Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (9 page)

Greg, Mary, and Julie, one year after Ann disappeared, 1962.

The 1967 sketch of the Oregon field where Richard Raymond McLish says he buried Ann’s body.

THE YOUNG POLICE officer, apparently chosen because he was agile, had one leg in and one leg out of Beverly Burr’s living room window. She couldn’t bear to watch. If he could maneuver into the house without breaking her collection of English pottery Toby jugs, without getting tangled in the TV antenna or leaving a fingerprint or a clue, then it made the possibility that an intruder had taken her daughter both more plausible and more baffling.

Instead of watching the officer, Bev kept her eye on the pottery displayed on the table immediately under the window, each one a caricature of a short, fat fellow seated with a jug on his knee. Their cheery grins taunted Bev.

The police were back to take another look inside the Burr house. They were still monitoring phone calls in the basement, there was still a patrol car each night on the street in front of the house, and they were busy chasing down tips and known sex offenders. But were they
certain
there was no evidence of an intruder? Just to be sure, the forensics team returned, hoping to add to their pitifully small cache, which consisted of the lone red thread and the toe print on the outdoor bench.

They took more photos of the outside of the house, and tried to get fingerprints off a downspout that Don had told them about. It had been pulled loose from a gutter on the northwest corner and might have been used as a handhold. It was beneath Greg’s bedroom window (who was asleep in the basement that night). There were no fingerprints on the southwest window, which they thought was the way the kidnapper had entered the house. Then they searched the living room again; it was the living room, and the window, the Toby jugs, the doors, and the furniture that should hold clues.

Late that night, the young, agile officer and his partner wrote in their report that the latest search was in vain. It was too late to find clues that might have been overlooked. There would be no latent fingerprint. A well-meaning relative of the Burrs had dusted the living room, top to bottom.

Bob Drost was the only member of the police force who believed Ann was alive. He thought she had been taken by someone she knew (that’s why the family didn’t hear any screams), someone who was desperate to have a little girl, someone who didn’t live in Tacoma and could raise Ann without the family knowing or others becoming suspicious. Someone who—he went so far as to say— “cherished” the little girl, yet was busy brainwashing Ann. He didn’t think it would take long for an eight-year-old to forget her family and cleave to a new one. Whoever abducted Ann, Drost said, didn’t leave “five cents worth of clues.” He described the result of the investigation as “a handful of nothing—it was like grabbing clouds.”

Drost was Captain of Detectives and had been away with his family on their annual fishing and camping trip to Lake Chelan, three hours east in the central part of the state. He returned to the biggest missing persons case since the Weyerhaeuser and Mattson kidnappings. But this case was more puzzling. The Weyerhaeuser boy was kidnapped off a city street, and a ransom demand came quickly. And Charles Mattson’s siblings saw him taken from their house; his body was found two weeks later. But with the Ann Marie Burr case there was no evidence, no witnesses, no body, and no credible ransom demand.

The newspapers reported that police could find no proof that anyone had entered the house. They were told there was no sign of a struggle in Ann’s bedroom. Ann’s disappearance was still not officially considered an abduction.

Drost was friends with Detectives Zatkovich and Strand, but especially Tony Zatkovich. Tony’s brother Al had married a close friend of Drost’s wife, Betty, and they considered themselves family—the kind of extended family that got together for Thanksgiving and birthdays. Drost had been a member of the same vigilante group of police as Detectives Strand and Zatkovich. When he got back from fishing, Drost officially put into place the major roles in the investigation: Strand and Zatkovich would be the lead detectives; Det. Richard Roberts would be in charge of the underground search, including the city sewer system; Police Inspector Emil Smith was overall search director.

Part of the detective’s job was to get to know as much about Ann as they could. They found that opinions of Ann varied greatly. Her grandmother, Marie Leach, had told police she thought Ann was “a little irrational.” Ann spent time with Becky B___ who lived a block away. Both of Becky’s parents worked, so the children would often spend time with Mrs. B___’s mother during the day. Becky had seen Ann on Wednesday. “I last saw Ann in the neighborhood between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. the evening before she disappeared. I think Ann has quite a temper and she throws tantrums,” Becky told police. Becky’s mother, a schoolteacher, said she considered herself “very good friends” with the Burr family. “It is my impression that she (Ann) is the favorite in the family. She most always gets what she wants and is very high in intelligence for a girl of her age. I feel the family is a little lax in the child’s activities, as to staying with other friends overnight or staying for dinner at their home,” Mrs. B___ told the police.

Her uncle Raleigh considered Ann “brilliant.” Ann gave off a confidence that could be misconstrued in a child. It could be mistaken as flirtatiousness. Her cousin, Eddie Cavallo, was 14 years old when she disappeared. “She was a little sweetheart,” he says. “She was like a teddy bear; you wanted to give her a little squeeze. She attracted males; she elicited a response from boys. She was a very sexual little kid. It was the way she was wired.”

Both the family and police knew the clock was ticking. “Hopes for the safe return of the missing youngster, believed to be barefoot and clad in only an ankle-length nightgown, continued to wane,” the
Tacoma News Tribune
reported. Over the Labor Day weekend, more than 600 men from the Army’s 2nd Battle Group, 39th Infantry, stationed at Ft. Lewis, and National Guardsmen from Camp Murray staged a massive ground search. It was too windy to take a helicopter up, but they covered 700-acre Point Defiance Park on foot, a mostly undeveloped wilderness in the middle of urban sprawl. Point Defiance was where the last, or one of the last, photographs of Ann was taken. Bev had taken Ann to the park’s zoo so she could feed the goats.

A number of Tacoma residents had dusted off their Ouija boards—a popular Christmas item the year before, by now relegated to the hall closet. They called police to say Ann was safe; Ann was far away from Tacoma by now; Ann was somewhere at Point Defiance Park. When the winds did let up, an Army pilot and a Tacoma police officer used a helicopter to cover the park from the air. They flew over its beaches, cliffs, wooded areas, boat house, and sewer outfall. They went as low as they could over Commencement Bay and “The Narrows,” what folks called the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which connects the city and the Kitsap Peninsula.

A dream took Alfred S___ from his home in Seattle to Tacoma, via a Greyhound bus. From the bus station he took a taxi to the Burr house. The 79-year-old man told Bev and Don that he had had a vision or a religious revelation that Ann was being kept in the back bedroom of a white house with green trim. He stated that the Lord had provided the vision, and the Lord had even provided an address, 4548 Pearl Street. Detectives Johnson and Six took Mr. S___ to the police station where he told his story again. Then they put him on a bus back to Seattle. Bev asked the police to check out 4548 Pearl Street. There was no house at 4548 Pearl Street; there was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store under construction. There were several white houses with green trim nearby, but they decided it wasn’t worth knocking on the doors.

Over the holiday weekend, the police returned to homes in North Tacoma that hadn’t been searched earlier. Detectives, in old clothes and with flashlights, meticulously crawled under houses and into attics.

The town’s Public Works Department began combing the main sewer lines near the Burr house. A three man crew went underground “using portable lights to probe the pitch black flumes of the city’s sewer network through the North End,” the
Tacoma News Tribune
told its readers who were following the search for Ann. At low tide, volunteer scuba divers went to the end of the line—the main outfall pipe on Commencement Bay, not far from Tacoma’s favorite night spot, The Top of the Ocean— where the rushing flow of storm drainage and sewage was rapid enough to push a body out the pipe and into the bay. But it hadn’t. Man holes and catch basins were searched and two muddy ponds in Buckley Gulch, which ran just a block from the Burr house, were drained. Citizen volunteers searched the nearby city of Fircrest, focusing on the construction site of a stadium for the town’s minor league baseball team, the Tacoma Giants.

When no trace of the girl was found, Det. Richard Roberts was asked what came next. “I just don’t know where we go from here,” he said. Tacoma Police Inspector Smith called it one of the most baffling cases in Tacoma crime files.

On September 3, the fourth day after Ann vanished, the city did what Don suggested just hours after Ann went missing; it sent men to search the ditches being dug at the University of Puget Sound. Don had worried that it was a feasible place to leave a child’s body. The digging in question was in an area on the western edge of the campus, running along Union Avenue for several blocks between Adams Street and Washington Street. The five fraternities (to be known as the Union Avenue Housing), would be connected by an underground tunnel and would share a common kitchen, also underground.

There’s no record of whether the police shared the bad news with Bev and Don. By the time they went to search the excavation sites, they couldn’t find any ditches with water. “At this time, all ditches are covered and the roads are open,” the police report noted. Traffic was driving over the spot where Don thought the body of his daughter might have been cruelly discarded.

By Sunday, police had administered polygraphs to nearly 30 men and boys. One was 13-year-old Terry M___ , who lived about a block from the Burrs. A year before, Terry had been arrested for window peeping at the college and taken to Remann Hall, the juvenile detention center and school. What the police found especially intriguing as they took another look at him was that he liked to peep early, before 6 a.m. His family attended St. Patrick’s, he knew Ann, and his younger brother played with her. Terry had been to the Burrs’ many times, but claimed to never have been inside the home.

Terry’s father was furious with the police. Just because his son had been picked up for peeping when he was 12, the police were trying to hang Ann Burr’s disappearance on him. Besides, the father said, window peeping is normal; a lot of boys do it.

But the police were intrigued with all the questions the boy asked about the case. Terry asked them as many questions as they asked of him. Did they have any evidence? He mused over his own theories with the police: it must have been a prowler. Were the searchers wearing gloves? Not to preserve evidence, but in case they had to comb through raspberry and blueberry bushes which were so fierce in the Northwest they could rip your skin off? The police concluded Terry was just as good a suspect as anyone else.

Detectives were going to the shoe stores in town, trying to track down a boy’s or men’s tennis shoe that matched the print on the Burr’s bench. They might have been Keds, but they had an unusual tread; that was their best clue so far. They withheld the information from the newspapers; a teenager, or even his parents, might hastily dispose of tennis shoes with an unusual sole.

The police finally got 15-year-old Robert Bruzas down to the police station. “It had been brought to our attention previously that Robert associated more with the younger children than those around his own age group,” Detectives Strand and Zatkovich wrote. Robert had been a
Tribune
paper boy for the last 13 months, a substitute carrier before that, and he was also working at the college swimming pool two blocks west. They asked him about his friends (one was Terry M___) their ages, and if he had ever kissed the 17-year-old girl that he admitted liking. He said no. Robert admitted playing with Ann and the other young girls in the neighborhood, “probably because none of the boys around his age were in that immediate vicinity. Another reason was that he liked the children.” He told the detectives that on the afternoon before Ann disappeared, he saw her and her friend Susie as he was on his way to pick up his newspapers. Then, police gave him a polygraph. He did
not
pass.