Bundy Green River Probe Role? -- Book Says Serial Killer Wanted To Help Investigation

Ted Bundy was a consultant to the Green River Task Force.

That role, in fact, provides much of the grist - and explains the odd name - for the latest book about serial killings in the Pacific Northwest.

It's called, "The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer."

Written by Robert Keppel, a former King County homicide detective and now chief criminal investigator for the state attorney general's office, the book gives an inside-the-investigations view of crimes that transfixed the Seattle area for two decades.

The theme is based on an unusual relationship that Keppel developed with Bundy, who was executed in Florida in 1989, but it's just one of countless head-shaking disclosures throughout the book.

"It's a book about my life," says Keppel. "I had a lot of fun doing it, but it was a struggle. I just didn't want some of those memories to come out."

Keppel started talking to Bundy in Florida in November, 1984, after receiving a startling letter described on Page 198.

"One day in October, 1984, I was buried in a pile of paperwork on my desk. I looked up to see Detective Ed Striedinger of the Seattle Police Department. He had retrieved a letter from a judge in Pierce County who wanted it delivered to task-force staff. It was a letter from a `wanna-be' consultant and the most unlikely person I ever expected to be of assistance in the Green River murders. The letter came from a cell on death row in Florida; the sender was Theodore Robert Bundy. I was stunned," Keppel writes.

SERIES OF MEETINGS

What followed was a series of meetings with Bundy, Keppel and Dave Reichert, then a King County Police detective, in which Bundy offered an unparalleled view into the world of serial killers, and his ideas on how to catch them.

The suggestions included having a "slasher film festival," showing violent movies and watching everyone who attended and setting up surveillances, based on his own experiences: It turned out that Bundy often went back to the scenes of his crimes, picking up evidence in parking lots while police watched, decapitating victims and moving their body parts around, driving back along Highway 18 near Issaquah to retrieve things he'd thrown from his Volkswagen.

The name, "The Riverman," came from Bundy's own label for the Green River killer.

"FRONT END" PROCESS

"Ted called the whole business about when, where and how the Riverman abducted his victims the `front end' process . . . (what) Ted called the `back end' process was just the opposite . . . the sites were much less of a mystery and, not coincidentally, offered us the best clues and trap to catch our man red-handed," Keppel writes.

Police did try surveillance, with disappointing results, which has been reported, although Keppel provides his own analysis.

"King County Police set up surveillance vehicles in several locations along the Green River . . . but the vehicles were not concealed from the hovering helicopter of one of the television channels in Seattle, which quickly became the Green River killer's eye in the sky," Keppel writes.

That's one of the kinder remarks Keppel makes about reporters. "The press creates its own magnified image of an event . . . In the throes of a high-profile case, police officials find themselves constantly in a corner, obligated to say something new every day. The feature stories are almost predictable. At first, the columns cover the known facts . . . when interesting facts dwindle, it's as if someone tosses a match into a volatile mixture . . . ultimately, editorials criticizing an apparent lack of effort on the part of police authorities cap off the coverage."

Keppel's just as hard on his own profession.

"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 . . . they did not go for the subtlety of the murderer's methods that I had envisioned," he writes.

Keppel tells of early computer efforts to catch Bundy, of how the names of 41,000 registered owners of Volkswagens and 3,500 names of possible suspects in the so-called "Ted killings" were used to try to solve the murders first detected in 1974.

Finally, more than 300,000 names were sorted, and in a famous incident that has been related, Bundy's name came up as the seventh top suspect; he was arrested by a Utah highway patrolman before Seattle detectives could talk to him, but the computer had identified him.

Other disclosures include telling how the last thing Georgann Hawkins talked about before she was killed in 1974 was how she had to take a Spanish test the next day at the University of Washington, and how she used a safety pin to hold up too-loose bell-bottoms; it was how Bundy knew about the safety pin that convinced Keppel he really was her killer.

OTHER INTERVIEWS

Keppel had other interviews with Bundy in Florida in 1988 and 1989. It wasn't until the final sessions that Bundy admitted killing at least eight women in Washington state, and it was only about Hawkins that he provided complete details of her death. Bundy was convicted of three killings, and admitted to at least 31 murders; Keppel thinks he killed about 100 people.

Even with Bundy's help, of course, the Green River killer, suspected of killing at least 49 women, never has been caught.

Keppel says his intention was to have the book distributed as widely as possible, to help catch or perhaps deter further serial killings, and expects it might be widely used in psychology classes. It will be available in bookstores Aug. 15.

Keppel himself says he doesn't understand what made Bundy do what he did, and Bundy never did precisely tell.

"A black hole is the closest I can come," Keppel says.

MORE COMPLEX PROBES

Keppel says the Green River investigations are more complex than the Bundy investigation ever was, with millions of possible killers.

"The problem with that whole thing is they don't have a verified sighting of the Green River killer," says Keppel, unlike Bundy.

"We knew how this guy walked, talked," says Keppel; one startling disclosure is that police even had a 1974 photo of his VW, which is reprinted in the book, but a parked patrol car blocked the license number.

Keppel says he thinks the name of the Green River killer already is in police files, and he hopes it will be found, although he doesn't think that will happen without a dedicated effort to follow the leads. The Green River task force has been disbanded.

"I was really against shutting the whole thing down, but if money is more important, so be it," he says.

As for Bundy, Keppel ends his book by describing Bundy as a "truly insignificant creature."