So much is made out of the lives of serial killers— the men who hunt, rape, torture, and kill. What about the men and women who chase them? How are their stories represented? Fictional films and television shows often dive into these types of stories, and today with all the true crime out there many of the actual investigators have even been on screen. It isn’t often the stories of the real investigators who brought down the most notorious killers in history make it into, or dominate, biographical films about the criminals they caught.
The Riverman (2004) feels like a feature film-length version of the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” Tom Towler’s screenplay looks at the story of Robert Keppel (played by Bruce Greenwood)— the real life version of Will Graham from the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, most recently portrayed by Hugh Dancy in the stylish and gory NBC series Hannibal— whose work on the Ted Bundy case returned to haunt him when he had to go back to talk with Bundy in hopes of generating leads in the Green River Killer case. The actual Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway, occupies mostly figurative space in the story, acting as the plot’s main driving point. Keppel’s relationship to Bundy is the screenplay’s major focus, their physical meeting in a Florida jail taking up a significant portion of screen time. Both the figurative and literal spaces these killers occupy in Keppel’s life allows the audience to witness, and experience, the psychological torture of those who hunt monsters.
What makes the screenplay interesting compared to most serial killer biopics is that Keppel is the focus. More than that, Bundy’s role in the Green River Killer’s case has been made out to be so much more than what it was in reality. The Will Graham-Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling-Hannibal Lecter relationships played up to such entertaining, grisly excitement and suspense in fiction is exactly that: fiction. The only information Keppel was able to get out of Bundy that actually helped the Green River Task Force’s investigation was Ted’s insight about the serial killer, whom he called the Riverman, likely returning to the scenes of his crimes to derive sexual pleasure from his victims’ bodies— something he hideously did with his own victims. The fact The Riverman pays more attention to Keppel than Bundy is significant, as well as the fact Ridgway is barely seen until late in the film. Rather than glorify Bundy or Ridgway in any form, the focus on Keppel helps the film maintain a better moral compass than many fictionalised adaptations of serial killers on screen.
Towler’s screenplay operates on a psychological perspective by use of space. Keppel’s headspace gets worse the closer he gets to Bundy, and the further he gets into the Green River Killer’s psyche, which is physically represented on screen. Bundy’s initially in his cell talking to Keppel and Dave Reichert (played by Sam Jaeger). He gradually moves out to the table with Keppel, shedding his handcuffs and restraints, as the literal distance between the two men closes to arm’s length. Following their initial meetings, Keppel begins to imagine himself in the literal shoes of the Green River Killer, just as the fictional Will Graham walks himself through a crime scene on Hannibal: he watches himself kill and dump the bodies of women. He even visualizes himself in the back of Ted’s car while Bundy recounts moments of his own crimes. His wife Sande (portrayed by Kathleen Quinlan) saw him go through this first while originally hunting Bundy years before, remarking that his head is “full of death” because of how he works. This is the psychological space which a profiler like him must inhabit to be able to empathise with me who rape, torture, and murder— certainly not an enviable position. Just as Keppel becomes closer to Bundy in a physical way and, in turn, to Ridgway in a figurative sense, so do we get closer to him psychologically as a person by understanding the devastating an emotional toll of catching serial killers.
Bundy as a character (played by Cary Elwes) offers more complexity to the psychological profile of a serial killer, and, despite his information not providing much for the FBI in real life, his presence in the film aids the viewer in getting more acquainted with Ridgway’s mind and thought process. Bundy, as a character here, serves a twofold purpose: he’s an antagonist for Keppel due to their history, and he’s also a source of insight for him, both of which takes a cumulative psychological toll on the profiler. Bundy describes Keppel’s predicament perfectly by use of a fishing analogy. Ted sees Keppel as a genuinely moral man and knows that having to wade into the deepest, darkest waters affects someone like him. He calls Keppel a “fisherman” who only makes small catches for years and years. He says to make the big catch the fisherman has to dive under the water himself, but this is where “a fisherman drowns.” After Keppel spends too much time with Bundy, he begins to drown emotionally, and it threatens to take him back to a bad psychological headspace that could threaten not just his stability as a person, but also the relationship he has with his wife and children.
On the one hand, Bundy distances himself from his own crimes by referring to his victim as a “subject” to undo them of personhood, and calling himself an “entity” or referring to himself totally in third-person, unable to confront his own humanity in the face of his hideous crimes. He admits to Keppel, albeit through this use of third-person speech, that if he talked with a victim too long it “would’ve made her too familiar” for him to kill later. On the other hand, Keppel can talk for hours with a killer, and his primary objective is exactly that: to make his subject, the killer, overly familiar. He’s able to put himself so deeply into the shoes of killer— in essence, finding a human connection with them— he verges on falling into their dark mindset himself. We see him juxtaposed with Reichert, who’s an uptight conservative-type unable to even pretend to empathise with a murderer, and it casts his skills in an even more impressive light. This powerful use of empathy, taken to a near superhero level in the fictional character of Will Graham, is what nearly transforms Keppel into a monster like Nietzsche warned.
Keppel nearly unravels after Ridgway’s given a polygraph, only to beat it with his sociopathic behaviour. He heads to the city strip where the Green River Killer’s picked up sex workers. There, he picks a up a girl as he attempts to get deeper into the killer’s perspective. Other members of the Green River Task Force wind up finding him while conducting surveillance, believing at first he could be a suspect, or even the killer, before he’s identified. There’s no evidence to suggest the real Keppel actually went this far in pushing himself psychologically, but this scene illustrates how deeply the murders affected his psyche, showing the potential worst of his deterioration in while hunting down monsters. This parallels “some kind of break down” Keppel is rumoured to have had while pursuing Bundy years prior. His coming together with Ted as a dark reunion is like the full circle of his psychological trials. Like a modern paraphrase of the earlier Nietzsche quote, Keppel gives a monologue about how the darkness in others can change those around them: “But if you’ve known someone with a soul so dark, so terrifying, and you’ve crawled into every foul corner they think they’ve hidden from you, and you’ve inhabited them, how do you come back? Can you return to how you used to be?”
Robert Keppel
Luckily for Keppel, he was able to avoid falling headlong into the abyss. His work with Bundy on the Green River Killer case actually helped him close the book on over a dozen unsolved murders— some known to detectives, some unknown until then— only days before Ted was executed in the electric chair, and in the end, without much real help from Bundy, the task force arrested Ridgway and he was later convicted for 49 murders. Although The Riverman is about the hunt for Ridgway, and partly about Bundy, its true focus remains on Keppel throughout and his state of mind becomes the device priming the film’s engine. Many films based on real serial killers focus on the grim details of the murders involved, or the personalities and lives of the killers. This one chooses to examine what effects those details have on people whose job it is to be immersed in them. Not to say we’re wrong for taking interest in stories involving serial murder— this column wouldn’t exist otherwise. Films like The Riverman, few though they may be, remind us that vicious predators like Bundy and Ridgway are not meant to be glorified. It’s the people who honour their victims by hunting and chasing their killers who ought to be examined, remembered, and honoured.
