Terrible Secrets Read online

  Terrible Secrets:

  Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

  by Robert D. Keppel, Ph. D.

  and Stephen G. Michaud

  Copyright © 2011 by The Cop and the Killer, LLC

  Bundy Cover photo:

  Cover image courtesy of AP Images. Accused murderer Theodore Bundy leans back in his chair (AP Photo)

  Crowbar and handcuffs cover photos:

  Pond5.com

  Published by MT7 Productions

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the publisher.

  2012 MT7 Productions

  ISBN 978-0-985552-008 (enhanced for iPad/iPhone/Mac only)

  ISBN 978-0-985552-015 (enhanced for Kindle for iPad/iPhone only)

  ISBN 978-0-985552-022 (standard graphic ePub)

  ISBN 978-0-985552-039 (standard graphic Kindle)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE:

  ‘I’m the most coldblooded sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Keppel versus ‘Ted’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Taylor Mountain

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We regroup

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Now is not the time’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Rise of Riverman

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I am playing no games with you’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The slasher film festival

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘I can’t. It won’t let me.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Endgame

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Terrible secrets

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Aftermath

  EPILOG

  DNA

  TIMELINE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  “You know, it’s easy to depersonalize somebody and think of him as an adversary, or somebody who is out to get one. Come face-to-face, you know, a lot of that hostility and those stereotypes and impressions tend to fade away, and I realize that they’re just people, too. And so I think, yes, I can see myself talking to you sometime in the future.”

  — Ted Bundy

  Introduction

  Over the nine-plus years that serial killer Ted Bundy spent on Death Row at Florida State Prison, he twice initiated lengthy, tape-recorded interview sessions. The first of these extended conversations, with Hugh Aynesworth and myself, took place across the winter, spring and summer months of 1980, following Bundy’s conviction for the 1978 abduction–murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl named Kimberly Diane Leach, the crime for which he ultimately was executed in January of 1989. The hundred or more hours we spent with Ted formed the basis of two subsequent books, The Only Living Witness, published in 1983, and Conversations with a Killer, which appeared in 1990.

  Bundy’s second invitation to come speak with him at the prison arrived via handwritten letter in the autumn of 1984 on the desk of Bob Keppel, the Seattle homicide detective who had pursued him from the time of Ted’s earliest known murders in the Northwest, a decade earlier. Among the dozens of investigators who’d worked on one or more of Bundy’s many cases, Keppel was easily the most knowledgeable.

  When Hugh and I interviewed Ted, he was still persisting in the fiction that he was altogether innocent, a victim of the system. Since that was patently untrue, we devised a workaround, an arrangement under which we permitted Bundy to discuss his crimes in the thirdperson, not as an actor but as an omniscient narrator. The subject clearly consumed him and he shared with us a lengthy and detailed description of serial murder from the killer’s perspective. The grotesque and often bizarre why of his crimes, insofar as he understood and could express it, was the principal thread of our discussions. These were by far the strangest days of my life.

  *

  Few police detectives relish the headaches and frustrations of investigating apparently motive-less and random homicidal violence. That is why in the summer of 1974, when a smooth-talking predator who called himself “Ted” boldly snatched two young women on a Sunday afternoon from a crowded state park near Seattle, Bob Keppel, then a rookie homicide detective with exactly one cleared case on his resume, was tasked by his captain (along with Keppel’s equally inexperienced partner, Roger Dunn) to lead the “Ted” investigation. None of the more senior guys wanted the job.

  But asking a young cop to take on these murder cases turned out to be an unintended coup. Though inexperienced, Keppel also was unburdened by the narrow consensus view among seasoned local investigators that the double disappearance was unconnected with several other recent, though widely-scattered, unsolved disappearances of other young women in the region. In an era when stranger crime was still comparatively rare – and the term “serial killer” was not yet in general use - Keppel was one of the first Northwest detectives to buck conventional wisdom and conclude that a lone wolf sex killer was striking at carefully-measured intervals across multiple police jurisdictions, leaving behind him absolutely no witnesses and not a trace of physical evidence.

  Once this region-wide pattern of predation was emphatically confirmed by the discovery of his two body dump sites, Keppel, along with Dunn and a third young detective, Kathleen McChesney, pursued their quarry methodically, innovating the use of a county payroll computer to sift through the tens of thousands of bits of information they’d collected, and to finally isolate Bundy out of thousands of reported suspects. It was an investigative tour de force, deploying unique tools to identify a rare and wily aberrant offender. The story of how they did it is a book in itself.

  By this time, however, Ted had moved on, and when he finally faced a jury, it was a continent away in Florida. There was no chance he would be returned to Washington, and thus no way Keppel would ever make his case against Ted in court.

  Then in 1984 Bundy set in motion one of the weirdest and most fascinating episodes in modern criminology. In his surprise letter, he offered to consult with Seattle authorities- his old nemeses – in their hunt for the so-far anonymous Green River Killer, who was threatening to surpass Ted’s grim notoriety as the region’s scariest and most prolific serial killer. “I know your man in a way that just facts alone cannot accomplish,” he wrote of the killer, whom Bundy liked to call River Man. “I do not know his face, but I have some pretty good ideas where you can look to see him yourself.”

  Keppel, who had waited for ten years to confront Bundy with the eight unsolved “Ted” homicides still in his in box, arrived at the prison for their first interview just weeks later.

  Ted certainly brought interesting credentials to any discussion of serial murder, and he came to their conversations with ideas for pro-active strategies that reflected his intimate personal experience with aberrant urges. He suggested, for example, that the police stake out one of River Man’s fresh victims, if possible. Bundy assured Keppel – correctly, it turned out – that the killer would want to revisit the corpse. Another idea was to put on what Ted called a “Slasher Film Festival.” He urged Keppel to “try and get the bloodiest, coolest slasher movie out there” and to present it at local movie theaters where the patrons could be surreptitiously photographed and their car licenses noted. Bundy was certain that violent local sex criminals, normally highly circumspect, would hazard identification to see such a film, helplessly swarming to it “like bees to honey,” as he put it.

  But Keppel was much less interested in what Bundy had to say about catching River Man than in finally questioning him on the details of his own bloody career. Nor was the why of Bundy’s crimes a particular concern. A detective, not a social scientist
, Keppel wanted to hear about the what, along with who, where, when and how.

  Cop and killer therefore were at odds at the outset. Following their initial two-day session, Bundy began firing lengthy letters to Keppel, covering every aspect of the Green River case, which “fascinated” him, he said repeatedly. But Ted adamantly, and then angrily, refused to discuss his own murders, or “terrible secrets” as he called them, the appalling self-knowledge that he, like other serial sex killers, carried inside.

  I remember discussing Bundy with Keppel over the course of these first conversations, and how Bundy made a very different impression on Keppel than he had with me. I had been amazed at the clinical detachment with which Ted described to us his various paraphilias and homicides. Keppel was struck with how tormented Bundy seemed.

  “I watched Ted closely,” he recalls. “His face was deeply lined. He sweated and he frowned almost constantly. His eyes were bloodshot. Obviously, he was in deep pain, and I thought I knew why. There was really only one dimension to his being – murder – and it trumped everything else. Once he’d fallen into the black hole and began killing he became the black hole, a human figure occupying a void, an inadequate cipher – total personal worthlessness which he recognized as well in the Green River Killer. There cannot be a more consummate loser than that, which I could see was horrible for Ted to contemplate.”

  We seemed to have encountered two different people.

  *

  Nineteen eighty-six brought the first of Bundy’s death warrants, and he began to consider the previously unthinkable. Ted thought he might trade his terrible secrets for time, possibly avoiding execution altogether. It was a long-shot bet that his appeals attorneys vehemently opposed. Yet in 1988, he met with Keppel once more with this notion very much in mind. Bundy evidently doubted whether he could give up the long-suppressed truth of his crimes on his own. They were too securely locked inside his psyche. So, against the day when only full, detailed, first-person confessions might delay his date with Old Sparky, Ted decided to teach Keppel what he believed were the most effective means for eliciting the truth from a serial killer – himself.

  Four years earlier, Bundy had insisted to Keppel that contrary to common notions a psychopath really can feel remorse for his acts – sometimes – although what Bundy described sounded a lot more like self pity. Now he told Keppel that no matter how reprehensible a killer’s crimes were as he described them, the interviewer must never betray shock or outrage at what he was being told. “The scary thing,” Ted explained, “is that you have to have real empathy. Real, not phony.”

  Their climactic confrontation would come within a year, too soon and with too little warning for Ted to have perfected his fanciful scheme for saving, or at least extending, his life. Instead, in January of 1989, Keppel returned to the prison for a third time to a scene of tension and chaos and - on Bundy’s part - fright. His offer to come clean in exchange for catching a break on his execution date hadn’t raised interest, as he hoped, but outrage, particularly among politicians eager to exploit the public consensus that Ted should be dead.

  The rest of the story is better told in the concluding chapters of Terrible Secrets. With almost no chance of rescuing himself, Bundy nonetheless directly cleared four cases for Keppel, and indirectly confirmed he had killed the four other victims on Bob’s list. He denied, unconvincingly, his culpability for several other unsolved Washington state killings – including that of an eight-year-old child Keppel believes Ted killed when he was fourteen - and then suggested in their anxious final interview that three other of his Washington victims remained unaccounted for. He could not, or would not, say who they were, or where they were.

  Bundy also cleared cases with detectives from three other western states, acknowledging in all a murder toll of 31 victims, certainly fewer cases than he actually committed, but as many as Ted in his confused final hours was prepared to admit.

  In the end, as he disclosed at least some of his terrible secrets to Keppel and the other detectives, it became clear that terrible secrets were all that Ted had. They defined him. And once they were known Ted’s pathetic inadequacy was also made clear. He was nothing but a killer. “This guy’s totally consumed by murder, 24 hours a day,” Keppel told a news conference.”

  At their next to last meeting, stripped of all pretenses, Bundy cried as he begged Keppel to intercede for him with Florida’s governor. “Bob,” he said, “they’re going to get me sooner or later. You don’t need to worry about that. But you’ve been after this for 15 years. A couple of months is not going to make any difference.”

  Keppel declined, and less than three days later Bundy was dead.

  PART ONE: THE CHASE

  Chapter One

  ‘I’m the most cold-blooded

  sonuvabitch you’ll ever meet.’

  Mike Fisher was hot.

  “Keppel, this is Fish,” he growled over the phone from Aspen. “The sonuvabitch is gone!”

  Click.

  The sonuvabitch, I knew, was Ted Bundy. And gone, I’d soon learn, meant that police detectives’ choice as the most dangerous sex killer in America had just jumped out a second-story window of the ancient Pitkin County Courthouse during a trial recess. Ted was last seen sprinting down the street, hell-bent for who knows where.

  The courthouse was an instant bedlam of shouts and red-faced deputies as Fisher, chief investigator for the county district attorney, hurriedly helped to mobilize local law enforcement to recapture their fugitive defendant, who had taken advantage of lax security to make good his escape.

  The only calm in the commotion was at the courtroom defense table, where Ted’s advisory counsel, Charles Dumas, who that morning had been arguing the unconstitutionality of Colorado’s capital punishment statute, turned to Chuck Leidner, the public defender. “Never,” deadpanned Dumas, “have I ever had a client show so little faith in my argument.”

  ***

  Ted himself might have enjoyed his lawyer’s quip. Though an incredibly destructive example of the so-called lust murderer, a fantasy-driven offender whose homicides are marked by a wild and primitive fury, Bundy was also a bright and smooth-talking psychopath, witty and urbane, handsome in his younger days, and the object of not a few young women’s sexual fantasies, as well. Until you got to know him, it was a battle (even for cops) to reconcile the pleasant and friendly defendant who so fascinated the press and the public with the beast that lurked within. These qualities, plus his extraordinary instincts as a predator, were major reasons Ted made it so devilishly difficult for us to stop him. As he’d later brag to me, “I have a Ph.D. in serial murder.”

  Mike Fisher had extradited Bundy to Aspen in January from the Utah state prison in Draper, where the personable former law student was serving up to 15 years for the 1975 aggravated kidnap of a 19-year-old telephone operator. Bundy already had been caught in an escape attempt from the penitentiary print shop, “a miserable little plot that I hatched,” as he’d later describe it to me. At the time, I agreed with Mike Fisher and others that he’d probably try again.

  Since his arrival in Aspen, Ted had become a celebrity to many of the mountain resort’s young and irreverent fun seekers, who reacted to his dramatic courthouse leap with amusement. An Aspen eatery quickly started featuring the “Bundy Burger”; patrons looked inside to discover the meat had disappeared. A T-shirt proclaimed, “Bundy’s In Booth D,” a reference to a spot at a local disco where cocaine allegedly was available for purchase.

  The joking sorted poorly with what Fisher and I and detectives in Utah had seen of Ted’s handiwork, including the savage murder for which he was being tried. The victim was 23-year-old Caryn Campbell, a pretty nurse from Michigan who had come to Colorado with her boyfriend, Dr. Raymond Gadowski, on a skiing vacation. On Sunday night, January 12, 1975, Campbell left the lobby of the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass, a few miles from Aspen, to fetch a copy of Viva magazine from the room she shared with Gadowski and his two children. She vanished somewhere
on the way.

  Five weeks later, Campbell’s naked, frozen corpse was recovered from a roadside snowfield less than three miles from the inn. The coroner reported that she’d sustained a massive skull fracture and died from it, as well as exposure to the subzero winter weather, within hours of her disappearance. It was unclear what else had been done to her. Years later, Ted would only say, “I did my thing” that night.

  ***

  The jagged arc of my own protracted saga with Ted Bundy began in 1974 when, over a period of seven months, he abducted and murdered at least eight young women and girls in Western Washington and Oregon, befuddling the police — including me — and terrorizing the region. He dumped most of his victims at two remote woodland sites where we later recovered their partial skeletal remains and almost nothing else of investigative value. Bundy was as careful as he was sly.

  But now, hundreds of miles away in Seattle, I’d play only a secondary role in this hunt for Ted. Things are going to get exciting for a while, I thought as I walked next door to inform my boss, Captain Nick Mackie, of the King County Sheriff’s Office, that the infamous Ted Bundy was once more on the loose. Within the hour Mackie would be inundated with urgent press queries.