I didn’t know that Ted had already found an audience more to his liking, where he could expound upon his theories: Keppel and Reichert. The Green River Killer was threatening to break Ted’s record, both in the number of victims and the years he had evaded arrest. Knowing Ted, that would have alarmed and frustrated him. The Green River Killer had probably killed more women than Ted, and he had remained free to kill more. Added to his edginess at losing his “throne,” Bundy needed once more to pontificate, to chide, to advise, and to point out his superior grasp of the criminal mind. Who would be better than the top-ranked detectives from King County?

He also believed that as long as he remained useful to law and order, he could avoid the electric chair. He had nothing much to lose, and neither did Keppel and Reichert. Maybe Bundy did understand the way the Green River Killer’s mind worked more than a normal man could. Maybe he would even shed some light on the Ted Murders that would give some answers to the parents of his own victims.

Ted sent a letter to Bob Keppel in the autumn of 1984, and Ted’s former attorney, John Henry Browne, followed that up with a message from Ted to Frank Adamson and Keppel. Ted wanted to help in the Green River investigation. “He wanted to give his opinion,” Adamson recalled. “I sent Keppel and Reichert to Starke to interview Bundy. I thought he might give something to Keppel that would allow us to charge Bundy here in Washington. I didn’t think he could help on our cases. Clifford Olson [the Canadian serial murderer of children] had also contacted Adamson and Danny Nolan to offer his thoughts.”

Characteristically, Adamson told Keppel and Reichert to go for it, to see what Bundy might have to say. He probably had at least as much to offer as the psychics who still described “water and trees and mountains.”

And so on November 16 and 17, 1984, with no fanfare at all, Bob Keppel and Dave Reichert met with Ted Bundy somewhere in the bowels of Florida’s most dreaded prison. Some of what Bundy opined would prove accurate, some would be off the mark, and some would be the boasting of a massive, but trapped, ego.

At the request of Captain Gary Terry of the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office in Tampa, Florida, Reichert and Keppel also asked Ted questions about a Tampa man who had been arrested only that week as a prime suspect in the serial killer murders of nine young women who worked the streets of Tampa and St. Petersburg. Bobby Joe Long, a technician in the medical field, later admitted to multiple rapes and murders in a forty-five-page statement. His downfall had come when he kidnapped a teenager who worked in a doughnut shop, held her captive for days as he sexually assaulted her, and then let her go. He had believed her promises that she wouldn’t tell anyone.

As odd as it may sound, the world of serial murder is quite small; investigators and experts eventually come to know each other, just as serial killers often correspond with one another. Bob Keppel would maintain a correspondence with Bundy and interview him again before Bundy had his final date with the electric chair. In the end, Bundy offered only theories that might one day be validated, but he couldn’t lead Keppel or Reichert to the Green River Killer’s front door.

THERE were still so many young women missing, and 1984 would end without any more bodies being discovered. And, seemingly, with no further disappearances. A third Christmas passed with only emptiness for the families who waited.

34

AND THEN IT WAS 1985 and, in America, the new year started off quietly. Because January 20 fell on the same Sunday as the biggest football contest of the year, Ronald Reagan’s ceremonial inauguration for his second term in office was preempted for a day in deference to Super Bowl XIX. Reagan was sworn in legally, but quietly, as the San Francisco 49ers overwhelmed the Miami Dolphins. He graciously agreed to wait until January 21 for the public festivities.

Nineteen eighty-five was not a big year for news of violent crime, and virtually no layperson outside the Northwest had heard of the Green River Killer. VICAP was not yet off the ground, so the problem of viable connections among and between law enforcement agencies across the country continued. It was quite possible that the Green River Killer had moved to another area, as serial killers are characteristically peripatetic. Or he was dead. He might well be in prison. He might even have had a sea change in his life, something so profound that it overrode his compulsion to kill—if only for a time.

A serial killer is, quite literally, “addicted” to murder. I have heard some of them phrase it just that way. Both Bobby Joe Long and Ted Bundy did. Their “fix” is killing, and the more entrenched their addiction, the more victims they require to feed their habit. Frank Adamson and the members of his task force could only hope that, if he was still alive, the Green River Killer would surely slip up before he killed any more young women.

In January 1985, Dr. Don Reay’s office released a few more details about the four sets of unknown bones that no one had claimed. The first Star Lake victim’s pelvis bore indications that it had once been fractured and one arm was dislocated. That could have happened as she fought her killer, but Gail Mathews’s sister-in-law read this new information nervously as she remembered that Gail had broken her pelvis in a boating accident in 1980. She was right to worry. Bill Haglund announced that forensic experts had obtained Gail’s X-rays from a Seattle hospital, and they were able to match them absolutely with the skeletal pelvis. Also in evidence was a small shred of skin from which criminalists had been able to raise a partial fingerprint—enough to compare to a known print. Gail’s own finger had left its mark on her flesh. Bones #2 belonged to the darkly beautiful woman who had once aspired to be an artist. “She was really good at art,” her estranged husband said about the woman who had originally come to Seattle from Crescent City, California. “She was just a nice young lady, down to earth.”

Ken Mathews had custody of their young daughter, and Gail had often visited her child. The last time she had visited was in late March 1983. They had split up without rancor. “She just kind of got all mixed up,” he said. “She had no real home and not many girlfriends. She was kind of lonely.”

Gail had no record for prostitution, although she had lived on Pac HiWay South. Her extended family hadn’t officially reported her missing until a year after her boyfriend knew she was gone because there were several erroneous “sightings” that made them feel she was all right. In truth, she had been dead for months when they started to worry in April 1984. The Star Lake site had begun to give up some terrible secrets, but Gail’s skull hadn’t been identifiable because her dental charts were not on file with the Medical Examiner’s Office.

A month later, on March 10, a man riding a three-wheeler stopped on a sharp curve just east of the old Star Lake gravel pit. He climbed off his bike and walked back into the woods toward a steep ravine, looking for a new area where he could ride. As his eyes scanned the slope leading down to where the creek had made the dirt sour and boggy, something caught his eye, but his mind unconsciously tried to avoid the obvious. He stared at a roundish object, partially covered with moss. Was it a football helmet?

He knew it wasn’t. But he didn’t want to slide down into the ravine alone to check. He contacted a friend who was riding nearby and the two men went back to stare at the perfectly round thing that lay half-mired in the swamp. Together, they sidestepped down the hill, holding on to trees to keep from falling. It was what they had feared: a human skull.