Home > Author > Robert D. Keppel
1 " Our effort was mocked by some police supervisors: has the computer caught Ted yet? "
― Robert D. Keppel , The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer
2 " When Mary Osmer later told us her story, her eyes glistened with guilt. To her, the stranger seemed friendly, sincere, very polite, and easy to talk to. He had a nice smile and didn’t get upset when she told him she wouldn’t go with him. "
3 " These three women picked up subtle signals that Bundy was sending off. When questioned, they said that he seemed too intent on what he was after and was uncomfortably nervous. Furthermore, they said he had spoken rapidly as if he were reading a script and he acted as if he had had a hidden agenda. Of the five different women who were approached by the stranger that day but didn’t go with him, two would later become severely psychologically traumatized when the truth about “Ted” came out, at the thought that they could have become a murder victim. "
4 " Our inexperience was telling, and it favored the killer. "
5 " The extent of this killer’s crimes was growing as more of the pieces of the puzzle came together.As the handlers rushed toward me with their eager search dogs sniffing the ground ahead of them, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t want them anywhere near this cranium. Dogs don’t care where they put their paws. Crucial evidence could be destroyed or altered if the dogs ran through this site. A basic tenet of Criminal Investigation 101 was racing through my head: protect the scene. But it was too late. Almost on cue, and certainly by accident, a dog’s paw struck the ground and a human jawbone erupted through the leafy surface. I yelled for everyone to stay back, but within a few seconds another dog walked across the leaves and dislodged another human jawbone. Then another dog stepped on another mandible. In stunned amazement, we all realized that a detailed search of the mountainside was required. At the very least, we had just discovered the remains of two people. "
6 " We needed an over-confident Ted, not a defensive Ted, because overconfidence breeds mistakes, and that’s just what we needed our Ted to make in order catch him. "
7 " The press creates its own magnified version of an event. The more intense the feeding frenzy for exclusives, the more the story changes from reporter to reporter until what the public gets is a distorted version of the truth. It’s as if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle were at work everytime a large story unfolds in the media, so that the presence of the media itself creates, changes, and redefines the story. You always have to be wary of what the media reports because the media itself has created parts of the story. "
8 " If it can be said that serial killers, through the control they exert and the terror they spread, make victims of the entire communities—families and loved ones, the police who track them, and the general public who must live in fear—then in his own way, Dave wasa victim of the Green River killer, just as I became one of Ted Bundy’s victims. "
9 " Years ago I read about a psychiatrist who said, ‘If you could only photograph everybody who came out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would have a mug book of all the active violent offenders against women in that particular area. "
10 " Ted was on a roll "
