investigation.
This system gained supporters soon after Schmitz checked it with the county’s computer experts and got their approval on it. The computer guys welcomed the challenge of developing an untriedapplication for the computer in the field of criminal investigation. Schmitz then convinced Captain Mackie to assign Sergeant Bill Murphy to the task force to act as our liaison with System Services.
Unfortunately, Sergeant Schmitz had not yet reckoned with the stolidly unresponsive nature of the King County police’s administrative bureaucracy. He soon discovered that at least in Mackie’s view, organizing the files was not the only duty he had been given. Even though he was doing useful things for our investigation, his perception of his role on the task force conflicted with Captain Mackie’s. The captain said he originally assigned Schmitz to supervise the investigation, not just organize the files. Clerks organize, sergeants supervise, and captains rule. So, by May 29, Schmitz had to content himself with an administrative transfer to the Communications Center. He would not be around to see the results of this project to which he had contributed so much. Schmitz would always remain one of my favorite associates since the nature of his contribution to the investigation far surpassed what police sergeants are normally expected to do. Even today, only a few people realize exactly what Sergeant Schmitz accomplished.
The Northwest Missing andMurdered Women Conference
By May 1975, there was a sense among task force members that our Ted killer had moved on to a new location, because we had not had any similar disappearances in the King County area since July 1974, 10 months earlier. We also believed, based on our premise that Ted was a traveler, that our murder cases were probably related to similar murders in other jurisdictions. So we decided to examine the murder cases in other jurisdictions, hoping to glean suspect information from them that might have a bearing upon our investigations. Maybe one of the locations we investigated would hold Ted’s signature multiple-body dump site.
With this aim in mind, Roger Dunn attended a conference in May 1975 in Boise, Idaho, that highlighted missing and murdered females from seven western states and British Columbia. All the investigatorswere faced with a number of extraordinary and still-unsolved cases of murdered females. Fortunately for us, there were attendees from Colorado and Utah who were investigating single, not multiple, murder cases that had occurred in October 1974—the cases of Laura Aime and Melissa Smith—and, from January 1975, the Caryn Campbell case. Those murders would eventually be tied to Ted Bundy, even though a firm connection had not been made at that time owing to the extreme difficulty of comparing the aged and significantly decomposed skeletal remains in Washington to the fresh discoveries in Utah and Colorado. Time and nature are great levelers and make most forensic comparisons like the ones that confronted us close to impossible.
What was most interesting and troubling about all of the cases described at the conference was that there was only one instance in which a signature multiple-body recovery site was located, like those at Taylor Mountain and Issaquah. It was 700 miles away from King County in rural Sonoma County, California. From December 1971 through March 1972, Sonoma County authorities recovered the bodies of four nude females, ages 12 to 19, at this one site located beside a steep precipice that bordered a country road that wound into the woods of rural Sonoma far away from any towns or villages. Two were skeletal remains from which the cause of death had been wiped away by time, and two were recent kills who had been strangled. It seemed all of the bodies were dumped from a vehicle onto the same hillside from the side of the remote county road. Then another nude female victim was found at the same location in July 1973. This
This system gained supporters soon after Schmitz checked it with the county’s computer experts and got their approval on it. The computer guys welcomed the challenge of developing an untriedapplication for the computer in the field of criminal investigation. Schmitz then convinced Captain Mackie to assign Sergeant Bill Murphy to the task force to act as our liaison with System Services.
Unfortunately, Sergeant Schmitz had not yet reckoned with the stolidly unresponsive nature of the King County police’s administrative bureaucracy. He soon discovered that at least in Mackie’s view, organizing the files was not the only duty he had been given. Even though he was doing useful things for our investigation, his perception of his role on the task force conflicted with Captain Mackie’s. The captain said he originally assigned Schmitz to supervise the investigation, not just organize the files. Clerks organize, sergeants supervise, and captains rule. So, by May 29, Schmitz had to content himself with an administrative transfer to the Communications Center. He would not be around to see the results of this project to which he had contributed so much. Schmitz would always remain one of my favorite associates since the nature of his contribution to the investigation far surpassed what police sergeants are normally expected to do. Even today, only a few people realize exactly what Sergeant Schmitz accomplished.
The Northwest Missing andMurdered Women Conference
By May 1975, there was a sense among task force members that our Ted killer had moved on to a new location, because we had not had any similar disappearances in the King County area since July 1974, 10 months earlier. We also believed, based on our premise that Ted was a traveler, that our murder cases were probably related to similar murders in other jurisdictions. So we decided to examine the murder cases in other jurisdictions, hoping to glean suspect information from them that might have a bearing upon our investigations. Maybe one of the locations we investigated would hold Ted’s signature multiple-body dump site.
With this aim in mind, Roger Dunn attended a conference in May 1975 in Boise, Idaho, that highlighted missing and murdered females from seven western states and British Columbia. All the investigatorswere faced with a number of extraordinary and still-unsolved cases of murdered females. Fortunately for us, there were attendees from Colorado and Utah who were investigating single, not multiple, murder cases that had occurred in October 1974—the cases of Laura Aime and Melissa Smith—and, from January 1975, the Caryn Campbell case. Those murders would eventually be tied to Ted Bundy, even though a firm connection had not been made at that time owing to the extreme difficulty of comparing the aged and significantly decomposed skeletal remains in Washington to the fresh discoveries in Utah and Colorado. Time and nature are great levelers and make most forensic comparisons like the ones that confronted us close to impossible.
What was most interesting and troubling about all of the cases described at the conference was that there was only one instance in which a signature multiple-body recovery site was located, like those at Taylor Mountain and Issaquah. It was 700 miles away from King County in rural Sonoma County, California. From December 1971 through March 1972, Sonoma County authorities recovered the bodies of four nude females, ages 12 to 19, at this one site located beside a steep precipice that bordered a country road that wound into the woods of rural Sonoma far away from any towns or villages. Two were skeletal remains from which the cause of death had been wiped away by time, and two were recent kills who had been strangled. It seemed all of the bodies were dumped from a vehicle onto the same hillside from the side of the remote county road. Then another nude female victim was found at the same location in July 1973. This
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