The Stranger Beside Me (17 page)

Had I had either the inclination, the opportunity, or the time to investigate events around Salt Lake City during that 110

fall, I would have read about cases that bore an eerie parallel to those seemingly ended in Washington. The siege of horror did seem to be over; by October three months had passed and there had been no more disappearances of young women. Detectives doubted that the killer had overcome his compulsion, had exorcized the devils that drove him. Rather, they felt that he was either dead, incarcerated in some other area, or that he had moved on.

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It was October 18, 1974, a Friday evening, when seventeenyear-old Melissa Smith, daughter of Midvale's Police Chief, Louis Smith, prepared to attend a slumber party. Melissa was a little girl, five feet three, 105 pounds, very pretty, and she wore her long light brown hair parted in the middle. She was a cautious girl, more so because of her father's profession. She had been warned again and again; Louis Smith had seen too much violence and tragedy not to be afraid for Melissa and her sister.

Melissa had planned to leave for the all-night party at a girlfriend's home early in the evening, but, when she phoned her friend's home, there was no answer. So she was still at home when another friend called her in distress over a lovers' spat. The friend was at work at a pizza parlor, and Melissa promised to walk over and talk to her. Wearing blue jeans, a blouse with a blue flowered pattern, and a navy blue shirt, Melissa left home, alone.

Midvale is a hamlet of 5,000 people, located just south of Salt Lake City, a quiet, solidly Mormon community. It's a good place to raise kids, and Melissa, although warned, had never had reason to be afraid. The walk to the pizza parlor meant negotiating short cuts-down a dirt road and a dirt bank, under a highway overpass and a railroad bridge, and across a school playfield.

Melissa arrived to comfort her friend, and stayed at the restaurant until|a little after ten. She had planned to return home, pick up her nightclothes, and go to the slumber party. Her chosen roif e home would be the same short cut she'd taken hours before.

Melissa never reached home. No one saw her after she walked out of the lighted parking lot of the pizza parlor. It would be nine days before her body was found near Summit

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Park, many miles east of Salt Lake City in the Wasatch Mountains, long since discarded by her killer.

Pathologist Serge Moore performed the autopsy on the battered body found nude in the lonely mountains. She had been beaten savagely, possibly with a crowbar, about the head. Melissa had sustained depressed fractures on the left side and back of her head and massive subdural hemorrhages. Her body was covered with bruises which had occurred prior to death.

She had also been strangled, by ligature. Someone had tightened her own dark blue stocking around her neck so cruelly that the hyoid bone was fractured. Melissa had been raped and sodomized. Sheriff Delmar "Swede" Larson of Salt Lake County, and Captain N.D.

"Pete" Hayward, a longtime homicide detective and now chief of his unit, assigned principal responsibility for the Meh'ssa Smith murder investigation to Detective Jerry Thompson.

It was not an easy case; no one had actually seen Melissa walk off into the shadows beyond the parking lot. No one had seen anyone with her or near her. And she had not been found for nine days. Her killer could be halfway around the world. As far as physical evidence, they had only the girl's body. There had been so little blood beneath it that it was probable she had been killed elsewhere-but where?

The investigation into Melissa's murder was still a nightand-day probe on Halloween, four days after her body was found. On October 31st, some twenty-five miles south in Lehi, Utah, seventeen-year-old Laura Aime, disappointed at the lack of excitement on Halloween night, left a café

and headed for a nearby park. It was a little after midnight. Laura Aime was almost six feet tall and weighed only 115 pounds. Her model-like slimness seemed to her to be awkward skinnyness instead. She'd dropped out of school and had moved in with friends in American Fork, working at one low-paying job after another. But she had maintained almost daily contact with her family who lived in Salem, Utah. When Laura vanished on Halloween night, her parents didn't even know she was missing. They didn't knew for four days-not until they called her friends' home to see why she hadn't been in touch with them.

"Laura isn't here," was the response. "We haven't seen her since she left on Halloween."

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The James Aimes were frightened. Her mother had warned her to be careful, that she must stop her practice of hitchhiking, when the news of Melissa Smith's murder had filled the headlines, and Laura had assured her that she was quite capable of taking care of herself.

Now, Laura herself was missing. The pretty, long-haired girl, the drifter in search of something to hold onto, had walked off into the night wearing only blue jeans and a sleeveless striped sweater. Had it been a normally cold winter, the place where they found Laura Aime would have long since been covered by a blanket of snow. But it was a mild Thanksgiving Day when hikers set out through American Fork Canyon on November

27th. They found her body there in the Wasatch Mountains on a river's bank below a parking lot. She was naked, battered so that her face was unrecognizable. Her father identified her on that bleak Thanksgiving Day in the morgue. He recognized some old scars on her forearm, scars left from the time her horse tossed her into some barbed wire when she was eleven.

The post-mortem exam of Laura Aime's body, performed by Dr. Moore, elicited conclusions much like those in the autopsy on Melissa Smith. Laura Aime had depressed skull fractures on the left side and back of her head, and she had been strangled. The necklace she had worn when she vanished was caught in the nylon stocking that had been used as a ligature and was still cinched tightly around her neck. She had countless facial contusions, and her body bore deep abrasions where it had been dragged. The weapon used to inflict the skull fractures appeared to have been an iron crowbar or pry bar.

Laura Aime had also been sexually assaulted; swabs taken from her vagina and anus showed the presence of nonmotile sperm. It was far too late to determine the blood type of the man who had killed her by the dead ejaculate that he had left. |

Blood tests indicated no sign of drugs, but did show that the teenager nfight have been under the influence of alcohol at the time of her death. The reading was just over .1-a legal indicator of intoxication, -but not necessarily so profound that she would have been unable to protect herself, run, or scream.

But a scream on Halloween night might have gone unno-114

ticed. If Laura Aime had called for help, no one had heard her. Ted Bundy's Seattle girlfriend, Meg Anders, and her friend, Lynn Banks, had both been raised in Ogden, Utah, and Lynn had been home for a visit during the fall of 1974. She'd read of the two murdered women, looked at their pictures, and seen the physical resemblance to the Washington victims. When she got back to Seattle, she confronted Meg with her suspicions.

Meg looked through the newspaper clippings that Lynn had brought back with her, and she drew a sigh of relief when she read that Melissa Smith had disappeared on the night of October 18th.

"There, see? October 18th. I talked to Ted that night about eleven o'clock. He was looking forward to going hunting with my dad the next day. He was in a good mood."

jLyïtff, s tfny woman-menés under riVe feet-was far more persuasive than her diminutive size would indicate, and she was frightened enough to be insistent this time.

"You have to go to the police! There are too many things that you and I both know. You can't keep hiding from it any longer." Meg Anders did contact the King County Police in the fall of 1974; her information about Ted Bundy resulted in the fourth listing of his name among the thousands turned in. Mine had been the first, and, like mine and the others, the information did not warrant particular scrutiny. Meg had kept most of her fears to herself in her first call to the detectives.

It was Lynn's urging which made Meg turn on her lover, but that friendship with Lynn also ended because of Lynn's animosity toward Ted. Ted himself had no idea that Meg had contacted the investigators. Melissa Smith's body had been found, and Laura Aime was still missing on Friday evening, November 8th, 1974. It was raining that night in the Salt Lake City area, a fine misty rain that promised to become a prolonged downpour. It wasn't a particularly propitious night for a shopping trip, but eighteen-year-old Carol DaRonch headed toward the Fashion Place Shopping Mall in suburban Murray, Utah anyway. She drove her new Camaro, leaving home a little after 6:30 P.M. Carol had graduated from high school in the spring of 1974 and taken a job with the Mountain Bell Telephone Company; she still lived at home with her parents. A fre-

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quent shopper at the mail, she had nothing to fear as she parked her car in the parking lot. She was going to shop at Auerbach's, and just browse.

She ran into some cousins, chatted with them for a while, made her purchase at Auerbach's, and was leafing through some books at Walden's Book Store when she looked up to see a handsome man standing beside her. He was welldressed in a sports jacket, green slacks, and cordovan colored patent leather shoes. He had wavy brown hair and a moustache. He asked her if she had parked her car in the lot near the Sears store, and she nodded. Then he inquired as to her license number and she gave it to him. He seemed to recognize it. He told her that a shopper had reported that someone had been trying to break into her car, using a wire coathanger. "Would you mind coming with me so we can check to see if anything has been stolen?"

She was taken by surprise. It didn't occur to her to wonder how the man with the moustache had found her, how he could have known that she was the owner of the Camaro. His manner was such that she assumed he must be a security guard or a policeman. She followed him meekly through the lighted central corridor of the mall and out into the rainy night. She became apprehensive as they walked through the parking lot, but the man seemed so hi control, explaining that his partner probably already had the thief in custody. "Perhaps you'll recognize him if you see him," he told her easily.

She asked to see his identification, and he only chuckled. Carol DaRonch had been trained to trust police officers, and she felt somewhat foolish for having questioned the man. She opened her car with her keys, and glanced around the interior. "It's all here. There's nothing missing. I don't think he managed to get in," she told him. The man wanted her to open the passenger door too, and she demurred jtthere was nothing missing, and she saw no need. She was surprised when he tried that door anyway, shrugged and l|d her back to the mall, telling her that they would confer with his partner. He glanced around. "They must have gone back to our substation. We'll meet them there and identify him."

"How would I know him?" she argued. "I wasn't even there. I was inside shopping."

The man brushed off her objections, hurrying faster now, 116

past many stores, and out into the darkness of the north parking lot. She asked his name, growing impatient and wary. She hadn't lost anything, and she had better things to do than follow this man on a wild goose chase.

"Officer Roseland. Murray Police Department," he answered shortly.

"We're almost there."

They stood outside a door with "139" on it. He knocked, waited, and no one answered. He tried the door and found it locked. (The door was a back entrance to a laundramat; it was not a police substation, but Carol didn't know that.)

Now the man insisted that she accompany him to headquarters to sign a complaint. He said he would drive her down in his car. She expected to see a squad car. Instead, he led her to a battered Volkswagen bug. She had heard of unmarked cars, even "sneaker" cars, but this didn't look like any police vehicle she'd ever seen. She demanded to see his I.D.

Looking at her as if she were a hysterical female, the man grudgingly flashed his wallet and she caught only a glimpse of a small gold badge. He put it back in his pocket so quickly that she hadn't been able to see the name of a department, or even a number.

He opened the passenger door and waited for her to get in. She debated refusing, but the man was impatient, and she got into his car. The moment the doors were closed, she caught the strong odor of alcohol on his breath. She didn't think policemen were allowed to drink on duty. When he instructed her to fasten her seat belt, she said "No." She was poised, ready for flight, but the car had already pulled out of the lot and was accelerating.

The driver didn't head in the direction of the Murray Police Department. He was driving in the opposite direction. She looked at cars passing by them, wondered if she should scream, wondered if she should try to jump out, but they were going too fast, and no one seemed to be noticing them at all.

And then the car stopped, so suddenly that it ran over a curb near the McMillan Grade School. She turned to look at "Officer Roseland" and saw that he was no longer smiling. His jaw was set, and he seemed removed somehow from her. When she asked him what he was doing, he didn't answer her.

Carol DaRonch reached for the door handle on her side,

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and started to jump out, but the man was too quick for her. In an instant, he had clapped a handcuff on her right wrist. She fought him, kicking, screaming, as he struggled to get the cuffs on her other wrist. He missed, and managed only to get the second cuff on the same wrist. She continued to fight, scratching him, screaming at the top of her lungs, screams that went unheard in the quiet neighborhood. He was getting angrier and angrier with her.

Suddenly, there was a small, black gun in his hand. He held it next to her head and said, "If you don't stop screaming, I'm going to kill you. I'll blow your brains out."