The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (58 page)

Russell knew that the police would search his apartment. In a final act of bravado, he called his female roommates and had them present to police, upon their arrival, a 1973 FBI evidence handbook. This was Russell’s way of announcing his invincibility by implying, “you’re not going to find anything because I know your business, too.” Russell was still trying to assert control, to maintain his sense of significance even though he knew the police were hot on his trail. But Russell was wrong. This was 1990, not 1973. His edition of the evidence handbook didn’t include DNA analysis, nor did he anticipate the thoroughness of the detectives’ search for evidence. At Russell’s apartment, a gym bag he always carried was recovered, and inside it was human head hair belonging to Andrea Levine.

In the subsequent murder trial of George Russell, my testimony was simple: the killer’s personal expression was permanently etched on the bodies of Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine. When I analyzed the murders by type and frequency of injuries and other unique characteristics from the first murder to the third, I drew only one conclusion: they were all committed by the same person.

I recognized the distinctive aspects of the killer’s imprint. First, all three victims were intentionally left so someone would find them. They were not concealed or hidden but were placed in locations where they would be discovered quickly. The killer left them openly displayed, knowing that whoever found them would be shocked, both physically and psychologically.

Second, they were posed in a sexually degrading positions. The killer got a thrill out of demonstrating their vulnerability after death. Moreover, only implements that the killer found at the scene were used for their portraits. He did this consistently in all three murders. For example, he used a pinecone with Pohlreich, Beethe’s red shoes, and Levine’s book about sex.

Third, the killer used foreign objects in sexual orifices as part of his protocol. The actual object was absent in the Pohlreich case. The act of sexually inserting foreign objects and leaving them in their cavities evolved from the first murder through the third. It became more of a need for the killer to demonstrate his personal expression by leaving a rifle in Beethe and a dildo in Levine’s mouth.

Fourth, the presence of all three of those relatively rare characteristics in each of the three murders was a very extraordinary occurrence. Notwithstanding the fact that the murders were committed in
a small geographical area, the chain of those unique characteristics was the fundamental aspect of the killer’s signature.

Fifth, the strength of the defense each victim was allowed to put up decreased from the first murder through the third murder. Pohlreich had multiple defense wounds, Beethe had two small defense wounds, and Levine did not have any defense wounds. The state of mind of the killer was influenced by the struggle put up by the first victim, so subsequent victims were not allowed any chance to fight back.

Sixth, the killer spent an increasing amount of time with each victim after death, rearranging their bodies in their final death poses. Remaining for any amount of time behind the Black Angus Restaurant and at the outdoor scene of Pohlreich’s killing was very risky, since someone could come upon the scene and interrupt the killer. Therefore, very little time was spent arranging Pohlreich’s body. The killer was with Beethe, injuring and arranging her body, for a longer period of time than he was with Pohlreich. With Beethe’s bedroom door closed, the presence of her sleeping children in the house posed no immediate threat of discovery to the killer. Levine’s apartment was conducive to taking even more time since she lived alone. Assaulting Levine with those fatal strokes, carefully cutting her over 230 times, and dutifully arranging her body probably took a considerable amount of time, at least more than it took to pose Pohlreich and Beethe.

Seventh, the number of injuries sustained by each victim increased from the Pohlreich murder through the Levine murder. Pohlreich sustained just enough injuries to cause her death. Beethe was beaten severely, more than what was necessary to kill her. Levine was also beaten excessively and cut extensively. The increasing number of injuries reflected the killer’s need to exercise absolute possession by creatively defiling their bodies.

I summarized that the gradual increases and decreases in certain acts—inflicting an increasing number of injuries in each case, spending more and more time after death with each victim, and reducing the participation on the part of a live victim from the first case to the last—in conjunction with open display, posing, and sexual insertion of foreign objects were the specific factors that identified the signature of the killer in the Pohlreich, Beethe, and Levine murders, leading to the conclusion that they were all killed by the same person.

George Russell was a lot like Ted Bundy. The most obvious similarity
was the considerable amount of time he spent with his victims after death. But George’s murders were ultimately flawed by his passion, his need to display his hatred, and his need to display his bodies in hopes that they would be found quickly to preserve the element of shock and surprise. George had to be in control, but he misunderstood control and thereby created the conditions for his own capture. Bundy, on the other hand, covered his signature by assuring that not only would his early victims not be found right away, but that when they were discovered, there would be nothing left but bones. His signature was buried along with his victims, and any physical evidence directly linking him to the crimes was buried as well.

The inception and development of HITS helped catch George Russell even though he broke all the rules of serial murder that Ted had laid down during our years of discourse. Russell didn’t simply attack prostitutes on the street like the Green River Killer did. He broke into people’s homes in the night, killed them in their beds, sexually violated their corpses in the most gruesome ways, and then displayed them like trophies for people to find the next day. He degraded his victims by posing them in their full sexual vulnerability. In death, they displayed the helplessness of the final moments of their lives, when Russell was beating them until the bones in their skulls shattered. But even the beating was part of his need to control. Serial murderers kill out of a need to control people because they can’t control anything else in life. In those moments just before and after the death of their victim, their need to control is gratified the most. And very, very few of these killers know how to cover up their signatures completely once they’ve expended their lust on a lifeless victim. Not even Bundy could cover up all his tracks; neither could the Green River Killer.

13
 
Suspects

W
hen there are an extraordinary number of murders occurring within a certain geographical area, especially if they are in different jurisdictions, there seems to be a resistance or hesitancy, political or otherwise, to approach those murders as if they were committed by the same person. Why?

It’s because police officers have continually investigated one or a pair of killers for just a single murder. Murders committed by the same killer over time are unusual for most agencies. They don’t know how to react because they’ve never investigated related murder cases before. So they end up using traditional single-murder investigative methods just as they have done in every murder case that came before. That reaction is a conditioned response, not the product of Sherlockian deduction. No matter what the type of case, investigators take the wrong approach by starting with the thought,
It’s okay, I can do it myself.
It’s worked that way before. The illusion has been emphasized over time at the expense of logic by the way cases have been assigned and followed up. The supervisor assigns a detective to a case. That detective has some help with the initial investigation, but when the heat dies down, it’s all his. His
name is on the folder. So what’s developed is a “my case” attitude. Anything that comes in regarding that one case goes to detective so-and-so. Other members of the department relinquish all responsibility for the investigation, thereby placing it solely in the hands of one unwitting detective.

The dangers of this attitude are very real and very large. One detective is left with only what worked in the past—looking for suspects within the closed circle of a victim’s acquaintances. How can a lone detective investigate a case that might have multiagency implications? When all the traditional investigative options are exhausted, what does the detective do? Indecision on the part of the investigator, lack of alternatives, and delays in pursuing strangers play right into the hands of the multiple killer. By the time the detective completes a routine investigation, he or she is already many steps behind the killer, and more than likely, the killer has probably murdered again and again. Serial cases call for a traditional investigation of the victim’s acquaintances as well as an investigation of suspects who are complete strangers.

Another infirmity that cripples serial-murder investigations from the very start is institutionalized separateness. Members of one department just aren’t used to working with members of other departments who are pursuing the same killer. The hesitancy agencies have about working together comes from the memory of how previous cases that were shared among different precincts or counties were handled when things were going badly—certainly it was the other guy’s fault. And when things were going right, the credit wasn’t equally shared. The dynamic is unfortunately horribly infantile, like two high-school girls bickering over the same boyfriend. The cold reality here is that the killer knows that this is exactly what happens. The more cunning killers intentionally abduct victims from one jurisdiction and eventually dump their bodies in another jurisdiction because they know the bickering alone between members of different departments will delay or even prohibit any meaningful investigation.

Whatever the reason for the resistance to recognizing the serial, many investigations have suffered for it. In the beginning of the
Bundy cases, there were those who didn’t believe that the victims at the Issaquah crime scene were related to women found at the Taylor Mountain site. Why? Because no one knew how the killer approached any of the Taylor Mountain women until the witnesses came forward in the Susan Rancourt case from central Washington. Even once the information became available, there were still doubters.

This attitude, apparent in the early stages of the Bundy investigation, was not unique. The early investigation into the victims of Bobby Joe Long, who raped and murdered at least 11 women in Florida, suffered from the same malady. The method of death was so different from one body to another, and the fact that victims came from various backgrounds had police officials publicly saying that there was no serial. Only when conclusive evidence was found—that of an orange trilobal fiber, which was discovered in each case by the FBI laboratory—did investigators link the victims together and conduct a meaningful follow-up investigation.

In spite of their experience with Bundy eight years before, some investigators in the King County Police Department didn’t believe the five victims in or near the Green River were killed by the same person who murdered the prostitutes whose bodies were found on land at the north and south ends of Sea-Tac Airport or east of Enum-claw. If that resistance indicated the prevailing attitude, how diligent were those very investigators in pursuing the theory that they were all murdered by the same person? Could their beliefs have been so clouded that their motivation to investigate thoroughly was stifled? Not wanting to admit the presence of a serial-murder case makes it next to impossible to go through any list of suspects with any degree of accuracy. It leads only to a more tense and ugly situation.

My approach to linking cases has been borne out by misinter-pretations in the investigations of killers such as Bundy, Russell, Long, and others like New York’s Arthur Shawcross and Atlanta’s Wayne Williams. All of these killers’ victims were found within a reasonably small geographical area and they drove the number of murders in the area above the average. The respective
investigations all began in the same way, with the disbelief that the victims were killed by the same person. Even at the earliest stages of the Green River cases, common sense told us that over 90 percent of the victims we discovered during the course of the Green River investigation were murdered by the same person. There are not five or six different killers thrown into the mix. A serial-murder case that has been filtered by reluctance and politics heavily bends the outcome of that investigation in favor of the killer.

For most serial-murder cases, there were no clear guidelines to alert police to the fact that they were dealing with a serial killer. And once the series was identified, there still were no standard operating procedures or textbooks that detailed the proper way to pursue a serial murderer versus a single-victim killer.