A Conversation About the Riverman, 1984, Part 12

This tape of Bundy taking to Keppel and Reichert in 1984 reminds me of why I value actually listening to an audio recording over relying entirely on a transcript. Keppel transcribed large portions of these recordings for his book The Riverman, and injected substantial amounts of his opinions throughout. On this tape in the audio series, Keppel pulls out a photo of Kathy Devine, a teenage hitchhiker who'd been stabbed and strangled in December 1973. Under the guise of a falsely implied tie to the Riverman, he asks Bundy questions about her with the intention of catching him in an accidental confession. Bundy, of course, did not take the bait.

Although the MO of Devine's case really didn't match Bundy's very well, Keppel was absolutely convinced he was responsible and wrote his book accordingly. I've included excerpts from his book, which you can partially follow along with on the tape. The audio does not seem to bear out Keppel's recollections of their conversation re: the Devine case, and Bundy's tone doesn't match its description in the book. This is likely because Keppel had already made up his mind about Bundy's guilt, and applied a hefty amount of confirmation bias to his writing. It's interesting to hear the contrast between the audio and Keppel's written account.

Keppel was wrong, though: a convicted rapist and former trucker named William Cosden Jr. was convicted of Kathy Devine's murder with DNA evidence in 2002.

Excerpts from The Riverman, by Bob Keppel:
"Rather than pick just any case as an example to discuss with Ted, we purposely chose the case of Kathy Devine... Her murder was never solved, but the case was one in which Ted himself was a great suspect. Devine was last seen getting into a green pickup truck driven by a white male with a beard near 90th and Aurora avenues in north Seattle. At that time Ted owned a green pickup (this is not true) in addition to his Volkswagen bug, and was sporting a full beard. Devine’s body was found near a camp-ground in southern Thurston County about 15 miles south of Olympia, the capital of Washington, where Bundy worked. I obtained permission from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Department to use photos from the Devine case...

As I placed a black-and-white photograph upside down in front of Ted, I said, “Whenever we’ve gone through our records, we found cases similar in nature to the Riverman’s.” Ted obviously understood that the photo was turned so he couldn’t see it, and he didn’t hesitate to grasp and rotate it until he was looking at the photo correctly.

Immediately, the contortions of Ted’s face told us that he was morbidly transfixed by the Devine scene. His jaw protruded, and his pupils were hideously dilated. His pulse bulged and radiated through his carotid artery like a huge water bump in a garden hose. I felt suddenly as if he were alone with his thoughts, replaying an internal video of his murder, even with us there. In a droning voice, Dave reported the facts of the case while Ted stared down. My guess from his reaction was that Ted didn’t need the explanation. He patiently waited while Dave explained what he already knew.

“Ummm,” Ted said, licking his lips while searching for the relevance of that particular photograph to the Riverman and not himself. Groping for some quick relationship to the Green River cases, I said, “We’re interested in her case because Ninetieth and Aurora is an area frequented by prostitutes.” Coyly, Ted reminisced with himself and kept the photo in front of him. He asked, “Now, where was this body located?”...

Ted interrupted as if he wanted to take over the description of the locale for us and came tantalizingly close to a confession of a detail only the killer could have known. “Off a dirt road,” he said in a voice that seemed to indicate that a deep memory had been evoked. But he caught himself and desperately tried to revert to a third-person narrative. He asked, “How far off the road?”

Ted regressed quickly back to his first-person version, “But there’s no attempt to conceal the body. And there are clues, there’s clothing here. Pretty strong individual to be able to rip those—or cut, possibly cut—those jeans like that.”

I was astonished by Ted’s observations since I could hardly decipher from the photo what condition the clothing was in, let alone how the jeans were cut. He had to have been there. He was there, right then, in his memory.

Reading my mind, Ted denied any connection to the photo. “Ummm, I don’t think I’ve even been there—that is, to the park. When I was a kid my parents used to go there all the time."

Glancing at the photo of the Devine body, Ted reverted to his mode of speaking hypothetically, like he usually did when we got too close to his cases. “Well, the obvious presence of clothing. ’Course, this was ten, eleven years ago, and they’re apt to change and will change as he discovers what works and what doesn’t, and studies—but the way the jeans are cut, that’s kind of unique.”

Cautiously, Dave continued by asking, “What are your impressions of the kind of guy that would have done something like this as compared to what we’re looking at?”

Ted said, “If he’s capable of it, he’s had ten years to change his M.O. and his—whatever you call them— fetishes or his rituals or his fantasies will change every time, too. So he might be taking the girls’ clothes over one period of time or not. He might be subjecting them to a certain type of abuse at one period and changing the next time. There’s no question about that.”

Dave sustained the hypothetical tone by stating, “But let’s say that our Green River person did this one, but, as you said, his M.O. is different. What was going through his mind back then, you know, just from your impressions of the photographs you looked at? I know it’s kind of difficult when you’re looking at black-and-white photographs, but what do you think his mind is doing then?”

“Well, that’s not much to work with,” Ted pleaded.

“You got the torn or cut pants,” Dave added.

“Oh, yeah. The whys of the cut pants are bizarre. And I don’t know what the autopsy revealed in terms of the presence of semen or any other marks on the body. The cut pants are really odd, boy. You know. Why? Why they’re cut? I don’t think they’re ripped. I think they are cut, unless he performed some sort of sex act right before or right after he left her there and came back and ripped her pants in order to do that. But that’s a little hard to figure. I mean, he didn’t have to hurry. He obviously had control of the situation. So, that’s a little bit bizarre.”