I’d never successfully pierced this wall of silence, or indifference, or even tried to, which is why the news I received on July 25, 1974, from Kathleen D’Olivo was such a startling surprise.
D’Olivo, a recent graduate of Central Washington State College, told me over the telephone that on the night of April 17, when Susan Rancourt vanished, a shabby-looking stranger with one arm in a sling approached her as if out of nowhere near the college library. There was a brace on his opposite hand. He was struggling with a stack of books. D’Olivo asked if he could use some help.
“Yeah, could you?” he replied.
The stranger led her to his car, parked in a remote and dark corner of the campus, which raised the young woman’s suspicions. Kathleen was on guard. When they reached his car, which she remembered as a shiny brown VW Bug, he produced his keys, fumbled with them and then dropped them. He stooped over as if to search for them, then asked if she could help. The sling and brace made it difficult to feel, he said.
D’Olivo told me that she was not going to bend over, leaving herself vulnerable, in front of this character. She suggested instead that they step back to see if the keys were visible in the light. They were. She grabbed them up and handed them to the stranger with a bright “Good night!” and briskly walked away, no doubt saving her life in the process.
A short while later Susan Rancourt wouldn’t be so alert, or lucky.
Map of Central Washington; the location of Bundy’s VW was illustrated by the witness (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
———
Kathleen D’Olivo’s story of her encounter that night forced me to radically alter my perspective. The striking similarities between her experience and what we knew of “Ted’s” approaches to the young women at Lake Sam didn’t prove the same killer was at work in both places, but they were nonetheless highly suggestive. We also knew that these could not have been copycat cases.
What was more, the reports of a man in a leg cast, on crutches, carrying a briefcase in the vicinity of Georgann Hawkins’ June 11 disappearance on the University of Washington campus also buttressed my dawning realization that I and cops in at least four other jurisdictions were chasing after the same guy in a haphazard, misguided and completely uncoordinated effort. “Ted” must have been snickering as he considered his next strike. He was making us look like fools.
***
Saturday afternoon, September 7, 1974, was sunny and hot. Roger Dunn and I were bouncing north on Interstate 5 from Tacoma in Dunn’s old pickup with a load of railroad ties for some do-it-yourself home landscaping when a news bulletin on his truck radio suddenly caught our attention. According to the brief report, skeletal remains had been discovered on a hillside just off Interstate 90 in Issaquah, about a mile or so from Lake Sam. The sheriff’s office was investi-gating. A couple of bird hunters — it was the first day of grouse season — had found the bones.
We immediately pulled off the interstate, found a pay phone and called the squad room. Our sergeant, Len Randall, informed us that only my presence was required at the scene that afternoon. Roger could head home.
The Issaquah site turned out to be very near the de-sanctified church where I’d gone through the police academy three years before. I arrived in my unmarked car, sweaty and smelly from unloading the creosote-soaked ties, walked past a knot of reporters behind a barricade and then up a dirt road to the scene. The going was uneven and my gimpy knee — I’d torn some cartilage in a pickup basketball game — exploded in hot pain that shot up and down my leg.
The hillside was covered with firs and cedars and was thick with ground vegetation, through which deer and coyotes, skunks, bears, feral pets, and lots of rodents had established numerous meandering trails. Very little sunlight penetrated the dense forest, creating a dark and mysterious aura below.
It looked like an appropriate place for murder, although we soon learned that this was a multiuse environment. There were spent .30-30 and .22 caliber shell casings scattered around, indicating that the area had been used for target practice. A quick look at the single, pebble-covered road that ran over the hillside showed that it was used fairly frequently by dirt bikers and riders on horseback.
At least five bras were recovered, as well as five sets of women’s underpants, a half-slip, a pink nylon nightgown, and some pantyhose. Apparently its seclusion also made the site a popular destination for lovers, or hookers and their johns.
Sergeant Randall showed me where the grouse hunters had found a skull. About 30 feet downhill of it, they discovered a human spine with a few gnawed ribs still attached. The animals had been busy. Between the two sites deputies also came across a large clump of long black hair, largely obscured beneath a layer of leaves and forest debris.
Some of the miscellaneous garments recovered at the Issaquah site. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives).
The hands-and-knees search of the hillside.
———
The bones already had been dispatched to the medical examiner’s office. Eleanor Rose, Denise Naslund’s mother, who was nearly unhinged by her daughter’s disappearance, arrived at the site and was told that the remains were not Denise’s. Just then, no one really knew whose bones had been found. The official reassurance was therefore a pointless and cruel deception.
Mrs. Rose would never recover from losing Denise. For years after Lake Sam she was an almost constant presence in my life as she obsessively followed the investigation. I didn’t know how to handle her. Yet my superiors were eager that I did, so they didn’t have to.
Randall informed me that next morning I was to direct a search of the hillside by a King County Explorer Search and Rescue (ESAR) team, made up mostly of experienced Boy Scouts with considerable search and rescue training. ESAR, organized in the 1950s, most commonly was dispatched to locate missing hikers and downed aircraft.
The 50 or so members of my ESAR crew, mostly kids in their mid-teens, searched shoulder to shoulder on their hands and knees across 130,000 square feet of sloping forest floor, laced with thorny blackberry thickets and tall stands of stinging nettles. You’d never get police officers to do that. In all, they spent 13 days at the Issaquah site and, according to their website, 4,887 hours conducting their search. They acquitted themselves well. It was, and remains, King County ESAR’s largest operation, ever.
I had never seen a human bone and had no idea how to correctly search such a site. It turned out that no one else did, either, so we invented some forensic procedures as we went along. Our principal innovation was to turn the site into a grid, as is done in archaeological digs, which allowed us to map our discoveries with precision. Every item was photographed in situ, then labeled with the date, time and location it was found, together with the name of the person who found it. We kept a chronological record of our discoveries, as well.
In total, we recovered and cataloged about 400 human bones and other items of evidence. These included a tire iron, a screwdriver, and a two-foot-long scabbard, perhaps for a machete. The kids also found a lump of coyote dung containing a small hand bone and some birds’ nests laced together with blond hair.
There turned out to be three distinct decomposition sites. From a jawbone, we established that one of the victims was Janice Ott. We didn’t find her skull. From a jawbone and skull we also identified Denise Naslund. She had suffered a powerful blow to her head from a heavy object, such as a tire iron. The third victim, for whom we had a leg bone and some vertebrae, but no jaw or skull, would remain unidentified for another 15 years.
For all we found, the Issaquah hillside yielded no hard evidence of “Ted’s” identity. Yet I thought it told us a great deal, indirectly, about the kind of killer he was, none of it very encouraging.
The site seemed very well chosen. It was isolated and private, yet readily accessible by car. I also noted that “Ted” need not worry about being disturbed as he went about his business there. Any approaching vehicle was easily detected at a dist
ance, giving him ample time to drive off, or perhaps to hide.
All the indications of extensive planning and care for detail — nothing belonging to any of the three victims was found — was consistent with John Liebert’s belief that “Ted” had killed before, and perhaps often, and that he certainly would keep killing until we, or something, stopped him.
I dreaded whatever was next.
Chapter Three
Taylor Mountain
Ted Bundy’s personal history is clouded and difficult to parse, studded with troubling episodes.
Louise Cowell was a young department-store clerk in post-war Philadelphia when she conceived him. She later claimed that his father was a recently returned veteran named Jack Worthington. There’s no documentary evidence that Jack Worthington actually existed, although we later learned that a Jack Worthington with an unlisted telephone number had lived in Philadelphia. Louis’s father, Samuel, was violent; her mother, Eleanor, suffered from mental issues that were treated with electroshock; and little Teddy was more than a bit strange. According to one of Louise’s two younger sisters, she awoke one morning to find that the child, aged three, had arranged knives all around her in her bed.
These facts notwithstanding, Ted steadfastly claimed that his early boyhood was idyllic and that he remembered it all very fondly. Whatever trauma he may have sustained, or whatever he may have witnessed, apparently was suppressed or erased.
Louise brought Ted to Tacoma, where her uncle, John Cowell, Jr., Sam’s younger brother, taught music at the College of Puget Sound. Not long thereafter, she met and married Johnnie Bundy, a Navy cook from North Carolina, and subsequently bore him two sons and two daughters.
Decades later, Bundy told Dr. Lewis, the psychiatrist, that as a young teen in Tacoma he liked to peer out his bedroom window into the neighbor’s bathroom and to sneak out of the house at night. He’d disappear into the woods out back, take off his clothes and run around naked in the dark. He believed this was the very earliest manifestation of what became, in time, his “problem.”
According to Bundy, from the time he entered Tacoma’s Woodrow Wilson High School, he felt increasingly isolated and uncomfortable among his peers. “I felt alienated from my old friends,” he told Michaud. “They just seemed to move on and I didn’t.”
He graduated from Wilson in 1965 and enrolled at what had become the University of Puget Sound, where he spent a lonely freshman year, living at home to save money, unable to integrate himself into school life. He felt “anonymous and small” at UPS, as journalists Michaud and Aynesworth put it.
The following year, he transferred into the Asian studies program at the University of Washington and started dating a tall and very attractive coed from California. His public fortunes, at least, had improved substantially. Ted was on a roll.
However, in the summer of 1967 Bundy hit another wall. Ted had enrolled in an intensive summer Chinese language program at Stanford, only to stumble badly. His girlfriend dumped him, and that autumn he withdrew from the University of Washington. He pulled together enough money to travel around the country by air, first to California, then to Aspen and on to Philadelphia.
Lewis diagnosed Ted as bipolar, or manic-depressive as the condition once was known. I can’t judge if she was accurate; in any case, this is not an insight of practical value to a homicide detective. But it does provide a useful narrative framework for trying to understand Ted’s progress toward murder.
His flame-out at Stanford, she testified, coincided with a depressive trough that persisted until the spring of 1968, when he returned from Philadelphia to Seattle and became immersed in one of his passions, Republican politics.
He was living in a small Seattle apartment, working as a busboy and as a night stocker at a grocery store, when by chance he met an old acquaintance from high school who told him that Art Fletcher, a Republican, was gearing up to run for lieutenant governor and looking for volunteers. Bundy jumped at the chance. He quit his jobs and joined the Fletcher campaign, where he thrived. He was popular with the females on the campaign, but he was well-liked among male colleagues, too. He became the candidate’s driver, and as a reward for his hard work in early August was sent to the GOP national convention in Miami. Ted told Lewis he felt “on top of the world” from spring to November of 1968, what she described in court as “a fairly clear manic episode.”
Depression, however, ensued once more, leaving him “lonely, unmotivated,” as Lewis put it, on a second trip to Philadelphia, where Bundy matriculated for a term at Temple University. During this period, he told Lewis, he frequently visited New York City to sample the pornography available around Times Square. Ted said that this was when he first began formulating fantasies of attacking young women, and made a single, aborted effort to secure a victim at the New Jersey shore. “I didn’t actually kill someone at this time,” he told the psychiatrist, “But I really, for the first time, approached a victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her, and she escaped.” He also revealed to Lewis that while at Temple he bought a false mustache and began experimenting with ways of changing his appearance.
The summer of 1969 found him once again in Seattle, living in a University District boardinghouse near the Sandpiper tavern, a college hangout that Ted patronized frequently. One night in September, after downing a pitcher of beer to give himself courage, he approached 24-year-old Liz Kendall and asked her for a dance. She declined at first but found Bundy attractive and charming. According to Kendall, who was divorced and the mother of a little girl, he said that he was a law student, working on a book about Vietnam. By the end of the evening, Kendall has written, “I was already planning the wedding and naming the kids.”
She took Ted home with her.
By this time Ted was an avid and a practiced voyeur, scouting the University District nightly for whatever he might see. He was stealing a lot, too, mostly expensive furnishings and accessories for his apartment. He was reading detective magazines for information and stimulation and also drinking heavily. His fantasies were growing more explicit and focused and insistent, as well.
The depression that had descended on him after the 1968 election finally began to lift in 1970. That summer, he returned to the University of Washington, this time as a psychology major, and burned through the curriculum with ease, finally earning his undergraduate degree in 1972, seven years after his college career had begun.
From May of 1970 until September of 1971 Ted drove a delivery van for Ped-Line, a medical supply company. Liz later noticed in his apartment a pair of crutches and a bag of plaster he’d stolen from Ped-Line. There was also an unexplained pile of keys he kept in a bowl, plus a bagful of women’s clothing she discovered there in 1973.
His next employment was a brief stint in a work-study program at the Seattle Crisis Clinic, where one night a week Bundy fielded calls from Seattleites in deep emotional distress. If they seemed suicidal, it was his job to keep them on the phone long enough for the police and EMTs to trace the telephone number and intervene.
Despite his classroom successes, Ted’s enthusiasm for psychology was fading just as the idea of becoming a lawyer — just like a lot of his political friends — caught his imagination. He applied to 10 law schools. Though his grades were good, his LSAT scores were so-so — a humiliation — and he was turned down everywhere.
Once more the black dog came prowling.
In May of 1972 he quit the Crisis Clinic and went to work on a federal grant as a counselor to psychiatric outpatients at Harborview Hospital. The empathy necessary for such work eluded him, but luckily for Bundy another election cycle was at hand. He caught on with GOP Governor Dan Evans’s successful reelection campaign.
This led to a succession of political jobs. First, he spent a month writing articles for the Seattle Crime Commission’s newsletter. Then he studied recidivism among inmates for the King County Office of Law and Justice Planning. Poring over thousands of records and rap sheets, he was struck by how chaotic and inconsisten
t recording keeping was, how offenders had incomplete, inaccurate or nonexistent records in the system. It taught Bundy a good deal about the ways in which police agencies work and don’t work.
He reapplied to law school with a reworked admissions package featuring a new personal statement about the LSAT’s deficiencies, plus a letter of recommendation from Dan Evans, Washington’s newly reelected Republican governor. One of his professors in the psychology department at UW also gave Ted a very positive review. This time, the University of Utah was sufficiently impressed to offer him a law school slot for the autumn of 1973.
Ted worked the summer of 1973 in Olympia at $1,000 a month for the Republican state central committee, studying cost overruns in their computers and helping out in other research projects. His boss, Ross Davis, the new head of the central committee, would later remember Bundy visiting his house later that summer. The two men were standing together in the Davis driveway as Ted rummaged around in his VW’s trunk, looking for something. Davis glanced into the trunk at the great pile of junk Bundy kept in it. Among the stuff, he noticed a pair of handcuffs.
Terrible Secrets Page 5