***
Since Ted’s arrest in August, all of our efforts in the northwest were focused on connecting Bundy to the “Ted” murders — or disconnecting him from them. In either instance, proving or disproving his responsibility for any of the crimes meant proving or disproving it for all of them, a high-stakes game. More simply, if Ted had an alibi for the deaths of Lynda Ann Healy, or Susan Rancourt, or Kathy Parks, or Brenda Ball, or Denise Naslund, or Janice Ott, or the disappearances and presumed homicides of Donna Gail Manson or Georgann Hawkins, we had no case at all against him.
What we turned up was sometimes startling — Bundy, for instance, once dated Herb Swindler’s daughter — and often persuasive of his guilt. When, for example, we finally loaded all our data into the mainframe, we asked how many of the 3,500 suspects popped up at two hits, the answer was 1,807. When we raised the bar to three hits, 622 of the suspects were still “Ted” candidates. At four or more hits, however, the pool shrank dramatically to 25, including Theodore Robert Bundy. He had been reported three times as a suspect, twice by Liz and once by a professor at the University of Washington. He was a registered owner of a Volkswagen. He had registered for three of Lynda Healy’s psychology classes. And an anonymous caller reported seeing Ted driving his VW near the site where two of the victims disappeared.
Twenty-four of the 25 Teds in the select circle had iron alibis. Bundy did not. As far as the King County computer was concerned, Ted was “Ted.” I would have liked to have seen that evidence presented to a jury.
We pulled his credit card, checking account, telephone, school and employment records for the years 1972 forward, permitting us to plot thousands of data points on our timeline. We could account for vast stretches of his time. For example, a review of his gas-card purchases showed that not only had Ted practically driven the wheels off his VW but that he compulsively kept his tank as full as possible, purchasing as little as $1.88 at one gas stop. His gas purchases also tended to spike just before and during each of the women’s disappearances.
Bundy’s checking account statement from the week before his 1975 arrest.
———
Law school records. (From the files of Robert D. Keppel, and from the notes of Stephen G. Michaud)
———
As I’ve noted, we knew that he took three classes with Lynda Healy. We discovered from his and her checkbook records that they shopped at the same Safeway in the University District. Moreover, both Ted and Lynda cashed a check at that Safeway the day before she vanished. The same store clerk had initialed both checks, and she had run them through her machine within minutes of each other.
Later in the investigation, Michaud and Aynesworth shared with us the dates that Bundy attended law school; they had access to his notes.
***
Out of an abundance of caution — and to forestall any future defense nonsense, no matter how unlikely — we checked nationwide to see if there were any other Theodore Robert Bundys out there. We found one, in Arizona. He was a few years younger than Ted, didn’t look a thing like him and could not have been involved in any of the crimes.
We also interviewed everyone we could think of, including his family and friends — especially Liz Kendall — business and political contacts, his teachers and professors. One psychology professor told us that in the spring of 1973 she and two colleagues had formed a board to recommend candidates for director of the Seattle Crime Commission, now defunct.
Her choice was Ted, although his chances were hurt by the disclosure that at Harborview Bundy apparently had stolen psychiatric records for patients of Dr. Jim McDermott. He seems to have been politically motivated; McDermott had been a Democratic candidate for governor. The doctor today is a multi-term U.S. Congressman from Seattle.
Captain Mackie and I interviewed Louise and Johnnie Bundy at their house in north Tacoma one evening in October. They were in a state of shock and disbelief — I can’t remember Johnnie saying a word — and had no insights they were willing to share about the very serious charges Ted was facing.
Louise did clear up one minor mystery: Why hadn’t Ted been drafted when he dropped out of the University of Washington in late 1968? The Selective Service System did cancel his student deferment, she told us, and reclassified him One-A. But before he received his greetings from Uncle Sam, Ted slipped on some ice and broke his leg. He was in a cast and on crutches for a while, Louise remembered. By the time he was healed, she explained, the draft lottery was in effect. He drew a high number and was never called, thereby avoiding the free trip to Vietnam that I and millions of others took.
It’s tempting to ponder a world where instead of taking young women’s lives Bundy had lost his own in battle. He would be remembered not as a monster but as a fallen hero.
I telephoned Ted’s boyhood friend, Terry Storwick, in Los Angeles, where Storwick was then working for the Veterans’ Administration. He and Ted had known one another in Tacoma from grade school through high school and had kept in touch ever since. Storwick lived in Ellensburg in 1974 and remembered over the phone that Ted visited him there that spring, sometime before his birthday on May 2. He couldn’t recollect much about the visit from Bundy, other than it was brief. We also learned from Terry that he was a member of a morning jogging class that included Susan Rancourt.
Ted’s cousin, John Cowell, was about his age and had known Bundy since he moved to Tacoma with Louise. Mother and child lived with the Cowells for a time. John also had taken a room at Ted’s University District boardinghouse in Seattle.
“John’s impression of Ted was totally positive,” I wrote in my investigative notes. “John does volunteer work with delinquent children, and he does not recall any of the typical signs in Ted’s childhood that would hint at deviant behavior. He described Ted as intelligent, high integrity, very busy, with a great deal of interaction with quite a few people.”
Cowell, under subpoena, drove me up into the Cascade foothills in the general region of Taylor Mountain with me. He reluctantly showed me the areas where he and Ted had hiked together in 1972 and 1973. “John,” I noted, “was also wary of incriminating Ted by showing the hiking routes.”
According to my final entry on Cowell, “Ted’s charges in Utah were discussed and John said the evidence appears strong against Ted; it is hard for John to believe Ted involved in such activity.”
Lynda Healy’s onetime roommate Kathy Henderson told me that she had first met Lynda in 1972 at the University of Washington through Karen Covach, a mutual friend. In the summer of 1972, the three of them rented a house together on Ravenna Boulevard in Seattle. John Cowell and his sister, Edna, a girlhood friend of Covach, visited the Ravenna house that summer.
That autumn, Kathy and Karen rented a house on 47th Street in the University District. Healy lived not far away with some other UW coeds at 5517 12th Avenue NE. Henderson said that according to what Covach once told her, Ted had visited their 47th Street house at some point. There were no further details.
I visited Henderson and Covach at their 47th Street residence soon after my telephone interview with Terry Storwick. They told me that at approximately five o’clock on the morning of December 31, 1972, someone who was never identified broke out a window pane in their door and apparently let himself in. They knew nothing more of the incident.
The next day I reached Edna Cowell by telephone in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where she worked for East Point Seafood. She was very cooperative.
Edna told me that she and Ted were quite close and that they’d seen one another three or four times in the first half of 1974. Ted had visited Edna at her residence on 43rd Street in the University District. She said that she had met Lynda Healy back in 1972 when visiting the house on Ravenna Boulevard.
To her knowledge, Ted did not know Healy, but they had discussed her disappearance. According to my notes, “She does not remember particulars of the conversation, other than it was a terrible thing.”
Like her brother, John, Edna could reca
ll nothing from Ted’s past that suggested he was capable of the abducting and brutally murdering young women.
***
The day after Bundy’s arrest in Utah, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer put the news on the front page under the headline, “Ex-Evans Campaign Aide Held in Kidnap.” From then on there was a constant media swarm around the story. After he made bail, as we expected, and then returned to Seattle in advance of his February, 1976, trial in the DaRonch case, there was no choice but to surveil him as closely as possible — we certainly couldn’t permit another murder to occur — and that led to some street confrontations that Bundy assiduously milked for their drama.
We did not, however, publicly identify him as a suspect in any of the “Ted” cases, no matter how hard the Seattle TV, radio, and newspapers pressed us to do so. Captain Mackie and the bosses made the intelligent decision not to alarm or antagonize our suspect, which we reasoned might only make him more guarded and alert. Better he assume that we were no threat to him. Maybe he’d make a mistake.
As far as we know he didn’t, and as Christmas, 1975, approached and Ted’s trial loomed, it was frustrating to have spent so much time collecting so much information so highly suggestive of his guilt, only to realize, bitterly, that we still could not take him to court with any concrete hope of a conviction.
We met in Salt Lake City with the Utah and Colorado investigators, plus David Yocum, the Salt Lake County prosecutor preparing to bring Ted to trial soon after the turn of the year. At the meeting, Yocum made it clear that if anyone had a murder case against Bundy ready to go, he would willingly defer. None of us did.
One afternoon shortly thereafter in Seattle, as Roger Dunn and I in separate cars tailed Ted around the city, we discussed by radio the wisdom of directly confronting him. It seemed like a good idea at the time, so when Bundy pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where he was then staying with friends, we did, too.
Roger followed Ted up the stairs to the door of the friends’ apartment. I was a few steps behind.
“I can’t talk to you guys right now,” Bundy said, almost apologetically.
“We do want to talk to you someday about our cases,” Dunn replied.
“Yes,” Ted said, “but now is not the time.”
PART TWO: THE CONFRONTATION
Chapter Six
The Rise of Riverman
In February of 1978, when Norm Chapman allowed his prisoner to use the office telephone, the Pensacola police detective specified that his department wouldn’t cover long-distance charges. So at about eight o’clock on Thursday night, the 18th, Bundy placed a collect call to Liz Kendall in Seattle and spoke with her for about an hour.
I was aware that he was being interrogated in Florida, but we knew nothing of the content of those discussions. What was more, with everything that was going on there, and so many people involved, I had the sense I might never get to talk to him about what I wanted to talk to him about.
I called Liz Kendall to see what she knew. I still suspected that she was aware of more about Bundy’s escapes than she admitted — time would prove that she probably was not — and I repeated my threat to jail her if I found out she’d been helping him. Liz took her jeopardy seriously. She said in fact she had heard from Ted, at about five on Thursday evening. Liz agreed to come down to our offices for a tape-recorded interview with me and Nick Mackie, who by this time had been promoted to major.
“My daughter accepted the charges,” she said. “I told him that he shouldn’t be calling me, that my phone had a tap on it, and he said he was in custody. I asked him ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘Florida.’ And later in the conversation . . . he repeated over and over again that this was really going to be bad when it broke, that it wasn’t going to break until tomorrow morning in the press, but it was going to be really ugly. I asked him if he was referring to the murder of some sorority girls in Florida, and he said he wouldn’t talk about it.”
Bundy hung up to call his mother and later tried to call back. This time Liz refused the charges and then took the phone off the hook, she said. But Ted kept trying. At 2 a.m. on Saturday, the 18th, Liz at last relented and accepted another call from her former fiancé in Florida. “He told me that he was sick,” she said, “and that he was consumed by something that he didn’t understand, and that, ah, he just couldn’t contain it.”
“Did he mention why he couldn’t contain it?” I asked.
“Well,” she replied, “he said that he tried. He said that it took so much of his time, and that’s why he wasn’t doing well in law school.”
The lust killer, like other aberrant criminals, may fantasize his crimes for years before actually committing them. The question of when Ted crossed that line has never been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Bundy himself addressed the issue on a number of occasions, beginning with his singular moment in the interview room with Don Patchen.
On the telephone, however, Ted seemed to be telling a different story. “I asked him if I had somehow played a part in what happened,” she told us. “He said no, that for years before he even met me he’d been fighting the same sickness and that when it broke we just happened to be together.”
If “when it broke” meant the start of his killing career, then Ted would have had to average 20 murders a year or more to reach 100 victims, an extraordinary pace to sustain.
“I don’t have a split personality, and I don’t have blackouts,” he added. “I remember everything I’ve done.”
I wanted more details. Liz replied that she asked again about the Florida murders and that Ted would not respond. “He said,” she told us, “that he felt he had a disease like alcoholism, or something like alcoholics that couldn’t take another drink. He told me that it was just something that he couldn’t be around, and he knew it now. And I asked what that was and he said, ‘Don’t make me say it.”
As Ted would later explain to me, an aberrant killer hides his “terrible secrets” at all costs, and the further those memories stretch into the past, the more inflexible, and impenetrable, the defenses against self-incrimination become. “Even when the day comes for him to talk about it,” Bundy said, “it becomes very difficult. Not because he doesn’t want to talk about it, but he really can’t open up.”
***
In early April, Lake City schoolgirl Kim Leach’s body was recovered from beneath the remote hog shed where Bundy had dumped her back on February 9. Capital indictments in both the Leach and Chi Omega cases were handed up in July. For a time, Bundy proceeded pro se – acting as his own attorney. Not until early 1979 did Mike Minerva, the Leon County public defender, and his team take over the thankless task of defending Ted in the first scheduled trial, the Chi Omega case.
Prosecutor Larry Simpson and his assistant, Mike McKeever, flew to Seattle, where we thoroughly briefed them on our cases and shared our insights into Bundy. For a time, Simpson and I discussed the possibility of me testifying at the trial, but the idea eventually was dropped.
His case against Bundy — built around the expert testimony of forensic odontologists who would testify that in their opinion Ted had left the bite mark in Lisa levy’s buttock — was strong, and Mike Minerva knew it. Moreover, the evidence and testimony Simpson had prepared to re-create the carnage that night at the sorority house was so vividly horrific a guilty verdict practically ensured a death sentence for Ted. The only hope for saving his life was a plea bargain.
In late April, 1979, Simpson, Minerva and state attorney Bob Dekle, who was in charge of the Leach prosecution, all agreed to trade life imprisonment for guilty pleas from Bundy, who would have to make his admission in open court. The victims’ families signed off. However, the deal had to go down soon. The strength of the Chi Omega case against Ted would soon become apparent in pretrial hearings, making it difficult for the state to accept such an agreement with such a notorious defendant who otherwise would surely die for his crimes, a popular solution in Bundy’s case.
The defense
team sold the plea bargain to Louise Bundy and Carole Boone, Ted’s emerging champion. Boone had known Ted since the summer of 1974 when they had worked together in Olympia at the department of emergency services. Liz was now out of the picture.
Minerva hoped he’d sold the deal to his client. However, as Bundy later told Michaud, he had been seething ever since the public defender told Ted he believed him guilty. Bundy also felt that his advisory counsel, Millard Farmer, a death-penalty specialist from Atlanta, had tricked him. “Suddenly,” he told Michaud, “it dawned on me that Millard had gotten his foot in the door in some devious way to put me in a position of accepting a plea bargain. I felt like he was conceding that I was guilty.”
Precisely.
That is also what Judges Edward Cowart and Wallace Jopling, scheduled to preside at Ted’s trials, expected to hear at a late-May hearing in Tallahassee. Instead, Bundy walked into a full courtroom that morning and attacked Minerva as incompetent. Louise and Carole Boone looked on in fear. Larry Simpson and Bob Dekle immediately signaled to the defense table that the plea bargain was canceled, and Ted went on to trial.
Terrible Secrets Page 8