The Taylor Mountain dump site in rural King County
The Taylor Mountain dump site, where the power lines cross, four miles south of I-90, was the place where Ted Bundy left the remains of at least four of his victims (Donna Manson may have been the fifth victim buried in that area, according to Ted’s own confession to detective Robert Keppel). Ted would carry the bodies up and through the foliage 1,000 feet northeast of the intersection of the power line road and highway 18.
Aerial view of Taylor Mountain, March 1975. The road on which
Ted took his victims and dumped them, was the service road that followed
powerlines and can be clearly seen in this photo. The cars at the entrance
belong to members of the search team. More photos of the Taylor Mountain
dumpsite can be seen on my Internet Archive site: https://archive.org/details/untitled-01_202202/Untitled-01.jpg Thank
you to Brad Fennell and Chris Mortensen who helped me identify the Taylor
Mountain photos that KCSO sent me unlabeled.
A 10-28-75
police report noted that Ted did a lot of hiking on Taylor Mountain, so
presumably he had been familiar with that area before he took his victims there:
The severing of the skulls, and Keppel’s suspicion that Ted removed
victims’ heads and took them with him at his rooming house (the Rogers’
residence)
Ted Bundy blamed the animals for eating the human skeletons up, but it didn’t convince Robert Keppel, who was persuaded that the victims’ bodies were missing from the Taylor Mountain dump site because they were buried elsewhere. From Keppel’s book “The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer”:
"He [Ted] had told me specifically on Friday, 'What you have found it aboveground, and what you haven't found is buried.' He must have buried the bodies of Healy, Parks, Rancourt, and Ball, but refused to talk about where they were buried. he blamed the animals for eating them all up. I knew that was bullshit. Bill Hagmaier had told me that Bundy told him some time ago that he had as many as four heads at home with him at one time. Hagmaier didn't have the specific knowledge of the Ted murders to know which ones he was referring to. They must have been the Taylor Mountain women."
“we’ve never found the skeletons that went with the skulls on Taylor Mountain. We’ve found only skull parts (hair, skull, skull, jawbone, jawbone, and a jawbone)”
"One widely held theory was that Ted decapitated his Taylor Mountain victims"
“Ted explained that the reason we didn’t find anything was because the ‘very poor little creatures out there just take them. I don’t know why they leave the skulls the way they do—maybe it’s just because they’re so hard to break up. If the bodies aren’t there, it’s because the animals took everything. And where they took them, God only knows. They must have just chewed them up.’
In order to keep Ted talking, I agreed with him. ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought. Because, in fact, if they were severed or hacksawed, we would have found some vertebrae, the little piece that fits right in the skull holding the skull together. I found every one of those on all the other cases, except these. And on the Green River cases, we find all those. So we know that the animals don’t chew those all the way up, all right? And with thirty-seven skeletons in Green River we know a lot about animal behavior, right?’
‘Oh, sure you do. Yeah, I forgot all about that,’ Ted said. Any mention of the Green River cases brought only a momentary spark to Ted’s eye.
At this point, Ted was exhausted, and his favorite subject, the Riverman, could not bring him around.
So I asked a few short yet very pointed questions. ‘Were those heads severed, like Georgann Hawkins?’
‘Yeah,’ Ted said affirmatively, with a smirk on his face.
‘They were?’ I gasped.
‘Uh-huh.’ Ted reaffirmed with a long silence while he caught a short 45-second nap.
I inquired disbelievingly, ‘They weren’t severed? Are you saying that because we don’t have any evidence of severing and you don’t want to say it, or are you telling me that’s fact?’
‘I wasn’t going to answer you when you asked,’ said Ted...”
Keppel himself wrote in "The Riverman" that the only human remains they discovered were on the animal trail that ran along a small creek that meandered down the slopes of Taylor Mountain... For instance, they found the shattered mandible of Susan Rancourt about 50 feet from the nearest vehicle access, over 800 feet from her skull, and Keppel acknowledged that the police surmised that some animal must have dragged her skull into the dense forest, since the terrain was virtually impassable by any human being.
Deep Creek. In the evergreens just
beyond the creek is where the skulls were found (photo courtesy King County Sheriff’s
Office)
Ted’s postoffense behavior - an effort to cover his tracks
From Keppel’s book “The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer”: “Ted’s postoffense behavior was an effort to cover his tracks and evidence of his otherwise organized nature. His disorganized behavior immediately after the murder of Hawkins, shown in his throwing away her clothing and his implements haphazardly, frightened Ted in his lucid moments because he couldn’t deal with his own panic. This duality, this bipolarity between the panic at having touched something deep and terrible inside himself during the murder and necrophilic sex and the anal retentiveness of cleaning up every scrap of evidence at the contact and murder sites, might seem like some kind of split personality, but it wasn’t. This was almost typical of control-type serial killers who allow themselves gratification with a corpse, only to be repelled by their own behavior in the hours immediately afterward. When the waves of panic subside, they become organized again and return to remove any signs of their presence. It’s almost as though his organized self was knowingly protecting his disorganized self.
Ted believed that someone might connect Hawkins’s belongings to him if they found them in the parking lot the next day. I found it difficult to understand why Ted was afraid of that, but it was part of his modus operandi, so I pursued it. ‘After the police had checked that area?’ I asked, not to imply that the police had done a poor canvass, but to lead Ted along on his favorite subject, criticizing police investigations.
‘Well, you can tell me. I’d seen whole streams of them driving around all over the place, but they were concentrating on places like the nearby parks. I bet you they couldn’t have looked in that parking lot and missed the white patent-leather clog and two white pierced earrings—little hoops.’
‘That was discovered by you the next day?’ I asked in amazement.
‘Yeah. Around five o’clock, six o’clock,’ Ted proudly stated.
My curiosity took over. If Ted drove by Taylor Mountain in the early morning hours after he killed Hawkins, why didn’t he take her up there initially or take the same power line road off Highway 18, where he had previously dumped Healy, Ball, Rancourt, and Parks, and dispose of Hawkins or her clothing in the same previously successful manner? So I said, ‘Okay, excuse me. After you left the Issaquah scene that night and went toward Taylor Mountain, did you go back to Taylor Mountain, knowing what was there?’
Before Ted even answered, I experienced a sinking and incredibly horrible sensation. The chills and goose bumps formed on the back of my neck; my stomach turned while I squinted at Ted, readying myself for his answer. A warning bell had just sounded loudly in my head. I had assumed there was a certain order to his murders: abduct, kill, and dump, then abduct, kill, and dump again. And when a previous dump site was not discovered, it could be used successfully again. The theory was that he abducted Healy on January 31, killed her, and dumped her on Taylor Mountain. Then Ran-court was abducted on April 17, killed, and her remains dumped on Taylor Mountain, and so on with the remainder of the women. The site had not been discovered, so he used it again and again. I had been dead wrong. Taylor Mountain was not the original dump site for those four young women, it was only where Ted had left their heads. But you try never to make a mistake with Ted, unless it’s part of your plan, because you lose his confidence in your expertise.
Ted casually verified my realization by saying, ‘No. No, I wasn’t going back. I just drove by there. That’s all. It was along the highway. I didn’t even slow down. Yeah, that was really not on my mind at that time.’
Not really on his mind at that time. What a shocking statement. Taylor Mountain wasn’t on his mind as a dump site at that time because their heads were someplace else—Taylor Mountain wasn’t a dump site until much later. I would eventually learn that Ted had four heads at his rooming house [Keppel’s perpetuation of the heads controversy, which is problematic], all stored together. I had realized that I had made a critically wrong assumption that all things happen in a certain predictable order. This is not the case with serial killers.”
Deep Creek (photo courtesy King County Sheriff’s Office)
About the Taylor Mountain search
“Roger Dunn and I planned to meet ESAR personnel at the intersection the next morning to begin excavating Taylor Mountain for further evidence. On the following day, this once-quiet and obscure forest was alive with the sounds of ESAR commands and the growl of chain saws our search teams used to prune the ultra-dense forest. We had to get beneath the surface of the last leaf fall because that was where valuable evidence would be located. ESAR personnel raked through each ounce of soil for even the most minute traces of physical evidence. Each branch was evaluated for its forensic value. A meticulous shoulder-to-shoulder, hands-and-knees search of the mountainside, similar to that conducted at Issaquah, was under way. The searchers would sift through over 2,000 ounces of soil per day for five days. Since the Issaquah crime scene search techniques were a model for other searchers to follow, we had prearranged that ESAR supervisors would inform their other teams statewide of them, so that all ESAR personnel would become experienced at these evidence search techniques. By now, the local ESAR kids were more dedicated to and proficient at carefully brushing an area for evidence than a group of excited archaeologists.
Detective Ted Forester was assigned to assist in evidence collection. Several weeks before, he had been investigating the double murder of an elderly couple. When he arrived at their home, he found the house in flames and, with the assistance of a firefighter, pushed the victims’ pickup to safety. Unfortunately, the processing of that arson scene ended after a long day and Forester had forgotten about the pickup truck and didn’t search it for evidence. Several days later, a newspaper reporter covering the story discovered the considerable amount of blood inside the pickup that Forester had overlooked. Detective Forester was sentenced to five days on the mountain with me not only as punishment but as a harsh lesson in what it takes to unearth evidence. Forester was a welcome addition to our team, since he was an accomplished woodsman and an expert with a chain saw.
After the discovery of the skulls and mandibles our search finds were few and far between. The only human remains we discovered were on the only animal trail that ran along a small creek that meandered down the gentle slopes of Taylor Mountain. About 50 feet from the nearest vehicle access, we found the shattered mandible of Susan Rancourt, over 800 feet from her skull. We surmised that some animal must have dragged her skull into the dense forest, since the terrain was virtually impassable by any human being. About 10 feet from her mandible, ESAR kids found a small clump of blond hair. It was a miracle that this portion of the full hair mass was discovered at all, since the area was full of densely intertwined vine maples and blackberry bushes.
At two P.M. on the third day, searchers who had begun walking slowly at three-foot intervals on a hillside adjacent to the one where we were finding most of the remains froze in their tracks. They had come upon a live explosive charge. As I approached the explosive, I could see another group of unexploded large ammunition rounds and rockets. The ESAR team had uncovered a dumping field created by a nearby explosives plant at the end of the dirt power line road that extended to the east from Highway 18. Employees at the plant had used the forest for their testing grounds. They had been informed we were conducting a ground search in hazardous territory but had failed to offer one word of warning. I was so infuriated that I closed access to the plant until the bomb squad cleared their pyrotechnic litter and our search was completed several days later. The dud rounds were very dangerous and been strewn over thousands of feet of hillside. The last thing I needed was for an ESAR kid to blow off a foot while searching. As if our job wasn’t difficult enough, now it was highly dangerous, too.
As the search for ‘Ted victims’ progressed over the week, an ominous scenario began to unfold. No bones other than skull parts were being discovered. Twenty yards up the hillside from Rancourt’s skull, we found what was left of a battered cranium. I was shocked that the maxilla, the bone that had once contained the upper teeth, was completely gone. We never found it, despite our intense search. We located her lower jawbone, which neatly fit into the narrow skull. The fracture lines were evidence that this victim was probably beaten beyond recognition. After eight days of searching, we could account for only three skulls, three human jawbones, and a small hair mass. We found numerous individual bones, but they were all confirmed to be animal bones by Dr. Daris Swindler, a physical anthropologist from the University of Washington. So what did all of this mean?
Theories of intentional decapitation were quickly dismissed by our supervisors because we didn’t find the neck vertebrae that would have confirmed it. Typically, when a person is intentionally decapitated, the cut is made below the base of the skull because it is relatively easy to sever the vertebrae with the appropriate cutting tool. Thus, neck vertebrae at a site where a skull is found usually indicate that the person was decapitated. For our supervisors, therefore, a lack of neck vertebrae meant no intentional decapitation. Although this logic was not infallible, it was often seized upon by police commanders, presumably to avoid undue fear in the community and increased pressure on themselves to find a ‘monster.’ On the other hand, we were confident that if those vertebrae were once on Taylor Mountain, we would have found them.
The most popular theory circulating among the police department supervisors was that the rest of the skeletons were obviously outside our search perimeter. If this were true, however, based on crime scene retrieval experience at Issaquah, we should have found other skeletal parts within close proximity of the crania. But what we learned from Issaquah was summarily downplayed.
My own theory—considered outrageous—was that, for a period of time, the killer had parked the skulls at another location, where they decayed individually, and then dumped his entire load just inside the edge of the forest. The physical evidence, which consisted of leaves in skulls from one previous leaf fall, the growth of the maple branches through and around the skulls, and the lack of any tissue on the crania left me with the feeling that they were exposed to outdoor elements, in one place, where they decayed at the same rate. In other words, they were put someplace else for a period of time and then brought to Taylor Mountain; the killer was moving around the body parts of his victims [curious theory, that of Keppel, about Bundy possibly moving around parts of his victims, leaving the parts exposed to outdoor elements in one place and then taking them elsewhere]. It seemed as though nobody in the department wanted to consider my theory seriously—maybe because it gave too much credit to the ability of the killer to manipulate evidence and escape detection. They also probably didn’t want to consider what it would take to catch a killer so remorseless that he could handle the body parts of his dead victims long after he had murdered them.”
Photograph
of the road leading up to Taylor Mountain, with searchers’ cars in background,
taken in March of 1975. Courtesy King County Sheriff’s Office
Date of the Taylor Mountain search
Keppel wrote in “The Riverman”: "On March 10, 1975, after having spent nearly one week on Taylor Mountain, I returned to the office to learn that the investigation had taken on a new urgency."
All the references to “animals” and “skulls” in Ted’s 1989 interview
with Keppel
The transcript of Ted’s 1989 interview with Keppel contains interesting references to “animals” and “skulls”, and at some point in the interview Keppel asked Ted where he placed the Taylor Mountain bodies specifically.
Excerpts from the interview transcript:
RK: And I’m not so sure how much is left, frankly. You could probable enlighten me.
TB: Well, it depends.
RK: Ya.
TB: It depends on a lot of things. It depends on, you Know, you’ve worked out there. You know what the crime scenes are. It depends on construction sites and highways and animals and all that stuff. But to be quite candid with you, there are a number, I’m sure, that are quite well in place.
About the Issaquah dump site:
RK: Where should we have found the bodies?
TB: Oh, well, lord Knows where, but the little creatures up there did. The animals would have done.
RK: Georgann Hawkins area is pretty much so thoroughly searched. I mean, that was the first one and it was -- we went for miles all over on hands and knees. We found a lot of bones, but, you know, by the time we got -- the only thing we have of her, or had of her, for the medical examiner lost bones-
TB: They lost the --
RK: Ya. Were two, was one femur bone. We ended up with five femur bones. That’s all we had. The only thing that we could possibly cover that may add to some of the answers is a location of Donna Manson, because she’s the one that’s missing. And we never found any, anything we think that is her at all. And we’ve never found the rest of Taylor Mountain either. I mean, we’ve found just skulls. And we never found the remainder of the bodies. [King County's medical investigators who were in charge of identifying the remains found at the Taylor Mountain dump site, initially mistook some human bones for animal bones: Keppel’s 1989 remark to Ted is based on that initial investigation, and years later it would be discovered that what Keppel took to have been animal bones, turned out to be human bones]
RK: We never found Janice Ott’s bicycle. We never did -- we actually found -- all we found of Janice Ott was her lower jaw bone. We didn’t find her skull. We found Naslund’s skull. We found Ott’s, what we think was Ott’s, backbone. You know, those animals they just walk around out there and do their thing.
Police report referring to a psychic who helped Psychic helped the police in the Ott case, courtesy of King County Archives
TB: They sure do. Ya.
RK: One, you know, I’d like to know where the Taylor Mountain bodies were placed too, because I’m sure if the bodies were there someplace we would have found at least one other bone -- out there. We went practically everywhere we could. This is the Taylor Mountain bone find. There’s a power line road that comes in from Highway 18 and basically -- this is Highway 18 out here. There’s a quarter sectional marker right here. This is a 1000 feet into this point from where the power line road meets Highway 18. Ok? Most of what we found was right in here. And all we found, as you can see, hair, skull, skull, jawbone, jawbone and a Jawbone over here. This -- and some hair in this area. We never found any bones. Now are those bodies buried out there someplace? Or are they someplace else where no one’s ever found them, any bones? The yellow cross-hatching is hands and knees shoulder to shoulder searches by 14, 15 year old kids. They did one hell of a job. That all area was nothing but overgrown vine maples and real heavy terrain getting in there.
TB: What’s the blue, a-creek or something?
RK: Ya. There's a creek there.
TB: I mean, ya, I mean, it’s just -- it could have been something else.
RK: Ok. We want -- You going to give me a hint where the rest of those bodies are?
TB: I don’t know. To be honest with you, I honestly can’t tell you.
RK: Were they dumped there?
TB: Well -- See -- the disadvantage here -- well, you’re not at a disadvantage, but I’m sure you, you consulted -- but I doubt there’s any textbooks in the area of animal deprivation, as such. But I’m sure that somebody’s written an article in some forensic journal. In any event there's very, very poor little creatures out there and they just take them.
RK: Right.
TB: And why they leave the skulls the way they do -- maybe it’s just because they’re so hard to break up.
RK: That's true.
TB: If the bodies aren’t there it’s because, I think, it’s because the animals took everything. And where they took them God only knows. They must have just chewed them up.
RK: Ya. That’s what I thought. Because I thought if in fact they were severed or hacksawed, what would have happened was that the -- we would have found some vertebre, that, the little piece that fits right in the skull holding the skull together, but they don’t -- I found everyone of those on all the other cases, except these. And on the Green River cases we find all those. So we know that the animals don’t chew those all the way up. All right?
TB: Ya.
RK: And with 37 skeletons in Green River we know a lot about animal behavior, right?
TB: Oh, sure you do. Ya. I forgot all about that.
RK: Looking back now to ‘74 here --
TB: Ya, well, you can get a --
RK: You got a lot more -- at the time -- we’re looking at about a year’s decomposition on some of these, that the animals had that much time to take them away. But, in the Green River cases some of them are five years, two years, three years. Right?
TB: Interesting, interesting I’ve got to say.
RK: Are you -- were these heads severed, like Georgann Hawkins?
TB: Ya.
RK: They were?
TB: Ahh ha. [long silence]
RK: They weren’t severed? Are you saying that because we don’t have any evidence of severing and you don’t want to say it, or are you telling me that’s fact?
TB: I wasn’t going to answer you when you asked. I just did that very well with the Salt Lake City guy.
RK: Oh, did you?
TB: Well, no, I just ran out of steam. I just ran out of steam. And I don’t have much left.
Was Taylor Mountain a dump site for the skulls because Ted had severed the heads on purpose and took them home with him after he murdered the women, and only later he dumped the heads on Taylor Mountain, as Keppel suspected?
To attempt to answer this question, I think one needs to look at the police investigation and examine the Rogers’ residence where Ted lived while he was attending the University of Washington (and during this period of time, Ted was also known to drive a tan VW bug). The Rogers’ residence was located at 4143-12th NE., Seattle, Washington. The landlady was referred to in the police reports as Mrs. Freda (also spelled “Freida” and “Frieda”) Rogers, and the landlord was Mr. Ernst Rogers (who died in the fall of 1975), and below are the references made to their residence in the police files, and I expect they offer enough information to give us a clue about whether Ted had the opportunity to store heads at the Rogers’ rooming house or not.
2021
photo of the house at NE 42nd & about 12th NE, which used to be owned by
Freda Rogers (courtesy Google Maps)
Two more photos of the Rogers' rooming house courtesy
Google Maps
According to Robert Keppel’s 3-27-75 report: “Had telephone contact with Dr. Rhay, medical examiner. He related that for the theory of decapitation, for someone to cut off the head, there would be cervical vertebrae attached to the skull. Due to the meaty portions of the neck it would be almost impractical for there not to be cervical vertebrae present. If there were no vertebrae attached to the head it would indicate that the heads were pulled away from the skeletal remains elsewhere. It would be almost impossible for animals to completely eat entire skeletons.” [since the vertebrae were no longer present, decapitation would have been determined]
According to 8-25-75 police report by Det. Kathleen McChesney (in the Seattle Police Files uploaded on Internet Archive): “McChesney had personal contact with Mrs. Ernest Rogers at her residence, 4143 12th NE [look it up on Google Maps]. She stated that Bundy is a very nice boy, that he lived in a room at their house for approximately 3 years while attending the University of Washington. She could not remember his employment record other than that he worked for the Republican Party. She stated that he left in September of 1974 to attend Law School in Utah because it is cheaper than in Washington State. She stated that he had a girlfriend who worked at the University of Washington; no particular men friends nor strange activities that she observed. She stated that his parents were from Tacoma and that he had a gray or brown Volkswagen, she thought it was gray. Mrs. Rogers thought Ted was a very nice person and apparently she was reluctant to give further information or was quite friendly with the suspect.”
According to 8-29-75 police report by McChesney (in the SPF), Ted moved to Rogers' residence prior to working for Legal Messengers in September of 1969. In 1969 and 1970 Winter Quarter he attended the University of Washington and also attended their Spring Quarter.
And according to McChesney’s 8-29-75 report, Freida Rogers, the landlady at the rooming house where Ted lived in Seattle, cleaned Ted’s room every Friday and Ted’s door was generally unlocked – and this I feel was a significant piece of information, leading me to believe that Ted could not safely store human heads in his unlocked room:
“In the Fall of 1973 Liz observed a sack of clothing in Ted’s room one night while he was at law school. The only piece of clothing she actually observed was a white bra which was a very large size. Liz assumed those to be Freida’s clothes and did not look at them any further. Freida cleaned Ted’s room every Friday and Ted’s door was generally unlocked. During 1972, Liz observed a television and stereo in Ted’s room. Ted admitted to her later that he had stolen these things but that he would not do something like that again. Liz also observed an electric typewriter in Ted’s room which she stated he had bought from the Republican Headquarters. Ted is described by Liz as materialistic – he enjoyed listening to music and still has the stereo and TV.
In May or June of 1974, Liz observed crutches in Ted’s room – Ted stated they belonged to Ernst Rogers, his landlord who had a problem with his feet. Ted was going to return them for Ernst or Ernst gave them to him, Liz could not remember.”
According to 10-8-75 report by Det. K. McChesney: McChesney had phone contact with Freda Rogers and arranged to look through her garage the following morning.
So the Rogers’ garage was also looked at.
According to 10-09-75 report by Roger Dunn: “Det. Keppel and I contacted Freda Rogers at her home 4143 12 N.E. and got her permission to search the garage where Bundy kept his belongings and his vehicle. There were no evidentiary items there whatsoever. I searched the flower beds and garden area with a metal detector but found nothing.”
The report also says that while Dunn was at the Rogers’ residence, he interviewed James A. Doros, 4143 12 N.E. bamt. apt. 634-3452. Doros told Dunn that Ted had a small yellow two man rubber raft, but Doros didn’t think it could be rigged up with a sail. He also said that Ted kept the boat clean as he did all of his belongings. And the last time Doros saw Ted was in May-June, 1975 when he drove back to Seattle for three or four days to put in a garden for the Rogers.
According to 10-15-75 report by Dunn: Dunn spoke with Danny Lazares, who also lived at the Rogers' residence when Ted lived there (Trivett moved in around 6-20-74 and moved out in late August, 1974), and he said that Ted was known as the "phantom" because he was around for a time then would disappear for days at a time and then show up suddenly. Lazares told Dunn that he noticed Bundy's car, but never saw him with any strange paraphernalia such as a yellow bike, jewelry, packs, slings, cassts, crutches et. al.
Dunn also spoke with Larry Trivett, who told him he and Lazares moved in to the Rogers’ residence and lived there from 6/10/74 to 8/29/74. They didn’t interact much with Ted and he wasn’t around that much. From Dunn’s 10-15-75 report: “They did see a girlfriend at his room and said he kept his room very neat and had nice plants, bed and pictures. His room was on the top floor in the Southwest corner. He didn’t recall ever going out with Bundy to a tavern and most of their conversation was around the T.V. Bundy would always take advantage of the good weather and although Trivett couldn’t remember if Bundy was around on 7/14, he had the impression that he wasn’t. Trivett didn’t recall Bundy having anything unusual. He said that most of the tenants stored their additional belongings in the basement as well as the garage.”
According to 10-27-75 report by McChesney: “Phone call from Freda Rogers who said that she does not keep her phone records after income tax time and that she would not be able to tell which calls belonged to Bundy as all her renters used the phone for long distance. Mrs. Rogers stated she was in poor health and getting upset because of all the questions regarding Bundy. If she does not locate the receipts she will call this office.”
According to 11-21-75 report by Keppel, Keppel contacted Freida Rogers at 4143-12 NE, Ted’s former residence, and “she related that a Seattle Times reporter had come to her home yesterday and questioned her about the $500 she had given Bundy before he left for Utah. The reporter claimed to have found out from Bundy when Bundy sold his VW, he said he needed money to repay Freida.
Keppel asked Freida if she had an attic or crawl space under her home. The house has an attic. One gains entrance to the attic through the bedroom on the upper northeast corner of the house. There is a trap door on the ceiling of the closet of the bedroom. At the time Bundy lived at the house, the occupant of the bedroom was John Muller.
Keppel searched the attic area without success. All the loose insulation was still covering the 2 x 4s and beams. If anyone would have been walking around in the attic the insulation would have fallen from the 2 x 4s.
Bundy’s bedroom was on the SW corner of the house, upstairs. It was 12 x 10 with a small closet. There was no entrance to the attic from Bundy’s room. The only entrance to the attic is through the NE bedroom. One must enter through the front door of the house to go upstairs. There are no separate entrances to the room. There were no other storage areas. Mrs. Rogers related that Ted loaded up his truck and left with all his belongings.”
So Keppel himself contacted Freida Rogers and visited her residence and inquired if she had an attic or crawl space under her home, and learned about her attic and even searched it himself, and wrote in his 1975 report that the attic could not have been used.
The Rogers’ rooming house had multiple tenants who shared the same facilities. While Ted was living here, he would have been living alongside other university students. Ted lived on the second floor for four years until he left for Utah on September 2nd, 1974.
In a Skype chat not long ago, Rob Dielenberg (author of the book “Ted Bundy: A Visual Timeline”) wrote this: “Storing heads in his room is out of the question. Go to the market, buy a pig's head and store it in your room. Find out what happens. You'll discover that within 12 hours, your room will be infested with flies. Then the stench. After 24 hours, you'll have major problems with fluids leaking from the orifices. After 48 hours, maggots...”
Ted started his crime spree while he was living at the Rogers’ rooming house in January of 1974. Karen Sparks, his first known victim, was attacked in a house that was less than half a mile away from the Rogers’ rooming house. On February 1, 1974, Lynda Ann Healy was abducted from a nearby house at 5517 12th Ave NE.
While talking to Stephen Michaud, Ted posited that the killer of Brenda Carol Ball may have picked her up at a bar and brought her back to his rooming house, and once there, they had “consensual sex” before he strangled her to death in her sleep.
The
Seattle ESAR search progress, in detail
The Department of Public Safety cooperated with and was assisted by the Explorer Search and Rescue units, looking for evidence in the Taylor Mountain wilderness area.
The Explorer Search and Rescue units that volunteered to assist at the Taylor Mountain search site, collected a lot of quantifiable data during the search operation. The evidence search conducted by Seattle ESAR resulted in crucial findings which were mentioned in “The Taylor Mountain Evidence Search” report of July 1975 prepared by the King County Department of Public Safety staff.
Between Jan. 31, 1974 and July 14, 1974 (on that day, 18-year-old Denise Naslund and 23-year-old Janice Ott were reported missing from Lake Sammamish) a total of seven girls were reported missing from various Western Washington communities under mysterious circumstances. One additional girl was missing from Corvallis, Oregon.
On Sept. 7, 1974, some bones were found by two hunters on a wooded hillside NE of Isssaquah, Washington (several miles east of Lake Sammamish State Park) and in the following five days Seattle and Tacoma ESAR conducted a massive and thorough evidence search, leaves and soil were dug through by the searchers, who also searched on hands and knees, and whole sections of blackberry bushes were leveled to the ground. Over 100 finds (mostly bones) were located at the Issaquah site, and detectives and anthropologists determined there were three bodies present: two of them were identified as Denise Naslund and Janice Ott right away, and the third body remained unidentified until January 1989, when Bundy whispered to detective Robert Keppel that the third victim was Georgann Hawkins and that her head had been buried on the hillside.
And it was only on March 1, 1975, that several Community College students working on a forestry project discovered a human skull on the north slope of Taylor Mountain. On March 2 and 3, 1975, the search was limited to King Co. Detectives and members of the German Shepherd Dogs. By the end of March 3rd, five finds had been made: two skulls, two jaw bones and one mass of hair. By the end of March 4, word was passed from the medical examiner that there were at least three bodies in the area. One of the jaw bones found on March 1, didn’t match either skull. One body was identified as that of 22-year-old Brenda Ball, missing from South King County since June 1, 1974 [more precisely, it was her skull that was identified].
Close up view of the skull of Brenda Ball photographed in situ at the Taylor Mountain dump site, with tape measure. Courtesy King County Sheriff's Office archives
With 62 searchers from Seattle and Tacoma ESAR, the search expanded further on March 5, it didn’t concentrate on the area of the initial finds. On March 5, a Tacoma team found a third skull several hundred feet east of the other skulls. During this day, several teams were assigned to search the area immediately alongside the highway and the powerline road. It seemed unlikely that the murderer would have carried a body all the way from the road to the point where the skulls were found. The brush was very thick and a stream (next to the road) was difficult to cross. It was felt that animals could have dragged the bones further inland to the places where they were found.
On March 6, the search continued with 73
searchers from Seattle, Tacoma and Mt. Vernon ESAR, and 50 members of the Civil
Air Patrol. By then three highly suspect areas had been identified, and the
emphasis in search planning began to shift in favor of the concentrated hands
and knees search of the high priority locations. A fourth search area was
discovered to the west of the others.
By the end of March 6, the medical examiner announced that two more girls had been identified (mostly through dental records): 21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy (a University of Washington undergraduate, the first girl to disappear) and 20-year-old Roberta Parks (missing from Oregon State University).
Roberta Kathleen Parks' skull and mandible. Courtesy King County Sheriff's Office archives
Word also came that there was a fourth, as yet unidentified, body in the area. The identification of Lynda Healy brought the Seattle Police Department into the search. Most of the search area consisted of heavy brush.
On March 7, the search continued with 106 persons from Civil Air Patrol and Explorer Search and Rescue. Most of the effort went in to a concentrated search of the four productive areas, although some teams expanded the search perimeter ensuring that no new area further out was missed. By the end of the day, two of the four priority areas were still producing finds. To this point, 87 finds had been recorded.
By now the fourth body had been identified: it was 18-year-old Susan Rancourt, missing from Central Washington State College in Ellensburg since April 17, 1974 – more precisely, her mandible was found and identified. And it was this last identification that established a tentative link between Taylor Mt. and the previous Issaquah search. Rancourt was missing from Central Washington State College: other girls there had had contact with a young man, an arm in a sling, asking them to help him load books into his car (a VW). The day Denise Naslund and Janice Ott disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park, other girls reported a young man with an arm in a sling, tried to get them to help him load a boat, and he too had a VW. This suspect, nicknamed “Ted”, had remained a mystery in spite of the extremely intensive investigation conducted by the King Co. Police, Seattle Police, and others.
From March 2 until March 8, when the search was completed, the Taylor Mt. search area was accessed only by searchers (247 in total) and the King Co. Police. The searchers and detectives paid particular attention to any direction or pattern in the finds, to better decide what areas to search next. The search was terminated on March 8 because the priority area was no longer producing finds. 447 people representing 16 agencies and volunteer search units had expended 12,771 man hours to search approximately 4,000,000 square feet of wooded hillside. Two of the original 8 missing girls were still unaccounted for, and yet another search was expected to take place.
Sample of the Master Log included in
Most evidence searches at the time were much less complex than the Taylor Mt. search. Most involved a single object (body, weapon, or whatever) to be found. Success was measured simply: either you found the object or you didn’t. But a search for scattered remains was also rather common.
The search effort at the Issaquah Evidence Search site started earlier, closer to the time of the murders, i.e. in 1974, whereas by comparison the search effort at the Taylor Mt. site started later, in 1975, and the feral animals would have had more time to scatter the remains. Due to the lapse of time between the actual murders and the discovery of the remains, it seems logical that more complete remains were discovered at the Issaquah site as opposed to the Taylor Mt. site. The last victim to be dumped at the Taylor Mountain location was Brenda Ball, who went missing on June 1, 1974. This means that local wildlife had at least 274 days to interfere with the remains. Feral animals that roamed free throughout the Taylor Mountain area where the remains were discovered, were black bears, cougars, coyotes, foxes, bobcats and raccoons.
By comparison, ancient remains found in
catacombs underneath urban streets, undisturbed by animals, have been preserved
for 2000 years.
In 2016, archaeologists turned up the skeletal remains of at least eight people of Malta. The remains of ancient Maltese islanders (human bones and skulls) were discovered in catacombs beneath a school in Rabat.
Skeletons and skulls found in crypts carved into stone, were preserved in some cases for thousands of years because they were totally undisturbed by animals.
Information about what coyotes, bears and mountain beavers do to remains, can also be glimpsed from Matt Bachmeier's 9/11/74 report related to the Issaquah dump site:
Coyotes were also in the Issaquah area which detectives Richard Dunn and Robert Keppel searched for evidence, and coyotes were known to drag bones and meat a long way. And mountain beavers were also known to be carnivorous.
The definitive remains found at the Taylor Mountain dump site, and Ted’s confessions
about the severing of the heads
The Taylor Mountain site was combed by the police, searching for remains. The following remains were found spread over the slopes of Taylor Mountain:
Roberta Parks' damaged skull (the King County Archives has photos of Parks’ skull)
Susan Rancourt’s shattered mandible, and battered skull
Brenda Ball's cranium
Lynda Healy's lower jawbone was also discovered by the search dogs on Taylor Mountain
Clockwise from top left: Parks' skull and mandible, Parks' skull and mandible, Rancourt's skull, Parks' skull, Parks' skull, Parks' skull, Parks' skull, Parks' skull, Parks' skull at center. Courtesy King County Sheriff's Office archives
Ted abducted Kathy Parks from Oregon State University in Corvallis and he dumped her skull on Taylor Mountain near Seattle. This kind of traveling was considered by Keppel to be Ted's attempt to cover his tracks. Roberta Kathy Parks had been murdered in May of 1974, like Brenda Ball.
From Keppel’s book “The Riverman”: “The only human remains we discovered were on the only animal trail that ran along a small creek that meandered down the gentle slopes of Taylor Mountain. About 50 feet from the nearest vehicle access, we found the shattered mandible of Susan Rancourt, over 800 feet from her skull. We surmised that some animal must have dragged her skull into the dense forest, since the terrain was virtually impassable by any human being. About 10 feet from her mandible, ESAR kids found a small clump of blond hair. It was a miracle that this portion of the full hair mass was discovered at all, since the area was full of densely intertwined vine maples and blackberry bushes.”
Susan Rancourt's frontall skull. Courtesy King County Sheriff's Office archives
Also from “The Riverman”: “No bones other than skull parts were being discovered. Twenty yards up the hillside from Rancourt’s skull, we found what was left of a battered cranium. I was shocked that the maxilla, the bone that had once contained the upper teeth, was completely gone. We never found it, despite our intense search. We located her lower jawbone, which neatly fit into the narrow skull. The fracture lines were evidence that this victim was probably beaten beyond recognition. After eight days of searching, we could account for only three skulls, three human jawbones, and a small hair mass. We found numerous individual bones, but they were all confirmed to be animal bones by Dr. Daris Swindler, a physical anthropologist from the University of Washington.”
From Keppel’s book “Terrible Secrets”: “Our working assumption was that the killer had dumped Brenda Ball near the roadway below and that the animals had dismembered her, dragging her skull far away from where they first encountered it. The next day, I returned to the scene with a small group of ESAR volunteers and their six search dogs, hoping to find more of Ball wherever the animals had taken her.
But we never would find another identifiable piece of her. Instead, as I was searching about 90 feet away from where we found Brenda Ball’s cranium, I tripped and fell over a branch just a short distance from a second skull. Like Ball’s, this skull was weathered and sun-bleached. A tree branch was sprouting through one of the facial bones. There was a six-inch radial fracture that ran straight up the center of the skull. Though her mandible was missing, I again knew in an instant who this was. None of the other missing women had such bridgework as Susan Rancourt.”
And Donna Manson was also buried further up Taylor Mountain, according to Ted, further up the power line road, on the left side. And Ted also told Keppel that her head was incinerated in Elizabeth Kloepfer’s fireplace, adding that “this is probably the disposal method of preference among those who get away with it”.
Ted also admitted to Keppel to severing the head of Georgann Hawkins and burying it at a separate location in Issaquah. Ted said he did this in an attempt to obscure her identification and impede any future investigation.
During prison interviews, shortly before his execution, Ted told FBI investigator William Hagmaier that he severed the heads of half a dozen of his victims.
DNA testing in 2008 proved Ted’s theory about animal scavenging on human skeletal remains
Human bones that were located on Taylor Mountain during the original March 1975 search (along with many animal bones too), started being DNA processed in 2005. The King County authorities contacted the families of Ted's Washington victims and asked them to provide DNA samples. The Rancourt family, the Ball family, and the Parks family cooperated, whereas the family of Lynda Ann Healy refused to cooperate.
In 2006, the DNA samples and bones were sent off to the University of North Texas for testing. In 2008, four of the bones were identified as belonging to Brenda Ball, two as belonging to Roberta Parks and one as belonging to Susan Rancourt. The other five bones that remained unidentified, are believed to be those of Lynda Ann Healy.
These DNA results show that Ted may have indeed buried skeletal remains at the Taylor Mountain dump site.
Internal emails exchanged in the summer of 2005 by King County authorities regarding the discovery of the bin of bones by the King County Medical Examiner's office, mentioned that Kathy Taylor (a forensic anthropologist for the King County Medical Examiner's Office) called to announce her office had a bin of bones. The e-mail exchange also revealed there were inquiries about attempts to collect DNA from any of the missing "Bundy" victims, and suggestions that the families of the missing girls be contacted to send samples, and the samples be sent to the North Texas lab to attempt to identify those victims.
And according to 2005 case follow-up reports, the remains had apparently been in the King County Medical Examiner's Office since 1984, and Tom Jensen (one of the detectives assigned to unsolved serial murder investigations like those of Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway) managed to determine that the remains were in fact from the Taylor Mountain site, where four of Ted’s victims had been found (Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, and Linda Healy).
Internal emails also showed how the authorities intended to contact the
families of the victims in their attempt to obtain DNA samples from them and
put names to the remains they had found.
It turned out that Marie Manson (the mother of Donna Manson) and Lyle Manson (Donna's father) agreed to both give DNA samples... Edith Hawkins (the mother of Georgann Hawkins), also agreed to assist with this investigation and give a DNA sample... Brenda Ball’s mother, Rosemary A. Arnaud, also gave a DNA sample... Susan Rancourt’s niece, Kelsey S. Stevens, also gave a DNA sample... Roberta Parks’ sister Susan P. McColl also gave a DNA sample...
Kathy Taylor, King County’s forensic anthropologist, had inventoried the unidentified remains, and determined that they were from at least two different victims. Twelve bones ended up being sent to the University of North Texas lab. According to the case number and location the remains were thought to belong most likely to two of the victims from the Taylor Mountain site (Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball and Lynda Healy being the victims from that site).
Once the University of North Texas lab had completed the DNA work, Brenda Ball’s bones were identified (from sample of mother Rosemary A. Arnaud), Susan Rancourt’s bones were also identified (from sample obtained from niece Kelsey S. Stevens), as well as Roberta Parks’ bones (identified from sample of sister Susan P. McColl)...
The following reports by Robert Keppel, from March 1975, noted down the remains found at the Taylor Mountain dump site:
The bones found at the Taylor Mountain dump
site had been initially placed into evidence with Kay M.
Sweeney, in
April 1975, and despite on-going attempts, no positive leads were
made to link the bones to any murder victims, and in January 1989 Keppel based his remarks to
Ted on the lab’s initial misidentification (Keppel told Ted: “we’ve
never found the rest of Taylor Mountain either. I mean, we’ve found just
skulls. And we never found the remainder of the bodies”). The methods
available before the DNA comparison approach was possible, couldn’t identify
the bones.
By 1988, a King County Ordinance had established a program for the collection, analysis, storage, and use of DNA identification data from persons convicted of sex felonies in King County, and directed the establishment of a technical committee, composed of scientific, forensic evidence, biomedical ethics, and civil liberties experts recognized in their fields, to ensure that the county was using the best DNA fingerprinting techniques available, and directed the technical committee, by September 1, 1988, to recommend to the council those analytical techniques, necessary protocols, methods for destruction of portions of samples not used for identification, and methods of obtaining cell samples that should be used by King County's DNA identification program. By then Kay M. Sweeney had been appointed as the Director of the Washington State Crime Laboratory.
Unidentified cases can take years to be solved but the work to do so is on-going, and samples may not always be available for DNA comparison.
The identified remains collected from the Taylor Mountain dump site invalidate the “pathological liar” theory advanced by some, and also the “possessive-with-the-remains” theory advanced by some. According to some people, serial killers are often so possessive, that they are fiercely secretive about the location of their victims’ remains and won’t reveal it to anyone, so as to “dominate” those remains forever and be the only ones to do so.
They are such “possessive” and
“controlling” creatures, serial killers... They want their victims all for
themselves, even beyond death, and they’ll jealously guard the secret of the
location of their remains forever... This notion probably provides good copy,
but as far as truth - claims go, it might not always be accurate. Ted Bundy
apparently did reveal to police investigators accurate details about the
locations of his victims’ remains, during the few days in which he debriefed
law enforcement about the locations of remains. Debra Kent’s patella was also
discovered in the approximate location where Bundy buried Debra, after Ted described
the location to Utah Detective Dennis Coach. In 2015 DNA testing was performed on
the patella
and it was determined that it was indeed from Debra Kent.
For more information on the dump sites Ted Bundy used, see: https://archive.org/details/washington-crime-scene-stuff
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