The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (51 page)

“I’m talking in generalities now,” he continued. “But I’ve encountered this in people. I’ve encountered guys who have held this secret for so long and so tightly, even when it really didn’t make any difference anymore that they told anybody; they couldn’t let it go. Because the psychological barriers, the mental apparatus that had been in place for years, was so powerful against revealing this to anyone, under any circumstances, that they just couldn’t bring themselves to share it. Even though they may have wanted to on some level.

“I mean, the secret, if you can look at it from a layperson’s point
of view, their secret was so terrible that they couldn’t reveal it. Well, that’s a judgmental kind of thing. To this guy, it’s just something that he was so used to keeping to himself, just for his own self-preservation. And the way that his thought patterns had to be so tightly controlled, that even when the day comes for him to talk about it, it becomes very difficult. Not because, necessarily, that he doesn’t want to talk about it ’cause he can, but he really can’t open up. It’s become—oh, it’s—I don’t know if I’m explaining this, but I run into it many times and I know how that is.”

I asked, “Then you’re saying that the detective cannot break that barrier?”

Now Ted was on a roll, knowing that he had just hit the nail on the head. How could he explain having real empathy? How could a murderer who had just taken so many lives in such brutal ways even understand empathy?

He continued. “Well, each person is different, and they have soft spots. And I’m not saying everybody is like this. I mean, there are some guys that are just going to come out and tell you, under the right circumstances. And I think Bobby Long is a good example of that. And the reason why I think Bobby Long was so forthcoming was because he’d only been at it for a few months.”

Ted had just explained why one category of serial killers were willing to confess—their murdering careers are short in duration, and they are called short-term serial killers. They had not had the time to strengthen their psychological framework in order to build up those barriers of denial and need for self-preservation, which takes years to accomplish, as in the case of a long-term serial killer, like Ted Bundy or the Riverman.

Ted went on to describe Gerald Stano, who was on Florida’s death row and was a suspect in over 40 female murders throughout the southeastern United States. “I knew one person in particular who was out there on the streets for seven years. His very first murder was a double—very first murder he admits to—was a double murder, seven years before he was caught. Now, he was a very busy person over the years. And he only scratched the surface with the
police because he was handled so badly. Oh, it was just tragic the way he was mishandled. He had a deep-seated need for approval, which is why he talked to police at all. But they really did exploit him, and they traumatized him to the point where he just stopped talking to them. But he wanted to be accepted. He wanted to be one of the guys. He—to this day, he feels more comfortable with the police than he does with inmates. But the system’s gotten ahold of him. ’Course, he won’t talk to anybody anymore. But I’m saying he’d been at it for seven years at least before he was caught. So to survive for that long with those kinds of secrets, those very terrible kinds of secrets—at least terrible in terms of most people’s perception—he had to have erected this mental barrier within himself about talking about this stuff.

“Whereas someone like Bobby Long, who went through a series of incidents and then, like I said, in June or July started killing people and was apprehended in November, [he] only had really a period of only six months where he’d been involved in this before the police caught him. He just opened right up.

“I think it has a lot to do with how long a person has had to live with this. For instance, the Green River guy, at this point, if he’s still alive, and he’s still out there somewhere, he’s going to be a tough nut to crack. Not because he’s intrinsically opposed to talking with police, although he may be, but because he has lived with the knowledge that you want from him for so long and had to guard it so closely. I mean, this is the most precious information in his life. If he would reveal any of it, he’d be a goner and he knows it. So he’s had to keep that more secure than any secret he’s ever had. Keep it to himself. And he lives with that day in and day out, to the point where it’s going to be hard for him, if he ever really was in that position to talk about it. You see what I’m getting at?”

I nodded. I understood.

“Whereas if you’d snatched the Riverman back in August or September of eighty-two, and he’d only been at it for a few months, the likelihood of him opening up and really just telling everything without a lot of strenuous interrogation would be pretty good. So I think that’s one dimension of what you face with the Green River guy now is that he’s lived with this for so long.

“It’s going to be hard for him to talk about it under the best of conditions. But to the extent that you can take the time to talk to
him, not just over the course of a few hours, but it took me days sometimes, coming at these guys a little bit at a time. Just one question at a time. I might just ask this one guy, who I told you has had it for seven years, one or two questions one day, and I might wait three or four days before I come back to him. Very gently. And I would catch him with two different stories. And I knew one story was true and one was false. And I’d make him admit to the true version to help us get into what really happened. Or talk about some things that I’ve experienced that might help, that he might be able to relate to. Just to know.”

Ted was explicitly preparing me for how I should act while interviewing the Riverman, but he had a much more important agenda: he was also teaching me how to get his own confessions, which had been bottled up in him for over a decade. “As a detective,” he said, “I would come across whenever possible—and I think more often than not—I would try to come across as somebody that would have known a lot of people who had done this. Who’s investigated a lot of cases like this, who understood what was going on here. Who understood the kind of thought processes, the kinds of motivations that lay behind, that would compel a person to kill another person like that. And not just one, but one after another.

“What has impressed me about the people I’ve talked to is they have a need to be understood, to share these burdensome secrets they’ve kept so long. But they don’t want to share them with just anybody. If they’re going to talk about them with anybody, they want to talk about them with somebody who is not going to judge them. Who’s going to understand this bewildering experience that they’ve been going through. I mean, I’m not saying I understand it. But it’s an awesome thing for a guy to confront. And if they can talk to somebody they feel will be able to say—I’m not saying congratulate them, but say that they understand, that they know they have a good feeling for what’s going on in a man’s life who does these kinds of things—then you have the best chance, I think, of settling the guy down to the point where he feels free to tell things which he’s kept to himself for so long.”

Bundy felt that the interviewer of a long-term serial killer should be someone who had established the necessary experience and respected credibility in serial-murder investigation. That was all well and good when you could control who the interviewer was. But I
wanted Ted to focus on situations when a detective who questions a long-term killer does not have that experience. “He’s talked to one killer in his time, and maybe that’s it. Then all of a sudden, he gets a case like this, where there could be three or four murders and they have arrested a suspect or they’re going to interview somebody as a suspect. They may not have any probable cause to arrest him at all. But just by virtue of the circumstances, the guy’s a suspect and could be the killer. That’s probably how we would encounter the Green River Killer. How would you approach somebody who could be the killer, but you don’t know for sure?”

Ted gulped. “Not knowing for sure? That’s a different situation than what I’m talking about because—this guy’s already here. They’re already in prison. Sure, it’s a different perspective entirely and there’s no sure answer, but I’ll tell you what, in my experience—I guess there’s all kinds of theories that detectives have about what works. But—and maybe coming on real strong and real hard and saying, ‘I know you did it. You might as well tell us.’—I’m sure it’s worked for some people from time to time. But in my experience, nothing will turn me off faster than a detective that comes on too hard. Because implicit in there is a lot of judgmental stuff and that would, generally, tend to put a guy off. ’Cause he knows, again, you have to sense if the detective is inexperienced. He may be an intuitive kind of guy and can sense what’s going on in the mind of the man he’s trying to question. We’ll deny that he’s the kind of guy who can be intimidated to the point where he opens up and then once he’s opened up then you can gently pull it out of him.

“But I’d say from my own experience that if the detective comes off just willing to talk, someone that’s just willing to talk and not come on real strong, that’s more likely to be the context where he can use his skills as a questioner and an interrogator to develop certain avenues, certain kinds of information that he wants.”

Ted had talked at great length about interviewing killers who do not immediately confess. Now he had to talk about some reasons why killers do confess. That, too, would be valuable information for understanding the Riverman. I asked, “When you were talking
about how serial killers would talk, is getting caught with the goods an overwhelming thing?” Maybe we’d catch the Riverman with handcuffs in his car, or a police badge in his wallet, or with the underwear from one of his victims. It’s not farfetched when you realize that that’s partially how Bundy was apprehended.

“That’s a good point,” he said. “From the standpoint of playing the standard game, playing by the rules of the criminal justice system, where you just proclaim your innocence and let your public defender do the talking, if you’re caught with the goods, it’s really kind of gone beyond the point of deniability, whether it be in a legal sense or in a psychological sense. And I think certainly, if a guy were caught with the body of a woman in his trunk, even eight years, six years later, I think he might be more vulnerable, you might say—there’s no point in denying it anymore. You might just say talk about it. ‘Let’s talk about it. What happened?’ And start with that and I think that certainly, if that were the case, he’d be more likely to tell something about everything, than if he were just arrested in his house and taken downtown.

“Because at that point, based upon everything that’s come out, like in the Green River cases, so far, it’s clear that the police … have next to nothing that’s of real value. They’ve got a lot of stuff—a few profiles and some descriptions of vehicles—but in terms of hard evidence, if I were the perpetrator, I would feel pretty confident.

“Although, still, being arrested, if it’s the first time he’s ever been arrested, that’s another factor. One of the first things I would do, and I’m sure the first thing you or task force people would do, if I had a guy that I wanted and had a warrant issued for to arrest him in this case, find out if he had any kind of criminal background. And I’m not talking just from the standpoint of trying to figure out if he’s done anything like that in the past, but try to find out how familiar he is with the system. Has he been hardened? Does he know what his rights are? I mean, not to say that you’d violate his rights, but has he been through the system before, so is he conditioned to how the game is played? Does he know how it is to be interrogated? How it is to go to trial? Does he know what prison is like and what jail is like? Is he familiar with all that? A lot of people, if ever arrested, have gone through the system like that before, gone to jail and gone to prison, even though he’s pretty solid in terms of not talking about what he’s done, the prospect of jail
and prison could still be very frightening to him because he simply has never experienced it before. Anybody who’s spent any time in prison, however, would not be as intimidated by the threat of prison or anything. The less experienced he is with the criminal justice system, obviously the better off you’ll be—in terms of questioning.”

The time from the first murder to the arrest is the main factor that Ted was talking about earlier when he described Bobby Joe Long as a short-term killer. The shorter the series, the more likely the suspect is to talk about it because he hasn’t had the time or the inclination to build up his barriers and his bravado that kept him alive on the street.

Ted added, “That’s my feeling; I’m very strong, along those lines. Early on, the guy’s more vulnerable. And all the experience of going out and abducting and killing someone is obviously a very terrible thing. But in terms of how the perpetrator sees it, it’s certainly traumatic; it can be very traumatic, too. If for no other reason that his very life, his freedom, his way of living, his own identity is threatened by possible discovery. So, early on, the guy could be unstable. He hasn’t figured it out. Psychologically, he hasn’t adapted to it. He hasn’t adjusted to it. Doesn’t know how to deal with the membranes of the system. And the more chance he has to rationalize it and justify it and work it out in his own mind, and more or less come to terms with it, and carry these very dark secrets, and the longer he carries them, the more he gets used to them, the more difficult it will be to get him to talk.”

Ted talked of the inmates who came to him because the media had written so much about him. These killers “got off,” he said, on sharing the details of their adventures and their crimes with him. They relived what they did, maybe even experienced again the same thrills of control and domination, but it was all self-serving, as was Ted’s interest. He was enjoying the details and hearing the story from them. But Ted didn’t tell them anything about his own murders. These he kept private because he knew they were the stuff of media interest as well and could be the keys that got him off death row.