Robert haggard attorney ted bundy

King County detective Bob Keppel took this photograph as he stood next to Brenda Ball’s skull on Taylor Mountain near Seattle. In this dense underbrush on the lonely mountain, searchers also found the skulls of Roberta Kathleen Parks, Lynda Ann Healy, and Susan Rancourt.

15
IN MAY OF 1975, Ted Bundy had invited some old friends from the Washington State Department of Emergency Services to visit him at his apartment on First Avenue in Salt Lake City. Carole Ann Boone Anderson, Alice Thissen, and Joe McLean spent almost a week with him. Ted seemed to be in excellent spirits and enjoyed driving his friends around the Salt Lake City area. He took them swimming and horseback riding. He and Callie took them one night to a homosexual nightclub. Alice Thissen was somewhat surprised that, although Ted said he had been there before, he seemed ill at ease in the gay club.

The trio from Washington found Ted’s apartment very pleasant. He’d cut pictures out of magazines and tried to duplicate the decor he favored. He still had the bicycle tire, hung from the meat hook in his kitchen, and he used that to store knives and other kitchen utensils in a mobile effect. He had a color television set, a good stereo, and he played Mozart for them to accompany the gourmet meals he prepared.

During the first week in June 1975, Ted came back to Seattle to put a garden in for the Rogerses at his old rooming house, and he spent most of his time with Meg. She still made no mention of the fact that she’d talked with both the King County Police and the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office about him. The cases of the missing women in Washington were no longer being played up in local papers.

Because neither King County nor the Seattle Police Department could spare the detectives detailed to the Task Force during the summer when so many of their investigators were on vacation, the Task Force was to be disbanded until September.

Meg and Ted decided to marry the following Christmas, and although they had only five days together in June, they made plans for her to visit him in Utah in August. Meg was almost convinced she had been wrong, that she had allowed Lynn Banks to cloud her mind with suspicion that couldn’t have any basis in fact. But time was growing short, far shorter than either Meg or Ted realized.

If anything was bothering Ted Bundy’s conscience during that summer of 1975, he didn’t show it. He was working as a security guard, still managing the building he lived in, and, though he sometimes drank too much, it wasn’t out of the norm for a college student. But his grades in law school had continued to drop. He wasn’t beginning to live up to the potential of a man with his I.Q., and boundless ambition.

It was close to 2:30 A.M. on August 16 when Sergeant Bob Hayward, a stocky, balding twenty-two-year veteran of the Utah Highway Patrol, pulled up in front of his home in suburban Granger, Utah. Bob Hayward is the brother of Captain “Pete” Hayward, the homicide detective chief in the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, but his duties are quite different. Like Washington State’s, Utah’s Highway Patrol deals only with traffic control, but Hayward has the kind of sixth sense that most longtime cops have, the ability to note something that seems just a hair off center.

In the balmy August predawn, Hayward noticed a light-colored Volkswagen Bug driving by his home. The neighborhood was strictly residential, and he knew almost everyone who lived along his street, and he knew the cars of the people that usually visited them. There was rarely any traffic at this time, and he wondered what the Volkswagen was doing there.

Hayward threw on his Brights so that he could catch the license plate on the Bug. Suddenly the Volkswagen’s lights went out, and it took off at high speed. Hayward pulled out, giving chase. The pursuit continued through two stop signs and out onto the main thoroughfare, 3500 South.

Hayward soon was just behind the slower car, and the Volkswagen pulled into an abandoned gas station parking lot and stopped. The driver got out, and walked to the rear of his car, smiling. “I guess I’m lost,” he said ruefully.

Bob Hayward is a gruff man, not the sort of highway patrolman that a speeder or reckless driver would choose to meet. He looked closely at the man before him, a man who appeared to be about twenty-five, who wore blue jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, tennis shoes, and longish, wild hair.

“You ran two stop signs. Can I see your license and registration?”

“Sure.” The man produced his I.D.

Hayward looked at the license. It had been issued to Theodore Robert Bundy, at an address on First Avenue in Salt Lake City.

“What are you doing out here at this time of the morning?”

Bundy answered that he had been to see The Towering Inferno at the Redwood drive-in and was on his way home when he’d become lost in the subdivision.

It was the wrong answer. The drive-in Bundy mentioned was in Hayward’s patrol area, and he’d driven by earlier that night. The Towering Inferno was not the picture playing there.

As the burly sergeant and Bundy talked, two troopers from the Highway Patrol pulled up in back of Hayward’s car, but remained inside, watching. Hayward seemed to be in no danger.

Hayward glanced at the Volkswagen, and noticed that, for some reason, the passenger seat had been removed and placed on its side in the backseat.

He turned back to Bundy. “Mind if I look in your car?”

“Go ahead.” The highway patrol sergeant saw a small crowbar resting on the floor in back of the driver’s seat, and an open satchel sitting on the floor in front. He played his flashlight over the open satchel, and saw some of the items inside: a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, some rope, and wire.

They looked like the tools of a burglar.

Hayward placed Ted Bundy under arrest for evading an officer, frisked him, and handcuffed him. Then he called Salt Lake County for backup from a detective on duty.

Deputy Darrell Ondrak had the third watch that night, and responded to 2725 W. 3500 South. He found troopers Hayward, Fife, and Twitchell waiting with Ted Bundy.

Bundy maintained that he gave no permission to search his car. Ondrak and Hayward say that he did.

“I never said, ‘Yes, you have my permission to search,’” Ted insisted, “but I was surrounded by a number of uniformed men: Sergeant Hayward, two highway patrolmen, two uniformed deputies. I wasn't exactly quaking in my boots, but … but I felt I couldn’t stop them. They were intent and hostile and they’d do what they damn well pleased.”

Ondrak looked in the canvas satchel. He saw the ice pick, a flashlight, gloves, tom strips of sheeting, the knit ski mask, and another mask—a grotesque object made from a pair of pantyhose. Eye holes had been cut in the panty portion and the legs were tied together on top. There was a pair of handcuffs, too.

Ondrak checked the trunk and found some large, green plastic garbage bags.

“Where’d you get all this stuff?” he asked Ted.

“It’s just junk I picked up around my house.”

“They look like burglar tools to me,” Ondrak said flatly. “I’m going to take these items, and I suspect the D.A. will be issuing a charge of possession of burglary tools.” According to Ondrak, Ted simply replied, “Fine.”

Detective Jerry Thompson met Ted Bundy face to face on that early morning of August 16, 1975. Thompson, tall, good-looking, perhaps five years older than Bundy, was later to become an important adversary, but now they barely glanced at each other. Thompson had other things to do, and Bundy was intent on bailing out and going home. He was released on P.R. (personal recognizance).

It was the first time in his adult life that Ted Bundy had ever been arrested, and it had been such a chance thing. Had he not driven by the home of Sergeant Bob Hayward, had he not tried to run from the pursuing policeman, he would have been home safe.

Why had he run?

On August 18, Thompson glanced over the arrest reports for the weekend. The name “Bundy” caught his eye. He’d heard it someplace before, but he couldn’t quite place it. He hadn’t even known the name of the man brought in early Saturday morning. And then he remembered. Ted Bundy was the man that the girl from Seattle had reported in December of 1974.

Thompson carefully read over the arrest report. Bundy’s car was a light-colored Volkswagen Bug. The list of items found in the car now struck him as much more unusual. He pulled out the DaRonch report, and the Debby Kent file.

The handcuffs found in Bundy’s car were Jana brand. The handcuffs on Carol DaRonch’s wrist were Gerocal, but he wondered just how many men routinely carried handcuffs with them. There was the crowbar, similar to the iron bar that DaRonch had been threatened with.

Ted Bundy was listed as being five feet, eleven inches tall, weighing 170 pounds. He was a law student at the University of Utah … yes, that’s what his girlfriend from Seattle had said too. He’d been arrested in Granger, which was only a few miles from Midvale, where Melissa Smith had last been seen alive.

There were more similarities, more common threads in front of Thompson than he’d yet had in his ten months of trying to find the man with the Volkswagen—“Officer Roseland.” On August 21, Ted was arrested on the added charges: possession of burglary tools. He did not appear to be visibly upset by the arrest and had deft explanations for the items found in his car. The handcuffs? He’d found them in a garbage Dumpster. He’d used the pantyhose mask as protection under his ski mask against the icy winds of ski slopes. And didn’t everyone own crowbars, ice picks, and garbage bags? He seemed amused that the detectives would consider any of these things burglary tools.

It was a posture that Ted Bundy would assume over and over again as the years passed. He was an innocent man, accused of things that were unthinkable for him.

The arrest by Sergeant Hayward on August 16 was the catalyst to a flurry of intense activity in the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office during late August and September of 1975. Captain Pete Hayward and Detective Jerry Thompson felt they had their man in the DaRonch kidnapping, and suspected that Ted Bundy might well be the man who had taken Melissa, Laura, and Debby.

Ted readily signed a permission-to-search form on his First Avenue apartment, and accompanied Thompson and Sergeant John Bernardo as they scrutinized the neat rooms. It was not a forced search. There was no search warrant listing specific items. In essence, this meant that the detectives had no authority to remove anything from Ted’s apartment, even if they should come across something they felt might be evidence. If they saw something suspicious, they would have to go to a judge and obtain a search warrant listing those items.

Thompson glanced up at the bicycle wheel suspended from the meat hook and at the assortment of knives hanging from it. Then he glanced at a chopping block.

Following Thompson’s glance, Ted said mildly, “I like to cook.”

The detectives saw the rows of law textbooks. A few months later, a Washington detective would comment to me that the Utah investigators had found a “weird sex book” in Ted’s library. When I asked Ted about it later, he told me that he had Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, and I laughed. I had a copy too, as did thousands of other people. It was hardly Krafft-Ebing.

There were other items in the apartment, seemingly innocuous, but meaningful in the probe going on. There was a map of ski regions in Colorado, with the Wildwood Inn in Aspen marked, and a brochure from the Bountiful Recreation Center. Questioned, Ted said he’d never been to Colorado, that a friend must have left the map. He thought he must have driven through Bountiful, Utah, but felt someone else had dropped the brochure in his apartment.

Thompson insists today that he found patent leather shoes in Bundy’s closet on that first visit, but when he returned later with a search warrant, they were gone. A television set and a stereo he had seen were also absent.

If the two detectives had expected to find something solid to tie Ted with the murdered Utah victims, they were to be disappointed. There were no women’s clothes, jewelry, or purses.

When they had searched the whole place, Ted agreed to allow them to photograph his Volkswagen Bug, parked in the rear of the building. It had dents and rust spots, and a tear at the top of the rear seat.

Bernardo and Thompson left. They felt they were closer to unraveling the truth, but were somewhat disconcerted by Ted Bundy’s casual attitude. He certainly didn’t appear concerned.

One of Ted’s women friends in Salt Lake City was Sharon Auer. She put him in touch with attorney John O’Connell, a tall, bearded man who affected a cowboy hat and boots. A respected criminal defense attorney in the Mormon city, O’Connell immediately put a lid on Ted’s conversations with detectives. The lawyer called Thompson and said that Bundy would not come to their offices as scheduled, on August 22.

Although Ted would not talk to detectives any longer, his mug shot, along with several others, was shown to Carol DaRonch and the drama teacher, Jean Graham, who had seen the stranger just before Debby Kent vanished forever.

It had been ten months, but Mrs. Graham chose Bundy from the stack of photos almost immediately. His mug shot showed him clean shaven. She said that Ted Bundy was a ringer for the man she’d seen, and all that was missing was a mustache.

Carol DaRonch was not as definite. The first time she thumbed through the packet of photos, she set Ted’s picture aside, but did not comment on it. When Thompson asked her why she had separated that photo from the others, she seemed reticent.

“Why did you pull that one out?” Thompson asked.

“I’m not sure. It looks something like him … but I really couldn’t say for sure.”

The next day, Bountiful detective Ira Beal showed her a lay-down of drivers’ license photos. In this group, Ted was depicted as he had looked in December 1974 and appeared quite different than the man in the mug shot taken in August of 1975. Ted was a man with a chameleonlike quality, his appearance changing dramatically in almost every picture taken of him, apparently through no conscious effort on his part.

Carol looked at the second set of pictures. This time, she chose Ted Bundy’s picture almost at once. She, too, remarked that he had had a mustache when she encountered him on November 8, 1974.

The kidnap victim’s identification of Bundy’s Volkswagen was less clear. Several times she had seen photos of it, and by the time she was taken to view it, it had been sanded, the rust spots painted over, and the tear in the back of the seat mended. It had also been scrubbed and hosed down inside and out.

Ted Bundy would never again be out of the constant attention of law enforcement agencies. He was not in jail, but he might as well have been. Surveillance units watched him continually during September of 1975, and wheels were turning behind the scenes. His gasoline credit card records had been requested, his school records were subpoenaed, and, probably the most disastrous move as far as his future freedom was concerned, Utah detectives had contacted his fiancee, Meg Anders.

Police crime-scene photographs of Lynda Ann Healy’s basement room in the house she shared with several other female students.

Ted Bundy with his lawyers at the first trial in Florida. June 25, 1979. (©Bettmann/Corbis)

This photograph was taken at Lake Sammamish State Park on Sunday, July 14, 1974. It shows a small group of people, one section of the park where there were 40,000 people picnicking, sunning, and swimming on the day Janice Ott and Denise Naslund vanished. Although the King County Police scrutinized scores of photographs like this, they never spotted a handsome, tanned man in a white tennis outfit.

47
I FLEW HOME, leaving Miami behind in the grip of a warm, pelting rain. I had to change planes in St. Louis, and there too, that city was crisscrossed with violent thunderstorms. We sat on the ground for two hours, waiting for a break in the storm. At length, we were the last plane allowed off the ground as lightning seemed to split the air only feet from the wing tips. The plane bucked and shook as if the pilot had no control, and we dropped, dropped, and then flew ahead. I was frightened. I had seen how very tenuous life can be.

When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid.

“No. I’ve already been there.”

It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole.

“I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.”

I had seen nothing but death in Miami, heard nothing but death—and death seemed to lie ahead for Ted. Hearing the stranger’s words was somewhat comforting. Ted had written in his last letter, “There’s nothing wrong with my life that reincarnation couldn’t improve upon.”

It seemed to be his only option left.

I believed that the verdict had been the right verdict, but I wondered if it had been for the wrong reasons. It had been too swift, too vindictive. Was justice still justice when it manifested itself as it had in the less than six hours of jury deliberation? Was this the delayed justice that should have come before? Perhaps there was no way that it could have been done cleanly, concisely, in a textbook case.

The people had spoken. And Ted was guilty.

10
“TED” HAD SURFACED, allowed himself to be seen in broad daylight, and approached at least a half dozen young women, beyond the missing pair. He’d given his name. His true name? Probably not, but for the media who pounced on the incredible disappearances it was something to headline. Ted. Ted. Ted.

Indeed, the dogged pursuit of reporters seeking something new to write was going to interfere mightily with the police investigation. The frantic families of the missing girls from Lake Sammamish were besieged by some of the most coercive tactics any reporter can use. When families declined to be interviewed, there were some reporters who hinted that they might have to print unsavory rumors about Janice and Denise unless they could have interviews, or that, even worse, families’ failure to tell of their exquisite pain in detail might mean a lessening of publicity needed to find their daughters.

It was ugly and cruel, but it worked. The grieving parents allowed themselves to be photographed and gave painful interviews. Their daughters had been good girls—not casual pickups—and they wanted that known. And they wanted the girls’ pictures shown in every paper, on every TV news show. Maybe that way, they could be found.

The police investigators had little time to spend giving out interviews.

Technically, the missing girls’ investigations fell within several different jurisdictions: Lynda Ann Healy and Georgeann Hawkins were within Seattle’s city limits and that probe was headed by Captain Herb Swindler and his unit. Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Brenda Ball had gone missing in King County, and Captain J. N. “Nick” Mackie’s men were now under the heaviest stress in looking for a solution to the latest vanishing. Thurston County’s Sheriff Don Redmond was responsible for the Donna Manson case, in conjunction with Rod Marem of the Evergreen State College Campus Police. Susan Rancourt’s case was still being actively worked by Kittitas County and the Central Washington University Campus Police, and Roberta Kathleen Parks’s disappearance was being investigated by the Oregon State Police and the Corvallis, Oregon, City Police.

The hue and cry from the public to produce, and produce some answers quickly, grew every day and the impact on the detectives was tremendous. If there could not be an arrest— or many arrests—the layman, bombarded with nightly television updates and front page stories, failed to understand why, at the very least, the bodies of the missing girls could not be found.

For the King County Police, the abductions and probable murders of three girls in the county meant thirty-five percent of their average yearly workload occurring in one month. Although the county population equals Seattle’s half-million people, the population is spread out, most of it in small towns, rural and sylvan and not as catalytic to violent crimes as the crowded city.

There were only eleven homicides in the county in 1972, nine closed successfully by year’s end. In 1973 there had been five, all cleared. Although the homicide unit in 1974 handled armed robberies in addition to murder cases, a field working sergeant and six detectives had been able to deal effectively with the caseload. The disappearance of, first, Brenda Ball, and six weeks later, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, would force drastic restructuring of the unit.

Mackie was a highly competent administrator. He was not yet forty when he took over as head of the Major Crimes Unit. He had reorganized the jail’s administration, and accomplished much, but his background was not heavily oriented toward actual investigative work. The field detectives were headed by Sergeant Len Randall, a soft-spoken blond bear of a man who made it a practice to join his men at major crime scenes.

For the main part, the King County detectives were a young group. The only man in the unit over thirty-five was Ted Forrester, who wore his appellation, “Old Man,” with grudging good nature. He handled the southeast end of the county—farmland, old mining towns, woods, and the foothills of Mount Rainier. Rolf Grunden had the south end, urban part of the future megalopolis of Seattle-Tacoma. Mike Baily and Randy Hergesheimer shared the southwest, also principally urban. Roger Dunn’s sector was the north end of the county, the area between Seattle’s city limits and the Snohomish County line.

The newest man in the unit was Bob Keppel, a slender, almost boyish looking man. It was in Keppel’s sector that the Lake Sammamish disappearances had occurred—the territory east of Lake Washington. Until July 14, 1974, Keppel had handled only one homicide investigation.

In the end, as the years passed, the “Ted” case would weigh most heavily on Bob Keppel’s shoulders. He would come to know more about “Ted,” more about his victims, than any of the other investigators in the county, with the possible exception of Nick Mackie.

By 1979, Bob Keppel’s hair would be shot with grey, and Captain Mackie invalided out of law enforcement with two crippling coronaries. Captain Herb Swindler would undergo critical open heart surgery. It is impossible to pinpoint just how much stress comes to bear on detectives involved in an investigation of the scope of the missing girls’ cases, but anyone who is close to homicide detectives sees the tension, the incredible pressure brought on by their responsibility. If a corporation president carries the responsibility of bringing in or losing profits, homicide detectives—particularly in cases like the “Ted” disappearances—are truly dealing with life and death, working against time and almost impossible odds. It is a profession that brings with it the occupational hazards of ulcers, hypertension, coronary disease, and, on occasion, alcoholism. The public, the victims’ families, the press, and superiors all demand immediate action.

The scope of the search for Denise Naslund and Janice Ott drew all of the King County’s Major Crimes Unit’s manpower into the eastside area, along with Seattle detectives, and personnel from the small-town police departments near Lake Sammamish State Park: Issaquah and North Bend.

In a sense, they had a place to start now—not for Janice and Denise alone, but for the six other girls they felt sure were part of the deadly pattern. “Ted” had been seen. Perhaps a dozen people came forward when the story hit the papers on July 15: the other girls who had been approached, who shuddered to think that they had come so close to death, and the people at the park who had seen “Ted” talk to Janice Ott before she’d walked away with him.

Ben Smith, a police artist, listened to their descriptions and drew a composite picture of a man said to resemble the stranger in the white tennis outfit. He erased, drew again, tediously trying to capture on paper what was in the minds of the witnesses. It was not an easy task.

As soon as the composite appeared on television, hundreds of calls came in. But then “Ted” seemed to have had no particularly unusual characteristics. A good-looking young man appearing to be in his early twenties with wavy blondish-brown hair, even features, no scars, and no outstanding differences that might set him apart from the thousands of young men at the beach. The broken arm—yes—but the detectives doubted that it was really broken. They were sure the sling was off now, thrown away, after it had served its purpose.

No. “Ted” apparently was so average looking that he, perhaps, had counted on his prosaic appearance, allowed himself to be seen, and was now taking a perverse pleasure in the publicity.

Again and again, the detectives probed. “Think. Try to picture something special about him, something that stands out in your mind.”

The witnesses tried. Some even underwent hypnosis in the hope they would remember more. The accent, yes, slightly English. Yes, he’d spoken of playing racquetball while he chatted with Janice Ott. His smile, his smile was something special. He spoke with excellent grammar. He’d sounded well-educated. Good. What else? Tan, he was tan. Good. What else?

But there was nothing else, nothing beyond the strange way he had stared at a few of the almost victims.

There was the car, the off-shaded brown VW Bug of indeterminate vintage. All Bugs looked alike. Who could tell? And the one witness who had walked out to the parking lot with “Ted” hadn’t actually seen him get into the Bug. He’d leaned against it as he explained that his sailboat wasn’t at the park. It could have been anyone’s car. No, wait, he had gestured toward the passenger door. It must have been his car.

No one at all had seen Janice Ott get into any car on the lot.

There was Janice Ott’s ten-speed bike, yellow Tiger brand. It wasn’t the kind of bike that could be quickly disassembled for ease of transporting. A full-size ten-speed would not fit into the trunk of a VW without sticking out. Surely someone must have noticed the car with the bike, either on a rack or protruding awkwardly from the car.

But no one had.

The lakefront park was closed to the public as police divers, looking like creatures from another planet, dove again and again beneath the surface of Lake Sammamish, coming to the top each time shaking their heads. The weather was hot, and, if the girls’ bodies were in the lake, they would have bloated and surfaced, but they did not.

County patrolmen, Issaquah police, and eighty volunteers from the Explorer Scouts Search and Rescue teams, both on foot and on horseback, combed the 400-acre park, finding nothing. Seattle police helicopters circled over the area, spotters looking down vainly for something that would help: a brilliant yellow bike or the bright blue backpack Janice had borrowed to use on Sunday, the girls themselves, their bodies lying unseen by ground parties in the tall vegetation east of the parking lot.

Sheriff’s patrol cars cruised slowly along all the back roads wending through the farmland beyond, stopping to check old barns, sagging deserted sheds and empty houses.

In the end, they found nothing.

There were no ransom notes. Their abductor had not taken the women away because he wanted money. It became more and more apparent as the weeks passed that the man in white was probably a sexual psychopath. The other women had vanished at long intervals. Many detectives believe that the male, too, operates under a pseudo-menstrual cycle, that there are times when the perverse drives of marginally normal men become obsessive and they are driven out to rape or kill.

But two women in one afternoon? Was the man they sought so highly motivated by sexual frenzy that he would need to seize two victims within a four-hour time span? Janice had vanished at 12:30. Denise around 4:30. It would seem that even the most maniacally potent male might have been exhausted and satiated after one attack. Why then would he return to the same park and take away another woman only four hours later?

The pattern of attacks had appeared to be escalating, the abductions coming closer and closer together, as if the awful fixation of the suspect needed more frequent stimuli to give him relief. Perhaps the elusive “Ted” had had to have more than one victim to satisfy him. Perhaps Janice had been held captive somewhere, tied up and gagged, while he went back for a second woman. Perhaps he had needed the macabre thrill of a double sexual attack and murder—with one victim forced to wait and watch as he killed the other. It was a theory that many of us could scarcely bear to contemplate.

Every experienced homicide detective knows that if a case is not resolved within twenty-four hours, the chances of finding the killer diminish proportionately with the amount of time that passes. The trail grows colder and colder.

The days and weeks passed without any new developments. The investigators didn’t even have the victims’ bodies. Denise and Janice could be anywhere—100 or 200 miles away. The little brown VW had only a quarter of a mile to travel before it reached the busy I-90 freeway leading up over the mountains to the east, or into the densely populated city of Seattle to the west. It was akin to looking for two needles in a million haystacks.

On the chance that the women had been killed and buried somewhere in the vast acres of semi-wild land around the park, planes went aloft and made images with infrared film. It had worked in Houston in 1973 when Texas investigators searched for the bodies of teenage boys slain by mass killer Dean Coril. If earth and foliage have been recently overturned, the already dying vegetation will appear bright red in the finished print, long before a human eye can detect any change at all in trees or bushes. There were some suspicious areas, and deputies dug delicately and carefully. They found only dead trees and nothing beneath them in the ground.

Home movies had been shot at several of the big company picnics held at Lake Sammamish on July 14, and the film was quickly developed. Detectives studied the subjects in the foreground but focused most intently on the background, hoping to catch a glimpse of the man with his arm in a sling. They didn’t smile at the laughter and playfulness on the screen. They kept watching for the man who might have been just out of focus. He wasn’t there.

Reporters checked out Lake Sammamish State Park on the Sunday following the abductions. They found, in spite of the spectacularly sunny day, a day much like the Sunday of a week before, that there were few picnickers or swimmers. Several of the women they talked to who were there pointed out guns hidden under their beach towels. Some carried switchblades and whistles. Women went to the restroom in teams of two or more. Park Ranger Donald Simmons remarked that the crowd was about a twentieth the size he expected.

But, as the weeks passed, people forgot or put the two disappearances out of their minds. The park filled up again, and the ghosts of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott didn’t seem to be haunting anyone.

No one, that is, but the King County Police detectives. Cases Number 74-96644, 74-95852, and 74-81301 (Janice, Denise, and Brenda) would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Dr. Richard B. Jarvis, a Seattle psychiatrist specializing in the aberrations of the criminal mind, drew a verbal picture of the man now known as “Ted,” a profile based on his years of experience. He felt that, if the eight missing girls’ cases were interrelated, if the girls had been harmed, that the assailant was probably between twenty-five and thirty-five, a man mentally ill, but not the type who would draw attention to himself as a potential criminal.

Jarvis felt that “Ted” feared women and their power over him, and that he would also evince at times “socially isolative” behavior.

Jarvis could see many parallels between the man in the park and a twenty-four-year-old Seattle man who had been convicted in 1970 for the murders of two young women, and for rape and attempted rape involving other girls. That man, designated a sexual psychopath, was currently serving a life term in prison.

The man Jarvis referred to had been a star athlete all through school, popular, considerate and respectful of women, but he had changed markedly after his high school girlfriend of long standing had rejected him. He later married, but began his sexual prowlings after his wife filed for divorce.

A sexual psychopath, according to Dr. Jarvis, is not legally insane, and does know the difference between right and wrong. But he is driven to attack women. There is usually no deficiency in intelligence, no brain damage, or frank psychosis.

Jarvis’s statements made an interesting sidebar in the Seattle paper that ran the story. Later, much later, I would reread that story and realize how close he had come to describing the real killer.

During the very few moments when detectives working on the cases had time to talk, we tossed back and forth possible evaluations of who “Ted” might be. He obviously had to be quite intelligent, attractive, and charming. None of the eight girls would have gone with a man who had not seemed safe, whose manner was not so urbane and ingratiating that their normal caution and all the warnings since childhood, would have been ignored. Even though force, and probably violence, came later, he must have, in most of the cases, gained their confidence in the beginning. It seemed likely that he was, or had recently been, a college student. He was apparently familiar with campuses and the way of life there.

The device used to gain the girls’ trust—beyond his appearance and personality—was certainly his illusion of comparative helplessness. A man with one arm broken, or a leg in a full cast, would not seem much of a threat.

Who would have access to casts, slings and crutches? Anyone perhaps, if he sought them out—but a medical student, a hospital orderly, an ambulance attendant, or a medical supplies firm employee seemed the most apparent.

“He’s got to be someone who seems above suspicion,” I mused. “Someone that even the people who spend time with him would never connect to ‘Ted.’”

It was a great theory, and yet it made finding that man even more impossible.

The astrology pattern, even though it had accurately predicted the weekend that the next disappearances would occur, was too ephemeral to trace. Maybe the man didn’t know that he was being affected by those moon signs, if indeed he was.

I was now shuttling charts full of strange symbols to Herb Swindler from R.L. Herb was taking a lot of ribbing from detectives who didn’t believe in “any of that hocus pocus.”

Both the King County Police and the Seattle Police were being deluged with communications from psychics, but none of their “visions” of the spots where the girls would be found proved accurate. A search for “a little yellow cottage near Issaquah” proved fruitless, as did the effort to locate a “house full of sex cultists in Wallingford” and a “huge red house in the South End full of blood.” Still, the information from clairvoyants was about as helpful as the tips coming in from citizens. “Ted” had been seen here, there, everywhere— and nowhere.

If the astrological moon pattern was to be believed, the next disappearance was slated to occur between 7:25 P.M. on August 4, 1974, and 7:12 P.M. on August 7th—when the moon was moving through Pisces again.

It did not.

In fact, the cases in Washington stopped as suddenly as they had begun. In a sense, it was over. In another sense, it would never be over.

AFTERWORD—
1986
AS I WRITE THIS, it has been six years since Ted Bundy was sentenced, for the third time, to die in Florida’s electric chair. In my naïveté in 1980, I ended The Stranger Beside Me by suggesting that the Ted Bundy story was at last over. It was not. I vastly underestimated Ted’s ability to regenerate in both spirit and body, to pit his will and mind continually against the justice system. Nor was I able to extricate Ted from my mind simply by putting him and my feelings about him on paper. The relief that I felt when I wrote the last line was immense. This book was a healing catharsis after a half-dozen years of horror.

But the next half-dozen years have forced me to accept that some significant part of my consciousness will be inhabited by Ted Bundy and his crimes, for as long as I live. I have written five books since The Stranger Beside Me, and yet when my phone rings or a letter comes from somewhere far away—several times a week still—the questions are invariably about “the Ted book.”

My correspondents fall generally into four categories. Laymen have contacted me from as far away as Greece, South Africa and the Virgin Islands, consumed with curiosity about Ted Bundy’s eventual fate. Most of them ask, “When was he executed?”

Police investigators call wondering where Ted Bundy might have been on a particular date. (Ted’s comments to Pensacola detectives that February night he was captured in 1978 are well-remembered by homicide detectives all over America. Although officially a murder suspect in only five states, Ted told Detectives Norm Chapman and Don Patchen that he had killed “in six states” and that they should “add one digit” to the FBI’s victim estimate of thirty-six.)

The calls that surprised me most were from Ted’s burgeoning “fan club,” unofficial but passionately vocal. So many young women who had “fallen in love” with Ted Bundy and who wanted to know how they could contact him to let him know how much they loved him. When I explained that he had married Carole Ann Boone, my words fell on deaf ears. I finally asked them to read my book once more, asking, “Are you sure that you can tell the difference between a teddy bear and a fox?”

Almost as fervent were the religious readers who hoped to get word to Ted so that they might prevail upon him to repent before it was too late.

Finally, there were the callers that Seattle policemen refer to as “220’s,” people deranged to greater and lesser degrees, who imagined that they had some bizarre connection to Ted.

The latter were the most difficult to deal with. An elderly woman came to my door near midnight, regal and impeccably dressed, and yet distressed because “Ted Bundy has been stealing my nylons and my pantyhose. He’s been coming into my house since 1948 and he takes my personal files. He’s very clever, he puts everything back so that you can scarcely tell it’s been moved …”

It did no good to point out that her “thefts” had begun when Ted was still a toddler.

Her visit did, however, make me realize that I could no longer have my home address printed in the phone book.

In ways that I could never have imagined, Ted Bundy changed my life. I have flown two hundred thousand miles, lectured a thousand times to groups ranging from ladies’ book study clubs to defense attorneys organizations to police training seminars to the FBI Academy—always about Ted. Some questions are easy enough for me to answer. Some may never be answered and some provoke more and more questions in an endless continuum.

If, indeed, Ted claimed to have murdered in six states—then which state was the sixth? Had there really been a sixth state—a hundred and thirty-six victims or, God help us, three hundred and sixty victims? Or had it been, for Ted, a game to play with his interrogators in Pensacola? His cunning jousts with police were always akin to Dungeons & Dragons, and he so delighted in outwitting them, watching them scurry around to do what he considered his bidding.

There may well have been myriad other victims, and yet it is an almost impossible task to deduce precisely where Ted Bundy was on a particular date in the late sixties and early seventies. I have tried to isolate periods of that time almost twenty years ago now, and so has Bob Keppel, the onetime King County detective who knows as much about Ted as any cop in America. But Ted was always a traveler, and an impulsive wanderer at that. He would say he was going one place, and head somewhere else. He hated to be made accountable for his whereabouts—by anyone—and he reveled in popping up to surprise those who knew him.

The year 1969 found Ted visiting relatives in Arkansas, and attending classes at Temple University in Philadelphia, his childhood home. In 1969, a beautiful dark-haired young woman was stabbed to death far back in the “stacks” of the library, at Temple. That case, more than a decade unsolved, came back to a Pennsylvania homicide detective when he traced Ted’s journeys in my book. In the end, he could only conjecture. No one could place Ted in that library on that evening.

Even more haunting is the unsolved murder of Rita Curran in Burlington, Vermont, on July 19, 1971. Each born in Burlington, Rita Curran and Ted Bundy were twenty-four years old that summer. Ted had, of course, been raised on the opposite coast while Rita grew up in the tiny community of Milton, Vermont, daughter of the town’s zoning administrator.

Rita was a very lovely but shy young woman. Her dark hair fell midway down her back. Sometimes, she parted it on the left side, sometimes in the middle. A graduate of Burlington’s Trinity College, she taught second grade at the Milton Elementary School during the school year. Like Lynda Ann Healy, Rita spent much of her time and energy working with deprived and handicapped children. Although she was well into her twenties, she hadn’t really lived away from home until the summer of 1971. She had worked as a chambermaid at the Colonial Motor Inn in Burlington for three previous summers, but this year was the first she’d taken an apartment there rather than commuting from her parents’ Milton home ten miles north.

She was attending classes in teaching remedial reading and language at the University of Vermont’s graduate school, and shared the apartment on Brookes Avenue with a female roommate. Rita Curran had no steady boyfriend— and that was probably one of her reasons for spending the summer in Burlington. She was hoping to meet a man who would be right for her. She wanted to be married—to have children of her own—and she’d laughed to friends, “I’ve gone to three weddings this year—all the bachelors in Milton are taken!”

• • •

On Monday, July 19, 1971, Rita changed bedding and vacuumed rooms at the Colonial Motor Inn from 8:15 A.M. to 2:40 P.M. That evening, she rehearsed with her barbershop quartet until ten. Rita Curran’s roommate and a friend left her in the apartment on Brookes at 11:20 to go to a restaurant. Both the front and back doors were unlocked when they left. Burlington, Vermont, was hardly a high-crime area.

People didn’t lock doors.

When Rita’s friends returned, the apartment was quiet and they assumed she had gone to sleep. They talked for an hour and then Rita’s roommate walked into the bedroom. Rita Curran lay nude. Murdered. She had been strangled manually, beaten savagely on the left side of the head, and raped. Her torn underpants were beneath her body. Her purse, contents intact, was nearby.

Burlington detectives traced the escape route of the killer and found a small patch of blood near the backdoor leading off the kitchen. He had, perhaps, dashed through the kitchen and out through the shed as Rita's roommate came in the front door. A canvass of neighbors was fruitless. No one had heard a scream or a struggle.

In 1971, there were approximately 10,000 homicides in America. What intrigued retired FBI special agent John Bassett, a native of Burlington, when he read about Ted Bundy was the remarkable resemblance between Rita Curran and Stephanie Brooks, the fact that Rita had died of strangulation and bludgeoning to the head and the proximity of the Colonial Motor Inn where Rita worked to an institution that had wrought so much emotional trauma in Ted Bundy’s life: the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers.