The Stranger Beside Me (18 page)

She fell backward out of the car, onto the sodden parking strip, saw the pistol drop to the floor of the car. Now he had a crowbar of some kind in his hand, and he threw her up against his car. She put up one hand, and with the strength borne of desperation, managed to keep it away from her head. She kicked at his genitals, and broke free. Running. She didn't see or care where. She had to get away from him. Wilbur and Mary Walsh were driving down Third Avenue East when a figure was suddenly caught in their headlights. Walsh threw on his brakes, barely missing it, and his wife fumbled with the door locks. They couldn't see who it was trying to get into their car, expecting a maniac at the very least. Then they saw that it was only a young girl, a terribly frightened girl who sobbed, "I can't believe it. I can't believe it." Mrs. Walsh tried to comfort her, telling her that she was safe, that nothing was going to harm her now.

"He was going to kill me. He said he was going to kill me if I didn't stop screaming."

The Walshes drove Carol DaRonch to the Murray Police Station on State Street. She was unable to walk, and Wilbur Walsh carried the slender girl inside, their entrance drawing startled looks from the men on duty there.

As her sobs subsided to gasps, Carol told the policemen that one of tieir men-Officer Roseland-had attacked her. Of course, thfce was no Officer Roseland in the department, and no one used an old Volkswagen while on duty. They listened as she described the car, the man, the iron bar he'd used against her. "I didn't really see it. I felt it in my hand as he tried to hit me with it. It had a lot of sides on it, more than four, I think."

She held up her right wrist, still bearing the two handcuffs. 118

Carefully, the officers removed the cuffs, dusted them for latent prints, and came up with only useless smudges. They were not the Smith and Wesson brand usually favored by policemen, but a foreign brand: Gerocal. Patrolmen were dispatched to the site of the attack near the grade school. They found Carol DaRonch's shoe, lost in the struggle, but nothing more. The Volkswagen was, predictably, long gone.

Patrol units cruised the mall, looking for a light colored bug with dents and rust spots, with a tear in the upholstery of the rear seat. They didn't find it, nor was Murray Detective Joel Reed successful in trying to lift prints from the door knob on door 139. Exposure to rain, even dew, can eradicate fingerprints quickly.

Carol DaRonch looked through a pile of mug books and ictuguiicu iiu uuc. Q\ic Tuau ncrvci actrri iVic Tfiîtn \>T&Vît, ?a& devoutly hoped never to see him again. Three days later, she discovered two small drops of blood staining the light fake fur of her jacket collar and brought the jacket in for lab testing. The blood was not hers; it was type O, but there was not enough of it to differentiate for RH

positive or negative factors.

Murray detectives had a description of a man, a car, an M.O., and, Thank God, a live victim. The similarities between the DaRonch almost-successful kidnaping and the murder of Melissa -Smith could not be denied. Melissa had vanished from the parking lot of the pizza parlor, a restaurant only a mile away from the Fashion Place Mall, but no one knew what ruse had been used to entice her from that lot without a struggle. Her father was a policeman. Would she have gone willingly with a policeman?

Probably.

Whatever "Officer Roseland's" mission had been on the rainy night of November 8th, he had been frustrated. Carol DaRonch had escaped. If he had intended to rape her-or worse-his appetite had only been honed to a keener edge. He had more to do that night.

Seventeen miles from Murray, Bountiful, Utah is a northern suburb of the Mormon city, a suburb that lives up to its name with its natural beauty and its recreational opportunities. On November 8th, the Dean Kents of Bountiful prepared to attend a musical presented at Viewmont High

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School. Dean Kent had been ill, but he was feeling better, and he and his wife, Belva, and their oldest daughter, seventeenyear-old Debby, headed for the premiere performance of "The Redhead." Debby Kent's younger brother, Blair, didn't care about seeing the play; he was dropped off at a roller rink and his mother promised to pick him up at 10 P.M. Shortly before eight, they arrived at the high school. They knew most of the crowd in the auditorium; high school drama productions tend to appeal principally to the families of the performers, classmates, and friends who have been prevailed upon to buy tickets. While the audience waited in hushed expectation, Viewmont High School's drama teacher, Jean Graham, a young woman only a few years out of college herself, was approached by s stranger backstage. She was busy, distracted, trying to coordinate last minute preparations for the performance, and she paused only briefly as the tall, slim man with the moustache called to her. She remembers that he wore a sports jacket, dress slacks, and patent leather shoes, and that he was very handsome. He was courteous, almost apologetic, as he asked her if she would accompany him to the parking lot to identify a car. She shook her head, scarcely wondering why he needed such help. She was just too busy.

"It will only take a minute," he urged.

"No, I can't. I'm in charge of the play," she said briskly, and hurried past him in the darkened hallway. He was still lingering in the hall when she headed toward the front of the auditorium twenty minutes later.

"Hi," she said. "Did you find anyone to help you yet?" He didn't speak, but stared at her strangely, his eyes boring into her. Odd, she thought. But she was used to men staring at her. Her duties required that she go backstage again some minutes later Jnd the man was still there. He walked toward her, smiling. |

"Hey, you look really nice," he complimented her. "Come on, give me a hand with that car. Just a couple of minutes will do it." His manner was easy, cajoling.

And yet she was on guard. She tried to get past him, told him that maybe her husband could help him. "I'll go find him." She was frightened, but that was ridiculous, she told

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herself. There were several hundred people close by. The man stepped to the side, blocking her way. They jockeyed for position in a peculiar side-to-side dance step, and then she was free of him. Who was he? He wasn't on the staff, too old to be a student, and too young to be a parent. She hurried backstage.

Debby Kent left at intermission to phone her brother and tell him that the play wouldn't be over by ten, and then returned for the second act. One of her girlfriends, Jolynne Beck, noticed the handsome stranger pacing at the rear of the auditorium. Jean Graham saw him there too, and felt curiously disturbed when she saw him for the last time, before the play had concluded.

Debby Kent volunteered to drive over to the roller rink and pick up her brother. "I'll be back to pick you up," she promised her parents. Several residents of an apartment complex across from the high school remember hearing two short, piercing screams coming from the west parking lot between 10:30 and 11 that night. They hadn't sounded like horseplay; they'd sounded like someone in mortal terror, screams so compelling that the witnesses had walked outside to stare over at the dark lot.

They had seen nothing at all.

Debby's brother waited in vain at the bowling alley. Her parents stood impatiently in front of the high school while the crowd thinned. Finally, no one was left, but their car was still in the lot. Where was Debby?

It was midnight, and they couldn't find their daughter anywhere. It seemed she'd never arrived at the car at all. They notified the Bountiful Police Department, described their daughter: seventeen years old, with long brown hair parted in the middle.

"She just wouldn't have left us stranded," her mother said nervously.

"Her father's just getting over a heart attack. And the car's still in the school lot. It doesn't make sense."

Bountiful police had the radio report on the attempted abduction in Murray; they were all too aware of the Melissa Smith case, and of the disappearance of Laura Aime. They sent patrol units out to circle the neighborhood around Viewmont High School, had the school itself opened and each room checked on the off chance that Debby might have been accidentally locked in a room. Her parents frantically called all her friends. But no one had seen Debby Kent.

No one has ever seen Debby Kent again.

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With the first thin wash of daylight the next morning, a police investigative crew searched the Viewmont High School parking lot, canvassed the neighborhood, looking for some clue to the inexplicable vanishing of Debby Kent.

They learned of the screams heard the night before, but found no actual witnesses to an abduction. There had been so many cars in the lot that no one could pick out one, perhaps a tannish old Volkswagen bug?

Bountiful detectives Ira Seal and Ron Ballantyne hunkered down to search the now empty lot. And there, between an exterior door to the school and the parking lot, they found the little key. They knew what it was-a handcuff key.

They took the key at once to the Murray Police Department, inserted it in the lock of the handcuffs removed from Carol DaRonch. It slid in perfectly; the cuffs opened. Still, they knew that some handcuff keys are interchangeable. The key wouldn't open their Smith and Wesson cuffs, but it would work on several brands of small cuffs. It could not be considered positive physical evidence connecting the two cases, but it most certainly was alarming. Carol DaRonch had escaped. Apparently, Debby Kent had not.

Just as in Washington State earlier in the year, the Utah law enforcement officers were inundated with calls. The last call that appeared to have any real bearing on the case came in mid-December. A man who had arrived at Viewmont High School to pick up his daughter after the play reported that he had seen an old, beat-up Volkswagen-a light colored bugracing from the parking lot just after 10:30 on the night of November 8th. There was no more. Debby Kent's parents were left to face a bleak, tragic Christmas season, just as Melissa Smith's and Laura Aime's were. Carol DaRonch was afraid to go out alone, even in the daylight. I

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Ted Bundy was not doing as well in his first year at the University of Utah's law school as he had done in his earlier college career. He was having difficulty maintaining a C average, and finished the quarter with two incomplètes-Ted who had breezed through tough courses at the University of Washington and graduated "with distinction," Ted who had assured the Director of Admissions at Utah that he was not "just a qualified student, but ... an individual who is obstinate enough to want to become a critical and tireless student and practitioner of the law, and qualified enough to succeed."

Certainly, he had to work to pay his way through and that would cut into his studying time, but he was also drinking a great deal more than he had in the past. He called Meg frequently and was very disturbed when he did not find her at home. Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected-demanded-that she be totally loyal to him. According to Lynn Banks, Meg's close friend, he would dial Lynn's number if he failed to find Meg at home, insisting on being told where she was. '

On November 18, 1974, I entered Group Health Hospital in Seattle to be prepped for surgery the next morning. I had had four babies without anesthetic, but this surgery proved to be more painful than anything in my memory, and I was sedated heavily for two days. I remember calling Joyce Johnson sometime in the late afternoon of November 19th, telling her that I was all right, and I remember my motherwho had come up from Salem, Oregon to stay with my children-sitting beside my bed. I also remember the deluge of flowers I received from various police departments. The Seattle homicide detectives sent me a dozen red roses, and Herb Swindler appeared carrying a pot of yellow mums, followed. by Ted Forrester from the

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King County major crimes unit with a huge planter. I don't know what the nurses thought as they saw the steady parade of visiting detectives with ill-hidden gun belts at their waists. They must have thought I was a girlfriend of the Mafia under surveillance.

Of course it was only a bunch of "tough" cops being kind. They knew I was alone and worried about getting back on my feet and able to work, and they were showing the sentimental side they usually keep hidden. Within a few days, I felt much better and rather enjoyed my notoriety. My mother visited me. She seemed worried as she remarked, "I'm glad I'm up here with the kids. You got a really strange phone call last night."

"Who was it?"

"I don't know. It sounded like it was long distance. Some man called you a little before midnight and he seemed terribly upset that you weren't home. I asked if there was any message, but he wouldn't leave any and he wouldn't say who he was."

"Upset? How upset?"

"It's hard to describe. He might have been drunk, but he seemed disoriented, panicky, and he talked rapidly. It bothered me."

"It was probably a wrong number."

"No, he asked for 'Ann.' I told him you were in the hospital and that I could have you call him back in a day or so, but he hung up." I had no idea who it might have been, and I would not remember the call at all until I was reminded of it almost a year later. The Intermountain Crime Conference was held at Stateline, Nevada on December 12, 1974, and law enforcement officers met to discuss those cases which seemed to have indicators that other states might be involved. Washington detectives presented jjheir missing and murdered girls cases, and Utah lawmen dbcussed Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debby Kent, Carol Dajfonch. There were similarities, certainly, but there are, sadly, hundreds of young women killed each year in the United States. Many of them are strangled, bludgeoned, and raped. The method of murder was not enough to assume that any one man was responsible for a particular group of victims.

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