The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (62 page)

For a short time, Ted went into his denial stage. He wasn’t going to tell all just yet. He was saving the goriest of details until his execution
was formally delayed. Gently, I inquired, “Do you remember what clothes she was wearing that night?”

Ted took time to gasp for air, then said, “Yup. A pair of white patent-leather clogs, blue slacks, some kind of halter top of which she had a shirt tied in a knot.” Bingo. Ted just described her clothing without the benefit of any notes. For the first time, he said something that possibly only the real killer would have known. Still, I needed more.

“Okay. And where were these deposited?”

“Along the roadside. I mean, not right along I-90. I went east to the infamous Taylor Mountain Road. What highway is that?”

“Eighteen.”

“At 18, turn right. Went south again and at some point, south of Taylor Mountain a lot of that stuff went out of the car. Down the embankments and what have you.”

“Embankments?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you have to pull over to do it or …?”

“I would stop, pull over to the side of the road. At this time, it was pretty light out, and just tossed it out. There were sometimes I would do that and sometimes I wouldn’t. At this point in time I was so frantic, so panicked, so whatever, about what had happened that I just had to get every reminder of that incident out of the car as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to take it home, didn’t want it to be around,” Ted lamented. That part of Ted’s modus operandi bordered on the disorganized edge of his personality. By his careless dumping of Hawkins’s clothing and the implements of his murder, Ted was providing evidence that might bring him dangerously close to getting caught, and he knew it. The only problem was that no police officer was close by to observe him in action. Suddenly, Ted was not the clever and charming killer—he was showing his weaknesses. During the hours after his murders he was extremely vulnerable to detection. Possibly, other killers like Ted were equally vulnerable to capture during that time period.

“Did you throw away some of your own stuff?” I said in disbelief.

“Oh, sure. I threw away the briefcase and the crutches, all that stuff. And the crowbar, everything. The handcuffs, everything. I’d get mad at myself a few weeks later because I’d have to go out and buy another pair. I mean, it’s not comical but that’s what would happen,” a smiling Ted admitted.

A flashback of the Issaquah crime scene began scrolling across my memory. I remembered one ESAR searcher finding an old rusty tire iron, and several people suggested that we just leave it. Not me—something told me to take it. There was no rational excuse for that tire iron being found in the woods along the Issaquah hillside. Certainly, no one would have been changing a tire out there. But murderous Ted Bundy had a reason to use it at that location.

Under the strain of the moment, Ted was beginning to become weary of talking without some positive support. Even he knew he could talk all day, but who would believe him? He needed to provide details that only the killer and the police would know. With that in mind, I posed a question to him. “Now that you’ve had a while to think about Georgann Hawkins, is there something you can tell me about her that probably only you know and we know?”

“Well …”

“I mean, the Spanish test is pretty darn good, if you ask me,” I admitted.

“That’s what she said, unless she was hallucinating. She said everybody called her George. Or how about that she used a safety pin to pin her blue slacks because apparently they were a bit too big.”

Silently, I relished what he had just said. The safety-pin information was absolute confirmation. I tried not to let on what I knew.
Aha.

“Or, that’s about all I know. I’m sure there are bits and pieces that will come back to me, but there wasn’t a lot, obviously, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. But that’s what comes to mind.” Ted sighed as though there were no more convincing details he could supply.

“Okay, how about the other two sets of remains in that area?” I asked, forgetting that Ted refused to talk about the Ott and Naslund murders. There was a long silence. I could see that Ted was pondering whether to continue or deviate from his preplanned strategy. The longer the silence, the more I knew I had to ask him another question about Hawkins, so I could keep him talking. Grasping at anything, I said, “Oh, one other thing.”

“Hmmm,” Ted said as though it was about time I came up with a meaningful question.

Tapping on my clipboard with my pen and pointing to the word
sever,
I asked, “Oh, one other thing about Georgann Hawkins. When did that happen?”

“When?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, May of …” Ted stammered.

“I know when she disappeared,” I said quickly. “On June twelfth.”

“Oh. June?” Ted chuckled. It seemed he was confused. He had murdered Roberta Parks and Brenda Ball in May of 1974, so the facts of another murder in June must have just run together in his mind with the other two. Ted frequently mixed the facts of his murders. After 15 years and so many victims, it was no wonder.

“The severing, when did that happen?” I continued.

“Oh, oh, oh, oh, that. Oh, excuse me. I was thinking of May, see? Ah, my memory. Oh, let’s see. I’d say about three days later,” Ted stated, opening his eyes and looking at me as if to see if I was believing his bullshit.

“Three days later?” I responded in astonishment. I felt Ted wasn’t telling the whole truth. He didn’t want to tell me that he removed her head the first day and took it home with him, as I suspected from the skulls without bodies I found on Taylor Mountain. I anticipated that he would come up with some feeble excuse why he removed it “three days later.”

“Had you gone back there before that time?” I asked, trying to get him to explain his actions.

“Uh huh. The next day,” Ted declared.

“The next day. What did you do the next day?” I asked sarcastically, knowing he wouldn’t tell me about his necrophilic activities now.

Unconvincingly, Ted stammered, “Just went back to check out the site, make sure nothing had been left there. See, you know, the feeling is, I reached the point and half expected that she might not even be there. That somehow, I hadn’t even killed her, if you will.

“So I went back—oh, yeah. Removed things like the rope. I—no, no, I had already done that. Can’t remember if I found anything there or not. But I wanted to make sure. Oh, that’s what it was. Talk about details coming back. I couldn’t find one of the shoes, so I thought it was there. But it wasn’t. So I went back—this was the next day—got on my bicycle, and rode back to that little parking lot. I knew there were police all over the place by that time, but I was kind of nervous—and I’ll tell you why in a minute. ’Cause I’d left and my car had been parked there. Somebody may have seen it.
Now, if something was found there, it might connect me. So I went back to that parking lot at about five o’clock in the afternoon and found both pierced earrings and the shoe, laying in the parking lot. So I surreptitiously gathered them up and rode off.”

Ted’s postoffense behavior was an effort to cover his tracks and evidence of his otherwise organized nature. His disorganized behavior immediately after the murder of Hawkins, shown in his throwing away her clothing and his implements haphazardly, frightened Ted in his lucid moments because he couldn’t deal with his own panic. This duality, this bipolarity between the panic at having touched something deep and terrible inside himself during the murder and necrophilic sex and the anal retentiveness of cleaning up every scrap of evidence at the contact and murder sites, might seem like some kind of split personality, but it wasn’t. This was almost typical of control-type serial killers who allow themselves gratification with a corpse, only to be repelled by their own behavior in the hours immediately afterward. When the waves of panic subside, they become organized again and return to remove any signs of their presence. It’s almost as though his organized self was knowingly protecting his disorganized self.

Ted believed that someone might connect Hawkins’s belongings to him if they found them in the parking lot the next day. I found it difficult to understand why Ted was afraid of that, but it was part of his modus operandi, so I pursued it. “After the police had checked that area?” I asked, not to imply that the police had done a poor canvass, but to lead Ted along on his favorite subject, criticizing police investigations.

“Well, you can tell me. I’d seen whole streams of them driving around all over the place, but they were concentrating on places like the nearby parks. I bet you they couldn’t have looked in that parking lot and missed the white patent-leather clog and two white pierced earrings—little hoops.”

“That was discovered by you the next day?” I asked in amazement.

“Yeah. Around five o’clock, six o’clock,” Ted proudly stated.

My curiosity took over. If Ted drove by Taylor Mountain in the early morning hours after he killed Hawkins, why didn’t he take her up there initially or take the same power line road off Highway 18, where he had previously dumped Healy, Ball, Rancourt, and Parks, and dispose of Hawkins or her clothing in the same previously successful manner? So I said, “Okay, excuse me. After you
left the Issaquah scene that night and went toward Taylor Mountain, did you go back to Taylor Mountain, knowing what was there?”

Before Ted even answered, I experienced a sinking and incredibly horrible sensation. The chills and goose bumps formed on the back of my neck; my stomach turned while I squinted at Ted, readying myself for his answer. A warning bell had just sounded loudly in my head. I had assumed there was a certain order to his murders: abduct, kill, and dump, then abduct, kill, and dump again. And when a previous dump site was not discovered, it could be used successfully again. The theory was that he abducted Healy on January 31, killed her, and dumped her on Taylor Mountain. Then Ran-court was abducted on April 17, killed, and her remains dumped on Taylor Mountain, and so on with the remainder of the women. The site had not been discovered, so he used it again and again. I had been dead wrong. Taylor Mountain was not the original dump site for those four young women, it was only where Ted had left their heads. But you try never to make a mistake with Ted, unless it’s part of your plan, because you lose his confidence in your expertise.

Ted casually verified my realization by saying, “No. No, I wasn’t going back. I just drove by there. That’s all. It was along the highway. I didn’t even slow down. Yeah, that was really not on my mind at that time.”

Not really on his mind at that time. What a shocking statement. Taylor Mountain wasn’t on his mind as a dump site at that time because their heads were someplace else—Taylor Mountain wasn’t a dump site until much later. I would eventually learn that Ted had four heads at his rooming house, all stored together. I had realized that I had made a critically wrong assumption that all things happen in a certain predictable order. This is not the case with serial killers.

Ready for something less traumatic, I asked, “Okay, so what happened in the next couple days?”

“Well, again, and this might be something you could plug into, if that’s what you want to do. The reason I was so nervous about anything
like that being found in that parking lot was that no more than two weeks before, I had been using the same modus operandi in the same neighborhood. In front, now, of the same sorority house that Georgann Hawkins disappeared from, I encountered a girl going out the door and asked her to help me. I walked her all the way to that lot, eleven o’clock on a Friday night. And I was drunk, and I was just babbling on. I told her I worked in Olympia, that I lived in a rooming house. I mean, I was just horrified later on.”

“Were you drunk when you got Hawkins?” I asked, again in disbelief, this time because it seemed that his apparently frequent drunken states did not impede his ability to avoid detection.

“Yes, more or less, but yes. That was basically part of the M.O. at that time. Yeah. But I reached all the way to the car—and this would happen sometimes—and just said, ‘No, I don’t want to do it.’ I said, ‘Thank you. See you later.’ And she walked away. But after the Hawkins thing, I was just paranoid as hell that this girl would say, ‘You know, something weird happened to me a couple weeks ago. This guy came along with crutches and asked me to help him. He took me to a Volkswagen and said he worked in Olympia and lived here in the university district.’ How many people could that apply to? So, there you are.”

It was hard to listen to Ted describe incriminating evidence that would have led us to him if we had seen the case for what it was from the very start. Unfortunately, I knew this woman had not come forward, or at least if she did come forward, the facts as Ted recounted were not in police reports. I now realized in retrospect that all the leads about a guy on crutches in the U-district seeking help for changing a tire, which were received after the Lake Sammamish murders, were probably Ted Bundy practicing his routines. What fools we were! The evidence was there all the time. What had we missed on Green River? The answers were all there, locked up in small memories in Ted’s brain, while time was running out on both of us.

“Okay, how about getting back to—going back to that scene?” I asked, wondering if he would actually get into his aberrant sexual perversions.

“Okay. Well, I went back the next day, and I went back about three days later to do that business we talked about earlier and went up the roadway with it.” Ted was talking about the removal of
Georgann Hawkins’s head, which we had talked about earlier. “It was sort of a crude attempt to disguise the identity—or avoid, I mean—the identification of the remains as such. I don’t know. In retrospect, it sounds pretty incoherent, but that’s what was motivating it at the time. And then maybe about a week to two weeks later, I went back for a third time. Yeah.”

“What for?” I asked. Weren’t the other times enough?

“Again, just to see what was going on. You know, there’s a lot of psychological stuff going on here that we just don’t have time for. I mean, we could spend days explaining it. I mean, there is an aspect here of, you know, the possessiveness I’m sure you’re familiar with, the aftereffects. This is why I’m so keen on the staking out crime scenes of this type afterwards, fascination with death, necrophilia, all that. But, of course, you know, in June after a week, what with all the local wildlife, that there’s not much left.”