The Stranger Beside Me (26 page)

A male witness!,who was present at Lake Sammamish on July 14 was out o£ the state when the news of the Utah arrest broke, and he'd seen no pictures of Ted at all-yet he picked Ted Bundy's picture from a mug lay-down without hesitation. So did the Oregon district attorney's son who had been in Ellensburg on April 17th when Susan Rancourt vanished. He was "seventy percent" sure, far from being as valuable in 174

court as one hundred percent would have been. "I drove back to Seattle from Ellensburg late that night," he recalled. "When I was about ten miles east of Issaquah, I noticed a small foreign car pulled off on a side road. The tail lights were small and round, like a VW's." The spot he mentioned was close to Taylor Mountain. Another tiny link?

For a fiction writer, it would have been enough. For an actual criminal investigation, it was circumstantial evidence, block upon block piled up until there was no doubt in the Washington detectives' minds that Theodore Robert Bundy was the "Ted" they had sought for so long. But enough to bring charges? No. They didn't have so much as a single hair, a button or an earring, nothing that locked Ted Bundy tightly to any of the victims. No prosecutor in his right mind would touch it. They would count over forty "coincidences," and, even taken all together, it wasn't enough.

The final "coincidence" was a case that Seattle Morals Detective Joyce Johnson had investigated, a rape case that occurred on March 2, 1974, at 4220 12th Avenue N.B., only a few houses from Freda Rogers's rooming house.

The victim, an attractive twenty-year-old woman, had gone to bed around 1 A.M. on that Saturday morning. "My shades were drawn, but there's a place where one of the curtains doesn't meet the sill and someone could look in and see that I was alone. About three-quarters of the time, I have someone with me. That morning, I'd forgotten to put the wooden slat in the window to lock it. The man took off the screen, and, when I woke up about four, I saw him standing in the doorway. I saw his profile. There was a light shining through from the living room where he'd left his flashlight on. He came over and sat on my bed and told me to relax, that he wouldn't hurt me."

The woman had asked him how he'd gotten in and he answered, "It is none of your business."

The man had worn a tee shirt, jeans, and had a dark navy watchcap pulled over his face to below his chin. "It wasn't a ski mask, but I think he had made slits in it for his eyes because he could see. His voice was well-educated. He'd been drinking; I could smell it. He had a knife with a carved handle, but he said he wouldn't use it if I didn't fight." The man had taped her eyes, and then he had raped her.

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She didn't fight him. When he was finished, he'd taped her hands and feet, telling her it was just to "slow her down." She heard him go into the living room and crawl through a window, then the sound of footsteps running toward the alley.

She heard no car.

She told Detective Johnson, "He was so calm and sure of himself. I think he's done it before."

The Seattle Police detectives, and Captain Nick Mackie and Ms detectives-Bob Keppel, Roger Dunn, Kathy meChesney-were convinced that they had found "Ted." They listed the tie-ins in the missing girls'

cases:

Ted Bundy matched the physical description-so much so that four people had connected him to the composite drawing of the man seen at Lake Sammamish. *He often wore white tennis outfits. *He had lived within a mile of Lynda Ann Healy, George-ann Hawkins, and Joni Lenz. *He drove a light tan Volkswagen. *He often affected a British accent. *He played racquet ball.

*He had had a knife, a cleaver, a taped wrench, a crowbar, a hatchet, crutches, plaster of Paris, surgical gloves, and unexplained women's clothing in his possession. *His whereabouts on the vital days could not be accounted

for.

*He had missed work for three days before and two days after the Lake Sammamish disappearances.

*He regularly traveled 1-5 between Seattle and Olympia.

*He had a friend on the Evergreen State Campus, often stayed with him.

*He had a friend in Ellensburg-a friend who recalled Ted's visiting in the spring of 1974.

*He'd had panty hose in the glove compartment of his car.

*His cousin knew Lynda Healy; he had taken the same classes LyndaJiad.

*He'd been seenlat Lake Sammamish State Park a week before Janice anti Denise vanished.

*He had hiked in the Taylor Mountain area.

*He liked to sneak up behind women; he liked to frighten women. *He preferred women with long dark hair, parted in the middle.

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] *He had tried to choke at least two women while making J

love to them. 1

*He frequented Dante's Tavern, the tavern Lynda had gone to the night she vanished. *His manner toward women could change in an instant-from tenderness to hostility. *He often wore a false moustache. *He liked to sail, had rented sailboats. *In the Colorado cases, his credit cards had been used in

the same areas and towns, on the same days the women vanished.

*He had lied and he had stolen.

*He appeared to be fascinated with bondage and sodomy. *He'd been arrested with a ski mask, panty hose mask,

handcuffs, gloves, garbage bags, strips of cloth, and a crowbar in his possession. *He'd reported his license plates missing in Utah, but kept

them and used them interchangeably with the new plates issued to him.

*His blood type was O, the type found on kidnap victim's Carol DaRonch's coat.

*He'd been identified by DaRonch, Graham, Beck, the young man in Ellensburg, and by three witnesses at Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14th. *He'd been seen by his elderly benefactress in July, 1974

with his arm in a cast. *During 1974 he'd slept during the days and was gone-somewhere-late at nights. *A woman was raped by a man answering his description

only three doors from the Rogers's rooming house. *One of his high school friends was acquainted with

Georgeann Hawkins's family. *He was intelligent, charming, and could approach women

easily and successfully. *He habitually wore corduroy trousers (the ribbed pattern

in the blood of Lynda Healy's bed?).

The list went on and on, and the investigators always came back to the fact that wherever Ted Bundy went, there was soon a lovely young woman, or two, or three, missing . ..

On the other hand, there were dozens of people who were willing to swear that Ted Bundy was a perfect citizen, a man who worked to wipe out violence, to bring about order and peace through the "system," that Ted Bundy was a lover, not

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I a destroyer, of mankind. If he was what detectives believed, a I mass killer, he had been cast from an entirely new mold. On November 13, 1975, while Ted remained in the Salt Lake County jail and his friends and relatives sought to raise the $15,000 needed to bail him out, what came to be known as the Aspen Summit Meeting was held. Mackie, Keppel, and Dunn were there, Jerry Thompson and Ira Seal from Utah, Mike Fisher from Aspen, and dozens of other detectives who had unsolved cases of missing and murdered girls. Inside the Holiday Inn, the details of all those investigations were exchanged, and the name Theodore Robert Bundy was heard often. A tremendous amount of information was exchanged, only making each department involved more certain that they now had their killer in jail. In jail, but with not enough physical evidence to bring further charges. Newspapers were full of suppositions, but few facts.

If the mysterious, unknown "Ted" had frustrated them before, the known Ted Bundy still eluded them.

On November 20th, Ted was freed on bail-$15,000 raised by Johnnie and Louise Bundy. When, and if, he returned to face trial on the kidnaping charges involving Carol DaRonch, that money would be returned and then given to John O'Connell to pay for Ted's defense.

In Seattle, Meg Anders was so frightened of her ex-lover that she made detectives promise that she be notified the minute he crossed into the state of Washington. It is indicative of his persuasive powers to note that, within a day or so of his return to Washington, he was back with her, living in her apartment. All her doubts had been erased, and she was completely in love with him again. She did not deny published reports that they were engaged to be married. She berated herself for having betrayed him and would, for years, stand by him.

Ted was free, but not truly free; wherever he went, he was under constant surveillance by officers recruited from both the King County and Seattle Police departments. Mackie explained it to me, 'NVe can't charge him, but we can't risk letting him out of <$ir sight. If anything should happen while he's up here, if another girl should disappear, there'd be hell to pay."

And so, from the moment Ted's plane landed at SeattleTacoma airport, he was tailed. He seemed, at first, to ignore

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the sneaker cars that followed him as he spent his days with Meg and her daughter, or stayed in a friend's apartment.

I didn't know if I'd hear from Ted when he was in Seattle, but several detectives took me aside and said, "If he calls you, we don't want you going anywhere alone with him-not unless you tell us where you're going to be first."

"Oh, come on," I said. "I'm not afraid of Ted. Besides, you're following him everyplace anyway; if I'm with him, you'll see me."

"Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."

I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore had begun.

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Ted called me shortly after Thanksgiving, and we made arrangements to meet for lunch at the Brasserie Pittsbourg, a French restaurant in the basement of an old building in Pioneer Square, a restaurant only two blocks from both the Seattle and King County Police headquarters. I hadn't seen him for two years, yet he seemed hardly changed, except that his beard was fuller. He was a little thinner perhaps, I thought, as he walked toward me through the rain, grinning. He wore corduroy slacks, a beige and brown coat sweater.

It was strange; his picture had been on the front page of Seattle's papers so often that he should have been easily recognizable, but no one even glanced at him as we spent three hours together. With all the

"sightings" there had been of the phantom "Ted," no one noticed this real Ted at all. We stood in line, ordered the daily special, a carafe of Chablis, and I paid for it. "When this is all over," he promised,

"I'll take you out to lunch."

We carried our plates into the back room and sat at one of the old tables with its butcher paper cloth. It was good to see him, good to know that he was out of the jail that he'd hated so. It was almost as if nothing had happened at all. I knew that he was a prime suspect, but that was all I knew at the time; I had no knowledge at all beyond the few innuendoes I'd read in the papers. Now, it didn't seem that any of the charges could be possible. I didn't know that Meg had told detectives so mudd, didn't know a single detail of the dayand-night investigations that had gone on since August.

I was a little nervous, and I glanced around, half-expecting to see several detectives I would recognize sitting at other tables. In fact, I had had lunch with Nick Mackie and Dr. Berberich at the same restaurant a few weeks before, and the

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Brasserie Pittsbourg was a popular eating spot for detectives. The food was excellent, and it was convenient.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see Mackie here," I told Ted. "He eats here about three days a week. He wants to talk to you. Maybe you should do it. He's not a bad guy."

"I have nothing to talk to him about. I'm sure he's a nice enough guy, but there's no point in our meeting. If they were alert, they could have seen me yesterday. I walked right through the first floor of the courthouse, right by their offices, and nobody spotted me." The surveillance had become a game to him. He found the men tailing him clumsy and awkward and was taking delight in losing them. "A few turns down alleys, around a few corners, and they can't find me. Or sometimes, I go back and talk to them, and that really throws them. What do they expect? I've got nothing to hide." He took particular pride in having lost Roger Dunn in the library at the University of Washington. "I went in the front door of the men's room and out the back. He didn't know there was another door. For all I know, he's still standing out there, waiting for me to come out." He was not amused, however, at the prevailing attitude about his guilt in the minds of the public. He was particularly incensed because he had planned an afternoon of fun foi' Meg's twelve-year-old daughter and the girl's best friend. "Her mother wouldn't even let her child Jo to a hamburger stand with me. It's ridiculous. What did she think I was going to do? Attack her daughter?"

Yes, I thought to myself, she probably did. I had certainly not made up my mind about Ted's guilt at that fall meeting in 1975, but I wouldn't have gambled my daughters' safety on my own feelings. Ted's stance was that of an innocent man; he was hurt by the accusations, and he'd just spent eight weeks in jail. I tried to put myself in his place, to deal with his outrage. And still, I was consumed with curiosity. But there was no way I could come right out and ask, "Ted, did you do it? Did you do any of it?" There are no rules of social etiquette for questioning an old friend accused of crimes that were so awful. He continued to toss away the Utah charges as if they were no more important than a slight misunderstanding. He was supremely confident that he would win in court in the DaRonch case; the burglary tools charges were too ridiculous

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to discuss. Things were fine with Meg. If only the police would leave them alone, allow them to enjoy this time together. She was a wonderful woman, supportive, sensitive.

We sipped wine, ordered another carafe, and watched the rain run down the windows, windows in the basement restaurant that were at sidewalk level so that we could see only the lower legs and feet of those who passed by outside. He seldom met my eyes. Instead, he sat sideways in his chair, his gaze fixed on the wall opposite.