The Stranger Beside Me (23 page)

At the time, I still felt that I might have caused Ted's arrest; it would be years before I learned that my information had been checked out and cleared early in the game, and then buried in the thousands of slips of paper with names on them. It had not been my doubts, but Meg's, which had pinned him to the wall.

My mixed loyalties threatened to cost me a vital portion of my income. I heard via the grapevine that the King County Police wanted those two letters Ted was known to have sent me, and that, if I didn't turn them over, I could forget about getting any more stories from that department. It would mean that a qualter of my work would be cut off, and I simply couldn't affotiî it.

I went directly to Nick Mackie. "I have heard rumors that if I don't turn over Ted's letters to the Task Force, your doors will be closed to me. I think I should tell you frankly how I feel, and what is happening in my life."

I told Nick that I had learned that my childrens' father was dying, that it would only be a matter of weeks or a few

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months at most. "I've just had to explain that to my sons, and they don't want to believe it. They hate me because I had to put it into words to prepare them. He is so ill that I no longer have any financial support from him, and I'm trying to make it alone. If I can't write up county cases, I don't think I can hack it." Mackie is an infinitely fair man. More than that, he could empathize with me. He was raising two sons alone; he had lost his wife a few years earlier. What I was telling him struck a nerve. And we had been friends for years.

"No one has ever said you would be barred from this department. I wouldn't allow it. You know you can believe me; you've always been fair to us and we respect you for it. Of course, we'd like to see those letters, but whether you turn them over or not, things will be like they always were here."

"Nick," I said honestly. "I have read those letters over and over, and I can't find anything in them that makes Ted sound guilty, even unconscious slips. If you'll let me ask him if you can see them, and if he agrees, I'll bring them to you immediately. That's the only fair way I can do it."

Nick Mackie agreed. I called Ted, and explained my problem, and he responded that, of course, I must let the county detectives see his letters. He had nothing to fear from them, nothing to hide. I met with Mackie and with Dr. John Berberich, the psychologist for the Seattle Police Department, and they studied the first letter and the second long poem. There seemed to be nothing inherent there that would be a subconscious or overt admission of guilt. Berberich, who is built like a basketball player, talked with me and Mackie over lunch. Was there anything I could remember about Ted's personality that made me suspicious? Anything at all? I searched back through the years and could find nothing. There was not the slightest incident that I could enlarge upon. "He seemed to me to be a particularly fine young man," I responded. "I want to help. I want to help the investigation, and I want to help Ted, but there just isn't anything weird about him-nothing that I ever saw. Ted is illegitimate, but he seems to have come to terms with tha'."

I had thought that Ted might stop contacting me after I'd shown his letters to the detectives. He knew that I moved constantly in the circle of the very investigators who were trying to catch him in a slip. But his correspondence contin-

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ued, and my ambivalence rose to a level where I was laboring under more stress than I could stand.

In an attempt to sort out my feelings, to deal with that stress, I consulted a psychiatrist. I handed him the letters.

"I don't know what to do. I don't even know what my motivations really are. Part of me wonders if Ted Bundy is guilty, not only of the cases in Utah, but of the cases here in Washington. If that is true, then I can write the book I've contracted for and write it from a position that any author would envy. I want that, selfishly for my own career, and because it would mean financial independence. I could send my children to college, and we could move to a house that isn't falling down around our ears." He looked at me. "And?"

"And, on the other side of it, the man is my friend. But am I supporting him emotionally, writing to him, because I just want to solve all those murders, because I owe something to my detective friends too? Am I, in essence, trying to trap him? Am I being unfair? Do I have the right to correspond with Ted when I have a niggling feeling that he might be guilty? Am I playing straight with him?"

"Let me ask you a question," he countered. "If Ted Bundy proves to be a murderer, if he is sent to prison for the rest of his life, what would you do? Would you stop writing to him? Would you drop him?" That answer was easy. "No! No, I would always write to him. If what the detectives believe is true, if he is guilty, then he needs someone. If he had that on his conscience. No, I would keep writing, keep in touch."

"Then that's your answer. You're not being unfair." "There's another thing. I can't understand why Ted is reaching out to me now. I haven't seen or heard from him in almost two years. I didn't even know he'd moved away from Seattle until he called me just before his arrest. Why me?"

The psychiatrist tapped the letters. "From these, I get that he apparently locks upon you as a friend, perhaps as a kind of mother figure-He needs to communicate with someone he feels is on his fitellectual level, and he admires you as a writer. There is the possibility of a more manipulative side. He knows you are close to the police and he may want to use you as a conduit to them, without his actually having to talk to them himself. If he has committed these crimes, he is probably an exhibitionist, and one day he'll want his story told. He

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senses that you would do that in a manner that would portray the whole man."

I felt somewhat better after that visit. I would try not to look ahead, but I would keep up my contacts with Ted. He knew about my book contract; I hadn't lied. If he chose to stay close to me, then I would let him call the shots.

17

If I was feeling guilty and somewhat disloyal to Ted during fall, 1975, Meg Anders was going through sheer hell. The information she had given to the Salt Lake County Sheriff's office had been discounted until Ted's first arrest on August

16th. Now, detectives in Utah, Colorado, and Washington were anxious to know everything Meg remembered about Ted, all the bits and pieces of information that had made her suspect her lover. They were trying to find the man responsible for the most brutal series of killings in their memories, and it looked very much indeed as if Ted Bundy was that man. Ted's privacy, Meg's privacy, did not matter any longer. Meg had adored Ted from the moment she met him in .the Sandpiper Tavern. She never had been able to understand what it was that made him stay with her; she'd had an overwhelming sense of failure for most of her life. She'd always felt she was the one member of her immediate family who hadn't lived up to their expectations. Everyone but Meg worked in a prestigious profession, and she considered herself "only a secretary." The love of a brilliant man like Ted had helped to assuage her feelings of inferiority, and she was about to see that relationship exposed to merciless probing.

Neither the Salt Lake County investigators nor the Seattle Task Force detectives liked what they had to subject Meg Anders to, the questioning that would delve into the most intimate details of her life, the slow tearing down of all that she had built up in the six years before. But one thing was apparent; Meg Anders knew more about the hidden Ted Bundy than anyone alive} with the possible exception of Ted himself. On September! 16th, Jerry Thompson and Dennis Couch from the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office and Ira Beal from the Bountiful, Utr,h Police Department had flown to Seattle to talk with Meg. They had first spoken with her father in

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Utah who suggested that it might be of inestimable value to the investigation if they would speak directly with Meg. Thompson was aware that Meg's doubts about Ted had predated the murders in Utah, had gone all the way back to the disappearance of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in July of 1974.

The three Utah detectives met Meg in an interview room in the King County Police Major Crime Unit's offices. They noted her nervousness, the terrible emotional strain she was under. But they also saw that she was determined to lay out all the information that had led her, finally, to the police.

Meg lit the first of a whole pack of cigarettes that she would smoke during the long interview. She stated firmly that she did not want the proceedings recorded on tape.

"Ted went out a lot in the middle of the night," she began. "And I didn't know where he went. Then he napped during the day. And I found things, things that I couldn't understand."

"What sort of things?"

"A lug wrench, taped halfway up, under the seat of my car. He said it was for my protection. Plaster of paris in his room. Crutches. He had an oriental knife in a kind of. wooden case that he kept in the glove compartment of my car. Sometimes, it was there; sometimes it was gone. He had a meat cleaver. I saw him pack it when he moved to Utah." Meg related that Ted had never been with her on the nights the girls in Washington had vanished. "After I saw the cornposite pictures of

'Ted' in the paper in July of 1974, I checked back through the papers in the library to get the dates the girls disappeared, and I checked my calendar and my cancelled checks, and he just. . . well, he just was never around then."

Meg said she had been more afraid after her friend, Lynn Banks, returned from Utah in November of 1974. "She pointed out that the cases down there were just like the ones up here, and she said, 'Ted's in Utah now.' That's when I called my father and asked him to get in touch with you down there.

"Will you tell Ted that I've told you all this?" Meg asked Thompson, as she lit another cigarette.

"No, we won't," the detective promised. "What about you? Will you tell him?"

"I really don't think I will. I keep praying about it, and I

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keep praying you'll find out. And I guess I keep hoping that you'll find out it's not Ted, that it's someone else . . . but deep down, I'm just not sure."

Asked to explain her doubts in detail, Meg talked about the plaster of paris she'd seen in Ted's room at the Rogers's. "I confronted him about it, and he told me he'd stolen it from that medical supply place where he was working. He said he didn't know why. 'Just for the hell of it,' he said. He said the crutches were for his landlord." Meg said that she'd once found a paper sack full of women's clothing in Ted's room. "The top item was a bra, a large size bra. The rest was just clothing, girls' clothes. I never asked him about it. I was afraid, and kind of embarrassed."

The detectives asked Meg if Ted had changed in any way in the last year or so, and she told them that his sexual drive had diminished to almost nothing during the summer of 1974, of his explanations about work pressures. "He said there was no other woman." The questions were excruciatingly embarrassing for Meg.

"Had he changed in any other way, in his sexual interests?" She looked down. "He got this book, this Joy of Sex book, sometime in December, 1973. He read about anal intercourse, and he insisted on trying it. I didn't like it, but I went along with him. Then there was something in that book about bondage. He went right to the drawer where I kept my nylons. He seemed to know which drawer they were in." Meg said she had allowed herself to be tied to the four bedposts with the nylon stockings before having sex. The whole thing had been distasteful to her. She had acquiesced three times, but, during the third occasion, Ted had started to choke her, and she'd panicked. "I wouldn't do that anymore. He didn't say much, but he was unhappy with me when I said, 'No more.' "

"Anything eJse?"|

Meg was mortified, but she continued. "Sometimes, after I was as\eep at mghj| Vd wake up and find him under the covers. He was looking at ... at my body . . . with a flashlight."

"Does Ted like your hair the way it is now?" Ira Beal asked. Meg's hair was long and straight, parted in the center.

"Yes. Whenever I talk about cutting it, he gets very upset. 158

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tuai ne oated besides me has hair just like mine." The three detectives exchanged glances. "Does Ted always tell you the truth?" Thompson asked. Mâg tfiûGk kéf Aèâ(f. 'Tve caught him in several lies. He told me that he was arrested down there for a traffic violation, and I told him I knew that wasn't the truth, that there'd been items in the car that looked like burglary tools. He just said they didn't mean too much, that it was an illegal search."

Meg told them that she knew Ted had stolen in the past. "I know he stole a television in Seattle and some other things. One time, just one time, he told me if I ever told anyone about it, that he'd . . . break my fucking neck."

Meg said that she was in constant touch with Ted, that she had spoken to him only the night before, and that he'd been his old, tender self again, telling her how much he loved her, planning their marriage. "He needs money: $700 for his attorney, $500 for tuition. He still owes Freda Rogers $500."

Meg knew too that Ted's cousin had told him that he was illegitimate when Ted was eighteen or nineteen. "It really upset him. Nobody had ever told him before."

"Does Ted ever wear a moustache?" Beal asked her suddenly.

"No, sometimes a full beard. Oh, he had a fake moustache. He used to keep it in his drawer. Sometimes he stuck it on and asked me how he looked in it."

The interview ended. Meg had smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. She had pleaded with the Utah investigators to tell her that Ted could not be involved, but they couldn't.

The picture of Ted Bundy that was emerging was far different than that of the perfect son, the modern day prototype of an Horatio Alger hero. Meg Anders was living a dual existence, something that was intolerable for her, something that was standard for her lover. She talked often to Ted on the phone, and he played down the police interest in him, even though, as he talked, he was under constant surveillance by the Utah lawmen. And she continued to answer questions put to her by the detectives who were trying to place him during all those essential time periods, some of them now a year and a half before. July 14, 1974 was an infamous day in Washington-the