Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Is it possible to see this apology as genuine? Is there any sense in trying? Ted Bundy is the textbook psychopath who shows us how to recognize the evil in our midst. His story is the story we all know. And yet the longer you listen to it—and listen not just to the legend, but to the people who knew Ted Bundy, and even to the man himself—the more you will find yourself hearing the story of a man who was not a mastermind, was not a genius, and who seems to have understood as little about what motivated him as the people around him did. As you draw closer to its center—and closer and closer to the demon core—you may begin to feel that the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.

  IN THE FALL OF 1974, TED BUNDY MOVED AWAY FROM Seattle to start his first year of law school in Utah, and left behind not just an adoring girlfriend, a proud family, and a vast circle of friends, but a region in panic. Between February and July of 1974, eight young women had gone missing—seven in Washington and one in Oregon—and local detectives had few leads. Almost all they had to go on was the fact that on the day both Janice Ott and Denise Naslund vanished in broad daylight from Lake Sammamish State Park, a man in a cast had been seen introducing himself to various women and asking them to help him move his boat. One woman accompanied the man as far as the parking lot and noticed that he drove a light brown Volkswagen Beetle. No one saw him approach 18-year-old Denise, who disappeared after she left her friends to go to the bathroom, but a witness did overhear the man introducing himself to Janice, a 23-year-old social worker who was sunbathing when a stranger knelt beside her and asked for help.

  “Sit down and let’s talk about it,” Janice said. To the witness who later described their interaction to the police, the conversation seemed warm and friendly. The man promised he would give Janice a ride in his boat, and in the meantime, he introduced himself. His name was Ted.

  Later, media accounts of what were then known as “the Ted Murders” suggested that Washington police immediately realized they had a repeat offender on their hands, and that the killer had held Seattle in his thrall since the disappearance of his first known victim, Lynda Healy, in the early hours of February 1. In fact, it wasn’t until “Ted” turned up at Lake Sammamish, nearly six months later, that the now eight missing persons cases were linked.

  It was also the first time some of the cases had received significant investigation. Despite the eerie circumstances surrounding the disappearances—Donna Manson had left a pot of soup on a burner turned to warm in her Evergreen State College dorm room; Kathy Parks had left her desk lamp on in her room at Oregon State University; Susan Rancourt had just put a load of clothes in the dormitory washing machine when she vanished from Central Washington State College—police officers were still inclined to dismiss the girls as runaways until they were overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. After Lynda Healy, a 21-year-old University of Washington student, disappeared from her own bedroom in the middle of the night, her housemates pulled back her covers to find that both Lynda’s pillow and the mattress beneath it were soaked with blood. The police were unimpressed. Probably, they said, Lynda woke up with a bad nosebleed and took herself to the hospital. She was sure to turn up soon. Detectives believed their alternate explanation for the bloodstains also ruled out the possibility of foul play: “Because they assumed Lynda Healy was possibly having her period at the time of her disappearance,” wrote Bob Keppel, the King County detective who would help head the area’s “Ted Squad” task force, “[the police] couldn’t figure out why anyone would kidnap her—they assumed no kidnapper would want to have sex with her.”

  The “Ted” killer’s “method of operation seemed flawless, almost scholarly, leaving his hapless pursuers on the police task force very little in the way of clues,” Keppel wrote of the investigation in his book about the case, The Riverman. Yet for nearly six months—quite possibly for longer—the killer had evaded the police in part because of their own blindness. Because they assumed Lynda had simply walked off into the night, the officers who investigated her disappearance didn’t see the need to dust her room for fingerprints or to test a semen stain they found on her sheets. What evidence they did remove from the scene was destroyed six months later, as routine then dictated in a missing persons case—well before the police were able to conclusively link Lynda’s disappearance to the seven that followed: Donna Manson the following month, then Susan Rancourt, then Kathy Parks, Brenda Ball, Georgann Hawkins, Janice Ott, and Denise Naslund, and then . . .

  There was nothing to worry about, until suddenly there was. After Janice and Denise both disappeared from Lake Sammamish in a single afternoon, the police started paying attention. So did the press. “Our investigation collapsed under the volume of unsolicited tips and Ted sightings,” Keppel wrote, “because we had no way to manage the information that was suddenly pouring in . . . the backlog of calls was so huge that Denise Naslund herself could have called in and told us she was fine and we wouldn’t have found the message for a week.”

  The missing persons case turned into a homicide investigation on September 7, 1974, when two grouse hunters found a human skull, spinal column, and rib cage on a wooded mountainside overlooking Interstate 90, east of Seattle. Searchers found a second spine and jawbone the following day. And in the underbrush there was one final clue: three grease spots—remnants of the oil that soaked into the earth as three bodies lay side by side, disintegrating until they were nothing but bones. By the following day, investigators had identified two of the three sets of remains: they belonged to Janice Ott and Denise Naslund.

  “The worst we feared is true,” King County detective Nick Mackie told the press.

  The news terrified the region. This was not the kind of destruction locals were used to, and it suggested that something was changing, that something might already be gone. In the past, a local woman told Tacoma’s News Tribune, “murder was something you read about happening in California or somewhere. Now it’s right in our backyards.” Captain Herb Swindler of the Seattle Police Department consulted a psychic about the case and argued that a “demon cult” might be to blame, while others theorized that “Ted” was the Zodiac Killer, or a disciple of the Manson Family. Yet even as investigators dealt with the public’s mounting terror, they still found time to undermine one another’s work. When the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Office created a combined task force, King County officers withheld information from the Seattle PD, worried that the competing jurisdiction might solve the case first and steal the glory. The joint task force folded within weeks. If nothing else, Bob Keppel would later recall, the people they investigated were always cooperative. “Everyone that we talked to as a suspect was helpful,” Keppel told Bundy biographers Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. “Even the best suspects, the murderers we talked to. ‘Hey, man, I kill people,’ they’d say. ‘But I don’t kill like that.’”

  Throughout the blistering summer of 1974, as the rest of the country followed President Nixon’s impeachment and the removal of US troops from Vietnam, Seattle residents waited for a break in the “Ted” case. It was a time when women feared for their safety, and men professed fear for the women they loved—men including Ted Bundy. Later his mother would remember a night when Ted, while visiting his family in Tacoma, watched his younger half sister, Sandra, get ready for a date. “Ted said to me, ‘You know, Mom, she looks like all those other girls,’” Louise Bundy told Seattle Times reporter Richard Larsen. “‘I hope you know where she’s going and who she’s with.’”

  Ted was equally protective of his girlfriend, Liz, and her young daughter. Liz was a 24-year-old single mother when she moved to Seattle in 1969, and she had been in town only a few weeks when she met Ted in a University District tavern. Liz, shy about her secretarial job, said she worked making heart valves in the university’s medical instruments department. Ted, 23 and still years away from finishing his bachelor’s degree, said he was a law student writing a book about
Vietnam. Both were pretending to be other people and seemed to find a sense of safety in each other. “It’s as if we knew each other before in some former life,” Liz remembered Ted telling her, after they had been dating for a few weeks. He became not just a boyfriend but a member of the family—and he adored Liz’s daughter, reading to her, baking a chocolate cake for her fifth birthday, and watching Saturday-morning cartoons with her while Liz slept in. “Their favorite was Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties,” Liz wrote in The Phantom Prince, her memoir of their relationship. “Ted could mimic Dudley perfectly.”

  The relationship that started with mutual lies soon seemed one in which they kept no secrets from each other. “My story about making heart valves had become a joke,” Liz wrote. “Every Sunday night Ted would say, ‘Well, you’d better get to sleep early so you’ll be rested up for making those heart valves tomorrow.’” And Ted allowed Liz into his life, joking about the sulfurous “Tacoma aroma” that shrouded his working-class hometown, introducing her to his mother and stepfather, and weeping when he told Liz he was illegitimate: he had never known his father, and his mother had given birth to him when she was a teenager, something he said he did not learn until he was a teenager himself.

  But Ted had big dreams. He was going to law school. He was going to make a name for himself. Liz supported Ted financially, since, she said, “neither of us doubted wealth was in Ted’s future. He was marked for success.” She was also sure they would get married and start a family. At first, Ted seemed to agree. They got engaged in early 1970, but Ted quickly broke it off. They were too poor, he said. They weren’t ready. Liz got pregnant, and had an abortion at Ted’s urging. Ted applied to law schools, and was devastated when he was accepted only at his last choice, the University of Utah. Their relationship stagnated. Ted saw other women. Liz got jealous. Liz saw other men. Ted got jealous. And gradually Liz saw a new pattern of behavior emerging: Ted would be cold and absent one day, then reappear the next, warm and present, showering her with declarations of his love.

  Around the same time, Liz noticed another pattern: young women were disappearing across the Pacific Northwest. One woman, Georgann Hawkins, vanished en route to her sorority house, which was only three blocks from Liz’s apartment. “Like most women living in the University District,” Liz wrote, “I was deeply disturbed by these disappearances. Walking at night from my garage to my front door scared me.” She might have felt safer if Ted had been around to protect her, but he seemed more distant than ever. “I was hurt that he hardly ever wanted to make love,” she wrote. “There had to be someone else. I wished I knew what she was like so I could be more like her.”

  Sometimes Liz even wondered whether her Ted was the “Ted” the police were searching for—worries she usually dismissed as quickly as she allowed herself to entertain them. He had a VW, but so did she. She had found plaster of Paris in his dresser—the same kind a person would use to put together a makeshift cast like the one witnesses had described—but he told her he had it in case he actually did break something. And the composite sketch didn’t look like her Ted, but the description sounded like him: the tennis whites; the unusual, almost East Coast–sounding accent; and the story about the sailboat. Ted didn’t have a boat, but he always talked about getting one someday.

  When Liz could find no other way to ignore her suspicions, she thought of how they might damage Ted’s future. “I visualized Ted and me married,” she wrote. “He would be campaigning for governor when it was revealed that his devoted wife had gone to the police in 1974, claiming that he was a murderer.” But in October, about a month after Ted left for Utah, Liz finally found she couldn’t ignore her fears any longer. One of her friends went home to Salt Lake City to visit family and learned about the recent murder of a local teenager named Melissa Smith. “I don’t want to scare you,” she told Liz, “but it’s happening in Utah.”

  That month, Liz called the King County Police Department’s tip line. Soon afterward, her suspicions again gave way to guilt. She didn’t have to worry: her tip immediately vanished beneath a drift of paperwork about likelier suspects. The Ted Squad wouldn’t begin investigating her Ted until August 1975. By then, he had already been arrested in Utah.

  Ted Bundy was arrested for the first time not for murder, rape, or kidnapping, but because he’d gotten lost. One warm night, he was driving around a Salt Lake City suburb when he got disoriented and pulled over to find his bearings. When he got back on the road, he noticed a car tailing him. He would later deny he knew it was a patrol car until he ran a red light and saw police lights behind him. Then, he said, he did what any law-abiding citizen would do: he pulled over and did his best to cooperate. He allowed the police to search his car, where they found an ice pick, a pantyhose mask, a ski mask, several pieces of rope, a pair of handcuffs, and a crowbar.

  The tools looked suspicious—like a burglary kit, maybe—but at a meeting three days after the arrest, Detective Daryle Ondrak still hesitated before mentioning the search. “I don’t know if this means anything,” Ondrak said, “but I was involved with a stop this weekend and the guy had a pair of handcuffs in his car.” As Ondrak described the man—well-spoken, apparently educated, and driving a tan VW—Detective Jerry Thompson wondered if this was the same man who had tried to abduct 18-year-old Carol DaRonch from a mall in Murray, Utah, the previous November. The suspect had lured Carol her into his tan VW by posing as a police officer, then tried to handcuff her and bludgeon her with a crowbar before she escaped.

  In October 1975, DaRonch identified Ted Bundy in a police lineup. Of the people who were surprised by his subsequent arrest, Bundy seemed the most shocked of all. He said he’d expected to be back on campus in time for a 2L class later that day.

  EVEN AFTER TED BUNDY WAS CONVICTED OF ATTEMPTED kidnapping, even after authorities connected him not just to the “Ted” murders of the Pacific Northwest but to at least seven more murders and missing persons cases in Utah and Colorado, and even after he was extradited to Colorado and charged with the murder of a nurse named Caryn Campbell, who had vanished from a Snowmass ski resort, it was still possible for people to look at Ted Bundy and feel not horror at what he was accused of, but shock that anyone so polite and clean-cut—so middle-class—could be suspected of such things. “If you can’t trust someone like Ted Bundy, you can’t trust anyone—your parents, your wife, anyone,” said his former boss Ross Davis, whose two young daughters Ted Bundy had regularly babysat.

  “I wouldn’t hesitate to line him up with my sister,” one of Bundy’s friends in Utah told the press at the time of his arrest. With remarkable frequency, men described Ted Bundy’s essential goodness in terms of how much they trusted him with the women in their lives—and as Captain Swindler of the Seattle Police tried to connect Ted Bundy to the “Ted” murders, he found that the department’s new prime suspect had already been close to his daughter Cathy. She had dated Ted years before, and she had trusted him, too. “He was someone,” she said, “who had a great deal of compassion in dealing with other people.”

  At the time of his arrest, it was difficult even to describe the crimes Ted Bundy was accused of: the term “serial killer,” coined during this period by profiler Robert Ressler, still existed only in FBI circles. Ressler’s criteria included at least three murders of victims unknown to the perpetrator, with cooling-off periods in between. In the past, killers who fit this mold—the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer, the Austin Servant Girl Annihilator, the Axeman of New Orleans—were colorfully named phantoms who terrorized a region for a few months or years, then disappeared. The public rarely needed to match a human face to a series of seemingly inhuman crimes, and in the rare case where a perpetrator was revealed, he was one of society’s rejects: no one wanted the Boston Strangler to take his daughter on a date. Ted Bundy was different. What did it mean for a man who had succeeded in American society to be capable of committing—or even imagining—such violence? Did it say something about the country that made him? Or did the pol
ice just have the wrong man?

  The general public had no words for Ted Bundy, and perhaps this was why, when he escaped police custody in June 1977—a feat he accomplished by leaping out the second-story window of the Pitkin County Courthouse law library when the guard stepped outside for a smoke—he became more folk hero than bogeyman. Aspen radio station KSNO announced a “Ted Bundy hour,” and played listener requests including Helen Reddy’s “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady.” A local woman named her quarter horse foal Ted Bundy, because, she said, “It’ll know how to run.” Aspen residents fund-raised for a courthouse plaque reading TED BUNDY LEAPT HERE, and a folk singer commemorated the event in ballad form:

  So let’s salute the mighty Bundy

  Here on Friday, gone on Monday

  All his roads led out of town

  It’s hard to keep a good man down

  When Ted Bundy was captured after six days on the run—exhausted, starving, freezing, injured, hallucinating, and reportedly twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he’d escaped—he still managed to grin roguishly for the cameras and make sure the headline writers knew he was in on the joke. “He said it was just too nice a day to stay inside,” the police officer charged with questioning him told the press.

  In December 1977, Ted Bundy’s former coworker Carole Ann Boone came to visit him in jail. As Ted and Liz drifted apart, his letters to Carole had shifted from friendly to intimate, but Carole still wasn’t prepared to see the man she called her “Sweet Theodore” in custody. “I was shocked to see him in a cell,” she told authors Michaud and Aynesworth. She was positive that Ted was innocent—a position she would maintain, publicly, for the rest of her life.

  When Carole described her jailhouse visit with Ted, she spoke of a man who seemed not just physically apart from the wider world, but no longer of it. “It is hard to describe,” she said, “except that in some strange way he was as far away, as far removed, as a person can be. Exiled in the midst.” During Carole’s visit, she noticed a spot on the floor where the gray paint had been worn away, exposing the pink material beneath. It was the place where Ted turned when he paced around his cell. Not long before, Ted had asked his former attorney John Henry Browne which states he thought were most likely to carry out the death penalty following the end of its national moratorium in 1976. “Texas and Florida,” Browne replied.