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

long brown hair; she was 5 feet tall and 19 years of age. She was a part of the counterculture population at the college, an individual. If she had disappeared for a couple days, that would not have been unusual.She had done it before. But this time when she left, she would never be seen alive again. Her body would never be recovered. Donna was thought to have been wearing a multicolored red-, orange-, and green-striped shirt; green slacks; a black maxicoat; a Bulova wristwatch; and an oval-shaped black agate ring. Her dental charts would be compared to those of at least 100 female homicide victims over a 10-year period. Ted Bundy would take her body’s location to his grave. All he would say was, “She is somewhere in the mountains, the Cascade Mountains.”
Susan Elaine Rancourt
     
    The town of Ellensburg is 150 miles east of Seattle on I-90. Ellensburg is the home of the famous Ellensburg Rodeo and of Central Washington State College, often noted as a teacher’s college. On April 17, 1974, Susan Elaine Rancourt was attending a meeting at the main library with about 100 other people. The meeting ended at ten P.M., and that was the last time Susan was ever seen. She was another pretty coed, 18 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall, with long blond hair. She was believed to last have been wearing a yellow coat, a yellow shortsleeved sweater, gray corduroy pants, and brown Hush Puppy shoes.
    By May 1974, the precinct squad room clipboards contained bulletins outlining known details about the disappearance of Healy, Manson, and Rancourt, and their physical descriptions, all in the hope that someone would come across them.
Kathy Parks
     
    Two hundred sixty miles south of Seattle, along the I-5 corridor, is Corvallis, Oregon, the home of Oregon State University. In the evening hours of May 6, 1974, Roberta Kathleen Parks, a 5-foot 7-inch 21-year-old attractive coed with long, dark brown hair, was last seen in her dormitory. It was thought that she left to go for a walk because she was depressed over her father’s failing health. She was last seen wearing a cream-colored jacket, a navy blue sweater, navy blue corduroy slacks, platform sandals, and silver rings, and carryinga brown purse with a shoulder strap. She was never to be heard from again. We found her remains on Taylor Mountain years later.
    As of June 1974, four coeds were missing from universities that were over 200 miles apart. The individual missing-person circulars listing the few facts known about their disappearances were only reminders of their shattered lives. No one made any connection among these women’s disappearances beyond observing that they were all missing. No one even suspected that the last person they ever saw was the same man. There were no news reporters making even the most casual links among the cases. In addition, there were other missing women, such as Brenda Ball, and not even the investigating officers tied her to the Ted cases.
    By July 1974, the whereabouts of six missing women—Healy, Manson, Rancourt, Ball, Parks, and Hawkins—were mysteries. Their last known locations—the cities of Seattle, Corvallis, Ellensburg, and Olympia—were spread apart by hundreds of miles. No trace of the clothing or jewelry they were wearing would ever be found. It would not be until the investigation began into the disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish on July 14, 1974, that the real investigation into the “Missing and Murdered Girls Cases,” more popularly known as the “Ted Murders,” would begin in earnest. The similar characteristics of their disappearances were to take shape only after their connections were substantiated by common body recovery sites.
    These were the memories flooding my mind as Ted Bundy described to me how he buried Georgann Hawkins’s severed head.

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A Different Kind of Killer
     
    S even months of committing murder after murder, each of them