Discuss Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes
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The keys
posted by DRDMovieMusingsSTAFFMOD on May 11, 2019 at 4:32 PM
Bundy's girlfriend reported her boyfriend Ted had keys that weren't his.
WHY TF did they not get a warrant, get those keys and try them in the doors to the homes of the victims?
One set fitting could plausibly be coincidence. Two, three, four sets matching? No jury would believe that to be coincedence.
Interestingly enough, the handcuff key for DuRonch's cuffs were found at the scene of the Kent abduction. Voila - Evidence. Charge. Trial. Conviction.
But they could/should have had same in Seattle.
Why has not one of these investigators been made to answer for not following up on the keys?
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on May 12, 2019 at 7:01 PM
Part of it has to be that they just didn't believe a relatively clean-cut, lawyer/politician hopeful white male could be capable of such crimes. They weren't looking for his type, so they ignored decent leads because he didn't fit their expectations for what this perp must have been.
How many lives were lost as a result of this? And, why have none of them owned up to this? Any reasonable person who is told "my tan Beetle driving boyfriend named Ted has a bunch of house keys and women's underwear that aren't his/mine/ours. If you've got nothing better to do, you should check it out" would go ahead and check it out. Why NOT?
Reply by write2topcat
on June 8, 2019 at 12:24 PM
Excellent point. I can't answer for the cops up there, but I would guess they were simply overwhelmed with leads being phoned in to them. If I recall correctly, they had asked for tips and got flooded with them. Maybe they had a manpower issue. In retrospect, that tip sounds really hot and something a good investigator would want to follow up. But did it ever make it to a detective? I imagine they had people continuously answering phones and taking information that would later be passed on to detectives. Was this tip sitting in a stack of tips to be followed up?
After they caught him with a bag of break-in tools in his car they had a good idea this was the guy. At that point you would think they would have found the tip. But this was before we had things computerized. Even so, data entry of all those tips would take time. They may not have found that tip until after he had escaped the second time and gone down to Florida.
If I had to guess, that would be mine: the tip was still on a piece of paper in a stack of other pieces of paper, not found until he was on the run.
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on June 9, 2019 at 8:15 PM
I appreciate your reasonableness here. It's rather easy for me to sit back, these decades later, with today's technology, from a vantage that is seeing so much more information all in front of me, and say "why didn't they see this?" If giving the entire benefit of the doubt, your guess is pretty fair, and likely not far from the truth.
Yet, when I step back, and look at a wider context, from Bundy to Dahmer to Robert Picton, all the differences notwithstanding, these three despicable human beings all were close to caught...but were let go/dismissed/overlooked...whatever we want to call it. Their sprees could all have been cut short - which is to say, a lot of lives could have been saved, if cops acted on more of the information that we now know was available to them. And, in this commonality, the specifics of each case fade, and what emerges, what rises to the top that binds them together, is what we, as a society, need to come to terms with, in order for our shared experiences to have any value and save future lives from monsters.
Dahmer's case is the nuttiest - a child with a hole in his head from where Dahmer was boring with a power drill, is on the street. Cops are called, witnesses say the boy, of visible minority, is exactly that, a child. Dahmer reassures the two cops at the scene that the boy is in fact an adult, they are having a lover's quarrel, so the cops have a laugh about it, leave the child to Dahmer, who takes the kid back to his place, and finishes him off. FFS. This ain't a tip sitting in a pile on a desk somewhere. They didn't run Dahmer's ID, nor the child's (if they had, theyd' have seen Dahmer had an incident on his record involving this child's brother); didn't examine the child's physical condition, didn't listen to the (also minority) eye-witnesses at the scene. The one voice that got all the attention, dignity, respect, weighted above all other voices and all material facts on display before them and within their grasp, was Dahmer's.
And, yes again, I agree, "back then", they may not have had all the intel. Today, we do. If they missed stuff back then, okay. But, today, we DO have the bigger picture on what makes these kinds of cases mitigatable - if we can learn from that bigger picture and agree on the most useful way to interpret it.
Reply by write2topcat
on June 10, 2019 at 12:21 PM
Agreed. And I remember the incident you speak of regarding Dahmer. There is no way to excuse the actions of those cops who saw the half naked boy in the street and gave him back to Dahmer. I cannot imagine they followed procedure. What a terrible lesson, which cost a boy his life, and other lives afterward.
Why do changes not happen until after tragedies so often? After tragedies a bunch of attention is paid to what should have happened. I suspect that small, local law enforcement departments were resistant to change, especially if nothing major had occurred in their area before. The Chief or the Sheriff would likely be inclined to keep doing things the way they were trained to do them, believing it had always worked before, that sort of thing. Then after a preventable tragedy happened, after action analysis began and they had to humbly admit that their system was inadequate.
I don't mean resistant to technology necessarily. Law enforcement adopted fax machines right away. But in general I think there is a tendency to stick with what you know, that sort of thing. I believe we are more proactive and better served by technology today, though I am sure things still fall through cracks in the system not yet plugged.
We are all familiar with the FBI criminal profilers today, but the guys who had the idea for that unit did not get much support for it in its infancy. Anyway, now local departments are aware of this science and know they can call the FBI for an analysis of troubling cases, even if those cases fall outside of FBI jurisdiction. Each time one of these preventable tragedies happens and makes national news, I hope departments everywhere begin to take inventory of their systems, their training, and not just regarding the system breakdowns which allowed the most recent tragedy to occur. I am sure none of them want to see their name attached to the next preventable murder, and I believe that in general our law enforcement agencies and departments nationwide are much better educated, trained and prepared today.
It is strange to look back at that time period. I lived through it. I was a young man then. It didn't seem like a backward or primitive era at the time. But compared to modern times it seems primitive. Back to Bundy and that tip, the person who took the tip might not have put it in the "hot tip pile". Think, a guy has a bunch of panties. He could be a pervert and the girlfriend found out about it. And he has a bunch of keys. There could be benign explanations for that also. And VW bugs were much more common then than today. The phone operator might not have viewed this as a hot tip. And I have to think that nearly every person who phoned in a tip was excited, thinking their tip might be the right one.
I am much more critical of the way the cops handled Bundy once he was arrested, allowing him twice to escape.
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on June 11, 2019 at 2:21 PM
@write2topcat Well said.