The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (11 page)

While Roger was busy collecting cases involving murdered females at outdoor locations, I was assisting other detectives in the investigations of a steady stream of white males who wanted nothing more than to be eliminated from the suspect list for the Ted killer. It was difficult then for any male in his early twenties, 5 feet 10 inches tall, medium build, with dark blond or light brown hair, who drove a VW bug, and whose first name was Ted to have any social life whatsoever. Those same men were getting dubious looks while at work and anywhere else they chose to go. There were hundreds of Teds out there, too many to count. Every Ted suspect we
contacted cooperated and opened up their lives to us. Some even called us first because they wanted to be officially eliminated from the active Ted list. They gladly handed over checking account records, credit card receipts, employment records, medical records, vacation travel vouchers, and anything else that accounted for their time. One by one, suspected Teds from the master list accounted for their whereabouts on the critical days when the victims were abducted and were eliminated as the possible murderer. There was only one Ted we were after, and he still remained at large and invisible to our investigators.

While the true Ted hid, Ted serial killer impersonators popped right out of the woodwork. I will never forget the morning I arrived at the office to find five strange men sitting on the benches in the reception area of the Detective Division. There was nothing outstanding about them. All had varying shades of hair color, one was 6 feet 6 inches, and another was 5 feet 1. As I passed by the receptionist, she released the electronic door lock and motioned for me to come around so she could talk to me. She informed me that all five were waiting to see me. Unbelievably, they had each confessed to the receptionist that they were the famous Ted killer.

I invited them all in to a large interview room together and had each one introduce himself to the others. I told them when they decided among themselves which one was really the Ted suspect to knock on the door and I would return to book him in jail. The five Teds each replied that they would return to their therapists for treatment. Their respective psychotherapists, for whatever reasons, had told each of them to confess to the police as part of their treatment programs. This was really great, I thought; not only were we trying to identify the real Ted, we were assisting in the therapy of the entire Seattle psychiatric-patient community. As I looked on the calendar, I noticed that it was five days before the full moon, the monthly astronomical marker that indeed signals psychics, psychos, and those self-ordained with extrasensory perception to contribute clutter and unusable information in the case files. The unusual occurrence was the talk of the task force. I probably just should have booked them all and been done with the whole case.

As months dragged by, the investigation into the Ted cases was pared down. It was simply costing too much for the county to fund the task force, so it was cut back even at the risk of slowing down efficiency
of the investigation. The Grisly Business Unit, as we were referred to by the department, was reduced to only a fraction of its former size and was disbanded by June 1, 1975. This left the county’s sustained commitment to the case at less than one year. Shortly thereafter, even its former members stopped talking about it.

Roger and I were left alone to carry the flag; even so, we were determined to make progress in the investigation. Captain Mackie assigned us two additional police officers who had been ordered to light duty—one had a broken leg and the other had a cast on his little finger. They were to man our telephones. I was designated the case coordinator or supervisor, but my official rank, for pay purposes, was only detective. Captain Mackie had become so disappointed with the lack of progress by every supervisor he had assigned to the case, he chose not to put a certified sergeant or lieutenant in charge. Relatively little administrative control was needed in the resulting scale-down to a small investigative team, he believed. We reported directly to Captain Mackie anyway, putting him in the ultimate role of supervisor, which was what he probably wanted.

At first, we conducted a weeklong examination of the circumstances within each Ted murder case, as tradition dictated. But that served only to complicate the entire investigation. Realizing this, we changed our methods and began to approach the overall investigation as a united process. Instead of eight separate cases, we had one case that consisted of eight crimes. Now, we asked, what could be done for the investigation as a whole? This, it turned out, would be the only way we would ever get to the bottom of the Ted murders.

Our strategy was threefold and it was roughly based on what two full-time detectives could be expected to accomplish in one year. First, the Lynda Healy murder case was the apparent beginning of our series, and after looking through the case file again, we realized that the initial investigation into her disappearance had been inadequate. In light of this, we decided to start with day one of her case and exhaust every possible lead, just as if we were starting from scratch on a case that had never been investigated. There was the possibility that the Healy case was the murderer’s first and that he may have made some mistakes not previously uncovered, like killing an acquaintance and thus making himself traceable.

Second, 3,500 persons were snitched off or investigated as suspects during the course of 11 months. Some subjects had apparently
merited packets containing extensive follow-up investigations, while others had seemingly warranted only minor criminal records checks. We examined every file for each suspect to determine if he had been thoroughly investigated. In addition, we decided that those who had been eliminated as suspects would be reinspected to assure ourselves that conclusive elimination procedures were used. It was our gut feeling that the killer was already in our files hiding beneath all of the paperwork. We would later find out that this instinct was right.

Finally, our third strategy, albeit nontraditional, was to continue the effort started by Sergeant Bob Schmitz to use King County’s computer to cross-check names from one list of suspects against another. During the investigation, many lists of potential suspects were gathered from various sources. We had over 30 lists, with one list containing over 41,000 names and many others with well over 1,000. Manually cross-checking the lists was now virtually impossible because of the amount of information we had.

This action plan impressed Captain Mackie because never before had anyone offered him a logical, absolutely reasonable course of action for these cases. Until this time, we had conducted the investigation somewhat haphazardly. Owing to the volumes of leads on the multiple cases, we had meandered, wandering aimlessly from case to suspect with no overall direction. What we had now was a method he could understand and for which he could expect weekly progress reports. He was so enamored of our proposal that he authorized us to select a detective willing to join us in our search for the phantom we had nicknamed the “angel of decay.” We soon found our prospects limited by our own requirements for the person who would hold the post. We wanted someone interested in the case, but most of the detectives in the department had been turned off by the nit-picking aspects of following up on a killer who had already left the area. Only one person really showed any interest in the job—Detective Kathleen McChesney.

McChesney had been frustrated at being assigned only jobs that the male police executives in the department felt a woman could handle. They had assigned her to the check unit, a paper-shuffling experience at best, and she wanted out in the worst way. Luckily for us, Kathy was no average detective by any means. Her zest for detective work was unending, and she eventually earned a Ph.D.
and went on to get a job as the FBI’s top female agent. Her ability to handle the small details and enthusiasm for a difficult investigation helped us solve the Bundy cases.

Roger, Kathy, and I began by turning over every stone in the Healy investigation, starting from day one of the original case. We treated this as if we were the primary detectives on a call that had just come in. The first solid clue we found was the arrest of Gary Addison Taylor for murder in Houston, Texas. He had lived across the street from Vonnie Stuth, who disappeared while apparently cooking dinner in November of 1974 and was thought to have been one of our Ted victims. Vonnie lingered on the newspaper’s list of Ted victims until Taylor told police where to find her body on a property that he owned in Enumclaw, Washington, 45 miles southeast of Seattle. Taylor had shot Stuth in the head with a 9-mm automatic pistol. The cause of death was markedly different than in the Ted cases and thus set Vonnie apart from the rest of the victims.

In spite of the differences of this murder from the other suspected Ted killings, Taylor interested us as a suspect since he had killed more than one female. At the time of his arrest, he had many keys in his pocket. He didn’t explain where they were from. We immediately contacted Lynda’s parents and the owner of the U-district house from which she had disappeared. His name was also Taylor. Was Gary Taylor related? Just one of the many coincidences of this case that was just that, only a coincidence. We retrieved the house keys, car keys, and keys to other locks belonging to Lynda. They did not match the keys in Taylor’s possession. Roger eventually eliminated Taylor as a suspect by placing him out of state at the time of our murders. But the investigation into Gary Taylor still held some value.

The matching of a victim’s keys to keys found on a possible suspect was an angle into the case that had not previously been considered, and it opened up a new path in the investigation. It gave us the idea to collect duplicates of all the keys that each of the victims would have had in their possession at the time of their disappearances.

Kathy McChesney’s first job was to interview Karen Sparks, a
woman who had been almost fatally bludgeoned and was in a coma for six months. On January 6, 1974, she was asleep in her bed when the attack occurred. Her memory had been impaired by the blows and she could remember only what happened on the previous day. She didn’t recall seeing her attacker. Her address at the time was 4325 8th Avenue NE in the U-district, a stone’s throw from 4143 12th Avenue NE, Ted Bundy’s residence at the time of the assault. We visited Sparks’s residence and noted the floor plan of the house. After seeing it and comparing it to Lynda Healy’s residence at 5517 12th Avenue NE, we felt that Sparks was a living victim of the neighborhood killer.

While Kathy and Roger began contacting the former roommates and friends of Lynda Healy, I contacted the Seattle police evidence room to look at the items in evidence that were collected at the time of Healy’s disappearance. I signed a temporary evidence removal form for 74-5953, Healy’s missing-person case number. Much to my disbelief, I was informed by a stuttering evidence clerk that all of the material taken from the Healy residence had been destroyed. He said that if an owner could not be found and a case was not labeled
HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION
or marked for court, the evidence was routinely destroyed after six months. Big mistake! I was pissed! I asked if anyone had tried to contact the owner. If so, who? Who authorized the destruction? But I was getting no answers. The file tracking on that evidence was marked
DESTRUCTION APPROVED.
The authorization signature was indecipherable. Good thing I couldn’t find him. This time
I
was ready to kill. Maybe the clerk felt the need to look for a new job because I threatened to go directly to the chief of police unless I learned who had approved the destruction of evidence for an active, open homicide investigation.

As I cooled off, I understood totally how such a thing could happen. The police officers who oversaw investigations were people after all and were bound to make mistakes. I turned and walked away from the counter, extremely disconsolate. Crime laboratory technicians would not get the opportunity to examine the only case with possible physical evidence that could be linked to the killer. Would any of the fibers, hairs, and other trace evidence on Healy’s bedding have similar characteristics to anything we found at Issaquah and Taylor Mountain? We would never know.

As I reached the outer door, I saw a pile of plastic and paper evidence
bags heaped next to it with a sign above them that read
ITEMS FOR DESTRUCTION.
I thought to myself that this was probably where Healy’s former belongings sat before they left the department for good. To this day, I don’t know what prompted me, but I walked over to the pile. Case number 74-5953 flashed at me like a neon sign. I reached down and pulled out bags containing Healy’s nightgown, sheet, and pillow. As soon as the evidence clerk realized that I had discovered the treasure, he rushed over and laid claim to it. He said he would have to get an authorization slip signed by Homicide for me to take the goods. Give me a break! Five minutes before, the evidence had been destroyed, as far as he was concerned. Now he had to get approval for me to take out the trash?

Eventually, after checking out the items in evidence according to department procedure, I delivered Healy’s belongings and the photographs of her room to Kay Sweeney, our crime lab expert. Sweeney suggested that we retrieve as many items that were in Healy’s room at the time of her murder as we could. Maybe someone had packed up all her stuff and hadn’t touched it since the crime. We noticed in the crime scene photographs that her photos had been pinned on the wall above the headboard of her bed. It appeared as though some were askew and, from the empty spaces, that some were missing from their place on the wall. We figured they might have been dislodged and fallen down between the wall and the bed during the assault. If so, we wanted to process those for latent fingerprints. The crime scene photos didn’t show the floor, so we didn’t know if there was a rug, which is often a magnet for the kind of physical evidence—hair or fibers—we were in search of. As it turned out, there
was
a rug.