truepenny | UBC: Keppel & Birnes, The Riverman (Reply)

The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer by Robert D. Keppel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book makes a fascinating counterpoint to Ann Rule's bookends, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story and Green River, Running Red: The Real Story of the Green River Killer--America's Deadliest Serial Murderer. It charts Keppel's path from the investigation of Ted Bundy's murders (which I've had to tag "the ted murders" instead of by geographical location as I usually do, since Bundy ranged from Washington State to Florida) to the investigation of the Green River murders . . . to the bizarre suggestion by Ted Bundy that he could be an invaluable resource in efforts to find the Green River Killer. And to the apprehension in 2003, more than ten years after Bundy failed in his efforts to beat the electric chair, of Gary Ridgway, and the ways in which Bundy's predictions do and don't match up with reality.

Keppel recognizes easily that Bundy is projecting himself onto the GRK, at the same time that he's driven mad with jealousy that somebody else is hunting on his territory. The simplest evidence of this is the way that Bundy keeps insisting that the GRK must be a Tacoma native, as Bundy was himself. Bundy keeps trying to swap himself in when he talks about the GRK (arguably, the only way that a person utterly lacking in empathy ever could proceed under those circumstances), and it's fascinating when he's right and equally fascinating when he's wrong, especially because the point on which Bundy was most consistently wrong was his assessment of the GRK's intelligence. Bundy was very smart (though never as smart as he thought he was) and he prided himself hubristically on his intelligence, so it's not surprising that he attributed the same intelligence to the GRK. But the interesting thing is that Ridgway isn't as smart as Bundy. In her book, Rule argues that the reason he went uncaught for so long was that he was such a loser, nobody could take him seriously as a serial killer. I wouldn't go quite that far (I think her own loathing of him may have colored her assessment, FOR WHICH I DO NOT BLAME HER), but I think Ridgway did survive uncaught as long as he did because he didn't have Bundy's prideful self-conception of himself as the most intelligent guy in the room. He was cunning, but he never tried to get "smart." And, horrible and counter-intuitive as it is to put it this way, he was a much more stable personality than Bundy. Bundy fell the fuck apart once he was on the run; his murders in Florida just became wilder and wilder and more unlike the careful, carefully thought out attacks he made on his victims in Washington State, and I think the very intelligence he prided himself on, that weird semi-accurate self-awareness that he shows in his interviews with Keppel--because he can never see himself entirely accurately, can never see the pits he's digging for himself to fall into --is part of what unbalanced him and made him need more and more and more, more murder and more violence and more of what he was able to recognize was depravity. (It's interesting that his last murder was a child, and his probable first murder--the one he refused almost hysterically to confess to--was also a child.) Whereas Ridgway, without that relentless over-clocking, was able to murder and walk away and murder again and eventually back off almost entirely. He never stopped killing between 1984 and 2001, but he slowed way, way down. If serial killers are addicted to murder, as Keppel and Bundy and Ridgway all suggest, in remarkably different phrasings, Ridgway was able to control his addiction; Bundy was not.

I've been struggling with how to describe this book in comparison with Rule. They're very different; one way to put it would be that Keppel writes like a cop and Rule doesn't, except that Rule was a cop, so however she writes is how a cop writes. A stereotyping way would be that Keppel writes like a man and Rule writes like a woman. Keppel tells Bundy, as part of the endless intricate pas de deux that the two of them dance, that he's not interested in the "why"--why Bundy was a serial killer--and while that's not actually true, since Keppel is intensely interested in why serial killers do what they do, the hunt, the kill, the afterparty--which, jeez, is a horrible metaphor, but both Bundy and Ridgway revisited their victims' corpses, partly for reasons of necrophilia (Ridgway admits to this without much apparent agonizing, but Bundy tied himself up in thirteen different kinds of hell-drenched knots over it: again, intelligence and self-awareness are not necessarily your friend if you're going to go in for this sort of thing) and partly for reasons of possession. They were both far more closely attuned to the places they left their victims' bodies than they were to their victims themselves. Which only makes sense; they only knew their victims for a matter of hours at the outside, but their relationships with those places stretched out over years. In 2003, Ridgway couldn't identify most of his victims from photographs, but he could lead detectives to exactly where he put them, and this despite the fact that the victims hadn't changed in the last 20 years and the land most certainly had. Keppel says that no one ever had any luck searching for Bundy's unfound victims, even when Bundy had described the location very precisely, and I wonder if it's because Bundy was lying, as he very well may have been, or if the land had changed in ways that the searchers couldn't adjust for but Bundy himself would have been able to. Moot point. Ridgway, with no investment in his own intelligence, took the plea bargain; Bundy, trying to prove he was the smartest man in the room, kept holding back the information until there was no leverage left in it.

Okay. Long tangent. What I was saying is, Keppel's interested in why, but he's interested in the why of serial killers as a class. He's not interested in Theodore Robert Bundy or Gary Leon Ridgway. And while he's outraged and grieved by the murders of these forty-eight plus young women, he doesn't have any interest in the sort of biographical detective work that Rule does. He's content with name, age, race, time and place last seen, when determinable, and the umbrella category of "working in prostitution." Other details are haphazard and mostly chosen because the irony makes them immediately memorable: Cheryl Wims, who was murdered on her 18th birthday; Cindy Smith, who'd moved back from California the day she disappeared in order to turn her life around; et cetera. And this is 100% okay because he's not writing the same kind of book Rule is. Rule's writing the story of the Green River murders, and that must include the stories of the victims. Keppel is writing about how he learned about catching serial killers through his work on the Ted murders and the Green River murders, and through his extraordinary interviews with Ted Bundy, as Bundy tried to teach him how to ask questions that would enable Bundy to answer him. (This is what The Silence of the Lambs looks like in real life. No Anthony Hopkins, no pretty FBI rookie. A middle-aged cop and Ted Bundy, whose manipulations were pathetic and terrifying at the same time and who wasn't, at the end, holding all four aces the way he thought he was. Hannibal Lecter is never pathetic, even in captivity, and there's part of me that says that makes him a horrifyingly irresponsible romanticization of men like Bundy and Ridgway.)

Very different perspective from Rule, but equally an excellent book.

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