Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (3 page)

Whatever the cause, Ted had been damaged emotionally. After a series of tests were performed on Ted in 1986, in preparation for another legal appeal, a psychologist concluded that Ted lacked “any core experience of care and nurturance or early emotional sustenance. Severe rejection experiences have seriously warped his personality development and led to deep denial or repression of any basic needs for affection. Severe early deprivation has led to a poor ability to relate to or understand other people.”

We learn attachment from our mothers, and the cruelest deprivation is when we don’t learn how to bond with others. Factors which cause a separation from a mother— including an unwanted pregnancy, being given up for adoption, or physical, emotional, or sexual abuse—lessen a child’s sense of security. Children who become adults with attachment disorder have difficulty forming lasting relationships and never learn to trust.

Dr. Lewis calls the incident of three-year-old Teddy putting the knives beside his teenage aunt “extraordinarily bizarre behavior” for a toddler. “It’s the kind of behavior that, to the best of my knowledge, you only see in youngsters who have themselves been seriously traumatized, who have either themselves been the victims of extraordinary abuse, or who have witnessed extreme violence among family members,” she said.

Some of Ted Bundy’s final words were about his childhood and his interest in the macabre. During his last hours he asked to see Dr. Lewis. He told her of how “very, very early” he had been fascinated with murder.

It might have been the incident with the knives.
Something
was the proverbial last straw as far as life at Teddy’s grandparents’ house. Something scared Louise’s sisters and her aunt. Ted’s great-aunt Virginia paid to send Louise and Teddy to the home of another brother, in Tacoma, probably to protect them, but from whom or what? Virginia explained it this way: “We felt Louise had to be rescued.”

Although she was moving thousands of miles away, Louise decided to drop her first name, Eleanor, and be known by her middle name, Louise. She also changed her last name and Teddy’s to Nelson to pass herself off as a widow or divorcee.

But the move west came too late. Whatever had shaped Teddy had left its mark. Teddy was missing something, and it was more than a father, a mother who wanted him, or a home without mental illness and violence. He was missing empathy. He was missing an ability to form emotional bonds. He was missing a conscience.

It was early morning, about 5:15 a.m., and Beverly Burr had startled a neighbor by knocking on the front door.

Bev was in her bathrobe, and, as would often happen, she had forgotten she had bobby pins in her hair. She had awakened a few minutes before, checked on her children, and found Ann missing, the front door standing open, and the living room window open wider than usual. She hurried outside and searched the yard. As she walked around the house, she saw that a garden bench—the one she had stolen from an Indian reservation during a summer trip— had been moved from the back of the house near the garage to underneath the window on the west side of the house. That’s when Bev began knocking on doors.

Some people tried to get Bev to come inside. Although it would be another warm day, it had just stopped raining, and the ground was wet. Oblivious to the dampness, Bev anxiously kept saying, “Ann is gone. Have you seen Ann?” They all said no, Ann wasn’t there. Bev peered around them to see for herself.

Two houses east, Alice Bruzas was getting into her car. Many mornings Alice drove her eldest son, William, to his job as a psychiatric aide at the veteran’s hospital. Alice’s teenagers—13-year-old Frannie and 15-year-old Robert— were friendly with Ann.

Alice paused, letting Bev tell the story about Ann being missing, and then went upstairs and woke Frannie to see if she knew where Ann was. Frannie didn’t. Although Frannie was five years older than Ann, they were occasional playmates. Frannie was too old for the dolls that Ann liked, but both girls had canaries and would get together at one house or the other to play with their birds. The families belonged to the same Catholic parish.

Alice seemed unconcerned about Ann being missing, and she hurried Bev away. Robert and Frannie thought of their mother as naively optimistic; she always, always, thought Ann would be found.

According to the police report, the first call to the Tacoma Police Department was made by Mrs. Donald B. Burr at 5:30 a.m. The dispatcher wrote that Ann Burr, age eight-and-a-half, had “taken off” in her night clothes.

Bev woke up Don and said she couldn’t find Ann. They dressed quickly. Within a few minutes, two Tacoma police officers were at their door. Roland Otis, 25 years old, had been on the Tacoma police force three years and was assigned to juvenile cases. Like many of the men in the department, Otis grew up in Tacoma’s north end.

It had been a busy evening for Otis and his partner, Leroy Bush. During the storm, they had come across the cause of the power outage. After a long dry spell, the heavy rain had knocked down a pole that snapped a power line at South 25th and Hosmer Street and started a fire. After reporting the fire to City Light crews, the policemen were ending their shift when they were dispatched to follow up on a report of a missing girl from 3009 North 14th Street.

As the rookie officers entered, they took a quick look around the house. The dining room was on the immediate right and the living room—the room with the window kept ajar for the TV antenna—on the left, the western most end of the house. To the rear of the dining room was a kitchen and breakfast nook. Bev and Don’s bedroom was at the back on the main floor. A carpeted stairway in the center of the house led to the children’s rooms on the second floor. Ann and Julie shared the front bedroom above the dining room. Mary’s room was across the hall, and Greg’s was above his parents’ room. There was a spare room across from Greg’s.

Bev told the police that Julie and Greg had slept in the basement the night before, how Mary and Ann had been up at least once in the middle of the night, and how she had found the window raised and the front door standing open, unlocked from the inside. The Burrs always locked the door at night, and the safety chain was always set. Bev and Don slept with their bedroom door open in case the children needed them.

The parents were worried. Officers Otis and Bush called the station to let the higher-ups know there was no trace of the girl. “This may not be just a missing girl,” one of them told headquarters. As soon as more police officers arrived, Otis and Bush were sent to search the neighborhood. Among the residents they stopped to speak to was Yvonne Doherty, the mother of seven children. She was hanging wet laundry on the clothesline in the yard of her house, at 15
^th
and Prospect, when the patrol car stopped. “They asked if I had seen a young girl,” Doherty remembered. “I hadn’t, and then I heard about it on the news.” She would become one of Bev’s closest acquaintances.

The officers drove and drove, looking for a small, goldenhaired girl in a blue and white flowered nightgown.
Other police officers began going door to door, waking neighbors and asking if they had seen Ann or anyone in the neighborhood who “didn’t belong” there. They asked permission to enter the homes and search from attic to basement.
Don got into one of the patrol cars, and he and the officer drove around the University of Puget Sound campus, a popular playground of children in the neighborhood. They didn’t see Ann, but for the rest of his life Don would remember a young man he saw at one end of a deep pit. It was still too early for a crew to be at the excavation site, but the young man—he might have been a teenager— was stamping his feet in the dirt which the rain had turned to mud. He looked right at Don.
It was 6:45 a.m. when detectives Tony Zatkovich and Ted Strand arrived. The two men were handsome in a Hollywood B movie kind of way. Zatkovich looked like a boxer, with a square jaw and a nose that had gone a few rounds. Strand was dapper, with prematurely-gray hair and glasses. Bev thought he looked like a “courtly gentleman.” The pair was famous for being members of Tacoma’s vigilante police, a group of officers who in the 1940s went outside the police department to clean up corruption in the city. That’s when Tacoma was known as “Seattle’s dirty back yard,” a “dirty city with dirty politics.”
Zatkovich and Strand’s white, 1958 Chevy four-door had an Oregon license plate, so they wouldn’t look quite so much like cops. They didn’t fool many people. Zatkovich’s son, Dick, called them “Dick Tracy One and Dick Tracy Two.” They didn’t need to work at the “good cop, bad cop” routine. It came to them naturally. When questioning a suspect, Zatkovich would be the tough guy, and then leave the room in disgust; Strand would stay and befriend the suspect. But by the 1960s, the men missed the old days, when, as Zatkovich lamented, they “could kick a juvenile in the ass and send him home” with no parental or legal intervention.
Bev shared with the detectives the story that she would tell hundreds of times—how Ann brought Mary to their room, how Bev had told Ann to “take her back up, dear.” The detectives noted that Bev sometimes deviated about what time she had last seen the girls.
What Beverly didn’t say—to the police, Don, or anyone—was that she had little hope. “When I first saw that window open, I knew I would never see her again. I knew I would never know what happened,” she remembered years later. “It came to me, just like that. It was a strong feeling. When they were searching, I thought, ‘What’s the point?’ I knew she was gone, and we would never see her again.” Frightened and not daring to admit her feelings, Bev mostly sat and listened. Every time the phone rang she jumped, certain that Ann’s body had been found.
The police tried speaking with Mary, who was the last to see Ann, but the three-year-old didn’t remember if she had seen someone come upstairs during the night and take Ann away. They may have tried hypnosis, but Mary was too young to articulate if she had seen anything.
Then the police sat down with the other children. Julie, who was seven, told them of a person who had talked to her the day before. She didn’t know if it was a man or woman because the person was dressed oddly, in a dark heavy coat, much too hot for a warm summer day. Bev remembered her children describing someone “dressed strangely in woman’s [
sic
] clothes with a veil, someone Julie said looked just like a boy.”
“Ann and I were playing on the porch with our Barbies,” Julie said. “Mom was there, but when the phone rang, she went inside to answer it. The person in the coat came over and said, ‘What house do you live in?’ I said, ‘This one.’ They ran down the street, got in a waiting car, and drove off. I always felt a little guilty. I always thought I was the one who was supposed to be kidnapped.”
The police took photographs inside and outside. They photographed Ann’s unmade bed, with its bedspread of pink and turquoise flowers; Julie’s was an exact twin. A stuffed monkey leaned against the wall, and a reading lamp balanced on Ann’s headboard. Books were scattered on the floor. Ann excelled in all subjects at school, but especially art and reading. The police asked to borrow Tammy, the doll that eerily looked like Ann, with a matching nightgown. They needed Ann’s fingerprints, and they wanted a good look at the fabric. Eventually police returned the doll to Bev. The powder used to lift fingerprints never disappeared.
Bev told the police that she and Don had heard Barney, their cocker spaniel, bark during the night, but they assumed he was alarmed by the sound of the wind and rain. The parents also told the police they thought they had heard someone in their yard a few nights before. Three neighbors, in fact, told police they had seen a Peeping Tom at their windows, but they couldn’t describe the person.
There was little evidence. Police found a red thread snagged on the brick under the window. The bench that the intruder had moved under the window was taken to police headquarters for examination; police thought it had a footprint on it, maybe from a tennis shoe, about the size of a teenager’s or a small man’s foot. A thorough search of the yard also turned up a shoe print in the flower bed by the basement door, according to the police report, “as though someone had peered or tried to gain access to the basement.” They made a mold of it. There were a few blades of grass on the living room floor. But what was a clue, and what was everyday life, tracked into the house by four rambunctious children, two adults, and a dog?
The police were disappointed. There was no sign of a struggle, nothing left behind. Did that mean that Ann knew whoever had entered the house? Had she encountered the man—from the beginning, the kidnapper was always assumed to have been a man—in the living room, before or after she had taken Mary to her parents’ room? Was it someone who knew the layout of the house, and went directly to Ann’s room? Or did she see someone she knew lean through the window and ask her to open the front door, and when she did, she was grabbed by him? Did she surprise a burglar? Why didn’t she make any noise? Or did she? The police asked for a recent photograph of Ann, and Bev gave them the one of Ann wearing her lei.
At first, Bev and Don tried to shield their children from the news that Ann was missing. But Julie knew. “We either were told, or we knew it. I remember my mom pulling open all the kitchen drawers and looking under the sink. I thought she was looking for Ann. Of course, she was hysterical.”
The two detectives tried to get a feeling about the parents. Don admitted he was sometimes firm with the children (he was firm with Bev, too) but said he hadn’t spanked Ann in two years. He said he could not believe that Ann would be outside in the storm in a nightgown unless it was against her wishes. He described how Ann confided in Bev, how close mother and daughter were. Bev told the detectives that their lives centered on the children, that “they do not spend time gadding about.”
It would have been hard for Bev to gad about. Because of Don, she didn’t drive, didn’t work, didn’t have a barbecue in the backyard or Christmas lights on the front of the house, and had to quit volunteering at the League of Women Voters. She would find an interest, and Don would say “enough.” She had thought of leaving him, but with Ann missing, that opportunity passed; she would need to focus on the other children to help them through the disappearance of their sister and to have the childhood they deserved. Until, or if, Ann came home, Bev still had three other young children.
Don was antsy and joined a group of searchers made up of police and volunteers. Within hours there would be hundreds of National Guardsmen scouring fields, abandoned buildings, gulches, sewers, garbage cans, and Tacoma’s many waterways. At the same time, police were going one square block at a time, searching every house where someone was home to let them in. They combed every garage, shed, yard, garden, shrub, and hedge, including the area known as Buckley Gulch, an area close to the railroad tracks, and Commencement Bay. And then there were the roads that led to dead ends, to sites of trysts—both wanted and unwanted—that the police called “rape stations” and “petting grounds.”
Just after noon on Thursday, detectives Zatkovich and Strand went to see Bev’s mother, Marie Leach. She lived on the top floor of 31 Broadway, one of Tacoma’s grand apartment buildings dating back to 1928. Marie had spent her married life living above or behind small grocery stores, so she enjoyed life at 31 Broadway. Although it was in the Stadium district, two miles from the Burr house, Marie’s apartment was a straight shot east. Ann had said on several occasions that she thought she could find her own way to her grandmother’s.
Marie and Bev weren’t close. Marie’s first child, Roy Leach Jr., called Buddy, had died of scarlet fever at age 10. The couple was devastated. Roy Sr. wore a black tie every day for the rest of his life in memory of his young son. They tried for another boy, but they had Bev. They tried again, and a few years later they finally had Jerry. But neither child would fill the void created by Buddy’s death. Bev thought her mother was vain and that she underestimated Bev’s mind and creative talents. Bev had defied her parents in the only ways she knew. As a child, her mother wanted Bev to study tap dancing; Bev refused to be Tacoma’s answer to Shirley Temple and abruptly walked out of the class one day. As a teenager, Bev smoked because she thought Ingrid Bergman looked sophisticated in her movies with a cigarette in one hand. Bev’s father wanted her to work in his grocery stores; instead, by age 15 she was selling floor lamps at Sears. Management was so impressed with the teenager that they suggested a career at the department store. “I thought about staying, but I was going to be a famous writer,” Bev explained.
Then there was Don. Marie didn’t think he was handsome. He hadn’t finished college like Bev, who had even taught school briefly. Marie thought Don was too blue collar; he was a civilian employee at Camp Murray, the Washington State National Guard base. In acknowledgement of his status, Don called himself “just a lunch bucket.”
It’s not that Bev celebrated when her mother died at age 95, but she enjoyed telling the story of how Marie slipped on ice cream on her kitchen floor, and lay there alone for a day until a neighbor found her. Marie never really recovered and died a short while later.
The police noted that Ann’s grandmother “did not seem excited, and seemed to think that Ann was somewhere in the neighborhood, sleeping. She says they are a very close family, go to church every Sunday together, but did say that of the four children, Ann is known to be a little irrational.” The detectives asked Marie about any bad blood in the family. She told them about the rift that had formed between Don’s family and hers. Bev and Don had been married by a justice of the peace on August 6, 1951. But Bev was Catholic, and she thought if the family was more involved in parish life at St. Patrick’s, it might help smooth out some rough spots in her marriage. In the spring of 1961, about the time Ann was confirmed, Don agreed to take instruction. The couple remarried, this time in the Catholic Church. Although he never formally joined the church, Don’s parents were furious and talked of disowning him.
Don and his father had also argued bitterly over the sale of the logging operation they ran in California in the early 1950s. Don’s father sold the business without telling him. The men had heated arguments about it. His father gave him $26,000 as his part of the sale, and another $8,000 to buy a house. Don didn’t think the payment reflected his fair share of the business.