Free The Riverman by Robert Keppel Page B

invisible, each of them leaving not even a ripple of turbulence on the surface of the water, each of them carried out seemingly without a trace of evidence left behind. This series of events showed that the Ted killer was equipped to survive undetected for the long term. His method of operation seemed flawless, almost scholarly, leaving his hapless pursuers on the police task force very little in the way of clues. Unbeknownst to us, Bundy was practicing his routines for approaching victims almost daily during this period. He was returning to crime scenes and retrieving evidence that would have connected him to the victim. Furthermore, he was reading voraciously from detective magazines and books, gaining valuable information about how police investigators perform their duties. In addition, he knew exactly how the King County Police Department conducted its investigations, because in the early 1970s he researched the crime of rape for the King County Crime Commission, which enabled him to review the actual case files of rape investigations conducted by county detectives. He pored overthis information and took steps to cover his homicidal instincts and vicious temper from those around him.
    We didn’t know who our Ted killer was, where he lived, or what motivated his attacks on women. There was very little, therefore, that we could do about him other than follow what few possible leads there were, even if we were led right down blind alleys or into dead ends. Whatever scant information existed had become our case, and it carried the gravest responsibility that had ever fallen upon the shoulders of King County detectives. The locations where each victim had last been seen and the two multiple-body recovery sites were all that was left of this elusive murderer’s trail. A very faint path of possible evidence lay to the east. No visible traces of the killer were left at the crime scenes themselves. But witnesses at the Lake Sam and Ellensburg areas gave some valuable clues that provided an outline of the young man calling himself Ted.
    As a result of our searches at Issaquah and Taylor Mountain and our ongoing investigation of the Ted abductions at Lake Sam, Roger Dunn and I were to oversee the Ott and Naslund missing-person cases. We willingly took on those investigations, even though there wasn’t much we
could
investigate. We kept these cases on active status in the hope that somewhere, somehow, we would find the facts that linked Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, the mysterious Ted, and the horrible death lairs where their remains were discovered. The whole case ultimately took on the aura of a legend. But the real truth is much more exciting than it has ever been portrayed.
    The newspapers said that Ted Bundy first came into our lives on that bright summer Sunday in Seattle on July 14, 1974, when Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park. However, for Roger and me, the Ted case officially started on the following Tuesday, July 16. It began when the Issaquah City Police chief and his detective, both of whom were wearing long, confused faces, walked into the offices of our Homicide/Robbery Unit of the King County Police Department. They told us about these two young women who had disappeared from the same park on the same sunny Sunday, and asked for our assistance. They wanted us to take over the case—their own detective would help us in any way possible—because they didn’t have the human or physical resources to investigate the mountains of leadsthat had begun to pile up surrounding the two disappearances. The case was simply too big for a small municipal department.
    There was, in the beginning, an aura of imminent success in the air simply because of Issaquah’s handing the cases over to us, the big boys from the “county.” It was very much like the feeling we got when we called in the FBI for assistance in a major case. You believe, at first, that you’ve called in the experts, the