By Serial Killer Magazine
In 1984 the King County detectives hunting the Green River Killer had thirty-odd bodies and no suspect. Ted Bundy, on death row in Florida, wrote to one of them offering to help. On November 17 they took him up on it.
What follows is part of what was said that day. Bundy had no information about the case beyond what the detectives brought into the room and what he had read in the papers. What he offered instead was an analysis of the unknown man built out of himself: how he would be choosing his dump sites, what the recovery dates would have felt like from the inside, what he would do next. The detectives called the man they were hunting the Riverman. He was Gary Ridgway, and he was arrested seventeen years later.
The reason this document is worth having is what it is not. Bundy is not performing remorse. He is not addressing a public, a jury or a parole board. He is not talking about himself at all, at least not on the surface. He is talking shop with two working detectives, and he gets interested.
WHAT THIS IS. An investigative consultation, recorded on tape by King County Police detectives on November 17, 1984, at Florida State Prison. Not a journalistic interview. Detective Dave Reichert, later Sheriff of King County and a member of Congress, asks the questions in the portion below; Detective Robert Keppel, to whom Bundy had written, was also present. The recording begins mid-conversation and the excerpt ends mid-session.
WHERE IT COMES FROM, AND WHO HOLDS WHAT. There are three layers here and they matter. THE UNDERLYING TAPE was made by King County detectives in the course of a homicide investigation and is probably a public record of King County, Washington. THE SURVIVING EXCERPT reaches us inside the audiobook edition of Dave Reichert’s "Chasing the Devil: My Twenty-Year Quest to Capture the Green River Killer," chapters 11 and 12, copyright David Reichert and Hachette Audio; the same sessions are the subject of Robert Keppel’s "The Riverman" (1995). THE TRANSCRIPTION is the work of the operator of the Ted Bundy Archive, a personal research blog. The audio is at archive.org/details/1984-interview-with-ted-bundy-about-the-green-river-killer and the transcript at tedbundyarchive.blogspot.com. Both are linked so you can go to them.
WHAT HAS NOT BEEN CHECKED. The audio was not listened to. The transcription is another party’s work and has not been verified against the recording. Its ellipses, its spellings of victim names and its one marked uncertainty are reproduced exactly as they stand, with nothing corrected, smoothed or reordered. One name transcribed as "Yates" does not match any documented Green River victim and may be a mishearing; it is left as transcribed. The other names Bundy reads aloud - Coffield, Chapman, Hinds, Mills, Lovvorn, Kasee Ann Lee, Terry Milligan, Mary Meehan, Antosh, Naon, Bush, Estes, Pitsor, Colleen Brockman, Agisheff, Wims - do correspond to documented victims, which is itself evidence the recording is what it is said to be.
AND THE INFERENCE THAT IS NOT BUNDY’S. The passage everyone quotes is the last line, that the killer has been back to his dump sites many times. REICHERT READ THAT WHOLE LINE OF ADVICE AS BUNDY DESCRIBING HIMSELF, AND WROTE SO. That is Reichert’s inference. It is contested, and Bundy nowhere in this passage says he returned to his own victims. Two other things to hold on to: he was a condemned man who had solicited these visits and had obvious reasons to be useful and to delay, and almost everything he predicts here was unfalsifiable at the time and was shaped by the case file the detectives put in front of him. His geographic predictions are not what led to Ridgway.
Ted Bundy: For some reason, he is running off Seattle victims in a much different way than he is running off his South victims...
David Reichert: Do you have any speculation as to why he may be doing that?
Ted Bundy: Well, first of all, there's no good place... he's trying to dispose of bodies where they won't be found. This guy doesn't want to get caught. I think he doesn't want these bodies found. I think it's clear that over time, at least it would appear, over time he's trying to improve his dumpsites... and he's trying to get better at disposing of bodies, generally speaking. Now, we can all say, he's really clumsy, I would have done it this way, but who knows, under his mental apparatus, what he thinks is effective and what isn't... But I think as far as the downtown Seattle approach, there's obviously no place close by to dump them... Pacific Highway South he's got all this stuff within driving distance and I think it appears to me... my guess would be... that they're dying shortly after he picks them up. 'Cos he's not going far with them. I'm making a real off the cuff guess.
David Reichert: One of the things I'd take a guess to is that almost all of them are exclusively car date prostitutes... they're not the type that had a motel room or take somebody back to your home... they sell themselves at the car...
Ted Bundy: Sure... I was going to ask what they were doing... were they plying their trade on the streets or inside establishments... were they standing on the street...
David Reichert: Standing on the street...
Ted Bundy: He's not taking them in the car. He's not picking them up... it's hard to say. It's all speculation. I'm sure you've gone over this a thousand times... but as far as downtown Seattle, there's obviously no good close site... where he can just drop them off so he's got to go somewhere so he gets on Interstate 5 and he's driving down 5 and he could just as easily drop off here as he did with Wims but it's just as likely he heads south and drops off Pitsor here and Colleen Brockman here and east on 90 and dropped off Agisheff here and Yates here... and also the other two victims, 25 and 16 in that same general vicinity. And of course, Snoqualmie and Interstate 90 in that area have gotten somewhat of a reputation you know... for that kind of activity and perhaps that is what attracted him there. 20,27, both Seattle and both way out there and I bet you... looking back... they're toward the tail end of 1983... one in September and one in October... about the time... you found several bodies that summer... and I bet you he was getting nervous... god damn they're starting to find my bodies again... excuse me, it's kind of fascinating to watch this unfold and I'm probably running ahead of myself... I'm confusing you two with asking questions... but just looking at how this unfolded I see here by the dates that ugh you found these first five really quickly... Coffield, Chapman, and Hinds, and Mills... I'm looking and you can see he changes... he's saying, "obviously I'm not going to use that Green River again... at least not for a while," ...and he's looking for something that's more effective so he goes back to dry land... look at number 6... he'd been on dry land with an intermediate victim, actually she was in between and went back to dry land with some of these other victims. Yeah... Mills is in here. And Lovvorn was found in September but still he sticks to these sites and I've got it more deliberately analyzed in my notes here... what I'm saying is that between September '82 and May of '83 you didn't find any bodies... so in his mind he was effective... and he got how many in that period... he got... between September and... I would say, starting with Kasee Ann Lee, which is not... you never found her again... But Terry R. Milligan, Salt Lake Road, and Mary Meehan... You didn't find a body for seven, eight months, anywhere, and this guy is starting to get bold again... "I finally found the ticket you know, they're not finding my bodies"... and uh, you didn't find [unintelligible: Christensen? or Brockman?] until May... and this guy he'd changed his tactic...
David Reichert: You say he's continuing to kill... He's still in the Seattle area... And we found these locations out here... what'd you think his next step would be?
Ted Bundy: To go with what's working... You know, he moved up east of Enumclaw and he's going deeper in the mountains... he's trying something new, something different. You found three east of Enumclaw, you'll find he probably won't be going up there anymore assuming he was going there, obviously he was up there for a time and I'll bet you'll find more up there... at least in my opinion, four or five more should be up there.
David Reichert: You think he'll go further east then, on I-90...
Ted Bundy: He's got the whole... who knows... this guy is learning... he's trying to find the best way to dispose of his bodies as he can think of. Up to now, he's been hiding... he's been dumping or burying them, or I don't know, a combination of the two... but God forbid someday he decides... he finds a secluded well somewhere that he starts dumping them all down the well and... or some other effective way or burying them in the basement like John Wayne Gacy... because well, quite frankly, I think you have a chance to catch him if you can start finding his next bodies... and I'll get into that later... ummm... yeah he's... I'm sure for a time after in late '83 that the discoveries, let's see... you found three bodies, in October '83, umm... and that bothered the hell out of him I'm sure... you found Antosh, Naon and unidentified bones... that would have been 10, 11, 12 on this list... 11 and 12 were south of the airport, 10 was over here by Green River. So I'm sure he's getting a little edgy about leaving any more bodies around over here... and I don't think it's a coincidence that your next body in chronological order is... there is no doubt there are bodies you haven't discovered but it's your early victims you haven't found... Kasee Ann Lee, Bush, Estes... this guy may not select his dump sites with the precision of a geographer's surveyor but it's clear that it's something that... places he's searched out and looked over in the daytime and the night time. But he's been back to them many times after... obviously. He's been back to them many times.
Quoted inside Reichert’s own narration rather than in the continuous transcript, and therefore Bundy’s words but not part of the exchange above.
"I know the instincts that the police system moves in. Everybody is called in and scours the site. The explorer scouts crawl on their hands and knees and this has always fascinated me, and appalled me because as I said... if they’d only waited, they’d have found somebody! The guy would have come right up to them."
Reichert also states that the detectives eventually got Bundy to admit there was a "fatal link between sex and violence" in the Green River case. Those five words are the only part of that sentence attributable to Bundy. The rest is Reichert’s characterisation.
The route to a copy of this material with no audiobook layer and no third-party transcription is a public records request to King County for the original 1984 recording. That is the recommendation of the researcher who collected it, and it is the only way this becomes ours outright rather than reproduced with attribution.