Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (13 page)

Haruye Kawano was one of six Japanese children in Bev’s sixth grade class at Central Elementary School; after Central, the girls went on to Jason Lee Junior High School. They had a lot in common; both their fathers owned small grocery stores, they lived just a few blocks from each other, and both girls were ambitious and competitive. “She was always elected president, I was elected vice president. It got to be irritating,” Bev joked.

In April, 1942, when the girls were 14 years old, eight thousand Japanese, including Haruye, her parents and her four siblings were sent to a “Jap camp” built in the valley, near Puyallup. It was named Camp Harmony. The
Tacoma News Tribune
reported that Old Glory “flew proudly” over the camp, and that by summer the “Japs” had made a “cheerful exit,” and boarded the train for internment camps at Pinedale, California and Twin Falls, Idaho. The evacuation was “accomplished on time and without incident.” The newspaper boasted that only five “Jap” were left in the city—three were in jail and two were in hospitals. The city would be rid of them as soon as possible.

After several weeks at Camp Harmony, Haruye and her family were sent away. Bev went to the train station to say goodbye to her young friend. She felt helpless as she stood and waved as the train pulled out of Tacoma, and Haruye and her family left a city that didn’t want them. Despite the description in The
Tacoma News Tribune,
it was not a cheerful exit.

A year later it was put before the people of Tacoma: did they want the Japanese to return? A majority said no, and it was early 1945 before they were allowed to resettle in Tacoma. But not all of them came back. Bev learned that her friend eventually became a nurse and lived in Chicago, but they never saw each other again. Bev was not good at making close friends. She would never again try in the same way.

It was summer, 1951, when Bev married Don. They had met as students at the University of Washington. During the war Don served in the Army Air Corps, where he learned accounting and bookkeeping. During one of their many breakups, Don dropped out of college and went to Alaska where he worked as an accountant and played the clarinet and saxophone in a dance band. And then he returned to Seattle and showed up at Bev’s door. By then she had graduated from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and was living in one of her father’s cabins on the east side of Fox Island, not far from Honeymoon Bay. She taught at the small school on the island, at what was known as Sylvan, Washington.

Bev’s father was not an outdoorsman, but he suspected that the land would be worth something, someday, as the surrounding cities grew. His efforts at owning land and cabins—especially ones that required a boat to get to— were mixed. On one of the family’s first outings, the boat began to take on water and nearly sank before the family reached shore. He was relieved when a bridge connecting the island to the mainland was built in 1954.

Bev liked teaching, but found it hard. It was her first experience, and she had four grades in one room at the island school. But her friend Larry M___ was teaching at the same school. It was not a coincidence. Although he was married, M___ was in love with Bev and she knew it. After Don’s return from Alaska, Bev agreed to marry Don. But the day before the wedding, Larry made a last appeal to Bev: he would leave his wife and young daughter for her. He begged her not to marry Don. Bev went to her parents, saying she wanted to call off the wedding. “They said I would ruin their lives,” Bev remembered. “I should have done what I wanted to do.” She was headstrong, but not enough to defy her parents. She often wondered over the years: would she be any happier as the wife of an insurance salesman, which is what Larry became when he left teaching? Would Larry M___ have encouraged her, in ways that Don didn’t, to write, to drive, to be fun-loving?

Bev’s thoughts on what constituted a successful life were not popular with her parents. “I did not want to get married and raise a bunch of kids but that was not normal; what was normal was to marry and have kids,” she would say. But she had “big dreams.” She wanted to be a journalist or, as she stated candidly, a “famous writer.” When she spoke of her dream, she pantomimed being in the trenches and holding a rifle. She wanted to go where the action was.

Bev and Don were married in her parent’s living room on August 6, 1951. Bev knew quickly that it was a mistake, that she and Don were not compatible. “I was really in love with someone else,” Bev told Raleigh Burr’s second wife, Bonnie Taschler. Ann was born 16 months later.

After Ann disappeared, the police spoke with Larry M___. Bev had included his name on a list of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances to be checked out. M___ willingly met with the police at their headquarters and told them he had not had contact with Bev in years. That may, or may not, have been the truth.

Now it was summer again, one year since Ann had vanished. As Bev hacked at the blackberries, she thought of Ann, of what lay ahead. Ann’s dog Barney would have to be put to sleep; he was having seizures. In a few days the children would start at a new school. They wouldn’t return to Grant, which Ann had attended. Bev hoped they would be safer at the parish school at St. Patrick’s. And Bev planned to put away some of the family photos long-displayed at the brick bungalow on N. 14
^th
Street. The ones with Ann were too heart-wrenching to see every day.

And then there was a subject she planned to bring up to Don. Sometime after Mary was born Don had had a vasectomy (there were rumors that the Catholic Church would soon ease its stand on birth control, but Bev had never been particularly devout, and Don never formally joined the church). So if they were to contemplate filling the void that Ann had left, they would need to adopt. Bev began to think about the possibility. Another blondehaired baby girl, another chance.

Bev was certain that Ann was dead and that the person responsible was someone the family knew. Don was more optimistic. “He was very quiet; he went to his job every day. He had a lot to do, which is probably good,” Bev said. “He didn’t quite accept it. I knew different.”

HE PRACTICED POSING. He could
appear
scholarly. He could
appear
confident. He could
appear c
harming, the all-American boy-next-door. Except the boyishness was really immaturity, and in a few years when he most wanted to impress young women, his posing didn’t work. He could only get them if he killed them.

In high school Ted felt that he didn’t understand social situations and social cues; within a couple of years he found that he didn’t have to understand them—he could pretend. So he did. He gave off a glibness, a charm that was superficial but that many young women, and the state’s politicians, thought was brilliance, even genius. There was talk, after he got involved in Republican state politics, that he might be another John Kennedy (a young
Republican
John Kennedy). Political leaders who he drove for, or spied for, or whose parties he attended, treated him like a favorite nephew.

“I became expert at projecting something very different,” Ted said later. “That I was busy. It is clear now, I think, that a huge part of my life was hidden from everyone—secret, as it were. It didn’t take much effort at all.”

Ted was good at over-claiming—exaggerating or fabricating his knowledge, experience and background to impress others. He pretended to be a law student when he was a just a junior at the University of Washington. He took a summer class in Chinese language at Stanford University in order to impress a former girlfriend, but became “extremely depressed” and didn’t complete it. He considered a career in architecture, again to impress a girlfriend, but his grades weren’t good enough to get into the classes at the University of Washington. He eventually settled on studying psychology.

He couldn’t sustain the suave charm that earned him, briefly, the moniker “The Cary Grant of serial killers.” In truth, the thing he was best at was undermining himself. He would stay in jobs just a few weeks or months (until he was suspected of stealing, or simply stopped showing up). He dropped in and out of colleges. Most importantly, he sabotaged his various trials by swaggering before juries that were deciding his life or death, and by either trying to represent himself or refusing to cooperate with defense attorneys. He would not plea bargain, even if it would have saved his life.

After graduating from Wilson High School in Tacoma in 1965 (with average grades), Ted lived at home and attended the University of Puget Sound, the campus that he and his mother had lived near when they first arrived in Tacoma, and the campus that was searched for any trace of young Ann Marie Burr. In 1966, after less than a year at UPS and a gap of several months, he transferred to the University of Washington’s Asian studies program, first living in a dorm, and then moving to an apartment. Ted later told a psychiatrist that his first years of college focused on his “longing for a beautiful coed.”

His mood disorder presented itself by 1967, at the latest. He began to have severe bouts of depression; he would be unable to attend classes, would isolate himself with alcohol and marijuana, and had increasing trouble controlling his fantasies. When the mania aspect of his bi-polar disease kicked in, he got involved in politics, felt “charismatic,” “oozed sincerity,” according to one admirer, changed majors, and for several years maintained a seemingly normal relationship with a divorcee with a young child.

His mother, Louise, thought Ted’s “trouble” (meaning the murders of at least 30 women and possibly dozens more) began when Ted was rejected by a girlfriend. They met in the fall of 1966, Ted’s first term at the University of Washington. Referred to as “Stephanie,” “Marjorie,” “Susan,” or “Diane,” (all pseudonyms) in books about Ted, she was pretty, with long hair parted in the middle and from a California family with money. She was “wealthy, poised and worldly,” everything Ted wasn’t. She eventually broke things off with Ted; later, she told investigators that she had tired of his games (including sneaking up on her and trying to frighten her) and had concluded that his boyishness was really immaturity. A couple of years later, when he had worked on his more refined persona, he re-met “Stephanie.” They became close again; in fact, she thought they were engaged. And then he suddenly dropped her, with no explanation. It had been a ruse, a game, just like the ones he and Doug Holt used to play on friends in Tacoma. It was one of his “getting over” games, tricking her to get even for the heartache she had caused him.

For years, people would theorize that the young women he murdered—many with long hair, parted in the middle—were stand-ins for “Stephanie” or even his mother. (Later, Ted said that he wasn’t pursing a “stereotype” so much as a “certain class” of woman.) If his first murders were committed in 1974 (and not in the 1960s, as many believe), then they began just a month after he played his trick on “Stephanie.” Most detectives and psychiatrists who studied Ted discount the possibility that he was “killing,” over and over, the girl who had first rejected him. Thousands of young women at the University of Washington had long hair parted in the middle, were pretty, and lived in sororities. One of them was Julie Burr, who not only was at UW when Ted was, but often visited Lake Sammamish, the scene of one of Ted’s most infamous crimes. Their paths may have very well have crossed.

Ted’s cousin, Edna Cowell, also at UW, introduced him to all her friends; they all had long hair parted in the middle. In fact, a friend of Edna’s was a close friend of Ted’s first known victim, Lynda Ann Healy. Like Ted, Healy was a psychology major at UW, and they reportedly had classes together. One night, Edna’s friend had a date to meet up with Healy; she never showed up. She had been abducted that morning, January, 31, 1974, from her basement apartment near UW. Her remains, and the remains of three other victims, were found on Taylor Mountain, east of Seattle, in March, 1975.

In the fall of 1969, Ted met Elizabeth Kendall in a bar near campus. Liz was 24 years old and divorced, with a two-year-old daughter. Liz and Ted dated for five years, until 1974, when he moved to Utah for another try at law school (after dropping out of UPS). During Ted and Liz’s relationship, at least 10 young women disappeared in the Pacific Northwest. Most were students on college campuses in Oregon and Washington. When Ted moved to Utah to attend law school, the killings mysteriously stopped in the Northwest and began in Utah and Colorado. Liz began to suspect that her boyfriend could be the mysterious “Ted” police were looking for.

Ted’s cousin, Edna, got to know Liz, but they were never close, probably because of Liz’s insecurities. “Ted and I were good friends, and she’d be incredibly jealous, insecure, super-needy,” according to Edna. In her defense, it was not easy to be Ted’s girlfriend. She experienced firsthand Ted’s moodiness, disappearances, secrets, and games. Like the others, she didn’t understand his love of startling people. There were indications that Ted was hiding parts of his life. As police looked for a young man with a cast on his arm or crutches, who tried to lure women to his car by asking them for help with his books or a sailboat, (often using a quasi-British accent), Liz found plaster of Paris and crutches in Ted’s apartment, and a hatchet under the seat of his car.

In a memoir of her life with Ted, Liz Kendall wrote that twice, when they were having sex, Ted deliberately put his arm on her windpipe, choking her. At least one of those times Ted went into a trance, and she had trouble getting him to let go. Then, on the Fourth of July weekend, 1974, the two were floating down the Yakima River. Liz was perched on the edge of the rubber raft when suddenly he “lunged” at her, put his hands on her shoulders, and pushed her into the river.

As she struggled in the icy water and managed to pull herself back into the raft, he was expressionless, she wrote. The incident happened just days before one of Ted’s most horrific crimes, the murders of two young women he lured separately from Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974. That’s when police finally had a name for the man they were looking for. There were several women whose lives were saved that day because they declined to help the man who said his name was “Ted.”