Zed A. Shaw, Painter

Also, apparently his girlfriend Liz at the time, actually called the damn police saying Ted Bundy was the guy. The police were looking for a Ted, with a VW Bug, and she found women's clothes, knives, tons of evidence, and....they didn't go grab him? WTF?

How many random “heh go arrest that guy” calls do you think cops of that era got

Watch the documentary. It wasn't "it might be my boyfriend". It was "he has that car, was at all the scenes, has a rape kit, looks like him, has women's clothes that aren't mine, I saw him leave, has no alibi" and they didn't even go talk to him. There was no excuse.

That’s the interesting question, that decides whether there’s no excuse or not. How many calls with a similar level of detail? It’s the thing documentaries always leave out and it’s the main thing that matters. Masking noise is a thing. We assume this is rare. Is it?

The police claim it was hundreds, but even *they* felt it was enough evidence to do a photo lineup but witnesses couldn't identify him from photos (months later only seeing from a distance, duh). They just said he couldn't be him because he's a republican law student.

Ok. So you’ve got hundreds of suspects. How many man hours does it take, in that era, per suspect? In what order do you dig through them?

Pacific Northwest cops have a very long history of ignoring serial killers. You can't sit here and tell me they are good at their job after Ted Bundy, Green River, and Pickton. All of them operated for years, decades, after being identified, because cops think like you.

I don't think it's in question whether the closing rate qualifies as "good at their job", but like, if you've got four guys and 20,000 man hours of work it's not a job that's going to be done very well.