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

the power line road in a fever of anticipation. They led us through a web of wet, slippery branches of vine maple. With every footfall, my still-degenerating knee burned with pain as the branches cracked beneath my steps and snapped back into the soles of my shoes. The foresters had tied red fluorescent tape to tree branches to mark our path. My first thought was that no person would carry a dead body in this far—the remains were over a thousand feet from the road. After what seemed like a never-ending trek through brush, we reached the area where the skull was resting. It was definitely human; no animal teeth had ever had the gleam of shiny dental work that this skull did. The skull lay on its left side, exposing a massive fracture to the right side of the cranium. At least an eight- by four-inch piece of skull bone was missing. As I looked at it, I thought the crack could have been caused by the teeth of gnawing, hungry animals. Soon I was to learn that no animal could have done this kind of damage to a human skull. Aside from this skull, we found no other bones in the immediate area.
    I could tell that the foresters had not touched the skull. The previous autumn’s fall of maple leaves filled the cranium and a spider’s web stretched over the jagged hole. It was lying quietly in a depression in the leafy surface of the ground. No body tissue seemed to be left. I didn’t need a forensic anthropologist to tell me that the skull had been there over five months.
    The dentition of the skull contained a pattern of silver fillings that were familiar to me. Since September 7, we had gathered all the missing-person reports of females throughout Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. With those records we had requested the dental charts of each victim. I had memorized the dental work detailed on over 15 of these charts and easily recognized the jawless expression of Brenda Carol Ball. My crude on-site identification was to be confirmed by a forensic odontologist three days later.
    We photographed the cranium from all angles and measured its position to two temporary triangulation stakes, which we set into the ground to mark the skull’s precise location as it would appear on a land survey. We carefully picked up the skull and preserved it in the position in which it was resting. Roger Dunn and I also collectedthe leaves and dirt that had been in the depression underneath the skull, hoping that if the skull had decomposed there, crime laboratory technicians would discover trace evidence, such as foreign hairs and fibers, that might belong to the killer. Since dusk was setting in, we decided to wait until the next day to resume our search for the remainder of the skeleton.
    With the identification of Brenda Ball’s skull, we did not immediately believe that we had made the first major skeletal discovery we had been hoping to find. Brenda’s disappearance was thought to be an isolated event that did not fit the mold of abductions such as those of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund or the other five coeds who had disappeared from the University of Washington and Oregon State University. Ball, white, 22 years old, 5 feet 3 inches tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, was last seen on May 31, 1974, at the Flame Tavern, five miles south of Seattle. She was wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck top with long sleeves, a shirt-style jacket, and brown cloglike wedge-heeled shoes. The Flame Tavern was a topless bar, known for the crowd of outlaw bikers it drew. Brenda, a hitchhiker and occasional drug user, was known to have dated male customers from the Flame on previous occasions.
    Everyone thought that Brenda had just taken off for a few days. Her mother would dispel that idea 16 days after her disappearance by claiming that she had never been absent for so long without calling home collect. Even so, no one believed that Brenda’s disappearance was connected to the deaths of Ott and Naslund or to the other missing coeds from the