The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (44 page)

Immediately, the contortions of Ted’s face told us that he was morbidly transfixed by the Devine scene. His jaw protruded, and his pupils were hideously dilated. His pulse bulged and radiated through his carotid artery like a huge water bump in a garden hose. I felt suddenly as if he were alone with his thoughts, replaying an internal video of his murder, even with us there.

In a droning voice, Dave reported the facts of the case while Ted
stared down. My guess from his reaction was that Ted didn’t need the explanation. He patiently waited while Dave explained what he already knew. “She was actually found in Camp Margaret McKinney. Later in nineteen seventy-four another girl, Brenda Baker, was found nearby in Millersylvania State Park. And you’re kind of aware what our M.O. is. We’ve got prostitutes, some in the river and some on land. And I just picked out a few photographs that were taken back there in seventy-three of this young lady. And that’s one of the reasons I asked you the question about whether or not he could have started putting these bodies on land, then the river, as far back as nineteen seventy-three.”

“Ummm,” Ted said, licking his lips while searching for the relevance of that particular photograph to the Riverman and not himself. Groping for some quick relationship to the Green River cases, I said, “We’re interested in her case because Ninetieth and Aurora is an area frequented by prostitutes.”

Coyly, Ted reminisced with himself and kept the photo in front of him. He asked, “Now, where was this body located?”

“She’s about ten miles southwest of Olympia. Five miles west of I-Five,” Dave answered.

Ted interrupted as if he wanted to take over the description of the locale for us and came tantalizingly close to a confession of a detail only the killer could have known. “Off a dirt road,” he said in a voice that seemed to indicate that a deep memory had been evoked. But he caught himself and desperately tried to revert to a third-person narrative. He asked, “How far off the road?”

“Found near the parking area at the park,” Dave quickly responded. “He didn’t have to carry her too far. She was within about ten feet of the parking lot.”

Ted regressed quickly back to his first-person version, “But there’s no attempt to conceal the body. And there are clues, there’s clothing here. Pretty strong individual to be able to rip those—or cut, possibly cut—those jeans like that.”

I was astonished by Ted’s observations since I could hardly decipher from the photo what condition the clothing was in, let alone how the jeans were cut. He had to have been there. He
was
there, right then, in his memory.

Reading my mind, Ted denied any connection to the photo. “Ummm, I don’t think I’ve even been there—that is, to the park.
When I was a kid my parents used to go there all the time. Found a picture of that area once, Millersylvania State Park.”

“Well, Devine was found in Camp Margaret McKinney, southwest of Olympia, not Millersylvania Park,” Dave reminded him. “She was picked up in Seattle. That’s where she was last seen.”

“That would have—that was seventy-three?” Ted responded, like he knew nothing about the case and was avoiding any reference that he might have murdered Brenda Baker, too. Ted mixed up the facts of his murders.

“Yeah, Ninetieth and Aurora on December seventh,” Dave volunteered when he didn’t need to. I would have pulled his plug if I could have to keep him from giving Ted any information.

Glancing at the photo of the Devine body, Ted reverted to his mode of speaking hypothetically, like he usually did when we got too close to his cases. “Well, the obvious presence of clothing. ’Course, this was ten, eleven years ago, and they’re apt to change and will change as he discovers what works and what doesn’t, and studies—but the way the jeans are cut, that’s kind of unique.”

Cautiously, Dave continued by asking, “What are your impressions of the kind of guy that would have done something like this as compared to what we’re looking at?”

Ted was about to reveal an important concept, yet to be written up in any homicide literature at the time. This concept would upset modus operandi purists, those who believed that the characteristics of one murder must be replicated in another in order for both to have been committed by the same person. Ted said, “If he’s capable of it, he’s had ten years to change his M.O. and his—whatever you call them—fetishes or his rituals or his fantasies will change every time, too. So he might be taking the girls’ clothes over one period of time or not. He might be subjecting them to a certain type of abuse at one period and changing the next time. There’s no question about that.”

Dave sustained the hypothetical tone by stating, “But let’s say that our Green River person did this one, but, as you said, his M.O. is different. What was going through his mind back then, you know, just from your impressions of the photographs you looked at? I know it’s kind of difficult when you’re looking at black-and-white photographs, but what do you think his mind is doing then?”

“Well, that’s not much to work with,” Ted pleaded.

“You got the torn or cut pants,” Dave added.

“Oh, yeah. The whys of the cut pants are bizarre. And I don’t know what the autopsy revealed in terms of the presence of semen or any other marks on the body. The cut pants are really odd, boy. You know. Why? Why they’re cut? I don’t think they’re ripped. I think they are cut, unless he performed some sort of sex act right before or right after he left her there and came back and ripped her pants in order to do that. But that’s a little hard to figure. I mean, he didn’t have to hurry. He obviously had control of the situation. So, that’s a little bit bizarre.”

Up to this point, cutting pants and mutilating bodies were classified by Ted as bizarre. But what was most bizarre was the sight of a serial killer in captivity looking at a photograph of what might well have been one of his own kills. From somewhere deep in the recesses of his memory and driven by the still-living sexual lust within him, Ted seemed to be projecting his own motive and patterns onto a phantom killer who was lurking, even then, in the shadows of the Northwestern forests over 3,000 miles away.

10
 
“The River Was His Friend”

T
ed Bundy was downright exhilarated as he described how the Green River Killer might have dumped his victims. When Ted talked about dump sites, he had a fire of excitement charging through his body that was not there when he was talking about abduction sites. His lightninglike hand gestures and his shifting body movements made to emphasize his points reflected his intense pre-occupation with the dump sites. It was almost as if he were there and enjoying every minute of it. These moments illustrated that Bundy and the Riverman shared a common fascination with the corpses of their respective victims. It was from sharing a similar experience that Bundy was able to sense how the Riverman had preselected his body recovery sites as a function of his own common sense, choosing them only after extensive trial and error in sampling many sites.

Ted began the conversation about dump sites by coyly explaining that he did not want to talk about what we had already considered. “Generally speaking, it’s hard to say. It’s all speculation. I’m sure you’ve gone over this a thousand times. But for prostitutes
missing from downtown Seattle, there isn’t an obviously good, close site where he can just drop them off. He’s got to go somewhere. Therefore, he has driven to Interstate Five, more than likely heading south. Then he easily dropped off victims on the roads that intersected I-Five as he did with Delores Williams along Star Lake Road.”

It seemed that the killer’s direction of travel was an important point in the case for Ted, especially since heading south fit Ted’s pet theory that the killer lived in the Tacoma area, south of Seattle. Ted supported his point by arguing, “He dropped off Pitsor on the Mount View Cemetery Road and Colleen Brockman on Jovita Road, both locations on the way from Seattle to Tacoma. Also, he had traveled east on Interstate Ninety and dropped off Agisheff on Highway 18 and Yates along I-Ninety near exit 38. Other victims were deposited in that same general vicinity. And, of course, Snoqualmie Pass along Interstate Ninety has gotten a reputation for that kind of activity, and perhaps that’s what attracted him there.” Ted had often said that killers learned from previous experiences, and based upon this fact, the Green River Killer would know to dump his victims along I-90 just as Ted had.

Ted had analyzed the dates when each victim was dumped in a specific location. He particularly noted that Abernathy’s and Bello’s remains were found “way out along Highway 410, over thirty-five miles from where they were last seen in downtown Seattle. They were missing toward the tail end of nineteen eighty-three, one in September and one in October. That was about the time that task force members found several bodies that autumn in locations where the Riverman had previously dumped victims, such as along the Star Lake Road and from around the airport strip.” So Ted surmised that the killer would naturally change locations, because he never returned to dump a victim in a location that had previously been found by the police. It was too risky.

With the keen perception of one who had evaded police for years, Ted said, “And I bet he was getting nervous. He said, ‘God damn, they’re starting to find my bodies again.’” Ted seemed to love speaking as if he were the Green River Killer. It was eerie, particularly after the years we spent on his trail, to hear him speak in the killer’s voice. Ted didn’t want to confuse us with his eagerness to explain and he hastened to add, “It’s kind of fascinating to
see how this unfolds, and I’m probably running ahead of myself. If I’m confusing you, please ask me questions, but just looking at how this unfolded—I see here by the dates that you found the first five real quick—Coffield, Bonner, Chapman, Hinds, and Mills.” Ted was desperate to answer our questions at this point and responded to them rapidly, without a moment’s hesitation.

Ted tried to prove his point that as the Green River Killer progressed, he became a more efficient killer. “You can see, he changes. Due to the five discoveries, he’s obviously not going to use the Green River anymore, at least not for a while. It was his friend for a period of time. He’s looking for something that’s more effective, so he goes back to dry land with his sixth victim.”

After August 15, 1982, the date Opal Mills was found on the bank of the Green River directly above two other victims who were in the river, the Riverman dumped Giselle Lovvorn, his next victim, on dry land. Ted said, “And Lovvorn is found in September, but still he sticks to these dry land sites with his subsequent victims.” By continuing to dump victims on dry land, the Riverman, Ted believed, had learned that the victim’s remains were not immediately discovered, like those found in the river. Also, when the victims were found, they were nothing more than skeletons and the killer surely took note that this type of dumping provided less physical evidence that could link him to his kills.

Ted was somewhat patronizing when he spoke of his analysis of the cases, saying, “I was able to more deliberately analyze it in my notes here. What I’m saying is, between September of eighty-two and May of eighty-three, you didn’t find any bodies. So, in his mind, he was effective, and he killed how many between those months? You got a whole mess of them that were not found until much later.

“He started back to dry land, knew you couldn’t find any bodies for seven or eight months, anywhere. And this guy is starting to get bold again. ‘Yeah. I finally found the ticket, you know, when they’re not finding my bodies.’ And we didn’t find the next one until May. He went from September to May. And the Riverman had changed, changed his path.”

Ted enjoyed the hypothetical question because it gave him a chance to make us think that he was guessing, so I asked him, “Let’s say he’s still in the Seattle area and is continuing to kill. Okay? And we found Abernathy and Bello out there, great distances
from where they were last seen. What do you think the Riverman’s next step will be?”

Without hesitation, Ted responded, “Well, go with what was working. And, you know, he moved up east of Enumclaw, thirty-five miles from Seattle, to dispose of victims. He’s going deeper into the mountains. He’s trying something new. He’s trying something different. You found three up east of Enumclaw. He probably won’t be going up there anymore, assuming he has been going up there. Obviously, he was up there for a time, and I’ll bet you’ll find another or more up there. At least, in my opinion, four or five more.”

Ted never gave us the credit for finding
all
the victims dumped in a particular location. According to him, there were always more. Eerily, Ted’s predictions were correct for the dump sites near the Intersection of I-90 and Highway 18 and at the south airport area. More bodies—presumably those of additional Riverman victims—were found in those areas long after our conversations with Ted had ended.

Dave Reichert was concerned about where the Riverman would dump future victims. He asked, “You think he’ll go further east on I-90?”