The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (68 page)

“How deep was the grave?” the detective asked.

“Two to three feet, at least, maybe three.”

“What was the diameter of it?”

“Just enough for the body,” Bundy answered.

“How did you place the body?”

“On its back. Yeah, on the back.”

“Did you put the body in there whole, or was it folded?”

“No, it was laid out,” Bundy said.

“Like normal?”

“Yeah,” Bundy continued. “Like fully extended.”

“Fully extended, arms at the side? Arms above?”

“No,” Bundy corrected. “At the side.”

“Ted,” Lindvall said. “This is really important to know if the body was placed in whole.”

“Okay,” Bundy answered. “Fine, well, I’m telling you it’s all in one place. It’s all there. I mean, it was at one time. At that time.”

“And was there any damage to the body other than strangulation?”

“No,” Bundy answered. “There was, I think you’ll see from, well, when you locate it that it should all be intact.” And it would be a skeleton by now, he and Lindvall agreed, and it would have no clothing and no possessions or items from the victim.

Matt Lindvall kept on encouraging Bundy not to hold back about what had happened at Julie’s gravesite on the first night Bundy left her there. Bundy, trying to back away from answering the question, kept telling Lindvall to talk to me, presumably about what Bundy did to his victims’ corpses, but Lindvall wasn’t buying it. “I know it’s difficult. Can’t imagine too much being more difficult than that,” Lindvall said. “I don’t want you to hold back. I think you’ll feel better about yourself.”

“We’ve both covered a lot of ground today,” Bundy replied, still searching for cover as he was pressed to answer about his activities at the crime scene.

“You know,” Lindvall said. “I mean you don’t tell everything.”

“I could have told you, if I had wanted, we’re talking about being dishonest. Just, hey, this is all that happened, period.”

“But that’s not all that happened,” Lindvall said.

“And yet I didn’t bullshit you,” Bundy continued. “And yet I won’t bullshit you now. I’m just having a hard time talking about that one segment of this rather prolonged incident.”

Lindvall acknowledged what Bundy was telling him.

“And I could just say that I’ve known guys”—
guys
was Bundy’s term for other serial killers, particularly the ones he’d met on Florida’s death row—“who’ve just bullshitted their way through this part of it and said, oh, nothing. I’m not going to bullshit you through it. I’m telling you that’s a point we’re going to, in my case,
we will talk about.” He tacitly admitted to Lindvall what Lindvall had suspected about what Bundy might have done with the body, acts performed on the body. “But not today.”

“Mike [Fisher] and I want to be able to say at a point in time in the future that you cooperated with us fully,” Lindvall said, perhaps trying to get Bundy to think of himself as a part of history, his words still resonating long after he was executed. “And that’s what you want us to be able to say. Well, that’s why I’m getting the last, should we say, roadblock out of the way and then I’m going to want to excuse myself. I want to thank you, knowing that I know everything about the situation that you know and remember.”

He reminded Bundy that there was another burial site in Colorado that he needed to cover with him as well as get as much details as possible in the Cunningham case; it would not only help Bundy, but it would add “validity to the scene of the burial.” In other words, what Bundy said about what he did would have to comport with what forensics reported after Julie’s remains were recovered from the burial site that Bundy had told Lindvall about.

“I don’t like what happened,” Bundy said at the close of the interview, referring not only generally to the crimes he had committed, but specifically to the murder of Julie Cunningham. “I mean, notwithstanding any speculation about the kind of personality that I might be. I, it’s not gratuitous for me to say that I feel horrible about it. And not that, sadly enough, won’t bring her back, but I do. And it’s not enough to say it’s an atrocity because it was. And not that anybody cares, but if it should ever occur to you to relate this to anybody, you can tell them that I get no secret joy or pleasure out of it. That my own special kind of hell and madness that I lived in ten, twenty years ago was as wrong and as terrible as it could be. And I’m sorry.”

Was Bundy being gratuitous in his final interview with the Colorado authorities or was he truly recounting what must have been the cowardly hell he walked through most of his entire life? Not only was he a chickenshit who coldcocked his victims before he carted them away and strangled them, he was a necrophile who sexually aroused himself with their remains as he spent time with them at their resting places, even as they were decomposing into skeletal shadows of what they once were.

But this interview was still not the last the world would hear from Ted Bundy.

16
 
Peace, ted

T
heodore Robert Bundy, like George Russell, John Wayne Gacy, and other serial killers, was a public danger. There are empty bedrooms, lonely people, and broken hearts scattered from Washington to Florida as a result of his murders. Without their families’ voices screaming for investigation, some victims are easily forgotten—out of sight, out of mind. But there will be more like them in the future and we must be ready to find their killers. Examining Bundy’s carnage and understanding how he thought and acted helps us investigate and deal more effectively with people like him. I had listened to and thought about every one of Ted’s words. He never spoke hastily when reflecting upon the Riverman’s habits. Even though Ted’s analysis of the Riverman was therapeutic for him, enabling him to relive his fantasies, it also revealed to me many of his own previously unknown behaviors, and those of others like him. Ted’s reflections about the Riverman were such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive faculties that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal that was still hidden from me.

Partly through the luck of the draw and partly because I just happened to be around, I was assigned to the job of investigating the disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in 1974 from Lake Sammamish State Park. At that time, I had no idea how to investigate
missing-persons cases. I now have a much better idea, and so at the end of over twenty-five years of investigative work and because Ted Bundy is dead, I can supply those missing links in the personality of Ted Bundy, which turned out to be remarkably gruesome. Detective work is of interest itself, but that interest was nothing to me compared to the string of Bundy’s murders, which gave me the greatest shock and surprise throughout my long career as a cop. Even now, after the long interval since Bundy’s execution, I find myself struggling as I think of the Bundy case, and feeling once more that sudden flood of grief, pressure, and incredulity that utterly overran my mind at times during this investigation. During the years dealing with Ted Bundy, while denying to colleagues and the media that I was doing so, I became something of a Bundy victim and a member of his coterie of investigators. Let me say to fellow police detectives and the public at large, which has shown some interest in this remarkably horrible man, that they are not to blame me for not having shared my knowledge with them before this time. I should have considered it my first duty to do so and would have told what only I knew if I had not been barred by an emphatic prohibition from Ted’s own lips.

Even though every murderer is different in nature, Bundy shared certain characteristics with other serial killers. Ted was a loner. Inside, he was extremely insecure. While striving for security, he made life miserable for the rest of us. His relationships with others were very superficial. He was a fellow who could not stick with anyone. His relatives and acquaintances may have tried very hard to have contact with him, thus feeling that they were very close to him. Many of his friends, both old and new, were starved for love and affection. They felt what Ted wanted them to feel because he was able to detect and exploit people’s needs. In a way, he made victims of all who knew him.

What added to Ted’s convincing nature was that he was intelligent, attractive, and charming—he had traits that were pleasing to most of his admirers. His reputation was that of an aspiring lawyer and a bright young man who was dutiful to family. But when Ted murmured gratitude, his words came from an empty heart. He would cast off friends without a thought, and once alienated, he could reel them back in like bloated trout. There was always something about Ted that they liked and kept coming back to. His efforts
to maintain friendships were nothing more than attempts to preserve control over those very people he used for his own purposes. Ted Bundy was an almost complete sociopath who made no distinction between what he wanted and what belonged to someone else. Ted had absolutely no sense of boundaries and sought to exercise his control over anyone who crossed his path.

Because of Ted’s appearance of having a winning, good-guy bravado, his friends thought that he was the last person who would have murdered anyone. Over the years, anytime I saw news stories in which friends of a suspected killer said, “He was such a nice boy, he couldn’t have done it,” I thought of Ted and said to myself that the police had the right guy.

Hervey Cleckley’s “mask of sanity” was the ultimate description of Ted Bundy as well as of the Riverman and other long-term serial killers. One of my fellow detectives best described Ted as an “empty suit.” Ted’s mask was more convincing than that of others. What lay beneath the surface was Ted’s fatally crippled personality, a dreadfully dark side, a black hole that no one could truly penetrate but that exercised control over others like a gravitational pull. Ted sucked everyone into that black hole—certainly his murder victims, people who supported him, and even the police interrogators who tried to pull information out of him. Ted perceived other killers as black holes also and could talk to them because he understood them. Luckily for us, black holes like Ted have unique attributes that make them stand out to police. Ted was attracted to other black holes, and that’s why he said he could help find the Riverman by entering what he perceived to be his psyche. Ted understood how black-hole personalities think and react and thus was able to retrace their footsteps or see through their eyes.

Now and then, Ted would gravitate toward normalcy, seeking harmless contact with others. But the rare occasion out with friends was tempered by the realization that when the social hour was over, he would eventually return to his life of despair. Most of the time, Ted was alone, spending his private moments engrossed in murder, rehearsing murder, and fantasizing about murder. I never saw a
man with more pain in his face. You had only to get a glimpse of his eyes to see it.

The most obvious of Ted’s characteristic behaviors was his high degree of mobility. Ted had a compulsion to travel, usually in a vehicle—prowling, hunting, cruising, and searching for victims. He became, especially when he was acting out the behaviors leading up to an abduction and murder, like the walking dead. There was no emotion except for the compulsion to possess someone else, to inflict upon her a crippling blow that would deliver her into his control. He was chilling in his single-mindedness to kill.

Ted, like other serial killers, who are all rootless creatures, had access to more than one vehicle, which allowed him to always be in transit and throw those who were searching for him off his trail. His tan Volkswagen Beetle was his primary mode of transportation for visiting his dump sites and trolling for victims. Also, he had a green pickup truck and, occasionally, drove his girlfriend’s light-blue VW. His use of different vehicles made detection difficult, since we were looking for a metallic brown VW Beetle.

Remarkable also was Ted’s ability for long-distance driving. Ted advised us that cities within 300 miles were easily accessible to the Riverman, and we surmised that he said that because that is what he thought himself when he was killing. Ted’s abduction and murder of Kathy Parks from Oregon State University over 280 miles from Seattle was the best example. Even worse for Oregon authorities, he dumped her skull on Taylor Mountain near Seattle. This kind of traveling defied the norm for conventional murderers, but fit the model of serial killers, who spread their victims’ remains over many different jurisdictions. Ted knew how to cover his tracks.

Ted altered his VW bug to suit his needs by removing the passenger side front seat and borrowing his fiancée’s ski rack. That enabled him to have his unconscious victim close to him, while carrying her bicycle on the rack, as he transported her away to the murder and victim dumping site. Other killers have removed inside door handles and locks, installed binding devices and portable “Kojak” lights, and carried radios that monitor police frequencies.