Refuting the book “Riverman” by Robert Keppel -multiple misrepresentations and misstatements that don’t match case files

 Page 10 of book:  “Issaquah…no clothing, wallets or jewelry – items commonly used for preliminary identification – had been found on site.” [Keppel is referencing the first day on site]

Refuting document:  ESAR list of finds:  a shoe is find #4; Detective Hahn who is in charge, states in his official summary report that many items of evidence were found; all told quite a few items to victims or unknown victims were found at Issaquah per the overall records of those initial search days – items such as a comb, book, brown camel hair coat, pantyhose, sweater, scarf, gold earring, green sock, bicycle shift cable. The area was secured and the search and rescue teams were all professionals and logged in every day along with their team supervisors.


Page 11 of book:  “Sergeant Randall ordered me to return the next day with Explorer Search and Rescue [ESAR] personnel to scout the area for any additional bones.  It was pickup work.  The more senior investigators had obviously thought it was a shit detail for the rookie homicide detective.  Even my colleague Detective Rolf Gruden chuckled and commented – with a snobbishly superior attitude – that I probably wouldn’t find anything.  He said they had searched the hillside and had found nothing but bones.”

Refuting documents:  ESAR Mission Data Sheets; supporting SAR reports and original search documents show that extensive personnel, professional were on site every day that searches were conducted and that care was being taken to preserve and protect the evidence that was removed each day.  Keppel was not in charge – other officers were.  Logs of who was on site, when, how many hours worked and how far each search team member had traveled were kept.  These documents were coded with separate search and rescue case numbers so other investigators may not have seen these over the ensuing years as they had been moved to the sealed area but Keppel knew as he was on site.  He misstated the efforts of these professionals and embellished his own role in the search efforts of that day.
Refuting documents:  9-7-1974;  Detective Mackie ordered the evidence search and Hahn was in charge.  On 9-8 it is noted that Keppel was on scene at 8am. This was the start of the search after the discovery of human remains on 9-7. Hahn’s report of that day states “through the day ESAR found many items of evidence which were processed by KCP, H&R”.  On 9-8-1974 it is noted that the officer in charge for the day was Donald Lundine.


Page 14:  “ESAR is a voluntary rescue organization whose members are trained in search techniques for locating lost hikers and downed aircraft.  ESAR’s 50 or so teenagers, who were supervised by a small cadre of adults, had never participated in a police evidence search before.”

Refuting documents: ESAR logs show that most personnel had assigned Department of Emergency Services numbers – these would not have been issued to minors. Logs were kept and and many had recorded bringing their cars to the site and had driven from 20 to 50 miles to get there. Logs were kept of all ESAR personnel every day and signatures of team members  and injuries while searching were also noted.  The officers listed in charge on several of the original documents were Lee Hahn and Donald Lundine – Keppel was only noted as there, not in charge.  The ESAR team leader was Les Janz.


Page 16:  “Unfortunately, we didn’t even consider that they could have been buried.  We had found so many bones on top of the ground we didn’t even think the killer’s modus operandi involved burial.  Our inexperience was telling and it favored the killer.”

 Refuting document:  ESAR evidence finds; On day 1 a shovel was found [find #9].  It was located 66 feet from search line 1. A depression in the soil was found 120 feet up search line 1.  There were human remains scattered and animal evidence [dung; bones with scat].  There was evidence of possible burial:  depression in the ground [find #2; shovel find #9; overturned earth find #321].


Page 18:  “The fresh physical and circumstantial evidence such as eyewitnesses, lead bullets, bullet casings, and weapons were noticeably absent from this scene.  The area had been stripped of all these usual forensic clues.  It was a scene of great mystery.  In the history of the King County homicide investigation, no murder case had a crime scene with so little evidence as this one.”

Refuting documents:  ESAR lists from their original records: brown camel hair coat [find #322]; book [find #308]; women’s underwear [find #327]; knife sheath [find #401] sweater and scarf [find #410]; pantyhose [find #328]; gold earring [find #510] hair curler [find #512]; note – the hair curler was found near the earring – green sock [find #516]; bicycle shift cable [find #517]; shoe [find #4]; cement [find #313] screwdriver [find #307] note – a screwdriver was also found on Taylor Mountain – small bottle [find #5] – note – this small bottle was found near bones and the shovel per the original ESAR notes.  Bundy was known to ply his victims with alcohol and/or drugs per the autopsies of two of his Utah victims and also he had shown Liz a date rape drug in a small bottle in Utah according to Liz’s book.  There was also a chemical bottle and a thermos found on site in the initial search of Taylor Mountain.
There were several finds of possible graves:  shovel [find #9] which Bundy talked of being carried in serial crimes; a depression in the earth [find #2]; overturned earth [find #321] which was located only 38 feet from find #317 which was a femur.  This proximity of the finds relative to each other was in the original records of the ESAR professionals.  Knowing the proximity of the evidence relative to each other is very important to analyzing the crime scene and I can’t imagine any investigator even at that time period not realizing its significance.


Page 19: “The killer probably saw for himself the results of predators scavenging human remains, since one body was there for over a month before the other two were discarded”.

 Lack of a citation document for this by Keppel:  where is the proof of this statement?  There was nothing in the records at all about it.  It is noted in the records that parts were found of at least one to two individuals whose skeletons did not match the known missing girls Ott and Naslund.  Where is the ME statement that proves these remains were there for that long and that there was a difference in the aging of the remains between one victim and the other two?  Only Ott and Naslund are ever discussed so where is the third and possibly fourth victim from that site?  Any statement that it was Hawkins or other cannot be proven and is conjecture only as WA State has claimed publicly that remains were “lost” of Issaquah.  What happened to the over 100 pieces of evidence collected from the site?  This was a major crime scene.


Page 25:  Under the Georgann Hawkins discussion:  “[Ted Bundy…] hoped that he had concealed forever her most identifiable characteristics – her teeth.”

Refuting documents:  Georgann Hawkins detective notes on a deformity she had of the tibia and fibula of one leg – a characteristic that would have identified her remains by x-ray.  It would only have taken an x-ray and DNA would not have been needed nor the teeth.  Two bones were found at Taylor Mountain that were sent to the ME office marked only as “Bundy bones”.  They were in a box of elk bones.  Police at the time were very aware of the deformity and there are detective notes of that time period where they were requisitioning leg x-rays of the victims found on Taylor Mountain.   There is also a notation on the original map of Taylor Mountain of a leg bone possibly being recovered near the stream where other items of evidence were found.
This is the exact quote of an internal memo from the ME Office in 2005 referencing a box of bones from Taylor Mountain being sent to the ME in March of 1984: “there is at least one human tibia and fibula in this bin and possibly one more human tibia.  [She]thinks based on the description that Bundy gave to Keppel in an interview that these may be bones belonging to Georgann Hawkins.  If I remember correctly Hawkins went missing from Seattle.  She says the only paperwork she has with the bin was signed over to the ME on 3-8-1984.  This is very near the time Keppel took over the Green River Killer Task Force investigation.
In 2005 skeletal remains [yes skeletal] were sent to TX to confirm that three of the four girls found there were identified by the skeletal bones.  The other bones did not match the three girls whose DNA had been sent and did not match Hawkins.  These skeletal remains were removed from Taylor Mountain during the days of the initial search and assigned evidence numbers.  Those evidence numbers allow them to be tracked through the records over the years.  There is no doubt they were found originally on Taylor Mountain and refute the decapitation theory that Bundy decapitated victims.  In the records that were sealed Hawkins is always listed at Taylor Mountain and not at Issaquah.  Hawkins remains missing.  Knowing skeletal remains were found at Taylor Mountain why did Keppel put forward the theory of decapitation and so willingly accept Bundy’s rendition of it with Hawkins when her remains were never found and there is no evidence to support that Bundy decapitated his victims in WA State or elsewhere that I can find.


  More to come….