The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (67 page)

“She was on her back, faceup. But the dry weather and all, it sort of, I don’t know what the term would be, ‘mummified’ her remains. Anyway, I’d gone back to bury her, which is why I had a shovel, a small shovel. And which is what I did.”

He buried her two to three feet down in the soft soil, on her back, arms extended along her sides to her feet, and covered the burial site with heavy rocks and tree branches that he dragged over. He did it, he said, to prevent any animals from getting to it. And it took him about forty-five minutes to complete the burial.

But Matt Lindvall still wasn’t happy with the story of what happened
between Bundy and his victim the first night at the burial site. It was difficult to talk about, Bundy said, but Lindvall pressed him until Bundy tried to explain, just as he once tried to explain to me, what it was like to live within a camouflage that you’re too afraid to release, even at the point of your own execution when there’s nothing more to be gained. What had Bundy done with his victim at the dump site after he had killed her? Now, in front of Lindvall, he struggled for an answer. But he had explained to me years earlier that there are some things a serial killer will do that he will never talk about, even when he believes his interviewer is not being judgmental, like a cop.

“I know you are and you’ve seen things, I’m sure,” Bundy said. “But it’s still an experience. I’m not asking for sympathy, but just that you understand that this has been something, this is the kind of memory that I’ve held so closely for so long that, um, ’course years ago I couldn’t have under any circumstances talked about it. Couldn’t have psychologically. There are many reasons. I’m not saying that’s the only reason, but the kind of identity that I’d created or was created, and I’m not talking about multiple personalities, but identity that was related to what happened to Julie Cunningham more or less thrived on a kind of secrecy that formed the identity and to give us that secrecy was a kind of … it felt like a kind of death.”

As he floated back to the memories of the night he met his victim, he told Lindvall about the actual conversation he had with her in the moments before he struck her, while they were walking to the car and she thought Bundy was just another guy she’d met up with, not a killer. “She mentioned that she had been on her way to have either dinner or drinks or both with a friend of hers, I believe a woman friend, but I’m not absolutely certain. But she said she wouldn’t, it wouldn’t matter if she was a little late, something to that effect. Also, I believe, she posted some letters. She stopped and ran over to a post office or a mailbox.

“I know there was some casual conversation,” Bundy said. “But that involved some aspects of her life, you know, not intimate, just general kind of conversation. I know it was more of that, but it’s, I can’t recall specifically right now. It’s something I could probably focus on, who knows?”

I remembered, during the visits I made to Florida to interview Bundy, how his moods seemed to change. At one point he was the
center of attention, the egomaniacal wannabe lawyer who believed he could defend himself against the most heinous of charges the state had filed against him. Bundy failed at that, and when the sentence of death was pronounced, he seemed to collapse into himself. Then the long process of appeals began as Bundy worked the system to his advantage, hanging on until the end of 1988, when it became apparent that he had run out of time. Even then, when there was no more hope left and it was obvious that his own lawyers had led him astray, he tried to cobble together an ego to confront the police, who were lining up to get their scheduled days with him. But he failed at that, too, and there was nothing left of him at the end.

I always wondered about the different aspects of Bundy’s personality and how they probably manifested themselves while he was committing murders and during the periods between homicides. Bundy was never really as smart as he thought he was, or as careful. For example, he told Matt Lindvall, who had asked him about the crowbar and the ropes he kept in his car, about the group of implements discovered by the Salt Lake City cop who had stopped Bundy for driving without lights in Salt Lake City. It was that arrest that proved Bundy’s ultimate undoing because it had led to the search of his car, which recovered the telltale strand of hair wound around the stick shift, implicating him in the Utah murder of Melissa Smith.

“The items that were recovered in Salt Lake,” Lindvall asked, “or the Utah area from your automobile, were these the items that were involved in the abduction and death in Vail, the crowbar, the ropes?”

“That’s a good question,” Bundy answered. “It could well have been, but they may have been changed. I went through these fits of despair where I throw everything away. And then I have to get more stuff.”

“Did you clean your car between these situations?” Lindvall asked.

“Well, that’s an understatement,” Bundy answered. “But when the police finally in Salt Lake got hold of the car, it had a new interior in it. I mean and the thing was steam cleaned inside and out, which is why I find it almost humorous why they found so-called hairs in there because, I mean, you couldn’t have found one of my hairs in there when I got done with that thing. But anyway, yeah, the inside of that car, the carpets, the seats, the rubber mats. I just went to a junkyard, got the stuff out of Volkswagens, you know, junk Volkswagens, took out everything, replaced the seats, some of
the seats, backseats, all the upholstery, that is, all the rugs, all the stuff in there. And I did it myself. Painted it.”

Matt Lindvall pressed Bundy to determine how he had managed to connect with Julie Cunningham on the night he killed her. Did Bundy know Vail? Had he been surveilling it, looking for victims? Had he visited it before? Or was Julie Cunningham simply in the wrong place when Ted Bundy drove through?

“Did you plan this in Vail because it was Vail or did it just happen?” Lindvall asked.

“It was just there,” Bundy said, reiterating that he did not know Julie Cunningham, had never met her before, and only walked with her straight from the covered bridge, where he had introduced himself and asked for help to the parking lot.

Bundy had spent four hours driving and then wandering around Vail. He said he got stuck in a snowbank behind an apartment complex for a couple of hours and had to dig himself out. Then he left his VW in a parking lot and wandered around on foot until it got dark. After dark, he returned to his car and got his crutches and paraphernalia, then took the crowbar out of the car and propped it up by the engine, thus setting up the trap for the next victim who would cross his path.

Even Bundy himself professed not to understand his own behavior. He’d implied as much to me during our interviews, always talking around the crime and trying to avoid as much as possible the admission that he himself had committed the homicides. You had to pin Bundy down to the facts without being judgmental, get him to open the door a little so that you could peek inside. But although he was not remorseful, he did evidence shame when he refused to talk about what he called the “hardcore” aspects to his crimes. When Matt Lindvall asked him about why he returned to the spot to bury Julie Cunningham and what else might have taken place when Bundy saw her remains still looking fresh, laid out in exactly the same spot where he’d left her, he demurred. What was there about Bundy’s returning to the spot?

“Why did you take that risk?” Lindvall asked. “Why did you decide to bury her? You hadn’t buried anybody else to that point, had you?”

“Oh, yes, I had,” Bundy said. Then he caught himself as if he’d given something away that he hadn’t meant to. But he was committed
to the answer. “Yes, uh, you know, it was, well, it was….”

“Only you know everything,” Lindvall said, and wondered aloud why there had been no discoveries of any of Bundy’s buried victims. “I’m trying to think. I don’t know of any cases where that has been the situation.” But Lindvall had heard the hint of an admission that there were other Colorado victims out there, buried in unknown places that only Bundy knew about.

And Bundy confirmed it by saying, “That’s why.” He always had to be right. “Because in every case where a woman was buried, there’s no body to be found.”

“Are there any other people buried in Colorado by you?” Lindvall asked him directly.

“Well, yeah,” Bundy answered, but he was suddenly aware that he’d been walked into an admission he might not have been prepared to make. “Well, you know, but it’s not a large number. The question, yeah, well, that’s something else.”

Then, when Lindvall suggested that Bundy’s behavior had deviated from what he did normally, Bundy explained, “Well, there is, this is something that I think we can all learn from. I mean, I’m still learning about myself and about this, this, I mean even though these events are remote in time, every time I’ve had an opportunity to go over this and I’ve only gone over it in the abstract with people, I’ve always worked around the edges. I’ve never told anybody the hardcore stuff before. But I’ve gone over it in my own mind, trying to understand it. What is ordinary? There is nothing ordinary about any of this.”

Lindvall was still perplexed about why Bundy had driven from Utah to Colorado to visit and bury Julie Cunningham’s body. It was a very risky thing for him to do, and it seemed that beneath Bundy’s explanations there was still something he wasn’t revealing. The underlying question was still: Why had Bundy gone back to the body?

In the case of the Washington dump sites, Bundy said, “I went back to that scene a day later, two days later, and I don’t know how much, how familiar you are, well, about crime scenes. I mean, after a day or two, the body is relatively fresh, after, depending on the climate, animals, humidity, time of year, you name it. Depends on the decomposition cycle.”

In Julie Cunningham’s case, however, six to eight weeks after Bundy had left her in the open, “I would describe it as being mummified,” he said. “I had never seen somebody who’d been out that
long who was not either eaten, I mean consumed by insects in some way. But the body was basically untouched, but, you know, obviously very different looking than someone who is either alive or just freshly killed.”

But why had Bundy gone back? He said it wasn’t particularly the condition of the body that he wanted to see. “That’s not the reason I went back. The reason I went back was twofold. Primarily, for the burial, and secondly, to check the scene to make sure that nothing had been left there.”

“Why did you choose to bury her?” Lindvall asked. “You could have just left and reduced the risk greatly.”

“My frame of mind at the time,” Bundy answered. “It just seemed, well, it just seemed like the thing to do. My motivations were twofold, but primarily to conceal.”

Lindvall reminded Bundy that he hadn’t concealed his victims’ bodies in either the Aspen murder or in Utah, which sent Bundy into an explanation of his modus operandi and how it tended to vary because “I was never an automaton. I would do things differently over time.”

Bundy reiterated that on the night of the murder, he hit Julie with the crowbar, an off-the-shelf crowbar you could get in any hardware store or Sears; and when he reached the dump site and hit her again, she was unconscious, half inside and half outside the car. He laid her on the ground, strangled her, removed her clothes, and carried her into the woods, but, “There are details I am not entirely clear about there.” He added, first, in answer to a question, that he did nothing whatsoever to the body and, next, asked whether Lindvall meant in the woods or by the car.

“I’m not really clear on that. This is something I would like to reserve until we can talk in more depth about it,” Bundy said, arguing instead that they should simply search for the body in the location where he said they’d find it and worry about events at the crime scene later. Obviously, he was concealing something: his behavior, his activity at the crime scene that first night, and the reasons he returned to the crime scene six weeks later. Even though Bundy had told me about his activities with Georgann Hawkins’s body, he was holding back with Lindvall about his activities with Julie Cunningham. He even admitted it.

So Lindvall proceeded along a different track. He referred to other
cases in Colorado, cases that weren’t necessarily Vail PD’s, to create a context in which Bundy could talk about why he buried Julie and what he might have done with her body both times he was at the dump site.

“I’m gonna ask you,” Lindvall began. “You abducted a girl from Grand Junction. Did you bury her?”

Bundy said he only wanted to focus on Lindvall’s case, Julie Cunningham.

“But you know we are focusing on that. But I am verifying, and that’s the only way I can verify what you’ve told me. The only way is by verifying something like that.”

Bundy again demurred, saying that he could only verify what he was asked. He wasn’t asked to talk about cases other than the Julie Cunningham case from Vail.

“Can you tell me,” Lindvall began again, this time referring to the other Colorado cases that Bundy seemed to be alluding to, “if they’re buried or not?”

Bundy hesitated again and then finally said, “There are other buried remains in Colorado.” And, in a backdoor admission, Ted revealed that there might actually be a dump site with other bodies.

“In Colorado?” Lindvall asked.

“Right,” Bundy answered.

“And associated with that Grand Junction situation and then buried in the same place?” Lindvall continued.

“No, no. Okay, okay,” Bundy finally said. “Well, we’ll get, is there somebody out there we can call to have them stop by the …?”

But no one in Colorado law enforcement would consider it, Lindvall told him, because of the late date and the vagueness of the location. So they had to work on it together, Bundy told him. Bundy would work on it and Lindvall would work on getting maps that Bundy could use to pinpoint the locations of body dump sites for them. And they did this until Lindvall maneuvered Bundy back to Julie’s burial site, when he tried, yet again, to get Bundy to talk about his activities at the site.