The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (5 page)

Soon after the sergeant’s phone call, the ESAR team members who were to help me search the bone site arrived. ESAR is a voluntary rescue organization whose members are trained in search techniques for locating lost hikers and downed aircraft. ESAR’s 50 or so teenagers, who were supervised by a small cadre of adults, had never participated in a police evidence search before. However, we believed that the techniques they used to find missing persons in the woods would be extremely successful in searching for bones on the Issaquah hillside.

ESAR began the search by establishing x and y coordinates, using string lines to form quadrants. The string lines were formed from a fixed point and a quarter-sectional marker. The area each quadrant covered was based on compass directions and preestablished distances. Within each quadrant, a hands-and-knees search was conducted. This method is similar to one archaeologists use in an archeological dig. Bones and other items of evidence that we discovered in our hunt were recorded with similar identifiers—the date, the time, the location, and the finder—and would be assigned an identification number. For example, a found item would be labeled:

09-11-74, 1010 hours, Det. Keppel found a turquoise comb near body decomposition site #1 which was 10 feet west of search base, photographed by Det. Dunn and marked by Det. Keppel as Evidence Item #5 and Search Find #305.

The 305 referred to its respective number on the search find diagram.

The number of discoveries these 15- and 16-year-old kids made was alarming and gruesome:

0850 hours:  Search teams began searching.0908 hours: Found hair near where two bodies weredumped.

0920 hours:  Found leather sheath, two feet long.

0923 hours:  Found screwdriver.

0924 hours:  Found blond hair near original dump area.

0950 hours:  Found rib bone.

1012 hours:  Found jawbone directly uphill from dump location.

1050 hours:  Found blond hair along animal trail.

1110 hours:  Found bird’s nest with blond hair intertwined.

1115 hours:  Found fecal material with small hand bone.

On and on it went, one discovery after another, day after day, for seven days. We hadn’t only uncovered a cache of human remains, we’d literally unearthed a graveyard, a killer’s lair, where he’d taken and secreted the bodies of victims.

Typically, homicide investigators process a crime scene for evidence, not human body parts. I wondered what these teenagers were thinking and feeling with each new discovery. What would they be like after a few days of finding hundreds of animal-ravaged skeletal parts? Did they wonder how bones wind up in coyote fecal material? Or how birds know to use human hair to weave their nests? Did they think about what kind of monster would leave a once-living, vibrant human being in such a humiliating state of desiccation? Was this why primitive tribes learned to bury their dead? Whatever their thoughts were, their willingness to kneel shoulder to shoulder, meticulously inspecting every inch of hillside, fighting stinging nettles, and lifting every twig and leaf with the care of a surgeon, was unbelievable. Not one word of complaint was uttered. No police officer that I knew would have searched with such dedication from dawn till dusk for seven days straight. I would always be thankful for their help on this tedious but all-important level of the investigation.

They were as methodical as they were dedicated. The bones and items of evidence were plotted on a diagram using the “baseline” method of sketching crime scenes. In the end, we recovered many bones, clumps of hair, fingernails, and hairs from within animal dung and fecal soil from three separate and distinct body decomposition sites. In addition to the human remains, we found a crowbar, shovel, screwdriver, female clothing (unrelated to the three victims), and many animal bones.

What we didn’t recover was the skull of Lake Sam victim Janice
Ott—we had recovered the rest of her remains on the site—and a skull and jawbone that would have been useful in identifying a third person whose name we did not know but the rest of whose remains we found as well. We believed, at first, that these missing parts were not found because animals had taken them somewhere outside our search perimeters. Unfortunately, we didn’t even consider that they could have been buried. We had found so many bones on top of the ground we didn’t even think the killer’s modus operandi involved burial. Our inexperience was telling, and it favored the killer.

I was the photographer most of the time and packaged all the evidence for processing. I used a Mamiya 110 camera, a clunky, boxy device resembling an old press camera from the 1950s, which I had never operated before. It was cumbersome and heavy and required a battery pack that was 12 inches high and 4 inches thick. A thick leather strap wrapped around my shoulder to help steady the camera while I focused the lens. Here was a machine definitely not made for dragging around a wooded hillside where I needed both hands for balance as I tried to step over ground cover that twisted around my ankles every time I moved. The whole point of a clumsy camera like this was its huge 110-mm negative that produced an image so fine that every minute detail of the evidence came out in perfect resolution. The camera produced prints so perfect that even when enlarged to almost poster size, they could be used in court before the most critical judge and jury.

Before touching or moving the evidence, I took two rolls of film and had an officer run it over to the photo lab for immediate processing. I didn’t want to interfere with the evidence and later find the photos I had taken hadn’t developed well. It was fortunate that the first two rolls were tested. I had not locked the lens in the open position, and as a result, all the prints were blurred. Subsequently, Roger Dunn was sent to the scene to be my assistant photographer. He constantly reminded me of the proper camera settings prior to each photograph, and from then on, the prints turned out fine.

So what began as a search for a few more bones belonging to a single skeleton had turned into a major bone find in which over 400 items of evidence and bones from the remains of three women were recovered. This was a first. The ESAR search techniques proved invaluable for us since we had never been faced with processing this
type of outdoor crime scene before. We learned the importance of thoroughness and of animal behavior, the latter of which helped us find remains along their travel paths. This search really was revolutionary and would be a model for crime scene processing forever.

As I went up and down the hillside, photographing, measuring, and packaging evidence and bones, I was obsessed with what the killer had left behind. What signs of him were left for us to find? Was there anything here that could be linked to this murderer? Locard’s Exchange Principle—Edmund Locard’s theory—states that when a murderer comes in contact with things at the crime scene, a cross-transfer of evidence occurs. This meant that we should find something of the killer at the crime scene and, conversely, that when we found the killer, we should find something from the crime scene on him.

The “fresh” physical and circumstantial evidence, such as eye-witnesses, lead bullets, bullet casings, and weapons, were noticeably absent from this scene. The area had been stripped of all these usual forensic clues. It was a scene of great mystery. In the history of King County homicide investigation, no murder case had a crime scene with so little evidence as this one.

What would the evidence that we did find tell us about the psychology of the killer? What might be detected from this scene? At this stage, it was all guesswork, since no one had ever had to solve such a series of crimes. First of all, even though the crime scene was only one mile from a populated area, I was impressed by how secluded this location really was and how much advantage the location gave to anyone lying in wait. It was the perfect terrain for staging an ambush or scouting for enemies. If you parked a car just off the dirt road, you could see or hear anyone coming from any direction. I got the feeling that this was no accident—the killer chose this site so he could cover his tracks well before anyone’s arrival.

The implication that the killer chose this location prior to committing the murders was also a frightening thought. We understood from this carefully selected multiple-body crime scene that each of his kills was premeditated and would share the same final scene. The killer had been there many times—if not to leave a body, definitely to scout out the area. The more we thought about the dump site, the more it seemed that these were no random catch-as-catch-can murders, but were premeditated, with escape routes and victim
disposal already planned out. For example, the distance from where the victims were last seen to the dump site indicated that the offender was not overly concerned about traveling some distance with a victim in his car. He was confident that he could elude the police and dispose of the body between the time when the victim was reported missing and when the official search began. The fact that we found no clothing remnants on the remains was evidence that the killer did not want his victims found with their own clothing, which might contain trace evidence that could be linked to him. He must therefore know how police collected evidence and developed theories of the crime from the remains at the crime scene. The killer probably saw for himself the results of predators scavenging human remains, since one body was there for over a month before the other two were discarded. How many times had he visited the dump site to note the progress of the corpse’s decay and the way wild animals scattered the remains? He must have stepped over his first victim to leave the other two.

It was my own rookie detective theory—crude both in empirical substantiation and manner of induction, and nothing more—that the killer was more than simply an opportunistic preplanner. I had concluded that he was rehearsing all of his options. The killer’s modus operandi, I felt, was dynamic and he was willing to change it out of convenience and necessity, leaving his clear signature as only a fantasy in my mind. The conditions of the crime scene were indicative not only of extensive pre-event planning but also post-event planning and superb execution, leading to the conclusion that the offender previously had been successful at committing murder. This killer was more experienced at cold-blooded murder than any of us were at watching people like him. Somehow I sensed he knew this and he knew he could get away with it. He was so elusive and so aware of his ability to strike and disappear that he was especially dangerous. His methods would make him almost as invisible as a shadow in the darkness. He was a community’s worst nightmare, a stalker of their daughters who was able to strike with impunity and invincibility. I had come up with this theory after a week’s investigation of the Issaquah bone yard. These ideas that were jelling within my head were no more than quivering bits of probability waiting to be confirmed by more substantial evidence. As it turned out, the killer’s own confession would prove me correct.

However, my theory was not even mildly supported by most police personnel at the time. Most of the homicide behavioral theorists on the case, especially the hot dogs from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, expected that any day a crazy psycho would be found running down the street with a bloody knife in his mouth and screaming “Mother.” They did not go for the subtlety of the murderer’s methods that I had envisioned.

As for tangible evidence, we identified the remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, the missing persons from Lake Sammamish State Park, as the result of the search at Issaquah. In the less than two months since the women had been murdered and dumped there, their bodies had thoroughly decomposed and their remains had been scavenged and scattered over the hillside by animals. There were also other bones, extra pieces of vertebrae and leg bone belonging to a third victim whom we were unable to identify.

Those extra bones rattled in my mind for the next decade. It would not be until Ted Bundy’s chilling and detailed confession to me in his final days before his walk to the electric chair that we would know the identity of that third set of remains. Ted would tell us that they were those of missing coed Georgann Hawkins, a victim we had included in the Ted cases but could not positively identify until Ted told us where he brought her body.

She was a strikingly beautiful coed, 5 feet 2 inches tall, with a slender build and long dark-blond hair. Near midnight on June 11, 1974, students at the University of Washington, 15 miles away from Issaquah, were returning to their dorm rooms after studying for final exams. Georgann was one of those students. The alley behind her sorority house was dimly lit, and the sound of footsteps could be heard echoing as people entered the small buildings on either side. It was the perfect setting for a handsome stranger named Ted to blend seemlessly into the campus setting and strike his next victim. What had Georgann Hawkins to fear from this man, who could have belonged to any one of the houses on the University of Washington’s fraternity row?

The University of Washington was not one of the country’s most
sedate campuses. Students and faculty ranged from the ultra-left to the ultra-right, with a broad middle band of moderate middle-class students. It had an active fraternity and sorority life in the mid-’70s. The off-campus Greek-letter society houses were the site of many parties and were regularly patrolled by the Seattle Police Department. There were arrests for drunken and disorderly conduct, vandalism, a petty theft once in a while, and, of course, marijuana possession. Perhaps the most violent reported crime was date rape. There were few transients roaming through the area. Most of the crimes were committed by locals and nearby residents. So Georgann, walking across campus late at night, would probably not be concerned about the kind of danger Ted presented.

Georgann was last seen by a friend who leaned out of a window of a fraternity house to talk to her. She was wearing a white backless T-shirt, a flowered-print long-sleeved shirt that was tied in the front, white open-toed clogs, and navy blue cotton bell-bottom pants that were too big around her waist and therefore held together with a safety pin. Only the police knew this last salient fact; they withheld it from public disclosure after her disappearance. Years later, Ted would mention that little-known fact. Georgann also had on a black onyx ring and a cultured-pearl ring in a Tiffany setting with a gold band.