The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (49 page)

I even let myself become Bundy’s victim by suspending my judgment and playing Bundy’s game. I let him teach me how to interview serial killers by interviewing him the way he wanted to be interviewed. Bundy was the teacher; I was the pupil. I put myself in his power by playing his game. But that was the only way I could get any information out of him if I wanted him to help me figure out the mind-set, motives, and movements of the Riverman. It was the only way I could get him to help me catch the Riverman.

Bundy’s first lesson was that long-term serial killers are unlike any other types of criminal suspects. They are battle-hardened, reinforced by their own denial, and can stand up in the face of interrogators looking for the quick confession. They also know more about serial murder than almost all detectives do. They have the advantage because they know who the police are and spend all their time eluding them. Detectives don’t know who the serial murderers are and, because serial killers are rarely arrested for murder, are often shocked to discover they have one in their custody. Usually, serial killers are picked up for crimes indirectly related to their murder spree. Most investigators, therefore, confront the killer never having interviewed one previously. Most do not know what to expect and have no experience with interview techniques that actually work.

For example, when the authorities in Pensacola, Florida, arrested Ted Bundy, they faced a criminal type they’d never seen before—a fugitive on the FBI’s most-wanted list and a suspect in over 25 especially brutal murders. Bundy was captured after being on the run from murder charges in Colorado. He had committed at least three murders in Florida but, at the time of his capture, was not the main suspect in any of those murders. He had even been shot at by the arresting officer while trying to escape apprehension for a multitude of charges, none of which was murder. Now, at last, he was in custody as a fugitive. While steadfastly denying his involvement in
any murders for years, after his capture and during the early hours of his detention, Bundy was especially vulnerable, open, and willing to talk. Investigators had a small window of opportunity for an interview that would have elicited incriminating statements.

At first, Bundy refused to identify himself, and investigators didn’t realize who they had just arrested. Their prisoner had been drinking while on the run and was physically and emotionally exhausted. He was weak and more capable of making incriminating statements than he had been at any time in his life up to that point. As his bravado failed him, Bundy did things that were very uncharacteristic. During one of the breaks in this interview and before he was identified, Ted called his former girlfriend in Seattle and all but confessed that he was the person that everyone suspected he was. He also came perilously close to giving incriminating statements to the detectives. One officer was trying to get a better understanding of the parameters of what Bundy was stalling about and Bundy muttered, “three figures.” In other words, Bundy was alluding to having murdered over 100 women, but the Pensacola police authorities had no idea what he was talking about.

The investigators didn’t convince Bundy to confess, but they were close. I asked him about this interview, fascinated because I knew that I could be in the very same situation with a suspect in the Green River murders. Bundy actually complimented the detectives who were holding him for sustaining the interview. Their strategy, if it was one, of platooning the interviewers—rotating in a fresh team every so often to maintain the interview process—was good because Bundy wanted to keep talking. They had a way of keeping him going even though they were getting tired. They didn’t give up on getting more information and on encouraging their suspect to cooperate so that he would feel better because he was finally telling the truth about himself to the police. This was working for him. Bundy felt that they were patient over the long haul and probed very carefully. They didn’t really know what they were looking for and therefore experienced no obvious frustration.

Would detectives familiar with Bundy’s cases have been as effective? Would they have been as laid-back and persistent? I doubt it. Bundy said he would have refused to talk to certain detectives, such as Mike Fisher from Colorado and Ben Forbes from Utah. Those two detectives had dogged him so well that he had built up a
resentment for them, so any questions on their part would have been ineffective. But he did say years later that he respected them because they were very thorough investigators. In Florida, it was the last time that any law enforcement officer would have the chance to speak with Bundy at length until Bundy contacted me in October 1984.

Now it was 1988, four years after Ted, Dave Reichert, and I first talked together in Starke, Florida. By the time Ted and I had settled in for the 1988 interviews, the Green River case was six years old and Bundy and I had become something more than pen pals. I was down here at his request because the last of his appeals was running out and his life was being measured in months, if not weeks. I believed that the topic matter of our interview in 1988 was impromptu, but it wasn’t. Ted wanted to teach me how to interview serial killers so I could master the techniques to get his own confessions. It was part of a master plan that Ted had to keep face while getting me to learn how to interview him with respect and not disdain. This would be his ultimate attempt at control.

Getting Ted Bundy to talk about interviewing serial killers was a prearranged strategy on my part as well as his. My plan was to talk with him at length about how he would interview serial killers and eventually inquire about the preferred circumstances under which a convicted murderer, like himself, would talk about his crimes. How would he interview the Riverman? But it was also an act. Previous experience dictated that Bundy would talk around the various elements of murder and its investigation, but he would carefully avoid any references to his own murders. This very method was also his way of developing rapport and confidence with the interviewer. Bundy’s suggestions about interviewing serial killers were pieces of valuable information for homicide investigators to consider in future cases.

First of all, Bundy emphasized the urgency of immediately interviewing any suspected serial killer upon the arrest. Any delay would allow the killer’s denial to harden and ultimately jeopardize any prospect of a meaningful relationship between the killer and
the detective. I asked him how he would get the killer to talk if he were the detective who had just had picked up the Riverman.

Bundy said, “Well, good question! I’ve thought about this, using my own experiences over the years; I’ve run across many people who have talked to the police and many who haven’t. And I’ve seen what’s happened. And I’ve seen guys who were handled properly from the standpoint of law enforcement, in my opinion, and those who weren’t.”

“Legally?” I asked. “According to the Miranda warnings, or in terms of getting information out of them?”

Ted wanted to speak only in terms of getting information out of them, whether the police are giving accurate information or whether they turned the guy off, intimidated him, threatened him, or otherwise caused him not to talk. Ted reminded me that he had lived in the prison environment for over 10 years and that it was sort of an avocation with him to hear guys’ stories about what happened to them when they were arrested. Ted was very curious about why some murderers confessed and why some didn’t. Ted was even more interested in what they told the police and what they held back. That kind of game fascinated him because he thought it might have been a power issue. Ted felt that he got a version from his fellow killers that was different from what the police could get. Bundy did acknowledge that he might not be hearing the facts, saying, “I may not be getting the straight dope, either.”

Not getting the straight story is a real problem for the police, and Bundy appreciated it. The killer has the advantage because only he knows all the facts of the murder. The interviewer is limited by knowing only those facts that have been discovered in the investigation, possibly not having enough information to refute the killer’s version. Thus, the savvy serial killer knows when the police are fishing for details and need him to make their case. In this kind of situation, the police can’t bullshit the guy into confessing. That’s why Bundy approached killers differently than the police could. Bundy had a real interest in knowing about the case. He said, “Not because I want to tell anybody, for just my own personal information.”
Obviously, it is impossible for police investigators to open an interview with a killer using the same premise.

Ted could express genuine interest owing to his fascination with guys like him. Ted said, “Some guy comes in and he’s been convicted of x number of murders; I’m just kind of fascinated by what happened. How and why did he start? I honestly have that kind of an interest. I have approached maybe as many as ten different persons accused of serial murder over the years, just to find out what was going on in their minds and how they did what they did and how they got caught.”

Bundy struggled daily with his own inadequacies and compared them to the other inmates’. His fascination with the other prisoners’ murders was really genuine. He
had
to know. As eager as a guy was to talk to him about murder, Ted was more than equally interested in listening for his own therapeutic, perverted satisfaction. Talking with other killers about their exploits also relieved the intense stress that Bundy was experiencing, because he was consumed with his compulsion to commit murder. If he couldn’t do it with his own hands, he had to hear about it—experience it vicariously through others. It was like a drug. Even in our interviews, it was difficult to make small talk, such as about the University of Washington football team. It wouldn’t be long before he would drift right back to the subject at hand—murder. Therefore, when interviewing someone like Bundy, it is important to display an active interest in or a fascination for murder. That can be difficult for someone who’s not a killer but who needs to get a confession out of one fast. Accordingly, due to inexperience, interviewers may alert the murderer to the fact that they are concerned only with facts pertinent to the case rather than being sincerely interested in and having compassion for the killer. This difference in approach can blow an investigator’s entire interview and only harden the suspect’s attitude and resolve to keep his story to himself.

Bundy advised me that many killers have been reluctant to talk after they’ve been caught. He told me to expect this in the Riverman. In order to open up the killers he talked to in jail, Bundy presented a very convincing fascination with what they did. He
explained, “This is not because I want to tell anybody, it’s because it fascinates me; it honest to God fascinates me, and you probably picked that up perhaps from time to time in my letters.” Bundy blew away his fellow killers with his expression of interest and created an air of expertise difficult for the unsuspecting killer to overcome. Bundy told me, “I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder. Over the years I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about it. The subject fascinates me. So when I’m confronted personally—not as a law enforcement guy, not as a detective, I’m not playing that role—I’m playing the role of me intrigued about what they did and wanting to know every last detail about it.”

Getting guys to open up about their murders was something Ted was proud of. Sometimes, he explained, they’re not forthcoming or they don’t know how to open up to him, and so “I have to help them tell me the kind of stuff that I want to know.” These were the killer’s grisly details not softened or adulterated with expressions of remorse. Ted continued, “I suppose the first thing that helps a guy open up that I’ve used is for him to tell me all the gruesome details of his murders; but he felt absolutely no remorse. He would tell it to me in graphic detail, but there’s one [murder] he just couldn’t tell; he was holding back on this one situation. But he said his story was that this girl just walked away, and nobody saw her again. And it didn’t sound right to me. I knew she didn’t walk away, okay? I just knew she didn’t walk away, but I couldn’t figure out why. I could tell, the way he was telling me, he wasn’t opening up to me. He was telling me without hesitation about all these other cases but not this one.”

Ted knew how to confront this killer without accusing him. He could say that he knew what really happened to her and just told him “he was bullshitting me.” Ted had the authority to say to them, “Well, listen, this is what I think, why I think people don’t believe you when you tell them this.” Ted’s approach on a case like this was “people don’t believe you when you tell them this …” It was a nonthreatening way Ted used to explain that he didn’t believe the killer’s story without telling him he was lying. Ted told me that by handling the killer this way, my own judgments and feelings would not be reflecting
my
doubts, that I should instead simply refer to what “other people” didn’t believe.

Ted could be convincing in an almost grandfatherly way. He could get to a level of understanding that no one else could. Ted
knew firsthand that there were some murders that a killer just could not talk about. He understood what was going through the killer’s mind. He told me that he would say to his guy, “‘This is what I think happened. Look at all these other crimes that occurred, and yet you want people to believe this girl walked away, and she never showed up, nobody ever saw her again. Now, I could understand maybe why you’re holding back on that one; I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, man, I can understand it.’ And he started talking about it, more or less.”

The killer wouldn’t be under any pressure from Ted, he said, because “I understood why he was holding back: he had a relationship. All these other women were strangers. But this one woman he knew. And he felt justified in killing strangers. He did not feel justified in killing people he knew. He felt these were okay murders; this one was bad. And he could not talk about it.” But that’s typically the case that can break the killer’s back, open the guy up to a confession. Ted said that “that’s the one that he still hasn’t told anybody about. He’s talked to me about it, in the third person.” Maybe this killer reminded Ted of himself. Ted said frequently that there are some victims that killers just cannot talk about, because the victim might be someone with whom the killer had a kind of relationship, even if it was only in his own mind or if the victim saw something human or intimate in the killer through their association. Maybe it was someone the killer actually thought he liked. Of course, Ted was not known to have killed
every
woman with whom he had a relationship shorter than 10 minutes’ duration, but to hear him talk, it would seem it was almost every woman.