Robert D. Keppel
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Robert David Keppel (born 15 June 1944) is an American retired law enforcement officer and detective most known for his work tracking serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.
Keppel first encountered the "Ted Murders" just one week after beginning work as a homicide detective. He investigated Bundy and his crimes extensively, and continued an erstwhile correspondence with him from the time of his initial imprisonment to his execution in 1989, at one point consulting him in order to form a profile of the then at-large Green River Killer. While Bundy was of little help to that investigation, Keppel was able to get him to confess to several unsolved murders.
With forensic psychologist and criminal profiler Richard Walter, Keppel published an article which groups serial killers into four distinct sub-types: power-assertive, power-reassurance, anger-retaliatory, and anger-excitation or sadism. Walter and Keppel also created the HITS database, which provides crime and offender characteristics for law enforcement.
Keppel has a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of Washington. As a kid, he grew up in Spokane, Washington and graduated from Central Valley high school in 1962 where he was a star athlete. He attended Washington State University in Pullman, Washington on an athletic scholarship and graduated in 1966. After playing freshman basketball at WSU, in his next three years of college, he elected to concentrate on high jumping in track. Although he was only 5 feet, eleven inches tall, he was an outstanding collegiate high jumper. He just missed making America's 1964 Olympic team as a high jumper. After he graduated from college, he high jumped 7 feet.
Keppel retired as chief criminal investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's Office. He joined the faculty of the Seattle University. As of 2006, Keppel was an associate professor of criminal justice at Sam Houston State University, and currently teaches there via teleconference. In 2007, Keppel joined the University of New Haven as an Associate Professor of criminal justice.
Keppel is author of The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer, made into a made-for-TV movie in 2004, starring Bruce Greenwood as Keppel and Cary Elwes as Bundy. He is also the author of many textbooks regarding criminal justice and related topics.
Contrary to popular to belief, author Thomas Harris did not base the relationship between FBI trainee Clarice Starling and serial killer Hannibal Lecter in his novel The Silence of the Lambs in part upon interviews between Keppel and Bundy. [1] [2]. Therefore, it is impossible for Thomas Harris to have based his fictional relationship on this real one.
