Our effort was mocked by some police supervisors: has the computer caught Ted yet?

When Mary Osmer later told us her story, her eyes glistened with guilt. To her, the stranger seemed friendly, sincere, very polite, and easy to talk to. He had a nice smile and didn’t get upset when she told him she wouldn’t go with him.

Our inexperience was telling, and it favored the killer.

We needed an over-confident Ted, not a defensive Ted, because overconfidence breeds mistakes, and that’s just what we needed our Ted to make in order catch him.

If it can be said that serial killers, through the control they exert and the terror they spread, make victims of the entire communities—families and loved ones, the police who track them, and the general public who must live in fear—then in his own way, Dave wasa victim of the Green River killer, just as I became one of Ted Bundy’s victims.

Years ago I read about a psychiatrist who said, ‘If you could only photograph everybody who came out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would have a mug book of all the active violent offenders against women in that particular area.