The Stranger Beside Me (61 page)

"Kim had a sore throat, and she went to bed early. She got up sometime during the night to go down to the bathroom to get a drink of water because she was coughing. She saw that the lights were out in the hallway. They were almost always on, and it was pitch dark-but she just had a little way to walk to touch the switch. But she said she suddenly felt such unreasoning terror-as if something awful was waiting for her. She had a terrible cough and she really needed a drink of water-but she backed into her room and locked the door. She didn't come out until the police banged on the door later. . ..

"And-it must have been a little bit after that-Tina started down the back stairs-to the kitchen to get a snack. It was the same kind of thing. She couldn't seem to make her feet go down those stairs. She started to shake, and she ran back to her room too. She'd felt something-or someone-waiting down below. . . ."

I had always believed that Margaret Bowman had been Ted's designated victim that January night in 1978. Margaret looked very much like Stephanie Brooks; she was a beautiful girl with the same long silken dark hair. It would have been easy enough for Ted to have spotted her on the Florida State Campus, or walking near The Oak and the Chi O

house-or

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even at Sherrod's. But how could Ted have known which room Margaret Bowman slept in?

I asked my Chi Omega caller that. "How did he know just where to go?"

"We had a room plan posted-"

"A room plan?"

"Like a blueprint of the house. Each room had a number, and the names of the girls who had that room were written in."

"Where was it?"

"In the foyer. Near the front door, on the wall there. We took it down after."

Posted on the foyer wall, right there in the one area of the sorority house where dates and delivery men . .. and strangers could read it and pinpoint exactly which room each girl occupied. It would have been propititious for a man stalking a particular girl. The Chi Omegas, beseiged by the press, ousted from their rooms by investigators dusting for prints, gathering evidence, and testing for blood, were evacuated from the huge house on West Jefferson and farmed out around Tallahassee with alumnae. They came back two weeks later, just about the same time the housemother's cat deemed the house safe again.

I have not been back to the Chi O house in Tallahassee, but I have returned many times to the Theta house on the University of Washington campus hi Seattle-with screen writers or magazine photographers-who want to see where Georgeann Hawkins vanished. It looks the same-the alley behind Greek Row with students constantly moving back and forth. Night or day, fraternity boys are still shooting basketballs at hoops nailed to telephone poles. The cars parked along there are newer models than those in the police photos-but otherwise, nothing has changed-not even the sorority itself that was Georgeann's destination.

But when one Considers an extrasensory awareness of danger or evil, I know I felt it in the narrow space between the Theta House and the fraternity just to the south of it. On the hottest, sunniest days, the air is icy, the pine trees there are crippled and blunted, and I want very much to be away from it, from the cement steps where Georgeann was to have perched while she threw pebbles at her roommates' window. 422

Fear made some of Georgeann's sorority sisters drop out of school for a time. A dozen years later, Georgeann Hawkins is still missing. The sorority girls inside the Theta House seem oblivious to what happened to her. They were only five or six in 1974; for them, Georgeann Hawkins might well have vanished in the 1950's.

Ted Bundy's rooming house on 12th. N.B. looks exactly the same as it did the day he moved out and headed for Salt Lake City. The old rooming house the next block overwhere the woman was raped by a man in a dark watch cap -has been razed to make room for the University of Washington's new law school buildings.

Farther north on 12th N.B., the green house where Lynda Ann Healy disappeared in 1974 has been painted a dull brown. The main floor is a pre-school now, and, in the front window, someone has pasted a decal of-eerily-a huge smiling teddy bear.

Donna Manson has never been found. The campus at Evergreen State College is even more heavily thicketed with fir trees today. In Utah and Colorado, the missing are still gone: Debby Kent and Julie Cunningham and Denise Oliverson.

No more evidence has been found. Not an earring. Not a bicycle. Not even a faded piece of clothing. All things that were secret a dozen years ago remain hidden.

When Ted was delivered by helicopter back to the bleak walls of the Florida State Prison northwest of Starke, he joined over two hundred inmates on Death Row, the building housing more condemned men than any other state prison. Compared to Utah's "Point of the Mountain" and the jails where he'd been incarcerated in Colorado, "Raiford" was a long step down in the amenities of prison life.

Starke, Florida, is the closest town of any size, with a population of about a thousand people. Approaching from the east, it appears to be a shanty town, economically depressed. The houses move from shack to middle-class closer to the hub of Starke-where the main intersection is marked by a Western Auto Store.

About three miles west of town, the prison looms on the

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left, and there is a neat sign reading "Florida State Prison." Just past the sign, a visitor turns into the main driveway and proceeds one hundred yards to the parking lot and the brick administration building. The prison is fifty yards beyond. It is not a modern concrete fortress; it is an old prison, stucco and faintly greenish white-not unlike the pallor of the inmates it holds.

The grounds are perfectly manicured, with bright flower beds; the driveway and the parking lot paved with carefully troweled cement. Richard Bugger is the Superintendant of the Florida State Prison. He is, in a sense, a "lifer" too. Dugger was born on the prison grounds when his father was the warden. He was raised here. He is Ted Bundy's contemporary, a tremendously fit, tautly muscled athlete-the antithesis of the standard movie portrayal of the pot-bellied, semi-comedic southern warden. Dugger has been described as a rigid man who goes by the book. He is certainly a no-nonsense prison superintendant.

Dugger runs his prison meticulously. Trusties keep the flat grounds of Florida State Prison a tentative oasis in the midst of inhospitable sandy soil. There is a farm-as all prisons have farms-cows, pigs, whatever will grow to add to the prison menu.

For Ted-born on Lake Champlain, nurtured on the Delaware River, raised on Puget Sound-Ted who craved water and trees and the smell of salt air coming off some sound or bay or ocean, this last stop on his downward spiral had to be hell. Raiford sits smack dab in the middle of a triangle of roads surrounding nothing. There are no waterways at all; the air outside dries the membranes of the nose and throat, or smothers with mugginess. Beyond the grounds, the vista is endless and barren; there is a factory down the road, the vegetation is scrabbly palms, and whatever will grow without water and with too much sun. The Okefenokle Swamp is approximately fifty miles north of Raiford. Gainesville (the city Ted once dismissed when his pin stuck there on a map because it had no large waterways) is thirty-five miles south. The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean are east and west, each an easy hour and a half s drive for a free man.

It probably didn't matter at all what it was like around 424

Raiford. Ted Bundy would not spend time outside the walls. 1 With his history and expertise at escape, every precaution would be taken that he would not demonstrate his talents at Raiford. This was something of a disappointment to a number of burly guards who muttered that they'd sure as hell like to see the bastard make a run for it-as they'd "enjoy splattering Bundy all over a wall."

Ted was not destined to be a popular prisoner. Not so much because of the crimes for which he'd been sentenced-but because of his attitude. Ted Bundy was a STAR, and that rankled both guards and fellow convicts. When he wrote to me from the Utah State Prison, Ted had confided that he was welcome in the "general population"-a sought-after "prison lawyer." He had not done very well for himself when he played lawyer in Miami; his counsel was tainted now. Besides, in this southern prison, he was isolated among all those men struggling not to die. He was alone in a cell most of the time, a cell once occupied by John Spenkelink

-the convict who had been executed six days before Ted chose to tear up his "admission of guilt" on May 31, 1979, throwing away what proved to be his last good chance to elude the death penalty. He would have been locked up forever-but he would have lived.

If it was a gamble, Ted had lost.

Less than a year later, Ted sat in the dead Spenkelink's cell, a short walk from "Old Sparky"-the electric chair that would soon hold the record for electrocuting more convicted killers than any other since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976. But Ted was not alone in this ugly life he'd come to. When Carole Ann Boone spoke her surreptitious vows of marriage in Kimberly Leach's murder trial on February 9th, she had meant them. She would stick by her "Bunnie."

Carole Ann did not, however, take Ted's name; she remained "Boone." After the two widely-publicized Florida trials, that was notorious enough. She and her son, Jamey, who was in his early teens-a dark, good-looking young man, who impressed newspeople at the Miami trial as being an exceptionally nice kid-chose to live-not in Starke-but in Gainesville.

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Carole Boone is an intelligent woman, with advanced degrees and an impressive job résumé. However, she had spent her financial as well as her emotional reserves in her fight to save her new husband. Ted at least, was housed, fed and clothed. Carole Ann and Jamey were on their own.

No one has ever questioned that Carole Ann believed in Ted's innocence, unquestioning. I have often wondered if she had truly expected that Ted would be freed, that they would one day be able to settle down like a normal family. Her obsession with him had landed her in Gainesville, Florida on public assistance-at least temporarily. She became only one of hundreds of prisoners' wives clogging the employment market. But it did not seem to matter. Nothing mattered but the fact that she was still close to Ted. She was Mrs. Theodore Robert Bundy, and each week she could journey up through Starke, turn at the Western Auto Store, and go three miles out the dusty two-laned road to see her husband. From time to time, she would write to Louise Bundy to tell her how Ted was doing. But in essence, Carole Ann had become everything to Ted, as he had been for her for so many years now.

Whatever he asked for, she would try to give him.

The Stranger Beside Me was published in August of 1980. I had not written to Ted; he had not contacted me-not since his ebullient phone call just before his Miami trial. As I wrote this book, I had been startled to find a great deal of anger surfacing from someplace inside me where I had unknowingly repressed it for years. I thought that I had juggled my ambivalence about Ted very well. But listing the murders, detailing the crimes, and being closeted for months in my office where the walls were papered with the photographs of young wornen who had died grotesquely changed me.

I thought that «wnetime I would write to Ted-but I wasn't ready when I finished the book. And I wasn't ready when I went out on a me

In seven weeks, I flew to 35 cities, and, in each, talked to interviewers from radio, television, and newspapers about Ted Bundy. Some of them-back in 1980-had never heard of him. Some, in surprisingly distant cities, had watched his trials on television.

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The night shows were different. People listening to their radios out there in the darkness somewhere are unable to sleep-most of them-for one reason or another. The callers' voices were more emotional than daytime listeners', opinions were expressed more freely. Many of them were angry-but their rage was polarized.

In Denver, on a midnight to three A.M. talk show, the host left me on the phone-and on the air-for fifteen minutes with a man who bragged that he had murdered nine women "because they deserved it"-disconnecting him only when the man threatened to "blow me away" with his .45 because I was being "unfair" to Bundy. The host walked me downstairs, pointing out the bullet-proof glass in the lobby-and helped me into a cab with a perfect stranger-who, fortunately, turned out to be most protective as he raced me to my hotel. (Later, the host of that late-night talk show was shot down and killed-in front of his own apartment house.)

In Los Angeles, I had a similar threat-because I was "too kind" to Ted Bundy.

But, for the most part, readers understood what it was I was trying to convey, and I was grateful for that.

My itinerary took me to Florida in September. The closest I came to the Florida State Prison was the day I was in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. lust as I went off the air in a radio station in Tampa, an urgent call came in from a man. The host said that I could not talk, but gave the caller the number of the next station where I would be interviewed. But, when I arrived in St. Petersburg, there was only a message. A man who would not give his name had said it was urgent that he speak with me-that I would know why, but that he could not stay on the phone. The next day, I was in Dallas. I never found out who the caller was. Ted? Or possibly just a "220?"

The St. Petersburg Times' interviewer had told me that he'd come up with a novel approach for reviewing my book. He had sent it to Râiford and asked Ted to criticize it-on its literary merits only-promising the usual thirty-five-dollar payment that book critics received. Ted would have loved that, I thought-if Vic Africano let him do it. Ted had not responded, but the book had not been returned. THE STRANGER BESIDE ME 427

In late September, after weeks on the road, I came home to Seattle for a few days to rest up for the second half of the tour. There was a letter waiting for me, a letter postmarked "Starke, Florida" and dated the day after I had been in Tempa. The handwriting was as familiar to me as my own.