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#1
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09-09-2026, 03:05 PM
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 ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:36 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 41,947 Mentioned: 2231 Post(s) Quoted: 21098 Post(s)
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Theodore Robert Bundy Interviewed on Green River Killings
Theodore Robert Bundy, convicted of three murders and no more than three, offered investigators his interpretation of the unsolved Green River killings during a 1984 Florida prison interview, but the case was not closed by anything he said. Bundy was born November 24, 1946, and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Young women began disappearing in western Washington in 1974. He was convicted of aggravated kidnapping in Utah, escaped custody twice in Colorado in 1977 and was arrested in Florida in February 1978. In the early hours of Sunday, January 15, 1978, an intruder entered the Chi Omega sorority house beside the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee and attacked four residents. Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, were killed, while Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner were seriously injured. An hour later, an intruder attacked Cheryl Thomas in a nearby house. Kimberly Leach, 12, was reported missing from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida, on February 9, 1978. Her body was found two months later near the Suwannee River. Bundy confessed to far more killings than the three for which he was convicted. In the week before his execution, investigators from Washington, Utah, Colorado and Idaho came to the prison at his invitation and described claims to about 24 killings. Larger figures circulate, but the prosecutor who convicted him in the Leach case said: "I think all these figures are suspect. I don't think Ted Bundy could give you an accurate number." Bodies of young women began appearing along the Green River south of Seattle in 1982. The first was Wendy Lee Coffield, 16, on July 15, and the case stayed unsolved for 19 years. Robert Keppel worked the 1974 Washington cases as a King County homicide detective and by 1984 was chief criminal investigator for the state Attorney General's Office. Dave Reichert was a King County detective on the Green River Task Force. Bundy wrote to the task force from death row in a letter dated October 1, 1984, offering himself as a consultant. The letter reached Keppel through a Pierce County judge. Keppel replied on October 16, 1984, asking Bundy to "provide just some facts about the nature of your help." Keppel and Reichert interviewed him at Florida State Prison on November 17 and 18, 1984. Bundy supplied interpretation, not information. He had been in custody since February 1978, four years before the killings began, and knew nothing first-hand about them. He called the unknown killer the Riverman and argued that the man was catchable at the body-disposal sites, not during the abductions, because he would return to those sites. Bundy pressed for surveillance of the dump sites and for screenings of violent films to watch who came. The Chi Omega case was tried on a change of venue in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit for Dade County before Judge Edward D. Cowart. Bundy was adjudicated guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, three of attempted first-degree murder and two of burglary. On July 31, 1979, he was sentenced to death on the two murder counts. The Leach case, indicted July 21, 1978, moved on a change of venue to the circuit court in Orange County, Orlando, before Judge Wallace Jopling. Bundy was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping and sentenced to death for the murder and life for the kidnapping. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the judgments on June 21, 1984, and May 9, 1985. Bundy was never tried for any killing outside Florida. He was executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, aged 42. Gary Leon Ridgway gave a DNA sample in 1987. In 2001, it matched evidence from four victims. He was arrested on November 30, 2001, and pleaded guilty on November 5, 2003, to 48 counts of aggravated murder in the first degree. A King County judge sentenced him on December 18, 2003, to consecutive life terms without parole. Ridgway pleaded guilty to a 49th murder on February 18, 2011. The recording contains audio only, with no video, and runs 7 hours 38 minutes across eight tapes and sixteen sides. Released by the King County Sheriff's Office Public Disclosure Unit, it is the interview itself, recorded at Florida State Prison on November 17 and 18, 1984. Tape starts within the recording:  ·
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#2
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09-09-2026, 03:05 PM
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Re: Theodore Robert Bundy Interviewed on Green River Killings
FBI agent Bill Hagmaier put his time interviewing Bundy on Florida's death row at more than 200 hours from 1984 to 1989, building the relationship that made Bundy's 1989 confessions possible. Hagmaier was attached to the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, which interviewed convicted offenders to develop the Bureau's profiling methods. He began visiting Bundy in 1984, the same year Bundy started writing to the Green River Task Force, and continued until the execution. Hagmaier was not investigating Bundy. The Florida convictions were final and on appeal, and the Bureau wanted to learn what Bundy could explain about offenders it had not caught. In February 1986, Bundy was still publicly maintaining his innocence and continued doing so until days before he died. Anything he said about his own conduct came while he was denying the murders. In his last days, Bundy called Hagmaier his "best friend" and asked to speak to him. Hagmaier said he knew the hand of the man who called him his best friend had also cut the heads off other people's daughters. The recording runs 82 minutes and captures their February 13, 1986, research interview, nearly three years before the execution. It is the interview itself, not an interrogation: No case is being made against Bundy, and no caution is given. The recording mainly documents the relationship that preceded the confessions by three years.
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#3
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09-09-2026, 03:05 PM
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| ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:36 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 41,947 Mentioned: 2231 Post(s) Quoted: 21098 Post(s)
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Re: Theodore Robert Bundy Interviewed on Green River Killings
Bundy began confessing to investigators after Florida Governor Bob Martinez signed his death warrant on January 17, 1989, setting his execution for the following week at the end of a decade in which Bundy had maintained his innocence. By January 1989, Bundy had run out of appeals. Investigators traveled to Florida State Prison from Washington, Utah, Colorado and Idaho, with Bundy addressing one jurisdiction at a time while asking for more time to continue. Martinez refused. When Bundy decided to talk, he asked for Hagmaier, the FBI agent who had been visiting him since 1984. Bundy's final law enforcement interview was with Robert Keppel on January 23, the day before Bundy died. Investigators who met with Bundy were not impressed. A Salt Lake County detective who spent about 90 minutes with him on the same day as this recording said Bundy admitted eight killings but provided specific details about only two. A Colorado police chief whose investigator took three confessions said Bundy was dangling a carrot and trying to buy time. James Coleman, Bundy's attorney of three years, called the confessions a "pathetic ploy." The recording runs 15 minutes and was made two days before the execution, during Bundy's confession week. It sits alongside the law enforcement interviews rather than among them and captures statements by Bundy as he tried to trade information for days he did not get.
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#4
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09-09-2026, 03:05 PM
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| ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:36 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 41,947 Mentioned: 2231 Post(s) Quoted: 21098 Post(s)
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Re: Theodore Robert Bundy Interviewed on Green River Killings
Bundy, 42, was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison, about 11 miles west of Starke, on the morning of January 24, 1989, and was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. He died for the murder of Kimberly Leach and was under two further death sentences for the Chi Omega killings. Several hundred people gathered outside the prison to see it done and cheered again when the hearse left. His final words in the death chamber came minutes before his death. Looking at his attorney James Coleman and his Methodist minister Fred Lawrence, Bundy said, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." The recording captures a separate, earlier statement to Florida State Prison Warden Thomas Barton at 6:15 a.m., less than an hour before Bundy was taken to the chair. Bundy gave directions to two places, one in Utah and one in Colorado, where he said he had left victims. It was the last thing he had to trade, but the execution went ahead on schedule. The locations were his claim and not an established fact. The recording covers Bundy's statement to Barton rather than his final words in the death chamber. Florida's governor released it two days later.
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#5
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09-09-2026, 03:42 PM
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| ★ ★ GENERAL ★ ★ Poster Rank:36 male Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 41,947 Mentioned: 2231 Post(s) Quoted: 21098 Post(s)
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Re: Theodore Robert Bundy Interviewed on Green River Killings
Bundy made four recordings alone in his Orange County jail cell in Orlando between January 26 and February 2, 1980, while on trial for the murder of Kimberly Leach and already under two death sentences from the Chi Omega case. He was still publicly maintaining his innocence. The tapes are not interviews. Nobody else was present and no questions were asked. On the first tape, Bundy explains that he concealed the recording from guards by leaving his television on. Journalists Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth were working on a book. Their introduction to Bundy came through a chain that began with Bundy's girlfriend, Carole Ann Boone. Michaud gained prison access by telling officials he was an investigator working on Bundy's appeal, which he was not. Bundy understood that the book would let him give his side and show he had not killed anyone. Contact with Michaud continued during the trial and for months after Bundy was sent back to the state prison. Michaud later recounted that Bundy spent weeks discussing only his childhood and refused to address the murders. Michaud eventually asked him to discuss the crimes in the third person, as an expert on the type of man who would commit them. Bundy adopted that approach, producing material used in the 1983 book The Only Living Witness, but none of it appears on these tapes. Here, Bundy speaks in the first person while on trial for his life, still denying everything and presenting the account of himself he chose to tell. An edited transcript of the interviews was published after his execution. In 2019, Netflix licensed the audio for a four-part series. The four cell recordings run about 79 and a half minutes. Three contain Bundy's account of growing up in Tacoma, while the fourth attacks Colorado investigator Mike Fisher and the handling of the Caryn Campbell case, in which Bundy was charged but never tried. The raw recordings have never been issued commercially in full, and these cell tapes circulate through private hands. Tape starts within the recording:
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