Terrible Secrets
Author: Robert D Keppel; Stephen G Michaud
Date: 2012-06-06 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: MT 7 Productions

Terrible Secrets:
Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

by Robert D. Keppel, Ph. D.
and Stephen G. Michaud

Copyright © 2011 by The Cop and the Killer, LLC

Bundy Cover photo:

Cover image courtesy of AP Images. Accused murderer Theodore Bundy leans back in his chair (AP Photo)

Crowbar and handcuffs cover photos:

Pond5.com

Published by MT7 Productions

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

2012 MT7 Productions

ISBN 978-0-985552-008 (enhanced for iPad/iPhone/Mac only)

ISBN 978-0-985552-015 (enhanced for Kindle for iPad/iPhone only)

ISBN 978-0-985552-022 (standard graphic ePub)

ISBN 978-0-985552-039 (standard graphic Kindle)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE:

‘I’m the most coldblooded sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet’

CHAPTER TWO

Keppel versus ‘Ted’

CHAPTER THREE

Taylor Mountain

CHAPTER FOUR

We regroup

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Now is not the time’

CHAPTER SIX

The Rise of Riverman

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘I am playing no games with you’

CHAPTER EIGHT

The slasher film festival

CHAPTER NINE

‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’

CHAPTER TEN

Endgame

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Terrible secrets

CHAPTER TWELVE

Aftermath

EPILOG

DNA

TIMELINE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

“You know, it’s easy to depersonalize somebody and think of him as an adversary, or somebody who is out to get one. Come face-to-face, you know, a lot of that hostility and those stereotypes and impressions tend to fade away, and I realize that they’re just people, too. And so I think, yes, I can see myself talking to you sometime in the future.”

— Ted Bundy

Introduction

Over the nine-plus years that serial killer Ted Bundy spent on Death Row at Florida State Prison, he twice initiated lengthy, tape-recorded interview sessions. The first of these extended conversations, with Hugh Aynesworth and myself, took place across the winter, spring and summer months of 1980, following Bundy’s conviction for the 1978 abduction–murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl named Kimberly Diane Leach, the crime for which he ultimately was executed in January of 1989. The hundred or more hours we spent with Ted formed the basis of two subsequent books, The Only Living Witness, published in 1983, and Conversations with a Killer, which appeared in 1990.

Bundy’s second invitation to come speak with him at the prison arrived via handwritten letter in the autumn of 1984 on the desk of Bob Keppel, the Seattle homicide detective who had pursued him from the time of Ted’s earliest known murders in the Northwest, a decade earlier. Among the dozens of investigators who’d worked on one or more of Bundy’s many cases, Keppel was easily the most knowledgeable.

When Hugh and I interviewed Ted, he was still persisting in the fiction that he was altogether innocent, a victim of the system. Since that was patently untrue, we devised a workaround, an arrangement under which we permitted Bundy to discuss his crimes in the thirdperson, not as an actor but as an omniscient narrator. The subject clearly consumed him and he shared with us a lengthy and detailed description of serial murder from the killer’s perspective. The grotesque and often bizarre why of his crimes, insofar as he understood and could express it, was the principal thread of our discussions. These were by far the strangest days of my life.

*

Few police detectives relish the headaches and frustrations of investigating apparently motive-less and random homicidal violence. That is why in the summer of 1974, when a smooth-talking predator who called himself “Ted” boldly snatched two young women on a Sunday afternoon from a crowded state park near Seattle, Bob Keppel, then a rookie homicide detective with exactly one cleared case on his resume, was tasked by his captain (along with Keppel’s equally inexperienced partner, Roger Dunn) to lead the “Ted” investigation. None of the more senior guys wanted the job.

But asking a young cop to take on these murder cases turned out to be an unintended coup. Though inexperienced, Keppel also was unburdened by the narrow consensus view among seasoned local investigators that the double disappearance was unconnected with several other recent, though widely-scattered, unsolved disappearances of other young women in the region. In an era when stranger crime was still comparatively rare – and the term “serial killer” was not yet in general use - Keppel was one of the first Northwest detectives to buck conventional wisdom and conclude that a lone wolf sex killer was striking at carefully-measured intervals across multiple police jurisdictions, leaving behind him absolutely no witnesses and not a trace of physical evidence.

Once this region-wide pattern of predation was emphatically confirmed by the discovery of his two body dump sites, Keppel, along with Dunn and a third young detective, Kathleen McChesney, pursued their quarry methodically, innovating the use of a county payroll computer to sift through the tens of thousands of bits of information they’d collected, and to finally isolate Bundy out of thousands of reported suspects. It was an investigative tour de force, deploying unique tools to identify a rare and wily aberrant offender. The story of how they did it is a book in itself.

By this time, however, Ted had moved on, and when he finally faced a jury, it was a continent away in Florida. There was no chance he would be returned to Washington, and thus no way Keppel would ever make his case against Ted in court.

Then in 1984 Bundy set in motion one of the weirdest and most fascinating episodes in modern criminology. In his surprise letter, he offered to consult with Seattle authorities- his old nemeses – in their hunt for the so-far anonymous Green River Killer, who was threatening to surpass Ted’s grim notoriety as the region’s scariest and most prolific serial killer. “I know your man in a way that just facts alone cannot accomplish,” he wrote of the killer, whom Bundy liked to call River Man. “I do not know his face, but I have some pretty good ideas where you can look to see him yourself.”

Keppel, who had waited for ten years to confront Bundy with the eight unsolved “Ted” homicides still in his in box, arrived at the prison for their first interview just weeks later.

Ted certainly brought interesting credentials to any discussion of serial murder, and he came to their conversations with ideas for pro-active strategies that reflected his intimate personal experience with aberrant urges. He suggested, for example, that the police stake out one of River Man’s fresh victims, if possible. Bundy assured Keppel – correctly, it turned out – that the killer would want to revisit the corpse. Another idea was to put on what Ted called a “Slasher Film Festival.” He urged Keppel to “try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie out there” and to present it at local movie theaters where the patrons could be surreptitiously photographed and their car licenses noted. Bundy was certain that violent local sex criminals, normally highly circumspect, would hazard identification to see such a film, helplessly swarming to it “like bees to honey,” as he put it.

But Keppel was much less interested in what Bundy had to say about catching River Man than in finally questioning him on the details of his own bloody career. Nor was the why of Bundy’s crimes a particular concern. A detective, not a social scientist, Keppel wanted to hear about the what, along with who, where, when and how.

Cop and killer therefore were at odds at the outset. Following their initial two-day session, Bundy began firing lengthy letters to Keppel, covering every aspect of the Green River case, which “fascinated” him, he said repeatedly. But Ted adamantly, and then angrily, refused to discuss his own murders, or “terrible secrets” as he called them, the appalling self-knowledge that he, like other serial sex killers, carried inside.

I remember discussing Bundy with Keppel over the course of these first conversations, and how Bundy made a very different impression on Keppel than he had with me. I had been amazed at the clinical detachment with which Ted described to us his various paraphilias and homicides. Keppel was struck with how tormented Bundy seemed.

“I watched Ted closely,” he recalls. “His face was deeply lined. He sweated and he frowned almost constantly. His eyes were bloodshot. Obviously, he was in deep pain, and I thought I knew why. There was really only one dimension to his being – murder – and it trumped everything else. Once he’d fallen into the black hole and began killing he became the black hole, a human figure occupying a void, an inadequate cipher – total personal worthlessness which he recognized as well in the Green River Killer. There cannot be a more consummate loser than that, which I could see was horrible for Ted to contemplate.”

We seemed to have encountered two different people.

*

Nineteen eighty-six brought the first of Bundy’s death warrants, and he began to consider the previously unthinkable. Ted thought he might trade his terrible secrets for time, possibly avoiding execution altogether. It was a long-shot bet that his appeals attorneys vehemently opposed. Yet in 1988, he met with Keppel once more with this notion very much in mind. Bundy evidently doubted whether he could give up the long-suppressed truth of his crimes on his own. They were too securely locked inside his psyche. So, against the day when only full, detailed, first-person confessions might delay his date with Old Sparky, Ted decided to teach Keppel what he believed were the most effective means for eliciting the truth from a serial killer – himself.

Four years earlier, Bundy had insisted to Keppel that contrary to common notions a psychopath really can feel remorse for his acts – sometimes – although what Bundy described sounded a lot more like self pity. Now he told Keppel that no matter how reprehensible a killer’s crimes were as he described them, the interviewer must never betray shock or outrage at what he was being told. “The scary thing,” Ted explained, “is that you have to have real empathy. Real, not phony.”

Their climactic confrontation would come within a year, too soon and with too little warning for Ted to have perfected his fanciful scheme for saving, or at least extending, his life. Instead, in January of 1989, Keppel returned to the prison for a third time to a scene of tension and chaos and - on Bundy’s part - fright. His offer to come clean in exchange for catching a break on his execution date hadn’t raised interest, as he hoped, but outrage, particularly among politicians eager to exploit the public consensus that Ted should be dead.

The rest of the story is better told in the concluding chapters of Terrible Secrets. With almost no chance of rescuing himself, Bundy nonetheless directly cleared four cases for Keppel, and indirectly confirmed he had killed the four other victims on Bob’s list. He denied, unconvincingly, his culpability for several other unsolved Washington state killings – including that of an eight-year-old child Keppel believes Ted killed when he was fourteen - and then suggested in their anxious final interview that three other of his Washington victims remained unaccounted for. He could not, or would not, say who they were, or where they were.

Bundy also cleared cases with detectives from three other western states, acknowledging in all a murder toll of 31 victims, certainly fewer cases than he actually committed, but as many as Ted in his confused final hours was prepared to admit.

In the end, as he disclosed at least some of his terrible secrets to Keppel and the other detectives, it became clear that terrible secrets were all that Ted had. They defined him. And once they were known Ted’s pathetic inadequacy was also made clear. He was nothing but a killer. “This guy’s totally consumed by murder, 24 hours a day,” Keppel told a news conference.”

At their next to last meeting, stripped of all pretenses, Bundy cried as he begged Keppel to intercede for him with Florida’s governor. “Bob,” he said, “they’re going to get me sooner or later. You don’t need to worry about that. But you’ve been after this for 15 years. A couple of months is not going to make any difference.”

Keppel declined, and less than three days later Bundy was dead.

PART ONE: THE CHASE

Chapter One

‘I’m the most cold-blooded
sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet.’

Mike Fisher was hot.

“Keppel, this is Fish,” he growled over the phone from Aspen. “The sonuvabitch is gone!”

Click.

The sonuvabitch, I knew, was Ted Bundy. And gone, I’d soon learn, meant that police detectives’ choice as the most dangerous sex killer in America had just jumped out a second-story window of the ancient Pitkin County Courthouse during a trial recess. Ted was last seen sprinting down the street, hell-bent for who knows where.

The courthouse was an instant bedlam of shouts and red-faced deputies as Fisher, chief investigator for the county district attorney, hurriedly helped to mobilize local law enforcement to recapture their fugitive defendant, who had taken advantage of lax security to make good his escape.

The only calm in the commotion was at the courtroom defense table, where Ted’s advisory counsel, Charles Dumas, who that morning had been arguing the unconstitutionality of Colorado’s capital punishment statute, turned to Chuck Leidner, the public defender. “Never,” deadpanned Dumas, “have I ever had a client show so little faith in my argument.”

***

Ted himself might have enjoyed his lawyer’s quip. Though an incredibly destructive example of the so-called lust murderer, a fantasy-driven offender whose homicides are marked by a wild and primitive fury, Bundy was also a bright and smooth-talking psychopath, witty and urbane, handsome in his younger days, and the object of not a few young women’s sexual fantasies, as well. Until you got to know him, it was a battle (even for cops) to reconcile the pleasant and friendly defendant who so fascinated the press and the public with the beast that lurked within. These qualities, plus his extraordinary instincts as a predator, were major reasons Ted made it so devilishly difficult for us to stop him. As he’d later brag to me, “I have a Ph.D. in serial murder.”

Mike Fisher had extradited Bundy to Aspen in January from the Utah state prison in Draper, where the personable former law student was serving up to 15 years for the 1975 aggravated kidnap of a 19-year-old telephone operator. Bundy already had been caught in an escape attempt from the penitentiary print shop, “a miserable little plot that I hatched,” as he’d later describe it to me. At the time, I agreed with Mike Fisher and others that he’d probably try again.

Since his arrival in Aspen, Ted had become a celebrity to many of the mountain resort’s young and irreverent fun seekers, who reacted to his dramatic courthouse leap with amusement. An Aspen eatery quickly started featuring the “Bundy Burger”; patrons looked inside to discover the meat had disappeared. A T-shirt proclaimed, “Bundy’s In Booth D,” a reference to a spot at a local disco where cocaine allegedly was available for purchase.

The joking sorted poorly with what Fisher and I and detectives in Utah had seen of Ted’s handiwork, including the savage murder for which he was being tried. The victim was 23-year-old Caryn Campbell, a pretty nurse from Michigan who had come to Colorado with her boyfriend, Dr. Raymond Gadowski, on a skiing vacation. On Sunday night, January 12, 1975, Campbell left the lobby of the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass, a few miles from Aspen, to fetch a copy of Viva magazine from the room she shared with Gadowski and his two children. She vanished somewhere on the way.

Five weeks later, Campbell’s naked, frozen corpse was recovered from a roadside snowfield less than three miles from the inn. The coroner reported that she’d sustained a massive skull fracture and died from it, as well as exposure to the subzero winter weather, within hours of her disappearance. It was unclear what else had been done to her. Years later, Ted would only say, “I did my thing” that night.

***

The jagged arc of my own protracted saga with Ted Bundy began in 1974 when, over a period of seven months, he abducted and murdered at least eight young women and girls in Western Washington and Oregon, befuddling the police — including me — and terrorizing the region. He dumped most of his victims at two remote woodland sites where we later recovered their partial skeletal remains and almost nothing else of investigative value. Bundy was as careful as he was sly.

But now, hundreds of miles away in Seattle, I’d play only a secondary role in this hunt for Ted. Things are going to get exciting for a while, I thought as I walked next door to inform my boss, Captain Nick Mackie, of the King County Sheriff’s Office, that the infamous Ted Bundy was once more on the loose. Within the hour Mackie would be inundated with urgent press queries.

Before the calls began, I contacted Ted’s mother, Louise, in Tacoma, thirty miles south of Seattle, where she worked as a secretary at the University of Puget Sound. Mrs. Bundy immediately worried that her eldest child — her “pride and joy,” as she later described him in court — might get himself shot. This was not an idle concern. I also notified Ralph Munro, a future Washington secretary of state and one of Bundy’s many important — and once admiring — friends and acquaintances in the senior state GOP hierarchy. I told Munro that Ted might try to get in touch and asked him to notify me should he hear from the fugitive.

I reserved my sternest admonitions for Liz Kendall (a pseudonym), Bundy’s longtime girlfriend and onetime fiancée. I found her at her job at the University of Washington. “If you think things will be bad for Bundy when he’s discovered,” I warned Liz, “if I find any information that you were part of it, you’re going to jail, too.” She got both barrels. I wanted to scare her, and I think I did.

Bundy jumped from the courthouse window on Tuesday morning, June 7, 1977. He scrambled up Aspen Mountain on foot, then planned to make his way south to Crested Butte, another ski area. If he got that far, he hoped to keep heading south through Gunnison to Durango and then find a way to head for the eastern U.S. before the search was widened beyond Aspen proper.

Mike Fisher and the rest of the Aspen authorities at first had no idea where to look for him, only the hope that he hadn’t found a way out of town. Roadblocks went up within 10 minutes. A house-by-house search was begun, and volunteers began scouring the dozens of trails that wind up into the wilderness from Aspen’s outskirts.

Fortunately for Fisher, Bundy had no maps, and no sense of direction, and quickly became disoriented in the mountains. Early on Monday, June 13, he sneaked back into Aspen and stole a l966 Cadillac, hoping there was a navigable route out of town without a roadblock up.

However, he panicked at the sight of some flashing amber lights on the street, feared a roadblock, and was clumsily turning the big car around just as two Pitkin County deputies came along. Noticing the Cadillac’s uncertain progress, they suspected a drunk and decided to investigate.

A short while later, a ravenous Ted Bundy was in the company of sheriff’s deputy Don Davis, eating sandwiches and drinking coffee and recounting his travails in the wild. He refused to meet with Mike Fisher.

Why, Davis asked, had Ted risked his life in such a way?

“He said,” the deputy told a reporter, “it was just too nice a day to stay inside.”

***

Bundy began at once to plan his next escape.

The authorities in Aspen hadn’t prosecuted a homicide in five years, which perhaps explains their casual inattention to security. For example, rather than keep Bundy in the courthouse’s basement jail, the Pitkin County authorities decided that on court days they’d ferry Ted back and forth from the newer and presumably more secure Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs. The decision annoyed Ted until he discovered that a metal plate in his cell’s ceiling was not securely welded in place, a blatant oversight. Using hacksaw blades provided by a jailhouse acquaintance, he cut through the welds, revealing an opening just large enough for him to squirm through.

Ted reconnoitered the crawl space above the cellblock on several occasions. A snitch repeatedly told the guards of Bundy’s nocturnal expeditions, but they ignored his reports. He was ready to go, again, and even had accumulated a $500 travel fund.

Then his plans were disrupted by developments in court.

Judge George Lohr repeatedly suppressed evidence of Bundy’s Utah kidnapping case and the several murders he was suspected of committing there, leaving prosecutor Milton Blakey — on loan to Pitkin County from El Paso County — with several pieces of circumstantial evidence with which to convict Ted in Colorado’s most liberal community, where the death penalty was anathema and many of the locals saw Bundy as a victim of the system. What was more, the witness Blakey expected would testify that that she’d seen Ted at the Wildwood Inn the night of Caryn Campbell’s disappearance instead identified an undersheriff as the man she saw.

Ted’s chances of beating the murder charge were looking up. But instead of capitalizing on the prosecution’s weakening case, Bundy continued plotting another escape, while in court he forcefully and passionately argued a defense motion for a change of venue.

On December 23, 1977, he received what at first he thought was an early Christmas gift from Judge Lohr, who granted the change of venue motion, set a trial date and announced the prosecution would move to El Paso County.

Unfortunately for Ted, El Paso County — which encompasses politically and socially conservative Colorado Springs, as well as military installations and the U.S. Air Force Academy — probably was the Colorado county most likely to convict him. There were few qualms locally about the death penalty, either.

Mike Fisher, who was in court that day, watched Ted smugly look around the room as Lohr spoke. “Theodore,” Fisher remembers, “is ‘Hey, I showed you. No, Blakey. I just won. I just beat ya.’ ”

Meantime, according to Fisher, Ted’s lawyer, Kevin O’Reilly, said nothing and quietly rocked in his chair next to the defendant, whom he disliked. “Then this question mark comes across Theodore’s face,” Fisher recalls. “Hmm. And he just leans over to Kevin O’Reilly and he says, ‘Where’s El Paso County?’ And O’Reilly doesn’t move. He just sits there. He looks up at me a little bit and then he says, ‘That’s Colorado Springs, you dumb shit!’

“Everybody must have heard it. Holy Toledo! Theodore jumps to his feet. ‘You’re sentencing me to death, without a trial! You can’t do this.’ Judge Lohr told him in so many words that ‘You’ve argued your point, young man.’ And off he went. He was hysterical. ‘This can’t happen!’ he’s yelling at Kevin.”

***

A Fool for a client

On Friday night, December 30, after dinner was served at the jail, Ted arranged some books and clothing beneath his blanket to suggest a sleeping form on his cot – he’d feigned illness in recent days — then crept up through the hole in the ceiling, across the dark crawl space, down into the chief jailer’s linen closet and out into the Colorado night. It was about 7:30.

“Keppel,” Fisher called me the next day, “the sonuvabitch is gone again!”

***

Bundy searched the snowy streets of Glenwood Springs for four hours that night before he found a battered old MG with the keys in it. Somehow, he steered the aged sports car about 25 miles up the road toward Interstate 70 before it expired in a snow bank. Just then a soldier pulled up and offered him a ride. They followed a snowplow eastward into Vail, where Ted learned the pass was closed to those without chains, which included the soldier. He asked around the lobby of the Holiday Inn for possible rides, received no offers, and so instead took the Trailways bus into Denver, where he made an 8:55 a.m. TWA flight to Chicago. It’d be another three hours before his escape was discovered back at the jail.

Knowing that Ted had a 17-hour head start, I doubted it mattered that roadblocks were never established, or that police surveillance at Colorado’s public transportation terminals, including Denver’s Stapleton Airport, didn’t begin until late on Saturday. As we’d later learn, by then he’d already landed in Chicago and caught an Amtrak train for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Bundy spent $12 for a room at the YMCA that night, New Year’s Eve.

Ted once more was a Page One story throughout the West, where newspaper editorialists scolded the Colorado authorities for allowing him to escape again, and so easily. Unlike his first run, this time I didn’t need to call anyone, except Liz. Louise Bundy telephoned me repeatedly, as did Ralph Munro and several of Ted’s other political friends, all hoping I had some word of where he’d gone, and all promising to stay in touch. I was, if anything, even sterner this time with Liz than I was before. I’m pretty sure she believed I was about to arrest her, even though I had no evidence she played any role in either escape.

We in Seattle and various other police departments in the region also received multiple reports of Bundy sightings. I didn’t believe any of them. Ted was too smart to risk identification and recapture in Washington, Utah, or Colorado, where his picture had been all over television and the papers, and the state and local police agencies would be on high alert for him.

Yet being very sure where Bundy wasn’t did not also mean I knew where he was, or could even guess. As the days passed with no credible information whatsoever about him or his whereabouts, it began to seem as if America had swallowed him up. Public interest waned. In Colorado, news coverage of the Denver Broncos’ upcoming Super Bowl XII match against the Dallas Cowboys soon crowded Ted off the front page.

Wherever he was, there was one fact I knew for certain. Ted would not slip quietly into anonymity, below the radar, for long. I knew his pathology, the demons that drove him. Sooner, not later, he would attack once more, and this time he’d explode.

We didn’t have long to wait.

***

Street view of the building’s front entrance, where Bundy exited the sorority with his oak club.

A rear view of the Chi O house (sliding glass door not shown).

Police sketch of the Chi Omega house’s second floor, indicating where the four victims were found.

Crime scene photo of Chi Omega Lisa Levy’s bedroom. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

Panty hose mask used at Chi Omega.

The club Bundy used to assault Cheryl Thomas. It was recovered from her bedroom floor.

———

“2 Coeds Slain, 3 Beaten by Night Stalker” headlined the Seattle Times story from Florida that my colleague, Kathleen McChesney, dropped on my desk Monday morning, January 16. According to the combined wire service report, while much of the country was absorbed in the previous day’s celebrations of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, or watching Dallas slam Denver 27-10 in the New Orleans Superdome, the city of Tallahassee was struggling with the fathomless horror of multiple early-hour assaults on and near the campus of Florida State University.

First to die on Sunday morning, in Room Four of the Chi Omega sorority house, was 20-year-old Lisa Levy. Her killer bludgeoned her, nearly bit the nipple from Lisa’s right breast, left a double bite mark on her left buttock and brutally sodomized Levy with a Clairol hair-spray bottle. A wad of gum, presumably his, was found in her hair.

His next victims were roommates Karen Chandler, 21, and Kathy Kleiner, also 21, across the hall in Room Eight. They would survive. Both suffered broken jaws, deep cuts and abrasions. He also fractured Chandler’s skull with his club, along with the orbit of her right eye and both cheekbones. Her right arm and one finger were broken, as well. Kleiner lost several teeth in the attack. Neither of the young women remembered anything of their assailant.

His last victim at the sorority was 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, next door in Room Nine. She was found dead from what an EMT described as a “crushing blow” to her right forehead and apparent puncture wounds to the same area. The intruder had brought with him two pairs of Alive pantyhose by Haines. Judging from evidence of wear and laundering, he probably stole them from a clothesline or Laundromat. He’d cut away one leg from both pairs, looping the opposite leg through the hole to form a ligature. One of these improvised weapons was found on Margaret Bowman’s bedroom floor. The other was tightly knotted around her neck.

Something interrupted him — perhaps a Chi O sister passing by the door on her way to the bathroom or the sound of a late arrival closing the back door — and he broke off the attack. I’m sure that otherwise he wouldn’t have stopped until he’d assaulted every coed on the second floor of the Chi Omega house.

We know in any event that an appetite for a further sexual carnage was still on him. He sneaked out the sorority house’s front double doors into the frigid, 18-degree weather. Less than an hour later, he found dance student Cheryl Thomas sleeping in her single-story duplex apartment bedroom on Dunwoody Street, a short distance from Chi Omega, and proceeded to club her, too. Thomas’s next-door neighbors were awakened by the sound and called 911. Her attacker, interrupted once more, fled back outside just minutes ahead of the police after fracturing her skull in five places and leaving a semen deposit on her bloody bed sheets. A pair of Sears Cling-alon Panty hose, fashioned into a mask, was found in the apartment, as was his discarded oak club. Thomas survived the attack but would never dance again. Her hearing and balance were permanently impaired.

***

After reading the Times article, my first thought was Ted. I immediately called Tallahassee to alert them about our fugitive killer. I spoke with J.O. Jackson, an agent with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who politely took down my information but obviously was too busy at the moment to pay much attention to this long-shot tip from the opposite end of America. The name Ted Bundy meant nothing to Jackson. I didn’t call him back, because I didn’t want to bother him. I knew what it was like for police detectives to be hounded by somebody to check out someone else.

Many of us in law enforcement from Washington, Utah, and Colorado had the same suspicion that Bundy had surfaced in Florida after a little more than two weeks on the run and, as we anticipated, had gone berserk. Unless he was caught, we knew, he’d surely kill again.

Yet now that our fears seemed confirmed, there was little any of us could do except to share with the Florida investigators what we knew of Ted’s history and his habits, and wait for events to unfold. Nearly another month would pass before the drama came to its sudden climax.

Bundy had stolen a car in Ann Arbor. He drove it to Atlanta, where he abandoned the vehicle and caught a bus for Tallahassee, arriving in the Florida capital on Saturday, January 7, with $160 of his original $500 still left. He found a place to stay at The Oaks, a ramshackle, three-story rooming house on College Avenue — since gutted by fire — where he’d be known as Chris Hagen, the name he invented the day he rented Room Twelve on the second floor, for $80 a month, a sum he’d manage to avoid paying altogether.

He immediately began roaming around Tallahassee and the FSU campus at night, repeating his pattern from the old days in Seattle. He also stole a bike, a radio, a TV, and a typewriter, just as he had as a student at the University of Washington. As his money ran low, he turned to shoplifting food from grocery stores. His neighbors at The Oaks, who saw little of him, found the new boarder odd in an indefinable way. “Maybe it was the look in his eyes, or whatever,” assistant manager Larry Wingfield told the police. “But he did seem basically different.”

In fact, Ted was having evident trouble sustaining his trademark glibness and poise. He no longer was moving easily, unnoticed, among strangers, or coolly coaxing unsuspecting females to their deaths. He was losing control.

On Saturday night, January 14, according to several Chi Omega sisters, Bundy appeared at Sherrod’s, a newly-opened disco next to the Chi O house on West Jefferson, near FSU’s main gate. He spooked the young women with his creepy stare. Mary Ann Picano told Ted’s jurors how she reluctantly agreed to a dance with the unnerving stranger, remarking to her friend, Anna Inglett, “Look at this guy I’m getting ready to dance with. He looks like an ex-con.”

Hours later, as police sirens pierced Tallahassee’s heavy Sunday-morning stillness and the capitol’s citizens awakened to the terrifying word of a serial slaughter, Oaks resident Henry Palumbo and his pal Rusty Gage approached the rooming house on foot. At the concrete staircase they encountered Chris Hagen, standing alone. “He was in complete silence,” Palumbo would remember. “He wasn’t doing anything. He was just standing there.”

***

Experts on aberrant criminality report that a lust killer such as Bundy typically will “reintegrate,” or regain his version of normalcy, following events such as the January assaults and murders in Tallahassee. But the urge to kill and defile inevitably reasserts itself. In later interviews with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Ted would call this behavior “inappropriate acting out,” prompted by the insistent demands of an internal “entity.”

He began boosting cash and credit cards from women’s unattended purses in supermarkets, the FSU library and even Sherrod’s, then rang up meals, clothing — especially socks, of which Ted was inordinately fond — tennis wear and even a bathrobe. He also bought gasoline for the white van he stole from the FSU media center in advance of his last hunting expedition to eastern Florida in February. Over the ensuing four or five days he’d put 750 miles on the vehicle.

On the wet and cold afternoon of Wednesday, February 8, Bundy spotted 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter walking alone across a Kmart parking lot in Jacksonville, about 160 miles east of Tallahassee. He jumped out of the FSU van and accosted the junior high school student, whose father was a Jacksonville police detective. She’d recall in court that he asked if she attended the school across the street, and was she headed for the Kmart? Parmenter described him as disheveled and unshaven, “real fidgety” and wearing some sort of badge on his jacket that read “Fire Department, Richard Burton.”

As the girl tried to sort out “Burton’s” question, her brother Danny, 20, arrived on the scene in his truck. Danny asked his little sister who the guy was, while at the same time he directed Leslie to get into the truck “What do you want!?” Danny called to Bundy, then exited his truck to confront the stranger face-to-face. Ted mumbled an answer, rolled up his window, and drove away.

That night, Bundy used a Visa card in the name of Ralf Miller to pay for Room 443 at the Holiday Inn in Lake City, Florida, about 60 miles east of Jacksonville along Interstate 10. One witness described Ted as “scrubby” with “slurred speech.” A maid remembered he had “funny eyes.”

The next morning was rainy. Bundy departed the Holiday Inn without bothering to check out. Several witnesses later reported a man driving a white van in the immediate vicinity of Lake City Junior High School, where 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach, a seventh-grader, disappeared on her way between buildings at about the same time. She was never seen alive again.

Bundy drove the 100 miles west to Tallahassee that day, pausing about 30 miles into the trip to dispose of Kim Leach’s body under an abandoned hog shed in the thick undergrowth around Suwannee State Park. Late on Sunday, the 12th, he stole an orange 1972 VW Bug off the streets of Tallahassee and headed west on Interstate 10. He made about 150 miles to Crestview, Florida, by Monday morning, then spent the day stuck in the sand in a restricted area of Eglin Air Force Base. Finally digging himself out after dark, he pushed on another fifty miles to Pensacola, where a motel clerk flagged the hot credit card he presented her, and he quickly departed. Ted spent Monday night trying to sleep upright in the VW.

Tuesday — Valentine’s Day — he found a men’s sports facility at a local community college where he could shower, shave and change. Then he washed his clothes at a Laundromat, pulled on the shirt he’d worn the day he killed Kim Leach, and spent most of the rest of the day at the beach. In the evening, Ted ate a big meal and drank a considerable amount. Later that night, he was caught trying to rifle a woman’s purse at a bar and just managed to talk his way out of a visit with the police.

However, the end of his run was at hand. At 1:30 on the morning of the 15th, Bundy was driving the VW slowly, with the headlights off, through a residential section of Pensacola when Officer David Lee in his cruiser noticed the orange Bug and radioed its license number to the dispatcher. The car came back stolen, so Lee prepared to make an arrest.

He pulled up behind the Bug and switched on his blue light. Bundy pulled over. Sidearm in hand, Lee approached the Volkswagen and ordered Ted to stand in front of the vehicle, hands on the trunk. As the officer glanced into the car to see if there was a passenger, Bundy took off running down the street. Lee fired a shot. Bundy stopped. They scuffled. Lee squeezed off another shot. Ted took a couple of hits on the head from the barrel of Lee’s revolver, and soon it was all over.

On an otherwise silent ride to jail, Bundy told Lee that he wished he’d killed him and then asked if he ran when they got to the police station, would the officer shoot him dead? Once he was booked and taken to a cell, Ted immediately fell into a deep asleep.

***

He first identified himself as Kenneth Misner, a well-known Florida State University athlete whose identity Bundy had hoped to assume. A photocopy of Misner’s birth certificate was in Ted’s mail the day he drove back to Tallahassee after killing Kim Leach. When Misner himself called the jail from Tallahassee, Bundy changed his name to John R. Doe. Not until Thursday night the 16th did he finally divulge his true identity, and then only after he was given access to a telephone and a promise that no announcement of his arrest would be made until nine o’clock on Friday morning.

His interrogators — Detective Norman Chapman of the Pensacola police, Detective Don Patchen of the Tallahassee police, and Stephen Bodiford, a detective with the Leon County sheriff’s office — had no trouble with keeping his arrest from the press a while longer. They didn’t know who Ted Bundy was, although they’d soon learn.

Much to the consternation of the public defenders who were then representing him, Bundy sat down with the detectives for five long interrogation sessions; Patchen recalls they spent at least 80 hours with Ted. The triple-team approach later came in for some criticism, but I think that rotating the three of them in and out of the interview probably kept each of them fresher and better able to keep Bundy focused on what they wanted to discuss, not his agenda.

As far as I know, this was the first time Ted ever spoke, albeit indirectly, about what he was then calling “my problem.” He confided that he was a peeping Tom and had a pornography habit, but though he made no pretense of innocence to the officers, Bundy either clammed up or grew vague whenever they steered the interrogation back to the Chi Omega cases or the Leach homicide. “The evidence is there,” he said repeatedly of the sorority house. “Go look for it.” The Kim Leach episode was “horrible,” he said. The detectives “wouldn’t want to see her.”

Patchen remembers that the three of them stressed that a first-degree murder conviction would surely mean the death penalty in Florida, while a confession might keep Bundy out of the electric chair, Old Sparky. At one point, they asked what it would take for Ted to clear up all his cases everywhere. He replied that he’d like to be sent back to the state of Washington. In Seattle, we were very interested in such a deal. Although I didn’t think it would ever happen, we were serious enough that Phil Killeen from the county prosecutor’s office was assigned to handle the details from our end.

Ted asked to see a Catholic priest. Father Michael Moody visited him. Later, Bundy would tell Stephen Michaud that Moody advised him not to talk to the police. Don Patchen says the meeting with the priest marked the end of the confession talks.

Years later in a conversation with Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist, Bundy talked of a malicious voice in his head that directed his crimes against women. “When I was first arrested,” he told Dr. Lewis, “I know that if the police had sat me down in a room, let me get drunk on, say, bourbon — a drink that really made me more vicious — hard liquor and 7-Up or something, and showed me some really hard-core pornography, I could have talked to them from that perspective. It would have come out of me just, it would have blossomed right out of me.”

Ted instead filled the long hours, first in Pensacola, and then in Tallahassee, with a carefully couched discussion of murder, implying throughout that his knowledge and experience were gained firsthand. But he never directly acknowledged that he was a killer. For example, as Bodiford explained in a later deposition, “We talked one night about his car. He said the front seat was either loose, or out of it, the right front of his Volkswagen.

“Well, why?”

“Well, I can carry things easier that way.”

“You mean you can carry bodies easier that way?”

“And he said, ‘Well, let’s just say I can carry cargo better that way.’

“Now we ask him, ‘That cargo you carried, was it sometimes – was it damaged?’

“And he said, ‘Sometimes it was damaged, and sometimes it wasn’t.”

Toward the end of the conversations, Don Patchen went into the interview room at the Leon County Jail without Bodiford and Chapman. Ted had so far refused to discuss his total number of victims, but Patchen had thought out an approach he believed might work.

He told Bundy that he was a Vietnam veteran and that he was tortured by the recollection of all the people he killed during the war. His conscience was deeply troubled. His dreams were full of terrors.

“So what about you, Ted?” Patchen asked. “If you can live with yourself, you must not have killed as many as I did. How many is it?”

According to the detective, Bundy indicated the answer was three digits and did not elaborate. Patchen took the response to mean that Ted had killed a hundred or so victims. Unfortunately for posterity, the batteries in the tape recorder had given out, and the police did not videotape the sessions with Ted. So the common suspicion that Bundy killed a hundred or more women ultimately rests on this single, enigmatic remark and Don Patchen’s interpretation of what it meant.

Bundy wouldn’t even be that specific when it came to came to discussing Kim Leach. Various people have opined that Ted strove to sustain the fiction of his innocence in the 12-year-old’s murder because his fellow inmates looked upon “baby rapers” with deep and menacing disapproval. It also may be that he was embarrassed by the crime, which belied his public image as the deadly handsome meta-murderer – evil wizard of the dark. Kidnapping and killing a pre-teen was hardly the stuff of legends.

Although Leach’s body would not be recovered until April, Bodiford already was building a strong circumstantial case that pointed directly to Ted as the young girl’s killer. All three Florida lawmen pressed their suspect to give the Leach family at least the cold solace of retrieving their daughter’s remains. But Bundy felt neither guilt nor remorse for any crime – nor was he concerned with the lifelong ache he’d planted in her parents’ hearts.

The possibility of redemption didn’t interest him, either. “He raised up in the chair,” Bodiford testified at his deposition, “and grabbed the pack of cigarettes and crumpled them and threw them on the floor and said, ‘But I’m the most cold-blooded sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet’.”

Chapter Two

Keppel versus ‘Ted’

I always wanted to be a cop.

I was born June 14, 1944, in Spokane, Washington, David and Eileen Keppel’s only child. My mother was an excellent amateur ice skater. My dad, a Marine veteran of World War II, spent the rest of his professional life in law enforcement, first as a Spokane County Sheriff’s deputy, then as eastern Washington representative for the state liquor control board, and finally as a store detective for the Rosauers Supermarkets chain in Spokane. My parents met at an ice show in which my mother appeared as a featured performer and my father carried the U.S. flag out onto the ice as part of the event’s honor guard.

I was a jock. My specialties at Central Valley High School were track and field and basketball. I cleared six feet, five inches in the high jump while at Central Valley, good enough to win the state championship. We also went to the state basketball tournament, losing by one point to a talented group from Garfield High School, in Seattle.

In 1966 I was the Pac-8 High Jump Champion. I cleared more than 7 feet in 1965, making me one of the top two high jumpers nationally. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel)

———

These successes meant a scholarship to Washington State University in Pullman, where I became the first person ever to high-jump seven feet in Washington and was named a track All-American twice. I also played varsity basketball at WSU for two years. I graduated in 1966.

My determination to become a policeman was largely due to my father’s influence. He had numerous friends who were police officers; there were cops in our house all the time. They’d come over for poker games. I’d sit at the table with these guys, listening to them tell exciting cop stories about how they caught the bad guys. They all wanted me to come work for them someday, and so did I.

My approach to policing also was largely shaped by my father, whom I respected deeply. Dad believed an officer’s first priority should be to help people. For example, when he was dealing with shoplifters at Rosauers, he was interested in achieving something more than just an arrest. He felt that if he could get these people to confess their crime, and perhaps pay for what they’d stolen, then that accomplished more, for all concerned, than just putting them in jail. I noticed that he had a lot of success with this attitude.

At WSU I majored in police science, now called criminal justice. The first-year administration classes were pretty boring. The second year was criminal investigation. I also took criminology-type classes in the sociology department, and then science courses, including biology, geology and anthropology with a law enforcement focus. I learned how to conduct a polygraph interview. After I finished my undergraduate degree, I delayed my inevitable entry into the military draft and trip to Vietnam to spend another 18 months at WSU to complete my master’s in police science.

Directly after receiving my master’s degree in 1968, I joined the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle, where my godfather was an assistant chief. Before being drafted, I spent six months as a deputy there. Drove a police car, wore a uniform. Had a gun. Didn’t know what I was doing, but I liked it.

After basic training, the Army sent me to military police school and then straight to the military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, where I learned to be a jailer. At Leavenworth, I got in touch with a girl I’d known in high school, Sandra Lingren, who was then a senior at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Sandra is known as Sandy, although she spells it Sande. She had dated my best friend at Central Valley and I had dated hers.

Now, seven years later, I wanted to know if Sande would like to go out and luckily enough for me, she did. We started dating.

In 1968, I applied for, and received, a direct commission as a first lieutenant. Sande and I were married on November 2 of that year.

I received further training in Georgia and at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where I made captain. Then I was shipped to Vietnam to serve as a sort of military police chief at the Army base at Phu Hiep, which was in the center of the country, right on the coast. About a hundred MPs reported to me, and they did all the police-oriented tasks — traffic, crime, murder, suicide. I did some coordination with the Vietnamese and Korean police. We also had a dog platoon that provided security to the Air Force base next door. It was a full-service police station.

In January of 1971, after my discharge from the Army, I entered the King County police academy, which trained all sheriff’s deputies and Seattle police officers. There were 50 cadets in my class. They elected me president because, at 26, I was the oldest guy with the most experience. The academy lasted for seven long months.

Once I got out on the street, I had some trouble with my fellow deputies who were crooked. I snitched on them, and they resented it. Partly because of these conflicts, I was transferred frequently. However, since my godfather was still an assistant chief, I was protected from retaliation.

The various sheriff’s offices all played competitive team sports against one another, as well as against some agencies in Pierce County to the south. Everyone took these games very seriously. Since I was good at basketball and football — I played guard, as I had in college, and wide receiver — I had at least as many allies as enemies among the other deputies. Our quarterback was Dave Reichert, who was great. Dave could throw a pass the length of the field. He later headed up the Green River Task Force and joined me for my first interview with Bundy. Dave went on to serve two terms as King County sheriff and was elected to the U.S. Congress as a Republican in 2005.

Though I fully subscribed to my father’s philosophy of policing, I discovered that it wasn’t always easy to play the role of the citizen’s helper. For example, I wasn’t going to make any deals with robbers and burglars. They were going to go to jail. But unlike most police officers, I actually enjoyed going to domestic disturbances — family fights — because it was a chance for me to counsel one side or the other, or both, so maybe they’d stop beating on each other, treat one another better. Other officers correctly see such calls as a chance to be assaulted themselves and are very wary of them. I saw this sort of work as basic to my role as a deputy. I enjoyed helping people.

***

In February of 1973 I joined the burglary/larceny detective unit.

I believed that detectives were the thing to be in a police department, the ultimate idea of a cop. Part of me liked using science and statistical tools, such as databases, to help solve crimes. I also liked collecting evidence at a crime scene, having the scene tell me something, putting all it all together.

But the most important thing a detective does is think, all the time. What am I doing right? What am I doing wrong? What do I need to know to do my job better? That’s what good detectives do, anyway. The poor ones tend to just react.

Experience, skill and the investigative mindset commonly come into play in all investigations, yet they are urgently important in homicide cases. One obvious reason is the comparative gravity of the crimes. It may be an economic or emotional catastrophe to have your car stolen, or your house burgled, but that is nothing compared to the murder of your child. The pressure to solve a homicide, and quickly, is intense. It comes from the victim’s family, from your department, from the press, and from within. Time is always precious. The longer a murder remains unsolved, the more likely it will never be solved.

The part of detective work I hated the most was a gory crime scene. I also disliked having to investigate a case committed by a fellow officer. I’m grateful that I never had to arrest a cop.

The best part of being a criminal investigator is when you solve a case quickly and neatly with some skill and art and get the bad guy off the street. I was lucky enough to experience one of those moments during my first week as a homicide detective, just days before Ted Bundy suddenly lurched into my life.

The victim was 68-year-old Chris Stergion, owner of Stergion Concrete in Enumclaw, a rural community in southeastern King County. In the early darkness of Thursday, July 11, 1974, my partner, Roger Dunn, and I were called to Stergion’s residence.

His wife reported that on the previous day her husband had told a teenaged drifter named James Lee Slade that he could sleep in the cab of a Stergion Concrete truck if he liked.

That night, they were awakened by the familiar “Ding!” of the antique cash register being opened in the business office adjoining their house. When Stergion went to investigate, he encountered Slade trying to burgle the place. The young man grabbed a set of calipers and began stabbing the old man again and again, at least 30 times.

Some workers across the street heard Stergion’s shouts as he was being attacked and then saw Slade running down the street. They telephoned the local police, who arrested the suspect. We recovered the calipers from the ditch where he’d thrown them.

I assumed that Roger and I would process the crime scene and that someone else with more experience would interrogate Slade, who was huge, well over six feet tall and heavily- muscled.

Then I was told that I would do the interrogation, alone. My sergeant and the other detectives there started joking behind my back about how I was going to get a confession out of this mammoth, obviously violence-prone, specimen. I was scared piss-less. I did not know what I was doing.

The only thing I could think of to equalize the situation was to make him remove his clothing. So I stripped him of his leather jacket, his blue jean jacket, his blue shirt, his pants, his shoes, everything, and put each item in a sack. When I was through, we put him in a light blue jumpsuit. The hulking Mr. Slade suddenly looked far less formidable and seemed to feel diminished, too, without all his gear.

I had been told that he was never without his black leather gloves. Now I noticed that they were gone and that there were cuts on both his hands. Sensing a connection to the crime, I asked him about the missing gloves. He gave me a lame story about leaving them in a truck, where they disappeared.

My disbelief was plain as I pressed him for more details. I observed that the gloves seemed to be important to him. Why didn’t he just put them in his pocket? I wondered. Nervously, he said they wouldn’t fit. I kept it up for a couple more minutes until Slade lost his composure and abruptly asked me if Craig Stergion was dead.

I said yes, and with that he began to tell the story of how he killed the old man. When I walked out of the room a short time later with a full confession, I could not have been more pleased with the looks of amazement I got from the sergeant and the others. Slade also gave me directions to the old warehouse where he had ditched his leather gloves. The right glove, with which he had grasped the calipers while stabbing the old man, was torn and soaked with blood.

I felt great about resolving the case so quickly. My sense of triumph, however, would be short-lived.

***

July 14 was a gloriously sunny Sunday at Lake Sammamish State Park, about 12 miles east of Seattle along Interstate 90 as it begins climbing eastward up into the Cascade Mountains. Tens of thousands of people swarmed that day to Lake Sam, as it is called, to enjoy the unusual blue skies and warm weather.

Among them was a pleasant-seeming young man, tanned and slender — most witnesses later guessed he was in his 20s — wearing either blue jeans or white tennis shorts and a T-shirt, with his left arm in a beige sling. He called himself Ted. He was driving a Volkswagen Beetle. There was something unusual about his accent. He sounded sort of British, as one person recalled.

“Ted” approached at least seven young women between noon and late afternoon at Lake Sam that Sunday. He told them that he needed help launching his sailboat and gestured toward his left arm as he explained how he’d injured the limb playing racquetball. Five of the females lived to recount their encounters with him. Two — 23-year-old Janice Ott, a juvenile probation officer, and 19-year-old Denise Naslund, a secretary attending computer-programming school — did not. By the time the sun set that evening, both had disappeared.

The restrooms where Denise Naslund was last seen at Lake Sammamish State Park

Janice Ott.

Missing person poster for Denise Naslund.

One of the “Ted” sketches we prepared. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

The Lake Sam cases originally belonged to the police in the town of Issaquah, which according to customary practice did not open a missing person investigation for either Ott or the Naslund case for 24 hours. One day later, on Tuesday, the Issaquah police chief and his single detective brought what little they had to the sheriff’s office and asked us to take over the case. Roger Dunn and I were then assigned the investigations — Roger was given Ott, I had Naslund — basically because we were both new guys and no one else in the homicide unit wanted them. (Coincidentally, I learned early in the investigation that Janice Ott’s father and my father were friends back in Spokane.)

Our captain, Nick Mackie, for some reason didn’t trust that Roger and I could interview anybody, so Mackie decided that the first round of interviews with witnesses at Lake Sam would be done by a team of local mental health professionals led by Dr. John Liebert and Dr. John Berberich, since deceased. Liebert is a forensic psychiatrist, and Berberich was a clinical psychologist, who advised police departments on internal issues. Both men taught at the University of Washington. Liebert advised King County Superior Court Judges on murder defendants’ potential for violence. For 20 years or more, he had interviewed every convicted murderer in the county and prepared a post-sentence report for the court.

Even this early in the case, it was becoming clear that contrary to a police detective’s usual experience, probably neither of the missing females had any previous connection to “Ted.”

These were stranger crimes, but no one should expect a ransom note. “Ted” had been trolling with his sailboat story and reeled in two unwary victims. They almost certainly were both dead by now. This meant that much of our normal investigative procedure — checking out relatives, friends and acquaintances, looking for anybody with a motive for abducting either Ott or Naslund — probably would be a waste of time.

Liebert and his team added that an offender so slick and bold and self-assured probably was practiced in committing this sort of crime and that he did so compulsively. He’d killed before and would want to kill again. There also was a good chance that he was a necrophile. If we ever found the victims, they likely would have been mutilated or dismembered.

When I asked if a guy so obviously crazy would have a history of mental problems, including institutionalization, neither of them believed he necessarily did. In contrast to the brutal and primitive murderer they described, Liebert and Berberich agreed that the public “Ted” obviously was highly credible, which suggested to them that he was well-concealed within his community and circle of friends. For that reason, he likely would be difficult to isolate as a suspect.

This was not the sort of offender profile that a newbie homicide detective with exactly one case on his resume wants to hear. Nor was I buoyed to learn from Liebert and the others that such a repeat offender — the term “serial killer” was not yet in general use — was thought to be exceedingly rare. Experts guessed that as few as 200 “Teds” were then at large and active in the United States.

From that moment onward, I read everything I could find on aberrant crime and abnormal psychology, a practice I’d follow for the balance of my career.

One of the first things we did was produce a composite sketch of “Ted” based on the various witnesses’ recollections. It was not a bad likeness of Bundy, who had a remarkably changeable appearance affected by a number of variables, such as mood, weight or the length of his hair. Ted also deliberately altered his looks.

We persuaded the local television stations to let us see their videotapes of the July 14 throngs at Lake Sam. Although this exercise netted us nothing, we did notice while watching the news footage that many people at the park had been taking their own pictures. So via the news media we asked everyone to send us their photos and negatives and received several hundred pictures from the public.

One black-and-white shot was particularly intriguing. There had been a disturbance at Lake Sam. The print showed the several police units that responded to it were parked in a row that effectively sealed off other vehicles from leaving. Among these trapped cars, under the very tree where one of our witnesses said she spoke with “Ted,” was a VW that exactly matched her description. Plus the driver plainly was seated inside! Unfortunately, we could not enhance the picture to positively identify the man, but I’m certain it was Bundy, and would later show the photo to Ted himself.

Bundy’s VW trapped in the Lake Sam parking lot. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

On July 18, theSeattle Times published some details of the Lake Sam cases under the headline “Police seek ‘Ted’ in missing-women case,” prompting an avalanche of telephone tips, under which Roger Dunn and I soon were buried. It was challenge enough just to take down the callers’ information, never mind working out what leads were most promising.

They were all over the place. For example, our telephone log reflects one caller’s information that a “guy matching the composite drawing goes to the University of Washington and throws a javelin.” Another witness told an officer she saw “a suspicious man in the Valu-Mart parking lot . . . This man was 5’ 3” tall and he had 6 half-gallons of milk with him, and a bunch of 7-Up. He came out of a store and got into a metallic-brown Buick Electra with unknown license plate, and unknown year, and drove away. No girls were seen.”

We did get excited, for a while, about some early suspects. One was Paul John Knowles, an itinerant killer whom we learned had stayed at an Issaquah motel on July 7. However, a little digging revealed that Knowles definitely was not in the area on July 14. I thought in any event Knowles was too big and ugly to be “Ted.” He was shot dead by a policeman in Florida later that year.

Another hot prospect was the Napa Valley Group, a band of Charles Manson’s followers we found camping off High Point Road, three or four miles east of Lake Sam. Once again, further checking showed they all had been in custody in California on the 14th. Nevertheless I told them, “There’s only one way for this to end, and that’s for you to hightail it eastbound and get the hell out of King County, because I don’t want you here.” I followed them all the way to Snoqualmie Pass.

On the 28th the Tacoma News Tribune stunned me, my department and the region with a multipage special report on the possible links between the Ott and Naslund cases and the disappearances and murders of seven other girls and young women in the Northwest over the preceding eight months. The story was among the earliest to point out that we might have a roving regional killer with whom to contend.

The paper’s earliest candidate for inclusion in a consolidated victim list was a 15-year-old runaway named Kathy Devine, last reported alive in December of 1973. Of all the cases the News Tribune examined, Devine’s death, together with the discovery in June of 1974 of the decomposing remains of another 15-year-old runaway, Brenda Baker, were the only ones we did not ultimately connect to Bundy. At this writing, the Baker case still remains open.

The first of the multiple unsolved disappearances the Tacoma paper cited was that of 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy, a University of Washington psychology major who in the early morning hours of February 1, 1974, vanished from her basement bedroom in a University District house Healy shared with four other coeds. Bloodstains were found in her bed and on the nightgown hanging in her closet. The Seattle police did not dust the room for fingerprints or process it for any other possible forensic evidence.

The News Tribune did not mention Mary Adams (a pseudonym), another young victim who less than four weeks earlier had been attacked in her own nearby University District basement apartment. She’d survive the intruder’s furious assault with a heavy metal rod, as well as severe internal injuries from the doctor’s speculum he pushed inside her.

Next on the newspaper’s list of missing young women was Donna Gail Manson, 19, who attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, about 60 miles south of Seattle. Manson vanished from the campus without a trace on the night of March 12. Her fate, as Ted would later tell me, was among the strangest of all his victims.

Donna Gail Manson’s poster: Her fate was among the strangest. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

Number Three among the missing coeds was 18-year-old Susan Rancourt, a freshman biology major at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, about a two-hour drive southeast from Seattle on Interstate 90. On the night of April 17, Rancourt left a meeting on campus to walk back to her dorm and was never seen alive again.

The least likely member of the group, as far as I was concerned, was Roberta Kathy Parks, 22, a coed at Oregon State University in Corvallis, 260 miles south of Seattle. I just would not believe that a Seattle-area killer would range so far out of his home hunting territory.

The last of the disappearances covered in the News Tribune special report was that of Georgann Hawkins, 18, a student at the University of Washington who was last seen alive about 1 a.m. on June 11 in the alley behind her sorority house. Witnesses reported seeing a man in a leg cast in the area that night. He was navigating on crutches and fumbling with a briefcase.

Georgann Hawkins’s missing person poster.
(Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

The approximate location Hawkins encountered Bundy, as it appears circa 2011. The alley and the lighting look much the same as it did in June of 1974.

Location where Bundy staged his VW and walked Hawkins to. He struk her from behind as she placed his books in the car. He pushed her into the car and drove away.
(Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

———

Map sketched of the alley where Georgann Hawkins disappeared. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

Herb Swindler, detective captain at the Seattle Police Department — which had jurisdictional responsibility for the Healy and Hawkins cases, as well as the earlier Adams assault — told the newspaper that there was no evidence he knew of to link any of the cases together, although they did share a number of similarities. “The real connection between the cases,” Swindler added, “is not in the hard evidence but in the lack of evidence.” The fact that no bodies had yet been recovered was “very, very unusual,” he said.

Herb and I already had met to compare notes in advance of the News Tribune story, and neither of us had connected the murdered and missing cases as had the newspaper. True, Dr. Liebert and his team told us that “Ted” probably had killed before, but there simply was no pattern to the cases that police detectives were then trained to recognize. We just didn’t understand what we were up against.

The News Tribune, groping to explain the cases, talked to sources who suggested an astrological explanation for them, or that the killer was “someone connected with college campuses,” maybe a male-female team, a “sexual psychopath,” or a gang of white slavers who were shanghaiing the young women and selling them into prostitution.

I also was familiar with one further case the paper did not include, the June 1st disappearance of 22-year-old Brenda Carol Ball from The Flame tavern in Burien, near Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Perhaps the newspaper didn’t know of the Ball case, or perhaps they ignored her because she was not a college student.

Her case had belonged to me since soon after her mother reported Brenda missing on June 17. Although I heard from the young woman’s friends that she was a free spirit who frequently took off on unplanned adventures, her mother insisted that Brenda would never be gone for so long without calling home.

I investigated her case as I’d investigate any missing person case, by sorting through her rather large and loose company of acquaintances and friends, hoping someone had a clue to her whereabouts. No one did. I definitely did not consider the possibility that her disappearance was in any way connected with the Lake Sam cases. There seemed to be nothing in common.

***

One of our elusive killer’s critical advantages was the ingrained habit among police agencies not to share information with one another. For example, we at the sheriff’s department never talked to the Seattle police about our cases, and they never discussed theirs with us. In fact, in those days trading information about crimes with other agencies was a good way to derail your career.

I’d never successfully pierced this wall of silence, or indifference, or even tried to, which is why the news I received on July 25, 1974, from Kathleen D’Olivo was such a startling surprise.

D’Olivo, a recent graduate of Central Washington State College, told me over the telephone that on the night of April 17, when Susan Rancourt vanished, a shabby-looking stranger with one arm in a sling approached her as if out of nowhere near the college library. There was a brace on his opposite hand. He was struggling with a stack of books. D’Olivo asked if he could use some help.

“Yeah, could you?” he replied.

The stranger led her to his car, parked in a remote and dark corner of the campus, which raised the young woman’s suspicions. Kathleen was on guard. When they reached his car, which she remembered as a shiny brown VW Bug, he produced his keys, fumbled with them and then dropped them. He stooped over as if to search for them, then asked if she could help. The sling and brace made it difficult to feel, he said.

D’Olivo told me that she was not going to bend over, leaving herself vulnerable, in front of this character. She suggested instead that they step back to see if the keys were visible in the light. They were. She grabbed them up and handed them to the stranger with a bright “Good night!” and briskly walked away, no doubt saving her life in the process.

A short while later Susan Rancourt wouldn’t be so alert, or lucky.

Map of Central Washington; the location of Bundy’s VW was illustrated by the witness (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Kathleen D’Olivo’s story of her encounter that night forced me to radically alter my perspective. The striking similarities between her experience and what we knew of “Ted’s” approaches to the young women at Lake Sam didn’t prove the same killer was at work in both places, but they were nonetheless highly suggestive. We also knew that these could not have been copycat cases.

What was more, the reports of a man in a leg cast, on crutches, carrying a briefcase in the vicinity of Georgann Hawkins’ June 11 disappearance on the University of Washington campus also buttressed my dawning realization that I and cops in at least four other jurisdictions were chasing after the same guy in a haphazard, misguided and completely uncoordinated effort. “Ted” must have been snickering as he considered his next strike. He was making us look like fools.

***

Saturday afternoon, September 7, 1974, was sunny and hot. Roger Dunn and I were bouncing north on Interstate 5 from Tacoma in Dunn’s old pickup with a load of railroad ties for some do-it-yourself home landscaping when a news bulletin on his truck radio suddenly caught our attention. According to the brief report, skeletal remains had been discovered on a hillside just off Interstate 90 in Issaquah, about a mile or so from Lake Sam. The sheriff’s office was investi-gating. A couple of bird hunters — it was the first day of grouse season — had found the bones.

We immediately pulled off the interstate, found a pay phone and called the squad room. Our sergeant, Len Randall, informed us that only my presence was required at the scene that afternoon. Roger could head home.

The Issaquah site turned out to be very near the de-sanctified church where I’d gone through the police academy three years before. I arrived in my unmarked car, sweaty and smelly from unloading the creosote-soaked ties, walked past a knot of reporters behind a barricade and then up a dirt road to the scene. The going was uneven and my gimpy knee — I’d torn some cartilage in a pickup basketball game — exploded in hot pain that shot up and down my leg.

The hillside was covered with firs and cedars and was thick with ground vegetation, through which deer and coyotes, skunks, bears, feral pets, and lots of rodents had established numerous meandering trails. Very little sunlight penetrated the dense forest, creating a dark and mysterious aura below.

It looked like an appropriate place for murder, although we soon learned that this was a multiuse environment. There were spent .30-30 and .22 caliber shell casings scattered around, indicating that the area had been used for target practice. A quick look at the single, pebble-covered road that ran over the hillside showed that it was used fairly frequently by dirt bikers and riders on horseback.

At least five bras were recovered, as well as five sets of women’s underpants, a half-slip, a pink nylon nightgown, and some pantyhose. Apparently its seclusion also made the site a popular destination for lovers, or hookers and their johns.

Sergeant Randall showed me where the grouse hunters had found a skull. About 30 feet downhill of it, they discovered a human spine with a few gnawed ribs still attached. The animals had been busy. Between the two sites deputies also came across a large clump of long black hair, largely obscured beneath a layer of leaves and forest debris.

Some of the miscellaneous garments recovered at the Issaquah site. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives).

The hands-and-knees search of the hillside.

———

The bones already had been dispatched to the medical examiner’s office. Eleanor Rose, Denise Naslund’s mother, who was nearly unhinged by her daughter’s disappearance, arrived at the site and was told that the remains were not Denise’s. Just then, no one really knew whose bones had been found. The official reassurance was therefore a pointless and cruel deception.

Mrs. Rose would never recover from losing Denise. For years after Lake Sam she was an almost constant presence in my life as she obsessively followed the investigation. I didn’t know how to handle her. Yet my superiors were eager that I did, so they didn’t have to.

Randall informed me that next morning I was to direct a search of the hillside by a King County Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR) team, made up mostly of experienced Boy Scouts with considerable search and rescue training. ESAR, organized in the 1950s, most commonly was dispatched to locate missing hikers and downed aircraft.

The 50 or so members of my ESAR crew, mostly kids in their mid-teens, searched shoulder to shoulder on their hands and knees across 130,000 square feet of sloping forest floor, laced with thorny blackberry thickets and tall stands of stinging nettles. You’d never get police officers to do that. In all, they spent 13 days at the Issaquah site and, according to their website, 4,887 hours conducting their search. They acquitted themselves well. It was, and remains, King County ESAR’s largest operation, ever.

I had never seen a human bone and had no idea how to correctly search such a site. It turned out that no one else did, either, so we invented some forensic procedures as we went along. Our principal innovation was to turn the site into a grid, as is done in archaeological digs, which allowed us to map our discoveries with precision. Every item was photographed in situ, then labeled with the date, time and location it was found, together with the name of the person who found it. We kept a chronological record of our discoveries, as well.

In total, we recovered and cataloged about 400 human bones and other items of evidence. These included a tire iron, a screwdriver, and a two-foot-long scabbard, perhaps for a machete. The kids also found a lump of coyote dung containing a small hand bone and some birds’ nests laced together with blond hair.

There turned out to be three distinct decomposition sites. From a jawbone, we established that one of the victims was Janice Ott. We didn’t find her skull. From a jawbone and skull we also identified Denise Naslund. She had suffered a powerful blow to her head from a heavy object, such as a tire iron. The third victim, for whom we had a leg bone and some vertebrae, but no jaw or skull, would remain unidentified for another 15 years.

For all we found, the Issaquah hillside yielded no hard evidence of “Ted’s” identity. Yet I thought it told us a great deal, indirectly, about the kind of killer he was, none of it very encouraging.

The site seemed very well chosen. It was isolated and private, yet readily accessible by car. I also noted that “Ted” need not worry about being disturbed as he went about his business there. Any approaching vehicle was easily detected at a distance, giving him ample time to drive off, or perhaps to hide.

All the indications of extensive planning and care for detail — nothing belonging to any of the three victims was found — was consistent with John Liebert’s belief that “Ted” had killed before, and perhaps often, and that he certainly would keep killing until we, or something, stopped him.

I dreaded whatever was next.

Chapter Three

Taylor Mountain

Ted Bundy’s personal history is clouded and difficult to parse, studded with troubling episodes.

Louise Cowell was a young department-store clerk in post-war Philadelphia when she conceived him. She later claimed that his father was a recently returned veteran named Jack Worthington. There’s no documentary evidence that Jack Worthington actually existed, although we later learned that a Jack Worthington with an unlisted telephone number had lived in Philadelphia. Louis’s father, Samuel, was violent; her mother, Eleanor, suffered from mental issues that were treated with electroshock; and little Teddy was more than a bit strange. According to one of Louise’s two younger sisters, she awoke one morning to find that the child, aged three, had arranged knives all around her in her bed.

These facts notwithstanding, Ted steadfastly claimed that his early boyhood was idyllic and that he remembered it all very fondly. Whatever trauma he may have sustained, or whatever he may have witnessed, apparently was suppressed or erased.

Louise brought Ted to Tacoma, where her uncle, John Cowell, Jr., Sam’s younger brother, taught music at the College of Puget Sound. Not long thereafter, she met and married Johnnie Bundy, a Navy cook from North Carolina, and subsequently bore him two sons and two daughters.

Decades later, Bundy told Dr. Lewis, the psychiatrist, that as a young teen in Tacoma he liked to peer out his bedroom window into the neighbor’s bathroom and to sneak out of the house at night. He’d disappear into the woods out back, take off his clothes and run around naked in the dark. He believed this was the very earliest manifestation of what became, in time, his “problem.”

According to Bundy, from the time he entered Tacoma’s Woodrow Wilson High School, he felt increasingly isolated and uncomfortable among his peers. “I felt alienated from my old friends,” he told Michaud. “They just seemed to move on and I didn’t.”

He graduated from Wilson in 1965 and enrolled at what had become the University of Puget Sound, where he spent a lonely freshman year, living at home to save money, unable to integrate himself into school life. He felt “anonymous and small” at UPS, as journalists Michaud and Aynesworth put it.

The following year, he transferred into the Asian studies program at the University of Washington and started dating a tall and very attractive coed from California. His public fortunes, at least, had improved substantially. Ted was on a roll.

However, in the summer of 1967 Bundy hit another wall. Ted had enrolled in an intensive summer Chinese language program at Stanford, only to stumble badly. His girlfriend dumped him, and that autumn he withdrew from the University of Washington. He pulled together enough money to travel around the country by air, first to California, then to Aspen and on to Philadelphia.

Lewis diagnosed Ted as bipolar, or manic-depressive as the condition once was known. I can’t judge if she was accurate; in any case, this is not an insight of practical value to a homicide detective. But it does provide a useful narrative framework for trying to understand Ted’s progress toward murder.

His flame-out at Stanford, she testified, coincided with a depressive trough that persisted until the spring of 1968, when he returned from Philadelphia to Seattle and became immersed in one of his passions, Republican politics.

He was living in a small Seattle apartment, working as a busboy and as a night stocker at a grocery store, when by chance he met an old acquaintance from high school who told him that Art Fletcher, a Republican, was gearing up to run for lieutenant governor and looking for volunteers. Bundy jumped at the chance. He quit his jobs and joined the Fletcher campaign, where he thrived. He was popular with the females on the campaign, but he was well-liked among male colleagues, too. He became the candidate’s driver, and as a reward for his hard work in early August was sent to the GOP national convention in Miami. Ted told Lewis he felt “on top of the world” from spring to November of 1968, what she described in court as “a fairly clear manic episode.”

Depression, however, ensued once more, leaving him “lonely, unmotivated,” as Lewis put it, on a second trip to Philadelphia, where Bundy matriculated for a term at Temple University. During this period, he told Lewis, he frequently visited New York City to sample the pornography available around Times Square. Ted said that this was when he first began formulating fantasies of attacking young women, and made a single, aborted effort to secure a victim at the New Jersey shore. “I didn’t actually kill someone at this time,” he told the psychiatrist, “But I really, for the first time, approached a victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her, and she escaped.” He also revealed to Lewis that while at Temple he bought a false mustache and began experimenting with ways of changing his appearance.

The summer of 1969 found him once again in Seattle, living in a University District boardinghouse near the Sandpiper tavern, a college hangout that Ted patronized frequently. One night in September, after downing a pitcher of beer to give himself courage, he approached 24-year-old Liz Kendall and asked her for a dance. She declined at first but found Bundy attractive and charming. According to Kendall, who was divorced and the mother of a little girl, he said that he was a law student, working on a book about Vietnam. By the end of the evening, Kendall has written, “I was already planning the wedding and naming the kids.”

She took Ted home with her.

By this time Ted was an avid and a practiced voyeur, scouting the University District nightly for whatever he might see. He was stealing a lot, too, mostly expensive furnishings and accessories for his apartment. He was reading detective magazines for information and stimulation and also drinking heavily. His fantasies were growing more explicit and focused and insistent, as well.

The depression that had descended on him after the 1968 election finally began to lift in 1970. That summer, he returned to the University of Washington, this time as a psychology major, and burned through the curriculum with ease, finally earning his undergraduate degree in 1972, seven years after his college career had begun.

From May of 1970 until September of 1971 Ted drove a delivery van for Ped-Line, a medical supply company. Liz later noticed in his apartment a pair of crutches and a bag of plaster he’d stolen from Ped-Line. There was also an unexplained pile of keys he kept in a bowl, plus a bagful of women’s clothing she discovered there in 1973.

His next employment was a brief stint in a work-study program at the Seattle Crisis Clinic, where one night a week Bundy fielded calls from Seattleites in deep emotional distress. If they seemed suicidal, it was his job to keep them on the phone long enough for the police and EMTs to trace the telephone number and intervene.

Despite his classroom successes, Ted’s enthusiasm for psychology was fading just as the idea of becoming a lawyer — just like a lot of his political friends — caught his imagination. He applied to 10 law schools. Though his grades were good, his LSAT scores were so-so — a humiliation — and he was turned down everywhere.

Once more the black dog came prowling.

In May of 1972 he quit the Crisis Clinic and went to work on a federal grant as a counselor to psychiatric outpatients at Harborview Hospital. The empathy necessary for such work eluded him, but luckily for Bundy another election cycle was at hand. He caught on with GOP Governor Dan Evans’s successful reelection campaign.

This led to a succession of political jobs. First, he spent a month writing articles for the Seattle Crime Commission’s newsletter. Then he studied recidivism among inmates for the King County Office of Law and Justice Planning. Poring over thousands of records and rap sheets, he was struck by how chaotic and inconsistent recording keeping was, how offenders had incomplete, inaccurate or nonexistent records in the system. It taught Bundy a good deal about the ways in which police agencies work and don’t work.

He reapplied to law school with a reworked admissions package featuring a new personal statement about the LSAT’s deficiencies, plus a letter of recommendation from Dan Evans, Washington’s newly reelected Republican governor. One of his professors in the psychology department at UW also gave Ted a very positive review. This time, the University of Utah was sufficiently impressed to offer him a law school slot for the autumn of 1973.

Ted worked the summer of 1973 in Olympia at $1,000 a month for the Republican state central committee, studying cost overruns in their computers and helping out in other research projects. His boss, Ross Davis, the new head of the central committee, would later remember Bundy visiting his house later that summer. The two men were standing together in the Davis driveway as Ted rummaged around in his VW’s trunk, looking for something. Davis glanced into the trunk at the great pile of junk Bundy kept in it. Among the stuff, he noticed a pair of handcuffs.

***

Bundy abruptly changed his plans that autumn. UPS in Tacoma had just opened a night law school, which seemed to offer superior networking opportunities if he intended to practice in the area, as well as advantages if he decided to pursue a political career in Washington. He enrolled at UPS and informed Utah that he couldn’t come because of injuries sustained in a car wreck.

Then disaster struck. As his LSAT scores had suggested, Ted had no aptitude for law, its abstractions, and ways of reasoning. “He did not attend classes,” Dr. Lewis testified, “did not go to his final examination, and seemed to be in a significant depression at that time.”

Believing the fault for his implosion must lie with UPS and not with himself, in December he secretly reapplied to Utah, mentioning nothing of his debacle. Ted was readmitted for the fall of 1974.

For the balance of the school year, as the coeds, starting with Lynda Healy on February 1, 1974, began to disappear, Bundy kept up a pretense of continuing his law studies, even going to class most of the time. From his gas receipts that we later subpoenaed, it was clear he was driving extraordinary distances throughout this period, although none of the receipts linked him with any known crimes.

Thanks to his political connections, Ted landed yet another job in government that summer. He was to work in Olympia on the biennial budget for the Washington Department of Emergency Services. After the twin abductions at Lake Sam that July, he took a lot of kidding from his colleagues at DES, who laughingly pointed out how much Bundy resembled the published composite of “Ted.” He was also reminded that he drove a Volkswagen.

At Liz Kendall’s office in Seattle, a co-worker made the same connection. “Doesn’t this look like someone you know?” he asked. “Doesn’t your Ted have a VW?”

That night, Liz went home and compared the newspaper sketch with some personal photos of Bundy. Was “Ted” her Ted? She wasn’t sure.

Liz would pass through a long night of doubt and self-reproach about Bundy, vacillating between love and fear, faith and worry. Twice in the coming weeks she’d anonymously contact our “Ted Hotline,” but she couldn’t bring herself to give the officer her boyfriend’s name.

The original tip from Liz Kendall called in to the late Randy Hergsheimer. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

Some added information based on conversations with Liz about Ted. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

***

Ted left for Salt Lake City in early September to enroll in the University of Utah College of Law. Once again, he quickly fell behind his classmates.

On October 2, 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox, a cheerleader, disappeared from the town of Holladay, which is just south of Salt Lake City. She has never been found.

On Friday night, October 18, Melissa Smith, 17, of Midvale, not far from Holladay, was last seen hitchhiking. Ten days later, her naked remains, half-frozen, were discovered in a canyon up in the Wasatch Front, the wall of mountains that rises dramatically to the east of the Salt Lake valley. Smith was covered with cuts and abrasions and had sustained multiple blows to her skull. One of her blue, knee-length stockings was knotted snugly around her neck. She had been raped and probably sodomized. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina.

Her eye makeup was undisturbed and all of her fingernails were intact, suggesting that Smith had been assaulted by surprise and had had no chance to fight back. The medical examiner believed from the condition of her body that she might have been kept alive somewhere for as long as a week before she was killed.

The Smith case terrified the region. When a Utah friend mentioned the murder to Liz by telephone, Kendall immediately thought of the Seattle and Northwest cases and of her Ted. This time, she actually met with one of our detectives, Randy Hergesheimer, known as Hergy, and gave him her name and Bundy’s name and explained why she had contacted us.

She told Hergy about Ted’s thievery and the keys and the women’s clothes in his apartment, as well as the crutches and plaster he’d stolen from Ped-Line. She explained how Bundy had kept a tire iron under her radiator and how he liked to tie her up for sex, using pairs of her pantyhose as restraints. He’d known exactly where to look for them in her dresser drawers.

Liz also gave Detective Hergesheimer some snapshots of Bundy. He shipped the information and pictures to the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department, where Homicide Detective Ben Forbes noted the name, Theodore Robert Bundy, reviewed the material, and then impaled the documents on his information retrieval system, a long spindle, where the information would rest undisturbed for 10 months.

The killings continued in Utah.

On Halloween, 17-year-old Laura Aime left a house party in Orem, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, to go buy some cigarettes. She was on foot. On November 27, Aimee was found as Melissa Smith had been found, naked and frozen in a Wasatch canyon. She had been bludgeoned and strangled with her own stocking. Also like Smith, she had been raped and sodomized. Aime had suffered a puncture wound to her vagina from an unknown instrument, as well. In contrast to her many wounds, her hair appeared to have been freshly shampooed not long before her death.

Friday night, November 8, Carol DaRonch, 19, a recent high school graduate working as an operator at Mountain Bell, drove her maroon Camaro into the parking lot of the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, near where Melissa Smith had been abducted three weeks before. As she was shopping for a present inside the mall, DaRonch was approached by a man with slicked-back hair, smelling of liquor, who said he was Officer Roseland of the Murray police. She noticed that he was wearing patent leather shoes. He asked the young woman for her license tag number, explaining that a car burglary had been reported in the parking lot.

Hesitantly, DaRonch followed “Roseland” back out to the parking lot and her Camaro, which was undisturbed. “Roseland,” who by his appearance was a very poor example of a cop, nonetheless was well educated, she could tell, and spoke with authority. He said they had to walk over to the police mall substation. Growing ever more suspicious, DaRonch asked him for some identification. He flashed her a metallic badge that she did not see clearly.

The substation — in truth, the back of a Laundromat — was locked. “Roseland” muttered something about his partner and said they needed to drive downtown. This was the moment for Carol DaRonch to run, fast, in any direction. But instead she followed him to his car, which she’d remember as a banged-up old Volkswagen Bug, with a tear across the top of the rear seat. Some instinct told the young woman not to buckle her seat belt, and she didn’t, despite “Roseland’s” repeated requests that she do so.

Then he struck. As they left the mall and were headed east, “Roseland” produced a pair of handcuffs and tried to clamp them on her wrists. He managed to attach the right one, but DaRonch put up a ferocious fight. Unable to subdue her, his hand slipped and the second cuff went around her right forearm.

She had the passenger door partially open when suddenly he was swinging a four-tong tire iron down on her. DaRonch just managed to get a hand up in time to deflect the club, wrenched her left arm out of his grasp, and stumbled from the VW, screaming, into the street. He whipped the little car around and disappeared.

A short while later, and approximately 19 miles north in the town of Bountiful, the Viewmont High School drama club was presenting The Redhead in the school auditorium.

Viewmont High School; Deborah Kent walked out of the auditorium and disappeared before reaching her car in the parking lot. (Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

———

Before the lights went down, drama teacher Raelynne Shepard, 24, noticed a mustachioed stranger, wearing patent leather shoes. They spoke. He told her she had beautiful eyes. She asked if he was waiting for someone, and he replied, “No.” He seemed a bit nervous to Shepard.

They encountered one another several more times before the play began. At one point, he asked her if she’d come out to the parking lot to identify a car. “I thought that was a little bit strange,” Shepard later told police.

Just before the intermission, he accosted the teacher once more, half commanding her to accompany him out the door. He didn’t make eye contact but instead stared at her breasts.

At the intermission, 17-year-old Debra Kent left the auditorium to go pick up her brother at a roller skating rink. Toward the end of the play, Raelynne Shepard again saw the stranger. He was seated directly behind Dean and Belva Kent, Debra’s parents.

When the lights came up he was gone, and so was Debra. She was never seen again. A key was later recovered in the auditorium parking lot. It fit the handcuffs that “Officer Roseland” had placed on Carol DaRonch’s right arm earlier that evening.

***

The closing months of 1974 were marked for me by an event and a realization. The event was the happy arrival of our daughter, Allison, who calls herself Allie, born on December 13. Her brother David had made his debut in April of 1972. John, our third and last child, would be born in 1977.

My realization was that since the Lake Sam abduction-murders of July, there were no further reports of missing women in the Northwest. Where in hell was “Ted”?

Dr. Liebert and my own, brief, investigative experience with this killer told us that “Ted” didn’t take vacations. We began to wonder if he was a sailor. There are numerous naval installations scattered around Puget Sound. Maybe “Ted” shipped out. Maybe he was sick in a hospital somewhere. There was as well the groundless hope that he was dead. We also wondered if he was in jail, quietly waiting — “Ted” so far seemed to do everything quietly, patiently — so he could pick up his avocation upon release. Maybe he’d simply moved on to start hunting somewhere else.

Of course there still were veteran police detectives all over the Pacific Northwest, probably a majority of them, who believed that despite the three decomposed bodies we recovered at Issaquah, there was no convincing evidence that “Ted” was good for any of the other missing females. They saw each case the way cops had always seen such cases: one at a time, in a vacuum.

Experience told them that the odds overwhelmingly were against the existence of a traveling bludgeon murderer, selecting and slaying our girls and young women according to his pleasure. After all, roughly two-thirds of all murders are committed by the victims’ friends, acquaintances, or family members.

But “Ted” demolished this conventional cop wisdom, as Roger and I expected he would, on rainy March 2, 1975, when a pair of community-college forestry students reported the discovery of a skull on 2,600-foot Taylor Mountain in eastern King County, near the town of North Bend. Taylor Mountain is part of a chain of high hills, later named the Issaquah Alps, that march eastward from Seattle up to the Cascades along the south side of Interstate 90.

Aerial view of Taylor Mountain.

———

The road leading up Taylor Mountain, with searchers’cars in background.
(From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Taylor Creek. In the evergreens just beyond the creek is where the skulls were found. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

It was late afternoon when Dunn and I arrived at the desolate and forbidding area where the foresters had discovered the skull. The hillside was covered in vine maples. There was no sign of habitation in any direction.

The students had marked a trail from the road to the skull with red fluorescent tape they attached to tree limbs. The route up through the thick growths of vine maple was slippery from the rain, and my bum knee screamed again and again with my frequent missteps. It was fully a thousand feet from the road to the skull, a helluva long way, I thought, for a guy to carry a dead body through such terrain, in the dark.

Since August, we had assembled files on every woman known to be missing throughout Washington, British Columbia, and Oregon. The documentation included their dental records, approximately 15 of which I had memorized over the months.

When we first encountered the skull, resting on its left side, its major feature was a yawning fracture on the right side of the cranium; a jagged chunk of bone at least eight inches by four inches was missing. A spider had spun its web across the hole. The rest of the skull was filled with last autumn’s leaves. By its weathering I guessed it had been resting there on Taylor Mountain for at least six months.

One of the four skulls recovered on Taylor Mountain (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

We photographed it from several angles, using two triangulation stakes to ensure we could re-create its exact position on a map.

The big surprise came when I examined the upper dentition (there was no jawbone). I would have known that neat row of silver fillings anywhere. Unmistakably here was Brenda Carol Ball, for whom I’d been searching since her mother reported her missing back in mid-June.

As Roger and I carefully removed the skull, along with the soil and leaves beneath it, in case they might yield trace evidence such as hair or fibers, Brenda Ball became my third open murder investigation. However, I still did not connect her with my other two, Denise Naslund and Janice Ott. At the moment in our minds she remained an isolated case.

Brenda Ball, age 22, last seen at a tavern in Burien
Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

———

Brenda’s missing person poster. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Our working assumption was that the killer had dumped Brenda Ball near the roadway below and that the animals had dismembered her, dragging her skull far away from where they first encountered it. The next day, I returned to the scene with a small group of ESAR volunteers and their six search dogs, hoping to find more of Ball wherever the animals had taken her.

But we never would find another identifiable piece of her. Instead, as I was searching about 90 feet away from where we found Brenda Ball’s cranium, I tripped and fell over a branch just a short distance from a second skull. Like Ball’s, this skull was weathered and sun-bleached. A tree branch was sprouting through one of the facial bones. There was a six-inch radial fracture that ran straight up the center of the skull. Though her mandible was missing, I again knew in an instant who this was. None of the other missing women had such bridgework as Susan Rancourt.

After interviewing Kathleen D’Olivo the previous summer, I was nearly as certain “Ted” abducted Susan Rancourt as I was that he had nothing to do with Brenda Ball’s disappearance. Now that it was clear that the same guy who apparently had picked up street-smart Brenda Ball outside a topless joint in Burien also had lured the unworldly Susan Rancourt to her death a hundred miles away on the peaceful campus of a state college, I was forced to accept that “Ted” had been ranging far more widely, and stalking a more various victim pool, than I had guessed.

On the third day of searching, we fielded a full crew of ESAR volunteers to scour the site as they had the hillside in Issaquah. The dogs, which were a bit less fastidious than humans about where they went and what they stepped on, were reassigned to other duties.

It was on this day that one of the ESAR volunteers discovered some unexploded ordinance on the hillside. We soon found a lot more explosives and discovered that a nearby munitions plant had used Taylor Mountain as a test range. I closed the plant down and didn’t let it reopen until a bomb squad had cleared the area of multiple duds.

The third skull we found was that of Roberta Kathy Parks, who had disappeared from Oregon State University in early May of 1974. She, too, had been bludgeoned. Up to the moment her remains were discovered, only the Tacoma News Tribune and other news outlets had made serious mention of Parks in discussions of the other missing females. To include Susan Rancourt in remote Ellensburg had strained most cops’ credulity. Now we knew “Ted” had traveled as far as 260 miles south to Corvallis in search of victims.

The last remains recovered on Taylor Mountain were those of Lynda Ann Healy, “Ted’s” earliest known victim and, we thought at the time, probably his first overall. At least that theory fit the known facts. Healy’s skull, like all the others, had been cracked open with a heavy, blunt instrument.

About the only good thing to be said for Taylor Mountain was its location in King County. I had worried that if a second dump site were found in another police jurisdiction, it would not be nearly so thoroughly processed, nor would we in the sheriff’s office be assured of learning everything of value that had been found. I was satisfied we’d gleaned every bit of evidence possible in our searches.

Once again, that wasn’t much. Like Issaquah, he left no trace of himself or any of the victims’ clothes or belongings. Nothing. Also troubling — we kept this out of the press — the only remains we found after six days of searching were three skulls, three jaws, a couple of small pieces of skull, a tooth, and a little bit of blond hair. If the killer had dumped his four victims near the road as we initially theorized, then we should have more bones littering the animal trails.

The idea circulated that the females had been decapitated. Our supervisors, possibly concerned over what a story like that might do to an already deeply shaken public, observed that upper vertebrae were customarily found with decapitated skulls. Since that was not the case at Taylor Mountain, the animals’ activity must explain the apparent anomaly. They added that the missing bones probably were scattered outside our immediate search area.

Few of my fellow cops bought into my theory, developed over time that the reason we found only crania and mandibles is that they were the only bones that he dumped there. I believed the evidence suggested he’d kept the heads somewhere else for a period of time, and then brought them to Taylor Mountain as a group for disposal. That would explain, among other things, why they all seemed to be in roughly the same state of decay, even though the victims’ dates of disappearance varied from January to June of the preceding year.

There also remained several important questions for which I had no answers. Where was Donna Gail Manson? Where was Georgann Hawkins? Who was the third victim at Issaquah? And where the hell was “Ted”?

Chapter Four

We regroup

With discovery of the Taylor Mountain dump site, what had been known as the “Missing and Murdered Women Cases” became “The Ted Murders.” While we were processing the site, the sheriff’s office and the Seattle police made a cosmetic gesture toward consolidating the investigative response to what even the police-department moss-backs now conceded was a common problem. The Ted Task Force — a sergeant and two detectives from the Seattle police, plus eight of us from my department — was established with great fanfare in a windowless, 10-foot by 25-foot room on Floor 1A of the King County Courthouse.

It was a fiasco.

We were never organized, no one was ever clearly in charge, and we could never agree on the order of business. The Ted Task Force consequently endured for less than a month, in which about all we did was answer an average of 500 telephones calls each day from private citizens offering information. Most of the callers seemed sincerely interested in helping, but naturally there were some jackasses and nut cases, as well. We later figured out that one guy alone telephoned us 600 times over the course of the investigation. We also later discovered that the last of the Ted Bundy tips was received back in October, 1974. We could have shut off the hotline phones altogether from that point forward.

On April 1, appropriately enough, the Seattle police withdrew their personnel, leaving the Healy case for us to work. They kept Georgann Hawkins, who was still a missing person at this point. Our bosses added two more detectives to the group, giving us a ten-person team, known around the department as the Grisly Business Unit (chasing the “Angel of Decay,” one of “Ted’s” nicknames), that would stay together until June 1, when budget considerations shrank the investigation back down to its original components, Roger and me, plus two deputies to answer the telephones.

At least it was now agreed throughout the sheriff’s office that we were chasing a new kind of killer — new to us, for sure — and to catch him would require a new kind of police outlook. We were ready to try anything.

Roger, for example, canvassed Northwest homicides dating back to January of 1969, searching for patterns or similarities. Nothing popped out, except for the distressing level of everyday mayhem he documented. Dunn found 94 reports of unsolved female murders in the 5 ½-year period.

We discussed, again, how likely it was that “Ted” was neither dead nor incarcerated nor somewhere on the high seas but instead had simply left the area, perhaps driven by the intense publicity following the Lake Sam abduction-murders to seek new hunting grounds where the potential prey were less wary and the police less vigilant.

In May, Roger attended the so-called Northwest Missing and Murdered Women Conference in Boise, Idaho, where detectives from seven western states and British Columbia gathered to discuss and compare their cases.

Roger presented our cases at the conference and learned for the first time the details of the Melissa Smith and Laura Aime abduction-murders of October, 1974, as well as Caryn Campbell’s murder near Snowmass in January of 1975. The fact that all three were found nude in the wilderness with horribly fractured skulls got our attention.

The Boise meeting also was our first contact with Detective Mike Fisher from Aspen, who strongly sensed that our “Ted” might also have been responsible for the Campbell slaying. We began sharing information with Fisher, frustrated that our contacts had to remain informal, since no official multistate investigative effort had been organized. None ever would be.

***

Our evolving investigative strategy finally resolved itself into a three-pronged approach. We decided that since Lynda Healy’s murder evidently was “Ted’s” first that we would intensively reinvestigate it, believing that since “Ted” was then new to murder, he may have made mistakes we could exploit.

Two, we looked at the 3,500 or so “Ted” suspects developed in the course of the investigation and decided to winnow them down to a top 100 whom we’d take a second or third look at. The aim was to eliminate possible “Teds” until we came to the real Ted, our killer, whom we were certain lurked somewhere in our enormous stacks of files. Sooner or later, we were going to ferret him out.

Three, building on a data-analysis model developed by Sergeant Bob Schmitz, we began making up lists: guys named Ted, guys who owned VWs, Lynda Healy’s classmates, mental patients released over the past 10 years, and so on. In the course of a month we created 30 such lists with more than 300,000 names on them.

Next, we went to King County Systems Services, whose programmers believed they could write an application for the county’s big mainframe computer to analyze the lists for multiple hits. When the machine wasn’t processing payroll checks or performing other such routine duties, it could help us search for “Ted.”

The “Ted” lists that I and other investigatorscategorized and entered into the computer. The higher the number of times a suspect appeared, the more viable the suspect.

———

How Bundy’s name appeared on the print out. Bundy was among those who appeared most. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

At this time, computers played next to no role in law enforcement, and certainly no one had yet announced a program for catching killers. This was a technical and conceptual milestone for my profession, and of course we encountered plenty of skepticism. In retrospect, it is one of my proudest achievements.

When Roger and I laid out our three-part plan of action to Captain Mackie, he saw at once that there was a consistent logic to our approach and that we could actually measure our progress, or lack of same, rather than carry on in the haphazard way we had for nearly a year. He even authorized a third detective to join us. Not surprisingly, picking through the mountain of details we had amassed on our way to identifying “Ted” did not appeal to most other detectives. In fact, the only one who came forward, eager to join us, was Kathleen McChesney, who in a male-dominated police agency had moved from one unappealing assignment to another, including the monumentally boring hot check unit. Kathy saw us as her ticket out of purgatory. We welcomed her as a very smart and hard-working partner with the detective skills and determination our team needed if we were going to ever bring “Ted” to bay.

Chapter Five

‘Now is not the time’

On Tuesday morning, August 19, 1975, our world was turned upside down. Lieutenant Ben Forbes, a detective with the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s office, called to inform us that Theodore Robert Bundy had been arrested in the early hours of Saturday, the 16th, in the town of Granger and charged with evading arrest. A charge of burglary tools possession was pending.

Deputy Kevin O’Shaughnessy, who took Forbes’s call, asked the detective why he’d thought to share this information with us. “Because,” Forbes replied, “you asked for it.” He then explained his telephone conversation of the previous October with Hergy Hergesheimer, who had relayed Elizabeth Kendall’s information and photos of Bundy. Forbes told Kevin how he’d retrieved the Bundy file from his desktop spindle, promised to send us a mug shot, and rang off.

The story of Bundy’s arrest, as we later learned, began with Sergeant Robert A. Hayward of the Utah State Highway Patrol seated in his patrol car in front of his house in suburban Granger at approximately 2:30 that Saturday morning. Down the street and right past Hayward crawled a VW Bug, its headlights off, with Ted at the wheel. From the license number, Hayward knew the car was not local. He also guessed this stranger might not have a credible explanation for his presence in the patrolman’s neighborhood at such an hour, driving slowly with his lights out.

About 10 minutes later, Hayward again encountered Bundy in the subdivision and this time turned on his red light. Ted bolted, with the cop in pursuit, through a series of red lights and onto a main thoroughfare before he finally pulled into a darkened gas station. Along the way, Hayward noticed bits of debris flying out the windows of the VW. It looked a lot like weed.

Marijuana, however, was the least of Ted’s problems just then.

Patrolman Hayward asked Ted what he was doing in Granger at that hour. Bundy replied that he’d been to see the movie Towering Inferno and then had gotten lost on his drive back to Salt Lake City. Hayward quickly ascertained that Towering Inferno was not playing in the area that night.

Hayward radioed for backup from the Salt Lake County sheriff. Soon a deputy and a sergeant arrived on the scene. As Ted stood by, they searched the interior of the VW and its trunk, discovering a set of handcuffs, an ice pick, a panty-hose mask, a ski mask, some lengths of rope, and pieces of white sheet. The officers also found a 14-inch tire iron.

Bundy was booked and released and his car impounded. Investigator Daryle Ondrak, who had taken custody of the suspicious items in the Volkswagen, told Ted to expect an added charge of possessing burglary tools.

Bundy’s mug shot after his August 1975 arrest. He appears radically different in a lineup two months later.

Bundy’s fingerprint sheet. (Courtesy Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office and King County, WA. archives)

———

The following Tuesday, the 19th, at a weekly meeting of area police detectives, Ondrak told the group how he’d arrested a polite and pleasant law student in his late 20s who drove a Volkswagen. It seemed incongruous, Ondrak explained, that such a person would be carrying around tools of the criminal trade, including a pair of handcuffs.

Sheriff’s Detective Jerry Thompson, Ben Forbes’s partner, who’d investigated the Melissa Smith murder of the previous October and also officer “Roseland’s” December assault of Carol DaRonch, snapped to attention. A well-spoken law student driving a VW who also owned handcuffs? Thompson, who had made zero progress on either the Smith or the DaRonch investigation, was very eager to learn more about Theodore Robert Bundy.

***

In Seattle, the moment he hung up with Lieutenant Forbes, Kevin O’Shaughnessy went in search of our Ted Bundy file, which he couldn’t find. As it happened, Kathy McChesney had taken it to her desk. It was legal-length folder Number 7 from the Top 100 suspect cases that we were then putting through intensive reviews.

O’Shaughnessy told McChesney of Ben Forbes’s telephone call, then the two of them and the rest of the office excitedly awaited my return. I could tell something was up the moment I entered the room. Everyone was in a sunny mood, smiling. Kevin told me about the call from Utah, and Kathy stepped forward to hand me Bundy’s file. I felt a buzz running through the room. After 12 months of horror, anger and worry – the longest year of my life – “Ted” at last had a name.

Letter from Utah’s Ben Forbes to me regarding Bundy’s arrest in 1975 (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

On Thursday, August 21, Ondrak drove out to Bundy’s rooming house and presented Ted with the promised arrest warrant for possession of burglary tools. The investigator then escorted Bundy to the sheriff’s office to be photographed, fingerprinted, booked, and led to a holding cage. After a while, Ted was taken to a small room, where Detective Forbes questioned him about the tools, beginning with the handcuffs.

The suspect said he’d found them at the city dump. He explained that once in Seattle he had grappled with a bicycle thief until the police came and thought the cuffs would be handy if such a situation arose again. It was an absurd story, guaranteed to sharpen the detective’s suspicions.

Ted said the panty-hose mask was an idea he’d learned about in a film about mountain climbers. As added protection against the bitter cold at altitude, he explained to Forbes, climbers tuck panty-hose masks under their regular nylon ones. Bundy said he was a skier, so he thought he’d try the same thing on the slopes.

The ropes and lengths of sheet were for tying the oars of his rubber raft. The ice pick, he asserted, required no explanation. It was a common household utensil with many uses.

As the interview concluded, Forbes told Ted he was a suspect in a kidnap and attempted murder case but did not mention Carol DaRonch. Bundy signed a form consenting to have his apartment searched, then was accompanied in handcuffs to a squad car for the ride back to his rooming house. There, as Ted looked on, Thompson spied a couple of pairs of patent leather shoes in the closet. He also found and seized – with Ted’s consent — a brochure from a recreation center in Bountiful, where Debra Kent had vanished; a Colorado Ski Country Guide with an X inked next to the listing for the Wildwood Inn; a Colorado road map; a telephone bill; and a Chevron credit card bill.

Thompson asked Bundy if he’d ever been to Colorado. Ted said no.

“Jerry,” Ted taunted him, “you do a pretty good job.”

“I think I do a damn good job,” the detective replied.

“Now you’ve got a straw,” Bundy continued. “You’re trying to fill up a broom. Keep going and one of these days you might make it.”

You are grasping at straws

Bundy would later tell his appeals lawyer, Polly Nelson, that he’d stashed a shoebox full of his victims’ photos in the building’s utility area. It was a “small miracle,” as Nelson puts it in her book, Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer, that Thompson didn’t find the pictures. “He [Bundy] retrieved the shoebox of photos he’d hidden there,” she reports, “and destroyed the most graphic and conclusive evidence.”

***

Thompson showed Carol DaRonch a picture of Ted’s car. She said it certainly could be “Roseland’s” vehicle, but she couldn’t say for certain. DaRonch also looked at a 28-picture photo lineup that included Bundy’s arrest photo. She hesitated over it, saying it looked “something like” her attacker, but again she was not certain.

Then the investigators turned up a Utah driver’s license photo of Ted taken in December, 1975, very near the time of DaRonch’s encounter with “Roseland.” This time, though not certain, she said that Ted looked “a lot like” her abductor.

October 1, Jerry Thompson visited Bundy at his rooming house with a subpoena to appear in a lineup the next day. Once the officer was out the door, Ted immediately had his bushy, medium-length hair cut. Next morning it would be neatly combed and parted on the opposite side.

Bundy’s rooming house in Salt Lake City. He lived in the room in the back with the fire escape. (Courtesy MT7 Productions)

———

Thompson was stunned at Bundy’s new look and immediately dubious about the lineup.

Yet twenty minutes later, as Ted waited nervously in the booking area, his lawyer, John O’Connell, walked up looking grave. “Well, Ted,” he said, “this looks like the way it is. You’ve been identified.”The charge was aggravated kidnap. Bail was set at $100,000.

Bundy’s October mug shot.

———

The Utah police line-up in which Carol DaRonch identified Bundy (second from right) as her abductor and assailant, despite Jerry Thompson’s concerns that she wouldn’t recognize Bundy’s different appearance. (From the Salt Lake City Police Department and King County, WA. archives)

***

Since Ted’s arrest in August, all of our efforts in the northwest were focused on connecting Bundy to the “Ted” murders — or disconnecting him from them. In either instance, proving or disproving his responsibility for any of the crimes meant proving or disproving it for all of them, a high-stakes game. More simply, if Ted had an alibi for the deaths of Lynda Ann Healy, or Susan Rancourt, or Kathy Parks, or Brenda Ball, or Denise Naslund, or Janice Ott, or the disappearances and presumed homicides of Donna Gail Manson or Georgann Hawkins, we had no case at all against him.

What we turned up was sometimes startling — Bundy, for instance, once dated Herb Swindler’s daughter — and often persuasive of his guilt. When, for example, we finally loaded all our data into the mainframe, we asked how many of the 3,500 suspects popped up at two hits, the answer was 1,807. When we raised the bar to three hits, 622 of the suspects were still “Ted” candidates. At four or more hits, however, the pool shrank dramatically to 25, including Theodore Robert Bundy. He had been reported three times as a suspect, twice by Liz and once by a professor at the University of Washington. He was a registered owner of a Volkswagen. He had registered for three of Lynda Healy’s psychology classes. And an anonymous caller reported seeing Ted driving his VW near the site where two of the victims disappeared.

Twenty-four of the 25 Teds in the select circle had iron alibis. Bundy did not. As far as the King County computer was concerned, Ted was “Ted.” I would have liked to have seen that evidence presented to a jury.

We pulled his credit card, checking account, telephone, school and employment records for the years 1972 forward, permitting us to plot thousands of data points on our timeline. We could account for vast stretches of his time. For example, a review of his gas-card purchases showed that not only had Ted practically driven the wheels off his VW but that he compulsively kept his tank as full as possible, purchasing as little as $1.88 at one gas stop. His gas purchases also tended to spike just before and during each of the women’s disappearances.

Bundy’s checking account statement from the week before his 1975 arrest.

———

Law school records. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel, and from the notes of Stephen G. Michaud)

———

As I’ve noted, we knew that he took three classes with Lynda Healy. We discovered from his and her checkbook records that they shopped at the same Safeway in the University District. Moreover, both Ted and Lynda cashed a check at that Safeway the day before she vanished. The same store clerk had initialed both checks, and she had run them through her machine within minutes of each other.

Later in the investigation, Michaud and Aynesworth shared with us the dates that Bundy attended law school; they had access to his notes.

***

Out of an abundance of caution — and to forestall any future defense nonsense, no matter how unlikely — we checked nationwide to see if there were any other Theodore Robert Bundys out there. We found one, in Arizona. He was a few years younger than Ted, didn’t look a thing like him and could not have been involved in any of the crimes.

We also interviewed everyone we could think of, including his family and friends — especially Liz Kendall — business and political contacts, his teachers and professors. One psychology professor told us that in the spring of 1973 she and two colleagues had formed a board to recommend candidates for director of the Seattle Crime Commission, now defunct.

Her choice was Ted, although his chances were hurt by the disclosure that at Harborview Bundy apparently had stolen psychiatric records for patients of Dr. Jim McDermott. He seems to have been politically motivated; McDermott had been a Democratic candidate for governor. The doctor today is a multi-term U.S. Congressman from Seattle.

Captain Mackie and I interviewed Louise and Johnnie Bundy at their house in north Tacoma one evening in October. They were in a state of shock and disbelief — I can’t remember Johnnie saying a word — and had no insights they were willing to share about the very serious charges Ted was facing.

Louise did clear up one minor mystery: Why hadn’t Ted been drafted when he dropped out of the University of Washington in late 1968? The Selective Service System did cancel his student deferment, she told us, and reclassified him One-A. But before he received his greetings from Uncle Sam, Ted slipped on some ice and broke his leg. He was in a cast and on crutches for a while, Louise remembered. By the time he was healed, she explained, the draft lottery was in effect. He drew a high number and was never called, thereby avoiding the free trip to Vietnam that I and millions of others took.

It’s tempting to ponder a world where instead of taking young women’s lives Bundy had lost his own in battle. He would be remembered not as a monster but as a fallen hero.

I telephoned Ted’s boyhood friend, Terry Storwick, in Los Angeles, where Storwick was then working for the Veterans’ Administration. He and Ted had known one another in Tacoma from grade school through high school and had kept in touch ever since. Storwick lived in Ellensburg in 1974 and remembered over the phone that Ted visited him there that spring, sometime before his birthday on May 2. He couldn’t recollect much about the visit from Bundy, other than it was brief. We also learned from Terry that he was a member of a morning jogging class that included Susan Rancourt.

Ted’s cousin, John Cowell, was about his age and had known Bundy since he moved to Tacoma with Louise. Mother and child lived with the Cowells for a time. John also had taken a room at Ted’s University District boardinghouse in Seattle.

“John’s impression of Ted was totally positive,” I wrote in my investigative notes. “John does volunteer work with delinquent children, and he does not recall any of the typical signs in Ted’s childhood that would hint at deviant behavior. He described Ted as intelligent, high integrity, very busy, with a great deal of interaction with quite a few people.”

Cowell, under subpoena, drove me up into the Cascade foothills in the general region of Taylor Mountain with me. He reluctantly showed me the areas where he and Ted had hiked together in 1972 and 1973. “John,” I noted, “was also wary of incriminating Ted by showing the hiking routes.”

According to my final entry on Cowell, “Ted’s charges in Utah were discussed and John said the evidence appears strong against Ted; it is hard for John to believe Ted involved in such activity.”

Lynda Healy’s onetime roommate Kathy Henderson told me that she had first met Lynda in 1972 at the University of Washington through Karen Covach, a mutual friend. In the summer of 1972, the three of them rented a house together on Ravenna Boulevard in Seattle. John Cowell and his sister, Edna, a girlhood friend of Covach, visited the Ravenna house that summer.

That autumn, Kathy and Karen rented a house on 47th Street in the University District. Healy lived not far away with some other UW coeds at 5517 12th Avenue NE. Henderson said that according to what Covach once told her, Ted had visited their 47th Street house at some point. There were no further details.

I visited Henderson and Covach at their 47th Street residence soon after my telephone interview with Terry Storwick. They told me that at approximately five o’clock on the morning of December 31, 1972, someone who was never identified broke out a window pane in their door and apparently let himself in. They knew nothing more of the incident.

The next day I reached Edna Cowell by telephone in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where she worked for East Point Seafood. She was very cooperative.

Edna told me that she and Ted were quite close and that they’d seen one another three or four times in the first half of 1974. Ted had visited Edna at her residence on 43rd Street in the University District. She said that she had met Lynda Healy back in 1972 when visiting the house on Ravenna Boulevard.

To her knowledge, Ted did not know Healy, but they had discussed her disappearance. According to my notes, “She does not remember particulars of the conversation, other than it was a terrible thing.”

Like her brother, John, Edna could recall nothing from Ted’s past that suggested he was capable of the abducting and brutally murdering young women.

***

The day after Bundy’s arrest in Utah, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put the news on the front page under the headline, “Ex-Evans Campaign Aide Held in Kidnap.” From then on there was a constant media swarm around the story. After he made bail, as we expected, and then returned to Seattle in advance of his February, 1976, trial in the DaRonch case, there was no choice but to surveil him as closely as possible — we certainly couldn’t permit another murder to occur — and that led to some street confrontations that Bundy assiduously milked for their drama.

We did not, however, publicly identify him as a suspect in any of the “Ted” cases, no matter how hard the Seattle TV, radio, and newspapers pressed us to do so. Captain Mackie and the bosses made the intelligent decision not to alarm or antagonize our suspect, which we reasoned might only make him more guarded and alert. Better he assume that we were no threat to him. Maybe he’d make a mistake.

As far as we know he didn’t, and as Christmas, 1975, approached and Ted’s trial loomed, it was frustrating to have spent so much time collecting so much information so highly suggestive of his guilt, only to realize, bitterly, that we still could not take him to court with any concrete hope of a conviction.

We met in Salt Lake City with the Utah and Colorado investigators, plus David Yocum, the Salt Lake County prosecutor preparing to bring Ted to trial soon after the turn of the year. At the meeting, Yocum made it clear that if anyone had a murder case against Bundy ready to go, he would willingly defer. None of us did.

One afternoon shortly thereafter in Seattle, as Roger Dunn and I in separate cars tailed Ted around the city, we discussed by radio the wisdom of directly confronting him. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so when Bundy pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where he was then staying with friends, we did, too.

Roger followed Ted up the stairs to the door of the friends’ apartment. I was a few steps behind.

“I can’t talk to you guys right now,” Bundy said, almost apologetically.

“We do want to talk to you someday about our cases,” Dunn replied.

“Yes,” Ted said, “but now is not the time.”

PART TWO: THE CONFRONTATION

Chapter Six

The Rise of Riverman

In February of 1978, when Norm Chapman allowed his prisoner to use the office telephone, the Pensacola police detective specified that his department wouldn’t cover long-distance charges. So at about eight o’clock on Thursday night, the 18th, Bundy placed a collect call to Liz Kendall in Seattle and spoke with her for about an hour.

I was aware that he was being interrogated in Florida, but we knew nothing of the content of those discussions. What was more, with everything that was going on there, and so many people involved, I had the sense I might never get to talk to him about what I wanted to talk to him about.

I called Liz Kendall to see what she knew. I still suspected that she was aware of more about Bundy’s escapes than she admitted — time would prove that she probably was not — and I repeated my threat to jail her if I found out she’d been helping him. Liz took her jeopardy seriously. She said in fact she had heard from Ted, at about five on Thursday evening. Liz agreed to come down to our offices for a tape-recorded interview with me and Nick Mackie, who by this time had been promoted to major.

“My daughter accepted the charges,” she said. “I told him that he shouldn’t be calling me, that my phone had a tap on it, and he said he was in custody. I asked him ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘Florida.’ And later in the conversation . . . he repeated over and over again that this was really going to be bad when it broke, that it wasn’t going to break until tomorrow morning in the press, but it was going to be really ugly. I asked him if he was referring to the murder of some sorority girls in Florida, and he said he wouldn’t talk about it.”

Bundy hung up to call his mother and later tried to call back. This time Liz refused the charges and then took the phone off the hook, she said. But Ted kept trying. At 2 a.m. on Saturday, the 18th, Liz at last relented and accepted another call from her former fiancé in Florida. “He told me that he was sick,” she said, “and that he was consumed by something that he didn’t understand, and that, ah, he just couldn’t contain it.”

“Did he mention why he couldn’t contain it?” I asked.

“Well,” she replied, “he said that he tried. He said that it took so much of his time, and that’s why he wasn’t doing well in law school.”

The lust killer, like other aberrant criminals, may fantasize his crimes for years before actually committing them. The question of when Ted crossed that line has never been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Bundy himself addressed the issue on a number of occasions, beginning with his singular moment in the interview room with Don Patchen.

On the telephone, however, Ted seemed to be telling a different story. “I asked him if I had somehow played a part in what happened,” she told us. “He said no, that for years before he even met me he’d been fighting the same sickness and that when it broke we just happened to be together.”

If “when it broke” meant the start of his killing career, then Ted would have had to average 20 murders a year or more to reach 100 victims, an extraordinary pace to sustain.

“I don’t have a split personality, and I don’t have blackouts,” he added. “I remember everything I’ve done.”

I wanted more details. Liz replied that she asked again about the Florida murders and that Ted would not respond. “He said,” she told us, “that he felt he had a disease like alcoholism, or something like alcoholics that couldn’t take another drink. He told me that it was just something that he couldn’t be around, and he knew it now. And I asked what that was and he said, ‘Don’t make me say it.”

As Ted would later explain to me, an aberrant killer hides his “terrible secrets” at all costs, and the further those memories stretch into the past, the more inflexible, and impenetrable, the defenses against self-incrimination become. “Even when the day comes for him to talk about it,” Bundy said, “it becomes very difficult. Not because he doesn’t want to talk about it, but he really can’t open up.”

***

In early April, Lake City schoolgirl Kim Leach’s body was recovered from beneath the remote hog shed where Bundy had dumped her back on February 9. Capital indictments in both the Leach and Chi Omega cases were handed up in July. For a time, Bundy proceeded pro se – acting as his own attorney. Not until early 1979 did Mike Minerva, the Leon County public defender, and his team take over the thankless task of defending Ted in the first scheduled trial, the Chi Omega case.

Prosecutor Larry Simpson and his assistant, Mike McKeever, flew to Seattle, where we thoroughly briefed them on our cases and shared our insights into Bundy. For a time, Simpson and I discussed the possibility of me testifying at the trial, but the idea eventually was dropped.

His case against Bundy — built around the expert testimony of forensic odontologists who would testify that in their opinion Ted had left the bite mark in Lisa levy’s buttock — was strong, and Mike Minerva knew it. Moreover, the evidence and testimony Simpson had prepared to re-create the carnage that night at the sorority house was so vividly horrific a guilty verdict practically ensured a death sentence for Ted. The only hope for saving his life was a plea bargain.

In late April, 1979, Simpson, Minerva and state attorney Bob Dekle, who was in charge of the Leach prosecution, all agreed to trade life imprisonment for guilty pleas from Bundy, who would have to make his admission in open court. The victims’ families signed off. However, the deal had to go down soon. The strength of the Chi Omega case against Ted would soon become apparent in pretrial hearings, making it difficult for the state to accept such an agreement with such a notorious defendant who otherwise would surely die for his crimes, a popular solution in Bundy’s case.

The defense team sold the plea bargain to Louise Bundy and Carole Boone, Ted’s emerging champion. Boone had known Ted since the summer of 1974 when they had worked together in Olympia at the department of emergency services. Liz was now out of the picture.

Minerva hoped he’d sold the deal to his client. However, as Bundy later told Michaud, he had been seething ever since the public defender told Ted he believed him guilty. Bundy also felt that his advisory counsel, Millard Farmer, a death-penalty specialist from Atlanta, had tricked him. “Suddenly,” he told Michaud, “it dawned on me that Millard had gotten his foot in the door in some devious way to put me in a position of accepting a plea bargain. I felt like he was conceding that I was guilty.”

Precisely.

That is also what Judges Edward Cowart and Wallace Jopling, scheduled to preside at Ted’s trials, expected to hear at a late-May hearing in Tallahassee. Instead, Bundy walked into a full courtroom that morning and attacked Minerva as incompetent. Louise and Carole Boone looked on in fear. Larry Simpson and Bob Dekle immediately signaled to the defense table that the plea bargain was canceled, and Ted went on to trial.

Ted would go to any length to protect his terrible secrets.

***

Bundy was tried and convicted and sentenced to death in Miami for the Chi Omega cases that summer, then convicted and sentenced to death in Orlando for killing Kim Leach the following February. His frequent courtroom tantrums and the grim evidence of what he’d done to his victims — broadcast nationwide — seared the cases into the public mind. The onetime media darling was now perhaps the most widely loathed and detested individual in the country, the poster boy for criminal depravity.

There was no chance that he’d ever leave the Sunshine State alive and therefore no possibility he’d ever have to answer in court for his depredations all over the West. It was deeply frustrating for me to have worked so hard at bringing him to justice in Washington State, without then seeing justice served. An important part of that regret was the realization that I probably would never get answers to questions I’d been carrying around in my head since “Ted” first invaded my life in the summer of 1974.

***

Serial killers may have been unknown back then — the earliest use of the term in its modern sense that I’ve found was in a ’50s-era textbook — but by the late 1970s they were cropping up like crocuses. Among the more infamous of these offenders, David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam,” was arrested in 1977; John Wayne Gacy, the “Killer Clown,” in 1978; and Kenneth Bianchi, the “Hillside Strangler,” in 1979.

Since 1974, I had read widely and deeply in both the professional and popular literature on what sometimes is called motiveless murder. I had attended seminars and FBI workshops, reached out to officers in other cities where serial killers had struck — including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco — and systematically familiarized myself with their investigations.

Similarly, since in Washington State we had created one of the first serial-killer investigative task forces, and therefore had practical knowledge of what worked and didn’t work, in these team exercises, other jurisdictions also looked to us for help. I found myself in demand as a consultant to other police departments around the country as they grappled with the same grim mysteries that we faced.

For example, in July of 1979, the so-called “Atlanta Child Killer” went to work, murdering 30 or more young black men and boys with impunity over the next two years. Many of the victims’ bodies were recovered from area waterways, particularly the Chattahoochee River. It appeared that the killer was dumping some of the bodies into the water from bridges late at night.

On Wednesday, May 20, 1981, I joined a group of other detectives from around the country who gathered at the Atlanta Hilton to consult on the case. In the course of the meeting, I suggested that the Atlanta police stake out the bridges, placing officers at both ends of the spans, and also in boats under the middle of the lengthier ones. I was delighted to learn that they were beginning to do just that, and it worked!

At 3 a.m. on May 22, the day our panel of serial-killer experts headed home, two two-person teams of police officers and FBI agents were stationed at the James Jackson Parkway Bridge — Interstate 285 — over the Chattahoochee when they heard a loud splash that sounded a lot like a body had been thrown from the bridge into the water.

A white Chevrolet station wagon was stopped, and its driver, Wayne B. Williams, a black amateur radio station operator, well-known among young people in the black community, was questioned for 90 minutes and released. Two days later, the body of 28-year-old Nathanial Cater was pulled out of the Chattahoochee about 200 yards downstream from the bridge. Fibers and dog hairs found with Cater connected him to Williams and ultimately led to the killer’s successful prosecution.

After my interrogation of James Lee Slade, this was my second favorite moment as a detective, ever. Instant gratification.

Late in the 1970s I began to think about teaching as a second, or parallel, career and took a master’s degree in adult education at Seattle University, expecting to go on to a doctorate. I wanted to learn more about adult education, but discovered in the course of my studies that my interests went beyond an education degree. My avocational track was shifting in a new direction. After years of studying everything I could about serial killers, I’d come to understand how little of practical value actually was known about them and how much rank speculation passed for expertise in the field. In time, this realization, combined with the frustrations of the Ted cases, catalyzed in me a determination to establish my own standard of murder scholarship; to master the subject of murder, specifically serial murder, in all its infinite variety. I decided to get a doctorate in homicide.

In 1980, I prevailed on the University of Washington to allow me to design an independent, multidisciplinary course of study leading to a Ph.D. My seven areas of inquiry would be pathology, odontology, psychiatry, psychology, law, sociology, and anthropology. I found willing advisors in each area and then went to work, one subject at a time, to learn what each discipline had to teach me about murder. In all, the process would require 12 years of work.

***

I left the King County sheriff’s department in March of 1982 after eight years there as a detective and accepted the position of lead investigator for the Washington state attorney general’s office, working out of Seattle. The new job promised a lot more responsibility — I was basically the chief detective for the state, and the chance to work a much broader range of cases. But barely had I figured out where the men’s room was before I found myself in the middle of another serial-murder investigation, the so-called Green River Killings.

Western Washington’s Green River, one of the state’s premier steelhead-fishing streams, rises in the Snoqualmie National Forest then flows west and north toward Seattle, where it becomes the Duwamish River before emptying into Puget Sound at Elliot Bay. Along the way, the river passes through Kent, a mid-sized working-class community that lies adjacent to the region’s major commercial airport, Seattle-Tacoma International, or Sea-Tac.

July 15, two boys pedaling their bikes across the 150-foot Peck Bridge over the Green River in Kent – about 20 miles south of downtown Seattle — saw the naked body of a white female caught on a snag in the middle of the stream. She was Wendy Lee Coffield, the earliest known victim of the Green River killer, or Riverman, as Ted liked to call him. Coffield, a 16-year-old prostitute from Tacoma, where she was last seen eight days before, had a pair of blue jeans tied around her neck. Her official cause of death was ligature strangulation.

On August 12, not far south of the Peck Bridge, a second nude female was found dead on a sandbar in the river, exposed by low tide. Her name was Debra Lynn Bonner. She was 23, white, also a hooker from Tacoma, last seen on July 25 afoot on a nearby strip of Pacific Highway South, infamous as a busy prostitute stroll that runs south from 140th Street to 216th Street. She, too, had been strangled with an article of clothing that her killer left knotted around her neck. Because Bonner’s body lay just outside the Kent city limit, the responding officer was Detective Dave Reichert from the sheriff’s office, my old football teammate from our rookie days together. Reichert, coincidentally, grew up in Kent and knew the river well.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, our area’s experience with Bundy, the discovery of two recently murdered prostitutes, nude, a few feet from one another in a local river, did not ignite the widespread suspicion among the cops that another serial killer had set up shop. That certainly was my fear, but few of my peers shared it. I thought they had their heads in the sand.

Three days later, my apprehensions were borne out when three more nude females were found murdered in, and beside, the river, about a half mile from where Coffield and Bonner were found. The two in the water had been weighted to the bottom by heavy stones. The first, Marcia Faye “Tiny” Chapman, 31, an African-American mother of three, had been reported missing by her mother two weeks earlier, near where she lived on Pacific Highway South. Chapman supported her kids by hooking.

The second victim was Cynthia Hinds, 17, also black, last reported seen on August 11, trolling for johns on the strip, about 12 blocks from where Chapman vanished.

Dave Reichert was the detective in charge of these new cases as well. As he oversaw a team of deputies at the scene, Dave hauled around a large-format camera like the ones we used to document our discoveries at Issaquah and Taylor Mountain, photographing the bodies in situ, and also any evidence that turned up.

The river’s edge was steep and dense with thorny blackberry canes more than five feet high, and the going was slow. Dave wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just evidence, when he almost stumbled over yet a third dead female, once again nude.

“I’ve got another one!” Reichert shouted.

This victim was Opal Charmaine Mills, 16, also black. Mills had been cited for soliciting sex. Her last known location was a phone booth on the strip. She was calling home, collect.

It required eight days to identify Chapman, Hinds, and Mills, a lifetime in a homicide investigation. Unlike Coffield and Bonner, none of the three was found with a ligature around her neck, but Dr. Donald Reay, the King County medical examiner, determined that all three died of asphyxiation.

The sheriff responded to the five discoveries by assigning 25 detectives to what already was being called the Green River Killings. In late September, a sixth victim was added to the list. She was 16-year-old Gisele Ann Lovvorn, a white girl, last reported seen on July 17, two days after Wendy Coffield’s body was found. Lovvorn worked the strip, as had the others. She was found nude, dead from ligature strangulation, in a deserted subdivision just south of Sea-Tac, about seven miles from the killer’s original river dump sites in Kent.

Then the reports of slain prostitutes tapered off. The 25-detective task force was gradually pared back to just five investigators. By the beginning of 1983, a vain hope was spreading among the sheriff’s top brass that the previous summer’s spate of hooker homicides was an aberration. Even if there was one guy out there murdering prostitutes, it seemed to some in the department as if he might have moved on, becoming someone else’s headache.

That’s when I received a visit from a distressed and nearly distraught Dave Reichert. The Green River Killings had begun to consume him, creating in Dave a single-minded fixation I remembered well from 1974, when “Ted” was a constant taunting presence in my head. The complete lack of apparent progress in the investigation was sapping Reichert’s self-confidence, stirring fundamental doubts about his competence as a cop.

On top of that, Dave confirmed what I had been hearing, that the sheriff might disband the detective task force altogether, leaving the six cases in Reichert’s lap. I didn’t share the general optimism that the killer had stopped or departed. Something told me that he simply had started doing a better job of disposing of his dead victims and that sooner or later this case would forcefully recapture everyone’s attention. I also was familiar enough with serial-murder investigations to know that one detective working on his own would be no match for such a killer. Dumping the Green River cases on Dave Reichert, in my view, would be as short-sighted as it was unfair.

I hit on a possible solution. As an employee of the attorney general I could have no active role in the sheriff’s investigation, but I could bring my experience to bear as an outside consultant, if asked. I told Dave that if I was approached by the sheriff’s office to review and analyze their cases, and possibly offer some suggestions, I might be able to redirect their thinking.

Less than an hour after he left my office, I received a telephone call from Major Richard Kraske, who’d been my lieutenant back in the “Ted” days. Dick already had come to me on a couple occasions to confer on the Green River investigations. Now he asked if I would take a more systematic look at what they were doing. Reichert had played it just right. I said sure and soon was at work on a 33-page report I’d deliver that May.

I found much about the investigation that needed correction. There was the familiar data overload; thousands and thousands of unsorted details had been collected. Unresolved discrepancies littered the witness statements, making it difficult to assemble reliable victim narratives. There was no system for prioritizing suspects.

My principal finding, which surely dismayed Kraske, was that the investigation was undermanned and not nearly aggressive enough in its outlook. I was not convinced that Wendy Coffield was the first victim, so my specific suggestions included a detailed review of all known prostitute murders and cases of female strangulation in western states for the past five years.

It appeared from the reports that the investigation also had overlooked the possibility that our killer had previously been active in the area. I suggested they conduct retrospective research on similar deaths predating Coffield’s to see if any individuals of interest popped up. In conjunction with that effort, I advised a review of any possible source of information, from suspicious-circumstance reports to game wardens’ written observations that might indicate suspect behavior.

I said the killer, like Ted, probably would not confine himself to King County, so they should reach out to other jurisdictions, share information with them, and try to keep communication flowing both ways. Similarly, I wrote that uniformed patrol officers needed to be kept in the loop. In order to make a useful contribution, these men and women needed to know what direction the investigation was taking. I was reminded that, as in the Bundy case, it is often a street cop who collars the serial killer in the course of discharging his or her regular duties. They need to be alert to what’s going on.

Besides reviewing documents at my desk, I also needed to get out into the field, particularly to visit the dump sites for whatever insights I might gather from them. When Dave brought me to the stretch of river where Chapman, Hinds and Mills were found, I was immediately struck by the privacy and seclusion of the area, only a short drive from the heavily traveled strip where the killer apparently had picked up all three of the women.

In fact, the site offered him many of the same advantages I’d noted that “Ted” enjoyed years before at the Issaquah dump site. There was even a pull-off near the river, largely obscured by tall weeds in the summertime, where he could do what he desired in privacy, while monitoring the road for the sound of oncoming vehicles or, at night, the sweep of approaching headlights through the grass. It must have galled him to have this obviously well-scouted hideaway discovered so soon after he began putting it to use.

***

As the sheriff’s office considered whether to act on my various proposals, I took part in the early planning of the first national response to serial killing, a computerized database and tracking network that eventually would be known as VICAP, for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. My involvement began the previous December with a telephone call from Pierce Brooks, a detective legend at the Los Angeles Police Department who also had been a member of the consulting team in Atlanta. Pierce was probably the most skilled and respected police detective in the country. When he had something to say, you listened.

Brooks began his career in the late 1940s, still the Stone Age of information technology for law enforcement. As he explained to me, if he wanted to research a suspect’s history to see if similar crimes had been committed in LA or elsewhere, he was forced to plow through newspaper archives, page by page, an inefficient, unreliable and time-consuming process that nonetheless could yield vital information.

I could empathize. Roger Dunn and I used the police teletype and did a lot of telephoning and letter writing, but save for what Roger learned from fellow detectives at the Boise conference in May of 1975, we were largely unaware of the bludgeon and strangulation murders, so similar to ours, that began in Utah and Colorado soon after our killings stopped.

Pierce sketched out his idea for a national resource center, built from detailed police detectives’ reports of apparently motiveless or otherwise baffling cases of multiple homicides and organized to isolate and highlight every conceivable facet of these crimes. I could see that over time, as more and more reports from various local law enforcement agencies were folded into the database, it could become a formidable investigative tool.

A detective in Seattle, for example, might want to know about stabbing murders of young gay hustlers whose bodies turned up in local waterways. An analyst at the center would consult the system to see if any similar cases had been reported or, perhaps, if there was some specific detail common to a number of reported hustler murders. If the computer revealed matches, then all the agencies in question would be made aware of the similarities. They could then consider together the possibility they were all pursuing the same offender and determine how to leverage their investigations in order to abbreviate his career and save lives.

I thought this was a great idea and told Brooks he had my support. Then he got to the real point of his call. Did I think such a network would have led to an earlier apprehension of Bundy? Obviously, Pierce was looking for a selling point when he took his proposed project before potential funding agencies and the politicians whose blessings would be critically important to its success. Everyone knew who Ted Bundy was.

I was happy to answer yes. If the center Pierce envisioned had alerted us at once about the Melissa Smith and Laura Aime homicides in the autumn of 1974, I said, we could have easily consulted our “Ted” Top 100 Suspects file to see which of them had left town for Utah. Bundy’s name would have popped up nearly at once. We would have isolated him that autumn, instead of the succeeding August, and yes, lives would have been saved.

Brooks brought me into his campaign as a consultant, and I attended two organizational meetings in 1983 before it became apparent that the FBI intended to co-opt Pierce’s project. The Bureau has extraordinary resources, and it was in a position to make Pierce’s dream come true. But every police detective knows the FBI also is resented, indeed hated, among many local police agencies that because of past, or perceived, slights will have nothing to do with the Bureau. Since I believed the national center needed the full, enthusiastic cooperation of local law enforcement everywhere in order to succeed, operating it under FBI auspices seemed a poor plan.

The project moved ahead without me and a group of like-minded police detectives. VICAP, located at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, went live in June of 1985. Pierce Brooks, its first program manager, died in 1998.

***

By late 1983, the Green River Killer’s victim list was up to 13, but the suspicion was growing within the sheriff’s office that he was good for perhaps 34 more dead prostitutes. The ill-advisedness of leaving Dave Reichert to manage the murder investigation alone by now was evident to all.

That autumn, the Seattle newspapers reported the growing body count with alarm and demanded in their editorial pages that the investigative effort be intensified. The new sheriff, Vern Thomas, whose administrative competence I admired, did just that at the turn of the year. Vern announced a new Green River Murders Task Force, under the direction of Captain Frank Adamson, with a staff of 50, including 25 detectives, among them Reichert. Dave was grateful the cavalry had ridden to his rescue but disappointed not to be named their leader.

Sheriff Thomas asked me to serve as a full-time consultant to the task force, with the particular responsibility to act as an advisor to Captain Adamson, who had no background in detective work but who had supervised internal investigations in the past. One of my specific assignments from Adamson was to brief the media on the complexities and difficulties of a serial-murder investigation, helping them to appreciate – perhaps – the enormity of this undertaking.

Six bodies were recovered in 1982, seven more in 1983 at wooded dump sites that dotted the region around Sea-Tac, as well as both sides of Pacific Highway South. The killer did not return to his dump site on the river in Kent to deposit any more victims. In fact, he stayed away from any part of the Green River with his dead victims ever since.

Then came a rush of discoveries, mostly bones, in early 1984. From the middle of March to the end of May 10 more dead prostitutes were found in his various dump sites around the area.

The story was now attracting media attention from all over the world, as an international audience apparently wanted to watch us tramping around crime scene after crime scene on their evenings news. It seemed as if everyone had taken an interest in our problem, including a uniquely knowledgeable individual then receiving his mail at Box 747 in Starke, Florida.

Bundy's Florida Prison mug shot, Convicted serial killer Theodore image courtesy of AP Images.

Chapter Seven

‘I am playing no games with you’

“Dear Task Force Members,” Bundy began his first letter. It was a six-pager, dated October 2, 1984. “I have some information which I think could prove useful in apprehending the person or persons responsible for what are referred to as the Green River murders. Before I provide such information, however, I need your assurances that this letter, as well as any subsequent communications we may have, will be held in the strictest of confidence. I do not want anyone outside your Task Force, especially members of the news media, to become aware of my offer to help and the nature of the help, should you accept it.”

There was no one on earth I less expected to hear from than Ted Bundy, nor anyone whose word I trusted less. I laughed as I read, “My offer of assistance is made sincerely and honestly.” He was up to something, but what?

Ted went on to explain in his soon-to-be-familiar looping scrawl that he was now receiving the Tacoma News Tribune by mail and that a recent article in the paper describing the discovery of a young woman’s body in Pierce County “was far more detailed and evocative” than anything he’d read before about the Green River cases. “It was without any conscious effort on my part,” he continued, “that the TNT’s accounts… aroused some vivid impressions about the behavior of the person or persons responsible for this series of murders.…”

It wasn’t difficult to imagine the sort of arousal Ted was describing to us.

However, lest we hope — as we immediately did — that this might finally be an opening to discuss Ted’s own murder career in the northwest, Bundy said he was willing to talk face-to-face with an investigator “but only about the Green River matter.” (The underlining was his.) “I am playing no games with you. We will handle this thing in a straightforward manner or we don’t handle it at all.”

Of course he was playing games with us. But I was curious to learn what these games might be. As it turned out, the letter was Ted’s opening gambit in an elaborate scheme to save – or at least prolong – his life, and we, the task force, were to be his pawns.

The letter arrived from Florida’s Death Row via Tom Swayze, a Republican superior court judge in Tacoma whom Ted knew from his campaigning days. A Seattle PD detective, Ed Striedinger, was dispatched to retrieve it from Swayze, which meant that we didn’t see it right away.

Bundy chafed at the delay and scribbled a second note, date October 15. This one he routed through John Henry Browne, a Seattle defense attorney Ted knew from his days as a suspect and defendant. Ted wrote that since he’d so far heard nothing from Judge Swayze or us, he feared his first letter might have gone astray and so would repeat its essential points. “I know your man in a way that facts alone cannot accomplish,” he said, a difficult proposition to deny, but not necessarily one of practical interest to me. “I do not know his face, but I have some pretty good ideas on where you can look to see him for yourselves.”

His tone was urgent; it appeared that in Bundy’s mind much depended on us accepting his offer.

“There are many reasons why I want to see if I can be of some help to you,” he wrote. “I won’t claim some noble, civic-minded motivation. Basically, the case has really begun to intrigue me. But I’m sure it intrigues lots of people. The difference is that I have knowledge and a point of view to add to your case investigation like no one else does.”

Again, we couldn’t quibble with that, but so what?

Captain Adamson doubted that Ted had anything of much value to tell us about the Green River cases, and I didn’t disagree. But he okayed the trip, to be taken in conjunction with a previously scheduled official visit to Atlanta, largely in the hope, which I shared, that despite Bundy’s stern warnings we might finally get to talk about his own string of murders.

It was decided that Dave Reichert, who knew the details of the Green River cases, would accompany me to the prison.

We once again contacted Dr. John Liebert, this time for tactical advice in managing the interview with Bundy. The psychiatrist had a couple of suggestions. To help establish an empathetic connection, Liebert said to repeat some of Ted’s phrases back to him. The repetition of his own words would act almost like a cue to reassure Bundy and keep him on track.

Liebert also shared a technique for “shaping” Ted’s attention. If he started wandering off into topics of no interest, I was to look away and yawn. Bundy would soon pick up that if he wanted my sympathetic attention and interest, he better stay focused on subjects that interested Dave and me.

Maintaining control of eye contact was important, too, said Liebert. He told me to keep Ted in a steady gaze. If he averted his eyes, I was to continue looking straight at him, a signal that I was in charge and there would be no funny business.

“Dear Ted,” I wrote him on October 16, “This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter…Your request that any communications we may have be kept in ‘strictest of confidence’ is absolutely honored.”

I informed him that a trip to Florida in November was possible and concluded, “I respect your statement of ‘playing no games,’ and, frankly, playing games with you is presumptuous on my part and a waste of my time. I am interested in what is useful in resolving the Green River killings and what your contribution is. We will communicate at your request only about the Green River murders and “nothing else.”

Bundy couldn’t wait to get started. Via the FBI office in Jacksonville, Florida, he asked by letter that we provide a variety of study materials for him, from a detailed list of the known victims to date to a collection of reliable press accounts, a regional map, and photos of the killer’s dump sites.

In a third letter to me, dated October 27, he demonstrated across 22 pages a firm grasp of the investigation’s key challenges. “As I’m sure you know,” he wrote, “the Green River murders are hard to investigate because 1, their disappearances are usually not reported ’til days or weeks after they actually disappeared, 2, their movements are often hard to trace, 3, a comprehensive list of their friends and associates is difficult to complete, and 4, in the beginning at least neither the news media nor the police paid the disappearances much attention. All of these conditions are ideal for the Riverman who probably wants attention as much as he wants to get caught, which is not at all.

“Also working in the Riverman’s favor, and one of the reasons he continues to work in the face of an intense investigation and intense publicity is that his victim class continues to provide him with ample candidates. (How many times have you seen a young girl hitch hiking shortly after the well-publicized discovery of another victim?) His victim class is vulnerable because it seems to be comprised of young women who are, in some respects, bolder, harder to intimidate and control, more mobile than most people, as well as being inclined to adopt the it-can’t-happen-to-me attitude people have about crime.”

He elaborated on the next page. “The Riverman,” Bundy wrote, “could theoretically be using many different ways to approach and abduct his victims, and in fact probably has several he uses. You may very well be surprised by the simplicity of his technique, the kind of thing where you’ll say, ‘Why didn’t we think of that before?’ For example, he could be playing the role of cop.…He could be stalking and physically carrying off his victims. He could be doing lots of things.

“However, my initial sense of what is going on is this: The victims, like the public, are looking for the stereotypical Henry Lucas type, the grizzled, older, drifter type with the sunken eyeballs and the lewd demeanor. These girls took steps to avoid such people and any other males they consider ‘strange.’ And for a matter of weeks or months, they developed a confidence they had been ‘successful’ in coming up with defenses adequate to the threat of the Riverman, until they met the Riverman, who fit none of their preconceptions.”

***

It was not in anyone’s interest that our presence or purpose in rural northern Florida be publicly known. To help ensure our anonymity, we went so far as to register both our rooms under Dave’s name at the sumptuous Starke Econo Lodge.

Yet I hadn’t considered Dave’s devotion to physical fitness. He brought his free weights with him to Florida and a ghetto blaster to play his aerobic workout tape as he exercised. It wasn’t long before Reichert was set up on the motel lawn, putting his well-developed physique through a rigorous routine as the motel’s housekeeping staff and others looked on appreciatively. Dave gave the ladies quite a show.

Such an exhibition, they apparently believed, deserved recognition. That night when we returned to the Econo Lodge after dinner, WELCOME DAVE REICHERT shone down on us from the motel’s outdoor reader board.

The nearby prison on State Road 16 rises behind a double chain-link fence, topped with razor wire, in the middle of a broad plain. When we arrived at about three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, November 17, inmate labor gangs were visible at work in the distance.

Assistant Warden Pete Turner took us to a small interview room furnished with a table and three metal chairs. One wall was fitted with a barred window, so that a guard could keep watch on the doings within. After one look at Bundy, however, it was clear that should Ted get rambunctious, Dave and I wouldn’t require much assistance in subduing him. Standing there in his chains and jumpsuit, bent slightly at the waist, he was a ghost of the charismatic, square-shouldered, and supremely self-confident defendant Americans knew from his televised trials in Florida. Bundy was shrunken — skinny, frail-looking and bad smelling — in a word, pathetic. He was about to turn 38 but could have passed for a man of 50 or more.

“Hello, I’m Ted,” he said, shifting his eyes toward the floor as I looked steadily at him. His handshake was limp and warm and wet. I thought the pose was deliberate, that although prison often has a debilitating effect on convicts, Bundy was playing on our sympathies, trying to disarm us with his apparent physical deterioration, just as he’d used slings and crutches to manipulate his victims. I knew that four months earlier he’d been caught in an escape plot that would have required physical and mental daring. Somewhere beneath that wasted exterior lurked all of Ted’s degenerate cunning and nerve.

We started with the fact of the 10 dead prostitutes found in quick succession the previous spring and then pointed out to Bundy that only one more confirmed victim had been added to our list since. Ted also noted from our victim list that there’d been an earlier lull in body discoveries from October of 1983 until the following March.

“Crime scenes,” he said, “are a favorite topic of mine.” Over the next two days he’d make that personal preference manifestly evident.

“It’s kind of fascinating watching some of this unfold,” he went on. “I mean, obviously they’re closely related. What confounds me, though, is the [rate of body discoveries] falls off like it did. I’m not saying he’s stopped. But he’s gotten a lot smarter somehow. Something has changed around October of ’83.”

“Do you think it’s possible this guy could stop?” Dave asked.

“No,” Bundy replied without hesitation. “Not unless he was born again and got filled with the Holy Spirit in a very real way. He’s either moved or dead or he’s doing something very different.

“My feeling is that if he’s changed his victim class just to deal with runaways and delinquents [and] was more careful in the way that he disposed of their bodies, there’s no question that this will explain the apparent drop-off.”

I wasn’t interested in this speculative flight, so as Dr. Liebert had suggested, I looked away and yawned.

Ted reacted at once. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I’m boring you-”

“You’re not,” I replied with a level gaze. Bundy averted his own once more.

He noticed how the killer was ranging further away from the Kent area to dump his victims. One was found in dense woodland off Interstate 90, far east of Seattle. Three were discovered dumped beyond Enumclaw, the high-country community in eastern King County where I’d scored my great triumph in the Slade case.

“You found three bodies in October of ’83,” Bundy remarked, “and that bothered the hell out of him, I’m sure.” Pointing at the Kent area on the map we’d provided, he said, “I’m sure he was starting to get a little bit edgy about leaving any more bodies around in here. It’s no accident that your next bodies start to turn up near Enumclaw.

“He’s trying something different. He moved up east of Enumclaw and he’s going deeper into the mountains. I’ll bet you find four or five more up there. God forbid someday he finds a secluded well somewhere that no one can stumble across and starts dumping them all down the well, or some other effective way, or burying them in the basement like the gentleman Gacy.”

Ted typically referred to other serial killers as gentlemen, as if they all belonged to some exclusive club.

I mentioned the first five victims to be discovered and posed a question. “What would you say,” I asked, “if one of the victims wasn’t in the river? She was actually on the bank?”

“Somebody may have surprised him,” Ted replied.

This was our speculation, too.

“I can’t imagine why he didn’t throw her all the way in, because this guy obviously thought that dumping bodies in the river was a good way of getting rid of bodies.” He went on: “A body on the riverbank can also say he wanted to come back and see that victim again. Bizarre, I know, but it could say that.”

This was Ted’s first hint of necrophilia’s central importance to the serial sex killer. I’d hear a lot more from him on this subject.

I asked what he thought about the instances where the killer apparently grabbed two victims on the same day, echoes of Lake Sam.

“It might not be because he wanted to,” Bundy replied, “but because he just got locked into a situation where he was so driven he had to. He saw one and to get one he had to get two and took two. But this seems to confound the general pattern where he goes for one, you know? One person is easier to control than two, unless he has very good technique. No one that I’ve heard of has escaped from this guy, and obviously he has a very good technique once he makes the move.”

“What do you say about his pattern?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t lock yourself into a pattern,” Ted said, “because that limits your options, and you don’t want to limit your options. But as far as his pattern goes, I’m looking here at frequency, how often he does it. He does one a week in July and he does five in August and he settles down to two or three a month until next May where he gets four. That’s pretty damn active. He’s going Sunday through Saturday, generally speaking. And he doesn’t show a preference for weekends, you know. He’s spreading them out. Two and three a month is pretty intense.”

“How long can he keep that up?” Dave asked.

“Until you catch him.”

***

Could press reports about body discoveries affect Riverman’s decision to kill?

Ted didn’t think so. “It’s not inconceivable,” he said. “He might be getting an ego charge out of beating you people, staying ahead of you. But that’s not what’s motivating him.”

“What is?”

That one sent Bundy stuttering, because it invited a response based on his own experience. After hemming and hawing, he managed a few coherent sentences. Buried within them you can find his agenda. “This would be purely speculating,” he said. “There are an infinite number of ways to explain how a man can come to a point where he destroys human life as this person has. I suppose the only way to really know, someday, is to have the man studied.”

For now, explained Bundy, all he knew was that the answer lay in the fusion of sex and violence in the killer’s mind, a fairly self-evident observation. “I don’t know if it’s anything anybody can rationally describe or explain,” he said, “except the fact that sometimes our society promotes that link between sex and violence unknowingly.”

Think of the killer as a victim, too, he was suggesting, then quickly shifted gears, trying to push the conversation toward two stratagems he’d cooked up “that might help you develop some suspects.”

Chapter Eight

A slasher film festival

In 1980, after he was prosecuted for murdering Kim Leach, Bundy spoke at length with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth at the prison for their book, The Only Living Witness. When he refused to substantively discuss his crimes, the authors invited him to do so in the third person, to “speculate” about the killings and the person who committed them. Bundy agreed to do so. Although he never came close to a confession that anyone could take to court, he did speak, obliquely, about himself, revealing, for example, that he’d taken at least one victim home with him. Later, talking to Detective Dennis Couch from Salt Lake City in the first person, he’d confess to taking a number of victims home for private time with them.

Ted seemed to like this third-person device and resorted to it in several subsequent interviews with detectives. But he knew that it wasn’t going to work with Dave and me in 1984. We wouldn’t let him hide behind some alleged fiction. So in order to share with us his frank estimations of the Green River cases — without openly confessing to any homicides of his own — he gave us a song-and-dance about how he’d interviewed other serial killers on Death Row, pulling from them their innermost secrets. Prominent among Bundy’s interviewees was his friend Gerald Stano — “one of the nicest, pleasantest individuals I’ve ever run across” — who talked with Ted about some of the estimated 20 to 40 Florida women Stano murdered. Bundy could now speak with unique authority on serial murder, having heard the straight story from the horses’ mouths, so to speak.

His bullshit bona fides established, Bundy proceeded to tell us how he knew from talks with his Death Row associates that the Green River killer was returning again and often to his dump sites, until they were discovered, to monitor them, to check for possible police activity, and — Ted was squeamish about discussing this — for necrophilic playtime with whatever was left of the dead women.

Ted then presented to us his first creative idea for catching the killer. Reasoning from the certainty that the killer was repeatedly returning to his dump sites, Bundy said, “If you ever find a fresh body, and if it looks like it’s a Green River victim, I’d put that site under surveillance. I wouldn’t move in. I think that that sounds a little bit odd to you, but let me show you why I think surveillance should be done and how it would be done.”

He said that he’d given this notion a substantial amount of thought and had 20 pages of handwritten notes on it. No question, dump sites were Ted’s specialty.

“Assuming some time down the line you find a fresh body,” he elaborated, “somewhat fresh anyway. I’d move in, secure the area, try to keep everything off the radio and set up a surveillance network in that area.

“Now, you might want to move the body under cover of darkness because, let’s face it, if your man comes back to that site, by the time he gets on top of that body, you’re already going to be in on him. So the body doesn’t have to be there.

“I know the police instinct is to move in and scour the site, call everyone in, Explorer Scouts crawling on their hands and knees. This always fascinated me and appalled me, because I said, ‘Jesus Christ! If they’d only waited they’d find somebody. The guy would have come right up to them!’ In my opinion, the best chance you have of catching this guy red-handed is to get a site with a fresh body and stake it out.”

I asked if the killer might return to a site once it was discovered by the police. If so, perhaps we should take license tag numbers of passing vehicles when a dump site was being processed.

“I don’t think he would,” Bundy said. He acknowledged that certain types of criminals might, such as some arsonists who enjoy watching fire departments battling their blazes. But the Green River killer, Ted surmised, “is not going to want to get near you, unless he is a little bit off, and a thrill seeker.”

Was he taking victims home, I wondered.

“My guess,” he replied, “is he doesn’t have a family. Probably your typical serial killer. And he has a lot of time on his hands without worrying about who’s asking where he is. So I say there’s a good possibility that he could well take them home, right? And keep them for a while.”

On the other hand, Ted noted that Riverman’s dump sites were in many instances close to where his victims had disappeared, suggesting to him “that they’re being killed in a few hours, in the car, and dumped.” So although the killer might be taking some of the dead prostitutes home, “it doesn’t look like it to me.”

“You mentioned you had another proactive-type item,” I said.

“Oh, yeah!” he answered brightly. “This is a little bit more creative. Let me get my notes.”

He produced a sheaf of handwritten notes and began his pitch. “I think it’s safe to say that the guy fantasizes a lot,” Ted began. “That is, he finds a way of vicariously experiencing the thing that gets him off, which in this case is killing young women.

“One reason for doing it vicariously is that it’s a lot safer sometimes to read a book or go to a movie, and maybe a lot more convenient than to run out and actually do it. If you follow what I’m saying here, the guy who’s killing these women, it’s like a hobby to him.”

Either Dave or I must have cocked an eyebrow, because Ted paused for a moment, then went on.

“Well,” he said, “it may be more than that. It may be an obsession. But just like anybody who has an obsession, whether it be fishing or bowling or skiing, he has ways he can vicariously satisfy it. Maybe going to peep shows, and maybe reading detective magazines, and, I think, there’s an excellent chance he gets off by going to look at what they call slasher films.

“I know it sounds weird. Years ago, I read a psychiatrist who said, you know, ‘If you could only photograph everyone who came out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would have a mug book of all the active, violent offenders against women in that particular area.’

“And I’d have to say that he was right on the mark, generally speaking. If I ran up against a dead end in this case, was really looking for some exciting new leads, I’d ask, ‘How will I take this idea that people who want to act out violently also get a thrill through books and magazines and films and TV and turn it into an actual technique for developing suspects?’ And I said, ‘You know, have a slasher film festival!”

At that moment, our tape recorder crashed to the floor. Dave picked it up and got it running again.

Ted laughed.

“You might think this is a little bit odd,” he went on, “but I really can tell you I don’t think it is.”

He seemed familiar with the slasher genre. “There have been quite a few out recently that dealt with the death of young prostitutes,” he said. Although he had been kept on disciplinary confinement — a sort of isolation — since his failed escape try the previous summer, Bundy seemed to be keeping up with at least one form of modern entertainment. He explained that ideally we’d have five or 10 of these movies playing at once.

“I would try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie out there,” he told us. “One that’s never been broadcast or shown in the Pacific Northwest. I would pick two theaters: one in Seattle and one in the Tacoma area, outside of the general vicinity where these girls have been disappearing. I’d find a theater that was out and away from other activities so that people would have to park right in front of the theater, as opposed to a downtown theater where they might park away.

“I’d see that the film was well-publicized in the Seattle and Tacoma newspapers, with the most lurid photos showing the girls being, you know, and the knife and the whole thing. Guaranteed to arouse those passions which, quite frankly, are unfortunately very unhealthy to arouse in people.

“Then for a period of a couple weeks I’d photograph everybody that came in and out of those theaters. I know that sounds weird, but believe me it isn’t. I’d photograph every male that came in there, and I’d also try to correlate the guy’s photograph with the license plate number on his car. That would be the only way you could link a face with something concrete that you could follow up on later, see?”

I nodded.

“If you have any eyewitnesses at all or if you in the future have any eyewitnesses – you would have a collection of individuals that I think would truly amaze your crimes-against-persons people. You would have people coming out of the woodwork, men who generally speaking are as normal as the day is long, who really are highly controlled individuals, but who indulge their violent fantasies . . . and their names are on no computer, their fingerprints are on no files, and the only time you ever see them come out in public is to view some of these movies, to get off. And there’s no other way you can reach them. Like, you know, bees to honey.”

Bundy’s idea certainly was among the more unusual investigative initiatives I’d ever heard proposed. But although I didn’t doubt that Ted knew whereof he spoke when it came to serial killers’ movie choices, it was an innovative but obviously unworkable scheme.

***

We broke off at about six that evening, then started again at 9:30 on Sunday morning. Overnight, the University of Washington played Washington State for the Apple Cup, emblematic of major college football superiority in the state, and a big deal for alumni from both schools. Bundy’s Huskies beat my Cougars 38-29.

I would have been happy to get the next morning’s discussion started with a little bantering back and forth about the game, or actually any topic besides murder, which clearly occupied Ted to the exclusion of almost everything else. He showed no interest.

Instead, he returned at once to his theme of alternatives to killing. “He’s very intense,” Bundy said again of the Green River killer. “As you can see, periods where he gets one and two a day, at times. That’s an extremely intense kind of need that just doesn’t go away.

“But there are times I’m sure he recognizes that if he keeps doing it as much as he’d like to do it, then he’s just courting disaster. He’s going to make a mistake and he knows it. So there are times when instead of actually doing it, he’s just going around hunting, pretending he’s doing it. Not pretending, but just going around, let’s say, developing more information, finding out where more prostitutes are hanging out; maybe just sort of stalking them, but not snatching any of them.”

Dave asked if the killer would have sex with a prostitute and then let her go: serial-killer catch and release.

Ted thought so. “I think there’s an excellent chance he has picked up a number of prostitutes whom he’s later released, for any number of reasons. Perhaps he just felt an unusual wave of compassion. Maybe he was surprised at some point and felt it’d be too risky to kill that particular individual. Maybe somebody saw him.”

Every one of these women, if they existed, were potential witnesses for us. But how to find them?

“Would there be anything unusual that he might do that maybe our officers [should] ask these girls?” Dave wondered.

Bundy replied that prostitutes no doubt were accustomed to a lot of strange behavior and that in any event Riverman probably made his move so quickly that there wasn’t time to observe anything out of the ordinary. He did suggest asking the prostitutes if any john had driven them to a particularly remote or secluded spot.

Later in the conversation, Ted added that we might consider asking the women about guys who parked away from the strip and approached them on foot. “I just don’t think he’s the type that’s going to drive up to the curb and have them get in,” Bundy explained. “He’s more careful than that. He doesn’t want anybody to overhear what he says to the girls. He doesn’t want anybody to see him, if that’s at all possible. And he certainly doesn’t want anybody seeing him get in the car.”

Also, in light of Riverman’s apparent success once a victim was in his power, Ted thought we should be alert for escape-proof vehicles such as vans, or cars with passenger doors that don’t open from within. I resisted the temptation to bring up vehicles with missing front passenger seats.

“How about the pickup?” I asked instead. “[The strip is] heavily patrolled. There are police officers out there harassing prostitutes all the time. How does he feel so good in there?”

“The same way Wayne Williams felt so good in Atlanta,” Ted said. “He knew the scene inside out. Because there were young, black children disappearing, there was an incredible amount of pressure. And yet he was just doing his thing. Why? Because he was a fish in water. He knows these individuals. He knows how to manipulate them. He might not even be coming up to them as a john, even though that appears to be the most reasonable explanation.

“He may be offering them employment, or money or drugs. Calling them on the phone even. I’m not saying he has one technique. He may not be a wizard, but he’s bright enough to understand that he can’t be approaching [his victims] the same way every time. I was continually amazed by this guy’s balls.”

I watched Ted closely. His face was deeply lined. He sweated and he frowned almost constantly. His eyes were bloodshot. Obviously, he was in deep pain, and I thought I knew why. There was really only one dimension to his being — murder — and it trumped everything else. Once he’d fallen into the black hole and begun killing, he became the black hole, a human figure occupying a void, an inadequate cipher — total personal worthlessness that he recognized as well in the Green River killer. There cannot be a more consummate loser than that, which I could see was horrible for Ted to contemplate.

“What is this guy’s ‘thing’?” I asked. “Is he all wrapped up in the approach? Is he all wrapped up in the event? Or is he all wrapped up in post-event behavior? Is there something we could key on?”

“I don’t have any feeling for that,” he answered. “I don’t know what condition the bodies were in, or anything. [But] I can try to answer part of your question. I think the hunt, the searching out, is always a big thing for him. He’s probably invested a lot of time and effort into it. As to what he might do to them once he gets them, that’s a big blank spot in my mind. I mean, I can’t even begin to guess.”

To the contrary, I felt Bundy probably had a pretty good idea of the sorts of things Riverman liked to do when he was alone with a dead body. But that was a piece of information he was not about to share — then or ever, as it turned out.

I again pushed the discussion back toward Ted’s murders by asking if the killer might at one time have broken into women’s residences and strangled them in the middle of the night. “We do have some of those a couple of years previous,” I told him. “They’re basically unsolved. Would he have said, ‘This is too dangerous, too chancy?’ ”

“And their bodies were left there?”

“Yes.”

“Were they prostitutes?”

“Well, they were questionable.”

Ted said he did not believe that Wendy Lee Coffield was the first victim, because a novice killer would likely have to build to the level of activity that we encountered at the outset of the series in 1982. So, yes, maybe the killer tried other approaches before.

“Liken it to somebody who’s looking for the right hole to fish in,” Bundy said. “He’s fishing here and there and maybe not catching much, but taking too much of a risk in the meantime. It could very well be that someone like this would break into a house and kill a woman, and then find it so risky and so unnerving and so difficult, quite frankly, that he would look for something that was perhaps easier.”

Lynda Healy’s basement bedroom murder in 1974, of course, crossed my mind as he spoke. As far as we know, Ted abandoned that approach until January of 1978 in Tallahassee.

“How about the hunt, though?” I pressed him. “Is the fact he would do one in a residence more of a thrill for him?”

“The question is,” said Ted, “did he select this woman beforehand? Or is he just like Albert DeSalvo, just knocking on doors? It makes a difference. There’s hunting involved in either case, a certain amount of expertise and sort of feeling out, you know, apartment complexes and looking at names on mailboxes. If you could talk to Albert DeSalvo’s spirit you’d find there’s something of an art to it. But if in fact he tracked a woman from a bar, that’s a little bit more sophisticated.”

Then Ted tried to sell us a novel concept that the Green River killer, “deeply disturbed” as he clearly was, might also be afflicted with a conscience or at least was capable of regret. It is axiomatic among mental health experts that psychopaths are incapable of feeling guilt or regret.

But Bundy mounted a sort of sympathy-for-the-devil argument, beginning with the fact — based on personal experience — that the time demands on a busy serial killer make it tough for him to keep the other, public, parts of his life running smoothly, and this is very stressful.

“When he’s doing all of this,” Ted said, “he can’t be conducting normal relations with people. His whole life is upset. He’s carrying around these terrible secrets. He might find it hard to hold a job. The pressure of threatening detectives. Notwithstanding what anyone says, I’m sure there’s got to be a sense of remorse. It may not be very strong. It may be stronger some times than others.”

This was quite an assertion. “You don’t believe this theory that some people have no remorse?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that theory at all.”

He raised alcoholics as an example, as if being a drunk were comparable to committing serial sex murders. “Alcoholics that I have known,” he told us, “suffer a great deal of remorse. I mean, they can’t hold a job. Their families are falling apart. They’re being mean and cruel to people, yet they still drink. They feel very bad about it, but they can’t stop themselves.”

Same thing for killers, said Ted.

“I’m sure there are some people who kill who feel no remorse,” he conceded. “But I think it’s accurate to say that just because a man feels remorse doesn’t mean he wants to turn himself in and be executed by the state. Because a man feels remorse doesn’t mean he can control the deep drive that causes him to kill.

“So I think there very well may be gaps, periods where between victims the reason he doesn’t do anything is because he’s just despondent over his inability to control his behavior.”

The balance of Ted’s little speech sounded defensive. “There’s only one person who knows the real person,” he said. “And he’s quite capable of feeling all the ranges of emotions that you do. Don’t overlook the fact that that in many respects he is, in fact, as normal as anybody else.”

Sure.

Ted did not once say remorse for killing people. What he really seemed to be discussing was self-pity, remorse for how personally disruptive the serial killer’s murder drive was, and of course the fact that it can, as it did in his case, lead to arrest and condemnation for his crimes. I know he was very sorry that occurred.

According to Ted, this killer’s remorse we were discussing in fact can be a suspect’s Achilles heel, the one weakness a cop might exploit in the right circumstances. “I would say,” he explained, “that if you ever feel like you have a good suspect, probably the best way to approach him is quickly. I’m serious. If you give him any time to collect his thoughts, he’s more than likely to be able to compose himself again, because he’s a very controlled individual.

“But if you catch him unawares and come down on him – God forbid that you violate his constitutional rights – I think you stand a much better chance of getting him to open up. It’s a tremendous burden he’s carrying around with him.”

“You do believe there’s a chance that this person might talk about what he’s done?” asked Dave.

“Well, sure,” said Ted. “If you catch him at it, sure. It’s a tremendous burden he’s carrying around with him. And you’ve got to make him think that you think he’s guilty. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it?”

We just looked at him.

“But this is a terrible case, and if you think he’s guilty and he’s carrying around this particular burden, he’s going to want to just let it off. He’s going to be so torn up inside he’ll let it [go], I think. If he’s the kind of person I think he is.”

Another insight Bundy felt was important to share was the possessiveness he said some serial killers feel toward their kills. “That’s one way of describing it, in rather bland terms,” he said. In fact, he was describing a feature of necrophilia. “[It’s a] possessiveness where the corpse could easily be as important as the live victim, in some respects. I mean, it’s that physical possession and ownership, a taking if you will, that is part of the syndrome. This is one of the reasons I think he returns to the dump site to either view his victim or in fact even interact with the body in some way.”

Again, Bundy wasn’t about to explain what he meant by “interact.”

***

There was a specific tension between Ted and me that would tend to sharpen over time. He was primarily interested in discussing the “why” of serial murder, while I had a practical interest in the “who, what, when, and where” — and “how” — of the crime, the better to understand serial killers and catch them. I didn’t need to get in touch with the inner killer in order to do my job.

“Possession” as he described it was an abstraction, and distraction, to me. Nor was it new. He and Michaud had discussed possession years before. So I yawned once more and looked away.

“You seem troubled,” Bundy said. “Am I boring you?”

***

One strategy we’d discussed with Dr. Liebert for prodding Ted from his arm’s-length analysis of the Green River cases toward a substantive discussion of his own killings was to show him a crime scene. Liebert agreed that such a picture likely would give Ted a jolt. It was worth a try.

The photo we selected was from the Thurston County sheriff’s case file for Kathy Devine, the 15-year-old whose remains were discovered in June, 1974, at Camp Margaret McKinney, which is southwest of Olympia. Devine had been stabbed and raped. We had a prima facie reason for showing Ted the picture; Devine had disappeared December 7, 1973. She had disappeared from the streets of North Seattle, as a number of the Riverman’s victims had, too. She was last seen climbing into a green pickup driven by a white male. Bundy owned a green pickup at the time and had grown a thick beard. He was a solid suspect in the then-unsolved homicide.

“Whenever we’ve gone through our records,” I said as I placed the black-and-white photograph on the table, oriented toward Dave and me, “we found cases similar in nature to the Riverman’s.”

Ted rotated the photo to get a better look and was at once transfixed. His eyes widened and darkened. His jaw jutted out. We could see the blood pulsing through the surface vessels of his head and neck. Bundy had gone into a type of dynamic trance in which some long-ago thrill seemed to burst forth in his memory, flooding his consciousness and blotting everything else – us, the room, the prison – from his mind. This, it was easy to intuit, was possession: Ted the possessor, as well as the possessed.

In time, he looked up. “Now where was this body located?”

Dave told him.

“Off a dirt road…,” Ted began to say, then stopped and turned the comment into a question. “How far off the road?”

Dave said Kathy Devine was found in a parking area. Her killer had carried her only a few feet before dumping her.

“There’s no attempt to conceal the body,” Bundy observed and added that the killer had left the victim’s clothing at the scene, potential evidence. Then he mentioned a detail difficult to make out from the photo, but not so at the scene itself. The victim’s jeans had been distinctively ripped or cut, which would have required “a pretty strong individual,” as Bundy put it.

“What are your impressions of the kind of guy that would have done something like this as compared to what we’re looking at?” asked Reichert.

Ted quickly gathered his thoughts, reverting to serial-murder consultant mode.

“If he’s capable of it,” he answered, “he’s had 10 years to change his M.O. and his — whatever you call them — his fetishes or his rituals or his fantasies will change every time, too. So he might be taking girls’ clothes over one period of time or not. There’s no question about that.”

***

As our allotted time with Ted drew to a close, Dave asked, “What made you say, ‘Okay, I need to contact the task force?’ ”

“It was a whole bunch of things,” Ted said. He had been reading the Green River articles in the Tacoma paper, he explained, and they were fresh in his mind over the several months of disciplinary confinement following his failed escape, when nearly every form of communication was denied him, from television to magazines, visits from Carole Boone, who had become his wife, and mother of his daughter. He wasn’t even allowed out into the yard for exercise.

So, according to Bundy, he had lots of time to keep turning the Green River cases over in his head. “I just said, ‘Well, I may be able to contribute something.’ It’s interesting. I’m not being altruistic here. I’m fascinated by it.

“And so that’s when I wrote to you. I had nothing else to do. I had this on my mind and I felt disposed toward doing it. I’m sure I’m not really telling you anything you hadn’t thought of or talked about before.”

“So we can count on you to continue to write us with thoughts you might have about this case?” Dave asked.

Here Bundy saw his chance to ingratiate himself, strengthen the bond.

“If you’re not bored,” he said, and then turned to me. “Are you, Bob, totally interested? If you feel I can be of some value, I’d love to. Now that I have a better grip on what’s going on, I feel really I do have a foothold on this situation.”

In his eagerness to please Ted was even mixing his metaphors, unlike him.

“Well,” I said, “don’t be too overconfident,” and explained that we’d shown him only a small slice of the information the task force had accumulated. “It is just a mammoth case,” I said.

Dave then asked when Ted might be ready to talk to us about his own criminal history. “Can you see Ted Bundy contacting us in the future and saying he’s ready to talk?” Reichert wondered.

“That’s a hard question to answer,” Bundy replied, even though he certainly knew it was coming. He continued carefully.

“I think it’s good that I’ve been able to talk to you, because I feel like I have a certain amount of rapport, even though we’ve just talked about this case.

“You know, it’s easy to depersonalize somebody and think of him as an adversary, or somebody who is out to get one. Come face-to-face, you know, a lot of that hostility and those stereotypes and impressions tend to fade away, and I realize that they’re just people, too. And so I think, yes, I can see myself talking to you sometime in the future.”

That was as definitive as he was going to get.

Our last subject of the day was the use of computer-analyzed lists as an investigative tool, which we had pioneered in the “Ted” investigation. I told him how Dunn, McChesney and I had ranged all over the map with our lists. Besides the obvious ones like VW owners and Teds who had been telephoned into us as suspects, we had taken down the names of roughly 500 people who had ridden at the Black Nugget Horse Ranch near the Issaquah dump site; the 1,200 or more folks who’d been guests at motels in the vicinity; the 1,000 who served the public at nearby groceries, gas stations, fast-food joints, and the like; all the students who’d transferred among the University of Washington, Central Washington State College, Evergreen College, and Oregon State University; all the names from the victims’ address books. We even entered all the names and addresses from any scraps of paper found in any of the victims’ rooms or residences.

I also explained about the Top 100 Suspects list, being careful, as I went through all that we did, to show how this approach was going to yield us Ted Bundy as our prime suspect whether or not Detective Forbes had called that August day in 1975, announcing Ted’s arrest. The Utah authorities had gotten lucky, for sure, and we all were grateful for that. But Ted’s number already was up, quite literally.

This revelation seemed to bother him, to upset a cherished belief that he was smarter than us, that his arrest was a fluke. The plain fact that we had been steadily plodding toward a solution offended his self-image.

He offered a couple of list ideas of his own. He suggested that if the Washington State Patrol registered any information on cars they found parked along remote roadsides at night, we might add them to our database. Similarly, he said, we might ask the same thing of logging truck drivers, who regularly traveled the same forest routes.

“Forgot one more list,” I said as we stood to go. “We included people who’d been injured at the Crystal Mountain ski area.” (In the nearby Cascades)

“Just Crystal Mountain?” Ted asked. “Why Crystal Mountain?”

“Well,” I said, savoring the moment, “I’ll tell you why. It was because when our suspect talked to one of the Lake Sam witnesses and made casual talk about what he enjoyed, he mentioned Crystal Mountain.”

“Yeah?” Bundy asked, impressed.

“Yeah.”

“How about that! You learn something every day.”

I couldn’t help smiling. “It shows up once in a while.”

“Yup.”

One more list (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:45).

Chapter Nine

‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’

Ted penned us a note from his cell that Sunday night. It read like the citation for some sort of award.

“Dear Bob and Dave,” he wrote, “I appreciate you taking the time and coming to talk with me. I hope you found it worthwhile in some way. Your dedication to your work and your knowledge of the cases were impressive. It’s not the volume of your knowledge of the cases that struck me, but it was that you knew enough to be asking a lot of vital questions, insightful questions. You managed to give me a glimpse of the massiveness and complexity of the investigation. I can see how easily people in your position can be overwhelmed by it all. It was a humbling experience in that you showed me what an inflated notion I had of my ability to help you in some meaningful way.”

Okay, Ted was a suck-up. Yet his fascination with the Green River cases was genuine, I thought, and his investigative ideas were welcome. As for his eager concern that I endorse his contribution to the investigation — he almost begged for my approval — that had everything to do with his emerging scheme to avoid, or at least delay, his date with Old Sparky.

In the coming months, he wrote us ceaselessly about Riverman and his cases, dispatching 50-and 60-page letters filled with his rambling ruminations on the investigation, frequent requests for more information, and, repeatedly, new arguments for holding the Slasher Movie Festival, which was becoming a fixation.

In parallel, Bundy also fostered a relationship with FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier, a member of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit, or BSU, later lionized in Red Dragon, book and movie, from which the unit got the nickname “Hannibal Lecter Squad.”

Hagmaier had approached Bundy as a possible subject for an expansion of the BSU’s well-known study of 36 serial killers, originally undertaken in the 1970s. Ted agreed to talk to the agent, at first in the third person. As Hagmaier explained to television documentarian Mike McCann, Ted opened up to him very slowly over a number of years, never actually confessing to a specific murder or telling Bill anything he could independently verify. Instead, Bundy conducted an extended tutorial on his own experiences as a serial killer.

Highlights of Hagmaier’s research sessions with Ted at the prison include Bundy’s explanation of how he selected his victims with extreme patience and care, sometimes stalking them for weeks in advance of killing them. This was one way he felt superior to prostitute killers, such as the Green River killer.

Hagmaier also shot down the common misperception that Bundy deliberately sought out as ideal victims girls and young women with long hair, parted in the middle, often wearing hoop earrings. “He mentioned a number of times,” Hagmaier told McCann, “that his victims were chosen not because of a particular physical profile. He was looking for people who should have known better: bright, articulate, clean people, not prostitutes or hitchhikers, but people who should have known better, who came from ‘good’ families, as he would say, who were brought up in a good Judeo-Christian environment. . . .”

Despite these preferences, Bundy conceded to Hagmaier that he’d picked up and killed a number of hitchhikers, some quite young, including the nameless female he said was his first homicide, in May of 1973, near Olympia. Ted said she was the only victim he killed with his bare hands and that he threw her dead body down a hillside. Then he went home and waited for what he believed was the inevitable visit from the police. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t come out of my room. I wet my pants,’” Hagmaier remembered.

Bundy told Bill that with every day the cops did not show up to arrest him, he grew stronger. “He said it was at that point, ‘When I recognized that I could get away with murder. I crossed the line.’

“He would give the analogy that life is full of lines and when you do things that you would not normally do, when you cross the one, it’s always easier to cross the second time, and it would be easier [still] to cross the third. He would talk about the man who comes home from work, angry with his boss, and one day he slams the door. The next day he crosses another line and kicks the dog. And it’s not long before he crosses other lines and he’s beating his wife. He said that each day [the man] does that without retribution it becomes part of him, and that’s the way it is with serial killers, as well.”

Bundy said he planted false clues – such as beer cans bearing other people’s fingerprints and saliva – at his dump sites. Interestingly, after we finally captured the Green River killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, in November of 2001, he said in his videotaped confessions that he, too, salted his dump sites with such false leads.

Ted also told Hagmaier that Kimberly Leach was a victim of opportunity. He claimed that he’d driven to her middle school that morning in the FSU van looking for a teacher, or maybe one of the kids’ mothers, to kidnap and kill. But after circling the school several times in search of likely prey, he settled on what was available, a 12-year-old schoolgirl.

I think he was lying.

***

In February of 1986, Florida Governor Bob Graham signed Bundy’s first death warrant. Ted’s legal representation at that point fell to Jim Coleman, a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering in Washington, D.C., and Polly Nelson, a young associate at Wilmer, Cutler, who had recently graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School. They would represent Bundy pro bono.

One of the first things Nelson did was arrange for Dr. Art Norman, a psychologist, to evaluate Ted as Nelson and Coleman cast about for a strategy for saving Bundy’s life. That spring, Norman reported on his session with Ted at the Wilmer, Cutler offices in Washington.

Nelson was appalled at what she heard.

“Dr. Norman didn’t say that Ted had brain damage,” she recounts in her book, “he didn’t say that Ted was mentally ill, he said that Ted just had wanted to kill. Dr. Norman said it was no different than a hunter shooting a deer and tying it to the hood of his car — only he’d gone after the game no one else dared to, the game that was the most highly valued: attractive young women. Ted was the ‘super male,’ he’d gone all the way. He’d dared to break the ultimate ‘taboo.’ Dr. Norman was fascinated by what Ted had told him. He continued on in great detail about exactly how Ted himself saw his murders. The rest of us didn’t speak as the room closed in.”

Nelson and Coleman were not pleased to learn that Bundy had been talking to me and to Hagmaier and put a stop to it. I received only three letters from Ted that year. In one of them he complained how I kept prodding him to discuss his own cases. He informed me that he had been “disappointed” when he first learned I would be the task force’s representative, because “I knew that you had been an investigator in certain cases where I was a suspect. I felt that these unsolved cases would naturally tend to preoccupy you and perhaps detract somewhat from what I had to say about Green River.” As a consequence, “I never felt that we established a dialogue in the Green River case.”

I doubt Bundy grasped just how transparent his machinations were.

Recently I had proposed to him in a letter that we begin a review of the “Ted” cases, taking a couple at a time, working them thoroughly, together. “I cannot help you out of your situation in any way,” I emphasized. “I cannot offer you anything but my trust and promise that the correct information will be passed on to other law enforcement agencies.”

That was not what Ted hoped to hear.

“I was very much surprised that you would bring such a proposal to me,” he responded in the letter, which seemed it was more likely meant for his lawyers’ eyes than mine. If not, Bundy held me in even lower esteem than I had imagined.

The following year, according to Nelson, she and Coleman went to the prison to finally hear their notorious client describe one of his murders in the first person. In view of his convictions and the evidence against him, defending Ted as an oppressed innocent as he’d insisted Mike Minerva do was not a viable option. Bundy once more was told to weigh revealing his “terrible secrets” against the finality of electrocution.

He still couldn’t do it.

“Ted began with a string of disclaimers,” Nelson writes. “ ‘This is very difficult for me, I have a lot of resistance to bringing this into the open — it’s part of me that needed silence to survive,’ and ‘I’ll use the term “I” because I know it was me, in the conventional sense, but you have to understand that it was not the same person who is talking to you now.’ Then he described the steps leading up to one of his first murders, a blond in the vestibule of her apartment building. He stopped after recounting his still-clear vision of her unconscious body laid out on the floor, after he had hit her with a club, her long hair spread out like a fan above her head. He could go no further, he could not describe what happened next. He choked. He heaved with sighs.

“‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’

“After a moment he skipped ahead and talked about pulling the woman’s body into the weeds at the back of the building, his searing remorse and horror, his mantra of assurance to himself that it would never happen again, the beast had been satisfied, the Good Ted would take back his life. He still could not admit to the murder itself, the actual moment of killing.…”

***

In early May of 1987, the Associated Press moved a story out of Boulder, Colorado, where, according to the wire service, Ronald M. Holmes, who taught criminal justice at the University of Louisville, had explained at a police seminar how Ted had spoken to him of a “person” who raped and killed a young girl when he was 11 1/2 years old, and threw her body in a ditch in front of her house. Holmes reportedly also said at the police meeting that he believed Ted had killed 365 victims.

I knew that Bundy had been exchanging letters with Holmes; Ted shared with me the correspondence. The professor had first contacted Bundy in late 1984, requesting an interview that Holmes said he hoped to turn into a presentation at an upcoming seminar. Ultimately, Bundy met with the professor and also disclosed to Holmes my correspondence with him, which annoyed me when I later learned about it.

The AP story received close attention in the northwest because of the lingering local questions over the disappearance, in 1961, of eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr, whose family lived in the north end of Tacoma, not far from the Bundys’ house. Someone boldly snatched the girl from her upstairs bedroom in the middle of the night as her parents slept downstairs and then silently spirited her away. She has never been found, and no arrests have been made in the officially unsolved case. Bundy, although he was just 14 at the time of the crime, emerged as a leading suspect, at least as far as the press was concerned, after his Utah arrest in August of 1975.

In the autumn of 1984 Ted wrote to Dr. William Conte, a Tacoma psychiatrist who was close to the Burr family, categorically denying any role in Ann Marie’s disappearance. “I have no absolutely no knowledge of what happened to Ann Marie Burr 23 years ago,” he wrote. “I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Nothing. At the time I was for all practical purposes a normal, healthy 15-year-old. Even the thought of harming another human being would have been as ghastly and alien as the thought of jumping off the Narrows Bridge.”

Because the girl’s disappearance was a Tacoma case, we never got involved in the investigation. Ted might have committed the murder, but I doubt it. I did know, Bundy’s protestations notwithstanding, that the Burr family still was not satisfied that he was innocent. So his alleged claim to Holmes that the “person” was an active killer by age l1 ½ was bound to upset them.

Then the Tacoma News Tribune published an interview with Holmes under the headline, “Experts says Bundy killed girl, 8, when he was 14.” According to the paper, Holmes estimated Bundy “could be responsible for as many as 400 murders.”

In this interview, Holmes remembered talking to Ted about the “person” responsible for Lake Sammamish and our other abduction murder cases.

“I then asked him if it would be reasonable to assume that this ‘other person’ may have had earlier victims,” the News Tribune quoted Holmes.

“He said, ‘Well, this other person we’re talking about may have started much earlier.’

Holmes asked, “How early?”

At age 14 or 15, Bundy told Holmes.

“The first victim of this other person could have been an 8- or 9-year-old girl,” Holmes said Bundy told him.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt Bundy did it,” Holmes said to the News Tribune, although he conceded that Ted had not actually confessed to the crime, nor did he have any hard evidence of Bundy’s culpability.

I sent Bundy the AP story.

“Dear Ted,” I wrote, “I have enclosed a recent news clipping and am interested in your reaction to it. I mentioned in a previous letter what I thought of Dr. Holmes and the fact that you revealed to him that we were corresponding. Apparently he chose this particular occasion to exploit his conversations with you. No doubt this garbage has caused strain on the Burr family, but I don’t think Holmes thought about that. It appears Holmes is turning you into Henry Lucas’s rival. I wonder if there is any correlation between 365 murders and the number of days there are in a year. No telling what he will say about you if you are executed. I hope someday you will choose the proper forum for the truth.”

Bundy denied everything in a July 6 letter to me. “I didn’t discuss my background or the allegations against me,” he wrote, “not so much as a single case, not in the first, second or third person, not directly or indirectly. During that meeting and in subsequent correspondence, it became clear that Holmes did not have the kind of capabilities needed to make use of my knowledge.”

Chapter Ten

Endgame

Bundy’s tenuous legal prospects deteriorated significantly in December of 1987 when U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp denied Nelson and Coleman’s petition for a new trial in the Leach case based on their claim that Ted had been incompetent to stand trial. In his statement from the bench, Judge Sharp characterized Ted as “a diabolical genius” and “a most intelligent, articulate, complex individual.” Added the judge, “I don’t really feel that anybody that was in this courtroom seriously, seriously questions Mr. Bundy’s competency.”

With time getting tight, Ted, in consultation with his civil attorney, Diana Weiner, evidently decided now was the moment to finally get serious about offering confessions for an execution delay. In one idea Polly Nelson characterized as a “grisly plan to dole out details for favors,” that would probably hasten the day of his execution if appellate courts heard about it, Ted reckoned it would take interviewers a year to fully debrief him, and then another two years of life would be his just compensation for coming clean at last.

His earlier disappointment with me notwithstanding, Bundy took me off his shit list and, in a letter dated February 11, 1988, invited me back for another conversation. We met at the prison at midday on the 22nd.

We started with a discussion of my latest initiative at the attorney general’s office, a statewide computerized system, modeled on the VICAP concept, that would collect, collate and analyze all murder and sexual assault cases in the state, whether the offender was a stranger to the victim or not, to create a relational database of practical value to local detectives. Just a few months earlier, I’d received a large grant to get started on the program, which would be called HITS, for Homicide Information Tracking System.

We touched on the pluses and minuses of the VICAP program, then Ted brought up the FBI’s serial-killer study and remarked, apropos of nothing, that the BSU agents out conducting the research interviews were “up against some pretty formidable problems because, obviously, not everybody accused of that kind of criminal behavior is going to talk to them.”

Wink. Nudge.

“And even if they do,” he continued, “there’s a question whether they’re going to be totally candid with them.”

Ted had set the bait, and I was more than willing to bite. As the time approached when he knew he would have to deliver full and complete confessions to – maybe – save his neck, he had decided he needed someone to draw the terrible secrets from him, someone he could train in the art of interviewing a serial sex killer. As time and experience would prove, he’d chosen me as his pupil.

I allowed that Edmund Kemper in California was probably an example of what Bundy was talking about. Kemper had woven some fairy tales for his interviewers.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s curious that someone would admit to that kind of conduct and then, over the years, for whatever reason or psychological need they have, to fabricate or embellish the story.”

“Do you challenge them?”

“Oh, yeah. I can see through a guy very quickly. I had a guy sit down and just tell me stories. I know he was telling me stories. And yet I also know that essentially he’d done what they said he did. But he had a need to tell it a different way so he looked different. He looked better in his own mind, okay? He wasn’t a savage, lust-filled killer. It’s very curious how some guys will rewrite history to satisfy their own needs. And they will lie to themselves, perhaps.”

“And they will lie.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:15).

Ted was being disingenuous here.

Several years before, he told FBI Agent Robert Ressler of the BSU that Kim Leach had suffocated in the mud as he sexually assaulted her. Bob Dekle, who prosecuted the case, points out in his book, The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution and Execution of Ted Bundy, that the physical evidence strongly suggests that Bundy almost surely murdered the girl in the back of his stolen van, most likely by slashing her throat with a huge Buck brand hunting knife he’d bought in a Jacksonville sporting goods store, probably for the occasion.

Was Ted trying to edit history, make himself seem somehow less loathsome? Possibly. Kim Leach’s murder always embarrassed him. But Dekle argues in his book that Ted probably made up the story out of a psychopath’s need to control every encounter, to confound his interlocutor and thus demonstrate his superiority. Truth in such circumstances becomes a relative commodity.

Bundy returned to his experience as an interviewer himself as we moved to the second lesson, what he called “the morality of murder.” He said that one of the inmates on the Row had spoken to him at length and in gory detail about any number of women he’d murdered, crimes for which this killer’s conscience remained unclouded. But he adamantly would not discuss one murder, because he’d had a relationship with the victim.

“All these other women were strangers,” Ted said. “But this one woman he knew. He felt justified in killing strangers. He did not feel justified in killing people he knew. He felt these were okay murders; this one was bad. And he could not talk about it.

“He finally started asking me questions. He said, ‘Well, what would happen if they found a body that was like this and like that? What do you think people would think?’

“It took us a while, talking generally, about how our minds work. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘you’ve already admitted to all these others. Why hold back on that one?’

“He says, ‘Yeah, but people will think I’m a really bad person.’

Morality of murder (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:13).

“This was something he held like a secret locked away in his chest. It was logically a foolish kind of reservation, because no one would think he was any more horrible than they already thought he was. This is what I found in a lot of guys I talked to. There are some things they’ll talk about and some things they won’t. They have a particular view of the world that you have to discover, a particular morality of murder.”

I asked how a police officer might exploit this insight during an interrogation. Ted replied there was a corollary to the morality of murder, and that was that serial killers have what he called “soft spots” for certain of their victims and will feel sorry for having killed them. This seemed liked a reworked version of killer’s remorse, which we’d discussed four years earlier, but I didn’t think this was a good moment to derail him with a challenging question.

The trick, he said, was to be sufficiently patient and understanding so that a killer will feel he can trust you with this information. In his case, Bundy explained, other cons recognized him for what he was, one of them, “so they know I’m not about to turn them in.”

It’s imperative, he said, for an interviewer to remain genuinely unfazed no matter how horrible the crimes he’s hearing about.

“What does a detective do to get to that sort of rapport?” I asked.

It’s not easy, he said.

“The scary thing,” Ted cautioned, “is you have to have real empathy. Real, not phony. Not just calling a guy by his first name or shaking his hand or giving him a cup of coffee and offering him cigarettes and going through all the standard procedure of putting a guy at ease, which is important.

Empathy (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:48).

“But there has to be a real empathy which, impossible as it may sound, lacks judgment. I mean, how do you detach yourself and say, ‘This guy did these things which I consider to be horrible and repulsive, and I’ve seen the impact it has on the community and the family’? How do you detach yourself from all that and all the personal stuff and just really try to get into the guy’s head without these barriers?”

Ted didn’t have the answer, so he restated the issue. “This guy has lived with this terrible memory, has lived with these urges and has lived with his behavior for so long, and has had to keep it secret just to be able to survive. I’ve encountered guys who have held this secret for so long and so tightly, even when it really didn’t make any difference anymore, that they couldn’t let it go. The mental apparatus that had been in place for so many years was so powerful against revealing this to anyone under any circumstances that they just couldn’t bring themselves to share it, even though they may have wanted to on some level.”

Bundy advised me to emulate his interview approach as closely as possible.

“As a detective,” he said, “I would try to come across as somebody that had known a lot of people who had done this; who has investigated a lot of cases like this; who understands what was going on; who understands the kind of thought processes, the kinds of motivations that would compel a person to kill another person like that. And not just one, but one after another.

“What has impressed me about the people I’ve talked to is they have a need to be understood, to share these burdensome secrets they’ve kept so long. But they don’t want to share them with just anybody. They want to talk about them with somebody who is not going to judge them, who’s going to understand this bewildering experience that they’ve been going through. It’s an awesome thing for a guy to confront.”

How to interview (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:07).

I pointed out that very few detectives have the kind of knowledge and experience with serial killers that Ted was describing. Nor will police investigators usually encounter their interview subject as a convicted felon already locked up in a prison. More likely he’ll be a suspect whom they may not have sufficient probable cause to detain, legally.

“That’s a different prescriptive entirely,” Bundy agreed. But in such a situation, he said, “nothing will turn me off, [or] the people that I know of, more than a detective that comes on too hard. Implicit [in that approach] is a lot of judgmental stuff that would generally tend to put a guy off. I’d say from my own experience that if the detective comes off just willing to talk, just willing not to come on real strong, that’s more likely the context where he can use his skills as a questioner to develop certain kinds of information that he wants.”

***

Bundy then yanked the conversation away from interview issues back to his favorite subject, dump sites, and allowed himself to drift onto another plane. I knew that he was afflicted with multiple paraphilia. Now he’d reveal his affinity for the paranormal.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that [a dump site] is the only place an investigator can put his feet right there on the ground, or wherever it is, and say, ‘I know that the guy I’m looking for has been right here. I may not know he’s been anywhere else, but I know he’s been right here.

“‘And why here?’ Try to put yourself in the mind of the man who chose that spot. If it’s a house, it’s the victim’s bedroom. But if it’s Star Lake [one of Riverman’s dump sites], why Star Lake? Imagine the guy driving there with the body. Imagine looking for this place in the dark. What’s going through his mind? What’s he looking for? Is he taking any precautions? Is he drunk? Is he high? Is he agitated? Maybe it doesn’t appeal to you as an investigator to try to get the feel, even if it’s completely fictitious, for the guy picking up that prostitute near the airport.”

Ted was off in the ether, but since it was unclear where he was going with these reveries, I decided to be patient, as he had advised me, at least until I figured out which planet Spaceship Bundywas headed for.

“I think any good investigator approaches every crime scene like that,” I said, “even the least experienced guy. I remember when I first started, you’re always asking the other guy that’s there, ‘What do you think of this? What significance does this have? Why did this happen this way? Where can we find this guy if he was just here an hour and a half ago?’ I think those types of things are highly necessary.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve gone out to the middle of Star Lake Road and just stood there and watched and looked into the trees and down the road, noticing how quiet it is. And the pullout where one body was found. It was obvious to me why that pullout was important to him. He could hear everything coming and going for a mile down the road and a mile up the hill. Either direction.”

What I didn’t get was how a police detective was supposed to commune with some scattered bones out in the wilderness, and I told Bundy so.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well,” I replied, “having a fresh body at a scene is a whole hell of a lot different than having bone sites, where the guy’s been gone for months.”

Ted emerged from out of the void to seamlessly field the question and in the process offer me another glimpse into his twisted psyche. “Do you videotape these scenes?” he asked me. “Have you taken various shots up and down the road and so on?”

I indicated that we had.

“I think that would be a potent tool,” he said. “I’m not sure how to use it, but for the person who did it to see these sites on videotape might loosen them up.”

Ted’s violent interest in the crime scene photo of Kathy Devine we’d shown him in 1984 came immediately to mind.

“It would be something that would start to get his mind in the groove, seeing scenes and sights that maybe he hadn’t seen for a long time. It would bring back to memory, vividly, these sights and sounds and smells and sensations that he had had at the time he was disposing of the victim’s body. Believe me, these are extremely powerful recollections for him.”

I still wanted an answer to my question. “How do you get a feeling for a killer at a bone site?” I asked again.

It turned out that you required a gift for conjuring the devil, which I’d just as soon not possess.

“I guess it has a lot to do with what you take there in your mind,” he said. “To me, it wouldn’t make a difference if it were a day or a month or six months. If somebody would tell me the bones were found where I was standing, I [could] stand there and try to re-create how he drove in and what he was looking for and how it’d be and what was he paying attention to, what he was seeing. Just try to get a feel for all that going on inside a guy’s head, to be able to get this feel of this man in a way that maybe other people who are less sensitive to what was going on there couldn’t. What was his state of mind as he picked up this dead body and began to carry her, drag it? Get all those feelings.”

Ted wasn’t taking me anywhere useful.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve probably stood, or sat, at 50 bone sites in my time. Most of the time I felt the killer was remote in my mind. I had the feeling we were way behind in the investigation, that the murders were most clear to the person who committed them.”

“This is true,” he answered, afraid once more that I was discounting his contribution. “I’m not saying that you can magically put yourself in this guy’s mind and see things through this guy’s eyes, and come up with his identity or even some really good clues of some sort.

“Getting back to one of my favorite topics, again, I’m telling you that if I were an investigator I would love to stake out that site, especially if it’s fresh. I still believe it’s a very powerful inducement for a man to go back to the scene.”

***

“What do you feel that police do wrong in serial-murder investigations?” I asked.

“The thing that constantly comes to mind is the way the crime scene is treated,” he said. “But [also] from what I’ve seen, the police often release too much information or talk too much about the case. In either case, if the perpetrator is paying any attention to what’s going on, he is going to know how to make his next move. I mean, if you get the sense that the police don’t know anything, or if an investigator gives an interview where he infers the police know something they don’t, or don’t have something that they do – sending false signals to the guy they’re looking for – that’s pretty dangerous. If he knows you don’t know anything, or you think you know something that you don’t, he’s emboldened. He’s going to feel more confident. So I think, except in rare circumstances, the less said the better.”

“How,” I asked, “would you structure information releases?”

“It would seem to me,” he answered, “that if the police felt they had a really good description of somebody and they released it that probably would do some good. However, if they’re wrong, they’re definitely barking up the wrong tree.”

I asked if a serial killer who has committed multiple offenses over the years can remember them all.

“My feeling is that they remember,” he said. “Whether or not they’re going to tell me exactly what happened is another question. I certainly haven’t encountered enough guys to run across, let’s say, a split personality type. I don’t run across anybody who professes to have amnesia, or blackouts, or anything like that. I’ve run across guys whose memories may be justifiably vague for reasons such as they were under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or, I think, the fear, the panic, the violence that went on there, [which] would somehow cloud their memories.”

“How do you verify that they’re telling you the truth?”

“It’s hard to put into words. It’s just knowing when they tell you something, whether it’s authentic or not. Let’s face it, killing someone is not a common experience. You can read all the murder mysteries you want, and you know that as graphic as some of these detective novels may try to be, you just know they’re not for real because you can tell the guy’s never been there. He’s just making it up. Whether you watch some of these slasher films, or whatever. You know that’s just Hollywood. This doesn’t really happen that way. You just know. So if a guy’s making it up, or if he’s just read about it, I just have a sense that he’s not being straight with me.”

I said his strategy was not practical for the police, who need to know times and dates and places to establish accountability.

Ted agreed but countered that his approach was “a way of opening someone up. If a guy has insulated himself from the reality of what he did but can discuss it in the third person or, better yet, in the first person, without getting specific, you’re gradually getting closer to the truth. I mean, everything he knows.”

In the short while we had left, I needed Ted to paint a clearer picture of how his confessions, should he willingly offer them up, would best proceed from his point of view.

“I guess that you have to be able to give him something,” he said, neatly articulating the core of the matter, at least from his perspective. Then he turned the question around. “Let’s say you have the Green River guy locked up for assault or something. How would you go to him? I mean, how could you approach such a person to confess to something which obviously carried some pretty heavy penalties?”

“Seems like a pretty impossible situation,” I said. Then I offered a hypothetical case that exactly paralleled Ted’s. “We [want to talk to] a guy that’s been under a death sentence for a while, but we’re faced with this situation. We have several crimes where the circumstantial evidence is pretty well focused on the guy, [but we don’t know] how to operate that type of interview.”

“You see,” Ted said, “everything is complicated by the demands of the criminal justice system; everyone is more or less required to play the game. If the guy on Death Row has appeals, he’d simply be foolish to talk. The system is not really geared to getting at the truth. It gets at approximations of the truth.”

There wasn’t much more to say. Bundy had groomed me on how to pull information from him in the event that he did decide to give up his terrible secrets, for which he expected “something” in return. I’d explicitly told him that I could be no part of any such deal. We filled the remaining minutes in an unfocused discussion of several topics – Ted took the opportunity to denounce pornography, as he often did, as a pernicious evil responsible, at least in part, for shaping his behavior – then I left him to pursue his desperate endgame, which I knew was doomed to fail.

Chapter Eleven

Terrible Secrets

A new Bob occupied the Florida governor’s mansion by the spring of 1988, Republican Bob Martinez, who understood as well as Democrat Bob Graham had that executing Ted Bundy would be an overwhelmingly popular act among his constituents. It was a nonpartisan issue. All that Martinez required was the opportunity to make it happen.

Ted wrote his appeals attorneys a letter, outlining his plan to offer Martinez a deal — full confessions for an extended stay of execution. Polly Nelson flew at once from Washington, D.C., to Florida and the prison, where, as she put it, “I needed to hear what a confession would sound like.”

Bundy began by refusing to discuss either of his Florida cases, because, he told her, “I owe that to the people who believe in my innocence,” by which he probably meant that his wife, Carole Boone, was still useful to him and there was no reason as yet for her to learn how she’d been cruelly used.

Nelson asked him if stories that he’d killed a hundred or more victims were true. “He actually chuckled and shook his head at the naiveté of non-murderers,” she reports. “’They have no idea what it takes to do one, what it takes out of you’.”

Nelson then asked if 35, a number she’d also seen in print, was an accurate victim count. “He finally nodded and mumbled, ‘Yes,’ ” she says in her book.

Ted told her of driving through the Idaho countryside, scouting for good spots to be alone with a victim, when he came upon a hitchhiker of about 15. Though he had not been actively hunting, he decided not to pass up this opportunity. After glancing in the rearview mirror for traffic, he pulled up and let her in.

She tried to begin a conversation. “He had to act fast,” says Nelson. “He did not like his victims to talk, he did not want to get to know them, he did not want to know they were real. He reached back for his tire iron and hit her over the head. She slumped in the seat, but awoke soon afterward, moaning. He knocked her out again.”

The teenager apparently regained consciousness once more. Ted told Nelson that he drove her to a remote site with which he already was familiar. There, he ordered her to undress and get down on all fours so he could take Polaroids of her.

“Then he got behind her, slung a noose around her neck, and strangled her as he raped her,” according to Nelson. “He continued to reassure her he would let her go, and she had seemed to believe him. He said he’d felt a little sad that he could not let her go, but she would be able to identify him, of course. Afterward, he pulled her body deeper into the woods and, the next day, drove back to take more pictures and to cut her body into pieces.”

The lawyer was overwhelmed by her client’s confession. “It was the absolute misogyny of his crime that stunned me, his manifest rages against women, that left me no place to retreat to,” she writes. “He had no compassion for this victim at all. It wasn’t that Ted took sadistic pleasure in telling his story, it was just that he was totally engrossed in the details. His murders were his life’s accomplishments. To him, each recollection was a profound illustration of his skill, his willingness to go forward, his good luck. There had been no guarantees — to Ted, each completed murder seemed like a small miracle.”

***

In July, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals sustained Judge Sharp’s decision. In November, Nelson and Coleman petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review the circuit court’s ruling. Legally, this was Bundy’s last gasp. If the high court refused to intervene, his life was forfeit.

The justices didn’t tarry. On Tuesday, January 17, 1989, they refused to grant a writ of certiorari, effectively closing the door on any further legal maneuvers. By noon that day, Governor Martinez signed Ted’s last death warrant. Bundy had a week to live. In a macabre coincidence, his execution would nearly coincide with yet another Super Bowl, 11 years after he ran amok upstairs at Chi Omega.

The Supreme Court’s ruling apparently came as no surprise among the lawyers. The day before it was made public — the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday — Diana Weiner called me in Seattle to ask if, in the event that her client lost his appeal, would I be interested in flying down to the prison for a “debriefing” with Ted on Friday, January 20?

Next day, the question became an invitation: Would I come down on Friday to interview Bundy? Weiner also went to Governor Martinez with Ted’s proposal. Late Wednesday, in Tallahassee, Martinez vehemently rejected their offer. “We are not going to have the system manipulated,” the governor fumed. “For him to be negotiating for his life over the bodies of others is despicable.”

My notes from speaking with Diana Weiner before heading to Florida to “debrief” Bundy in 1989. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Besides Ted and Weiner, the only other person I knew who thought it was a good idea to spare his life was my mentor and friend, Dr. Liebert, who even went on television to suggest Bundy be shipped to the Washington state prison at Walla Walla, where Liebert and colleagues could pull on their hip boots and wade around in Ted’s inner swamp. Had Bundy accepted the plea bargain deal that Larry Simpson and Bob Dekle offered him 10 years earlier, no date with Old Sparky would have been imminent, and such an in-depth research project might well have been possible. But feelings ran high against Ted in 1989, and the voice of science proved unpersuasive.

There were, as well, two more reasons Bundy’s plan wouldn’t work. After so many years of peddling falsehoods, Ted had deep credibility issues. Understanding that, he planned initially to give up cases in which there seemed to be a chance at recovering his victim’s remains. This strategy excluded, for example, any of the murdered women previously identified at Issaquah or Taylor Mountain.

The problem was that after 15 years, the earth around his dump sites had in some cases shifted dramatically, displacing the bones, dispersing them or burying them deep below the surface. Then there was the time of year to consider. In January, the high country Bundy usually chose for victim disposal typically was frozen hard and/or buried under ice and snow. No victims would be recovered between Friday, when Bundy started talking, and Tuesday morning, the appointed hour of his execution. Nor have any since been found.

***

I had hopes for our encounter, but no expectations. After I refused to make any representations on Ted’s behalf to Governor Martinez but also agreed, immediately, to keep the content of our conversation private for the duration of the current crisis, we began to talk on Friday the 20th.

Unlike the calm of the hours I’d spent with Ted in 1984 and 1988, the stress in the room felt like a train wreck about to happen. Bundy insisted that Diana Weiner be on hand, so under prison rules we couldn’t meet around a table but only across a Plexiglas barrier. Weiner and Bill Hagmaier sat with me; on the other side was Ted with a couple of officers at his back.

For reasons he’d repeatedly articulated in our meetings past, Ted couldn’t just start talking. Afraid of being overheard — as he’d earlier acknowledged, this was not rational — he took my tape recorder and pushed it and his mouth against the speaking hole, and our conversation began. When he got to the more sensitive material he feared the officers might overhear, he scribbled it on a piece of paper for me to read and whispered low into my machine.

The painstaking and detailed interview prepping of the previous year was now just another artifact of our relationship, a memory. There’d be no time to gradually extract the story from him. Missing, too, was the vast audience Ted believed had raptly awaited his disclosures. After a decade and more, few people, including survivors, actually cared what he had to say. I did, because I was a cop. Just about everyone else had moved on. Only Ted had not.

Still, it was the defining moment in my long history with Bundy when he whispered “Georgann Hawkins” through the voice hole, wrote down her name, and said “the Hawkins girl’s head was severed and taken up the road about 25 to 50 feet yards and buried in a location about 10 yards west of the road on a rocky hillside.”

A map of the Issaquah crime scene that Bundy drew for me at the prison. (From the filesof Robert D. Keppel)

———

“Where is the rest of her?” I asked.

“Where the others are.”

The Issaquah crime scene. Bundy described the railroad tracks (foreground), and a “grassy” area, just beyond the tracks on the left. (Courtesy of the King County archives)

———

Although we had long assumed that the third victim – actually the first victim – dumped on the Issaquah hillside was the pretty coed who’d disappeared from behind her University of Washington sorority house in June of 1974, for Ted to unequivocally, if briefly, confirm it was she, and that he had killed as well as “the others,” Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, was a profound breakthrough. It was the first time Bundy had ever openly shared his terrible secrets. Suddenly he was no longer an alleged or suspected serial killer, but a confessed one, and just as suddenly three of my longest-pending cases were solved.

I felt joy, relief and amazement but dared not betray anything. After taking a moment to regain my equilibrium, I asked how Hawkins was killed.

Ted describes the moment he placed Hawkins in the car. (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (1:58).

“Well,” he replied, “we can go through it stepbystep.”

“Okay, why don’t we take Hawkins and go through it stepbystep?” I answered, remembering my lessons from Dr. Liebert.

Ted closed his eyes and kept them closed until his story was told.

He described how he’d been out with his crutches and a briefcase about one o’clock in the morning, moving along an alley when Hawkins came into view, walking toward him. He asked her if she’d help him get the briefcase to his car; she agreed, so they walked on together until they reached the Volkswagen, parked in an unlit dirt lot. Positioned on the ground, just behind the right rear tire, were a tire iron and a pair of handcuffs.

As they approached the VW, Ted said, he reached for the tire iron, slammed it down onto her head, then pushed Hawkins’ unconscious body into the car, handcuffed her and quickly drove away to the Issaquah hillside. The route took him south on Interstate 5 from the university to the I-90 intersection, where he headed east. His destination was on the north side of the freeway, but instead of taking the next exit and doubling back, Bundy said he risked arrest by cutting across several lanes of traffic and then disappeared up into the wooded hillside.

His dazed and bleeding victim gradually was regaining consciousness.

“One of the things that makes it a little bit hard,” he told me, “is that at this point she was quite lucid, talking about things. It’s not funny, but it’s odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances. And she said that she had a Spanish test the next day, and she said she thought I had taken her to help tutor her for her Spanish test. It’s kind of an odd thing to say.”

He sighed, eyes still tightly closed.

“The long and short of it,” he continued, “was that I again knocked her unconscious, strangled her and drug her about 10 yards into the small grove of trees that were there.”

“What did you strangle her with?” I asked.

“Cord.”

“Cord?”

“An old piece of rope.”

“Is this something you brought there with you?”

“Yeah, something that was in my car.”

“Okay. Then what happened?”

“Then I packed up my car. By this time it was almost dawn.”

Whoa! Ted had skipped about six hours there. I called him on it.

“Well, I skipped over some stuff there,” he said, “and we’ll just have to get back to it sometime. It’s just too hard for me to talk about it right now.”

Of course we didn’t get back to it, although I tried several times. Ted obviously feared that if what he’d done to Georgann Hawkins’ corpse somehow became publicly known, he surely wouldn’t survive past Tuesday morning. So the details of his long night in the woods with the dead girl will remain for all time among his terrible secrets.

I’d read in The Only Living Witness that Ted often recoiled in the aftermath of a murder, not so much in disgust at his own degeneracy, but out of amazement at his risk taking and fear of detection. The Hawkins homicide was such a case, he said.

“I was just absolutely kind of scared to death,” he said, “shocked, horrified. I went down the road throwing everything that I had: the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothes, just tossing them out the window. I was in a sheer state of panic. It’s like you break out in a fever, or something.”

“Did you throw away some of your own stuff?” I asked.

“Oh, sure,” he answered. “I threw away the briefcase and the crutches and all that stuff. And the crowbar, everything. The handcuffs. I’d get mad at myself a few weeks later because I’d have to go out and buy another pair. I mean, that’s not comical, but that’s what would happen.”

Bundy said that much of his fear stemmed from the fact that less than two weeks before, he’d prowled the same University District neighborhood late at night, using the same ruse.

“I was drunk,” he explained, “and I was just babbling on. I told her I worked in Olympia, that I lived in a rooming house. I reached all the way to the car and just [thought] No, I don’t want to do it. I said, ‘Thank you. See you later,’ and she walked away.

“After the Hawkins thing I was just paranoid as hell that this girl would say, ‘You know, something weird happened to me a couple of weeks ago. This guy came along with crutches and asked me to help him. He took me to a Volkswagen and said he worked in Olympia and lived here in the University District.’

“How many people could that apply to?”

The afternoon after he abducted Hawkins, Ted returned on his bicycle to the University District parking lot where he’d positioned his VW the night before. He hadn’t been able to locate one of Hawkins’ shoes and wanted to see if it had fallen off as he assaulted her with the tire iron. The area was swarming with cops, he said.

“I’d seen whole streams of them driving around all over the place,” he remembered, “but they were concentrating in places like the nearby park.”

Bundy found the shoe, a white patent leather clog, in the parking lot, as well as her pair of white hoop earrings. “So I surreptitiously gathered them up,” he said, “and rode off.”

He said he also returned to the Issaquah hillside that day, and then twice again.

“Were you going back to that scene to commit sex acts?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

His third visit to the dump site came two weeks after the murder.

“What for?” I asked.

Ted gave me one of the creepiest answers I’ve ever heard in an interview.

“Just to see what was going on,” he said, hesitantly. “You know, there’s a lot of psychological stuff going on here that we just don’t have time for. I mean, we could spend days explaining it. I’m sure you’re familiar with, you know, the aftereffects. This is why I’m so keen on the staking out of crime scenes of this type afterwards. Fascination with death, necrophilia, all that. But of course you know in June, after a week, what with all the local wildlife, there’s not much left.”

***

Bundy told me that he hadn’t intended to discuss any specifics with me that day and resisted when I asked for details of Donna Gail Manson’s fate. For the time being, all he would say was “she’s up in the mountains,” the encounter with her was “nightmarish,” and “I have trouble piecing it together.”

According to Ted, his victim total in Washington state was 11, including Kathy Parks. Now that he’d acknowledged the Manson homicide, I knew of eight victims. Who were the other three? Bundy wasn’t saying — he had trouble remembering any of his victims’ names — but did indicate his anonymous victims all had been buried, which accounted for the fact we knew nothing of them. One of the three was buried in King County, he said. They all remain anonymous today. Their graves have never been found.

Bundy said he began killing in 1972 and then quickly said no, it was 1974. I went down a list of possible victims with him, including Kathy Devine and Ann Marie Burr. He denied responsibility for either. I had long suspected Ted was responsible for the 1966 attack on two stewardesses who lived in the Queen Anne section of Seattle. One of the women survived her injuries; the other didn’t. Ted insisted he knew nothing about the crimes.

The only topic Ted really wanted to discuss was whether I would speak out in favor of suspending his execution in order to learn more from, and about, him. I told him that my boss, Washington state Attorney General Ken Eikenberry — and one of Ted’s old acquaintances — had announced he firmly opposed any deal to extend Bundy’s life. I added that for my part, keeping him alive a while to fully debrief him was an appealing notion, but that I was a cop and not a policymaker. I dealt with situations as I found them, not how I wished they might be.

There was fear in his eyes, and he began to cry.

“I’m not asking for clemency.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:27).

“I’m not asking for clemency,” he said between sobs. “I’m not asking to get off. I’m not asking for sympathy. But I draw the line. We need a period of time: 60, 90 days, a few months, systematically going over with everybody, bottom to top, everything I can think of. Get it all down. You can use it as you see fit. But that’s how it is.”

The antagonism his deal proposal had provoked in Florida and Washington and elsewhere, plus my implacable neutrality on the issue, had put panic in his heart. He almost pleaded with me.

“Bob,” he said, “they’re going to get me sooner or later. You don’t need to worry about that. But you’ve been after this for 15 years. A couple of months is not going to make any difference.”

“Bob, they’re going to get me.” (Source: From recorded interviews conducted by Robert D. Keppel) (0:20).

Next day, Saturday, the newspapers reported that Ted had cleared 11 cases with investigators. They didn’t get their news from me.

On Sunday, he gave up eight murders in Utah to Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office. Before Bundy spent his half-hour with Couch, the Utah cops were pretty certain of three murder victims: Melissa Smith, Debra Kent, and Laura Aime. Bundy told Couch that he’d also killed 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox on October 2, 1974, and 15-year-old Susan Curtis in late June of 1975. The other three victims are unknown. Smith and Aimee are the only two Utah victims whose bodies have been recovered.

***

Mike Fisher brought with him Matt Lindvall, an investigator for the Vail Police Department, to interrogate Ted about the disappearance of Julie Cunningham, a pretty, 26-year-old ski instructor who vanished from the streets of Vail late on the afternoon of March 15, 1975. By chance, Lindvall had known Cunningham. He had also been the night manager at the Vail Holiday Inn on the night of January 30, 1977, when the fugitive Bundy had canvassed the motel’s lobby, looking for a ride into Denver.

Julie Cunningham’s missing person poster. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Ted told Fisher and Lindvall how he’d used his crutches ploy to lure Cunningham to his VW in a Vail parking lot. As usual, the Bug’s front passenger-side seat had been removed. He clubbed her on the head with his tire iron and started driving west with Cunningham’s handcuffed figure slumped on the floorboards to his right, the same way he’d transported Georgann Hawkins to his Issaquah dump site in June of the previous year.

As seemed to happen fairly frequently with Ted’s victims, Cunningham regained consciousness along the way.

“I can’t say exactly what the roads were like,” Bundy told the Colorado lawmen, “as everything was pretty much a blur. I think I was intoxicated. Under these circumstances there’s a high degree of stress, kind of distorts my memory somewhat. That and the passage of time, so everything is not crystal clear.

Ted was asked what Cunningham said as she came to.

“I have a hard time coming up with exact words,” he said. “I can remember among other things that she was just asking me who I was and all. You know, where I was from, that kind of thing."

He drove Cunningham west about 90 miles on Interstate 70 to the little community of Rifle, Colorado, where he turned north on State 13, until he found a dirt turnoff that afforded him the privacy he required.

“What happened when you stopped the car?”

Ted went silent for a few moments.

“I’m not pausing for melodramatic effects,” he explained. “This is the hard part. After talking with Bob Keppel yesterday I felt I’d been about nine rounds with Mike Tyson. It’s opening up stuff that I’m certainly not proud of, to say the least, but it’s more distressing and disturbing than I can do justice to . . . See if I can work at this way.

“She’d been asking me to loosen these handcuffs. And I did so. I got out of the car to try to figure where things were. Walked away from the car and apparently she’d slipped out of the handcuffs and begun to exit the car. Of course she didn’t know any more than I where we were, maybe less. I couldn’t even now or then assess [her] injuries, but I imagine she wasn’t fully able; I mean, after being knocked unconscious.

“But anyway, I noticed her opening the door and getting out of the car…It becomes such a blur. I can tell you it was a struggle, and [I] knocked her unconscious again.”

“What happened after you knocked her unconscious on this occasion?” Lindvall asked. “Is that where it ended?”

Bundy interrupted the interview with a question of his own. Did Lindvall know Cunningham? “I got the feeling that you did,” Ted said.

Lindvall confirmed that he did know Cunningham. At one time they had lived in the same apartment complex.

“It hit him hard,” Lindvall recalls. “Ted slid right out of his chair. It gave him a kind of strange bond with me.”

“I just, I could sense the emotion,” Bundy said.

“Well,” replied Lindvall. “It’s emotional pain whether I would have known her or not.”

“Sure,” Ted replied. “I mean, nevertheless.”

It was a peculiarly awkward moment for both men.

“Please,” said Lindvall, “don’t let that affect how you feel I may feel towards you. Because I told you I have no problem with our discussion.”

“Sure, well,” said Bundy.

“I wasn’t a police officer at the time. Did she survive that second blow?”

“I believe she probably did,” Ted answered. “I’m pretty sure she did, but I can’t say for certain.”

“And then what?”

Bundy said he used one of his several lengths of cord to strangle Julie Cunningham to death.

“Was she on the ground?”

“Yes.”

“Was she face down or face up?”

“It’s so pitch black. I mean, some of these visions and images are not clear…. I’m having a hard time even articulating what I remember. I just want to be able to find the words. I want you to note this in your mind, so we can come back to it. 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. So why don’t we jump forward a little bit, and then we can come back?”

As with Georgann Hawkins, Ted would never finish the story of what he did to Julie Cunningham. All he would add was that he left her, naked, on the ground, and took away her clothes and personal effects, which he later deposited in a Salt Lake City Goodwill bin. Bundy also said he revisited the dump site approximately six weeks later to bury her. It took him half a day of searching to relocate it. He said he found Cunningham as he’d left her, partially mummified by the cold, dry weather, and surprisingly undisturbed by the animals.

“What took place before you buried her?”

“Nothing.”

The burial required about 45 minutes, Ted said, then he covered the grave with heavy rocks and some branches and drove away, never to return, according to Ted.

***

Easily most surprised among the homicide detectives Bundy summoned to the Florida State Prison that weekend was Russ Reneau, chief investigator for the Idaho state attorney general. Until I called Reneau, relaying Ted’s invitation to come talk to him about murders in his state, Reneau had no clue that Bundy had victimized Idaho, too.

Ted had two cases for him. The first was a white female hitchhiker he said he picked up, murdered and dumped into a river. He had no name for this victim but said he believed she was an Idahoan.

The second was a young girl he’d picked up outside her school in Pocatello in May of 1975. He took her to his room at a Holiday Inn, Ted said, where he murdered her in the bathtub. Then he drove her body north of the city and put it into a river. Bundy was able to supply a sufficient amount of detail — particularly facts from what the girl had told him about herself and her family — for Reneau to established that she was 12-year-old Lynette Culver of Pocatello.

As part of his confession, Ted recalled how in Pocatello the night before he killed Culver, he’d sneaked into the upper floors of a college dormitory and was discovered and escorted out of the building. He didn’t share with Reneau what he had hoped to do in the dorm, had he not been interrupted. Less than two years later in Tallahassee, upstairs in the Chi O house, he’d rampage room to room with a club and his panty-hose ligatures. Then he picked up another 12-year-old child, Kim Leach, and murdered her.

***

On Sunday, the 22nd, I was given another half-hour with Ted, our last encounter, as it turned out. He had been on a steady high for days and now was drained, resigned, and, he told me, more interested in getting some rest than anything else. It was after nine in the evening. With the Big Sleep looming just 34 hours away, I would have thought Ted would try to savor every second left to him, tired or not.

I was aware he’d considered suicide, as well as faking mental illness so his lawyers could claim he was incompetent to be executed. Three state psychiatrists were brought to the prison to examine him just in case. Maybe he still was contemplating such desperate measures, but the Ted I confronted for the last time seemed to have abandoned all hope. I know he later did some praying and talked to Bill Hagmaier about what might become of his soul.

I had a more temporal agenda.

Taylor Mountain. “Are you going to give me a hint where the rest of those bodies are?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “To be honest with you, I honestly can’t tell you.”

“Were they dumped there?”

“If the bodies aren’t there it’s because, I think, the animals took everything.”

I’m certain he was lying. By this time, Bill Hagmaier had relayed to me Bundy’s admission that he’d kept four of his victims’ heads at his rooming house. I think he decapitated his dead victims, buried their bodies, and kept their skulls as trophies, or talismans, or whatever.

I asked about Janice Ott’s bicycle. He said he left it in a poor neighborhood of Seattle and that undoubtedly some child had appropriated it long ago.

“How about Donna Manson?” I asked. “Where’s she?”

Bundy said her body was buried further up Taylor Mountain but that her head was not.

“Where is it?” I wanted to know.

“It’s nowhere.”

“It’s nowhere?”

“Well, I’m not trying to be flippant. It’s just nowhere. It’s in a category by itself.”

He stopped then said, “I can see the headlines now.”

I motioned toward Bill Hagmaier. “He wants to know,” I said, “and I want to know for my own good.”

“Well, it was incinerated,” Bundy finally admitted. “It was just an exception, a strange exception, but it was incinerated.”

“Where did you incinerate it?”

“Ah,” Ted responded. He laughed a little laugh.

“C’mon partner,” I said. “These are things I don’t know about you.”

“This is probably the disposal method of preference among those who get away with it,” he said, adding that it was the most bizarre thing he’d ever done, “and I’ve been associated with some bizarre shit.”

“Tell me about it. What the hell happened?”

“Well, I promised myself I would never tell this, because, I thought, of all the things I did to this poor woman, this is probably the one she is least likely to forgive. Poor Liz.”

“Where?”

“In her fireplace.”

“Burn it all up?” I asked, straining to comprehend something so grotesque.

“Down to the last ash,” he confirmed, “and in a fit of paranoia and cleanliness, you know, just vacuumed down all the ashes.”

I’ll never know if Ted could top that story. We spent the remaining few minutes going back over his Washington state killing career. This time, he said he murdered his first victim, a hitchhiker, near Olympia, in May of 1973, as best he could recall, consistent with what he’d told Bill Hagmaier. But he shared no further details. If he was telling the truth, this young woman died anonymously and remained that way. “I never heard anything more about her,” he offered.

Once more I asked about Ann Marie Burr, and once more he vehemently, but unconvincingly, denied responsibility.

I had overspent my allotted 30 minutes, and Mike Fisher, irate, was standing outside ready to ask his last set of questions about Caryn Campbell.

So I just blurted, “When and where was your first murder?”

“One more question, right?” Ted said.

“I was just curious.”

“Well,” he said in his final words to me, “we’ll have to bring that up, do that some other time, you know, if there is another time.”

Chapter Twelve

Aftermath

Following Bundy’s execution early Tuesday morning, January 24, 1989, the FBI convoked a conference at its Quantico training facility, where local and state law enforcement officials with an interest in the case met to share information, ask and answer questions, and try to address outstanding issues.

The meeting hit a bump when Bill Hagmaier of the BSU disclosed that Bundy had told him he’d kept a stash of souvenir victims’ photos at his rooming house in Salt Lake City. He told Hagmaier that the pictures were hidden in a utility area when Jerry Thompson had come with a warrant to search the residence, essentially the same story Ted had given his lawyer, Polly Nelson, in confidence.

Thompson and Mike Fisher were angered to hear of this so long after the fact. Hagmaier protested his innocence. “I’m not trying to keep anything from anybody,” he said, explaining that he hadn’t felt any urgency in sharing the story and in any event he believed he should first tell the interested jurisdiction, Salt Lake County, and that is what he did.

A page of my notes from the post-execution FBI conference on Bundy. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)

———

Late on Sunday night, the 20th, after I and then Mike Fisher concluded our last interviews with Bundy, Hagmaier had conducted a state-by-state victim review with Ted. Here is the list of killings Ted acknowledged to Bill:

Washington: Eleven, including Kathy Parks. Three victims were unnamed and remain so.

Utah: Eight, with three still unidentified. Among the Utah victims, only Melissa Smith and Laura Aime have been found.

Colorado: Three. In a last-minute taped conversation with prison warden Jim Barton, Bundy gave up 25-year-old Denise Oliverson of Grand Junction, whom he said he murdered on the 6th of April, 1975. Ted told Barton he put Oliverson’s dead body in the Colorado River.

Oregon: Two. Both unidentified.

Idaho: Two. One, the hitchhiker, unidentified.

California: One. Unidentified.

Florida: Three.

The total, then, that Ted conceded to law enforcement officials was 30, 10 of whom are still complete mysteries to us. In his taped conversation with Barton, Bundy also denied killing anyone in the several states where he was a suspect in unsolved killings. These were: Illinois, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont.

None of us, of course, were going to take Bundy’s word for anything. Thirty seems to be a floor figure for his number of homicides, and I believe he probably was good for a substantial number more. However, and despite a lot of suspicions, in more than two decades since his execution no one has conclusively connected Ted with any further homicides anywhere.

***

In 1992, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Washington. My examining committee included Charles Lee Smith, chief justice of the Washington state supreme court; Dr. Reay, the King County medical examiner; Daris Swindler, who had identified Janice Ott and Denise Naslund for us; and Elizabeth Loftis, an expert in eyewitness testimony at the University of Washington, who, coincidentally, had been a defense expert at Bundy’s 1976 Utah trial for kidnapping Carol DaRonch.

I was now a Doctor of Murder.

Seven years later, after 17 years as the attorney general’s chief investigator, I retired from active law enforcement and entered the academic phase of my career. Besides publishing, consulting widely on serial-murder investigations, and giving the occasional lecture, I accepted a number of teaching appointments over the years, beginning with the auxiliary faculty of the School of Sociology at the University of Washington; then the criminal justice department at Seattle University; Sam Houston State College in Huntsville, Texas; and, most recently, the Henry C. Lee College of Criminal Justice and Forensic Science at the University of New Haven. For a number of years I also delivered an annual paper at the Centre International De Sciences Criminelles Et Penales in Paris.

***

On November 30, 2001, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert was pleased to learn from his detectives that at about three that afternoon they’d arrested Gary Leon Ridgway, 51, at his workplace, Kenworth Truck Company in Renton, where Ridgway was a painter, in connection with the murders of the first four victims believed killed by the Riverman. The crucial connection was microscopic bits of paint that connected the victims to Kenworth and thus to Ridgway.

He ultimately confessed to 48 murders and is thought to be responsible for at least that number more. Unlike Bundy, when Ridgway was offered life in prison in exchange for full confessions, he grabbed the deal. He’s now in permanent residence at the Washington state penitentiary in Walla Walla, where John Liebert once had hoped Ted would be sent.

Ted’s scorecard as a Green River killings consultant was mixed. He’d guessed that the killer was in his early 20s back in 1984; Ridgway was already 35. On the other hand, Ted was right when he inferred that Riverman was picking up not only prostitutes, but also runaways, and that he had developed approaches that work equally well with both groups to put them at ease. Ridgway’s secret weapon was a photo of his son.

Bob Keppel on the scene, circa 1978. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

———

Keppel on the set of “The Riverman,” a made-for-television film about the Green River murders that first aired on A&E in 2004. He is shown on location in Nova Scotia. (From the library of Robert D. Keppel)

———

And, yes, as Ted knew, the Green River killer was a necrophile. “That would be a good day,” Ridgway told the police, “an evening or after I got off work and go have sex with her. And that’d last for one or two days…till the flies came. And I’d bury ’em and cover ’em up.”

Maybe Ted also was right that there is a brotherhood of serial killers who recognize one another on instinct, as any predator might. He made it pretty clear to me that they were his tribe.

Ted’s IQ was measured at 128 in a prison test. Gary Ridgway’s reportedly is 82. Bundy was caught just 3 ½ years after his first known murder; Ridgway, though he was first brought to police attention in 1983 and thereafter kept popping up as a Green River suspect, survived on the loose for at least 18 years.

Ridgway was, by these indices, as well as his overall known body count, easily the more successful of the two, relative intelligence notwithstanding.

On the other hand, Gary Ridgway could not have gotten himself hired as a janitor at the University of Washington, while Ted, had he wished to stalk streetwalkers and throwaway kids, would I’m sure have made himself just as invisible as Ridgway did along the Pacific Highway South strip. Certainly nobody at the low-rent joint where he picked up Brenda Ball thought he looked out of place, although much later one of the bar patrons would remember a guy with his arm in a sling.

But I think what distinguishes Ted goes beyond total kills, or the relative sophistication of his murders, or even his high-end victim pool that so impressed the psychologist Art Norman back in the 1980s. Like the best detectives I’ve ever known, Ted was a thinker and a formidable force.

Ridgway was a shoplifter, Ted was a jewel thief. Ridgway would not have sent me back to college. Ted did. A born killer, perverted, deluded, an offense to the soul, Bundy also rewrote my narrative of the criminal mind and transformed me as a cop. I’m not especially grateful for that, but it was an education I wouldn’t have missed.

Epilog

DNA

DNA analysis did not exist as a forensic tool for law enforcement in the years that Ted Bundy was active as a killer. Had DNA screening been available to us, we certainly would have shortened Ted’s career. But now DNA just might give us a chance to solve some of those possible Bundy cases from long ago.

In 2010, the cold case squad at the Tacoma, Washington, police department began a review of the Ann Marie Burr case. In the course of their work, the detectives turned up a tissue sample of unspecified type and origin that they hoped might yield a DNA print of the young girl’s abductor.

When Tacoma PD discovered that Bundy’s DNA profile had never been entered in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, and, in fact, no one seemed to know if there was a preserved sample of Ted’s DNA in any form, the detectives hit the phones, calling all the old jurisdictions where Bundy had been detained or stood trial, hoping that somehow, somewhere, such a specimen was extant.

They finally were told of an old vial of Ted’s blood that for some reason had been kept in a desk drawer for decades and was available for testing. It turned out that while much of the sample was spoiled, some flecks of dried blood near the mouth of the test tube were well preserved and yielded a complete profile, which has since been entered into the CODIS database and is now available to law enforcement agencies around the country.

The questioned tissue in the Burr case was too old and corrupted to prove or disprove Bundy was her abductor. But because of the creativity and hard work of the Tacoma cops, the possibility now exists that someday we may shed further light on the enduring mystery of Ted Bundy and his murder career.

BUNDY TIMELINE

GC = Chevron Gas Card Purchase

PC = Personal Check on Rainier Bank

Crimes are highlighted. Bundy was convicted of, or confessed to, all of them.

Note: Regular gas cost approximately 50-70 cents a gallon throughout this period. Bundy’s VW got about 25 mpg.

1974

Residence:

4143 12th Avenue NE

Seattle

January:

Second, Wednesday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle. Wearing a beard.

Third, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $3.75.

Fourth, Friday:

Between midnight and 1 a.m., Mary Adams (pseudonym), 18, is attacked with club and speculum in her basement bedroom, four blocks from Bundy’s rooming house.

Seventh, Monday:

PC – University of Puget Sound Law School. Also, UPS bookstore.

Ninth, Wednesday:

PC – Landlord. GC – Seattle - $4.15.

Eleventh, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Fourteenth, Monday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Fifteenth, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $2.78.

Sixteenth, Wednesday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Seventeenth, Thursday:

PC – University of Washington bookstore. Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Eighteenth, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twentieth, Sunday:

Shaves off beard.

Twenty-first, Monday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twenty-second, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $1.50 (parking).

Twenty-third, Wednesday:

GC – Seattle - $3.00.

Twenty-fifth, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twenty-ninth, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $3.46. Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Thirtieth, Wednesday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

February:

First, Friday:

In the early morning hours Lynda Ann Healy, 21, disappears from her basement bedroom in the University District, 15 blocks from Bundy’s residence. He and Healy both cash checks at the local Safeway (49th and Brooklyn) on January 31st.
GC – Seattle - $2.15. Ted attends evening classes at UPS.

Fourth, Monday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Sixth, Wednesday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Seventh, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $2.35.

Eleventh, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $4.50 (8.9 gals.).

Thirteen, Wednesday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Fifteenth, Friday:

Uses credit card to buy a pair of shoes at the Nordstrom’s University Store in Seattle. Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twenty-second, Friday

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twenty-seventh, Wednesday:

GC – Seattle - $4.35. Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

March:

First, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Fourth, Monday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Fifth, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $3.00 (6 gals.).

Sixth, Wednesday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Seventh, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $3.10.

Eighth, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Ninth, Saturday:

Uses credit card to buy shoes Nordstrom’s Northgate. (Seattle)

Eleventh, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $4.75. (Two purchases). Fails to pick up Unemployment check in Seattle.

Eleventh or Twelfth:

Helps Liz Kendall (pseudonym) move.

Twelfth, Tuesday:

Donna Gail Manson, 19, disappears from the campus of Evergreen State College in Olympia about 7 p.m.

Fourteenth, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $3.11.

Fifteenth, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Eighteenth, Monday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Nineteenth, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $4.30.

Twenty-second, Friday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Twenty-fifth, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $3.50.

Twenty-sixth, Tuesday:

GC- Seattle – 80 cents (parking).

Twenty-seventh, Wednesday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Twenty-ninth, Friday:

GC – Seattle - $3.55.

April:

First, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $4.55 (8.4 gallons).

Third, Wednesday:

Attends evening classes at UPS.

Fifth, Friday:

PC – Landlord.

Ninth, Tuesday:

Drops out of UPS law school.

Tenth, Wednesday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Eleventh, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $6.05 – (9.4 gallons. Two purchases).

Twelfth, Friday:

GC – Seattle - $3.56 – (6.5 gallons).

Fifteenth, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $3.35.

Sixteenth, Tuesday:

Has new muffler put on his VW.

Seventeenth, Wednesday:

GC – Seattle - $1.32.

Seventeenth, Wednesday:

Shortly after 10 p.m., Susan Rancourt, 18, disappears from the campus of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. Bundy is visiting an old boyhood friend in Ellensburg at the time.

Eighteenth, Thursday:

Deposits unemployment checks.

Nineteenth, Friday:

Liz’s birthday, buys her a bouquet at Ness Flowers.

Twenty-second, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $5.12.

Twenty-fourth, Wednesday:

Picks up unemployment check in Seattle.

Twenty-fifth, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $3.75 (7.4 gallons).

Twenty-sixth, Friday:

Mails application to University of Utah College of Law.

Twenty-ninth, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $3.75 (7.4 gallons).

May

Second, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $3.62.

Third, Friday:

GC – Seattle - $3.25. Bundy’s first day at the State department of emergency services in Olympic National Park.

Sixth, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $2.40 (4 gallons).

Sixth, Monday:

Roberta Kathy Parks, 22, vanishes from the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Ninth, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $4.95.

Twelfth, Sunday:

GC – Seattle - $8.30 (Two purchases).

Thirteenth, Monday:

Requests readmission to UPS law school. Readmitted, but doesn’t show up.

Fourteenth, Tuesday:

Buys Adidas tennis shoes at Northgate Nordstrom’s (Seattle). Buys gas in Seattle.

Fifteenth, Wednesday:

Buys gas in Tacoma.

Twentieth, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $4.77.

Twenty-second, Wednesday:

GC – Seattle - $4.32.

Twenty-fourth, Friday:

GC – Seattle - $4.05.

Twenty-seventh, Monday:

Buys dress at Southcenter Mall (Seattle) with credit card.

Twenty-eighth, Tuesday:

Buys gas in Seattle.

Twenty-ninth, Wednesday:

GC – Seattle - $4.78 (9.1 gallons).

Thirty-first, Friday:

GC – Olympia - $3.32 (6.1 gallons). Receives acceptance from the University of Utah College of Law.

June

First, Saturday:

Brenda Ball, 22, last seen at a tavern in Burien.

Later in the day, Bundy attends baptism of Liz’s daughter.

Third, Monday:

GC – Olympia - $5.36.

Fourth, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - 95 cents.

Fifth, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $4.66.

Seventh, Friday:

GC – Olympia - $5.03.

Eighth, Saturday:

PC – Landlord. Bundy visits relatives in Tacoma.

Tenth, Monday:

GC – Olympia - $4.45 (6.1 gallons).

Eleventh, Tuesday:

GC – Olympia - $5.25 (7.5 gallons).

Eleventh, Tuesday:

At approximately 1 a.m., Georgann Hawkins, 18, disappears from the alley behind her sorority at the University of Washington

Twelfth, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $3.33.

Thirteenth, Thursday:

GC – Olympia - $3.26 (5.7 gallons).

Fourteenth, Friday:

GC – Olympia - $3.20. (5.4 gallons).

Seventeenth, Monday:

GC – Olympia - $4.75 (8.3 gallons).

Nineteenth, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $4.15.

Twenty-first, Friday:

GC- Tumwater (near Olympia) - $5.00.

Twenty-third, Sunday:

Attends brunch and a daylong party. Spends night with girlfriend.

Twenty-fourth, Monday:

GC – Olympia - $4.69. Calls in sick to work.

Twenty-eighth, Friday:

GC – Olympia - $5.15.

Twenty-ninth:Saturday:

GC – Seattle - $1.35.

July

First, Monday:

GC – Seattle - $4.52. (8.8 gallons).

Second, Tuesday:

GC – Seattle - $4.85.

Third, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Olympia.

Fifth, Friday:

GC – Tumwater - $5.82.

Sixth, Saturday:

Rafting trip with Liz. GC – Yakima and North Bend- $4.47.

Seventh, Sunday:

GC – Seattle - $4.20.

Ninth, Tuesday:

GC – Olympia - $3.40 (5.9 gallons).

Tenth, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $4.85.

Eleventh, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $6.35 (Two purchases). Calls in sick to work.

Twelfth, Friday:

Calls in sick to work.

Fourteenth, Sunday:

GC – Seattle - $3.40. Has morning argument with Liz. They later have dinner together.

Fourteenth, Sunday:

“Ted” abducts Janice Ott, 23, and Denise Naslund, 19, from Lake Sammamish State Park.

Fifteenth, Monday:

Calls in sick to work.

Sixteenth, Tuesday:

Calls in sick to work.

Seventeenth, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $5.24.

Eighteenth, Thursday:

GC – Olympia - $3.50 (6.4 gallons).

Twenty-first, Sunday:

GC – Seattle - $4.49 (8.3 gallons).

Twenty-fifth, Thursday:

GC – Tacoma-$4.53.

Twenty-seventh, Saturday:

GC – Seattle - $3.88 (7.3 gallons).

Thirty-first, Wednesday:

Buys gas Seattle.

August

First, Thursday:

Buys gas Olympia.

Second, Friday:

Buys gas Olympia.

Sixth, Tuesday:

GC – Olympia - $1.78.

Seventh, Wednesday:

GC – Olympia - $5.30.

Eleventh, Sunday:

GC – Olympia - $4.85.

Fifteenth, Thursday:

GC – Tacoma - $5.20.

Eighteenth, Sunday:

GC – Olympia - $4.10.

Twenty-second, Thursday:

GC – Olympia - $3.00.

Twenty-fourth, Saturday:

GC – Olympia - $3.87

Twenty-fifth, Sunday:

GC – Olympia - $4.22 (7.6 gallons).

Twenty-eighth, Wednesday:

Resigns from department of emergency services.

Twenty-ninth, Thursday:

GC – Seattle - $5.00.

September

Second, Monday:

Departs Seattle for Salt Lake City and University of Utah College of Law.
GC – Seattle - $3.00 – Yakima, WA. - $2.85 –
Pendleton, Ore., - $2.25 – Boise, Idaho - $4.08.

Second, Monday:

Bundy kills an unknown hitchhiker near Boise and throws her body in the Snake River.

Third, Tuesday:

GC – Burley, Idaho - $3.80 (6.5 gallons).

Sixth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

New Residence:

565 First Avenue

Salt Lake City

Seventh, Saturday:

Skeletal remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund and an unidentified third victim are recovered from a hillside in Issaquah. In January of 1989, Bundy identifies the third victim as Georgann Hawkins.

Eleventh, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Seventeenth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Tremonton, Utah.

Eighteenth, Wednesday:

Flies to Seattle to bring his furniture back to Salt Lake City by truck.

Buys gas in North Bend, Yakima, Hermiston, and La Grande, Oregon; and Burley, Idaho.

Twentieth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-third, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-fourth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Murray, a Salt Lake City suburb.

Twenty-sixth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Murray.

Twenty-seventh, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirtieth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

October

First, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Second, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Second, Wednesday:

Nancy Wilcox, 16, disappears from Holladay, a suburb just south of Salt Lake City. Her remains have never been recovered.

Eleventh, Friday:

Buys gas twice in Salt Lake City.

Fourteenth, Monday:

Buys gas, Murray.

Sixteenth, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eighteenth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eighteenth, Friday:

Melissa Smith, 17, of Midvale, near Holladay, disappears. Her nude, battered and frozen remains are recovered nine days later in a mountain canyon.

Nineteenth, Saturday:

Buys gas twice, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-fifth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-sixth, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-eighth, Monday:

Buys gas, Bountiful, a suburb of Salt Lake City.

Thirty-first, Thursday:

Laura Aime, 17, disappears after attending a Halloween party south of Salt Lake City. Her nude, battered and frozen remains are recovered late in November in a mountain canyon.

November

First, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eighth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eighth, Friday:

Carol DaRonch, 19, is assaulted by “Officer Roseland” and barely escapes the attack. Twenty miles away in Bountiful, Debra Kent disappears from a Viewmont High School theater presentation. Her remains have never been recovered.

Later that evening, Bundy telephones Liz.

Sixteenth, Saturday:

Buys gas twice, Salt Lake City.

Seventeenth, Sunday:

Buys gas in Heber, Utah, southeast of Salt Lake City.

Eighteenth, Monday:

Buys gas twice, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-first, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-second: Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirtieth, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

December

Second, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Sixth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twelfth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twentieth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-fourth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirty-first, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Ogden.

1975

January

First, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Tenth, Friday:

Buys gas twice, Salt Lake City.

Twelfth, Sunday:

Buys gas twice, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, 40 miles from Aspen.

Twelfth, Sunday:

Caryn Campbell, 23, a nurse, disappears from a ski lodge near Aspen. Her nude and frozen remains are recovered from a roadside snow bank in February.

Thirteenth, Monday:

Buys gas in Green River, Utah. Calls Liz at night.

Fourteenth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirty-first, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

February

Ninth, Sunday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Tenth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eleventh, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Nineteenth, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-third, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

March

First, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fourth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fifth, Wednesday:

Skulls of Lynda Healy, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks and Brenda Ball are recovered from Taylor Mountain.

Eighth, Saturday:

Buys gas three times, Salt Lake City.

Thirteenth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fourteenth, Friday:

Buys gas, Laramie, Wyoming.

Fifteenth, Saturday:

Buys gas, Golden, Silverthorne, and Dillon, Colorado.

Fifteenth, Saturday:

Ski instructor Julie Cunningham, 26, disappears from downtown Vail, Colorado. Her remains are never recovered.

Sixteenth, Sunday:

Calls Liz from Salt Lake City.

Twentieth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-second, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-sixth, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

April

First, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Third, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fourth, Friday:

Buys gas, Golden, Colorado.

Fifth, Saturday:

Buys gas, Silverthorne, Colorado.

Sixth, Sunday:

Buys gas, Grand Junction, Colorado.

Sixth, Sunday:

Denise Oliverson, 25, disappears from Grand Junction. Her remains are never recovered.

Sixth, Sunday:

Buys gas, Green River, Utah.

Tenth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fourteenth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Seventeenth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twentieth, Sunday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-second, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-fifth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirtieth, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

May

Third, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fifth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Sixth, Tuesday:

Lynette Culver, 12, disappears from Pocatello, Idaho. Her remains are never recovered.

Twelfth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fifteenth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Eighteenth, Sunday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Thirtieth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

June

Fifth, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Sixth, Friday:

Buys gas in Idaho; Pendleton, Oregon and Ellensburg, Washington.

Twelfth, Thursday:

Buys gas in Pendleton and Boise.

Thirteenth, Friday:

Buys gas in Salt Lake City.

Twenty-seventh, Friday:

Susan Curtis, 15, disappears from the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo. Her remains are never recovered.

July

Ninth, Wednesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twelfth, Saturday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fourteenth, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Fifteenth, Tuesday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Twenty-first, Monday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

August

Eighth, Friday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City.

Sixteenth, Saturday:

Bundy is arrested.

Seventeenth, Sunday:

Bails out.

Twenty-first, Thursday:

Buys gas, Salt Lake City. Re-arrested.

Twenty-second, Friday:

Bails out again.

September

Eighth, Monday:

Carol DaRonch identifies Bundy’s Volkswagen.

October

Second, Thursday:

DaRonch identifies Bundy in lineup as her attacker. He is charged with aggravated kidnap.

November

Twentieth, Thursday:

Bundy bails out once more.

Twenty-seventh: Thursday:

On Thanksgiving Day, Bundy flies to Seattle.

December:

First-Eleventh:

Bundy is in Seattle.

Twelfth-Thirty-first:

Bundy is in Salt Lake City.

1976

January:

For most of the month, Bundy is in Seattle.

February:

Twenty-third, Monday:

Bundy’s trial for the aggravated kidnap of Carol DaRonch begins.

March:

First, Monday:

Bundy is convicted and sentenced to prison for up to 15 years.

October:

Twenty-first, Thursday:

Bundy is charged in Colorado with murder of Caryn Campbell.

1977

January:

Twenty-eighth, Friday:

Bundy is extradited to Colorado.

June:

Seventh, Tuesday:

First escape.

December:

Thirtieth, Friday:

Second escape.

1978

Residence:

The Oaks

College Avenue

Tallahassee

January:

Seventh, Saturday:

Arrives in Tallahassee.

Fifteenth, Sunday:

The Chi Omega assaults. Roommates Kathy Kleiner, 21, and Karen Chandler, 21, survive their injuries. Lisa Levy, 20, and Margaret Bowman, 21, do not. Cheryl Thomas, 21, is later attacked in her duplex.

February:

Ninth, Thursday:

Kimberly Diane Leach, 12, disappears from her Lake City, Florida, schoolyard. Her remains are recovered from beneath an abandoned hog shed in April.

Fifteenth, Wednesday:

Bundy is arrested in Pensacola.

1979

July:

Twenty-fourth, Tuesday:

In Miami, a jury finds Bundy guilty in the Chi Omega cases. He receives the death penalty.

1980

February:

Seventh, Thursday:

A jury in Orlando convicts Bundy of the Leach murder, and he is once again sentenced to death.

1989

January:

Twenty-fourth, Tuesday:

Bundy is executed at the Florida State Prison.

Bibliography

Dekle, George Robert. The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution and Execution of Ted Bundy. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2011

Kendall, Elizabeth. The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1981.

Keppel, Dr. Robert D. with William J. Birnes. The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. New York: Pocketbooks, 1995.

Lewis, Dr. Dorothy Otnow. Guilty by Reason of Insanity. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998.

Michaud, Stephen G., and Hugh Aynesworth. The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy. Irving, Texas: Authorlink Press, 1999.

Nelson, Polly. Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer. New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1994.

Reichert, David. Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2004.

Ressler, Robert K., and Tom Shachtman. Whoever Fights Monsters. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992.

About the Authors

Robert D. Keppel has more than 33 years of homicide investigation experience as a detective with the King County, Washington, sheriff’s department, and chief investigator with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. A foremost expert on serial murder, Keppel holds a Ph.D. in criminal justice from the University of Washington. He has published widely on crime and criminals in the professional and popular press, and frequently consults in multiple-murder cases around the U.S. He and his wife, Sande, live in Western Washington.Visit www.bobkeppel.com.

Stephen G. Michaud, well-known for his detailed explorations of the criminal mind, is the author or co-author of 18 books, including Ted Bundy: Conversations With a Killer, a New York Times bestseller; Dark Dreams, an Edgar finalist, and The Only Living Witness, cited by the New York Daily News as one of the 10 best true crime books ever written. He is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Visit www.stephenmichaud.com.