The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (80 page)

We can’t be sure about whether Bundy was correct or not in his assertion that the Riverman simply could not stop killing. Bundy said that there had to be more killings after March 1984, but the affidavit submitted to the court does not account for any new crimes after that date. Perhaps there were more crimes. But until there is further investigation into what crimes might have been committed after March 1984, we really won’t know whether Bundy was correct or not.

I still believe that much of Ted Bundy’s Riverman hypothesis was a projection of himself. Certainly there was more to learn about Bundy, about the emotional processes that drove him from crime to crime, about the secrets he shared with the bodies of his victims during his private moments at their gravesites. These were the secrets that Bundy wouldn’t allow himself to share with Detective Matt Linvall, even though he acknowledged that it was a secret he had shared with Julie Cunningham. It was one of the things, Bundy said about serial killers, that many of them would not talk about, even though they would talk about their crimes.

As the clock on Bundy’s life ticked down, the pressure to get him to talk about a wide variety of crimes only increased. There were scheduling arrangements to be made as each of the final minutes of his life increased in value to those who needed information about open cases. Just how many secrets did Bundy retain as he walked those final steps to the execution chamber amid the growing clamor outside the prison gates for the news that America’s most infamous serial killer was dead?

Only the prison warden would find out, and that would be on the final night of Bundy’s life.

19
 
Bundy’s Last Night

The crowds had been gathering outside the prison for days once the news got out that Bundy’s execution had finally been set, that a tiny piece of history was about to take place. They were an assortment of people milling outside the prison gates, setting up their soap-boxes for the cameras and lights, and taking ownership of Bundy’s execution for their own purposes. There were the anti-death penalty protesters with candles and signs, ready to stand their vigil; the pro-death penalty advocates, equally adamant, demanding an eye for an eye; perhaps friends or relatives of some of the victims across four states, wanting to be nearby when the switch was thrown; those people seeking both vengeance and the opportunity for a tailgate party, setting up outdoor grills and breaking open coolers to celebrate Bundy’s execution.

Then there were the lookie-loos, the rubberneckers, the people wanting to be a part of the moment when the nation’s most infamous serial killer walked the last few steps down death row to the electric chair. And there were the news vans, their satellite dishes reaching to the sky, recording the people outside the prison, waiting for the hearse to carry Ted Bundy’s corpse to wherever he would be interred. It was an eerie twilight party atmosphere, anti-climactic really, and almost apocalyptic. It was as if these same
people would be milling around outside dressed in their shorts and Hawaiian shirts on the evening before the midnight when the world came to an end.

For each group outside the prison, Bundy meant something different. For the anti-death penalty people, he was their poster boy. Why should he be executed when he held the key to so many cases that could be resolved with just a few words from him? The pro-death group saw Bundy as a monster incarnate, a description with which he, in his own words, had already concurred. He was a human predator whose career stretched across the four states we know about and maybe even more that he wouldn’t talk about. Considering what he did to his victims and the terror that someone like Julie Cunningham must have endured during the ride from Vail, even Florida’s electric chair was too quick and easy a punishment for the man. Those seeking vengeance and retribution were there to celebrate that final day.

For the others who were there to be a part of history, Bundy had become history. He realized it, tried to manipulate the moments even up to the end, but whether he ever understood what was happening, I may never know. As evil as Bundy’s crimes were, he represented something at the very end of the human spectrum. His case made so many headlines that Bundy became transformed toward the end of his life into something he never was in real life. There were Bundy souvenirs, Bundy fan clubs, Bundy memorabilia, and a whole Bundy mystique. In fact, one of the souvenirs being passed around were bumper stickers that said: “I’ll buckle up when Ted does.” Yet for all the mythos surrounding Ted Bundy, he always remained a cowardly individual who could not even muster the courage at the end of his life to accept total responsibility for what he had done even though he tried to make himself as significant as possible by holding out the hope that he knew how to resolve even more unsolved cases. It was a pathetic attempt, but it was all he could do. Thus, Bundy probably didn’t understand what his case had become to the nation, that he himself had become kind of an icon embodying a special kind of malevolence, even as he settled in before the tape recorder’s microphone to contemplate his execution the following morning.

Bundy knew that people were gathering even before he sat down with the warden on his final night. It was his last chance to open up, to clear up cases that still lingered for hopeful investigators in different states. Had Bundy murdered women in New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and California? There were unsolveds from all over the country and cold case homicide detectives looking for a break. Maybe Bundy had stopped in one of their cities overnight, passed through on his way from Colorado to Michigan to Florida. Maybe one of their cases was his.

Again, fidgeting with a map of locations in different states where some his victims might have been buried and talking with the warden of Florida State Penitentiary, Bundy, as if he were an insurance claims processor working through a form, methodically began to go down the list of inquiries from investigators in different states that were fed to him by the warden.

“January 24, 1989,” Bundy began. “For the Utah detective named ‘Couch,’ there’s one more we didn’t have time for. It’s going to be hard. Between Price and Green River, about ten miles south of Price, a road going south out of Price, maybe five or ten miles, there is a side road to the left going toward the mountains, going east. A quarter mile in there’s a dirt road to the left. This is not going to work too well,” Bundy said, referring to the map he was looking at, “but I’ll try to do something with it. A hundred to two hundred yards in on the dirt road, stop and to the left off the dirt road, maybe fifty yards in, there’s the remains of a young woman who disappeared from Brigham Young University, June of 1975. That’s as close as I can get it from the map that we have here.”

“Do you know her name?” the warden asked.

“No, I don’t,” Bundy answered. She was a nameless victim.

“Is that it?” the warden asked again.

“To Mike Fisher and the Colorado detectives, the last woman they wanted to talk about, Denise Oliverson, I believe. Referring again to Denise Oliverson, or whoever it was out of Grand Junction that Mike Fisher wanted to discuss, I believe the date was in April 1975. The young woman’s body would have been placed in the Colorado River about five miles west of Grand Junction. It was not buried. That’s all the ones that I can help you with. That’s all the ones that I know about. There are no missing ones outstanding that we haven’t talked about.”

“That’s all of ’em, Ted?” the warden wanted to know.

“Yeah,” Bundy said, then asked if he could “get a smoke off somebody.”

“Ted, I had some inquiries from Illinois and New Jersey,” the warden continued.

“Okay,” Bundy answered. “Well, let’s just deal with whatever is outstanding like that. I can say without any question that there is nothing that I was involved in in Illinois or New Jersey.”

“How about Burlington, Vermont?” the warden asked. “Nothing there? Texas?”

“No,” Bundy answered, his voice getting softer.

“Miami?” the warden continued.

“No.”

“Okay,” the warden said. “That’s all we’ve got. Okay, Ted, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Bundy said, and that was the end of the final interview he gave to law enforcement about his crimes on the last night of his life.

I don’t know what secrets Bundy took to the grave with him, crimes that he was either too embarrassed to talk about or too close to the victim to reveal. He had indicated to me that there were crimes that serial killers would never reveal to authorities because they held a special meaning to them.

Very early the next morning, Ted Bundy walked the steps to the chamber where he would be strapped into the electric chair. Outside, the protesting, chanting, and celebrating crowds watched for the lights to dim, the indication that the execution was actually under way. At the moment the switch was thrown, even amid the chants from some of the spectators, there was still a pervasive silence from most of the people outside the gate. Bundy had officially gone into history and the cheering and jeering that followed the path of the hearse taking his body out of the prison was almost pro forma.

In the end it was the system that had trapped a frantic Bundy in its web and wouldn’t let him crawl out. Bundy had tried everything—defending himself, using the appeals process, and finally employing a desperate gambit to trade names of victims and confessions for time. But the State of Florida gave him no wiggle room at all. And when the Supreme Court would not give him another stay of execution, it was the end of him.

Ridgway, starting his confession strategy, perhaps with Bundy in mind, at the beginning of the process rather than after a death sentence, will have a different end. He will live out his life in prison,
but the outside world will come to him in the form of interviews and questions. Dave Reichert was right when he said he knew from the look in Ridgway’s eyes that “he had fooled me. He had fooled the detectives.”

For over twenty, perhaps even thirty years, Ridgway had killed and escaped to kill again. He was the consummate serial offender, venting his anger on victims who, because they lived outside the law, were the perfect targets for a perfect serial killer. “It was technology that caught me,” Ridgway said after having slipped through two lie detector tests and a number of police interviews for homicides he knew he’d committed. So at the end, when he knew that there were crimes the police would never solve but for him, he played the card that Bundy should have played at the beginning. And in so doing, Ridgway now moves from invisible phantom, through the court system, and into prison, proud of his crimes and even prouder of his last-minute strategy that spared his life.

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Gary Ridgway in Court

According to the prosecutor’s summary of evidence submitted by the King County District Attorney to the court, on December 5, 2001, the King County Prosecuting Attorney charged Ridgway with four counts of aggravated murder in the first degree for the murders of Carol Christensen, Cynthia Hinds, Marcia Chapman, and Opal Mills. In three of the four counts, DNA evidence linked Ridgway to the victims. The body of Cynthia Hinds was discovered within a few feet of two other victims, leaving no doubt that the same killer was responsible. On April 2, 2002, the prosecutor notified the court that the state would seek the death penalty against Ridgway.

After finding microtrace evidence of paint on the bodies of additional victims whose bodies had been discovered at sites near the bodies the women whom Ridgway was already charged with murdering, the prosecutor filed additional charges of murder in the first degree against the accused for the murders of Wendy Coffield, Debra Bonner, and Debra Estes.

Despite large numbers of additional victims, the prosecutor revealed, it was clear that the evidence developed by the police would allow the state to prosecute Ridgway only for those seven victims. The dearth of any other evidence pointing to any suspect meant in all likelihood that, absent a confession, the cases would
remain unsolved. Gary Ridgway faced seven counts of aggravated first degree murder, but he could not be charged with more than a fraction of the Green River killings.