Kay McFadden / Times staff columnist
"The Riverman" is finely crafted look at monsters and lawmen

CHRIS REARDON / A&E Cary Elwes gives a superbly modulated, low-key performance as serial killer Ted Bundy in the A&E film "The Riverman." It's based on the 1995 book by former King County detective Robert Keppel about Keppel's jailhouse conversations with Bundy in an attempt to solve the Green River killings.

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In A&E's "The Riverman," two themes emerge from a film-noir swirl of rain-spattered streets, disturbing flashbacks and marvelously tense acting.

First is the old adage that it takes a thief to catch a thief or, this case, serial murderer. Second is the notion that the best hunters embrace the mindset of their prey.

But the makers of "Riverman" exercise a different kind of entrapment: a TV sting operation.

Airing at 8 tonight, the movie closely sticks to the 1995 tome "The Riverman: How Ted Bundy and I Hunted the Green River Killer." The chief author is local law-enforcement legend Robert Keppel, who today teaches at Sam Houston State University in Texas and directs the Center for Crime Assessment and Profiling.

While tonight's artful film vividly renders the interior world of at least one infamous criminal, however, the connection between Bundy and convicted Green River killer Gary Ridgway proves far more tenuous than the publicity implies.

The tantalizing hook is that Bundy, who was on death row in 1984, volunteered insights to Keppel that helped identify Ridgway as a suspect many years before his arrest.

Keppel certainly has the background to support his assertions. As a homicide detective for the King County Sheriff's Department in the 1970s, he was primary investigator on Tacoma native Bundy's suspected murders in the Northwest.

Then, while chief special investigator in the state attorney general's office and already acquiring a national reputation, Keppel consulted on the Green River killings with the lead detective, one Dave Reichert.

	CHRIS REARDON / A&E Sam Jaeger, right, plays detective Dave Reichert. "The Riverman" begins in 1982, with Reichert investigating the Green River killings. But the film focuses on Ted Bundy and former detective Robert Keppel.

The movie "Riverman" opens at this juncture. Following a dark, moody introduction by Keppel (Bruce Greenwood), we return to Aug. 15, 1982. Reichert (Sam Jaeger) has just been assigned to take charge of a case already under intense media scrutiny.

Cut to a riverbank where young women's bodies are surfacing. Reichert stumbles as he's taking photos and practically falls on another collection of remains. He subsequently visits Keppel's class on homicide at the University of Washington and asks for help.

The film version of a partnership is thus established. Reichert is the naïve, by-the-book straight arrow and Keppel the imaginative, albeit somewhat troubled, veteran. Their interaction is presented as mostly amiable and complementary.

Things get more interesting when Keppel one day receives a letter in the mail from Bundy (Cary Elwes), who's awaiting execution in Florida for the murders of several women and has just lost an appeal. He suggests helping with the Green River case.

Despite concerns from wife Sandy (Kathleen Quinlan), Keppel flies with Reichert to Florida. There ensues the most fascinating part of "Riverman" — and the most frustrating.

Initial meetings with Bundy involve both Keppel and Reichert. The movie clearly wants to convey that Bundy provides some valuable observations, and you anticipate seeing their application to the Green River killings.

But Keppel has an ulterior motive: the still-unsolved murders of eight women in the Seattle area. As we learn from additional flashbacks, Bundy was a suspect.

So when Reichert returns to Seattle to confront a suspect that turns out to be Ridgway, the Green River part of the film moves offstage. The camera stays on Keppel's talks with Bundy.

As in "The Silence of the Lambs," these cat-and-mouse exchanges are the supremely suspenseful parts of "Riverman." At the climax, Bundy confesses to the eight Seattle-area murders and eventually, to 28 killings in all. The particular revolting details exposed under Keppel's prodding are not for faint-of-heart viewers. There's a re-enactment of the first murder to which Bundy admits, of a young University of Washington student whom he lured by pretending to be on crutches.

Yet "Riverman" is not exploitive or simple-minded. Greenwood, Elwes and Jaeger turn in superbly modulated, low-key performances. Executive producer Hawk Koch and director Bill Eagles reconstruct familiar events in an imaginative fashion that transports us from the overtly sleazy turf of low-rent prostitution to the far more disturbing realm of predatory perversion.

"If you held a slasher film festival in the SeaTac area," Bundy advises Keppel at one point, "I'm sure you'd have a whole pile of suspects." We later see Keppel cruising Pacific Highway South, getting a disturbing feel for the terrain.

Nonetheless, viewers may experience disappointment. The trail from Bundy to Ridgway is implicit rather than explicit, especially after Ridgway passes a polygraph test.

It's worth noting that even those close to this case have expressed doubts about Bundy's usefulness.

Reichert, who is running as a Republican for the 8th Congressional District seat vacated by Jennifer Dunn, had his own book about the Green River case come out in July under the title "Chasing the Devil."

According to Times reporter Michael Ko, "Chasing the Devil" largely dismisses the contributions that the Bundy talks made toward helping solve the case. It also describes ongoing tensions between Keppel and Reichert.

In fact, the case wasn't cracked until November 2001, after Reichert's OK to use new DNA testing techniques on old evidence finally led to charging Ridgway with murder.

That's minimized in "Riverman." Instead, the movie offers a few scenes of Ridgway (Dave Brown) that insistently mirror Bundy's profile of domination and objectification.

"I'm sorry for doing it," says Ridgway at the film's end. "But I wasn't, uh, I wasn't killing a person."

It must be hard enough to be a law officer without mentally filing away stuff like this.

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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