***
Bundy abruptly changed his plans that autumn. UPS in Tacoma had just opened a night law school, which seemed to offer superior networking opportunities if he intended to practice in the area, as well as advantages if he decided to pursue a political career in Washington. He enrolled at UPS and informed Utah that he couldn’t come because of injuries sustained in a car wreck.
Then disaster struck. As his LSAT scores had suggested, Ted had no aptitude for law, its abstractions, and ways of reasoning. “He did not attend classes,” Dr. Lewis testified, “did not go to his final examination, and seemed to be in a significant depression at that time.”
Believing the fault for his implosion must lie with UPS and not with himself, in December he secretly reapplied to Utah, mentioning nothing of his debacle. Ted was readmitted for the fall of 1974.
For the balance of the school year, as the coeds, starting with Lynda Healy on February 1, 1974, began to disappear, Bundy kept up a pretense of continuing his law studies, even going to class most of the time. From his gas receipts that we later subpoenaed, it was clear he was driving extraordinary distances throughout this period, although none of the receipts linked him with any known crimes.
Thanks to his political connections, Ted landed yet another job in government that summer. He was to work in Olympia on the biennial budget for the Washington Department of Emergency Services. After the twin abductions at Lake Sam that July, he took a lot of kidding from his colleagues at DES, who laughingly pointed out how much Bundy resembled the published composite of “Ted.” He was also reminded that he drove a Volkswagen.
At Liz Kendall’s office in Seattle, a co-worker made the same connection. “Doesn’t this look like someone you know?” he asked. “Doesn’t your Ted have a VW?”
That night, Liz went home and compared the newspaper sketch with some personal photos of Bundy. Was “Ted” her Ted? She wasn’t sure.
Liz would pass through a long night of doubt and self-reproach about Bundy, vacillating between love and fear, faith and worry. Twice in the coming weeks she’d anonymously contact our “Ted Hotline,” but she couldn’t bring herself to give the officer her boyfriend’s name.
The original tip from Liz Kendall called in to the late Randy Hergsheimer. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)
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Some added information based on conversations with Liz about Ted. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)
***
Ted left for Salt Lake City in early September to enroll in the University of Utah College of Law. Once again, he quickly fell behind his classmates.
On October 2, 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox, a cheerleader, disappeared from the town of Holladay, which is just south of Salt Lake City. She has never been found.
On Friday night, October 18, Melissa Smith, 17, of Midvale, not far from Holladay, was last seen hitchhiking. Ten days later, her naked remains, half-frozen, were discovered in a canyon up in the Wasatch Front, the wall of mountains that rises dramatically to the east of the Salt Lake valley. Smith was covered with cuts and abrasions and had sustained multiple blows to her skull. One of her blue, knee-length stockings was knotted snugly around her neck. She had been raped and probably sodomized. Dirt and twigs were found in her vagina.
Her eye makeup was undisturbed and all of her fingernails were intact, suggesting that Smith had been assaulted by surprise and had had no chance to fight back. The medical examiner believed from the condition of her body that she might have been kept alive somewhere for as long as a week before she was killed.
The Smith case terrified the region. When a Utah friend mentioned the murder to Liz by telephone, Kendall immediately thought of the Seattle and Northwest cases and of her Ted. This time, she actually met with one of our detectives, Randy Hergesheimer, known as Hergy, and gave him her name and Bundy’s name and explained why she had contacted us.
She told Hergy about Ted’s thievery and the keys and the women’s clothes in his apartment, as well as the crutches and plaster he’d stolen from Ped-Line. She explained how Bundy had kept a tire iron under her radiator and how he liked to tie her up for sex, using pairs of her pantyhose as restraints. He’d known exactly where to look for them in her dresser drawers.
Liz also gave Detective Hergesheimer some snapshots of Bundy. He shipped the information and pictures to the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Department, where Homicide Detective Ben Forbes noted the name, Theodore Robert Bundy, reviewed the material, and then impaled the documents on his information retrieval system, a long spindle, where the information would rest undisturbed for 10 months.
The killings continued in Utah.
On Halloween, 17-year-old Laura Aime left a house party in Orem, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City, to go buy some cigarettes. She was on foot. On November 27, Aimee was found as Melissa Smith had been found, naked and frozen in a Wasatch canyon. She had been bludgeoned and strangled with her own stocking. Also like Smith, she had been raped and sodomized. Aime had suffered a puncture wound to her vagina from an unknown instrument, as well. In contrast to her many wounds, her hair appeared to have been freshly shampooed not long before her death.
Friday night, November 8, Carol DaRonch, 19, a recent high school graduate working as an operator at Mountain Bell, drove her maroon Camaro into the parking lot of the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, near where Melissa Smith had been abducted three weeks before. As she was shopping for a present inside the mall, DaRonch was approached by a man with slicked-back hair, smelling of liquor, who said he was Officer Roseland of the Murray police. She noticed that he was wearing patent leather shoes. He asked the young woman for her license tag number, explaining that a car burglary had been reported in the parking lot.
Hesitantly, DaRonch followed “Roseland” back out to the parking lot and her Camaro, which was undisturbed. “Roseland,” who by his appearance was a very poor example of a cop, nonetheless was well educated, she could tell, and spoke with authority. He said they had to walk over to the police mall substation. Growing ever more suspicious, DaRonch asked him for some identification. He flashed her a metallic badge that she did not see clearly.
The substation — in truth, the back of a Laundromat — was locked. “Roseland” muttered something about his partner and said they needed to drive downtown. This was the moment for Carol DaRonch to run, fast, in any direction. But instead she followed him to his car, which she’d remember as a banged-up old Volkswagen Bug, with a tear across the top of the rear seat. Some instinct told the young woman not to buckle her seat belt, and she didn’t, despite “Roseland’s” repeated requests that she do so.
Then he struck. As they left the mall and were headed east, “Roseland” produced a pair of handcuffs and tried to clamp them on her wrists. He managed to attach the right one, but DaRonch put up a ferocious fight. Unable to subdue her, his hand slipped and the second cuff went around her right forearm.
She had the passenger door partially open when suddenly he was swinging a four-tong tire iron down on her. DaRonch just managed to get a hand up in time to deflect the club, wrenched her left arm out of his grasp, and stumbled from the VW, screaming, into the street. He whipped the little car around and disappeared.
A short while later, and approximately 19 miles north in the town of Bountiful, the Viewmont High School drama club was presenting The Redhead in the school auditorium.
Viewmont High School; Deborah Kent walked out of the auditorium and disappeared before reaching her car in the parking lot. (Courtesy of MT7 Productions)
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Before the lights went down, drama teacher Raelynne Shepard, 24, noticed a mustachioed stranger, wearing patent leather shoes. They spoke. He told her she had beautiful eyes. She asked if he was waiting for someone, and he replied, “No.” He seemed a bit nervous to Shepard.
They encountered one another several more times before the play began. At one point, he asked her if she’d come out
to the parking lot to identify a car. “I thought that was a little bit strange,” Shepard later told police.
Just before the intermission, he accosted the teacher once more, half commanding her to accompany him out the door. He didn’t make eye contact but instead stared at her breasts.
At the intermission, 17-year-old Debra Kent left the auditorium to go pick up her brother at a roller skating rink. Toward the end of the play, Raelynne Shepard again saw the stranger. He was seated directly behind Dean and Belva Kent, Debra’s parents.
When the lights came up he was gone, and so was Debra. She was never seen again. A key was later recovered in the auditorium parking lot. It fit the handcuffs that “Officer Roseland” had placed on Carol DaRonch’s right arm earlier that evening.
***
The closing months of 1974 were marked for me by an event and a realization. The event was the happy arrival of our daughter, Allison, who calls herself Allie, born on December 13. Her brother David had made his debut in April of 1972. John, our third and last child, would be born in 1977.
My realization was that since the Lake Sam abduction-murders of July, there were no further reports of missing women in the Northwest. Where in hell was “Ted”?
Dr. Liebert and my own, brief, investigative experience with this killer told us that “Ted” didn’t take vacations. We began to wonder if he was a sailor. There are numerous naval installations scattered around Puget Sound. Maybe “Ted” shipped out. Maybe he was sick in a hospital somewhere. There was as well the groundless hope that he was dead. We also wondered if he was in jail, quietly waiting — “Ted” so far seemed to do everything quietly, patiently — so he could pick up his avocation upon release. Maybe he’d simply moved on to start hunting somewhere else.
Of course there still were veteran police detectives all over the Pacific Northwest, probably a majority of them, who believed that despite the three decomposed bodies we recovered at Issaquah, there was no convincing evidence that “Ted” was good for any of the other missing females. They saw each case the way cops had always seen such cases: one at a time, in a vacuum.
Experience told them that the odds overwhelmingly were against the existence of a traveling bludgeon murderer, selecting and slaying our girls and young women according to his pleasure. After all, roughly two-thirds of all murders are committed by the victims’ friends, acquaintances, or family members.
But “Ted” demolished this conventional cop wisdom, as Roger and I expected he would, on rainy March 2, 1975, when a pair of community-college forestry students reported the discovery of a skull on 2,600-foot Taylor Mountain in eastern King County, near the town of North Bend. Taylor Mountain is part of a chain of high hills, later named the Issaquah Alps, that march eastward from Seattle up to the Cascades along the south side of Interstate 90.
Aerial view of Taylor Mountain.
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The road leading up Taylor Mountain, with searchers’cars in background.
(From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
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Taylor Creek. In the evergreens just beyond the creek is where the skulls were found. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel and King County, WA. archives)
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It was late afternoon when Dunn and I arrived at the desolate and forbidding area where the foresters had discovered the skull. The hillside was covered in vine maples. There was no sign of habitation in any direction.
The students had marked a trail from the road to the skull with red fluorescent tape they attached to tree limbs. The route up through the thick growths of vine maple was slippery from the rain, and my bum knee screamed again and again with my frequent missteps. It was fully a thousand feet from the road to the skull, a helluva long way, I thought, for a guy to carry a dead body through such terrain, in the dark.
Since August, we had assembled files on every woman known to be missing throughout Washington, British Columbia, and Oregon. The documentation included their dental records, approximately 15 of which I had memorized over the months.
When we first encountered the skull, resting on its left side, its major feature was a yawning fracture on the right side of the cranium; a jagged chunk of bone at least eight inches by four inches was missing. A spider had spun its web across the hole. The rest of the skull was filled with last autumn’s leaves. By its weathering I guessed it had been resting there on Taylor Mountain for at least six months.
One of the four skulls recovered on Taylor Mountain (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
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We photographed it from several angles, using two triangulation stakes to ensure we could re-create its exact position on a map.
The big surprise came when I examined the upper dentition (there was no jawbone). I would have known that neat row of silver fillings anywhere. Unmistakably here was Brenda Carol Ball, for whom I’d been searching since her mother reported her missing back in mid-June.
As Roger and I carefully removed the skull, along with the soil and leaves beneath it, in case they might yield trace evidence such as hair or fibers, Brenda Ball became my third open murder investigation. However, I still did not connect her with my other two, Denise Naslund and Janice Ott. At the moment in our minds she remained an isolated case.
Brenda Ball, age 22, last seen at a tavern in Burien
Courtesy of MT7 Productions)
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Brenda’s missing person poster. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel)
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Our working assumption was that the killer had dumped Brenda Ball near the roadway below and that the animals had dismembered her, dragging her skull far away from where they first encountered it. The next day, I returned to the scene with a small group of ESAR volunteers and their six search dogs, hoping to find more of Ball wherever the animals had taken her.
But we never would find another identifiable piece of her. Instead, as I was searching about 90 feet away from where we found Brenda Ball’s cranium, I tripped and fell over a branch just a short distance from a second skull. Like Ball’s, this skull was weathered and sun-bleached. A tree branch was sprouting through one of the facial bones. There was a six-inch radial fracture that ran straight up the center of the skull. Though her mandible was missing, I again knew in an instant who this was. None of the other missing women had such bridgework as Susan Rancourt.
After interviewing Kathleen D’Olivo the previous summer, I was nearly as certain “Ted” abducted Susan Rancourt as I was that he had nothing to do with Brenda Ball’s disappearance. Now that it was clear that the same guy who apparently had picked up street-smart Brenda Ball outside a topless joint in Burien also had lured the unworldly Susan Rancourt to her death a hundred miles away on the peaceful campus of a state college, I was forced to accept that “Ted” had been ranging far more widely, and stalking a more various victim pool, than I had guessed.
On the third day of searching, we fielded a full crew of ESAR volunteers to scour the site as they had the hillside in Issaquah. The dogs, which were a bit less fastidious than humans about where they went and what they stepped on, were reassigned to other duties.
It was on this day that one of the ESAR volunteers discovered some unexploded ordinance on the hillside. We soon found a lot more explosives and discovered that a nearby munitions plant had used Taylor Mountain as a test range. I closed the plant down and didn’t let it reopen until a bomb squad had cleared the area of multiple duds.
The third skull we found was that of Roberta Kathy Parks, who had disappeared from Oregon State University in early May of 1974. She, too, had been bludgeoned. Up to the moment her remains were discovered, only the Tacoma News Tribune and other news outlets had made serious mention of Parks in discussions of the other missing females. To include Susan Rancourt in remote Ellensburg had strained most cops’ credulity. Now we knew “Ted” had traveled as far as 260 miles south to Corvallis in search of victims.
The last remains recovered on Taylor Mo
untain were those of Lynda Ann Healy, “Ted’s” earliest known victim and, we thought at the time, probably his first overall. At least that theory fit the known facts. Healy’s skull, like all the others, had been cracked open with a heavy, blunt instrument.
About the only good thing to be said for Taylor Mountain was its location in King County. I had worried that if a second dump site were found in another police jurisdiction, it would not be nearly so thoroughly processed, nor would we in the sheriff’s office be assured of learning everything of value that had been found. I was satisfied we’d gleaned every bit of evidence possible in our searches.
Terrible Secrets Page 6