The Stranger Beside Me (5 page)

And so, when the quiet nights came, the nights when the moon was no longer full, when the welfare money had run out with no money left to buy liquor, and when the street people and the callers seemed to be enjoying a spate of serenity, Ted and I talked for hours to each other. 26

On the surface, at least, it seemed that I had more problems than Ted did. He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.

Most of the Crisis Clinic volunteers gave our time because we had endured crises ourselves, tragedies that made us more able to understand those who called in. I was not an exception. I had lost my only brother to suicide when he was twenty-one, a Stanford senior about to enter Harvard Medical School. I had tried vainly to convince him that life was worthwhile and precious, and I had failed because Yd been too close to him and had felt his pain too acutely. If I could save someone else, I think I felt that it might help me to expiate some of the guilt I still carried.

Ted listened quietly as I told him about my brother, of the long night's wait while sheriff's deputies looked for Don, finally finding him too late in a deserted park north of Palo Alto, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In 1971 my life was not without problems. My marriage was in deep trouble, and I was again trying to cope with guilt. Bill and I had agreed to a divorce only weeks before he'd been diagnosed as having malignant melanoma, the deadliest of skin cancers.

"What can I do?" I asked Ted. "How can I leave a man who may be dying?"

"Are you sure he's dying?" Ted responded.

"No. The first surgery seems to have caught all the malignancy, and the skin grafts have finally held. He wants to end the marriage. He says he wants to, but I feel as if I'm really running away from a sick man who needs me."

"But it's his choice, isn't it? If he seems well, and if your being together is an unhappy situation for both of you, then you have no guilt. He's made the decision. It's his life, and, especially when he might not have that many years ahead, it's his right to decide how he wants to spend them."

"Are you talking to me as if I were a crisis caller?" I smiled.

"Maybe. Probably. But my feelings would be the same. You both deserve to get on with your lives."

Ted's advice proved to be the right advice. Within a year, I would be divorced, and Bill would remarry, would have four good years doing what he wanted.

27

What was happening in my life in 1971 is unimportant to the story of Ted Bundy, save for the fact that Ted's incisive viewpoint on my problems, his unfailing support and belief in my capabilities as a writer who could earn a living on her own, demonstrate the kind of man I knew. It was that man I would continue to believe in for many years. Because I had opened up my life to him, Ted seemed to feel at ease in talking about the vulnerable areas in his world, although it was not until many weeks after I met him that he did so.

One night, he moved his chair through the alcove that separated our desks and sat beside me. Behind him one of the posters that were plastered over most of the walls in our offices was in my direct line of vision. It was a picture of a howling kitten clinging to a thick rope, and it read, "When you get to the end of your rope ... tie a knot and hang on."

Ted sat there silently for a moment or two as we sipped coffee companionably. Then he looked down at his hands and said, "You know, I only found out who I really am a year or so ago. I mean, I always knew, but I had to prove it to myself."

I looked at him, a little surprised, and waited for the rest of the story.

"I'm illegitimate. When I was born, my mother couldn't say that I was her baby. I was born in a home for unwed mothers and, when she took me home, she and my grandparents decided to tell everyone that I was her brother, and that they were my parents. So I grew up believing that she was my sister, that I was a 'late baby' born to my grandparents." He paused, and looked at the sheets of rain that washed over the windows in front of us. I didn't say anything; I could tell he had more to say.

"I knew. Don't tell me how I knew. Maybe I heard conversations. Maybe I just figured out that there couldn't be twenty years' difference in age between a brother and a sister, and Louise always took care of me. I just grew up knowing that she was really my mother."

"Did you ever say anything?"

He shook his head. "No. It would have hurt them. It just wasn't something you talked about. When I was little, we moved away-Louise and I-and left my grandparents behind. If they were my mother and father, we wouldn't have

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done that. I went back east in 1969. I needed to prove it to myself, to know for sure. I traced my birth to Vermont, and I went to the city hall, and I looked at the records. It wasn't difficult; I just asked for my birth certificate under my mother's name-and there it was."

"How did you feel? Were you shocked, or upset?"

"No. I think I felt better. It wasn't a surprise at all. It was like I had to know the truth before I could do anything else. And when I saw it there on the birth certificate, then I'd done that. I wasn't a kid. I was twenty-two when I found out for certain."

"They lied to you. Did it seem like they'd deceived you?"

"No. I don't know."

"People lie out of love too, you know," I said. "Your mother could have let you go-but she didn't. She did the best she could. It must have seemed the only thing she could do to keep you with her. She must have loved you very much."

He nodded, and said softly, "I know ... I know."

"And look at you now. You turned out pretty good. In fact, you turned out great."

He looked up and smiled. "I hope so."

"I know so."

We never talked about it again. It was funny. In 1946, when Ted's mother had found out she was pregnant in Philadelphia, I had been a high school student thirty miles away in Coatesville. I remember that when the girl who sat next to me in physics class became pregnant, it was the talk of the school. That's the way things were in 1946. Could Ted understand that in 1971? Could he even fathom what his mother had gone through to keep him?

He certainly seemed to have made the most of his considerable assets. He was brilliant, and making almost straight A's in psychology in his senior year, even though most of his studying had to be done between calls during his all-night shifts at the Crisis Clinic. I had never brought up any facet of psychology that Ted wasn't fully conversant with. During that autumn quarter of 1971, Ted was taking ecological biology, adaptation of man, laboratory of human performance, and an honors seminar.

He was handsome, although the years of adversity ahead would somehow see him become even handsomer, as if his features were being honed to a fine edge.

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And Ted was physically strong, much stronger than I had thought when I saw him for the first time. He had seemed slender, almost frail, and I had made it a habit to bring cookies and sandwiches to share with him each Tuesday night; I thought he might not be getting enough to eat. I was surprised one warm night when he'd bicycled to the clinic wearing cut-off blue jeans. His legs were as thickly muscled and powerful as a professional athlete's. He was slender, but he was whipcord tough. As far as his appeal for women, I can remember thinking that, if I were younger and single-or if my daughters were older-this would be almost the perfect man.

Ted talked quite a bit about Meg and Liane; I assumed that he was living with Meg, although he never actually said he was.

"She's really interested in your work," he said one night. "Could you bring in some of your detective magazines so I can take them home to her?"

I did bring in several, and he took them with him. He never commented on them, and I assumed that he hadn't read them.

We were talking one night about his plans to go to law school. It was almost spring then, and, for the first time, he told me about Stephanie.

"I love Meg, and she really loves me," he began. "She's helped me with money for school. I owe her a lot. I don't want to hurt her, but there's somebody else I can't stop thinking about."

Again, he had surprised me. He'd never mentioned anyone but Meg.

"Her name is Stephanie, and I haven't seen her for a long time. She's living near San Francisco, and she's completely beautiful. She's tall, almost as tall as I am, and her parents are wealthy. She's never known anything but being rich. I just couldn't fit in with that world."

"Are you in touch with her at all?" I asked.

"Once in a while. We talk on the phone. Every time I hear her voice, it all comes back. I can't settle for anything else unless I try one more time. I'm going to apply for law school anyplace I can get in around San Francisco. I think the problem now is that we're just too far apart. If we were both in California, I think we could get back together." I asked him how long it had been since he'd gone with 30

Stephanie, and he said they'd broken up in 1968, but that Stephanie was still single.

"Do you think she might love me again if I sent her a dozen red roses?" It was such a naive question that I looked up to see if he was serious. He was. When he talked about Stephanie in the spring of 1972, it was as if the intervening years hadn't happened at all.

"I don't know, Ted." I ventured. "If she feels the same way you do, the roses might help-but they wouldn't make her love you if she's changed."

"She's the one woman, the only woman I ever really loved. It's different from the way I feel about Meg. It's hard to explain. I don't know what to do."

Seeing the glow in his eyes when he talked about Stephanie, I could envision the heartbreak ahead for Meg. I urged him not to make promises to Meg he couldn't keep.

"At some point, you're going to have to choose. Meg loves you. She's stood by you when the going is rough, when you don't have any money. You say that Stephanie's family makes you feel poor, as if you don't fit in. It might be that Meg's real, and Stephanie's a dream. I guess the real test is-how would you feel if you didn't have Meg? What would you do if you knew she had someone else, if you found her with another man?"

"I did once. It's funny you should bring it up, because it just made me wild. We'd had a fight, and I saw some guy's car parked outside her apartment. I raced around the alley and stood up on a garbage can to look in the window. The sweat was just pouring off me and I was like a crazy man. I couldn't stand to think of Meg with another man. I couldn't believe the effect it had on me ..."

He shook his head, bemused by the violence of his jealousy.

"Then maybe you care more about Meg than you realize."

"That's the problem. One day I think I want to stay here, marry Meg, help bring Liane up, have more children-that's what Meg wants. Sometimes it seems like that's all I want But I don't have any money. I won't have any money for a long time. And I can't see myself being tied down to a life like that just when I'm getting started. And then I think about Stephanie, and the life I could have with her. I want

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that too. I've never been rich, and I want to be. But how can I say

'thanks a lot and goodbye' to Meg?"

The phones rang then, and we left the problem in midair. Ted's turmoil didn't seem that bizarre or desperate for a man of twenty-four; in fact, it seemed quite normal. He had some maturing to do. When he did, I thought he would probably make the right decision.

When I arrived for work a few Tuesdays later, Ted told me he had applied for admittance to law school at Stanford and at the University of California at Berkeley.

Ted seemed to be a prime candidate for law school; he had the incisive mind for it, the tenacity, and he believed totally in the orderly progression of changes in the system of government through legislation. His stance made him something of a loner among the work-study students working at the Crisis Clinic. They were semihippies, both in their garb and their political views, and he was a conservative Republican. I could see that they considered him a rather odd duck as they argued about the riots that were constantly erupting on the University campus.

"You're wrong, man," a bearded student told him. "You aren't going to change Vietnam by sucking up to the old fogies in Congress. All they care about is another big contract for Boeing. You think they give a shit about how many of us get killed?"

"Anarchy isn't going to solve anything. You just end up scattering your forces and getting your head broken," Ted responded. They snorted in derision. He was anathema to them. The student riots, and the marches blocking the 1-5 Freeway enraged Ted. On more than one occasion, he had tried to block the demonstrations, waving a club and telling the rioters to go home. He believed there was a better way to do it, but his own anger was, strangely, as intense as those he tried to stop.

I never saw that anger. I never saw any anger at all. I cannot remember everything that Ted and I talked about, try as I might, but I do know we never argued. Ted's treatment of me was the kind of old-world gallantry that he invariably showed toward any woman I ever saw him with, and I found it appealing. He always insisted on seeing me safely to my car when my shift at the Crisis Clinic was over in the wee hours of the morning. He stood by until I was safely inside 32

my car, doors locked and engine started, waving to me as I headed for home twenty miles away. He often told me, "Be careful. I don't want anything to happen to you."

Compared to my old friends, the Seattle homicide detectives, who routinely saw me leave their offices after a night's interviewing, at midnight in downtown Seattle with a laughing, "We'll watch out the window and if anyone mugs you, we'll call 911," Ted was a like a knight in shining armorl

I had to drop my volunteer work at the Crisis Clinic in the spring of 1972. I was writing six days a week, and, beyond that, I was getting stale--a little jaded on the phones. After a year and a half, I had heard the same problems too many times. I had problems of my own. My husband had moved out, we had filed for divorce, and I had two teenagers and two preteens at home who provided their own crises for me to cope with. Ted graduated from the University in June. We had never seen each other outside the Crisis Clinic, and now we kept in touch with infrequent phone calls. I didn't see him again until December. My divorce was final on December 14th. On December 16th all current and former clinic personnel were invited to a Christmas party at Bruce Cummins's home on Lake Washington. I had a car-but no escort-and I knew Ted didn't have a car, so I called and asked him if he would like to attend the party with me. He seemed pleased, and I picked bun up at the Rogers's rooming house on 12th N.B. Freda Rogers smiled at me and called up the stairs to Ted.