The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (25 page)

In the 20 years since the formation of VICAP, the unit has been involved in more than its share of major serial killer investigations. It can claim some successes for itself, just as others outside the FBI can point to some of the unit’s spectacular failures, but the basic philosophy that brought us all together in 1983 is as sound now as it was then, particularly in light of regional and municipal homicide tracking and investigation systems that have broadened the retrieval capabilities of offender database programs. All investigators of major homicides believe that information about serial crimes should be shared so killers can’t hide behind the administrative walls that separate agency from agency. I can claim that VICAP was something of a success for me, too, because it brought me together with investigators like Pierce Brooks, Captain Robertson, Frank Salerno, and others. What I didn’t know in December 1982, when Pierce first called to talk to me about VICAP, was that in a few short months, I would be in the thick of another serial-murder investigation. This one was to become the nation’s most notorious case and the event that would bring me face-to-face once again with my old nemesis—Ted Bundy.

6
 
The Green River Murders

W
hen my friend Gregory P. Canova, a highly respected senior deputy with the King County Prosecutor’s Office, was hired to become the chief prosecutor for the attorney general, he asked me to move over from my desk at the King County police and join him at the AG’s office. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. The chance to supervise statewide investigations, especially the tough cases that found their way up to the state level from local agencies, was very attractive to me. Nine months earlier I had looked into a similar position in another state as a criminal investigator, but rumors of corruption within the police force there kept me home. I’m glad I stayed, because the attorney general’s job offer was just what I wanted. So, in March 1982, I left the King County Police Major Crimes Unit to take the newly formed position of chief criminal investigator with the Washington State Attorney General’s Office.

I was in my new position for only a few months and just acclimating myself to the job when, during the summer of 1982, a short newspaper article describing the discovery of a female body spinning in the shallow eddies just beneath the Peck Bridge over the Green River caught my eye. At the time, there was nothing special about the article, other than the location of the find. It was not uncommon for people to drown in the Green River, but usually they were found many miles farther upstream in the gorge area, not within the city limits of Kent, Washington.

The Green River runs south of Seattle, bisecting the towns of Auburn and Kent and emptying into the Puget Sound. It meanders through Seattle’s suburbs, produce farms, and the county’s wooded areas. From the air, the Boeing Airplane Company’s buildings and other industrial complexes appear to hug its edges like mussels that have clamped themselves onto dock pilings. Along its banks are some of the finest steelhead fishing spots in western Washington. At its closest bend, Issaquah and Taylor Mountain are about 15 miles away to the north.

Two young boys riding their bicycles across the Peck Bridge on July 15, 1982, spotted a body hung up on snags in the middle of the Green River. The Peck Bridge, about 150 feet long and painted that ugly state-government green, intersected the Frager and Kent-Des Moines roads. Kent police officers knew right away that the river victim had probably been murdered because she was nude except for a pair of blue jeans tightly knotted around her neck. Obviously, this was not the typical garb of an accidental drowning victim. The body was later identified as Wendy Lee Coffield, a 16-year-old white female prostitute who was last seen July 7, 1982, 15 miles to the south in the Tacoma area. The King County medical examiner officially listed her cause of death as ligature strangulation. Ever since my days tracking Ted Bundy, any discovery of a murdered female was like an alarm that made me want to mobilize an investigation. My first thoughts were that there was another Theodore Robert Bundy lurking in the wilderness and using the river as a dump site the way Wayne Williams did in Atlanta. At the time,
some investigators openly criticized me for always making the assumption that a murdered female found in a river was possibly the work of a serial killer like Ted. The memories of the Ted murders were unpleasant for all the agencies in the area, so many detectives shied away from making any connections among murder victims. Furthermore, they regarded any theories about serial killings as bad ways to start a case. It seemed as though some of the detectives from police departments in the area were prejudiced against conducting serial-murder investigations. I think this attitude was one factor that prevented authorities from solving Washington’s longest open murder case.

Less than one month after the discovery of Coffield, an employee of P. D. & J. Meats, a meat company located on Frager Road just south of the Peck Bridge, was taking his afternoon break. On August 12, 1982, the startled employee saw what appeared to be a nude female body exposed by a low tide and lodged on a sandbar. Because her body lay just outside the Kent city limits, Detective Dave Reichert of the King County police was called to the discovery site to process the scene for evidence and retrieve the remains. Dave Reichert recovered the body of Deborah Lynn Bonner, a 23-year-old white prostitute. She had been missing since July 25, 1982, from the strip area of 216th and Pacific Highway South, a red-light district frequented by men looking for an easy pickup.

Despite what the media reported about the lack of contact between the Kent police detectives and King County detectives, the two agencies did exchange information about the Coffield and Bonner murders soon after the bodies were discovered. Their intent was to establish some connection between the two strangulations, but they made a big mistake when the they drew the flawed conclusion that the only similarity between the murders was the location of the bodies in the Green River near the Peck Bridge. Their conclusion that the killers were different was partly based on a hot suspect King County detectives thought they had in the Bonner murder. Police leapt to this conclusion when they were told that an acquaintance of Bonner’s had been overheard threatening her life in a Tacoma tavern just days before her murder. That was all the detectives needed to convince them that they had a traditional murder, and they got confident that an arrest was imminent. Inasmuch as
their suspect was completely alibied for the Coffield murder, King County assumed the Bonner and Coffield murders were not part of a series. They were wrong.

It was late that summer, just as King County homicide thought it was closing in on its primary suspect in the Bonner case, when their traditional murder theory was blown apart with the discovery of three more bodies. All Seattle was stunned by the story that broke on the evening news about three more prostitutes who were found dead in or near the Green River. The detectives in King County homicide were in shock. They had good reason to be.

On August 15, 1982, a man, rafting down the Green River looking for bottles—a common practice for area residents—saw what he believed to be a mannequin, submerged in about two feet of water. As he poled his way closer he realized that this was no mannequin, it was a corpse. Petrified by his discovery, the man shrieked for help and people in the area called the police.

On that hot sunny summer day in the serene Kent Valley, the surface of the Green River was remarkably clear, rippled only by the presence of police divers. The crystalline water reflected the sunlight with a dappled sparkle, forcing Detective Dave Reichert to make frequent f-stop lens adjustments on his unwieldy Mamiya camera. He photographed every aspect of the crime scene as divers discovered not one, but two bodies beneath the surface of the water. Both corpses were held down with 40-pound angular basalt rocks common to the riverbed. This was a first—never before in the records of King County murders had any bodies been found secured and hidden in such a way.

Detective Reichert kept snapping away at the crime scene, getting as many angles as possible on film for forensic teams to analyze. But if he thought he could wrap up his work early, he was wrong. The banks of the Green River held a surprise for him that day. It had been a lush spring and summer, and the grass growing on the slope of land bordering the river was over five feet high, tall enough to obscure the line where the land ended and the river began. Reichert wasn’t mindful of this as he backed up along the gentle slope of the south bank in order to get a wider angle and
clearer focus on the crime scene. Stepping carefully backward into the high grass, Reichert suddenly disappeared from sight. He had tripped and fallen over another horrifying discovery—the nude body of a third female victim. This was a day that conjured up memories of the same terrifying discoveries of the bodies of murdered females along the Green River that police authorities had stumbled through in the foothills of the Cascades eight years earlier during the Ted case.

The first of the women discovered underwater was Marcia Faye Chapman, black and 31 years old, who had been last seen leaving her home near South 188th and Pacific Highway South on August 1, 1982. A mother of three children, Chapman was described by beat officers as a novice at prostitution. The other submerged victim, Cynthia Jean Hinds, 17 years old and also black, had been last seen hooking johns on August 11, 1982, just 12 blocks south from where Chapman disappeared. The third victim, over whom Reichert had stumbled on the riverbank, was 16-year-old Opal Charmaine Mills, also black. Mills was last seen on August 12, 1982, at a telephone booth at South 194th and Pacific Highway South, where she had made a collect call to her home.

The three victims died from probable asphyxiation, but their bodies were lacking the obvious indicators of ligature strangulation. They were nude, but unlike the previous victims, Coffield and Bonner—who had been found with clothing tightly knotted around their necks—Chapman, Hinds, and Mills had nothing to show how or even whether they were strangled. Now, suddenly, the investigation was fixed on the possibility that a serial killer was operating once again in Ted Bundy’s old stalking grounds of King County. But not everyone within the ranks of the investigators agreed with this theory. Even though the sheriff of King County assigned 25 detectives to investigate all the Green River cases, some officers felt that Coffield and Bonner were not linked to the other three. After all, there was no evidence that these two women were ever held down with rocks. Besides, some argued, Coffield and Bonner were white, and Chapman, Hinds, and Mills were black. Those investigators who wanted the cases separated were making the same mistake investigators had made in Atlanta. Weighted bodies versus nonweighted bodies, black versus white, clothing versus nudity—these were insufficient grounds for separating the cases. The larger
profile was still intact: all of these women were prostitutes and easily accessible; they all died from asphyxiation; and they were all found in the Green River. Find out who picked up any one of the victims from the strip or who dumped any one of the bodies in the river and in all likelihood that person would be the serial killer.

While Kent and King County detectives gradually cleared prime suspects in the murders of Coffield and Bonner, others were working feverishly to I.D. the last three women in the river. But it took eight days before the three latest victims were positively identified, because two of the women had not been reported missing. This was a major stumbling block for the Green River investigators because missing-persons reports are usually one of the first clues detectives look for when they stumble over an unidentified corpse. So it took eight days of showing photos around the Sea-Tac strip and scraping together whatever forensic evidence was available. And during those eight days, the killer’s trail became cold. But considering what was lying in store for investigators—numerous victims of the Green River Killer who would not be identified for more than a year after the discovery of their skeletal remains—eight days wasn’t bad at all.

Investigators knew that serial killers returned to crime scenes for any one of several reasons. They returned either to dump more bodies, to discover what the police found or didn’t find, or to perform necrophilic acts with undiscovered victims the way Bundy did. Killers feel comfortable at sites with which they are most familiar. The Green River Killer continued his work, dumping three successive quarries in the river within close proximity of one another, even though the recoveries by police of the first two had been highly publicized. We knew that the killer would probably be monitoring police activities by reading the newspaper and watching television newscasts, because that’s what other serial killers had done. But the first two recoveries by police didn’t scare the killer away; they only forced him to change his tactics. It was almost as though the killer learned he must do something to prevent future discoveries of his work at his watery disposal site. So instead of choosing a more remote site to avoid detection, he weighted his subsequent victims’ bodies down with rocks in the same river.