fbi undercover agent switching assignment

#Fbi undercover agent switching assignment serial#

“When you like investigating, that’s what you want to do,” she says. “Her ability to handle the small details and enthusiasm for a difficult investigation helped us solve the Bundy cases.”Īfter seven years with King County, at a time when it looked like she was headed back to patrol work, McChesney reconsidered the FBI. “Her zest for detective work was unending,” former detective Robert Keppel ’66, ’67 writes about McChesney in his book The Riverman: Ted Bundy and the Hunt for the Green River Killer. “We picked up key pieces that led us to Bundy as a suspect.” “We got tremendous information from so many people,” she says. A former girlfriend of Bundy’s told McChesney that he kept crutches, bandages, and medical plaster around, which helped the team realize he faked an injury to lure his victims. She was able to learn things his friends and girlfriends were less likely to share with a male detective, she says. McChesney’s particular duties included interviewing the women in his life.

#Fbi undercover agent switching assignment serial#

Posted to the sex crimes unit, she joined the task force investigating serial killer Ted Bundy. “But it was an extraordinary experience.” “It hadn’t exactly been my goal,” she says of the beat work. She trained at the police academy, with five other women in her class. It was the early 1970s and women were showing they could be effective police officers, valuable in ways their male counterparts weren’t. “I ate a lot of carbs and wore a lot of jewelry.” So the commission gave McChesney one month to gain seven pounds. He acquiesced, saying he could take her on, but that she couldn’t be insured because she was underweight. She appealed to the county’s civil service commission, which instructed the sheriff to hire her. So McChesney applied, and took the civil service exam and scored very well. “He said, ‘Why would you let the requirement stop you?’” “I was neither.” Her boss was undeterred. She thanked him for the encouragement, but noted that she didn’t meet the job condition that she be 5’ 4” and at least 110 pounds. “It was really nice in the workplace to have someone recognize your abilities.” “He said, ‘This has you written all over it,’” says McChesney over coffee last spring at her home near Los Angeles. Her supervisor encouraged her to apply for an opening for a policewoman. She was good at her job, fast, focused, and efficient. Kathleen McChesney ’71 outside the FBI’s Los Angeles field office (Photo Jon Rou) But by then McChesney had a job with the King County police that she loved, as a fingerprint examiner, a civilian position with duties including fingerprinting, photography, and evidence collection. Edgar Hoover died and the policy was changed. It was an inauspicious beginning for the girl from Auburn who would eventually become the highest ranking woman in the agency.

He gave one to each student until he got to me. “But then he passed out the applications. “We all wanted to apply,” says McChesney. Everyone was impressed with the smart looking fellow in the three piece suit. One day during Kathleen McChesney’s senior year, an FBI recruiter came to campus.