Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (21 page)

Nelson described Ted’s conduct in court this way: “Egocentricity, even at the cost of his own best interests.” Nelson believed there was another error committed, too. The jury in the Chi Omega murders had been hung at six to six for life or death; the judge erroneously instructed them that they were required to break the tie. Without that instruction, Ted would have been given a life sentence.

Reluctantly, because he didn’t believe he was incompetent, Ted agreed to Nelson’s petition. Work could proceed on the appeals. Just days before he was to be executed, the Florida Supreme Court denied a stay of execution but the U.S. Supreme Court granted one. He was so close to being executed that Ted had been measured for a casket. For the next three years Ted would be just a hair’s breadth away from execution.

Nelson was never swayed by the charm that others saw. Ted wanted her to see him as he saw himself, smart, charming, sophisticated. She didn’t. “What he always reminded me of was a stereo salesman,” she said. “Glib, seemingly competent, until he was off script.” Where others had seen intellect, even brilliance, she saw a man “about as intelligent as a fair-to-middling college undergraduate….he could talk and write, but he couldn’t comprehend or respond….he was incapable of independent thought or elaboration.” Nelson also described him as “…like a precocious ten-year-old…very literal.”

At that time, Ted was still claiming he was innocent of all the murders attributed to him. Ted told Nelson, “Believe me, Polly, I am not the kind of person who would hurt a fly…” She didn’t believe that, but she had entered the case with what she calls “naïve optimism,” hoping for the “miniscule possibility that Ted had been convicted falsely.” Nelson and Ted hadn’t talked in detail about his crimes; he was afraid she would be revolted. So was she. Her assignment was to dispute his trials, not be involved in the details of the crimes. But with the Chi Omega execution on hold he now faced execution for the murder of Kimberly Leach. Nelson needed to know if there was a chance he had not, in fact, killed her. Nelson really did not want him to be guilty of killing the child.

She finally put it to him. She asked Ted if there was any mistake; could the girl have been killed by someone else? He stared at her and eventually shook his head. It was, Nelson said, his first direct admission of guilt.

Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis calls herself “the last woman to kiss Ted Bundy—and live to tell about it.” A psychiatrist and a professor at Yale and at New York University School of Medicine, Lewis was researching death row inmates. Nelson asked if Lewis would meet with Ted Bundy. Lewis’ work centered on the search for evidence of childhood abuse. That, she believed, was a key to understanding criminal behavior because abuse appeared to change the anatomy of the brain. Specifically, damage to the prefrontal cortex compromises our ability to know the difference between good and bad choices, and to suppress emotional or sexual urges. In 1986, the year she met Ted, Lewis and her frequent collaborator, Dr. Jonathan Pincus, published a study of 14 juveniles condemned to death; all had suffered severe head injuries in childhood and nearly all had been so traumatized they couldn’t remember being abused. Lewis and Pincus believed that the most vicious criminals, are, “…overwhelmingly, people with some combination of abusive childhoods, brain injuries, and psychotic symptoms…”

Lewis began talking with Ted, as well as combing his medical records and talking to family members. She was not impressed with Ted’s bravado. When he first met her, he boasted, “I’ve had seven books written about me!” She said, “Well, I’m dyslexic and haven’t read any of them!”

After meeting with Ted, Lewis “bypassed the small talk and blurted out her diagnosis” to Nelson. “Did you know that your client is bipolar?!” she asked Nelson. It was the first evidence that Ted had a recognized mental illness that might have impaired his judgment at his trials. Lewis said that Ted had been “severely mentally ill” since his teenage or college years.

Trying to get anecdotal evidence from Ted’s family was not easy. Nelson said that Louise Bundy took “an immediate dislike to Dr. Lewis and insisted that Ted was innocent and that there have never been any problems.” But Ted’s relatives in the east—the aunts who had sent him west, away from his grandfather—did confide in the psychiatrist. Dr. Lewis began to hear the stories about Ted scaring people with knives and about his grandmother’s hospitalizations for manic depression. In a rare moment of candor during the three years when execution seemed imminent, Louise Bundy told Dr. Lewis and Polly Nelson, “I can’t wait until it’s all over.”

Lewis’ critics claim she is sympathetic to killers and that anyone can claim they were abused as children. She usually testifies for the defense in death penalty appeals, and has done so for some of the most famous death row inmates in the country, including Mark David Chapman (who shot John Lennon), and serial killer Arthur Shawcross (who cut out and ate the vaginas of some of his victims). Lewis hadn’t believed in multiple personality disorder until she met Shawcross, who she says has three personalities; she said she has seen multiple personalities in at least a dozen of the 150 to 200 prisoners she has studied.

At Ted’s competency hearing Lewis testified that Ted had a lifelong mental illness which she diagnosed as a bipolar mood disorder (also called manic depression). At the same hearing, his co-counsel in both the Chi Omega and Lake City (Leach) trial said Ted had seemed “disinterested” in the trials, fought any suggestion of an insanity defense, and showed no concern about the possibility of receiving the death penalty. But a psychiatrist who examined Ted for the state called him “brilliant,” and said Ted knew “the gravity of the charges.” The request for a new trial, on the grounds that Ted had not been competent to help in his defense, was denied.

Hugh Aynesworth went to Florida for the competency hearing. It had been several years since he and Stephen Michaud had spent time with Ted and published their book. Ted wouldn’t make eye contact with Aynesworth in the courtroom. It was the first he had heard of Ted’s abusive grandfather, the knives incident, and Ted’s manic depression.

In May, 1986, as Nelson worked on Ted’s appeals, NBC was getting ready to air a two-part television movie,
The Deliberate Stranger,
based on
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reporter Richard Larsen’s book about Ted. Ted was portrayed by Mark Harmon, formerly of
St. Elsewhere
and
People
magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” that year. Harmon told reporters that he found the role so emotionally harrowing, it kept him awake nights. He said even his dogs didn’t know him.

Ted didn’t watch the movie (he said he was afraid it’s portrayal of him would make him angry), but Nelson watched a tape of it the next day. She found it “stunningly accurate.”

After the movie aired, Ann Rule received letters and phone calls from teenage girls convinced they were in love with Ted; they wanted to go to Florida and save him. Rule told each of them that they weren’t in love with Ted Bundy; they were in love with Mark Harmon.

Besides the hordes of young women who wrote directly to him (therefore not getting Ann Rule’s good advice), Ted corresponded with Rule, Beverly Burr, a niece of Bev’s, John Hinckley Jr. (who had tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in order to impress actress Jodie Foster), and many others. Polly Nelson saw it all as more of Ted’s “phony” persona. “His letters were extremely patronizing and condescending,” she said. She didn’t like the way he would presume an intimacy with anyone and everyone. His psychiatrist became “Dorothy,” Beverly Burr became “Beverly,” her doctor became “Bill.”

Dorothy Otnow Lewis wasn’t the only clinician or academician studying serial killers who sought to include Ted Bundy in their research. Dr. Ronald Holmes, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Louisville’s School of Justice Administration, was also corresponding with Ted. In 1986, before Lewis ever met Ted, Holmes had three lengthy interviews with him, totaling about 24 hours. Holmes had a two-year grant to study serial killers in the U.S. His work didn’t make news until he talked about Ted Bundy at a seminar in Boulder, Colorado, in 1987, and said Ted had implied he might have committed his first murder and rape when he was young.

“Expert Says Bundy Killed Girl, 8, When He Was 14,” read the headline in the
News Tribune
on May 9, 1987. Bev Burr was photographed holding what the caption described as “a few tattered but preserved mementos of her missing child and the failed search to find her.” The story said that during interviews the previous year, Ted Bundy told Ron Holmes that he had “stalked, strangled and sexually mauled his first victim, an eight-year-old girl who mysteriously vanished from her Tacoma home 26 years ago,” and that he had “stashed the body of Ann Marie Burr in a muddy pit, possibly near the University of Puget Sound.” Only when one reads on is it clear that Ted— again—had been speaking hypothetically.

“This is what he told me,” Holmes stated. “He said he knew Ann because of someone’s paper route; she helped him deliver his papers occasionally. He said he had been in the house before. He entered her house by the side window, walked past the parent’s bedroom, and up some steps. He coaxed her out, downstairs. There was an apple orchard next door. He raped her, killed her, dumped her in a ditch in front of the house, maybe a sewer line. The next day he went over and watched the police talk to the Burr’s on the front porch. He kicked dirt around with his foot. He said she had a crush on him. He said it was his first murder but he had thought about it before. I believe what he told me is absolutely true,” Holmes explained. “There is no doubt he knew her.”

Ted also played the numbers game with Holmes, reportedly telling him that he had committed more than 300 murders in 10 states, not the 20 or 30 murders attributed to him.

As opposed to the earlier interviews with Michaud and Aynesworth, and later sessions with Bob Keppel and Dr. Lewis and Polly Nelson, the prison wouldn’t let Holmes take in a tape recorder, so none of Ted’s revelations to Holmes are on tape.

Of course, Ted wanted something from Holmes. He asked Holmes to buy Carole Boone a home computer. Holmes told Ted that if he was going to buy a PC for anyone, it would be one of his children in college. “He dropped me then,” Holmes said.

A story in the
Seattle Times
about Holmes’ revelations quoted retired Tacoma Police department detective Ted Strand as saying he worked on the Burr case for more than five years, “and we never once had Ted Bundy as a suspect; he was just a kid.” A Tacoma police department spokesman told the
News Tribune
that they had no evidence linking Bundy to the Burr case and had no plans to reopen their investigation based on Holmes’ theory.

However much Holmes was discounted—and he was, by Bill Hagmaier of the FBI, by Ann Rule, by Bob Keppel, and by others—it gave Bev and Don Burr the first hope they had experienced in years that they would find out what happened to Ann. And it might have been one of the times Ted was telling the truth. By 1999, the Tacoma police department was giving weight to the Burr-Bundy connection.

Sometime in the last few months of his life Ted explained to FBI agent Bill Hagmaier who Ted considered his “best friends” and “his family.” One was Hagmaier, who Ted had come to know. The other members were John and Marcia Tanner, his “spiritual advisers,” and a woman named Diana Weiner.

“I got to know Ted pretty well,” Hagmaier said. “One of the ways I related to Ted, we were similar in age, education, we both had a young daughter.” Hagmaier specialized in criminal personality profiling and later in his career consulted on dozens of high profile cases, including the JonBenet Ramsey case and the hunt for the Green River Killer. As Ted had offered to consult with Bob Keppel, he had also offered himself to the FBI. Hagmaier met with Ted on and off for years—without Polly Nelson’s knowledge. She was not pleased when she found out.

Hagmaier said Ted brought up the case of Ann Marie Burr several times. “I can say one of the things he was genuinely concerned about was that after he was gone, people would pile it on,” and blame him for murders he had not committed, Hagmaier said.

“He said, ‘Look, I didn’t do that one, I couldn’t have done it.’” Hagmaier said he doesn’t believe everything Ted told him, but he never caught him in a lie, either. Hagmaier also said Ted like to “jerk the chain” of others, and he may have been doing that when he confessed to Ronald Holmes.

John Tanner was a Florida attorney; he and his wife Marcia were born-again Christians who visited Ted as part of their lay ministry. At the end of Ted’s life, they described him as “a Christian, remorseful for his actions and earnest in his desire to help ease the pain of his victim’s families by confessing to his crimes.”

The fourth member of what Ted now called “his family” was Diana Weiner, a Sarasota lawyer married to another attorney. In late 1986, Polly Nelson got word that a “scantily clad young woman” was visiting Ted. Dr. Art Norman—who had evaluated Ted before Dr. Lewis joined the team—told Lewis he’d brought in Weiner to “soften Ted up,” maybe get Ted to go along with plans for the competency hearing. Both Nelson and Lewis were suspicious of Weiner. She claimed Ted was entitled to another attorney—her—to handle his civil matters since the prison was involved in a lawsuit with its inmates. Lewis and Nelson were worried that Ted was being manipulated and tried to prevent her access to him, but Ted only grew closer to Weiner, especially after Carole Boone left Florida.

“Ted was offered a lot of money and sex to cooperate,” Hagmaier said about the numbers of people wanting something from Ted at the end of his life. Another person who wanted something from Ted was the radio evangelist and psychologist James Dobson. Ted had contacted Dobson about an interview, and Ted’s estate or Carole Boone probably benefitted financially from it. It was videotaped, and seen or heard via Dobson’s radio show, by millions of people. Dobson’s work had focused on the dangers of pornography for years. He had been a member of the 1985 Meese Commission on Pornography (commissioned by U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese).