department, Gary Ridgway’s various residences, his work locker at Kenworth Trucking, and his vehicles were all searched. As of this update, Gary Ridgway is currently awaiting trial in the state of Washington for the murders of Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds, Marcia Chapman, and Carol Christensen.

Ted Bundy didn’t know, when he wrote to me after I became the consultant to the Green River Murders Task Force, that police investigators had already made contact with an individual the task force would later scrutinize very carefully as the case progressed. Dave Reichert and I didn’t tell Bundy about anybody the task force had spoken to with regard to the case. Naturally, that was to be kept secret until such time as the prosecuting attorney made it public. And with the public release of Sue Peters’s affidavit of probable cause for a search warrant following the arrest of Gary Ridgway, a whole part of the case that was unfolding during the time we were speaking to Ted Bundy in Florida is now part of the public record, as are Bundy’s confessions.

Accordingly, at this point, almost fourteen years after Bundy’s execution and twenty years since our conversations with him began, it’s instructive to ask one very basic question: Were Bundy’s profile and observations about the Green River Killer correct? Was Bundy right? Given what Detective Peters wrote in her affidavit, we can compare what’s in the public record about the investigation and Ridgway’s admissions with what Bundy said to see just how accurate he was.

The King County affidavit describes the route the investigation took as police made contact with various witnesses including prostitutes, a pimp, friends of missing victims, at least one living witness, Gary Ridgway’s
girlfriends, and his first and second wives. Ridgway’s admissions amplify and confirm the information in the King County affidavit. What we’re concerned with as we compare Bundy’s predictions with the record of the investigation as set forth in the public record is only whether Bundy’s assessments about the nature of the investigation have any validity at all.

Bundy, as it became abundantly clear during the interviews, was projecting a lot about what he thought and did into the Green River case, which he was following in the newspapers. However, because he was being more subjective than objective, he was able to conjure up a prototypical suspect, whom he called the “Riverman,” a name the suspect himself used in a letter to police, and impart to that creation what he thought such a suspect might think and do. He also made certain basic assumptions about what our investigation would find.

For example, Bundy assumed that anyone able to move in and out of the area with the bodies of his victims had to have an intimate knowledge of the area, particularly the areas from where victims had been recovered. Just the amount of victim recoveries, Bundy hypothesized, meant that his Riverman knew how to move around without attracting any attention, even if he were moving around in plain sight. Knowledge breeds confidence, exactly the kind of confidence Bundy didn’t have when he frantically drove out of Vail, Colorado, with the semiconscious body of Julie Cunningham alongside him in his VW. Bundy’s self-described panic led him more than 70 miles away from Vail to a wooded area off a dirt road, where, in complete isolation, he strangled Julie and left her body in the open. He returned weeks later to bury it.

Bundy’s Riverman, he believed, did not exhibit this level of panic because he was completely familiar with the areas where bodies would be left. And as the Sue Peters affidavit shows, Detectives Haney and Doyon, on their September 14, 1986, driving tour with Marcia Winslow indicated that Marcia was taken to the Frager Road, and she pointed out areas where she and Gary had gone bicycling and had gotten off their bicycles to engage in sex. This area included the
grassy banks by P. D. & J. Meats, and also under a large tree next to a pond by the Peck Bridge. (This is the location where Green River victims Coffield, Bonner, Mills, Chapman, and Hinds had been found.) There were other areas, the affidavit says, including Star Lake Road and Cottonwood Grove Park, where Marcia Winslow said she had visited with the subject of the King County affidavit and from where bodies had been recovered. If what Marcia Winslow told King County detectives, as reported in the affidavit, was accurate, then Bundy’s assessment of his Riverman’s knowledge of areas where bodies had been recovered was accurate.

Bundy said that for his Riverman to be able to pick up victims quickly and without attracting attention, he had to understand the entire prostitution scene. He had to know how to approach a prostitute, or a woman on the street who could be mistaken for a prostitute, make a date, and get out of the area quickly. The entire “date” itself, as we talked about it with Bundy, was a kind of mini-abduction for cash. He hypothesized that the Riverman would know where the prostitutes congregated, how to make a date so as not to set off an alarm, and where to dump the body in a place he knew so well that he believed it and he would be safe.

Again, the King County affidavit not only contained interviews with friends of the victims but actual witnesses to the contacts between the killer and women believed to have become victims. At least one witness, Paige Miley, reported to police how quickly her friend Kim Nelson had disappeared from a bus stop and how unnerved she was when a stranger casually asked her about her friend. The stranger seemed to be familiar with her friend, and who, evidently, knew the area.

Kim Nelson had disappeared from a covered bus stop in front of a car wash at South 144th and Pacific Highway South on November 1, 1983. Several nights later, while Miley was working as a prostitute in front of the Moonrise Motel, the affidavit says, “she was approached by a man driving a red pickup truck…. After talking about a date, the man asked Miley where her blonde friend was. Miley immediately became concerned with the fact that the man
was aware of Kim Nelson’s presence on Pacific High Way South.” The man, whom Miley did not know but described as “a white male, late twenties to early thirties, with brown hair and a wispy moustache … drinking a can of Budweiser beer that he held between his legs,” seemed familiar enough with the prostitution scene to talk about a “car date” and to have asked about her friend Kim Nelson. He also seemed familiar enough with Miley so as to be able to talk to her. Ridgway, in his confession, said he had already murdered Kim, and asked Paige about her on the spur of the moment to see if Paige suspected anything.

Bundy believed that his proto-Riverman used his familiarity with prostitutes on the Sea-Tac “scene” along Pacific Highway South so as to be able to manipulate them. He had to be able to get them into his car without arousing suspicion and to talk to them in their own language of dates and car dates. The King County affidavit, narrating the report of prostitute Dawn White, indicates how White, even though she thought the man who approached her was “weird and different,” in her own words, still felt obligated to initiate contact with him after a car date they were trying to make was broken up by a police unit.

“White and her friend were contacted by the King County Police in Larry’s Market parking lot,” the affidavit says. “Because the police made them leave the area, the date did not occur…. However, later that day she looked up his name in the telephone book and called him at home telling what happened regarding the incident with the police.” She arranged for a meeting with the stranger for a later date, but said they “went their separate ways,” and she didn’t see him until a year and a half later when they met by accident at a McDonald’s in Seattle.

Even though Dawn White was not entirely comfortable with the stranger she said approached her and her friend in a parking lot, she nevertheless felt safe enough to initiate contact with him on her own and arrange for a later date. Perhaps this is the kind of behavior, the ability to get the people Ridgway contacted to trust him enough to do what he wanted, that Bundy was talking about when he described his Riverman as being able to manipulate the members
of his victim pool. And, of course, Bundy was correct in that. Ridgway later bragged to investigators about how easy it was to manipulate his victims, especially the teenagers and runaways, with a photo of his own son.

The amount of time between the discoveries of bodies and when the actual crimes might have taken place made it hard, Bundy said, for police to follow up. How can you reasonably follow up quickly on a missing person if you don’t know the victim is missing? How can you prosecute a homicide investigation when the victim has been missing for so long you can’t tell when she was actually abducted or killed? These were the questions Bundy admitted he had to appreciate when he talked to Dave Reichert and me about ways the police could identify his concept of the Riverman.

Indeed, the King County affidavit exemplified just such a problem when various witnesses reported to the task force that they believed they knew who the Green River Killer might be or reported that their friends might be missing and, perhaps, had become victims of a crime. For example, Paige Miley’s report to the task force on August 12, 1986, presented police with just such a problem because her report of the missing Kim Nelson, whose remains were recovered off I-90 on Garcia Road on June 13, 1986, was made almost three years after Nelson disappeared from the bus stop.

Similarly, Rebecca Garde Guay’s report of a November 1982 assault upon her when her assailant tried to choke her was made over two years later in 1984. The police contacted Ridgway, as the affidavit says, in February 1985, and in the ensuing conversation, according to the affidavit, “Ridgway said he picked up Guay, who was hitchhiking, at about 5
P.M.…
Guay inquired of him if he ‘dated,’ at which time he replied yes. At that time they agreed to a $20 act of sex (blow job).” Later on, the affidavit states that Ridgway “admitted choking Guay after she bit him, saying he choked her with his arm for ten to fifteen seconds.” The police report on this encounter was made two years after the encounter took place. The police interview with Ridgway took place three months later.
But the police investigator’s acceptance of Ridgway’s explanation only served to embolden Ridgway.

Bundy’s point—that the length of time before reported assaults and reported missing victims was so great that the police were at a disadvantage in the investigation from the outset—is evidenced by the King County affidavit, which contains specific examples of how this was so and Ridgway’s own admission of guilt, in which he explained his methodology of hiding victims’ remains.

As the King County affidavit shows, missing persons reports and allegations of assaults against prostitutes were filed often months or years after the events took place. As a result, official police follow-up did not take place in a timely fashion, nor was there extensive media coverage of the allegations of missing persons until the bodies of missing women began to be recovered. It was only then that the media began focusing attention on the number of body recoveries and the identities of the victims. By then, even though some complaints of assaults had been made, it was difficult to pin down when victims who were reported missing actually went missing. Bundy suggested that part of the underlying reasons for this particular problem was the nature of the victim pool itself.

Bundy reiterated that prostitutes and women who could be mistaken for prostitutes, such as hitchhikers and runaways, were a pool of ready-access women. These were “low-risk” victims, he explained, because they were already prepared to step into anyone’s car for a date. They also tended to avoid the police because they, like the Riverman, were operating outside the law. Many of them were runaways, too, and cocaine abusers.

In the King County affidavit, prostitute Dawn White’s account of her contact with a potential date who negotiated with both her and her friend for sex, chose Dawn White, asked her to wait while he went into a store to make a purchase, and then returned to find her
gone is an example of the way members of this victim pool tend to avoid police. White explained that when the stranger who had made a date with her went into the store and asked her to wait in the parking lot, she was contacted by a police unit patroling the area. The police told her to move along. She did, not wanting to do anything that might get her arrested. However, she looked up the stranger’s name in the phone book, called him, and scheduled a later date. By her own statement to the police, Dawn White was making herself available, and her story demonstrates the easy access any assailant might have had to members of this victim pool.