The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  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. H
e 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.

  11

  I CAN REMEMBER standing in the Homicide Unit of the Seattle Police Department during August of 1974 and looking at a computer printout, single spaced, that the detectives had taped to the twelve-foot ceiling of their office. it reached the floor and overflowed. On it were the names of suspects turned in by citizens, names of men they thought might be the mysterious “Ted.” Just locating and questioning each of the “suspects” could take years, if there was enough manpower to do it, and, of course, there wasn’t. There probably wasn’t a police department in the country with enough investigators to go through that awesome list of suspects precisely. All King County and Seattle police could do was to cull out those that looked the most likely and check out those men.

  One of the reports that had come in, on August 10, had a familiar, ominous sound to detectives. A young woman related an encounter that she had had in the University District a few blocks from where Georgeann Hawkins vanished. “I was walking near 16th N.E. and 50th on July 26 at 11:30 in the morning. There was this man—five foot nine or ten, good build, with brown hair to his collar—and he was wearing blue jeans, but one leg was cut off because he had a cast on his leg all the way up to his hip. He was on crutches, and he was carrying a kind of old-fashioned briefcase. It was black, round on the top, with a handle. He kept dropping it, picking it up, and then dropping it again.”

  The girl stated that she had passed him, and looked back when she heard the briefcase thud to the sidewalk. “He smiled at me. He looked like he wanted me to help him and I was almost going to … until I noticed his eyes … they were very weird and they gave me the creeps. I began walking very rapidly away until I got to the ‘Ave’ [the main business thoroughfare in the University District]. He was very clean-cut, and his cast was white and fresh. It looked like it had just been put on.”

  She’d never seen him before, and she hadn’t seen him again.

  Police patrol units out of the Wallingford Precinct in the city’s North End watched constantly for men with broken arms and men with legs in full casts, but they found few, and those they did stop to question proved to have real injuries.

  Something had been bothering me for two weeks as August drew to a close. I kept going back to the composite picture of the “Ted” in Lake Sammamish State Park, reading over the physical description and the references to a “slight English, or English type accent.” And I saw a resemblance to someone I knew. I put it in the back of my mind and told myself that I too was caught up in the hysteria of that long, terrible summer.

  I knew a lot of men named Ted, including two homicide detectives, but the only Ted I knew who fit the description was Ted Bundy. I hadn’t seen him or talked to him for eight months and, for all I knew, he had left Seattle. But the last time I’d seen him, I knew that he’d lived at 4123 12th Avenue N.E., only blocks from so many of the missing girls.

  I felt guilty that a friend I’d known for three years should even come to mind. You don’t go running to the police to turn in the name of a good friend, a friend who seemed the very antithesis of the man they sought. No, it couldn’t be. It was ridiculous. Ted Bundy would never hurt a woman. He wouldn’t even make an off-color remark to one. A man whose life’s work was oriented toward helping people, toward eliminating the very sexual violence that marked the crimes, couldn’t be involved, no matter how much he resembled the composite.

  I went through periods where I didn’t think about it, and then, usually just before I dropped off to sleep at night, Ted Bundy’s face would flash through my mind. A long time later, I would learn that I wasn’t the only one who wrestled with such indecision that August, that there were others with much more insight into Ted Bundy than I had, and they, too, were torn.

  Finally, I decided that I could do something that would erase my doubts. As far as I knew, Ted didn’t even have a car, much less a VW Bug. If I could check to see that that was still true, then I could forget it. If, by the furthest stretch of my imagination, Ted Bundy had had anything to do with the missing girls, I had an obligation to come forward.

  I chose to contact Seattle Homicide detective Dick Reed. Reed, a tall, lean man with the irrepressible humor of a practical joker, had been in the homicide unit longer than any of the other seventeen detectives. He’d become a close friend. I knew I could count on him to be discreet, to run a Motor Vehicles Department check on the computer on Ted without making a big deal out of it.

  I called him and began haltingly, “… I don’t really think this is anything, but it’s bugging me. I have a good friend named Ted. He’s about twenty-seven, and he matches the description, and he used to live out by the University, but I don’t know where he is now. Listen, I don’t even think he has a car because I used to give him rides. And I don’t want this to be like I’m turning him in or anything. I just want to know if he has a car now. Can you do that?” />
  “Sure,” he answered. “What’s his name? I’ll run it through the computer. If he has a car registered to him, it will show.”

  “His name is Ted Bundy. B-u-n-d-y. Call me back. O.K.?”

  My phone rang twenty minutes later. It was Dick Reed. “Theodore Robert Bundy. 4123 12th Avenue N.E. Would you believe a 1968 bronze Volkswagen Bug?”

  I thought he was teasing me. “Come on, Reed. What does he really drive? He doesn’t even have a car, does he?”

  “Ann, I’m serious. He’s currently listed at that address, and he drives a bronze Bug. I’m going to go out and drive around the block and see if I can spot it.”

  Reed called me back later that afternoon and said he hadn’t been able to find the car parked near the house on 12th N.E. He said he would go a step further. “I’m going to send to Olympia and get a driver’s license picture of him. I’ll pass it on to the County.”

  “But my name doesn’t have to be on the information, does it?”

  “No problem. I’ll put it down as anonymous.”

  Reed did put Ted Bundy’s picture into that vast hopper with some 2,400 other “Teds”—and nothing came of it. The King County detectives couldn’t possibly show mug “laydowns” of each of those 2,400 “suspects” to the witnesses at Lake Sammamish State Park. Just the sheer number of faces would confuse them, and there was nothing about Ted Bundy at that time that would mark him as a likely suspect. The computer check on Ted drew no “hits” at all that would make them suspect him.

  I forgot about it. I didn’t lend much weight to the fact that Ted had acquired a Volkswagen. A lot of people drove VWs, and I heard nothing more to indicate that Ted Bundy was a viable suspect.

  I hadn’t seen Ted since the Christmas party at the end of 1973. I had tried to call him once or twice when I was living on the houseboat to invite him down, but I’d never found him home.

  Ted’s job with the Republican Party had phased out, but he’d been busy attending law school at U.P.S. in Tacoma for most of the school year 1973-74. He’d been receiving unemployment insurance at the beginning of spring 1974, and his attendance at U.P.S. had become desultory at best. On April 10 he dropped out of law school altogether. He had received a second acceptance from the registrar at the University of Utah Law School for the coming fall. He hadn’t even taken his final exams at U.P.S., although he wouldn’t admit it to the students in his carpool. When they asked about his grades, he’d sloughed off the question with, “I can’t remember.”