The "killing season" pattern actually gets even more incriminating with Deborah Tomlinson, the young woman killed in the last couple days of 1975. My follow-up blog article (still in progress; in fact I'm still investigating aspects of it right now) will go into the many suspicious details on Deborah's murder. Some of the weirdest details include:
- Grand Junction cop Dave Schumacher, who was likely one of Linda Miracle's boyfriends and later shot a civilian to death (predictably with no consequences), lived in the apartment right above Deborah
- Deborah appeared, by numerous witness accounts, to be dealing drugs, seemingly at the behest of her uncle
- Her father was being targeted by the mafia, apparently trying to make him give up some land that he owned, and both she and him had experienced physical danger (such as being run off the road) in the months leading up to her murder
- John Antonopoulos, the purported citizen investigator who I met in 2020 and initially worked with throughout 2021, shows multiple signs of being a person-of-interest in Deborah's case
In the meantime, here are the heavily-redacted GJPD records:
https://archive.org/details/DeborahTomlinson_GJPDYou raise good questions about the DNA; I myself have been skeptical too. The GJPD offered to send me their DNA analysis in addition to the records I linked, but at the time, it was too expensive for me. Now that I've saved up a bit more money I will order it. Not letting DNA occupy too much significance in old unsolved cases like these is a solid practice, as it never tells the whole story even when it
is handled correctly. For instance, even with the alleged DNA match to Jerry Nemnich in Linda Benson's murder, there was also an unidentified sample which was downplayed by the prosecution at trial. And even if these people like Nemnich or Jimmy Dean Duncan (the latter conveniently deceased since 1987) were involved in the murders, that doesn't rule out that they were part of something bigger.
To your question about what Bundy's true role was: First of all, I think that many of his alleged victims who supposedly just fit the classic serial killer profile (random victims within the killer's demographic group of interest) were actually targeted for specific reasons. This is true of his crimes even before Colorado. Donna Gail Manson (see the
RI thread I have on her), a Pacific Northwest victim, was into occult topics, and was researching them for her college class with an adviser named Richard Alan Miller who was directly linked to MKUltra. In my blog post I discuss one of Bundy's alleged Utah victims Debra Kent, whose real murderer is likely not Bundy but instead a local drug distributor named Ronald Dennis Auth. Auth moved massive volumes (in the tens of millions if not hundreds of millions) of Colombian marijuana in the Caribbean, during the same period that the CIA and mafia were doing the same, so his involvement would almost certainly suggest a deeper motive. Debra's father Dean Kent was a corporate officer of Utah's Triangle Oil Company, a company
later found to be engaged in financial misconduct whose officers also included members of the Allred family (powerful LDS family name).
Getting into the Colorado crimes, I'd argue that the pattern ramps up even more. Caryn Campbell, whose real murderer may be Grand Junction police chief Ben Meyers instead of Ted Bundy, was the sister of a Fort Lauderdale cop. It just so happens that Fort Lauderdale was the headquarters of the aforementioned CIA/mafia drug operations which Ron Auth was likely part of. These operations extended out into Aspen CO, where Caryn was murdered, and Vail CO, where Bundy's next alleged victim Julie Cunningham was murdered. And of course on top of that, you have Julie's coincidental friendship with the daughter of prominent Salem cop Jim Stovall, who was well acquainted with Salem's former police chief...Ben Meyers. And finally, the next Colorado victim attributed to Bundy, Denise Oliverson, marks the start of Grand Junction's "killing season".
I don't know exactly what role Bundy played in these murders, but if he wasn't part of them, he was being maneuvered into leaving behind circumstantial links that would make him a patsy for them. We supposedly have Bundy making gas purchases with his credit card near Aspen on the day of the Campbell murder, near Vail on the day of the Cunningham murder, and in Grand Junction on the day of the Oliverson murder. While far from sufficient to convict him in any fair trial, it's a pretty incriminating pattern, but it also feels overly convenient: this careful master criminal just happens to produce easily-traceable records of being in or near the exact cities where he commits all three of his Colorado murders? Either way, he was laying a trail: whether it's of him participating in these murders, or of him being directed to these places without knowing the reason a la Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. (Impersonation, if someone got ahold of his credit card, is also possible, once again a la Lee Harvey Oswald.)
This criminal enterprise, primarily centered around interstate drug traffic (though with some aspects of sexual exploitation as well), appears to have been eliminating those who posed a threat to their operations. Bundy was not linked to all of the group's murders, but he was linked to several, and by allowing a "serial killer" to take credit, it effectively removed any exploration of deeper motives. Similarly, it removed any exploration of whether non-Bundy murders by the same enterprise were connected to Bundy's supposed murders. That is what I think Bundy's main purpose was: providing a means to write off various murder-for-hire cases as the work of a "lone nut".
Overall, I think serial killers fitting the
Programmed to Kill profile tend to fall in two major categories (though there are plenty of overlaps): traffickers and hitmen. The traffickers (which your investigation has largely focused on) tend to be procurers, pornographers, or "cleanup" persons for organized sex rings. Major examples would be Dean Corll, the OCCK group, John Wayne Gacy, the Hillside Stranglers (a notable example involving girls instead of boys), Wayne Williams, Bob Berdella, and Marc Dutroux. The hitmen are individuals who either commit or are set up to take the fall for (usually it's a mix of both) contract murders, so that the contracted nature of these murders gets obscured by their designation as "serial killer" victims. Major examples would be the "Zodiac" (though much like OCCK, the idea of a single Zodiac is likely a myth), John Linley Frazier, Herb Mullin, Ted Bundy,
Thomas Creech, David Berkowitz, Henry Lee Lucas, Ottis Toole, Doug Clark, and Joseph DeAngelo. I'd say Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer are both a pretty even cross between the two categories.