The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer by Robert Keppel

of the crime scene. Nobody even knew a homicide had taken place until almost a year later. Ted had left Seattle by then and was in Utah, and there was no way to connect him to the crime, or so he thought. He had killed efficiently and thoroughly in the throes of his feral savagery and he had gotten away with it. Had that been his only crime, it might have been the “perfect” homicide.
Taylor Mountain
     
    The rotary-dial telephone on my desk had an obnoxious ring, as if every incoming call were trumpeting its singular importance. This call happened to warrant its jarring alarm. It was the radio-room operator and he was very explicit. “You have a found skull off Highway 18. Two citizens will meet you where the power lines cross, four miles south of I-90.” What Roger and I had predicted about the Ted investigation was coming true: there was another significant skeletal remains discovery in a different location. We had a strong premonition that that would be the case, but we couldn’t prove why. We just had a feeling that the Issaquah site was only the beginning. There were missing girls and women from all over the Pacific Northwest who should have been discovered—dead or alive—by now. Our team’s major fear was that the expected body recovery site would be in another jurisdiction, leaving us no controlover the crime scene processing and keeping key clues to the investigation out of our hands. We knew from prior experience that another agency’s investigators would pick up the surface remains and leave. Our team had developed a unique approach to this investigation, and unless our methods were followed, we were afraid we’d never catch this killer. It was becoming more clear that this killer couldn’t stop. He kept on killing and had to leave the bodies somewhere. The question was where. It turned out that some of them were on the slopes of Taylor Mountain.
    No ordinary police officer would understand the detail and on-scene planning that had been necessary for the recovery of evidence and body parts at the Issaquah scene. It had been King County’s first experience with such a site and our handling of it was somewhat flawed. Were we to have another body dump site to cover, we would be far better prepared to gather evidence. We had learned from Issaquah that there was a pattern established by small animals when they carry remains along animal trails away from the original dump site where the major decomposition takes place. Animals that tugged away a decomposing skull pulled at the remains as the skull was being dragged along the ground. At Issaquah, some teeth and a mandible, as well as the mass of hair, were dislodged and fell off along the trail. We learned that if we searched in logical directions along known animal trails after the discovery of the skull, we would discover the dislodged parts. We also had discovered that it was important to sift through the dirt along the animal trails for teeth, bullets, fingernails, and jewelry that had been dislodged from body parts. Human beings are more than stray bits of fingernail, matted hair, and gnawed-upon bones, and no one took pleasure in this search to reassemble the victims of the mysterious Ted. However, it had to be done if we were going to find the culprit, and this time we were prepared for Ted’s next site.
    It was March 2, 1975, a typical foggy and rainy Seattle day, and Roger Dunn and I were eastbound on I-90 past the Issaquah site. Eleven miles east of the city of Issaquah was the Highway 18 cut-off to the south, a major Seattle bypass to Tacoma. Because we were rising in elevation toward the gray, dismal clouds, the rain was pounding down hard on the hood of our car. Going south on Highway 18, it is desolate, bordered by woods on both sides; there are no houses, gas stations, or any other buildings, for that matter.
    The forestry students from Green River Community College who had found the bones while marking trees for a class project greeted us at