The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (17 page)

Between February 9 and February 13, when he was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, a desperate and disoriented Ted Bundy was on the run. He was out of money; people had reported the credit cards he had stolen and police had been alerted to the vehicles he had stolen as well.

Finally, police arrested Bundy in Pensacola wearing the same torn shirt he had worn when he killed Kimberly Leach. Fibers from his shirt were later matched to fibers at the crime scene. For the next three days, Bundy was held in jail while the Florida authorities were unaware of Bundy’s identity as well as his role in the Chi Omega murders in Tallahassee. At eight
P.M.
EST, the evening of February 16, 1978, the day he was identified as Ted Bundy, he placed a call to his former girlfriend Liz Kendall.

When I interviewed Liz about that phone call five days later, she
described how Ted almost, but not quite, admitted to having something to do with the disappearances of the young women at Lake Sammamish, the event that had brought me into this case. This was the closest he would come to anything even resembling an admission to murder in the state of Washington until he and I began communicating.

I would have to wait another six years to reopen the cases while Bundy was tried, convicted, and sentenced to the electric chair in Florida for the deaths of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberly Leach. At the point of his conviction and sentencing, I had assumed that the story of Ted Bundy would end in Florida. Fate, however, had charted a very different course.

4
 
The Splash Heard ’Round the World

T
he excitement of being part of the task force and chasing Bundy had all but died away by early 1981. I had returned to the daily routine of homicide investigations. My Bundy cases were as silent now as the hillsides of Taylor and Issaquah mountains in the dead of winter and Ted was neatly tucked away on death row at the Florida State Penitentiary. We were busy investigating several intriguing murders in a row that were difficult, yet solvable. They weren’t smoking guns, so we weren’t required to charge off through a crowded shopping mall in hot pursuit of a homicidal maniac who was frothing at the mouth. These were cases that challenged our methods of deduction and required us to be imaginative if we were to be successful. I relished working those types of cases and when we broke them, the excitement we generated spread to all of the many police officers involved. Those cases enhanced my belief that practical experience was the main way to develop a detective’s nose for choosing the right lead to pursue.

The Bundy investigation had taught me important lessons in patience and provided me with the ability to develop leads from what looked like less than nothing. Moreover, having investigated a long-term unsolved case at the beginning of my career, I didn’t have the expectation of the “24-hour solution” that many homicide
detectives have. My attitude was that the job should be done right—investigators should proceed deliberately, intelligently, and thoroughly. Long-term investigations gave me the opportunity to deduce in a logical manner and in relative quiet what step to take next. The rush-rush attention of police supervisors for a quick resolution in the pressure cooker of public scrutiny had usually subsided by the time the case got to me because I was one of the detectives who usually handled the long-term cases. Thus, additional pressure from the media for a quick solution wasn’t usually something I had to deal with. But all that was about to change.

Between July 1, 1979, and May 1, 1981, a frightful series of crimes against young boys terrorized Atlanta, Georgia. Police authorities had connected 28 unsolved murder cases and one missing person, most of whom were children. These were soon known by the nationwide press as the “Atlanta child murders.” The victims were black, school-age children who were kidnapped, assaulted, killed, and dumped within an average radius of 10 miles away from their homes. The pattern of assaults and body discovery sites suggested to detectives that a serial murderer using a vehicle was operating in the greater metropolitan Atlanta area. Because most victims had died from some type of asphyxiation, the cluster of murders was thought to be discrete, that is, a part of one series, and related. Because the crime locations were spread over a number of jurisdictions, a multiagency task force involving local, state, and federal officers had been established to investigate the series of murders. The task force had determined that they were looking for a serial killer.

Ted Bundy had demonstrated to the world the horror of a serial killer. His Florida trial had been a showcase of his pseudograndiosity, bravado, and overinflated ego. The press coverage of that trial and the persona Ted presented to the public revealed one aspect of a serial killer. Ted was not, as he had been previously called, a mass murderer. He was not a crazed fanatic on a wild-eyed rampage taking out whomever was unlucky enough to be in his line of fire. He was personifying himself as the embodiment of the ultimate methodical superkiller, trying to demonstrate his control over the
criminal justice system, over the press, and over anyone who came into his purview. Thus, by 1981, the term
serial killer
had come to represent killers who operated like Ted Bundy, and when the task force uttered it, the world’s press corps descended upon Atlanta.

There is a great truth about press coverage few people ever understand. I saw it take place in Atlanta, experienced it firsthand a few years later in Seattle during the Green River investigation, and saw it graphically demonstrated on television during the Los Angeles riots of 1992. The press creates its own magnified version of an event. The more intense the feeding frenzy for exclusives, the more the story changes from reporter to reporter until what the public gets is a distorted version of the truth. It’s as if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle were at work every time a large story unfolds in the media, so that the presence of the media itself creates, changes, and redefines the story. You always have to be wary of what the media reports because the media itself has created parts of the story. For example, in Atlanta, every move the police investigators made was carefully tracked by each reporter seeking to scoop the competition in discovering the identity of the Atlanta Child Killer. Members of the press were relentless in their pursuit, jealously guarding their own tips and leads while criticizing the task force’s follow-up activities in the cases. Much of the confusion that took place among members of the multiagency task force was the result of rumors that came out of the press coverage. At times it was as though the police were reacting to the press more than they were to the case.

Among the press and investigators as well, theories about the nature of the killer abounded as each expert column in the newspapers seized upon new interpretations of the evidence. Meanwhile, the killer kept on striking, abducting black children from local neighborhoods and dumping their bodies in the woods outside Atlanta and along the banks of the Chattahoochee River. The most politically sensitive theory about the killer that the press picked up characterized the murders as hate crimes carried out by members of a white racist group. If one were to think about the crimes seriously, it’d soon be obvious that an ongoing series of murders of black children in black neighborhoods during a full police mobilization required the killer to have been virtually invisible. It would have been impossible for a group of white men to have carried out these crimes. A gang of whites roaming through black neighborhoods
would have been noticed—more than noticed, they would have set off a full alarm. Furthermore, white men wouldn’t necessarily have been able to gain the confidence of young black children. The organized racial conspiracy theory just didn’t add up when you took a serious look at the evidence. However, because the police were cautious not to expound upon their own theories in public, the press chose to emphasize the racial conspiracy in their coverage. Suddenly, the police found themselves having to play political correctness games as they pursued the case before the eyes of the country.

Never in the history of federal intervention had any one case commanded so much attention as the Atlanta child murders. The federal government contributed millions of dollars in a grant to the city of Atlanta to help fund the investigation as well as to bolster the preventive aspects of the cases. There was also an unfortunate political side to the grant that, while well-meaning at its inception, created a great deal of confusion among the agencies trying to catch the killer. Grant money was earmarked for victims’ families even though police weren’t really always sure which child was a victim of the Atlanta Child Killer and which child wasn’t. In order to be a victim and be entitled to money, it became important for a family of a dead child who might fit the victim profile to have that child’s name placed on the list. Once officially on the list, the family would be entitled to receive as much as $100,000 on behalf of their murdered child. That policy actually prolonged the investigation because it meant that police had to check out leads that took them far away from the real investigation. After all, if a child’s name had been added to the list, it meant he was officially a victim. If he was listed as a victim, it had to be checked out whether he was truly a victim. That took police on a number of wild-goose chases after phantom leads. Meanwhile, the killer kept on killing and the police kept on tripping over themselves in the race to find the next body before the “other cops” did.

I followed this case with great interest on the national television news, which, because of the number of leaks at the competing police agencies, was privy to far too much sensitive information and was providing updates to the cases from inside the police investigation.

There was no exchange of information among police departments in the Northwest and Atlanta until I was called by Dr. John Liebert. Dr. Liebert was the Bellevue psychiatrist who, along with Dr. John Berberich, provided the only criminal profile in the Ted cases. Dr. Liebert was invited to Atlanta to consult with Commissioner Lee Brown on the cases. Before he flew down, he spoke extensively with me about my opinion of the characteristics of the Atlanta Child Killer. I was pleased to make any contribution I could to Dr. Liebert’s work and flattered that he’d consulted me. Because the Atlanta Child Killer had become something of a national publicly acknowledged synonym for
terror,
there was extreme political pressure to highlight a white extremist political motive for the murders.

This, however, was definitely not the profile Dr. Liebert and I felt comfortable with. Our discussions covered and then dissected every possible motive for the killings. After we looked at the crimes from every angle, we kept returning to a diagnosis of the borderline personality disorder for the killer. This was Dr. Liebert’s term. My more practical assessment was that the Atlanta Child Killer was a very intense long-term, control-type lust-murderer. We both agreed that these types of murderers could sustain apparently normal, socially acceptable behavior for long periods of time. That part of the killer’s public appearance was higher in profile than his periodic regression to violence, much like the behavior pattern of Ted Bundy. The killer would seem like a well-adjusted person who might be a role model for other people. Therefore, he could be the neighbor next door, and the untrained observer wouldn’t be aware of his murderous dark side. Someone like a girlfriend or wife would be aware only in retrospect, long after he was arrested and confirmed as the murderer, that he wasn’t normal. They, like Ted’s fianée Liz Kendall, would see through cracks in the veneer, but wouldn’t be able to arrange a pattern out of what they saw until afterward. The mask was too difficult to penetrate.

In our discussions, Liebert and I considered the impact of suggesting that the killer was a black man who could wield authority over the
children. That was really the only feasible choice. With the limited knowledge of the case, we had to rely on statistics and common sense. Blacks historically kill blacks more often than blacks are killed by people of other races, especially when the victims are children. And, as mentioned before, a white man leading a black child out of a black neighborhood would have been noticed after the very first crime.

After Dr. Liebert returned from Atlanta, he informed me that I would probably receive a call from the authorities down there. He wouldn’t tell me what he discussed with them, and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t protocol. Because he was a consummate professional, he wasn’t about to relate any information outside of the standard channels. He merely said that he would be submitting his profile of the killer to Commissioner Lee Brown. Because he obviously related the substance of our joint discussions about the nature of the killer in his profile, I realized that I was going to be asked to consult in some capacity on the Atlanta child murders. This would be a high-profile, reputation-building consulting job. I had to be aware of the political impact of this case and my public role as one of the consultants on it. It was as if I were being put on some sort of standby.