The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (69 page)

After his murders, Ted was obsessed with leaving very little in the way of evidence that could be traced to him. Similarly, many long-term serial killers are focused totally on destruction of evidence. Only on the rare occasion would any evidence be left behind at any body recovery site by a serial killer. The risky part was returning to those scenes to clean them up. Someone might see him.

Of course, killers like John Wayne Gacy carried the possession aspect to the extreme by burying many of his victims in the crawl space beneath his home. Bundy experienced ultimate control of his victims at first by taking their severed heads home with him while he was killing in Washington State. He then changed his method of operation, taking the entire body of his victim home with him while he was in Utah.

Ted’s tidiness was not the only reason he revisited his body dump sites. His unwritten signature was expressed in terms of his complete control and grisly possession of women. By frequently using the terms
objects
or
things
for
female, lady,
or
woman,
he relegated women to the inanimate in his mind. The young women he attacked were articles to possess as far as he was concerned. His assault and abduction of Lynda Healy while she slept in her basement room was an ultimate high for him at the time. He took total control of her by removing her under cover of darkness. The Chi Omega murders at Florida State University were a different means of control for Bundy. If it were not for one unwitting sorority sister who interrupted Ted’s frenzy at a time when he thought he was in total possession of numerous coeds, Bundy would have killed every single woman asleep in that house.

It was almost as though Bundy took complete possession of his victims, in all of their dimensions. As evidence of his morbidity, Ted readily admitted that he was preoccupied with the cyanotic hue of a corpse’s fingernails, discoloration of the skin after death, necrophilia, and possession of the female corpse. In psychological terms his behavior can best be described as compulsive necrophilia and extreme perversion. Ted’s suggestion of staking out freshly discovered crime scenes was a well-conceived strategy to catch the compulsive necrophiliac in the act. Even though Ted never stated it outright, by suggesting the crime scene surveillances, I think he believed the Riverman was a compulsive necrophiliac.

Ted, like many serial killers, was uncommonly familiar with the
routines of police work. This was no accident, because serial killers watch police to find out how they can best avoid detection. Early in his career, Ted had studied rape investigations as part of his role with the King County Crime Council. He convincingly posed as a police detective when he tried to abduct Carol DaRonch at the Fashion Place Mall in Salt Lake City. Many other serial killers were very involved with law enforcement activities. Kenneth Bianchi, one of the Hillside Stranglers, applied for a job with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and was working as a security cop when he was arrested. Edmund Kemper of Santa Cruz, California, visited the same tavern that police detectives frequented after work. Arthur Shawcross had his morning doughnuts and coffee at a little shop where he met with local police as the shifts changed and told them how the fish were biting in the nearby Genesee River. John Wayne Gacy had his personal vehicle rigged up like a detective’s squad car, blue light and all. He also monitored police frequencies on his portable radios.

Bundy learned a lot more about police procedures by voraciously reading every detective magazine he could get his hands on. Ted’s detective magazine interest was twofold. First, he learned about the details of rape-murder investigations and how they were conducted. If bestselling true crime author Ann Rule, then writing under the pen name of Andy Stack, only knew that her research educated the very partner she sat next to at the crisis clinic … Second, he took photographs of murder victims, who were graphically displayed, out into the woods to enhance his fantasies about them. During the period when he was living in Seattle and killing, Bundy also took crime photos to isolated places where he could associate their death with his control. This was another way he could anticipate the thrill of control before he ever took a victim to a dump site.

The geographic knowledge Ted possessed of his abduction points and dump sites was formidable. In fact, his familiarity with them is beyond comprehension to the normal person. Ted traced his travels by continuously practicing his routines for abduction. Therefore, he was extremely comfortable in his surroundings, not looking out of place. Often, when police detectives canvass neighborhoods, they typically ask people, “Did you see anything unusual?” Keeping in mind that serial killers are not seen running down the street with a bloody knife in their teeth, which
would
be
something unusual, the more appropriate question that police might want to ask when tracking a serial killer is “What did you see that was usual?”

Monitoring the investigation of himself, “the Ted killer,” through the news media was a survival technique for Ted. He was able to gauge how close investigators were to his trail by analyzing what they said to the media. Ted told us that police spokespersons say too much to the media and, as a result, often tip off the killer. He realized that police were usually under tremendous pressure to provide details to reporters, but Ted warned that they should not play games with the killer through the media. He admitted that some killers were susceptible, but that the police ran the risk of entering dangerous territory if they tried it with someone like the Riverman. It’s not that police would tell the killer something the killer already knew, Ted said; the police were more likely to assume the killer knew something when he really didn’t. By tipping the killer off to police strategy when they thought they were feeding him disinformation, the police were likely to impede their own investigation. Ted’s main point was that the police would release part of the story, unaware of what the entire story was. Guess who was the only person who knew the whole story: the killer himself.

Throughout his adult life, Ted was a master at juggling his life of feigned normalcy with his life as a killer. While he lived with his fiancée, he killed over a score of other women. He made it a point to be with Liz Kendall at dinner and then would disappear until midnight or later. In those hours, Ted was loose on campus, haunting the paths taken by coeds, practicing his routines, or mysteriously abducting women from their avenues of security. If Liz complained, he would make her feel guilty for not appreciating the time he allotted to her. The rage inside Ted was so intense that he readily blamed others for his problems. The result was that those people were cleverly manipulated by Ted to feel guilty about causing him his problems.

The only physical quirk Bundy displayed, which was noticeable only to an alert observer, was his abnormal use of eye contact. The living witnesses from Lake Sammamish noticed that the Ted who tried to pick them up had a strange stare while he was talking to them. It was as if his eyes were transfixed on his prey, like the eyes of a cat. I remember that the only time he looked at me was when he was manipulating me. At other times Bundy’s eyes darted
around rapidly in their sockets, following whatever movement was in his area. Then, at a point in our conversation, he would suddenly fix his eyes on me, with that look on his face that said, “Are you believing my bullshit?”

Retrospectively, some of Ted’s personality traits can be found in those neat boxes often used in abnormal-psychology texts discussing the characteristics of typical psychopathological behaviors. Unfortunately, he was often able to mask many of those behaviors and go undetected as the dangerous creature he was.

Throughout Ted’s life, he constantly stole everyone’s trust. He conned the best. One such person was Professor Ronald Smith of the University of Washington’s Psychology Department. Professor Smith once wrote in Ted’s behalf for law school admission: “Mr. Bundy is undoubtedly one of the top undergraduate students in our department…. He is exceedingly bright, personable, highly motivated, and conscientious…. He has the capacity for hard work and because of his intellectual curiosity is a pleasure to interact with…. I recommend him to you without qualification.” Ted proved that attending college full-time was not an impediment to his murderous compulsions.

Serial killers are very knowledgeable of the areas they operate in. They literally kill in their own backyards or, as others have written, they live and move about among their prey. Ted was completely at home on a college campus, at sorority houses, or at a ski resort frequented by young adults. The Riverman, we surmised, was very much at home among the bars along the Sea-Tac strip, as Florida’s Bobby Joe Long was at home among the topless bars of North Tampa. Arthur Shawcross was so familiar with the hookers in Rochester’s red-light district that the women called him by name, confided their problems to him, waited for him to drive them home on cold winter mornings, or sat on the car he was driving because the hood was still warm. If Shawcross himself is to be believed, they literally placed themselves in his trap.

Serial killers are clever and cunning; however, too much has been made of serial killers who have an excessively high IQ. Most
people want to believe that all serial killers are highly intelligent, to be able to kill for so long. High intelligence is not a prerequisite. The crude reality is that some are borderline defective or possess a normal IQ, but are clearly literate. What is important is the killer’s ability to abduct and kill someone without detection. To operate effectively, a killer must abide by the rules of the neighborhood without drawing attention to himself.

The general public and Ted’s acquaintances had the impression that Ted was a clever, good-looking, and intelligent psychopathic killer caught up in the ecstasy of raping and murdering pretty women. What I observed was totally different. In revelations more chilling than Hannibal Lecter’s, I saw four Teds behind one mask. He was not a split personality, but there were four different levels on which our relationship worked. They all existed between the two poles of the antisocial narcissistic personality: grandiosity to utter self-devaluation. Let me caution the reader here that in spite of our investigative effort, gaps remain in the understanding of Bundy’s personality.

At first, it was as if Ted were the Riverman himself, the cunning psychopath, planning and practicing the lures he used with women, familiarizing himself with appropriate dump sites, checking his routes to and from, and meticulously planning what he would do after the murder to cover his tracks. He projected that personality during our interviews.

The second was an almost hapless version of Ted, the disorganized neurotic, a loser often in a drunken stupor, a frightened, reluctant killer traumatized by his murderous behavior, and afraid of having any remembrance of his most recent murder anywhere near him. It wasn’t that he was afraid of getting caught; he was afraid his neurotic personality would completely disintegrate in front of whomever he was with, and he would do anything to get it away from him. His neurotic tendencies also drew unnecessary attention to him. That neurosis allowed Bundy to give too much information about himself to potential victims that he did not abduct.

The third Ted that I observed was the self-serving, swashbuckling, hypergrandiose paranoid, driven by an eerie bravado and dazzled
by his own sense of omnipotence, who personally negotiated with governors and attorneys general, and held beleaguered relatives of murder victims and detectives hostage with information. That third Ted behaved like a cruel despot, indifferent to the reality that was taking place around him. Ted’s grandiose behavior was exemplified best by his own words, spoken to me after he finished confessing and was ready to negotiate for his life on the Friday prior to his Tuesday execution.

“Do you want to talk about the events leading up to Lynda Healy, the first one on Taylor Mountain, the area that we have on the record?” I asked plainly.

Ted gave a huge sigh, as if he was about to tell all, when he was interrupted by Diana Weiner. She apparently knew Ted was in trouble and intervened to rescue him. I was shocked by her interruption and even more shocked that FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier didn’t defend me and tell her to butt out. Ted trusted Bill to some extent, so I anticipated that Ted might have listened to him, but he said nothing. Whatever the substance of their conversation, when we continued Ted would not talk about murders when there wasn’t someone missing.

Ted said to them, “I mean, here’s what I’d like to do today. No, but I appreciate any advice I can get.” Hagmaier was still quiet.

Reaffirming that I might be able to corroborate more from cases I knew more about, I said, “’Cause I think I can corroborate a lot about the Taylor Mountain incidents, and you might be able to lead me to the evidence there. There are some things about Ott and Naslund, too, you could probably corroborate.”

Confidently, Ted regained his composure after I temporarily had him on the ropes, no thanks to Bill Hagmaier. Mistaking my name for Bill’s, Ted said, “Well, Bill, I could corroborate something on virtually every one of the—I mean, almost without a doubt on every one of these, in one way or another. I don’t think anybody doubts that I’ve done some bad things. The question is what, of course, and how and maybe even most importantly why. And I—I’m not—”

More than slightly perturbed, I interrupted, “Well, most of the people that are coming here, you know, the law enforcement people, are wondering which cases you are talking about. What can you help us with in finding other bodies, and if there’s any other physical evidence out there, like bicycles, clothes, and backpacks,
what happened to the stuff that’s missing—basic information that you’re definitely the one.”

“That’s right,” he reaffirmed. “And law enforcement is definitely one of the primary interested parties here, but not the only one. I think they represent many people, and rightly so, those who are the legitimate kind of interests here, but there are other interests.”