of hair color, one was 6 feet 6 inches, and another was 5 feet 1. As I passed by the receptionist, she released the electronic door lock and motioned for me to come around so she could talk to me. She informed me that all five were waiting to see me. Unbelievably, they had each confessed to the receptionist that they were the famous Ted killer.
I invited them all in to a large interview room together and had each one introduce himself to the others. I told them when they decided among themselves which one was really the Ted suspect to knock on the door and I would return to book him in jail. The five Teds each replied that they would return to their therapists for treatment. Their respective psychotherapists, for whatever reasons, had told each of them to confess to the police as part of their treatment programs. This was really great, I thought; not only were we trying to identify the real Ted, we were assisting in the therapy of the entire Seattle psychiatric-patient community. As I looked on the calendar, I noticed that it was five days before the full moon, the monthly astronomical marker that indeed signals psychics, psychos, and those self-ordained with extrasensory perception to contribute clutter and unusable information in the case files. The unusual occurrence was the talk of the task force. I probably just should have booked them all and been done with the whole case.
As months dragged by, the investigation into the Ted cases was pared down. It was simply costing too much for the county to fund the task force, so it was cut back even at the risk of slowing down efficiencyof the investigation. The Grisly Business Unit, as we were referred to by the department, was reduced to only a fraction of its former size and was disbanded by June 1, 1975. This left the county’s sustained commitment to the case at less than one year. Shortly thereafter, even its former members stopped talking about it.
Roger and I were left alone to carry the flag; even so, we were determined to make progress in the investigation. Captain Mackie assigned us two additional police officers who had been ordered to light duty—one had a broken leg and the other had a cast on his little finger. They were to man our telephones. I was designated the case coordinator or supervisor, but my official rank, for pay purposes, was only detective. Captain Mackie had become so disappointed with the lack of progress by every supervisor he had assigned to the case, he chose not to put a certified sergeant or lieutenant in charge. Relatively little administrative control was needed in the resulting scale-down to a small investigative team, he believed. We reported directly to Captain Mackie anyway, putting him in the ultimate role of supervisor, which was what he probably wanted.
At first, we conducted a weeklong examination of the circumstances within each Ted murder case, as tradition dictated. But that served only to complicate the entire investigation. Realizing this, we changed our methods and began to approach the overall investigation as a united process. Instead of eight separate cases, we had one case that consisted of eight crimes. Now, we asked, what could be done for the investigation as a whole? This, it turned out, would be the only way we would ever get to the bottom of the Ted murders.
Our strategy was threefold and it was roughly based on what two full-time detectives could be expected to accomplish in one year. First, the Lynda Healy murder case was the apparent beginning of our series, and after looking through the case file again, we realized that the initial investigation into her disappearance had been inadequate. In light of this, we decided to start with day one of her case and exhaust every possible lead, just as if we were starting from scratch on a case that had never been investigated. There was the possibility that the Healy case was the murderer’s first and that he may have made some mistakes not previously uncovered, like
I invited them all in to a large interview room together and had each one introduce himself to the others. I told them when they decided among themselves which one was really the Ted suspect to knock on the door and I would return to book him in jail. The five Teds each replied that they would return to their therapists for treatment. Their respective psychotherapists, for whatever reasons, had told each of them to confess to the police as part of their treatment programs. This was really great, I thought; not only were we trying to identify the real Ted, we were assisting in the therapy of the entire Seattle psychiatric-patient community. As I looked on the calendar, I noticed that it was five days before the full moon, the monthly astronomical marker that indeed signals psychics, psychos, and those self-ordained with extrasensory perception to contribute clutter and unusable information in the case files. The unusual occurrence was the talk of the task force. I probably just should have booked them all and been done with the whole case.
As months dragged by, the investigation into the Ted cases was pared down. It was simply costing too much for the county to fund the task force, so it was cut back even at the risk of slowing down efficiencyof the investigation. The Grisly Business Unit, as we were referred to by the department, was reduced to only a fraction of its former size and was disbanded by June 1, 1975. This left the county’s sustained commitment to the case at less than one year. Shortly thereafter, even its former members stopped talking about it.
Roger and I were left alone to carry the flag; even so, we were determined to make progress in the investigation. Captain Mackie assigned us two additional police officers who had been ordered to light duty—one had a broken leg and the other had a cast on his little finger. They were to man our telephones. I was designated the case coordinator or supervisor, but my official rank, for pay purposes, was only detective. Captain Mackie had become so disappointed with the lack of progress by every supervisor he had assigned to the case, he chose not to put a certified sergeant or lieutenant in charge. Relatively little administrative control was needed in the resulting scale-down to a small investigative team, he believed. We reported directly to Captain Mackie anyway, putting him in the ultimate role of supervisor, which was what he probably wanted.
At first, we conducted a weeklong examination of the circumstances within each Ted murder case, as tradition dictated. But that served only to complicate the entire investigation. Realizing this, we changed our methods and began to approach the overall investigation as a united process. Instead of eight separate cases, we had one case that consisted of eight crimes. Now, we asked, what could be done for the investigation as a whole? This, it turned out, would be the only way we would ever get to the bottom of the Ted murders.
Our strategy was threefold and it was roughly based on what two full-time detectives could be expected to accomplish in one year. First, the Lynda Healy murder case was the apparent beginning of our series, and after looking through the case file again, we realized that the initial investigation into her disappearance had been inadequate. In light of this, we decided to start with day one of her case and exhaust every possible lead, just as if we were starting from scratch on a case that had never been investigated. There was the possibility that the Healy case was the murderer’s first and that he may have made some mistakes not previously uncovered, like
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