The Stranger Beside Me (32 page)

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His days were spent working in the prison printshop, listening to other prisoners' grievances, and "wishing I were not here." He seemed happy to report that Meg was becoming more independent, even though it meant she didn't write to him as often as before, but he was looking forward to a visit from her on August 28th.

However, Ted had not become completely mellow; he launched into an harangue directed at Nick Mackie and other members of the law enforcement field. He did not want Mackie to read his letter on the psychiatric evaluation, although he forgave me for suggesting it. I think you should know where I stand on the subject of

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policemen in general and Mackie in particular. Policemen have a job, a difficult job, to do, but I am sorry because I don't care one bit for the "job" they did on me no matter how genuine the devotion to duty. I have a standing policy from this point forward never to talk to a law enforcement officer about anything except the time of day and the location of the toilet. Mackie has earned my particular disrespect. True, he may be a good cop, feeds his dog Alpo, and doesn't eat his young alive, but my empathy for him ends there.

Someday, Ted said, he would be interested to hear the "monstrous theory" held by the King County Police Department, but he was not presently interested in "story book fiction." He asked me to continue to stay in touch with Meg, and to "tell Mackie only that he has earned a special place in my heart, as I have probably earned one in his." Ted's letters that summer and fall of 1976 ranged from the anger and humor of this one, to requests for information, to the blackest lines of depression. The mood swings, given his circumstances, were to be expected. His bid to remain free pending his appeal had been denied, and the Colorado murder charge hovered just ahead. There were several letters where he asked me to check out the credentials of Northwest reporters who were attempting to interview him. I tracked most of them to their sources and reported that they seemed to be essentially innocuous writers from small publications. Something happened to Ted's stability during the first week of September, something that seemed to make him despair completely. Reconstructing the time sequence later, I deduced that Meg had said something to him during their August 28th visit that made him think he had lost her forever.

The letter Ted sent me on September 5th was typed on the cover from a pad of typewriter paper, and its contents seemed steeped in the bleakest loss of hope. It could not be interpreted as ^ything other than a suicide note, and it frightened me.

Ted explained that the letter was like a call to the Crisis Clinic, but that there could be no reply. "I am not asking for help, I am saying goodbye."

He wrote that he could no longer struggle for justice, that he was not having just a bad day, but that he had reached "the end of all hope, the darkening of all dreams."

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The letter as a whole-each sentence in it-could only mean one thing. Ted planned to kill himself: "What I am experiencing now is an entirely new dimension of loneliness mixed with resignation and calm. Unlike times of low morale I have survived in the past, I know I will not wake up in the morning refreshed and revived. I will wake up knowing only what has to be done-if I have the courage."

As my eyes raced down the page, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up; it might already be too late. He'd written this three days before.

The last sentences were a plea to the world who believed him guilty of any number of terrible crimes against women: "Lastly, and most important, I want you to know, I want the whole world to know that I am innocent. I have never hurt another human being in my life. God, please believe me."

Although he had said the letter could have no answer, I remembered that Ted and I had both had been taught at the Crisis Clinic that any contact made by someone in emotional distress-any reaching out-must be regarded as a cry for help. Ted had written to me, and I had to assume that meant he wanted me to stop him from destroying himself. I called Bruce Cummins, our long-ago mentor at the Clinic, and read him the letter. He agreed that I had to take some action.

I called John O'Connell's office in Salt Lake City. It was either that or notify Warden Sam Smith's office in the prison, and Ted had better friends in his lawyer's office. I reached Bruce Lubeck and told him that I feared Ted was about to kill himself. He promised to go out to Point-of-the-Mountain and see Ted.

I don't know if he went or not. I wrote a special delivery letter, a letter full of "Hang in there's" and sent it, holding my breath for days, expecting to hear a news bulletin.

It never came.

Instead, on September 26th, Ted wrote me a letter that was a partial explanation. He referred obliquely to hanging himself, but assured me that he was "hanging in there with nothing but my soul, I will add to your relief."

Apparently, it was not my letter that had turned him around, but a session of handball which he'd found to be an effective method of catharsis.

"It (handball) has a curious way of draining the bitterness away. Or perhaps it's the body's way of asserting itself over the destructive impulses of the mind, temporarily mindless of

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the body's uncompromising, unquestioning, eternal desire to survive. The body may only appear as host to the brain, but the intellect, fragile and selfish, is no match for the imperative of life itself. Hanging around, intangibly, is better than being tangibly nothing at all." Ted apologized for alarming me; I wonder if he realized how very upset I had been to receive that suicide note, if he remembered how guilty I'd felt because I hadn't been able to save my own brother's life when he'd reached the point of suicidal thoughts.

Ted had decided to live, and, with this decision, his anger and bravado burst forth in his ensuing letters.

Again and again, he castigated the police. "Police detectives are a curious breed, but one learns quickly that when they have something they act first and talk later ... I never underestimate the inventiveness and dangerousness of such men. Like wild animals, when cornered they can become very unstable."

Ted had reason to fear the "dangerousness" of police detectives. On October 22, almost exactly a year since he had been charged in the DaRonch kidnapping case in Utah, he was formally charged with the murder of Caryn Campbell in Pitkin County, Colorado. I suspect that he was as eager to confront his accusers as he told me he was. His strength in the face of attack seemed to be real, as it would always be. The overt challenges he could face; he was best on his feet, scornfully denying charges against him.

However, it is possible that Ted had not planned to be around when those charges finally came down. On October

19th, Ted had not returned to his cell from the yard. Warden Sam Smith announced that Ted had been discovered behind a bush, and that he'd had an "escape kit" on his person: a social security card, a sketch of a driver's license, road maps, and notes on airplane schedules. Ted had written that his "pristine" behavior had allowed him more freedom around the prison, and now there was speculation that,|with his job in the printshop, he might have intended to print up phony identification papers. He was immediately placed in solitary confinement. In retrospect, viewing Ted's propensity for escape that was to surface in the months ahead, it is likely that he had planned an escape from Point-of-the-Mountain, an escape that was aborted. On October 26th I received a letter from Sharon Auer, 220

who enclosed a brief note that Ted had sent her to send to me. Sharon was still very much a part of his life, even though his letters to me extolled no one but Meg. Sharon was horrified at the maximum security cell where Ted was being held, although her impressions of the "hole" were based on Ted's description of it as he was allowed no visitors. Ted had written to her that he envisioned his cell as something resembling a Mexican prison. "Eight feet high, ten feet long, six feet wide. Two feet in from the front are steel bars running from floor to ceiling. A solid steel door-with only a peephole for the guard to look in-closes off the front of the cell. The walls have graffiti, vomit, and urine coating them."

Ted's bed was a concrete slab with a thin mattress, and the only item of hope in the cell was a crucifix hanging over the wash basin. He could have nothing to read, but was allowed to receive letters. He would be there fifteen days, and Sharon was angry that he had received this harshest punishment possible for such a minor infraction as having a social security card on his person. She wrote that she was trying to write him three or four letters a day. "The bastards may not let me visit, but they're sure going to tire of carrying mail to him ..." Reading her letter, I was again bemused and somewhat dismayed at what the denouement might one day be when those two women who loved Ted realized they had been deluded into believing that each was the only one. And I? I made up the third corner of the three-woman network giving Ted emotional support. I had managed to remain relatively unscathed. Tom by conflicting feelings and doubts still-but 7 was not in love with Ted. Sharon and Meg were.

Ted wrote to me from solitary confinement on Halloween. He said he had had only a woman's social security card, and not the kind used for identification, and blamed Warden Smith for blowing the circumstances out of proportion. I never found out what woman's name was on that card. Ted was angry, but he was not chastened.

Adversity of this kind only serves to make me stronger, especially when it is clear to me that it is designed to create the pressure some believe will shatter my "normal facade." How absurd. Said one prisoner, when he heard of the decision to place me in isolation, "They're trying f to break ya, Bundy. Yeah, they're just tryin' to break THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 221

ya." I couldn't have agreed with him more, but since there is nothing to "break," I'll have to suffer instead. The fact that some persons continue to misjudge me has become almost humorous. Ted commented on the Colorado case only to the extent that he insisted he was innocent of any involvement. He hinted that he had documents that would destroy Colorado's case. "The Colorado trial will mark the beginning of the end of a myth."

He said he had sent me a note via Meg-which was a slip because it had not been Meg who forwarded it, but Sharon. And he chided me gently for living in luxury in my new house, for writing to him on my new personalized stationery. "Personalized stationery is one of the small but truly necessary luxuries of life."

Ted was attempting to push my guilt buttons. I was free, and living in splendor, and he was in the "hole." I refused to take the bait, and wrote back,

You said you'd given the message for me to Meg-but it was Sharon who sent me one. You probably just misspoke yourself. Don't go getting the two of them confused or you'll be in hot water! While you're envying my security, remember you have two members of the opposite sex in love with you, and I haven't got any. Fortunately, I've been so busy lately with work, housing, and the kids' problems, there hasn't been much time to ponder this glaring lack. I am still sleeping with my typewriter and it's still cold, lumpy and unresponsive.

Ted's reply came after his extradition arraignment on the Colorado murder charge, an arraignment that took place on his thirtieth birthday. I had sent him two humorous birthday cards (explaining that Hallmark didn't put out a card specifically for his prlflicament: "Hi there . . . Happy Thirtieth Birthday and Haopy Arraignment."). He had chosen to view his situation witfi wry, angry humor and I geared my responses to that.

Ted wrote after the extradition hearing that he had drawn the largest crowd of reporters he'd seen in one place since his ordeal began, and he denigrated the press's sense of fairplay and justice "-since it has none." He assured me that the

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"eye witness" in Aspen was of no consequence since she had picked out his picture a full year after the Campbell disappearance. Although Ted's extradition arraignment on November 24, 1976 had drawn a flock of reporters, he was not the most famous prisoner in the Utah State Prison that week. It was a fellow convict-Gary Gilmore-a convicted murderer with a death wish, who made the cover of Newsweek on November 29th. Compared to Gary Gilmore, Ted was decidedly second string news. It would not always be so.

Gilmore was an habitual criminal who had shot two young men during robberies, and he had a kind of bitter mystique about him. He too was involved in a doomed romance with a woman who seemed as bedazzled and driven as Ted's Meg was. The tragic child-woman, Nicole Barrett, who had entered into an abortive suicide pact with Gary Gilmore, reminded me of Meg in her obsession with her lover-but Ted apparently saw no correlation at all between his romance and Gilmore's and detested the other man for his manipulation of Nicole. He had studied Gary and Nicole when they met in the visitors' area.

"The Gilmore situation grows curiouser and curiouser. Have seen him on occasion in the visiting room with Nicole. I'll never forget the deep love and anguish in her eyes. Gilmore, however, is misguided, unstable, and selfish . . . The media preys on this Romeo and Juliet saga. Tragic. Irreconcilable."

Nor did Ted have anything good to say about Gilmore's legal advisors. Ted had little time to ruminate on the "saga" of Gary and Nicole; he was busy reviewing and indexing 700 pages of testimony from the DaRonch trial, and, at the same time, studying Colorado criminal law. After reviewing the Utah trial, he could not see how the judge could have found him guilty, and he was sure that there would be no guilty verdict in Colorado.

"I feel like a general conducting a battle, not General Custer either," he wrote enthusiastically. "Legally, I am on very solid ground!" Ted never failed to comment on what was happening back in my world, even if it meant only a sentence or two at the end of his letters. This time, he wrote: