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Reichert and Bundy talked for two days, and Bundy played mind games. "He talked in the third person all the time, but later we realized he was talking about himself," says Reichert. But Bundy did give Reichert some useful insights: a serial killer doesn't leave home in the morning compelled to kill; he will do it when he feels like it and when he feels safe. He needs to be in control. He told Reichert the police were giving too much information to the press and concurred with Reichert's suspicion that the killer was at times taunting the cops. "Certainly there is an amount of competition between this individual and the police," Bundy was quoted as saying in The Riverman, a book about the case by Robert D. Keppel, an investigator who aided Reichert on the case.
Back in Seattle, the investigation was getting bogged down by the sheer number of bodies. Corpses were being found in a wide arc around SeaTac Airport by kids on bikes, a man walking his dog, mushroom collectors, soldiers on exercises. "Every time you found a body it was like being hit on the head with a baseball bat," says Reichert. Often when the cops went to examine a body in the woods, they would come across the remains of several others nearby.
"We had mountains of evidence. We even took birds' nests from scenes hoping we would find a hair from the suspect or a piece of jewelry," says Bruce Kalin, a detective brought in on the case in early 1984. At each dump site, the cops cut away the undergrowth and sifted through the topsoil for several hundred yards in every direction. It took three to four days to process each set of remains. The forest helped turn up evidence for those who knew how to look. The decomposing bodies made the soil more acidic, turning overhanging foliage yellow. The number of layers of leaves on the remains indicated how many years they had been there.
Police called in an FBI profiler from Quantico, Va., to help them narrow their search. His profile suggested the killer felt humiliated by women, was an outdoorsman who knew the local countryside well and may have had some religious motives. Reichert and his men thought the profile was too broad to be very useful. And there wasn't much help coming from the county coffers. For 18 months, the cops could not get special funding for a full-scale investigation of the murders. Many people in Seattle felt the problem was not so much the killer but rather the proliferation of prostitutes on the strip. Finally, in January 1984, a year and a half after the killings began, a dedicated Green River task force was set up. At its height in 1986, it had 56 members chasing down 47,000 tips and 17,000 names. Several times investigators thought they had found the killer. Reichert was convinced that the killer was a taxi driver who worked the strip, but that lead was dropped when the killings continued even while the cabbie was under 24-hour surveillance.
After three years of fruitless work, the investigation had become a public joke. In 1986 the Seattle Times ran a cartoon depicting a cop peering through binoculars and speaking into a walkie-talkie, saying "He's white male...harbors a deep resentment towards the opposite sex...and knows these woods inside out." The next panel showed cops surrounding a small boy in front of a tree house (with a sign reading NO GURLS ALLOWED) and yelling "Freeze dog-breath! Green River Task Farce!"