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A late February wind whipped across the campus of Central Washington University, sweeping the dry snow along the ground and rattling the windows of the small frame building of the campus police headquarters.
At his desk, Al Pickles, the campus security chief, leaned back in his chair and, with arms folded across his chest, stared through his window at some students, bundled in parkas and knit caps, bending into the cold wind on the campus pathways. For the five-thousandth time, it seemed, he had Susan Rancourt on his mind, the coed who disappeared from that campus ten months earlier.
“I just can’t think of another damned thing that we might have done,” he sighed. Pickles’ words were directed to Bob Miller, the university’s dean of students, sitting on the opposite side of the chief’s desk. It had become routine for the dean to stop in now and then to see how things were going in the search.
Pickles swiveled in his chair and leaned forward to his desk, reaching for a file folder. “We had a meeting of law-enforcement people over in Seattle Thursday. Everyone was there, comparing everything they had, on all the missing girls. Seattle P.D. King County. Thurston County. The Oregon State Police. No one had anything new. Except ...”
The chief opened the file folder. “Except that, down in Clark County, down around Vancouver, they found a couple of skeletons last month up in the hills.”
Miller listened as he read from his report: “Carol Valenzuala, age 18, disappeared August 2, 1974. Her skeleton was found in a high valley, a heavily wooded area, by a couple of hunters. Right nearby there was another skeleton. An unknown female, white, 17 to 23 years of age, 125 pounds, 5–5 to 5–7. Long dark hair. They don’t have her identified.”
“You don’t suppose ...” Miller began.
“No,” Pickles shook his head. “It’s not our girl.” They checked the teeth against the dental charts of all the others, including Susan’s, and there was no match. Just an unidentified skeleton of a girl.
Pickles—and he had become accustomed to the grins and gags his unusual name inspired among the kids around the campus—was a veteran law-enforcement man. His Bronx accent betrayed his boyhood in New York. He had started out as a motorcycle cop for NYPD, then later migrated west, serving on the police force of a series of small towns through California and Oregon. For a while, until a political clash put an end to the job, Pickles had been police chief at Leavenworth, Kansas. He liked his job at Ellensburg. As campus police chief at Central, Pickles often explained with pride, “I’ve got the responsibility for the peace and order and security of a community of 7,000 good young people.”
Pickles had taken Susan’s disappearance personally. He had been on the telephone often with Susan’s parents in Anchorage and had developed an almost fatherly interest in her. And a vexing wonderment about where she’d gone. Susan, Pickles remembered, had been one of the kids who turned out every morning before class for the informal jogging club to which Pickles also belonged. He vaguely remembered her. She had also been one of the volunteers who sewed shoulder patches on the uniforms of the new campus police auxiliary.
“Y’know, Bob,” Pickles told the dean, “I wake up every damned night with the thought, ‘Is there something we’ve missed?’ Maybe there’s something there that’s so obvious. And we don’t see it.”
“Al, I don’t know what else could be done.”
“God knows we haven’t spared the time or money trying,” said the chief. “I’ll betcha we must have had contact with nearly every state in the country. ...” He opened one of the loose-leaf notebooks on the Rancourt disappearance and began skipping through its pages, reading.
“There’s a Susan look-alike who’s supposed to have been seen in Mobile, Alabama, with two guys in a car with Florida plates, heading for Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A nice, helpful campus officer down at Northeast Louisiana State University says he saw a girl who matches Susan’s description there, carrying a green suitcase. ... Some old guy insists that a girl working in a massage parlor in Portland looks like Susan, some girl using the name of Crystal. ... Susan’s sister, over at La Conner, the brother-in-law, the boyfriend, no one can give us a single idea. ...
“There was one kind of crazy nut we interrogated and he looked good for a while. But we could place him somewhere else at the time Susan disappeared. And he tells us, ‘She will be found under water in the gates at the end of the canal system.’ Of course we checked there. We’ve checked everywhere.
“They found a nude female body in Palm Beach County, Florida, and so we got Susan’s dentist in Anchorage to send a copy of her dental charts down there. Susan’s got—or Susan had—really distinctive teeth. Ceramic crowns, a bridge, numerous fillings. She had really pretty teeth in front. Well, anyway, that didn’t pan out. A long pass—from Anchorage to Palm Beach—but no completion.”
Pickles closed the volume. Dean Miller sighed.
“I’m starting to worry that we’re never going to find her,” conceded the chief.
* * *
Every thread of possibility, in each of the cases of the vanished girls, seemed to fray to nothingness.
And everyone involved was willing to try anything. “Well, why not?” said Bill Harris when he heard the idea. “Why not a water witch? We’ve tried everything else.” The campus security chief at Oregon State University had run out of all the conventional ideas in his search for Kathy Parks. Benton County Sheriff John Dolan, whose office had been cooperating with OSU campus police in the search, mentioned the witch. Polk County Sheriff Woody Jones had told Dolan about the witch—an older man up at Monmouth, Oregon, who had quite a knack for finding underground water and, sometimes, finding bodies which were under water. Not long before, Dolan had heard, the Monmouth water witch had helped locate the body of a dead child.
When they finally located Charlie Bowman, the witch, he said he was more than willing to help. He drove to Corvallis immediately. A leathery old rancher and slightly deaf, Charlie made it clear, right off, though, that he didn’t want them calling him a water witch. “Mention the name water witch,” he told the officers, “and right away it spooks people. Call me a diviner.
“First of all, I’m going to need something that the girl wore, something of hers that no one else could have worn.” Harris retrieved one of Kathy’s boots which had been locked away since her disappearance.
Charlie Bowman’s technique was simple and, he said, “ain’t no magic in it.” His body, he had discovered, contained its own unique chemistry and sensitivity to magnetic impulses. In his gnarled hands, Charlie held his homemade divining rod, which consisted of two brass rods welded together in a V. “It doesn’t have to be brass,” he explained. “Y’can use barbed wire if y’wanna. Stick of wood’ll do just fine if you can’t find nothin’ else.”
During that first day of divining, they tried all around the Corvallis area, then headed east to the corridor of Interstate 5. Harris and the other campus officers always thought that Kathy at that point might have gone—or been taken—southward to California, her home state. “Nope,” declared Charlie. “She’s way off to the north.” He removed his one hand from Kathy’s boot and took up his divining rod. The impulses were being transmitted in a circuit through his arms now. “Left hand’s the negative,” he explained softly. “And the right hand’s the positive.”
“Nope. She’s lots further north. Maybe Portland.”
Next day they started driving early. Along with Harris and Charlie was Chris McPhee, Kathy’s distraught boyfriend. He had traveled to Oregon from his job in Louisiana to help search for the pretty girl he hoped to marry. Charlie’s divining that day took them north to Portland and then eastward, across the northern edge of Oregon, until they reached Umatilla. By late afternoon, they had crossed the Columbia River into eastern Washington State.
When they turned toward the Cascade Mountains, Charlie said, “Nope. Nope. It’s all wrong.” He had been bothered by a confusion of impulses. “It’s the boot,” he concluded. “I can tell some other girl’s had her foot in this boot, some girl besides your Kathy.” It was after midnight when they got back to Corvallis that night. Harris was glad for the cover of darkness. He felt a little awkward about it all.
Charlie Bowman wouldn’t give up. “By golly,” he said stubbornly, “I’m just gonna find out where she’s at.” Next day he and his friend, Shorty Fisher, who ran a gas station at Monmouth, went out on their own. Again, Charlie’s divining led them northward, into Washington State. There, though, he lost the vibrations. Over a three-day period, Charlie had traveled nearly 1,200 miles in the search. At some roadside places, he’d picked up a sardine can and a couple of beer bottles which he was certain gave off impulses of Kathy or someone who had been with her. Charlie was absolutely certain of one thing: “She’s up north there somewheres.”
* * *
Low and softly rounded, Taylor Mountain has almost motherly contours—in contrast to the steeper foothills further east. Taylor is seldom noticed by motorists driving along Washington State Highway 18, which curls between several small towns in rural King County, south and east of Seattle.
To the east, the high Cascades were whitened by snow on that first day of March 1975. The Saturday morning was heavily overcast, and the dense forest covering Taylor Mountain was glistening wet from the previous night’s rain.
Two forestry students from Green River Community College were slowly working up one side of Taylor, picking their way through silent, dripping stands of second-growth Douglas fir, red alder, and the pesky vine maple. As a class project, Alex Kamola and Larry Sharie, dressed in rain garb, boots, and hard hats, were cruising an eighty-acre tract there on Taylor, running their line and compass course. Methodically, they worked to the top of the mountain, stopping frequently to take their readings and log locations.
During the late afternoon, they were working their way down the opposite side, when Alex reached a low place at the foot of the mountain. In a swampy area thick with sword fern, maple, and little cottonwoods, he stopped, startled.
Lying in the wet grass, near a rotted log, was a human skull.
“Hey,” he shouted to Larry. “There’s a skull down here.”
“Be right down,” Larry shouted back.
Alex sat on a log and examined the skull. He could see that some of the upper teeth had fillings. Curving around the side of the skull bone was a jagged fracture. There was no jawbone.
Larry arrived. “Ugh. Bizarre,” he muttered. “Let’s mark the spot and finish up.” They left an orange streamer used for timber marking and went to telephone the police.
* * *
Speeding toward the scene of the call, King County Detective Bob Keppel was driving past Issaquah on Interstate 90 when his eye turned automatically toward that steep hillside on his left, the place where the Lake Sammamish girls’ skeletons had been discovered five months earlier. I wonder, he thought. I wonder if ... Keppel glanced at his car’s mileage reading. Taylor Mountain, the place to which he had been called, would be another ten miles to the east, higher in the foothills. Keppel was thinking about pieces of that third skeleton—still unidentified—which had been found there near Issaquah.
I wonder if a coyote or bear could have carried that damn skull ten miles, all the way out to this Taylor Mountain.
No, he reasoned, whatever had been found, it was a new victim.
When Keppel, Detective Roger Dunn, and the others gathered at Taylor Mountain, it was late, too dark, to begin an immediate search. They’d developed a better plan following the Issaquah search, which had been a nightmare, with reporters and curiosity seekers constantly invading the discovery area. The lone dirt road leading to the flank of Taylor Mountain was sealed off that night. Keppel scanned the mountain, with its dense timber and tangled underbrush, and estimated, “It’s gotta be a million-to-one shot that a skull would ever be found here. Amazing.”
The officers lifted the skullbone into a plastic bag, sealed it, labeled it, and dispatched it to the medical examiner’s office in Seattle.
Keppel, a police-science graduate of Washington State University, was a scholarly looking, soft-spoken detective who was recognized as one of King County’s—and Seattle’s—brightest and best investigators. Before his transfer to the homicide and robbery detail of the county police force in early 1974, he had been working on a missing-persons case—the disappearance of twenty-two-year-old Brenda Gail Ball. She had last been seen leaving the Flame tavern, in a suburb southwest of Seattle, around two o’clock the morning of May 31, 1974. Brenda did part-time secretarial work. She wasn’t a college student. So, at first, her disappearance had not been related to the missing coeds. But Keppel had concluded that the date of Brenda’s disappearance, her age, her physical appearance, other circumstances, all added up. It was a case similar to the others.
Late that night, Keppel received the medical examiner’s identification of the skull. Dental charts left no doubt. It was Brenda Ball.
Keppel was back out on Taylor Mountain early the next morning. Again, it was chilly and wet. Drooping from the low overcast, gauzy strands of fog interlaced the tall firs. Search volunteers had been summoned and were still en route when Keppel climbed across the face of the mountain, seeking a boundary marker which had been placed the day before. As he waded through the thick underbrush in a slippery place, Keppel’s boot caught in a web of maple roots. He fell—heavily—landing on his hip and one elbow in the thick carpet of rotting leaves.
His eyes were riveted to the sight. Five feet from where he lay, at eye level, was another skull.
Christ, he thought. That’s gotta be the Rancourt girl from over at Ellensburg.
He recognized the pretty white teeth across the front, which appeared unattached to the skull bone above. Through months of work on the cases of vanished girls, Keppel had memorized characteristics of the missing girls, including their dental charts. Al Pickles and his campus police over at Ellensburg, perhaps seventy miles or so eastward across the Cascades from this point on Taylor Mountain, had stressed the uniqueness of Susan’s teeth. She had ceramic crowns and distinctive bridgework.
At the base of the mountain the search volunteers had begun to arrive. Some handlers were already on the mountain with their search-and-rescue German shepherds. As a dog approached him in the woods, Keppel’s eye noticed that the animal’s paw, stepping in the thick leaves, turned up a human jawbone.
“Everybody get back out of here,” the detective shouted. “Everyone out! Watch where you step! Walk straight back. Everybody the hell out of here.” Whatever grisly deposits might lie in that thick tangle of forest, brush, and marsh on the mountainside, it had to be preserved if ever the investigators were to reconstruct what had happened.
Later that day, the Air National Guardsmen, the young Explorer Scouts, and the other searchers assembled around the county police truck at the foot of the mountain. Keppel, standing on the tailgate, addressed them: “We’re going to search the area first on hands and knees, shoulder to shoulder.” He held up a large map of the mountainside, which had been divided by grid lines. “Now, if there is any discovery, everyone stops right where he is. Then we mark it and plot its location on the map.” On the mountainside, orange streamers outlined the initial search zone, an area about the size of nine football fields, on the face of the mountain.
It proceeded like a combination slow-motion military maneuver and painstaking archaeological dig. On hands and knees, the searchers on the mountain moved inch by inch, their fingers lifting one leaf at a time. Slowly they crept through the ferns, the blackberry vines, and huckleberry shrubs around the tangled trees.
First news reports of the discovery and search on Taylor Mountain shocked the region. A platoon of news media people assembled around the search base at the foot of the mountain to report developments.
As the search inched down the mountainside, the keen eyes of Explorer Scouts picked up the almost-invisible strands of long human hair which had become entangled in the bushes. It was a path of human hair. As he logged the discoveries on the map, Keppel shook his head. It appeared that predators—coyotes, perhaps wildcats—had been at work on the bodies, scattering the remains. A jawbone was found. Another day of searching passed. Another skull was found. Then another jawbone. Each discovery was logged, charted on the map, packaged, and rushed to the medical examiner’s office.
Anxious parents awaited the ominous news reports. Dale Rancourt heard about it in Alaska and was on the telephone with Ellensburg, begging Al Pickles, the campus police chief, for any news: “Al, have they found Susan on that mountain?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out for you,” Pickles replied.
He telephoned Seattle, in an effort to reach Captain Nick Mackie, chief of the investigation. He was told Mackie wasn’t taking any calls and wasn’t returning any calls.
Pickles exploded in frustration and anger: “I’ve got a father who’s going out of his mind, and I’ve promised him we’d let him know as quickly as there’s any information. I’ve turned over to Mackie and his boys every damned piece of information in our investigation, trying to cooperate. What the hell kind of cooperation is this? Mackie won’t even return a telephone call.”
In Olympia, Thurston County Sheriff Don Jennings and his officers were having the same trouble. “Can’t get a thing out of Mackie,” snapped Jennings. The feeble sense of cooperation among the police agencies was falling apart.
Eventually Mackie made the announcements to the press, as the bones were identified. The skull with the pretty teeth, he confirmed, was that of Susan Rancourt.
When the mountainside search was in its fifth day, two detectives arrived at the Bellevue home of Mr. and Mrs. James Healy. Lynda’s parents had been waiting for—and dreading—some word for thirteen months, ever since Lynda vanished from her basement apartment. The somber-faced detectives told them there could be no mistake. The teeth of the jawbone matched Lynda’s dental records.
Later, Lynda’s mother spoke bravely to news reporters: “We still had some hope that maybe she would show up some day, that maybe we would have her home again. But if it’s impossible for that to happen, I guess we’re glad to know. It’s kind of a relief in a way. She was a wonderful girl. Maybe I was just lucky to have had her for twenty-one years.”
On Taylor Mountain, in a tangle of wet brush, about 350 feet from an animal trail which crossed the search area, they found the fourth skull.
Keppel studied it, noticing its slightly different, slimmer shape. He thought about all the photographs of missing girls which were posted in the detective’s room in Seattle where he and the others had spent so many months working. One photo leaped to his mind as he studied the skull—the photo of Kathy Parks. “I’ve got a feeling that’s the Parks girl from Oregon State,” Keppel told a fellow detective. “She’s the one with the really slender face.
“But, God, that’s hard to believe. This mountain is more than 250 miles from where that girl disappeared.”
Two days before the forestry students had made their initial discovery on Taylor Mountain in Washington State, Kathy’s parents, in Lafayette, California, had sorrowfully observed the twenty-first birthday of their missing daughter. When Kathy had been born February 27, 1947, in Lakewood, Ohio, she was premature, weighing two pounds, nine ounces. Doctors had placed her immediately in an incubator, and the whole family prayed for their little “preemie.” Slowly, the infant gained weight and eventually grew quite healthy. The only indication of her premature birth was a slightly elongated skull, the result of having lain quietly on her side during those early weeks of life in that incubator. As a young woman, the slenderness of her face gave Kathy a rather dramatic look of fragile beauty.
Her parents had missed sharing her previous birthday with her, too. That year Kathy was away from home, in college at Corvallis. Her father had preserved their exchange of correspondence at that time. Charles Parks had written to his daughter, “My dearest 20 yr. old daughter. It sure doesn’t seem like 20 years have gone by since I was looking at you in an incubator at Lakewood Hospital in Cleveland.” Her father urged Kathy to take practical courses at the university with an eye on her eventual financial independence. He had closed the letter, “In any event, all my love, good luck and study hard. Have some fun with the attached check or buy some shoes or a dress.—Love, Dad.”
Kathy had been affected by the rare letter from her father. She had replied, “Dear Dad: I was touched by your letter to me, so I thought I’d like to sit down and write a letter to you—Just for you.” She poured out her affection for her dad and suggested they erase all memories of those father-daughter frictions which had occurred when Kathy was in her rebellious teens. “Well,” she had concluded. “I could write pages on the whole subject, but I’ve got a class in 10 or 15 minutes, so it’ll just have to wait. I just wanted to tell you I love you and I’m proud of you, too. Hi to Mom and I’ll see you soon. Take care. All my love.—Kathy.”
The Parkses never had a chance to see Kathy again, though. A few weeks after she wrote that letter she disappeared.
The slender skull and a jawbone were X-rayed in the crime lab in downtown Seattle, and lab chief Kay Sweeny, comparing it with Kathy Parks’ dental records, was virtually convinced the remains were hers. But there had been severe damage to the skull. Blows of some kind had caused multiple fractures. Most of the upper teeth had apparently been broken away by a blow or blows.
Sweeny wanted to be certain. He placed the skull and jawbone in a foil-lined paper bag, sealed it, checked out a Cessna 182 from his flying club, and flew south from Seattle to Oregon. Bill Harris, the OSU campus security chief, met him at the Corvallis airport and drove him to the office of Kathy’s dentist.
After his own examination, the dentist confirmed Sweeny’s conclusion. The skull and jawbone were the remains of Kathy Parks.
For Harris, like Pickles on his campus up in Washington State, the search for “his” girl finally was over. By coincidence, Bob Tucker, an FBI agent, was on the OSU campus that day, and Harris asked him, “Is it possible for the FBI to come in on this?” It was possible, Tucker confirmed. He explained that federal agents could come into the case of Kathy Parks if there had been an abduction.
Harris called the Parks family in California and broke the bad news to them. “But we may be able to get the FBI in on the case now, because she was found in another state,” Harris told Charles Parks.
“Oh, that would be wonderful,” replied the father. “We’d really appreciate that very much.”
Tucker, sitting in Harris’ office, joined in the telephone conversation. He informed the father he’d do whatever he could to bring the FBI in on the investigation. (Eventually, though, Tucker’s superiors decided the FBI had no grounds to enter the case. There was no proof that Kathy had been alive—and thus a kidnap victim—when she was transported across the Columbia River into Washington State. In fact, the damage to her head suggested she might have been attacked almost immediately after she encountered her killer, on or near the OSU campus that spring night.)
For days, the search continued on Taylor Mountain until there were no more discoveries. A mountainside had been covered, inch by inch, and it was not practicable to go on forever. Keppel and others, some using German shepherd dogs, did a walking search over several miles around the intensive search area.
Four skulls and jawbones had been found, and the identifications were certain: Lynda Ann Healy, twenty-one, vanished from her bedroom apartment in the University District; Susan Elaine Rancourt, eighteen, from the campus at Ellensburg; Roberta Kathleen Parks, twenty, from Corvallis; and Brenda Carol Ball, twenty-two, last seen leaving the Flame tavern.
Still unaccounted for were Donna Gail Manson, who vanished on her way to the jazz concert in March 1974 at the Evergreen State College campus, and Georgann Hawkins, the girl who vanished in June from the University of Washington’s Greek Row.
Keppel and the other detectives theorized that the unidentified skeletal remains found at the Issaquah site, with the Lake Sammamish victims, had probably been Georgann. The officers speculated that the abductor-killer had used Taylor Mountain as a dumping ground for his victims through the first five months of the year 1974. Then, for some reason—perhaps he had been spooked, fearful the site might be discovered—he had chosen a mountainside location near Issaquah, beginning in June. Georgann, who vanished June 11, would have been the first victim to be placed there.
The investigators were convinced that, although no trace of her had been found, Donna Gail Manson, the victim from Evergreen, had probably been transported about 100 miles northward and left on Taylor Mountain, too—exactly one year before the discoveries. Her bones had apparently all been carried away by animals.
Tenderly, Paul Barclift, the Thurston County detective, talked it over with Lyle and Marie Manson. “Even though there was no trace of her found there, it sure looks like Donna was up on that mountain, too,” said the detective.
Quietly, the mother and father accepted their lifetime sentence of doubt. They’d read and reread news articles about the man named Ted—his ploy of an arm in sling, seeking help. And they’d think of Donna, walking to a jazz concert, crossing the campus in the darkness. Marie Manson opened a scrapbook containing some of Donna’s writings and her attention went to an impromptu, almost poetic, list of “things to give” which Donna had written while she was in high school.
Things to give to people:
* * *
A region reeled under the impact of the stunning news—that all those missing girls had, indeed, been murdered.
Detectives of the Seattle Police Department were assigned to assist the King County police in a joint investigation—a rare and ill-fated experiment in cooperation between two (sometimes rival) agencies. Captain Mackie was placed in charge. “You just don’t think that something this bizarre is real,” mourned Mackie. “It’s the most frustrating mystery we’ve ever seen in the Pacific Northwest.”
No clues—just bones—had been found on Taylor Mountain. No clothing of any of the girls was found. There was nothing new for the investigators to go on, except the probability that one man was responsible for all the crimes—the Lake Sammamish abduction-killings and all the others revealed by the Taylor Mountain discoveries. The connection was seen in the Rancourt case. Two Central Washington coeds had an encounter with a man whose arm was in a sling on that campus. That matched the MO of the “Ted” at Lake Sammamish. The fractures of the victims’ heads, the mountain location where they were left, added up to one killer.
As a massive new phase of the investigation opened, the team of city and county detectives appealed anew for information about men named “Ted,” who drove Volkswagens and who might speak with a clipped accent, a British accent perhaps. Once again, police telephone lines were flooded with calls from the public. On the wall of the crowded detectives’ room in the downtown King County courthouse, someone posted the simple reminder: “Get Ted.” The task force became known as the Ted Squad.
Keppel and the other investigators began reworking all the disappearances and speculating on the eeriness of the individual crimes. Lynda Ann Healy, perhaps bludgeoned in her bed and then taken—unconscious? dead? how? clothed?—out of her basement apartment while a roommate slept nearby. From that apartment, Lynda would probably have been taken on a forty-minute drive in the night, eastward to the mountain. The most logical route for that trip would have been via a busy freeway corridor, through the bright lights of downtown Seattle.
And Kathy Parks. Taken in Oregon, she would have been transported, 250 miles or more—alive? dead?—to the mountain. If her killer had taken her there directly, officers calculated he would have been depositing her body on Taylor Mountain around dawn the morning of May 7. Had someone seen a car there? And if her killer was the mysterious “Ted,” driving a Volkswagen, how did he manage it? With a ten-gallon tank, he would probably have needed to add gas to the tank somewhere between Corvallis and the Seattle area. But at a gas station? With a living kidnap victim in his car? Or a dead body?
Some of the detectives believed there must have been a “slaughterhouse” somewhere—a place where the killer might have kept the victims for a while. Perhaps there was some ritualism involved in the killings. “Where are all the other bones on the mountain?” asked Captain Herb Swindler, chief of homicide for the Seattle police. “With four girls up there, maybe more, you should have hundreds of bones.” Increasingly, Swindler was drawn to a theory that a believer in some “demon cult” might be involved. Even Mackie, his counterpart captain in the county, conceded it was possible the skulls on Taylor Mountain could have been the result of decapitation.
Keppel, among others, disagreed. He theorized that the bodies had been placed on the mountain intact. Then, the detective reasoned, through the following months, the predators of the mountain had carried away all the other bones. Eventually, a “subtask force” of consulting anthropologists and zoologists, after a study of the locations of the skulls and the predator life on the mountain, confirmed Keppel’s belief.
The Taylor Mountain discoveries cleared one suspect—James Edward Ruzicka. A convicted sexual psychopath, Ruzicka had escaped from Western State Hospital near Steilacoom, forty miles from Seattle, the day Lynda Healy vanished in Seattle. He had been reported in the University District, not far from Lynda’s apartment that night. Eventually, Ruzicka was charged with rape murders of two West Seattle girls. In March 1974 Ruzicka was finally captured in Beaverton, Oregon, where he was charged—and convicted—in the rape of an Oregon girl. Because Lynda Ann Healy’s murder had been associated with the other Taylor Mountain victims, Ruzicka was cleared. He had been in jail at the time of the Ball, Rancourt, and Parks disappearances.
Weeks of intensive investigation had also cleared another once-promising suspect. During the autumn of 1974 an orange Volkswagen had been seen parked in the Issaquah foothill area not far from where the remains of Janice Ott and Denise Nasland had been discovered. The vehicle’s registration led to a commercial fisherman, a young man serving aboard a fishing vessel. Investigators’ interest surged when they discovered that he was about the same weight, height, and age as the “Ted” described in the park, and his boat had docked in Seattle the day before the Lake Sammamish crimes.
Their suspect had gone to sea again, and so police put his residence under surveillance until the ship returned to port. It was his hair—extremely long, worn in a queue which fell onto his back—which cleared him. That hair would have been much too long on July 14 to have matched the “Ted” description. The fisherman also had a sheepish alibi for the fact that his Volkswagen was seen in a remote area near Issaquah—that’s where he tended his illicit marijuana patch.
When the hundreds of telephone calls clogged police switchboards during the Ted Squad investigations, there may have been occasional fumbles.
Maria Ackley, a Seattle writer-photographer, became concerned when she noticed that her pretty young woman shopping companion was being followed by a strange young man with his arm in a sling. Mrs. Ackley watched the man follow her friend, an out-of-town visitor, from place to place in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, and concluded, he looks exactly like the “Ted” in the police sketch. Unnoticed, she hurried to a telephone in the market and dialed the police emergency number, 911.
When the Seattle Police Department operator answered, Mrs. Ackley said excitedly, “I’m at the Pike Place Market, and there’s a strange man here, with his arm in a sling, following a young woman. He looks exactly like the ‘Ted’ you’re looking for. Can you send a policeman here right away?”
The police operator told her no officer was available at the moment. And besides, Mrs. Ackley was told, the “Ted” case was King County’s, not Seattle’s.
She banged the receiver into its cradle. From that pay phone she frantically watched the man stalking her friend from place to place in the market.
Quickly Mrs. Ackley dialed the private number of her husband, Norman Ackley, a King County Superior Court judge. A bailiff summoned the judge to the telephone, and when he heard his wife’s excited pleas, the judge recessed court, summoned a detective, and drove hurriedly to the market.
The man had disappeared into the crowd of shoppers.
In October 1974, Al Bricker and his fourteen-year-old son had been riding a motorcycle across a mountainside between their home at North Bend and the Issaquah area. Along a power-line road, heavily used by motorcyclists and jeep drivers, Bricker noticed a cardboard box, which had been placed, apparently to hide it, beneath a small maple tree. Bricker parked his bike and, with his son, bent to open the carton and investigate its contents. On top were some women’s blouses, pants, and a swimsuit.
“Let’s not touch anything,” Bricker told his son. Bricker had read the news that some murdered girls had been found near Issaquah a month ago, and that police were looking for clothing as possible clues.
Not far away from that maple shrub, Bricker and his son discovered a brown paper bag which contained, all neatly folded, several white cotton brassieres. Beneath the bras was a collection of panties.
“C’mon, let’s go get the police,” said Bricker.
Within an hour, Bricker and his son had left a message at a satellite office of King County police that he wished to talk with a detective. When days passed and there was no response, Bricker tried again. His messages to police went unanswered.
As winter’s rain and snow closed in on the mountainside, Bricker returned to the site. He found that the carton and the bag had been smashed, the contents scattered and buried in the mud by tires of passing motorbikes.
“Dammit,” he grumbled. “What kind of law enforcement have we got here anyway? Why wouldn’t they at least come to take a look?”
Neither Bricker nor the police knew it at the time, but his discovery had been made within a few hundred yards of Taylor Mountain, where the remains of some murdered girls would lie in the woods for months before being discovered.
By mid-April 1975, after months of investigations and the intermittent floods of telephone calls into the Ted Squad headquarters, Mackie reported to the public that 2,247 names of potential suspects had been turned in and examined. Many of them were “Ted.” More than 900 cars, most of them Volkswagens, had been checked.
The Ted Squad chief gave the nervous citizenry of Seattle and the rest of the Pacific Northwest a bleak report:
“We have no crime scene evidence, no means of death. It’s the worst case I’ve ever been on. There’s just nothing. ... We’ll need a break on it.”
In the deluge of tips which Mackie had mentioned was a call to King County police about a Volkswagen driver named Theodore Robert Bundy. Bundy, who seemed a highly unlikely suspect, had since moved from Seattle to Salt Lake City, where he was enrolled in the University of Utah law school.
The break, which Mackie was hoping for in mid-April, was four months away.