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The stern-looking men crossing the lobby of Aspen’s Holiday Inn conspicuously did not belong among the skiers or other seasonal fun seekers who check into the high-priced lodges of this fashionable Rocky Mountain resort. They were law-enforcement men, wearing casual clothing, carrying briefcases and notebooks. They passed the registration desk, striding purposefully toward a meeting room, trying to ignore the news reporters who buzzed around them.
“Excuse me,” said a reporter to one of the passing men. “Where are you from?”
“Uh—Grand Junction,” replied the plainclothesman without slowing.
Thirty detectives and prosecutors had come to Aspen in mid-November 1975—it was the off-season, and only a foot of snow covered nearby Buttermilk Mountain—for what was officially the Intermountain States Law Enforcement Conference. News reports about the event would use the catchier name “Aspen Summit Conference.” In the bar, over drinks, the waiting reporters kiddingly referred to it as “the Bundy huddle.”
Theodore Bundy, in jail in Salt Lake City, had become a hot suspect in an increasing number of crimes in a widening zone of the West. The lawmen came together to compare dozens of similar, unsolved cases of murdered girls and young women in several states—California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado. It intrigued the news gatherers that Captain Edwin (Butch) Carlstadt had flown in from northern California for the session.
For years Carlstadt had been at the frustrating task of tracking California’s so-called Zodiac killer. One after another, Carlstadt had investigated murders of girls and young women in northern California—fourteen or more between December 1969 and December 1973—in which the victims, often hitchhikers, were found nude, without clothing or other belongings. Near the bodies was found an elaborate witchcraft symbol of twigs and rocks.
Aspen’s Carroll Whitmire, sheriff of Pitkin County, sought to quiet the mosquitoish reporters who swarmed around the gathering of lawmen. In his cowboy hat, Western suit, and boots, the sheriff assured the visiting newsmen: “You’re sure welcome to visit Aspen. But I’m afraid there won’t be anything for you to report out of this meeting. We’re not goin’ to have anything to announce for you.”
“What’s the purpose of the meeting, sheriff?”
‘‘We just want to put all these cases into one basket. ... Perhaps something can come out of this.” He conceded the obvious: “We’ll be discussing Theodore Bundy, sure, but not just Bundy alone.”
Inside the closed meeting room, the officers, getting acquainted with each other, took places around tables, spread out notepads, uncapped pens, and took a fraternal vow of secrecy about the proceedings. A guard was posted at the door to prevent eavesdropping. (In fact, more than a year would elapse before any of the proceedings were leaked.)
Detective Keppel of Seattle, opening some of his file folders, positioned himself at the speaker’s stand to begin describing how Seattle’s Ted Squad, through the previous eleven weeks, had investigated Bundy.
“Things were rather sketchy about his early life, his early years,” Keppel began, “mainly because the crucial people we talked to—his cousin, his mother—have this particular image of him where he could do no wrong.
“At age thirteen—we ran across one individual who knew him then—he was rather naive about sex at that period of time in his life. When, any time, anyone would mention sex, he would shove, push, run, go away, whatever was appropriate.
“He’s left-handed, and he’s left-eyed, whatever that means.”
At the tables, dotted with coffee pots, cups, ashtrays, briefcases, and legal pads, Keppel’s audience scribbled notes. It was to be more than the usual rundown on a conventional suspect. Some Seattle psychiatrists, enlisted to advise the Ted Squad, had urged Keppel and the other detectives to seek out details of Bundy’s early years, his relationships with others, his sexual proclivities, any other clues to his psychological makeup. Keppel’s presentation stabbed into some of those zones.
Keppel hadn’t come to Aspen to praise Bundy. In tones dripping with dislike, the detective proceeded to sketch a consistently unflattering portrait of the suspect.
“Up through the fifth grade he was constantly displaying babyish activities. He was rather a loner, didn’t want to get involved with too many people at the time. He liked to do superior work when he did it. That doesn’t mean that he did do superior work. He just liked to pass this on in school—this impression that he did do superior work. His character was such that he was too good for any sort of discipline. I don’t know whether this led from his mother’s emphasis or what.”
Try as they might, the Seattle detectives had never been able to discover any proof of homosexual tendencies or activities in Bundy’s life. That would, in their view, have been an expectable characteristic in a man suspected of violence against women.
But Keppel had some revelations for his audience about Bundy’s heterosexual relationships—vignettes which had been divulged, with reluctance and fear, by the women in Bundy’s life. One was a vivacious brunette whom Bundy dated during the time he was cheating on Cas. “He used to take her on various trips, and he seemed to be very, very familiar with areas east of Seattle that we are interested in. They drove on specific roads where our bodies were found. ...” said Keppel.
“We finally drug out of her that they went to a little picnic down on the beach in Washington, and the beach was overcast. So they went back farther inland where the sun was and went to a place he knew about. ... She was more or less tainted by alcohol.”
Their sexual intercourse, the young woman had said, “‘was more of a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am sex act.’ But what she could remember about it was that she couldn’t breathe,” said Keppel. “He had his forearm right across her neck. And she kept yelling at him that she couldn’t breathe. And finally, when he was finished, he pulled it off. But he had no knowledge what he was doing at the time.”
That had occurred in 1972. The listening detectives jotted down the date.
Outwardly, Keppel explained, Bundy gave the appearance of an energetic, skillful, bright young man, moving from job to job, gaining his education, moving upward in life. But Keppel drew an otherwise portrait—of a young man who dipped into petty thievery, used his boyish good looks and charm to exploit and manipulate others, and who seemed to lack an inner discipline to finish any major task. Bundy’s brief career in law classes had been flawed by absenteeism and unfinished work.
Keppel recalled some vague suspicions which arose around Bundy when he had his part-time job at the Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle. “He worked there for about a month. The people were kind of skeptical, because they were experiencing thefts from lockers. And so they let him go. There were no official charges drawn up against him. There were no official accusations. They just thought it better that he leave. So he left.”
Keppel reviewed Bundy’s jobs with law enforcement, beginning with the crime-prevention commission, followed by his contract with King County as “T.R.B. Associates” to study recidivism among criminal offenders.
“His specific duties were to study recidivism rates among offenders in the King County jail. To do this he had to delve into police reports. ... The main thing about it was that he knew about offenders and how screwed up our system was in keeping track [of crimes and criminals]. He is very familiar with problems of police jurisdictions. He had constant talks with people about this when he talked about sexual assaults on women—with the problems of police agencies, just down the line [which] would have a sexual assault on a girl and then wouldn’t ever even contact the [next] police agency. ...”
Keppel allowed the implication of that to fall heavily on the ears of the lawmen in his audience, the notion that they were considering a man who understood police jurisdictions and boundaries, who was familiar with their vulnerability—their imperfect exchange of information with each other.
None of the detectives wished to talk about—even think about—those months during which crimes were being committed while both Seattle and Salt Lake City had Ted Bundy’s name among the suspects in their files.
Cas Richter’s initial telephone call to the police had been one of hundreds. Her voice was one among a chorus of fear and suspicion during the panic and chaos of late September 1974, after the Lake Sammamish victims had been found—a nervous voice which communicated more vagueness, jealousy, and perhaps flakiness, than solid fact.
* * *
When interviewed by police following Bundy’s arrest, Cas had been nervous, fearful, vacillating. “Oh, God, I just don’t know,” she had said. “I sometimes think I must be all wrong about Ted.” Her thin face was drawn, her eyes circled by signs of strain. With wringing hands she had answered their questions for a while, revealing her suspicions of Bundy. Then her mood would change, and she would rise to defend him. “It was tough on her,” reflected Keppel. “She still cared for him. He was calling her regularly [from jail], and he had a way to swing her loyalty back to him.”
For the men in the Aspen meeting room Keppel re-created the evolution of Cas’s suspicions during 1974. It was really an accumulation of happenings that might have been ignored—Ted’s unexplained absences, particularly during the middle of the night, and his habit of sleeping during daylight hours. Ted had an unnerving game, said Cas—hiding in the bushes near her house at night, then jumping out to frighten her.
Cas had made some unsettling discoveries. Once she had found a pair of surgical gloves in one of Ted’s jacket pockets. That was explainable, she reasoned. He had worked as a deliveryman for a surgical-supply firm.
But another memory caused a chilling focus of all of Cas’s vague feelings—the time she discovered Ted had brought home a package of plaster of paris. It was a package of the product used by surgeons in fashioning casts. Cas had remembered vividly the news media’s references to the “Ted” suspect at Lake Sammamish State Park—the man who was described as wearing a sling, perhaps a cast, on one arm.
It had been around the end of 1973, Keppel told his audience of lawmen, when Bundy “started experimenting with various sexual moves and methods” in his and Cas’s sex relations. “He had asked if it was all right if he tied her up.” Cas had consented. Keppel went on: “So he immediately goes over to where she has her nylon stockings. Of course, she doesn’t think that he knows anything about where her clothes are. And he just reaches right in the drawer and picks out a nylon stocking and comes over and ties her to the bedposts and does his thing.
“He did this three or four times, and then she cut him off, because she didn’t like it.
“She recalls him actually, physically, on one occasion—while she was tied up—strangling her. And she actually had to awaken him out of this sexual involvement. This is when they terminated their tying-up activities.
“That brings us up to about January of 1974. And that’s when our troubles started,” Keppel reflected.
A few days later, Sharon Clarke was attacked as she lay sleeping in her basement apartment.
Keppel shared with the other investigators the efforts and failures to make one solid tie between Bundy and all the disappearances of the girls in the Pacific Northwest. Ted Bundy and Lynda Ann Healy had taken some of the same psychology courses at the University of Washington. But never were they placed together at one time. They lived in the same neighborhood and shopped at the same Safeway store. He could have seen her often, said Keppel.
Bundy could be placed at the Evergreen State College from time to time. He and a friend, Tom Sampson, often used the racketball courts at Evergreen. But no gas-charge receipt, no witness, no fact of any kind, could place Bundy on or near the Evergreen campus when Donna Gail Manson disappeared.
“He had been strolling around libraries a lot. We’ve got a lot of people that have seen him around libraries. But it gets kind of funny. He’s not carrying any books. And when he stops to talk to these people, he always says that he’s been studying in the library. Here he is, just wandering and meandering around the libraries at night, both at the University of Puget Sound library and the University of Washington library. So he likes libraries.”
Keppel’s soliloquy came to the double disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund on July 14, 1974.
“Bob, what about your witnesses at the state park that day the girls went out?” The question drifted out of the Aspen audience.
“Of course we have him [Bundy] positively ID-ed by two of our witnesses so far,” Keppel replied. “And the third has a tentative ID on him as being the one who snatched Janice Ott. ...” But the other witnesses were uncertain. The problem, Keppel reflected, was the variability of eyewitnesses. His fellow investigators murmured, understanding. King County’s witnesses at Lake Sammamish had differing memories of the man’s height, build, and hair color. “We’ve had a lot of difficulty in investigating the case. ... A lot of people were interviewed in the beginning and [when they were asked if they recognized Bundy] they just can’t remember back that far—a year and a half previous.”
Janice’s yellow bike never was found. Keppel believed it had been abandoned somewhere, then stolen.
Cas had assisted the Seattle investigators with information about Bundy’s whereabouts during part of that day, July 14, 1974.
“In the morning hours,” said Keppel, “He was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. He’d gone over to her house, and they had some sort of argument about what they were going to do that day.” She wanted to go to nearby Green Lake in Seattle. Bundy disdained the idea and went his own way. “So the last time she saw him was about ten o’clock in the morning. And she didn’t see him again until six or six thirty that night. ... He had her ski rack on his Volkswagen. He also utilized the ski rack to take his bicycle places. ... When he got back [to her house that evening], he claimed he was feeling real bad. And they still went out to dinner that night. But before he went out to dinner, he made the effort to change the ski rack over from his car to hers.”
Keppel’s presentation to the other investigators coasted to an inconclusive finale. It had been an intriguing symphony of circumstances, but it lacked a finale. There was no hard evidence.
A few more questions came from the audience: “How about clothing? Any of the victims’ clothing ever found?”
“We didn’t find any clothing. No physical evidence at all. We didn’t find any flesh. All we had was bones.
“Just bones.”
Keppel’s voice held a sigh of finality.
* * *
“Just bones,” echoed the next speaker at the rostrum of the Holiday Inn meeting room.
Chuck Brink, investigator for the Clark County sheriff’s office at Vancouver, Washington, delivered his report on two more 1974 Washington State homicides which had received less media attention. Hunters had found the skeletal remains on a remote wooded hillside in late 1974 in southwest Washington State, more than 150 miles from Seattle. One of the skeletons, said Brink, was identified as the remains of dark-haired, eighteen-year-old Carol Valenzuala, a girl who had vanished from downtown Vancouver on a Friday, August 2, 1974. That was a little more than two weeks after the Seattle victims disappeared at Lake Sammamish.
“We’ve never been able to identify the other skeleton,” said Brink. A medical examiner concluded the second skeleton was that of a young woman who was apparently killed at about the same time. “So again,” reported Brink, “it looks like we’ve got maybe a fellow that has an affinity for the same dumping grounds for his bodies.
“The similarity between our killings and Seattle’s is just uncanny,” said Brink. But all he had, again, were bones. No clues.
(Note: Two weeks following the Aspen conference, there would be one development possibly related to those Clark County mysteries. At Evergreen State College, near Olympia, campus security chief Mack Smith would discover an obscure report in the campus complaint files. An Evergreen coed, Joni Dadarion, had reported that a strange man had surprised and terrified her at a dormitory laundromat late at night, August 1, 1974. She was alone, removing laundry from a machine, she said, when he “suddenly appeared behind me. I can’t explain how scared I was. He was real schitzy, real wild looking.” By chance, another woman student showed up at that moment, and the man had fled. Later, in late November 1974, when the campus chief and Thurston County Sheriff Don Jennings showed the young woman a photo lineup, she held onto a photo of Bundy, looking at it, muttering, “I don’t know. I can’t be sure. The guy that night was so wild looking.” She thought the time of the incident could have been after midnight, making it August 2. “Her identification wasn’t positive,” the sheriff said, “but it was pretty good.” Both the sheriff and campus chief were convinced the “schitzy-looking” man had been Bundy and that he had stopped off at Evergreen, prowled for a while, then continued driving into southwest Washington where the Valenzuala girl had vanished the following day in Vancouver.)
* * *
Thomas gave the other officers an update on the investigation of Bundy and the Utah cases—the DaRonch kidnapping, the murder of Melissa Smith and the disappearance of Debbie Kent. Just as had Keppel in his investigation of Bundy’s life in Seattle, Thompson had concluded that Bundy, in his life and dealings with people in Salt Lake City, had been “a loner” who always seemed short of money, and a “leech.” Thompson recalled an interview he’d had with Cas’s father. “He said he [Bundy] at times seemed like a nice guy, but, in his opinion, he was a schizoid. ... He was very moody.”
When Thompson began a review of Bundy’s gasoline credit-card purchases through the early months of 1975, it was a cue for investigators from Colorado towns, one after another, to report on their strangely similar cases of murders and disappearances, many of which now seemed to have a “Bundy connection.” From Salt Lake City, Bundy apparently had begun travels into Colorado in early 1975. Caryn Campbell, a Michigan nurse, vanished from a ski lodge near Aspen January 12, and her nude body had been found in a remote mountain pass in February. Not far away, at Vail, Julie Cunningham, an attractive ski instructor, vanished from her apartment complex during the early evening of March 15. Then Denise Oliverson, a twenty-five-year-old, disappeared three weeks later while riding her bike at Grand Junction. Neither of those young women had been found. Melanie Suzanne Cooley, eighteen, who disappeared in mid-April from the small mountain town of Nederland, about fifty miles west of Denver, had been found murdered about two weeks later in a canyon. Shelly Robertson, an effervescent brunette, disappeared from the Denver area June 30; her nude body was found in August inside a mine shaft at the foot of Berthoud Pass.
Initially, those had been nothing more than a series of unsolved crimes which seemed only to have a vague geographical connection occurring at places along the east-west corridor of Interstate 70 between Denver and Grand Junction, near the Utah border.
Suddenly, after Bundy’s arrest, several of those cases took on a common focus. Bundy’s Chevron gas card had been used for gasoline purchases at times and places which conspicuously coincided with the crimes. Two card charges were made at Glenwood Springs January 12; Caryn Campbell vanished from the nearby Aspen area that day. There was a gas purchase at Dillon March 15; Julie Cunningham vanished that day from Vail, about 30 miles away. Gas was purchased on the card April 5 at Grand Junction, the same day and place where Denise Oliverson vanished. To all the investigators of those cases the coincidences were tantalizing but there was nothing else to connect Bundy with any of the crimes. “We’ve yet been unable to put Bundy physically in Aspen,” said the Aspen investigator, Mike Fisher, as he detailed for fellow officers the Caryn Campbell homicide.
As they swapped information, the investigators began to eliminate Bundy from at least one of the Colorado murders. Melanie Cooley, whose body was found partially clothed, with the hands tied with green nylon cord, her skull fractured by the blow from a large rock, offered a sharply different MO.
Carlstadt, the California investigator, in reviewing the Zodiac killings, conceded to the other officers, “Mr. Bundy has been eliminated from our cases.” Seattle’s investigation had placed him in Washington State at the time of at least two of the California crimes.
By midday, November 14, the investigators were folding their notebooks, agreeing to further exchanges of information. Each of the men had assimilated an enormous volume of information about Ted Bundy, but none was any closer to the solution of any of the dozens of homicides.
King County Detective Nick Mackie had decided on one last desperate effort. He resolved to stop at Salt Lake City, en route home to Seattle, to request a personal interview with Bundy about the Washington State homicides—a gambling attempt to extract a confession.
Everyone, even Mackie, sensed that would be futile. Thompson had told the other officers, “I asked O’Connell, Ted’s attorney, if other agencies could talk to Ted.” The defense lawyer, Thompson explained, “said, ‘We’re not going to talk with anyone.’”
As the detectives at Aspen said their good-byes, one of the Colorado investigators summed up the frustrations of the proceedings with a glum comment to the men from Salt Lake City. “It looks like the only hope any of us has for tying down Mister Bundy is your kidnapping case there in Salt Lake City.”
“Yeah,” sighed Thompson. “And the Carol DaRonch case is no cinch.”