The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (10 page)

Once the remains of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott were identified in the dumping area discovered on September 7, their missing-person cases were officially closed and the homicide investigations opened. The media coverage intensified immediately and the public responded by inundating the department with thousands of tips. By November 1974, my desk was covered with a dense layer of call-back slips, all of which looked exactly alike. There were too many Ted suspects and too many leads to prioritize.

We finally minimized this organizational nightmare with our invention of the tip sheet. The design of the tip sheet was simple. It contained blocks to check which phase of the investigation the particular tip was about—Lake Sammamish, Ott, Naslund, Ted suspects, VW bugs, Ott’s bicycle, additional bone finds, and a miscellaneous category. There was also a space for the full name, address, and telephone number of the caller. There was even a free text area so the message-taker could summarize the nature of the information provided by the caller. Now we had a way to prioritize the significance of the call and better relate it to the different cases. This tip sheet was the prototype of clue or lead sheets that would come to be used nationwide in future serial murder investigations.

In December 1974, Roger Dunn followed up a lead involving Mary Denton, another young woman, like Maher and Susan Rancourt, who was approached in front of the main library on the campus of Central Washington State College. To the best of her memory she recalled that sometime in April 1974 she observed a man with a sling on his arm drop his books on the sidewalk. She asked if she could assist him and he said yes. He asked her to carry the books to his car. The man’s yellow-colored Volkswagen bug
was parked on a dark street several blocks away from the library. Like Maher, Denton was nervous about the stranger. As she reached the car, he opened the passenger door, and when he did, she noticed that the seat was missing. Acting upon her instinctive fear, she immediately dropped the books and ran. She never saw the man again.

On March 10, 1975, after having spent nearly one week on Taylor Mountain, I returned to the office to learn that the investigation had taken on a new urgency. I was greeted by my new sergeant, Bob Schmitz, who confirmed rumors from the previous week that the Seattle and King County Police homicide units formed a combined investigation of the Ted murders. The now-legendary Ted Task Force had been officially created and tucked away on floor 1A of the King County Courthouse, away from the department-store atmosphere of the police department. The office was a 10-foot by 25-foot windowless rectangular room at the end of an Escheresque stairway that was too large for a jail cell, but certainly as dank. Roger and I would be sentenced to that back office for over a year.

The newly assembled task forced looked far better on paper than it actually was because, despite the best intentions of everyone, its development was flawed from the start. Sergeant Schmitz himself was an organizational genius. However, he defined his role on the task force too narrowly to be of much help. Claiming to have been assigned only to organize information previously compiled and not to supervise us in the tracking down of new information, he was a filing clerk rather than a manager and was quick to tell Roger and me that we were still in charge of the investigation proper. No doubt the case files needed to be organized, but we were disappointed that he resisted taking the role of investigative team leader. Try as we might to convince him to coordinate the operation, Schmitz was very strong-willed and assumed only those duties that he felt he should. He would not go beyond organizing the existing files.

While it seemed practical at the time, assembling a team of one sergeant and two detectives from the Seattle Police Homicide/Robbery Unit and the contingent from King County was very counter-productive and short-lived. No one was ever clearly in charge and there were constantly conflicting opinions concerning the order of daily business. The task force eventually broke itself into two different groups—the Seattle police, who followed up the Healy and Hawkins investigative leads, and Roger and I, who covered the rest. That might have worked, except that none of us could get away from the incoming telephone calls long enough to investigate anything.

With the discovery of the remains on Taylor Mountain, information about the Ted investigation was the news media’s main focus. In response to this increased coverage, over 500 private citizens called each day of the first weeks of the task force’s existence to provide information about possible Ted suspects and suspicious circumstances. We were accomplishing less work that would lead to finding the killer because 99 percent of the telephone calls we received had nothing to do with Ted Bundy—unbeknownst to us, all the calls referring to Ted Bundy had been received by October 1974 and had long since been submerged under an ocean of paperwork. In retrospect, we would discover later in the investigation that there was nothing we were doing at that time that would get us closer to Ted Bundy.

By April 1, 1975, less than one month after the beginning of the task force, the Seattle police contingent was reassigned to their old duties, leaving the investigation of the Healy case in our hands. King County reassigned 2 more detectives to bring the total to 10 officers on the task force. This reorganization would ultimately help the task force do the job it had been formed to do.

However, when the reorganization took place, we were still floundering. Our archives of files had expanded, spilling out of our filing cabinets and across the desks. The mounting tip sheets and other police reports had become too clumsy to be useful and were indicative of a creeping crisis that would soon overwhelm the task force detectives. Given the thousands of pages of files and the confused memories of detectives from which most of the meaningful details had long since evaporated, it became impossible to find anything quickly. Sergeant Schmitz continued to organize our files as if he were driven by inner voices, but he was constantly in danger of falling behind. Many investigators had contributed all kinds
of paperwork, none of which was indexed for easy retrieval. It was nearly impossible to find out if someone else was working on a particular suspect without leafing through piles of investigative files.

Eventually, Schmitz provided priceless assistance by devising a master indexing system that enabled investigators to find certain types of information quickly. He took all the tip sheets and information about suspects and filed it, alphabetically, by the person’s name who provided the information. He created a file for tips that were turned in anonymously and were indexed by the suspect’s name. Additionally, he made out 3- × 5-inch index cards and filed them by the name of a suspect, cross-referencing the card with the name of the caller on the bottom.

Now, for the first time, if a detective wanted further information about a suspect, he looked at the caller’s name on the bottom of the card and checked that name in the tip sheet file. Schmitz’s filing system immediately uncovered a critical time and paper management problem that would continue to bedevil most subsequent serial murder investigations—too many people calling in and providing useless information. One such person called in over 600 times. If we had employed Schmitz’s system from the beginning, we would have caught this joker by the second call, preventing him from interrupting our investigation further.

Even though we finally felt organized, we still had volumes of paperwork to analyze. However, the dilemma of how to deal with thousands of names collected during the investigation fired Schmitz’s imagination. By mid-April 1975, he had sat in his airless corner monotonously filling out over 3,000 filing cards when an idea struck him. He created what became known as the computer name-matching program. His idea arose out of a gnawing resentment of the futility of the investigative procedures employed to date. We were collecting names, but we had no meaningful way to analyze the weight and significance of the names we had. Thus, Schmitz became fascinated by the prospect of categorizing the numerous lists of suspect names into various aspects that were important to the investigation.

This system gained supporters soon after Schmitz checked it with the county’s computer experts and got their approval on it. The computer guys welcomed the challenge of developing an untried
application for the computer in the field of criminal investigation. Schmitz then convinced Captain Mackie to assign Sergeant Bill Murphy to the task force to act as our liaison with System Services.

Unfortunately, Sergeant Schmitz had not yet reckoned with the stolidly unresponsive nature of the King County police’s administrative bureaucracy. He soon discovered that at least in Mackie’s view, organizing the files was not the only duty he had been given. Even though he was doing useful things for our investigation, his perception of his role on the task force conflicted with Captain Mackie’s. The captain said he originally assigned Schmitz to supervise the investigation, not just organize the files. Clerks organize, sergeants supervise, and captains rule. So, by May 29, Schmitz had to content himself with an administrative transfer to the Communications Center. He would not be around to see the results of this project to which he had contributed so much. Schmitz would always remain one of my favorite associates since the nature of his contribution to the investigation far surpassed what police sergeants are normally expected to do. Even today, only a few people realize exactly what Sergeant Schmitz accomplished.

By May 1975, there was a sense among task force members that our Ted killer had moved on to a new location, because we had not had any similar disappearances in the King County area since July 1974, 10 months earlier. We also believed, based on our premise that Ted was a traveler, that our murder cases were probably related to similar murders in other jurisdictions. So we decided to examine the murder cases in other jurisdictions, hoping to glean suspect information from them that might have a bearing upon our investigations. Maybe one of the locations we investigated would hold Ted’s signature multiple-body dump site.

With this aim in mind, Roger Dunn attended a conference in May 1975 in Boise, Idaho, that highlighted missing and murdered females from seven western states and British Columbia. All the investigators
were faced with a number of extraordinary and still-unsolved cases of murdered females. Fortunately for us, there were attendees from Colorado and Utah who were investigating single, not multiple, murder cases that had occurred in October 1974—the cases of Laura Aime and Melissa Smith—and, from January 1975, the Caryn Campbell case. Those murders would eventually be tied to Ted Bundy, even though a firm connection had not been made at that time owing to the extreme difficulty of comparing the aged and significantly decomposed skeletal remains in Washington to the fresh discoveries in Utah and Colorado. Time and nature are great levelers and make most forensic comparisons like the ones that confronted us close to impossible.

What was most interesting and troubling about all of the cases described at the conference was that there was only one instance in which a signature multiple-body recovery site was located, like those at Taylor Mountain and Issaquah. It was 700 miles away from King County in rural Sonoma County, California. From December 1971 through March 1972, Sonoma County authorities recovered the bodies of four nude females, ages 12 to 19, at this one site located beside a steep precipice that bordered a country road that wound into the woods of rural Sonoma far away from any towns or villages. Two were skeletal remains from which the cause of death had been wiped away by time, and two were recent kills who had been strangled. It seemed all of the bodies were dumped from a vehicle onto the same hillside from the side of the remote county road. Then another nude female victim was found at the same location in July 1973. This surprised the investigators, because the killer had returned to a previously discovered dump site. On the strength of modus operandi alone, the Sonoma series appeared strikingly similar to the Ted cases, but we could not find any common suspect whom we could link to Seattle and Sonoma County. So, frustrating as it was, we had to be content simply with monitoring each other’s cases and nothing more.

Lieutenant Bill Baldridge and Detective Mike Fisher, who were investigating the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen, Colorado, stayed in close contact with our task force. Their gut feeling, which would ultimately prove true, was that their murder was connected to the Ted cases. Therefore, anytime they discovered a suspect who had ties to Seattle they called us. When we started using our computer
tracking system in the investigation, we included in the lists of names all those people who were registered guests at the Snow-mass Inn in Aspen, where Campbell was last seen. While we were communicating and sharing valuable information with Colorado at the detective level, there was never a movement at the administrative level to begin a multistate investigation team prior to Bundy’s arrest in Utah. This made it difficult for us, because at the investigator level everything was required to stay informal—and nothing was funded. Had we begun a formal multistate investigation, the money would have been there to allow us to travel and to set up joint facilities to pursue the case.

Meanwhile, through June 1975 Roger looked into the many murders in the Northwest, trying to uncover those with any similarity to the Ted cases. He collected 94 homicide reports on unsolved murders of females between January 1969 and May 1975. Entry after entry on his follow-up report read the same—a gruesome account of carnage like what befell Beverly Jenkins: age 16, 5′6″, 125 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes, last seen 5-25-72 at 0300 hours in Springfield, Oregon, found 6-5-72 alongside roadway in Douglas County, Oregon, asphyxiated, throat slit, nude, with branches over the body. The body count of murdered females during this time was incomprehensible by rational standards. What was out there killing these young women? The police reports offered little help. Each investigation was as shallow as it was inconclusive—there was no common suspect among them. There was no suspect, period.