The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (7 page)

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 collected
the 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 area. Months later, a subsequent investigation revealed that on the night of her disappearance Brenda had been dancing at the Flame Tavern and had left with a Ted look-alike who matched our description of him from Lake Sam, right down to the sling on his arm.

The day after the initial discovery of Ball’s cranium, six German shepherd search dogs, their handlers, and I combed the Taylor Mountain site, hoping to find more bones. We met at the intersection of the power line road and Highway 18. Our first mission was to find the marked location of Ball’s skull and spread out from there, searching for the rest of her skeleton. I thought I’d be able to walk directly to the site. Unfortunately, a day earlier, I hadn’t paid much attention to the markers placed on trees by the foresters. Their red tags were too far apart, and the density of the forest made
it difficult to determine where the next one would be. Suddenly, I was lost. The forest was a blizzard of vine maple branches dripping water from a recent rainfall, and we quickly became soaked to the skin. The dog handlers and I decided to split up. We all headed out in different directions, and whoever found the path first was to call out to the others.

I had just walked down into a narrow hollow between two hillsides when I heard a handler yell that he had found the marked location about 25 yards away. The darkened forest was so thick that I couldn’t see him from where I was standing. As I began to stumble toward the sound of his voice, an unforgiving maple branch smacked my legs out from under me and down I went, face to the ground. With my hands firmly pushing against the wet, slimy leaves, I pushed myself up as far as my knees. By this time, I was reeling at the pain in my knee again and wishing I had never played basketball. My contact lenses were a blur. As fate would have it, 4 feet from my squinting eyes sat another cranium, obviously sunbleached and clean from exposure to the elements. It had been there a long time—a branch had grown through the opening in the facial bones of the skull. A 6-inch radial fracture extended up the center of the skull from its base. Without hesitation, I recognized the brilliant-white bridgework of Susan Elaine Rancourt, a coed missing since April 17, 1974, from Central Washington State College, which was over 150 miles away to the east.

With embarrassing glee, I yelled to the others that I had found a cranium. I was sickened at the thought of how joyful I was. However, the evidence of another major skeletal discovery was unfolding, and I felt the weight of the world settle on my shoulders at the thought of finding more clues that would help me track this killer. The extent of this killer’s crimes was growing as more of the pieces of the puzzle came together.

As the handlers rushed toward me with their eager search dogs sniffing the ground ahead of them, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t want them anywhere near this cranium. Dogs don’t care where they put their paws. Crucial evidence could be destroyed or altered if the dogs ran through this site. A basic tenet of Criminal Investigation 101 was racing through my head: protect the scene. But it was too late. Almost on cue, and certainly by accident, a dog’s paw struck the ground and a human jawbone erupted through the leafy surface. I yelled for everyone to stay back, but within a
few seconds another dog walked across the leaves and dislodged another human jawbone. Then another dog stepped on another mandible. In stunned amazement, we all realized that a detailed search of the mountainside was required. At the very least, we had just discovered the remains of two people.

While I drove to a telephone to break the news to Captain Nick Mackie, an ESAR dog handler specifically marked the area by running a string line due north of the quarter-sectional marker at the intersection of the power line road and Highway 18. Eleven hundred feet from the corner, the string line bisected the area of the bone find. Measuring at 90-degree angles off the string line, the remains were easily positioned on a diagram:

1. Bone find #1, cranium (Ball’s), 1,010 feet in, 90 degrees west off string line number one, 65 feet
   

2. Bone find #2, cranium (Rancourt’s), 1,105 feet in, 90 degrees east off string line number one, 22 feet
   

3. Bone find #3, mandible, 1,098 feet in, 90 degrees offstring line number one, 20 feet, and so on
   

We had begun to lay out the master search diagram of bones and other pieces of evidence.

I informed Captain Mackie of the find. Naturally, he was surprised and not a little irritated that his lieutenant and sergeant had informed him that the initial discovery of bones was just an isolated incident and that nothing else would be found.

Since it was late afternoon, Roger Dunn and I planned to meet ESAR personnel at the intersection the next morning to begin excavating Taylor Mountain for further evidence. On the following day, this once-quiet and obscure forest was alive with the sounds of ESAR commands and the growl of chain saws our search teams used to prune the ultra-dense forest. We had to get beneath the surface of the last leaf fall because that was where valuable evidence would be located. ESAR personnel raked through each ounce of soil for even the most minute traces of physical evidence. Each branch was evaluated for its forensic value. A meticulous shoulder-to-shoulder, hands-and-knees search of the mountainside, similar to that conducted at Issaquah, was under way. The searchers would sift through over 2,000 ounces of soil per day for five days. Since
the Issaquah crime scene search techniques were a model for other searchers to follow, we had prearranged that ESAR supervisors would inform their other teams statewide of them, so that all ESAR personnel would become experienced at these evidence search techniques. By now, the local ESAR kids were more dedicated to and proficient at carefully brushing an area for evidence than a group of excited archaeologists.

Detective Ted Forester was assigned to assist in evidence collection. Several weeks before, he had been investigating the double murder of an elderly couple. When he arrived at their home, he found the house in flames and, with the assistance of a firefighter, pushed the victims’ pickup to safety. Unfortunately, the processing of that arson scene ended after a long day and Forester had forgotten about the pickup truck and didn’t search it for evidence. Several days later, a newspaper reporter covering the story discovered the considerable amount of blood inside the pickup that Forester had overlooked. Detective Forester was sentenced to five days on the mountain with me not only as punishment but as a harsh lesson in what it takes to unearth evidence. Forester was a welcome addition to our team, since he was an accomplished woodsman and an expert with a chain saw.

After the discovery of the skulls and mandibles our search finds were few and far between. The only human remains we discovered were on the only animal trail that ran along a small creek that meandered down the gentle slopes of Taylor Mountain. About 50 feet from the nearest vehicle access, we found the shattered mandible of Susan Rancourt, over 800 feet from her skull. We surmised that some animal must have dragged her skull into the dense forest, since the terrain was virtually impassable by any human being. About 10 feet from her mandible, ESAR kids found a small clump of blond hair. It was a miracle that this portion of the full hair mass was discovered at all, since the area was full of densely intertwined vine maples and blackberry bushes.

At two
P.M.
on the third day, searchers who had begun walking slowly at three-foot intervals on a hillside adjacent to the one where we were finding most of the remains froze in their tracks. They had come upon a live explosive charge. As I approached the explosive, I could see another group of unexploded large ammunition rounds and rockets. The ESAR team had uncovered a dumping field created by a nearby explosives plant at the end of the dirt power line
road that extended to the east from Highway 18. Employees at the plant had used the forest for their testing grounds. They had been informed we were conducting a ground search in hazardous territory but had failed to offer one word of warning. I was so infuriated that I closed access to the plant until the bomb squad cleared their pyrotechnic litter and our search was completed several days later. The dud rounds were very dangerous and been strewn over thousands of feet of hillside. The last thing I needed was for an ESAR kid to blow off a foot while searching. As if our job wasn’t difficult enough, now it was highly dangerous, too.

As the search for “Ted victims” progressed over the week, an ominous scenario began to unfold. No bones other than skull parts were being discovered. Twenty yards up the hillside from Rancourt’s skull, we found what was left of a battered cranium. I was shocked that the maxilla, the bone that had once contained the upper teeth, was completely gone. We never found it, despite our intense search. We located her lower jawbone, which neatly fit into the narrow skull. The fracture lines were evidence that this victim was probably beaten beyond recognition. After eight days of searching, we could account for only three skulls, three human jawbones, and a small hair mass. We found numerous individual bones, but they were all confirmed to be animal bones by Dr. Daris Swindler, a physical anthropologist from the University of Washington. So what did all of this mean?

Theories of intentional decapitation were quickly dismissed by our supervisors because we didn’t find the neck vertebrae that would have confirmed it. Typically, when a person is intentionally decapitated, the cut is made below the base of the skull because it is relatively easy to sever the vertebrae with the appropriate cutting tool. Thus, neck vertebrae at a site where a skull is found usually indicate that the person was decapitated. For our supervisors, therefore, a lack of neck vertebrae meant no intentional decapitation. Although this logic was not infallible, it was often seized upon by police commanders, presumably to avoid undue fear in the community and increased pressure on themselves to find a “monster.” On the other hand, we were confident that if those vertebrae were once on Taylor Mountain, we would have found them.

The most popular theory circulating among the police department supervisors was that the rest of the skeletons were obviously outside our search perimeter. If this were true, however, based on
crime scene retrieval experience at Issaquah, we should have found other skeletal parts within close proximity of the crania. But what we learned from Issaquah was summarily downplayed.

My own theory—considered outrageous—was that, for a period of time, the killer had parked the skulls at another location, where they decayed individually, and then dumped his entire load just inside the edge of the forest. The physical evidence, which consisted of leaves in skulls from one previous leaf fall, the growth of the maple branches through and around the skulls, and the lack of any tissue on the crania left me with the feeling that they were exposed to outdoor elements, in one place, where they decayed at the same rate. In other words, they were put someplace else for a period of time and then brought to Taylor Mountain; the killer was moving around the body parts of his victims. It seemed as though nobody in the department wanted to consider my theory seriously—maybe because it gave too much credit to the ability of the killer to manipulate evidence and escape detection. They also probably didn’t want to consider what it would take to catch a killer so remorseless that he could handle the body parts of his dead victims long after he had murdered them.

Due to the growing intensity of the news coverage of the dump site discovery, I was forced to set up a line across the power line road beyond which no reporter could pass. Most of the press were familiar faces by now: John Sandifer, Ward Lucas, Lou Corseletti, Dick Larsen, and Julie Blacklow. Over the next year, all would become veteran, self-appointed Ted Bundy experts. I was accustomed to coming out of the woods about every two hours to give them a report. Usually, I really couldn’t say much, but I learned 20 different ways to say that we had found more remains. What I didn’t want to reveal was that only skull parts were found. The reporters sensed something was awry because we didn’t bring many large packages out. I felt so uneasy about this that I started bringing small bones out in large packages so no one would be the wiser. We also had to use different radio codes every day because the media had radio scanners tuned into the ESAR walkie-talkie frequency. It was like a game of spy versus spy. After several days, the search process was beginning to wear on me and I got testy with the media. A new television reporter arrived and abruptly demanded that I brief her on everything that had taken place the preceding week. I blew up—which was very uncharacteristic of me—and I
told her to get the hell out and go review the news clips. Then I turned around and walked away.