The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (15 page)

“He just can’t answer your questions about those days,” the cautious attorney said, leaving any interpretations regarding the nature of our conversation entirely up to me.

I could tell by the tenseness of O’Connell’s voice on the phone and by listening to his interviews on television that he, too, risked becoming one of Ted’s many psychological victims—people who wanted to believe what Ted was saying even though they had doubts about his story. But even he couldn’t get Ted off the hook with us because Ted never had an alibi. Ted Bundy was the only suspect of the entire list of 3,500 that we could not eliminate. Every other one was alibied.

In December we found out that the judge in Utah was permitting Ted Bundy to travel to Seattle while he was out on bail. We made immediate plans to put Bundy under 24-hour surveillance. By now we were certain that Bundy was our Ted, and there was no way we would allow him to snatch a female while in our county again. At first, our stakeouts were covert, but that didn’t last long. Ted easily recognized the people following him and stopped to make conversation. After a while there was no point in continuing the charade. Many of our crews either transported Bundy wherever he wanted to go or followed closely behind him. Bundy knew that we were looking for some indication that he was guilty, some behavior that would have tipped us off to his fear that we were getting too close, but he played the game well and gave us nothing.

On one particular occasion, Roger and I were in different cars. We were following Ted while he was driving a green VW Beetle that belonged to one of his attorney friends. Ted led us back to his apartment. Roger had been thinking that the time was right for us to confront Ted to see if he would talk to us. It was close to Christmas and the time of his Utah trial was drawing near. Maybe he would confess or give us a clue that would lead us somewhere. I had agreed with Roger and we took the opportunity on this particular day to confront Ted in the apartment where he was staying. Ted was already inside when Roger and I pulled up in our separate cars. Roger went in first. I was just coming up the stairs when Roger knocked and I heard the front door open. I reached the floor just in time to hear Bundy say sheepishly, “I can’t talk to you guys right now.”

“We do want to talk to you someday about our cases,” Roger said.

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

At that, Roger gave him his business card and we turned and left the apartment. Roger and I thought later that it was odd for Ted not to have proclaimed his innocence like the other defendants we had spoken to. He was trying to tell us something. He would want to talk someday to his pursuers, but we just didn’t realize how long we’d have to wait or under what circumstances that discussion would take place. Unfortunately, his answers to my questions came many, many years after that encounter in the hallway of the apartment building just before Bundy went back to Utah, where he would be tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail.

In the history of the Ted Bundy investigation, the phone call from Ben Forbes has always been thought of as the keystone to the entire case. It was fate, many of the newspapers said, that Bundy was driving along without his lights, was flagged down by a trooper whom he tried to evade, was stopped, searched, and arrested. It was fate that the call to our task force from Utah intersected with our routine follow-up of case files at a time when Bundy could be flagged. Had Bundy not crossed paths with the trooper, he would never have been picked up and the Utah and Colorado murders would have possibly gone unsolved. But for that fate, Bundy would have slipped through our net and our missing and murdered women’s cases would never have been solved. Bundy would never have escaped from the Colorado courthouse where he was being tried and he never would have fled to Florida. But for fate, Bundy might still be alive today, invisible and menacing. It was fate, they say, that caught up with Bundy on that night in a Salt Lake City suburb.

It’s true that although the phone call from Ben Forbes was indeed vital to our case, the big question actually was: would we have identified Ted Bundy as the Ted killer without the phone call? I’ve often speculated about that, and here’s what would have happened, inasmuch as the Bundy file was next on our “to be investigated” list, had there been no phone call from Salt Lake City. Call it the
Twilight Zone
scenario.

We were struggling with an investigation with many murder suspects and without much firm evidence on any of them. Each investigation of a suspect followed its own unique course with each individual. Each of the suspects’ willingness to cooperate with the task force provided us with the specific details or alibis that put them in the precise places where the killer could not have been at the critical times when crimes were being committed. However, while we were eliminating suspects one by one through our investigation, the same process also told us that the real killer had to have a trail that we would eventually cross. If every other suspect had left a path, the real killer could not possibly have been a phantom. At the same time, with the closure of each new file, the intensity of the investigation also diminished. We had gotten to the point where we were accumulating just enough information to take another suspect off the list. One suspect would look good for a while, then, as Roger Dunn liked to put it, “he’d look just like shit in a handbasket.”

The routine of following up 100 suspects, one after the other, over the long term was almost like a mind-numbing disease. If you weren’t careful, the monotony was debilitating; you could easily miss a key element to the entire investigation. It was also tempting to take the easy way out: minimal work, tell yourself you’d done enough to close the folder, and move on to the next file. There was no inspector’s manual for dealing with these things. You just had to navigate into the fog by dead reckoning and hope that you found the right markers before they slipped by you in the night.

Ted Bundy’s case file was #7. It was sitting in Kathy McChesney’s to-do basket when I walked into the task force office on August 19. On the Saturday night before, unbeknownst to any of us, Ted Bundy drove by a Utah state trooper who, by the time he made his U-turn, lost the VW after it turned onto one of the side streets of the subdivision. The trooper was tired, and after a fruitless search down three or four streets, decided his quarry had disappeared and headed home. Bundy drove back to his apartment and went to bed. There was no phone call from Ben Forbes by the time I walked into the office and noticed the file marked B
UNDY
and picked it up.

I looked down at the legal-size case file in the wire basket and opened it. The contents of Ted’s manila folder had the appearance
of severe disorder: several tattered tip sheets, handwritten notes on small pieces of torn paper, and photographs in small envelopes stashed inside. Initially Hergy had been tipped off by this Ted’s girlfriend, Liz Kendall, and a few other callers. I now had to follow up on Hergy’s investigation, to trace the steps he took, to see whether those steps could eliminate Ted #7, Theodore Robert Bundy.

I found the file full of unworked leads as if Hergesheimer had taken the information and simply not followed it up. The information from each caller had been recorded, but the nature of the call itself seemed not to have piqued the interest of the officers who had taken the call. What had gone wrong? Had Hergesheimer simply misjudged the importance of the calls, which was not typically his wont, or was there something else at work? As I looked more closely at the file, I realized that if this case file had not made it onto our top-100-Teds-of-all-time list, I might well have passed it by myself, because at first glance the callers’ information didn’t seem that vital. One thing was certain: had Hergy been made aware of the connections between Taylor Mountain and Issaquah, he would have jumped all over the information he’d received. But by the time he’d gotten the information in October 1974, no one had even thought to connect the seven cases.

Four photos of Ted Bundy were in the file. The only way I knew they
were
Ted Bundy was because the captions
read
TED BUNDY.
At first glance, the photos could have been of four different people. He was a real chameleon, this guy, whoever he was. We had no current photos of Bundy, so I couldn’t immediately rely on showing his picture to the witnesses at Lake Sammamish. Two of the snapshots were taken by his girlfriend in 1972, and he was wearing a beard in a 1973 shot. His driver’s license photo depicted a much older-looking man.

The information in Ted Bundy’s file came from three primary sources. The first, probably only because it was already in the file before his fiancée’s lead, was from an anonymous person who reported Ted’s license tag, Ida-Boy-Henry-Six-Twenty-One. I could see that someone had worked this tip after the initial call came in. He ran the tags through the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to get the name Ted Bundy, the make on his car, and his address at the time. Then he ran the name Ted Bundy through the Department of Licensing to get a date of birth. Hergy had gotten the driver’s license
photo himself even though the handwriting on the tip sheet belonged to someone else. The unknown officer who worked this information soon broke off his follow-up because that tip, by itself, didn’t merit a high priority. There were hundreds of registered owners of VW Beetles who were named Ted.

The second Ted Bundy tip source came from one of Bundy’s psychology teaching assistants, Joel Kast, whose call proved to be a critical lead. Kast called initially to report spotting a police composite sketch Ted look-alike. A Ted Bundy, one of his former students, looked remarkably like the police sketch that had appeared in the papers. Kast said that his Ted was a good student, personable, had a possible accent, and had taken a class in abnormal psychology. Although Kast had no way of predicting Ted Bundy’s violent tendencies, his tip put one immediate fact in the file that struck a resonant chord in my memory. One of the living witnesses to the Lake Sammamish abductions reported that the Ted who had chatted her up spoke with what seemed like a British accent. And it was from the Lake Sammamish descriptions that we developed the police composite sketch. This would have been an important lead to follow in our investigation of Ted #7.

Following just that lead, I would have checked with the university registrar for a printout of all of Ted #7’s classes. I would have routinely cross-checked this list with the lists of classes that the coed victims at the University of Washington had taken and, to my amazement, I would have found that Bundy, our Ted #7, and Lynda Healy had shared several psychology classes together. A Ted victim and a top 100 Ted in a class at the same time—that’s where their paths surely would have crossed initially. Thus, from that information alone, Bundy would have become my prime suspect. We would have found Bundy’s name and Healy’s name on other class lists, and suddenly one of the basic theories of homicide would come into play—that people are usually murdered by someone they knew.

Other pieces would fall into place immediately, too. For example, Lynda Healy was the “first” victim, according to our investigative model. We were already following up her homicide as if it were a routine murder case on its own. Thus, the fact that she was in the same class with someone whose description matched a police composite of a suspect in other murders would have brought us
to Ted via her case and not just through the case file folders sitting in the task force office. Also, as we pursued her list of acquaintances, we would have found other items that brought her into Bundy’s circle of acquaintances. We would have considered the crossing of their paths much more than mere coincidence as we pursued our leads.

The third source in Bundy’s file was his girlfriend Liz Kendall. Her call and subsequent persistence led Randy Hergesheimer to notify Utah authorities because Liz knew Ted had moved to Salt Lake City to go to law school at the same time that surrounding jurisdictions were reporting a string of female murder cases. She believed that these cases shared aspects of the King County cases. What Liz didn’t know was that we had already exchanged information with Utah and Colorado detectives and knew about all the female murders, especially the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen on January 12, 1975. But Liz provided us help with a valuable lead in this homicide investigation as well.

We had already used store credit card and gasoline credit card purchases as a method of eliminating other suspects, so it would have been logical to assume that we would have used Bundy’s credit purchase records in the same way. Liz Kendall would tell us about Ted’s Chevron and Nordstrom’s credit cards and we would have retrieved his records. From Chevron security, we would learn quickly that Ted made prolific use of his credit card because he was forever buying gas. We would note that Ted seemed extremely paranoid about running out of gas. In fact, his record showed that he had always been topping off his tank with purchases as small as $1.88 on the very days surrounding the murders in Washington State. I would have noticed that there were numerous instances when Ted charged his gasoline on many of the days the women were killed, the days before they were abducted, and the days immediately after the murders. One conspicuous purchase, I would have noticed, took place at a gas station only minutes from Aspen in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, on January 12, 1975—the exact day and precise location of the Campbell murder. Bundy’s credit records also placed him right near the ski resort at Vail on March 15, 1975, when Julie Cunningham disappeared. During a lifetime of police investigations you learn that these coincidences just don’t happen. Our Ted #7 had been all of these places for a reason.

The search through Bundy’s credit records would have been quick and invisible. Ted would never have known that we had pulled copies of his credit transactions because we would not have been required to notify him. Liz Kendall certainly would not have told her boyfriend that she had snitched him off to the King County task force and the Utah authorities. Utah investigators would have regarded him as a viable suspect because not only did his credit records not eliminate him from any of the Washington murders, they actually placed him near the scenes of the Utah and Colorado murders on or near the days they were committed. However, because Ted was already in their jurisdiction and would have been unaware of all the police activity surrounding him, he probably would not have acted defensively and might have actually done something to incriminate himself—like trying to abduct someone like Carol DaRonch. Therefore, believing that any aggressive move on their part might have spooked someone against whom a homicide case was being constructed in three states, the Utah police would not have wanted to move too quickly against Ted and would have probably put him under surveillance.