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Faculty Profile
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Q:
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Which new instructor has spent his life catching, and teaching others how to catch, serial killers?
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A:
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Robert Keppel, associate professor of Criminal Justice
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A Dogged Investigator, An Insightful Teacher
Ted Bundy was charismatic, handsome and murderous. A serial killer who held the country in a frightened thrall in the 1970s, Bundy was identified by a tenacious young Washington detective, the son of a Washington state deputy sheriff.
Robert Keppel was his name, and one week into his job as a homicide detective in Washington, he drew a missing person’s case that eventually was linked to Bundy. Soon, murdered women began turning up in larger numbers, and the list of suspects grew larger still.
Keppel devised a computer program that narrowed 3,500 suspects to 25. Ted Bundy was one of them. Then the phone rang.
It was the Salt Lake City, Utah’s sheriff’s office. They had identified a prowler caught in a local neighborhood as Bundy.
Before Bundy’s killings finally ended, he had taken the lives of at least 30 women, and possibly far more. He died in the electric chair, but not before Keppel interviewed him for help with the notorious Green River Killer, who had been responsible for the deaths of at least 50 prostitutes and teenage runaways, primarily in Washington state.
“Technically he wasn’t any help in actually naming the Green River Killer and catching him,” Keppel said. “But in understanding the Green River Killer, he was a big help.”
From their conversations came Keppel’s mass-market book, “The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt the Green River Killer” (Pocket Books, 2004).
Keppel’s intensive study of –and long experience with – serial killers led him away from a second career moonlighting as a store detective or a corporate security guard and into the world of education. With his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Washington, he has taught at Seattle University, a private Jesuit school in Seattle, and has been cultivated by universities with the most esteemed Criminal Justice programs in the nation. He is now at work on a book about serial violence.
“My whole life is consumed with how to investigate killers and how to catch them,” he said. “Writing and teaching is a way to help others investigate them. I teach the solvability of murder cases, how to study the killers, how successful investigations proceeded and how the killers were caught. With the book, I am trying to make the reader understand how cases are connected so they can use that to their advantage to catch the killer.”
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