Terrible Secrets Page 4

  The part of detective work I hated the most was a gory crime scene. I also disliked having to investigate a case committed by a fellow officer. I’m grateful that I never had to arrest a cop.

  The best part of being a criminal investigator is when you solve a case quickly and neatly with some skill and art and get the bad guy off the street. I was lucky enough to experience one of those moments during my first week as a homicide detective, just days before Ted Bundy suddenly lurched into my life.

  The victim was 68-year-old Chris Stergion, owner of Stergion Concrete in Enumclaw, a rural community in southeastern King County. In the early darkness of Thursday, July 11, 1974, my partner, Roger Dunn, and I were called to Stergion’s residence.

  His wife reported that on the previous day her husband had told a teenaged drifter named James Lee Slade that he could sleep in the cab of a Stergion Concrete truck if he liked.

  That night, they were awakened by the familiar “Ding!” of the antique cash register being opened in the business office adjoining their house. When Stergion went to investigate, he encountered Slade trying to burgle the place. The young man grabbed a set of calipers and began stabbing the old man again and again, at least 30 times.

  Some workers across the street heard Stergion’s shouts as he was being attacked and then saw Slade running down the street. They telephoned the local police, who arrested the suspect. We recovered the calipers from the ditch where he’d thrown them.

  I assumed that Roger and I would process the crime scene and that someone else with more experience would interrogate Slade, who was huge, well over six feet tall and heavily- muscled.

  Then I was told that I would do the interrogation, alone. My sergeant and the other detectives there started joking behind my back about how I was going to get a confession out of this mammoth, obviously violence-prone, specimen. I was scared piss-less. I did not know what I was doing.

  The only thing I could think of to equalize the situation was to make him remove his clothing. So I stripped him of his leather jacket, his blue jean jacket, his blue shirt, his pants, his shoes, everything, and put each item in a sack. When I was through, we put him in a light blue jumpsuit. The hulking Mr. Slade suddenly looked far less formidable and seemed to feel diminished, too, without all his gear.

  I had been told that he was never without his black leather gloves. Now I noticed that they were gone and that there were cuts on both his hands. Sensing a connection to the crime, I asked him about the missing gloves. He gave me a lame story about leaving them in a truck, where they disappeared.

  My disbelief was plain as I pressed him for more details. I observed that the gloves seemed to be important to him. Why didn’t he just put them in his pocket? I wondered. Nervously, he said they wouldn’t fit. I kept it up for a couple more minutes until Slade lost his composure and abruptly asked me if Craig Stergion was dead.

  I said yes, and with that he began to tell the story of how he killed the old man. When I walked out of the room a short time later with a full confession, I could not have been more pleased with the looks of amazement I got from the sergeant and the others. Slade also gave me directions to the old warehouse where he had ditched his leather gloves. The right glove, with which he had grasped the calipers while stabbing the old man, was torn and soaked with blood.

  I felt great about resolving the case so quickly. My sense of triumph, however, would be short-lived.

  ***

  July 14 was a gloriously sunny Sunday at Lake Sammamish State Park, about 12 miles east of Seattle along Interstate 90 as it begins climbing eastward up into the Cascade Mountains. Tens of thousands of people swarmed that day to Lake Sam, as it is called, to enjoy the unusual blue skies and warm weather.

  Among them was a pleasant-seeming young man, tanned and slender — most witnesses later guessed he was in his 20s — wearing either blue jeans or white tennis shorts and a T-shirt, with his left arm in a beige sling. He called himself Ted. He was driving a Volkswagen Beetle. There was something unusual about his accent. He sounded sort of British, as one person recalled.

  “Ted” approached at least seven young women between noon and late afternoon at Lake Sam that Sunday. He told them that he needed help launching his sailboat and gestured toward his left arm as he explained how he’d injured the limb playing racquetball. Five of the females lived to recount their encounters with him. Two — 23-year-old Janice Ott, a juvenile probation officer, and 19-year-old Denise Naslund, a secretary attending computer-programming school — did not. By the time the sun set that evening, both had disappeared.

  The restrooms where Denise Naslund was last seen at Lake Sammamish State Park

  Janice Ott.

  Missing person poster for Denise Naslund.

  One of the “Ted” sketches we prepared. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

  ———

  The Lake Sam cases originally belonged to the police in the town of Issaquah, which according to customary practice did not open a missing person investigation for either Ott or the Naslund case for 24 hours. One day later, on Tuesday, the Issaquah police chief and his single detective brought what little they had to the sheriff’s office and asked us to take over the case. Roger Dunn and I were then assigned the investigations — Roger was given Ott, I had Naslund — basically because we were both new guys and no one else in the homicide unit wanted them. (Coincidentally, I learned early in the investigation that Janice Ott’s father and my father were friends back in Spokane.)

  Our captain, Nick Mackie, for some reason didn’t trust that Roger and I could interview anybody, so Mackie decided that the first round of interviews with witnesses at Lake Sam would be done by a team of local mental health professionals led by Dr. John Liebert and Dr. John Berberich, since deceased. Liebert is a forensic psychiatrist, and Berberich was a clinical psychologist, who advised police departments on internal issues. Both men taught at the University of Washington. Liebert advised King County Superior Court Judges on murder defendants’ potential for violence. For 20 years or more, he had interviewed every convicted murderer in the county and prepared a post-sentence report for the court.

  Even this early in the case, it was becoming clear that contrary to a police detective’s usual experience, probably neither of the missing females had any previous connection to “Ted.”

  These were stranger crimes, but no one should expect a ransom note. “Ted” had been trolling with his sailboat story and reeled in two unwary victims. They almost certainly were both dead by now. This meant that much of our normal investigative procedure — checking out relatives, friends and acquaintances, looking for anybody with a motive for abducting either Ott or Naslund — probably would be a waste of time.

  Liebert and his team added that an offender so slick and bold and self-assured probably was practiced in committing this sort of crime and that he did so compulsively. He’d killed before and would want to kill again. There also was a good chance that he was a necrophile. If we ever found the victims, they likely would have been mutilated or dismembered.

  When I asked if a guy so obviously crazy would have a history of mental problems, including institutionalization, neither of them believed he necessarily did. In contrast to the brutal and primitive murderer they described, Liebert and Berberich agreed that the public “Ted” obviously was highly credible, which suggested to them that he was well-concealed within his community and circle of friends. For that reason, he likely would be difficult to isolate as a suspect.

  This was not the sort of offender profile that a newbie homicide detective with exactly one case on his resume wants to hear. Nor was I buoyed to learn from Liebert and the others that such a repeat offender — the term “serial killer” was not yet in general use — was thought to be exceedingly rare. Experts guessed that as few as 200 “Teds” were then at large and active in the United States.

  From that moment onward, I read everything I could find on aberrant crime and abnormal psych
ology, a practice I’d follow for the balance of my career.

  One of the first things we did was produce a composite sketch of “Ted” based on the various witnesses’ recollections. It was not a bad likeness of Bundy, who had a remarkably changeable appearance affected by a number of variables, such as mood, weight or the length of his hair. Ted also deliberately altered his looks.

  We persuaded the local television stations to let us see their videotapes of the July 14 throngs at Lake Sam. Although this exercise netted us nothing, we did notice while watching the news footage that many people at the park had been taking their own pictures. So via the news media we asked everyone to send us their photos and negatives and received several hundred pictures from the public.

  One black-and-white shot was particularly intriguing. There had been a disturbance at Lake Sam. The print showed the several police units that responded to it were parked in a row that effectively sealed off other vehicles from leaving. Among these trapped cars, under the very tree where one of our witnesses said she spoke with “Ted,” was a VW that exactly matched her description. Plus the driver plainly was seated inside! Unfortunately, we could not enhance the picture to positively identify the man, but I’m certain it was Bundy, and would later show the photo to Ted himself.

  Bundy’s VW trapped in the Lake Sam parking lot. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

  ———

  On July 18, theSeattle Times published some details of the Lake Sam cases under the headline “Police seek ‘Ted’ in missing-women case,” prompting an avalanche of telephone tips, under which Roger Dunn and I soon were buried. It was challenge enough just to take down the callers’ information, never mind working out what leads were most promising.

  They were all over the place. For example, our telephone log reflects one caller’s information that a “guy matching the composite drawing goes to the University of Washington and throws a javelin.” Another witness told an officer she saw “a suspicious man in the Valu-Mart parking lot . . . This man was 5’ 3” tall and he had 6 half-gallons of milk with him, and a bunch of 7-Up. He came out of a store and got into a metallic-brown Buick Electra with unknown license plate, and unknown year, and drove away. No girls were seen.”

  We did get excited, for a while, about some early suspects. One was Paul John Knowles, an itinerant killer whom we learned had stayed at an Issaquah motel on July 7. However, a little digging revealed that Knowles definitely was not in the area on July 14. I thought in any event Knowles was too big and ugly to be “Ted.” He was shot dead by a policeman in Florida later that year.

  Another hot prospect was the Napa Valley Group, a band of Charles Manson’s followers we found camping off High Point Road, three or four miles east of Lake Sam. Once again, further checking showed they all had been in custody in California on the 14th. Nevertheless I told them, “There’s only one way for this to end, and that’s for you to hightail it eastbound and get the hell out of King County, because I don’t want you here.” I followed them all the way to Snoqualmie Pass.

  On the 28th the Tacoma News Tribune stunned me, my department and the region with a multipage special report on the possible links between the Ott and Naslund cases and the disappearances and murders of seven other girls and young women in the Northwest over the preceding eight months. The story was among the earliest to point out that we might have a roving regional killer with whom to contend.

  The paper’s earliest candidate for inclusion in a consolidated victim list was a 15-year-old runaway named Kathy Devine, last reported alive in December of 1973. Of all the cases the News Tribune examined, Devine’s death, together with the discovery in June of 1974 of the decomposing remains of another 15-year-old runaway, Brenda Baker, were the only ones we did not ultimately connect to Bundy. At this writing, the Baker case still remains open.

  The first of the multiple unsolved disappearances the Tacoma paper cited was that of 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy, a University of Washington psychology major who in the early morning hours of February 1, 1974, vanished from her basement bedroom in a University District house Healy shared with four other coeds. Bloodstains were found in her bed and on the nightgown hanging in her closet. The Seattle police did not dust the room for fingerprints or process it for any other possible forensic evidence.

  The News Tribune did not mention Mary Adams (a pseudonym), another young victim who less than four weeks earlier had been attacked in her own nearby University District basement apartment. She’d survive the intruder’s furious assault with a heavy metal rod, as well as severe internal injuries from the doctor’s speculum he pushed inside her.

  Next on the newspaper’s list of missing young women was Donna Gail Manson, 19, who attended Evergreen State College in Olympia, about 60 miles south of Seattle. Manson vanished from the campus without a trace on the night of March 12. Her fate, as Ted would later tell me, was among the strangest of all his victims.

  Donna Gail Manson’s poster: Her fate was among the strangest. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

  ———

  Number Three among the missing coeds was 18-year-old Susan Rancourt, a freshman biology major at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, about a two-hour drive southeast from Seattle on Interstate 90. On the night of April 17, Rancourt left a meeting on campus to walk back to her dorm and was never seen alive again.

  The least likely member of the group, as far as I was concerned, was Roberta Kathy Parks, 22, a coed at Oregon State University in Corvallis, 260 miles south of Seattle. I just would not believe that a Seattle-area killer would range so far out of his home hunting territory.

  The last of the disappearances covered in the News Tribune special report was that of Georgann Hawkins, 18, a student at the University of Washington who was last seen alive about 1 a.m. on June 11 in the alley behind her sorority house. Witnesses reported seeing a man in a leg cast in the area that night. He was navigating on crutches and fumbling with a briefcase.

  Georgann Hawkins’s missing person poster.

  (Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

  The approximate location Hawkins encountered Bundy, as it appears circa 2011. The alley and the lighting look much the same as it did in June of 1974.

  Location where Bundy staged his VW and walked Hawkins to. He struk her from behind as she placed his books in the car. He pushed her into the car and drove away.

  (Courtesy of MT7 Productions)

  ———

  Map sketched of the alley where Georgann Hawkins disappeared. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)

  ———

  Herb Swindler, detective captain at the Seattle Police Department — which had jurisdictional responsibility for the Healy and Hawkins cases, as well as the earlier Adams assault — told the newspaper that there was no evidence he knew of to link any of the cases together, although they did share a number of similarities. “The real connection between the cases,” Swindler added, “is not in the hard evidence but in the lack of evidence.” The fact that no bodies had yet been recovered was “very, very unusual,” he said.

  Herb and I already had met to compare notes in advance of the News Tribune story, and neither of us had connected the murdered and missing cases as had the newspaper. True, Dr. Liebert and his team told us that “Ted” probably had killed before, but there simply was no pattern to the cases that police detectives were then trained to recognize. We just didn’t understand what we were up against.

  The News Tribune, groping to explain the cases, talked to sources who suggested an astrological explanation for them, or that the killer was “someone connected with college campuses,” maybe a male-female team, a “sexual psychopath,” or a gang of white slavers who were shanghaiing the young women and selling them into prostitution.

  I also was familiar with one further case the paper did not include, the June 1st disappearance of 22-year-old Brenda Carol Ball from The Flame taver
n in Burien, near Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Perhaps the newspaper didn’t know of the Ball case, or perhaps they ignored her because she was not a college student.

  Her case had belonged to me since soon after her mother reported Brenda missing on June 17. Although I heard from the young woman’s friends that she was a free spirit who frequently took off on unplanned adventures, her mother insisted that Brenda would never be gone for so long without calling home.

  I investigated her case as I’d investigate any missing person case, by sorting through her rather large and loose company of acquaintances and friends, hoping someone had a clue to her whereabouts. No one did. I definitely did not consider the possibility that her disappearance was in any way connected with the Lake Sam cases. There seemed to be nothing in common.

  ***

  One of our elusive killer’s critical advantages was the ingrained habit among police agencies not to share information with one another. For example, we at the sheriff’s department never talked to the Seattle police about our cases, and they never discussed theirs with us. In fact, in those days trading information about crimes with other agencies was a good way to derail your career.