The Stranger Beside Me (24 page)

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da^ tkal Ta.tii.ce Oil •a.M. Qe.tûsft Ng&\\isçl ^aâ. "^si^.ÇSl ^ISSk Lake Sammamish State Park.

Meg remembered that Sunday. "We'd had an argument the night before. I was surprised to see him that morning. He came over, and L told him I was going to church and then planned to lie out in the sun. We quarreled again that morning. We just weren't getting along. I was really surprised to see him later."

Ted had called Meg sometime after six that evening and asked her to go out to eat.

"Was there anything unusual about him that night?" "He looked exhausted, really wiped out. He was getting a bad cold. I asked him what he'd done that day because he was so tired out, and he said he'd just lain around all day."

Ted had removed a ski rack from his car-a rack that belonged to Meg-and placed it back on her car that night. After they'd gone out to eat, he'd fallen asleep on her floor, and gone home at 9:15. Beal and Thompson wondered if it was possible. Could a man leave his girlfriend on a Sunday morning, abduct, rape, and kill two women, and then return casually to his friend's home and take her out to dinner?

They questioned Meg again about Bundy's sex drive. Was he-they tried to phrase it tactfully-was he the kind of man who normally had several orgasms in a period of lovemaking?

"Oh, a long time ago, when we first started going together. But no, not lately. He was just normal."

Thompson made a decision. He pulled out a picture of all the items found in Ted's car when he'd been arrested by Sergeant Bob Hayward on August 16th. Meg studied them. "Have you ever seen any of these things?" "I haven't seen that crowbar. I've seen the gloves, and the gym bag. Usually, it's empty. He carries his athletic supplies in it."

"Did you ever confront him about the taped lug wrench that you found in your car?"

"Yeah, he said%ou never know when you can get caught in the middle of a jtudent riot."

"Where was it l&pt?" Thompson asked. "Usually in the trunk of my car. He borrowed my car a lot. It was a Volkswagen bug too, a tan one. Once, I saw the wrench under the seat in front."

Meg recalled that Ted had often slept in his car in front of 160

her house. "I don't know why. He was just there. This was a long time ago, and there was a crowbar or a tire iron or something that he left in my house one night. I heard him come back in, and I opened the door to see what he wanted. He looked really sick, like he was hiding something, and I said, 'What have you got in your pocket?' He wouldn't show me. I reached in and pulled out a pair of surgical gloves. Weird. He didn't say anything. It seems incredible now that I didn't just say, 'Go away.'

"

It was weird. But, until the events of 1974 and 1975, Meg had never connected Ted's nocturnal habits to anything definite. Like so many other women in love, she had simply put it all out of her mind. 18

Ted wrote me in October, 1975 that he felt as if he were "in the eye of a hurricane," and, indeed, he had been in the center of some manner of storm ever since his arrest in August. I hadn't known of this arrest until he phoned me at the end of September, and he had passed it off with a shrug to me just as he had with Meg and his other Washington friends. It would be a long time before I learned of the investigation that went on throughout the entire autumn. Once in a great while in the years ahead, a detective would let something slip, and then say hastily, "Forget I said that." I didn't forget, but I didn't tell anyone what I'd heard, and I most assuredly didn't write anything about it. Occasionally, odd bits and pieces would leak to the press, but the entire story would never be known to me until after the Miami trial, four years hence. As it was, having only fragments of the story, I tried to withhold judgment. Had Ted been a complete stranger to me-as all the other suspects I'd written about had beenresolution of my feelings might have come sooner. I don't believe it was because I was dense; better minds than mine continued to support him.

In each case that I researched after the "Ted" murders, each young woman's murder where a suspect was arrested, I traced back to see where that man had been on the days of crimes where Ted was a suspect. And, for the "Ted" crimes, the men had solid alibis. By the fall of 1975, there were more than a dozen detectives in Washington, Utah, and Colorado working full-time on Ted Bundy: Captain Pete Hayward and Detective Jerry Thompson fromjthe Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office; Detective Mike Fisner from the Pitkin County District Attorney's Office in Aspen, Colorado; Detective Sergeant Bill Baldridge from the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office; Detective Milo Vig from the Mesa County Sheriff's Office in Grand

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Junction, Colorado; Detective Lieutenant Ron Ballantyne and Detective Ira Beal from the Bountiful, Utah Police Department; Captain Nick Mackie, and Detectives Bob Keppel, Roger Dunn, and Kathy McChesney from the King County, Washington Sheriff's Office; Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson, and Detectives Ted Fonis and Wayne Dorman from the Seattle Police Homicide Unit.

Ted had stated to Jerry Thompson and John Bernardo that he had never been to Colorado, had explained away the maps and brochures of the ski areas by saying "Somebody must have left them in my apartment." Mike Fisher, in checking Bundy's credit card slips, found that that was not true. Moreover he was able to place Bundy's car-the VW bug, bearing two separate sets of plates-in Colorado on the very days that the victims in that state had vanished, and within a few miles of the sites of the disappearances.

The Chevron Oil Company duplicate records noted that Ted had purchased gas as follows: on January 12, 1975 (the day Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn) in Glenwood Springs, Colorado; on March 15, 1975

(the day Julie Cunningham walked away from her apartment forever) in Golden, Dillon, and Silverthorne, Colorado; on April 4, 1975 in Golden, Colorado; on April 5, in Silverthorne; and on April 6 (the day Denise Oliverson vanished) in Grand Junction, Colorado. But only once had "Ted" ever been seen, and that was in Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974. The King County detectives began to chart as much of Ted Bundy's life as they could ferret out. That was why his law school records had been subpoenaed. Because their probe into Ted had been carried out with a minimum of fanfare, Detective Kathy McChesney had been very startled when I had called her at Ted's behest. The investigators had not known that Ted was even aware that he was under suspicion in Washington.

At the same time that Ted's Utah law school records were subpoenaed, his telephone records were requested from Mountain Bell in Salt Lake City, records going back to September, 1974 when he'd first moved to Utah.

Kathy McChesney asked if I would come in for an interview in early November, 1975; she had been given the assignment of interviewing the women Ted had known in Seattle, however peripherally. Again, I repeated-this time for the record-the circum-

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stances under which I'd met Ted, our work at the Crisis Clinic, our close, but sporadic, friendship over the intervening years.

"Why do you think he called you just before his arrest in Salt Lake City?" she asked.

"I think it was because he knew that I worked with you all the time, and I don't think he wanted to talk to detectives directly." Kathy thumbed through a stack of papers, pulled one out, and said suddenly, "What did Ted say to you when he called you on November 20, 1974?"

I looked at her blankly. "When?"

"Last year on November 20th."

"Ted didn't call me," I answered truthfully. "I hadn't talked to Ted since sometime in 1973."

"Yes, we have his telephone records. There's a call to your number a little before midnight on Wednesday, November

20th. What did he say?"

I had known Kathy McChesney since we had both been in the King County Police Basic Homicide School in 1971 (she as a deputy sheriff and myself as an invited "auditor"). She had been promoted to detective, although she looked more like a high school girl, and she was sharp. I'd interviewed her countless times when she worked in the sex crimes unit. I wasn't trying to evade her question, but I was puzzled. It's difficult to remember what you were doing on a particular date a whole year before. And then it dawned on me. "Kathy, I wasn't home that night. I was in the hospital because I'd had an operation the day before. But my mother told me about a funny call. It was a call from a man who wouldn't leave his name, and .. . yeah, it was on November 20th." That mystery was solved, but I have often wondered since if the events to follow might have somehow been different if I had been home to take that call. In the years ahead, I would receive dozens o£ phone calls from Ted-calls from Utah, Colorado, Florida-as well as scores of letters, and we would have several fac^to-face meetings. I would be caught up in his life again, Tom between belief in him completely and the doubts that grew stronger and stronger.

Kathy McChesney believed me; I'd never lied to her and I never would. If I'd known who the man was who'd called me, I would have told her. 164

Ted also made two other calls on the night of Novembd 20th-two calls between eleven and midnight. Although he had broken his

"secret" engagement to Stephanie Brooks in January of that year, sent her away without any apologies or explanations, he had placed a call to her parents' home in California at 11:03 P.M. Stephanie hadn't been there. A woman friend of the family recalls that she talked to a friendly sounding man who asked for Stephanie. "I told him that Stephanie was engaged, and living in San Francisco . . . and he hung up." Ted had next dialed an Oakland residence where none of the occupants had ever heard of Ted Bundy or Stephanie Brooks. The couple who lived there had no contacts in Seattle or Utah, and the man who answered figured it had been a wrong number.

By the time Ted reached my number in Seattle, he'd been very upset, according to my mother. In wondering who that call might have been from, Ted's name had never entered my mind. Now, as Kathy asked me about it, I knew that the timing of the midnight call might be imperative; Ted had called me twelve days after Carol DaRonch had escaped her kidnaper, and after Debby Kent had vanished, twenty days after Laura Aime disappeared, a month after someone spirited Melissa Smith away.

"I wish I'd been home that night," I told Kathy.

"So do I." \

Kathy's assignments took her to the elder Bundys' residence in Tacoma. They believed none of the charges against their son. There would be no permission to search their home or the area around their cabin on Crescent Lake. What was unthinkable would not be helped along by the Bundys. And there was no probable cause to obtain search warrants. Freda Rogers, Ted Bundy's landlady for five years, was also fiercely protective of him. From the day he had located his room at 4143 12th N.B., by knocking on doors, Freda had liked him. He had been a good tenant, more like a son than a roomer, often putting himself out to help them. His room in the southwest corner of the old house had rarely been locked, and it was cleaned every Friday by Freda herself. Surely, if he had something to hide, she reasoned, she would have sensed it.

"His things are all gone; he moved everything

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out in September of 1974. Look around, if you like, but you won't find anything."

Detectives Roger Dunn and Bob Keppel checked the Rogers's house from top to bottom, even climbing up into the attic. If anything had been hidden up there, the insulation would have been disturbed, and it had not been. They moved over the grounds with metal detectors, looked for spots where something might have been buried. Clothes? Jewelry? Parts of a bicycle? There was nothing.

Kathy McChesney talked with Meg Anders. Meg produced checks that Ted had written in 1974. They were not incriminating in the least; simply small checks written for groceries. Meg's own checks helped her to isolate what she had done on particularly important days and to determine whether she had seen her fiance on those days.

Asked about the plaster of paris she had seen in Ted's room, Meg said she'd seen it first a long time ago, perhaps in

1970. "But I saw a hatchet under the front seat of his car, a hatchet with a pinkish leather cover, in the summer of 1974, and the crutches. I saw them in May or June of 1974. He said they belonged to Ernst Rogers."

"We'd been to Green Lake one day. I asked him about the hatchet, because it bothered me. I can't remember what his explanation was, but it made sense at the time. It was in August of 1974; I'd just come back from a trip to Utah. He was talking about getting a rifle that day. The cleaver, and the meat tenderizer ... I saw those when he was packing. And the oriental knife. He said someone gave him the knife as a ' present."

"Can you think of anything else that bothered you?" McChesney asked.

"Well, it didn't then, but he always kept two pair of mechanic's overalls and a tool box in the trunk of his car."

"Did Ted have any friends at Evergreen College in Olympia?"

"Just Rex St£|rk, the man he worked with on the Crime Commission. Rex was on the campus in 1973 and 1974, and Ted stayed somf nights with him when he worked in Olympia. Rex had a place on a lake there."

"Did he have friends in Ellensburg?"

"Jim Paulus; he knew him from high school. And his wife. We visited them once,"

Meg knew of no one Ted might know at Oregon State

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University. No, there had never been any pornography in hisl room. No, he didn't own a sailboat, but he had rented one! once. Ted often liked to search out lonely country roads I when they went on drives. M

"Did he ever go to taverns alone?" •

"Only O'Bannion's and Dante's." Ï

Meg consulted her diary. There were so many dates toi remember. I

"Ted called me from Salt Lake City, on October 18th last I year, three times. He was going hunting with my father the I next morning. He called me on November 8th after 11:00. I (Salt Lake City time zone would make it after midnight I there.) There was a lot of noise in the background when he I called." I