Robert Keppel

Robert David Keppel (born 15 June 1944) is a retired American law enforcement officer and detective best known for his work investigating serial killers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway.

Keppel 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. After playing freshman basketball at WSU, in his next three years of college, he elected to concentrate on High Jumping in Track and Field. Although he was only 5'11", 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.

He earned a B.S. in Police Science and Administration at Washington State in 1966, and his M.A. in 1967. In 1979 he received a Master of Education degree from Seattle University. In 1992 he received his Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Washington.

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 a 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. Keppel was able to get Bundy to confess to several unsolved murders in the weeks leading up to his execution.

Bundy was sent a paperback copy of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon — which depicts the relationship between a detective and an incarcerated serial killer — when it was revealed that Harris was in attendance for a portion of Bundy's 1979 Miami "Chi Omega" murder trial, and incorporated several elements of Bundy's case evidence into the plot of the novel (most notably the bite-mark exhibits and related testimony). Harris also based the relationship between FBI trainee Clarice Starling and serial killer Hannibal Lecter in his 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs upon interviews between Keppel and Bundy concerning the Green River Killer.

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