The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (26 page)

A general Green River surveillance was not conducted after the Bonner or Coffield discoveries because police were not sure where they were dumped into the river or whether a repetitive killer was at work. However, finding three relatively fresh murder victims at a single location was enough incentive for the King County police to then set up surveillance. Reichert and the rest of the detectives were very familiar with the success of bridge surveillance in Atlanta, the strategy that ultimately brought in the Atlanta Child Killer.

Whether it was watching 7-Eleven stores after a couple of commercial robberies, or areas of prostitution as in the Yorkshire Ripper cases in England, surveillance was a proven method of finding killers. King County police set up surveillance vehicles in several locations along the Green River. They were well hidden, yet within the range that powerful scopes could record the license numbers of passing vehicles. But the vehicles were not concealed from the hovering helicopter of one of the television channels in Seattle, which quickly became the Green River Killer’s eye in the sky. The five-o’clock news and every subsequent news broadcast revealed the police surveillance to everyone, including the previously uninformed killer. I and many police experts believed the Green River surveillance would have developed firsthand information leading to the identity of the killer had it not been for the television news teams covering the story. While it is true that the police had set up the surveillance much too quickly for an off-the-record news briefing to obtain the cooperation of the traffic helicopter units, I think that the news teams should have checked in with police sources about the units the helicopter cameras picked up before going on the air. The exposure of the surveillance vehicles has been the central focus of homicide investigation seminars for police officers nationwide.

Unfortunately for police, the killer seemed to have seen the afternoon news pictures of his pursuers waiting for him, for he never returned to his river spot to dispose of victims. In the year following the first of the Green River murders, the killer would go undetected, while abducting and murdering over 20 women. He
discarded their remains in remote wooded areas where our surveillance couldn’t pick him up and where the bodies would be scavenged of any meaningful evidence by wild animals.

The Green River series continued with the discovery on September 25, 1982, of a white 16-year-old named Giselle Lovvorn. Her partially decomposed nude body was found in a wooded area a quarter mile away from the Sea-Tac airport’s southern runway, about seven miles from the Green River dump sites. Because she was not found in the river, some investigators felt she was not part of the Green River murder series. But like four other murdered women in the series, she was last seen heading to hook in the same area along Pacific Highway South, on July 17. Lovvorn also died of ligature strangulation.

The year 1982 ended with King County law enforcement officials feeling that the killer had left town because no new bodies had been discovered since Lovvorn and little or no information was incoming about potential missing prostitutes. The force of detectives working on the cases had dwindled to five. The case, though active, had been relegated to the administrative back burner. That was when I got involved.

At the time, in February 1983, my office on the thirteenth floor of the Dexter-Horton Building in downtown Seattle was a mess, with the investigative files from a San Juan County murder case piled elbow-deep and covering just about everything on my desk, including the telephone. That didn’t stop it from ringing loudly, however, especially one day in late February. It was Dave Reichert on the other end, asking if he could come to my office for a talk. His request surprised me—we usually met in his office—and there was an unusually sorrowful tone to his voice. My head was swirling with what might be happening. What was his terrible news?

Reichert’s five-minute trek to my office seemed to me like an hour. It was common that my secretary, Shirley Lindberg, would escort visitors down the long hallway leading to my office. But on this occasion, Dave had negotiated on his own the maze of open file cabinets lining the walls.

I had my very first sight of Dave when Sergeant Sam Hicks, my homicide sergeant at the time I left the King County police, was murdered while pursuing a murderer. Dave and Sam were close friends and deeply religious and he was terribly grieved by the murder of his friend and colleague. I remembered how sloped his shoulders were at the time, as he if were carrying the grief of all of us around on his own back. On this February day, as I saw him walking down the hall to see me, he was slumping again. I wondered what had happened.

As he tried to explain what was going on, Dave seemed frightened and confused. His face and demeanor reflected the frustration and despair his ongoing serial-murder investigation had caused him. He had been thrown into a brand-new territory that had no road map, an investigation where the rules seemed to change every time you thought you had a solid lead. He looked like he was experiencing what Roger Dunn and I felt during July 1974, when the Ted investigation appeared hopeless. With his eyes welling up with tears of frustration, he said he needed help. He had worked countless hours trying to catch the killer. The more his frustrations built, the more he became possessed, and the longer he worked. If it can be said that serial killers, through the control they exert and the terror they spread, make victims of the entire communities—families and loved ones, the police who track them, and the general public who must live in fear—then in his own way, Dave was a victim of the Green River killer, just as I became one of Ted Bundy’s victims.

No one who has not been there knows what it’s like to be on the trail of a human killing machine who will not stop. Every day, you second-guess yourself about clues that might have been missed, hot leads that turn cold, and prospective witnesses who’ve stared right into the face of the killer but remember nothing because they didn’t know what they were looking at. Families call you for information and you wish you could say something positive, but you can’t. Newspaper and television reporters dog your steps, hoping to find the one clue you’ve missed just in time for the news at eleven so they can hand it over to the killer, who’s also dogging your path. Each morning you wake up dreading the thought that someone will find another body, and by the time you get to the site, there are satellite TV trucks already spreading information, most of it pure conjecture, about the victim. You’re making the police department
look bad because the killer is still at large, so police brass give you withering stares in the halls of the administrative building as you pass them, and your fellow detectives don’t even want you around because they don’t want to be associated with failure. Neither your friends nor your family can offer any consolation because no matter where you turn or what you do, the killer’s hiding in the shadows, always looking for victims and always watching you. The truth is out there, and you haven’t found it. I suspect this is what Dave Reichert was feeling as he walked down the hall to my office that day.

King County PD administrators were at the point of transferring away what few detectives were left on the Green River Murders Task Force and leaving the entire investigation to Dave Reichert to pursue. In effect, that would have imprisoned him for life along a Mobius strip of an unsolvable case and intertwining blind alleys. Up to that point, the respective worlds of six dead women and their families had consumed his life and dominated his every waking moment at the expense of his own family relationships. And during this period, he had slowly withdrawn into an intellectual and emotional corner. Reichert was totally immersed in thoughts of how to catch the killer and feeling guilty that he wasn’t out there trying at that moment he was talking to me in my office.

I was thinking that maybe if he just stayed on the street long enough, trolling from tavern to tavern along the Sea-Tac strip, he might just stumble into the encounter between the phantom killer and his victim, the killer making himself visible just long enough to lure his victim into a trap before he disappeared into the woods. Maybe something, just something in the way a car or a van pulled over to the curb and a hooker disappeared inside, would trigger Reichert’s street instincts and he would follow them and catch his killer. It could happen any day or night. That’s what Roger and I thought when we were looking for clues in the Ted cases. I could understand Reichert’s emotions completely. I also sympathized with him because I knew he wanted to tell someone his story, much like Robbie Robertson told me his story about the Michigan child murders.

Like Captain Robertson’s, Reichert’s story was not about a cop who couldn’t solve a case, it was a tale of personal devastation brought on by what he believed to be overwhelming failures. Cops
are supposed to be tough—at least that’s what they tell themselves. But nobody tells them how to react when they’re faced with failure every day on the job, which was what was happening to Reichert. All he felt was his own inadequacies. Nothing he did brought him any closer to success. He was taking this case personally, and each new body find was like a left hook to his gut. Had he lost his abilities as an investigator? Had the Green River Killer defeated him in a classic contest of good guy versus bad guy? These were his private fears. He told me that his demons had taken him over, and, now, though he masked it very well around others, he realized that his personality and reality had been taken over by the search for the Green River Killer.

Dave had come to me not just for counseling purposes and the release of pressure from a psyche about to explode; his visit had to produce something tangible for him as well. Since I was no longer with the department, I could not become officially involved with the investigation in any way, and thus was now an outsider. By coming to me privately as he did, Dave had violated the strict procedures of his department. Under the unwritten code of investigators, as archaic as it might seem, Reichert had admitted personal defeat. If the story got around, he would be totally ostracized by the other members of his department. Thus, he suggested, my discretion was as well known as my abilities, and I was the one person in the world who could help him get through the process of an impossibly difficult investigation that had no end in sight.

I thought for a moment; then an idea stuck. What if Dave suggested to his superiors that I review the Green River murder investigations with an eye to discovering something they had overlooked? What if my report recommended a direction that the investigation might take? Dave’s eyes widened with pleasure. For the past couple of months, he was having extreme difficulty convincing his superiors to increase and not diminish the investigative effort. Dave felt that the Green River Killer hadn’t stopped in September and wanted the task force inquiry to continue. However, the King County police hierarchy decided to fold the murdered-prostitute cases back into the regular homicide department workload. The cases would be relegated to the back burner, and as long as no new serial murders were uncovered in the area, the Green River murders would be a painful but forgotten piece of history buried forever in the King County homicide files.

Dave Reichert and I had hatched our plans, and he returned to his office. In less than an hour Major Richard Kraske from King County police was on the line. Dick was my lieutenant when I was first assigned to homicide at the beginning of the Ted murders. He had consulted with me on previous occasions in the Green River investigation. He, too, was looking for some way to approach the investigation. Kraske was torn between reducing departmental expenditures, for which he was directly responsible, and avoiding neglect of open investigations into the murders of six individuals. Unaware that Reichert had been my emissary, he asked if I would be willing to review the Green River investigations, come up with an objective analysis of the way the case had been handled, and make whatever recommendations I could. Reichert had carried out our plan very well, and had set the wheels into motion. I requested that Kraske, out of formality, write a letter of request to my boss.

My Green River murders review officially began on March 7, 1983, just after Dave Reichert had delivered all the case files and photographs. I started my analysis, logically enough, with a look at Wendy Coffield’s file, since hers was the first known homicide in the series. I was amazed at the small amount of paperwork regarding her case. In serial-murder cases, usually the first and the last cases are most revealing about the suspect. A cursory examination of the files served only to make the cases more complex. In the first place, there seemed to be numerous leads in the Coffield case that had not been followed up on by our Green River Task Force after the Kent police investigation. There was the real possibility that the name of the murderer was in the Coffield file, and it appeared that the King County authorities had not pursued several clues to her murder. The absence of information from the Green River files about the Coffield case was disturbing.

I was also dismayed after I realized that any evaluation of the cases was next to impossible without first making major changes in the existing Green River files. Information about each victim and suspect was scattered throughout all the case books. Thus, it was difficult to decipher what work was actually completed with respect to each suspect and victim. At my request, the investigators reorganized the notebooks. The variety of information in many of the detectives’ follow-up reports, officers’ reports, statements, and lab reports pertaining to a particular suspect and victim were placed chronologically in individual files for each suspect and victim.
The examination of those newly organized files made sense of exactly what was accomplished in each separate investigation and how that information could be related.