The Stranger Beside Me (35 page)

The word of Ted's escape was a news flash on every radio station between Denver and Seattle, down into Utah. In As:t pen, residents were told to lock their doors, hide their chil-j dren, garage their cars.

! Frank Tucker, the District Attorney who was the chief ob-ject of Ted's derision that summer, commented in I-told-youso terms,

"I am not surprised. I kept telling them." ; Apparently everyone had been expecting Ted to run, but

| no one had done anything about it, and now they ran in circles trying to get him back. The roadblocks on the two ^ roads leading out (of town took forty-five minutes to set up;

(à the dogs were delayed for almost four hours on their flight 2| from Denver because carriers could not be located and the ijm airlines refused to fly them without carriers. If there is a pa-tron saint of escapees, he was looking down favorably on Ted Bundy. Back in Seattle, I began to receive phone calls from friends and law officers, warning me that Ted was loose. It was their

237

feeling that he might head toward me, thinking that I would hide him or give him money to get across the Canadian border. It was a confrontation that I didn't relish. I doubted that he would head back toward Washington; there were just too many people who would recognize him. If he got out of the mountains around Aspen, he would do better to head for Denver, or some other big city. Nevertheless, Nick Mackie gave me his home phone number, and my sons were instructed that they must get to their phone and call for help if Ted appeared at our front door.

My phone rang three times on the evening of June 7th. Each time I answered, there was no one there ... or no one who spoke. I could hear sounds in the background as if the calls were coming from a phone booth on a highway, cars racing by.

I finally said, "Ted . . . Ted, is that you?" and the connection was broken.

When Ted made his desperate jump for freedom, it had been a beautiful sunny warm day in Aspen; but nightfall brought the temperature drops common to mountain towns even in summer. Wherever Ted was, he was undoubtedly cold. I slept restlessly, dreaming that 7 had gone camping and discovered that I'd forgotten to bring blankets or a sleeping bag. Where was he? The tracking dogs had stopped, confused, as they'd reached the Roaring Fork River. He must have planned that. They couldn't pick up his trail beyond his first four block run to the river shores. It began to rain in Aspen late in the afternoon of that Monday in June, and anyone unlucky enough to be without shelter would have quickly been soaked to the skin. Ted wore only a light shirt and slacks. He was possibly suffering from a badly sprained or broken ankle . .. but he was still free.

He must have felt like the protagonist of Papillon, the book he'd almost committed to memory during his long months in jail. Beyond the cleverness of escape, Papillon had dealt with mind "control, man's ability to think himself past despair, to contAl his environment by sheer force of will. Was Ted doing tnat now?

The men who tracked Ted Bundy looked like something out of a Charles Russell or Frederick Remington painting, garbed in Stetsons, deerskin vests, jeans, cowboy boots, and carrying sidearms. They could have been possemen of a cen-238

tury earlier, looking for Billy the Kid or the James boys; I wondered if they would shoot first and ask questions later when-and if-they found Ted.

Aspenites vacillated between utter fear and black humor. While deputies and volunteers made a house-by-house search in the resort city, entrepreneurs hastened to capitalize on this new folk hero who was capturing the imagination of a town where ennui can set in quickly. Ted Bundy had thumbed his nose at the system, had beaten the "dumb cops," and hardly anyone stopped to think about the broken body of Caryn Campbell that had been found in the snowbank way back in 1975. Bundy was news, and good for laughs.

Tee-shirts began to appear on well-endowed young women, reading: "Ted Bundy" is a One Night Stand"; "Bundy's Free-You can bet your Aspen on it!"; "Bundy lives on a Rocky Mountain High!"; "Bundy's in Booth D." (This last slogan referred to a national magazine article which stated that, if one sat in Booth D in a local restaurant, one could purchase cocaine.)

One restaurant put "Bundy Burgers" on its menu . . . open the bun and the meat has fled. A "Bundy Cocktail" served locally was made of tequila, rum, and two Mexican jumping beans.

Hitchhikers, wanting to be assured of a ride out of Aspen, wore signs reading, "I am not Bundy."

Paranoia reigned along with the high-jinks. One young male reporter, after interviewing three young women in a café about their reactions to' Bundy's escape, was promptly turned in as a suspect; his identification and press card had meant little.

Everywhere, fingers of blame were being pointed. Sheriff Keinast blamed Judge Lohr for allowing Ted to represent himself, and for letting him appear in court without his leg irons and handcuffs. Tucker blamed everyone, and Keinast admitted to one reporter wearily that he wished he'd never heard of Ted Bundy.

By Friday, June 10th, Ted had been missing three days and the FBI joined the manhunt. Louise Bundy appeared on television and begged Ted to come back. She was worried about Ted being out in the mountains. "But most of all I'm worried about the people who are looking for him not using good common sense and pulling the trigger first and asking questions later. People will think, 'Oh, he must be guilty;

239

that's why he's running.' But I think just all the frustrations piled up and he saw an open window and decided to go. I'm sure by now he's probably sorry he did."

The number of searchers had dropped from 150 to 70 by Friday. The feeling was that Ted had made his way out of the search area, and possibly had had an accomplice. Sid Morley, thirty, serving a year for possession of stolen property, had become friendly with Ted in the Pitkin County Jail and transferred with him to the Garfield County Jail. Morley had failed to return from a work release job on the Friday before Ted's jump from the courthouse and the searchers felt he might have been waiting to help Ted.

However, Morley was taken into custody on June 10th near a tunnel on Interstate 70, fifty miles west of Denver. Questioned, he insisted that he'd known nothing about Ted's escape plans and he did not, indeed, seem to be involved. Morley's own opinion was that Ted was still in Pitkin County, but outside of Aspen.

Nationwide, it was a big week for escapes. Even as Ted Bundy was being tracked in Colorado, James Earl Ray, along with three other inmates, escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee on June 11th. For one day, the story of that escape would take western headline precedence over Bundy's.

Ted Bundy was still in Pitkin County. He had made his way through town on June 7th to the foot of Aspen Mountain, and then hiked easily up the grassy slope; it had been a bad year for snow, but the warm winter was lucky for Ted. By the time the sun set that first night, he was up and over Aspen Mountain and walking along Castle Creek, headed south. Ted had maps with him of the mountain area around Aspen, maps which were being used by the prosecution to show the location of Caryn Campbell's body. As his own defense attorney, he had rights of discovery!

If he could have kept going south until he came to the hamlet of Crestad Butte, he might have been able to catch a ride to freedom.*But the winds and rain had driven him back to a cabin he'd rfissed along the way, a well-stocked and temporarily unoccupied mountain cabin. Ted rested there after breaking in. There was a little food in the cabin, some warm clothing, a rifle. On Thursday morning, June 9th, better equipped and carrying the rifle, he headed south again. He might have made it to Crested Butte,

240

but he didn't keep going straight south. Instead, he cut west over another ridge that wasn't so choked with lingering snow, and found himself along the East Maroon Creek.

He was going in circles now, and soon found himself again on the outskirts of Aspen. He headed back up Castle Creek for the cabin where he'd found shelter days earlier. He was too late. Searchers had found that he'd been there; in fact searchers were fanning out around the cabin as he watched behind vegetation a couple hundred yards away. The posse members found scraps of dried food in the cabin and learned that the gun and ammunition were missing. They identified one fingerprint found in the cabin as being Ted's. Then they learned that someone had broken into a Volkswagen camper in a resort area on Maroon Lake-apparently on Friday, June 10th-and had taken food and a ski parka. Despite the stolen bits of food, Ted had lost a lot of weight, his injured ankle was swelling, and he was close to exhaustion. He headed back north, toward Aspen. On Saturday night, June llth, he slept in the wild, and Sunday found him skirting the edges of town. On Sunday night, he had been gone almost a full week; he was still free, but he was right back where he'd started and he needed a miracle to get out of town. Huddled, exhausted and shivering, in the tall bushes at the edge of the Aspen Golf Course, he saw an old Cadillac parked nearby. He checked and keys were in it. Ted seemingly had his miracle-wheels.

Crouching low in the seat, he steered first toward Smuggler's Mountain and the propitiously named Independence Pass route that headed east away from Aspen. Then he changed his mind; he would go west, instead, toward Glenwood Springs, back toward the jail where he'd been incarcerated, but further than that, beyond that, west to complete freedom.

It was now 2:00 A.M. on Monday, June 13th.

Pitkin County Deputies Gene Flatt and Maureen Higgins were patrolling the streets of Aspen, headed in an easterly direction that early morning when their attention was drawn to a Cadillac coming toward them. The driver appeared to be drunk; the car was wavering all over the road. They weren't even thinking of Ted Bundy as they turned around and followed the Cadillac. They expected to find a drunk driver in-

241

side. Actually, Ted was cold sober, but his reflexes were dulled by exhaustion; he couldn't control the Cadillac.

The patrol car pulled up alongside the fishtailing Cadillac and signaled it to pull over. Gene Flatt walked over to the driver's side of the car and looked in. The man inside wore glasses and had a band-aid plastered over his nose. But Flatt recognized him; it was Ted Bundy, who was about to be captured only blocks from where he had escaped. Ted shrugged and smiled thinly as Flatt said, "Hello, Ted." The mountain maps were found in the stolen car, indicating that Ted's leap from the courthouse had not been a spur of the moment impulse. He had planned the abortive escape attempt. Now, he was in more trouble than he'd been in before; he was lodged temporarily in the Pitkin County Jail until June 16th when he was arraigned on charges of escape, burglary, and theft. Judge Lohr handed down an order that Ted would henceforth wear handcuffs and leg irons when he was being moved from place to place. But he would still be allowed to have most of the privileges he'd been granted before so that he could participate in his own defense: the law library access, the free long distance calls, all the other investigative tools.

A week after Ted was recaptured, my phone rang a little before 8 A.M. Awakened from a sound sleep, I was startled to hear Ted's voice.

"Where are you?" I mumbled.

"Can you come and pick me up?" he asked, and then laughed. He had not escaped again, but for a moment, I'd believed that he had somehow gotten out of jail once more.

He told me he was fine, a little tired, and suffering from the loss of about twenty pounds, but fine.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

"Would you believe I just looked out the window and saw all that lovelv green grass and blue sky out there and I couldn't resist?'^-No, I wouldirt, but I didn't have to say so; it was a rhetorical question. I

It was a short conversation, and when I wrote to him I couldn't help starting with, "Tried to answer your last letter but you'd moved and left no forwarding address."

I had not yet expressed my answer to his question in the letter written just before his escape. He wanted to know my

242

i

feelings about his guilt or innocence. What I told him was that I felt the same way I had felt on the Saturday afternoon in January, 1976, our last meeting before he was returned to Utah for trial in the DaRonch kidnapping case. I had told him then that I could not fully believe in his innocence. I don't know if he recalled what I'd said or not, but my reference to that afternoon in the tavern seemed to be enough. I also reminded him that I had never written one line about him for publication. Although he was big news, and getting bigger, I had managed to keep that promise. It seemed to satisfy him.

His first letter after his capture was not as bitter or scathing as those just before had been; perhaps his taste of freedom had softened him somewhat.

Ted said he was recuperating from the effects of the failed escape, and that he thought very little of his few days of freedom. He was trying to forget being free, but he didn't regret taking the chance. "I learned much about myself, my weaknesses, my capacity to survive, and the relationship of freedom to pain."

Everything about this letter was muted; he had tried and he had failed, and it was as if he'd turned down the energy in his emotions. After he was recaptured, he had learned from Meg that she was involved with another man. A year before, he would have been beating his breast in agony; now he viewed Meg's final defection rationally and soberly.

"Accepting the loss of her will never be easy. In fact, I doubt that I could ever truly say I accept her loving and living with another man. I will always love her so I could never say that I do not dream of our life together. But this new development, like my capture, must be taken calmly. My survival is at stake."

Perhaps that was the essential word: "survival." If he allowed himself to grieve for Meg, he would not be up to the fight ahead. He wrote that he could only hope for a belief in a life to come. "I would dream of loving Meg again in another time."