The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (14 page)

When I got to the office later that day, I noticed a tangible difference in the atmosphere. The dogged monotony of the daily routine was gone. It had been replaced with something closer to a buzz of excitement. There were smiles on their faces, mischievous smiles, that signaled that Kathy McChesney and Kevin O’Shaughnessey had something they were dying to brag about. They were onto something. Since the first of June, we had been working on some
good, credible leads, but none of them had the substance to make us think we had our suspect. We were still digging, hoping for the piece of evidence that would turn the investigation into a real hunt for a live killer. Kevin told me about the call from Forbes. Kathy handed me Bundy’s case file as if she were a kid giving a Christmas present to a parent. I looked at the case file, then at Kathy. The excitement was contagious.

Two days later, on August 21, 1975, Ted Bundy was formally arrested again in Salt Lake City, Utah, for possession of the burglary tools found during the search of his car on the night of the sixteenth. At seven in the evening on the twenty-first, while Bundy was still in jail, a team of police officers in Salt Lake searched his apartment. They found a brochure from the Wildwood Inn ski resort near Aspen, Colorado, where several women, including Caryn Campbell, had been reported missing. Police also found a program from a high-school play in Bountiful, Utah. Debra Kent was last seen on the night of that play in Bountiful, and she was one of the missing young women whose story had made the Seattle papers. The Utah missing-persons cases had been part of our conference on related cases in the Northwest, and the publicity about them had prompted Bundy’s girlfriend Liz Kendall to call Detective Randy Hergesheimer to warn him about Ted. That was one of the reasons Ted had made it to our top-100 list. The circle of evidence was closing around Theodore Bundy.

From here on out, the evidence against Bundy began to mount in a terrifying manner. Now police called Carol DaRonch, a young woman Ted had attempted to kidnap from a Salt Lake City—area shopping center, to identify Bundy’s car. Ted had posed as a police officer, lured her into his car, handcuffed her, and attempted to attack her when she started to struggle. She escaped, flagged down a passing car, and Ted fled the area. The missing key to the handcuffs was found in Utah in the Bountiful High School parking lot where Debra Kent had disappeared. On September 8, 1975, DaRonch identified Ted’s VW. Less than a month later, on October 3, at nine in the morning, Bundy was standing in a police line-up. He had cut his long hair and parted it on a different side, but Carol DaRonch
identified him anyway. At eleven that same day, he was arrested for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal murder. That’s when the story hit the newspapers.

We had just begun our own independent investigation into Ted Bundy’s background when the Seattle newspapers ran a front-page story implicitly linking the Utah Ted with the King County Ted. Whereas the Seattle police denied, for the record, that they were investigating Ted Bundy as a suspect in the King County abductions, Captain Mackie of the King County Sheriff’s Department refused to eliminate Bundy from consideration. Actually, we had been much further along in our piecing together the Ted puzzle than either Captain Mackie or anyone on the task force was willing to reveal. In fact, we were so interested in the connections among the Utah, Colorado, and Washington cases that Kathy McChesney, Roger Dunn, and I immediately began separate inquiries into tips and information from these different locations that were in Bundy’s file.

Within a week after the call from Ben Forbes, Kathy McChesney had made contact with Liz Kendall. Kendall called after Kathy had spoken with Bundy’s former landlady. By 10:15 that same morning, Kendall sat across from Kathy in the task force office and began to unfold her story. She explained her general misgivings about Bundy and then went into detail. As Kendall described Bundy’s movements from Seattle to Utah and between Seattle and Colorado, it became obvious to McChesney why Kendall had first reported her fiancé to Randy Hergesheimer. It was also obvious why Hergesheimer had followed up the lead with Ben Forbes in Utah.

Liz Kendall told Detective McChesney that she and Ted had met at the Sandpiper Tavern in the U-district during a damp September six years ago, in 1969. Since then, they had broken up once for a couple of weeks while he was dating another girl he had met at a mental health center where he was working at the time, but they had gotten back together.

Kendall went on to say that Ted had held a number of jobs, including one at a medical supply firm called Pedline. Liz remembered that she’d been concerned about some plaster of Paris that
she saw in his room during July of the previous year when the papers reported a guy in a cast who had been seen at Lake Sammamish at about the time two women were abducted. Liz Kendall told Kathy that she knew Ted had been to Lake Sammamish at that time. He had shown up at her house dressed in a T-shirt on Sunday, July 14, while she was getting ready to go to church. They had gotten into a fight and Ted went home. When Ted returned to her house that evening, he was wearing a gray turtleneck and long pants and complained to her that he wasn’t feeling well. In spite of that fact, however, Ted took the ski rack off his VW and put it back on her VW before taking her out to dinner.

Liz said she also remembered seeing a stolen television in Bundy’s apartment and stolen stereo equipment around that time as well. She also saw a pair of crutches, Ace bandages, and medical plaster. All of these things aroused her suspicions about Ted, especially after the series of abductions and murders had been reported in the Salt Lake City area shortly after he went to Utah to attend law school.

For the next few weeks Liz Kendall’s conversation with Kathy McChesney continued and the task force investigation into Bundy’s movements became more intense. He was our number-one suspect. We were in contact not only with Salt Lake City on an almost daily basis as they pursued their leads into the missing women’s cases in Utah, but also with Colorado authorities who were investigating the homicide in Aspen. In addition, we were following up leads that showed that one of Bundy’s acquaintances in the Ellenburg, Washington, area had been registered in a jogging class with the missing Susan Rancourt. It was all circumstantial, but, for the first time in over a year, the leads were there for us to follow.

Three months into our investigation of Ted Bundy, we had encountered nothing in Ted’s history or the pattern of his whereabouts that would have derailed our efforts, so the case was still on track. We were working 16-hour days, following every lead and tip that had been compiled. The web of circumstances identifying Ted case file #7 as the prime suspect closed tighter and tighter around Bundy. At every juncture and with each new piece of information, he became a stronger suspect. There was nothing we turned up that eliminated him from consideration, and the only negatives—people who failed to identify him—eventually turned out to be positives. For every one of his friends who had only laudatory things to
say about Ted, we found three acquaintances who questioned his every move. As we inched forward in the shadows of the Utah and Colorado cases, an outsider would have thought we would have been exuberant. Yet we were still frustrated and our patience was wearing thin because even with mounting evidence, we had not made contact with Bundy. Both the extensive news media coverage of Bundy—they had linked Ted to the Seattle cases in their stories—and Bundy’s lawyer in Utah kept us away from Bundy himself even though contact with a prime suspect is routine protocol for homicide investigators. Then the Utah case broke open.

On October 15, 1975, after he had been arrested in the Carol DaRonch kidnapping, the Utah police searched Ted’s VW and found a piece of hair. This discovery became for us another ironic twist of luck that we couldn’t have planned for. Ted had expected the search, of course, because he knew what the police procedure would be if he was caught. Therefore, he had carefully cleaned the inside of his car as thoroughly as any car had ever been cleaned. His shock can only be imagined when he learned four months later that the one area of the car that he’d forgotten about—the long, spindly stick-shift lever of his VW—had wrapped around it a pubic hair from Utah murder victim Melissa Smith, Police Chief Smith’s daughter. And in the trunk of the VW, police located and forensics identified a hair from the head of Colorado murder victim Caryn Campbell. How many other clues had been scoured away by the meticulous Ted Bundy? We’ll never know, but the presence of Campbell’s hair formed the basis for the eventual murder charges in Colorado.

We were still very wary of contacting Ted and his attorney, John O’Connell, because of their aggressiveness in defending the Utah kidnapping charge that had been filed. We didn’t make formal contact with Ted right away when he was in Seattle after his release on bail because of the presence of the news media. As soon as Ted showed his face in public, camera-laden journalists were right there to record it. There were actually two primary reasons for our not pursuing Bundy publicly with this kind of press attention. First, there was precious little we could do to get Ted to focus on our questions while defending himself against reporters’ questions about the Utah case. Second, Captain Mackie had already gone on record dismissing Bundy as a suspect in the King County Ted cases.

The Seattle Police Department’s quick October 1975 denial of the task force’s interest in Ted was a clear, although technically accurate, example of public disinformation, but it had a good purpose. On the one hand, Captain Nick Mackie didn’t want to give the media a suspect to pursue until that suspect was the prime one. As far as Captain Mackie was concerned, Ted wasn’t the prime suspect until the task force named him. We weren’t about to name him too soon and blow our whole investigation. Thus, Bundy simply remained Ted #7 until we had all the loose ends tied up. Furthermore, had Mackie mentioned Ted’s name as a possibility, Ted might have been far more defensive about his dealings in Seattle than he actually had been. We needed an over-confident Ted, not a defensive Ted, because overconfidence breeds mistakes, and that’s just what we needed our Ted to make in order catch him.

As it turned out, disinformation is probably the best way to lure a serial killer out into the open, because serial killers carefully read the newspaper accounts of their crimes. Going public with our suspicions about Bundy would have focused media attention on us. We would have had to have fed the media constantly to keep their hunger for news satisfied, and that would have tipped Bundy to what leads we had and where we were getting them from. Even more important, I was to find out years later, was that in our reluctance to pursue Ted aggressively in the first weeks after he was picked out of a Salt Lake City line-up, we had inadvertently established a level of trust with Bundy that would remain until his execution took place years later in Florida. Because of Utah Detective Ben Forbes’s aggressive pursuit of Bundy and the perseverance of Colorado’s Mike Fisher, Bundy was determined to give neither man the satisfaction of full face-to-face “deathbed” confessions to all the crimes he was suspected of having committed. He felt these men hounded him and that he was superior to them because he had escaped their custody. However, he did confess to the Caryn Campbell murder in Aspen and to the Julie Cunningham disappearance from Vail, Colorado, to Mike Fisher and Vail Detective Matt Lindvall.
He confessed to Detective Dennis Couch the eight murders he committed in Utah.

But our relationship with Bundy was different. We were laid-back, because we always assumed that after Utah and Colorado our time with Bundy would come. We had more background information on Bundy than the Colorado and Utah police did and our investigation actually held the key answers to the entire Bundy case. In fact, even by mid-November 1975 we were confident that we had our man. But whereas we were convinced, proving his guilt in court and convincing a skeptical press would be a different matter. In successive news stories, Ted Bundy was portrayed as the good-looking, aspiring law student and friend to Republican politicos around Washington State. Every time I read that another of his acquaintances couldn’t believe he was a brutal killer and that the police definitely had the wrong guy, my stomach turned. If only they knew what I knew.

Finally, the time came when I telephoned Bundy’s attorney, John O’Connell. We had to talk. I asked to speak with Bundy so he could help us eliminate him as a suspect in our cases and thus end the media mob still pursuing him and asking about his activities in Seattle. This would be more like housekeeping, I told him, just get this mess cleaned up so he and his client could concentrate on their Utah case. I told him that it would help us, too, by getting the media off our backs. Mr. O’Connell was courteous, cautious, and interested. I wanted to know, I said, whether Ted had an alibi for any of the times when our young victims were missing. O’Connell, a skillful attorney, said he understood and requested that I write a letter with the important dates listed. Then, maybe, he suggested, Ted could “intelligently” reply. Impatient as I was, I thought his request for a letter to Ted from me was just a stall tactic and that Ted would never answer it. By law, he didn’t have to provide answers to anything that he thought might incriminate him. Therefore, I kept my hand facedown as well. Fortunately, O’Connell had no knowledge of the mountains of circumstantial evidence that we had accumulated against Bundy.

After a month of waiting for a return letter to my request, I called O’Connell. “Did you receive my letter?” I asked him. He said yes. “Did Ted have an alibi for any of the dates?”

He answered by saying, “Ted can’t.”

I was stunned by his answer. “You mean he didn’t do anything or
he can’t give an answer for any of those dates?” I asked. I didn’t quite believe what I was hearing.