That spring, a few months before Nixon’s resignation, Ford had visited Olympia to speak and I went to see him with my college press credentials. I was deeply and naively disappointed that his speech was a vigorous defense of his boss. In Washington state, Attorney General Slade Gorton had been the first high GOP official to call on Nixon to resign. Former U.S. Attorney General Elliott Richardson had made a stealth visit to the Evergreen State College campus, where I got to meet him, a famous victim of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” who quit when the president scandalously pressured him to fire the special prosecutor who was investigating him. The air crackled with political drama.
I remember the day Nixon resigned. I was editor of the Evergreen college newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal in Olympia. For part of the year I also had a nightly newscast on KAOS-FM radio, our school’s station. The newscast was a “rip-and-read” affair; I pulled what I thought were the most important world news stories off a chattering wire-service teletype machine and read them into a microphone. For months, Watergate was at the top of the news, but at its resignation climax the campus was eerily quiet. I remember walking across the empty Red Square plaza thinking how such a big historic moment could pass without a public peep.
It was not the only drama going on. In March 1974, a 19-year-old student disappeared from Evergreen as she walked to a campus event. As the months went by, no one knew what happened to Donna Gail Manson. A $500 reward was offered by her parents. I participated in a search party organized by the Thurston County Sheriff’s office and campus security. Her case was added to a growing list of young college women who were vanishing. We reported on her disappearance. A task force on murdered and missing women was held on campus that July, and more abductions were predicted.
And they happened. It was clear by that summer that there was a pattern in some of these disappearances. July was a turning point: Two young women vanished in broad daylight during a busy summer day at Lake Sammamish. As police interviewed park-goers, a suspect named “Ted” with a Volkswagen Beetle had been approaching women to help him with a boat. Some got suspicious and passed. Still, it jibed with a previous incident at Central Washington University. A kidnapper’s name and MO were coming into focus.
In September, the remains of the two missing Lake Sammamish victims and one other were found on a wooded hillside in nearby Issaquah. The missing persons’ case was suddenly a murder case, and we all eventually came to learn about serial killer Ted Bundy. He is believed to have killed at least 30 women and girls, maybe many more. It took years, but before Bundy’s execution in Florida in 1989 for killings committed there, he confessed to Donna Manson’s murder, including graphic details. Her body was never found.
These 1974 events still echo in 2024. President Joe Biden’s decision not to run for reelection sent shock waves through our national politics and the 2024 election. Facing certain impeachment, Nixon’s stunning resignation shook the institution of the presidency. It was an historic first. And while Nixon was an “unindicted co-conspirator” for Watergate crimes that threatened democracy, many of his top aides were convicted of Watergate-related offenses. Nixon was later pardoned by President Ford for any crimes he might have committed. Today, former president Donald Trump has been the most indicted former president in U.S. history, and is, for now, a convicted felon, another first. The Supreme Court’s recent broad decision on presidential immunity has reopened the question of what a president is allowed to do in office.
Republican Dave Reichert is running for governor, a former King County Sheriff who as detective interviewed Ted Bundy for assistance in trying to get into the mindset of the Green River killer, Gary Ridgway, who followed Bundy in slaughtering young women in the Seattle area beginning in the early 1980s. Ridgway wasn’t caught and convicted for some 40 years until, in the early 2000s, DNA evidence connected him to some of the victims. He was convicted of 49 murders and given a life sentence for each, but the total number of victims is believed to be 70 or higher. He is in the state prison in Walla Walla.
Questions are left that we’re still trying to explain. Is our democracy strong? How did the housecleaning of institutional corruption in the Watergate era become such a mess in the present? Is the Supreme Court a fair arbiter? Is the rule of law something we can all agree on? What seemed like a moment of clarity in 1974 now seems badly blurred.
And what makes a Ted Bundy or Gary Ridgway? Books and documentaries continue to explore these subjects. Bundy’s cousin has recently written a book, Dark Tide, that offers a look at Ted and his Washington family. But no matter how closely you look at their crimes — or perhaps because you might look closely — they remain largely unfathomable.
As a student journalist back in the ’70s, it didn’t occur that future me would have so many big questions about the stories we covered half a century later.
