The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  Probably.

  Whatever “Officer Roseland’s” mission had been on the rainy night of November 8, he had been frustrated. Carol DaRonch had escaped. If he had intended to rape her, or worse, his appetite had been honed to an even keener edge. He had more to do that night.

  Seventeen miles from Murray, Bountiful, Utah, is a northern suburb of the Mormon city, a suburb that lives up to its name with its nature beauty and its recreational opportunities. On November 8, the Dean Kents of Bountiful prepared to attend a musical presented at Viewmont High School. Dean Kent had been ill, but he was feeling better, and he and his wife, Belva, and their oldest daughter, seventeen-year-old Debby, headed for the premiere performance of The Redhead.

  Debby Kent’s younger brother, Blair, didn’t care about seeing the play. He was dropped off at a roller rink and his mother promised to pick him up at 10 P.M. Shortly before eight, they arrived at the high school. They knew most of the crowd in the auditorium. High school drama productions tend to appeal principally to the families of the performers, classmates, and friends who have been prevailed upon to buy tickets.

  While the audience waited in hushed expectation, Viewmont High School’s drama teacher, Jean Graham, a young woman only a few years out of college herself, was approached by a stranger backstage. She was busy, distracted, trying to coordinate last-minute preparations for the performance, and she paused only briefly as the tall, slim, man with the mustache called to her. She remembers that he wore a sports jacket, dress slacks, and patent leather shoes, and that he was very handsome.

  He was courteous, almost apologetic, as he asked her if she would accompany him to the parking lot to identify a car. She shook her head, scarcely wondering why he needed such help. She was just too busy.

  “It will only take a minute,” he urged.

  “No, I can’t. I’m in charge of the play,” she said briskly, and hurried past him in the darkened hallway. He was still lingering in the hall when she headed toward the front of the auditorium twenty minutes later.

  “Hi,” she said. “Did you find anyone to help you yet?”

  He didn’t speak, but stared at her strangely, his eyes boring into her. Odd, she thought. But she was used to men staring at her.

  Her duties required that she go backstage again some minutes later, and the man was still there. He walked toward her, smiling.

  “Hey, you look really nice,” he complimented her. “Come on, give me a hand with that car. Just a couple of minutes will do it.” His manner was easy, cajoling.

  And yet she was on guard. She tried to get past him, told him that maybe her husband could help him. “I’ll go find him.” She was frightened, but that was ridiculous, she told herself. There were several hundred people close by. The man stepped to the side, blocking her way. They jockeyed for position in a peculiar side-to-side dance step, and then she was free of him. Who was he? He wasn’t on the staff. He was too old to be a student, and too young to be a parent. She hurried backstage.

  Debby Kent left at intermission to phone her brother and tell him that the play wouldn’t be over by ten, and then returned for the second act. One of her girlfriends, Jolynne Beck, noticed the handsome stranger pacing at the rear of the auditorium. Jean Graham saw him there too, and felt curiously disturbed when she saw him for the last time, before the play had concluded.

  Debby Kent volunteered to drive over to the roller rink and pick up her brother. “I’ll be back to pick you up,” she promised her parents.

  Several residents of an apartment complex across from the high school remember hearing two short, piercing screams coming from the west parking lot between 10:30 and 11 that night. They hadn’t sounded like horseplay. They’d sounded like someone in mortal terror, screams so compelling that the witnesses had walked outside to stare over at the dark lot.

  They had seen nothing at all.

  Debby’s brother waited in vain at the roller rink. Her parents stood impatiently in front of the high school while the crowd thinned. Finally, no one was left, but their car was still in the lot. Where was Debby? It was midnight, and they couldn’t find their daughter anywhere. It seemed she’d never arrived at the car at all. They notified the Bountiful Police Department and described their daughter: seventeen years old, with long brown hair parted in the middle.

  “She just wouldn’t have left us stranded,” her mother said nervously. “Her father’s just getting over a heart attack. And the car’s still in the school lot. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Bountiful police had the radio report on the attempted abduction in Murray. They were all too aware of the Melissa Smith case, and of the disappearance of Laura Aime. They sent patrol units out to circle the neighborhood around Viewmont High School, had the school itself opened and each room checked on the off chance that Debby might have been accidentally locked in a room. Her parents frantically called all her friends. But no one had seen Debby Kent.

  No one has ever seen Debby Kent again.

  With the first thin wash of daylight the next morning, a police investigative crew searched the Viewmont High School parking lot and canvassed the neighborhood, looking for some clue to the inexplicable vanishing of Debby Kent.

  They learned of the screams heard the night before, but found no actual witnesses to an abduction. There had been so many cars in the lot that no one could pick out one, perhaps an old, tan hued Volkswagen Bug?

  Bountiful detectives Ira Beal and Ron Ballantyne hunkered down to search the now empty lot. And there, between an exterior door to the school and the parking lot, they found the little key. They knew what it was. A handcuff key.

  They took the key at once to the Murray Police Department, inserted it in the lock of the handcuffs removed from Carol DaRonch. It slid in perfectly. The cuffs opened. Still, they knew that some handcuff keys are interchangeable. The key wouldn’t open their Smith & Wesson cuffs, but it would work on several brands of small cuffs. It could not be considered positive physical evidence connecting the two cases, but it most certainly was alarming. Carol DaRonch had escaped. Apparently, Debby Kent had not.

  Just as in Washington State earlier in the year, the Utah law enforcement officers were inundated with calls. The last call that appeared to have any real bearing on the case came in mid December. A man who had arrived at Viewmont High School to pick up his daughter after the play reported that he had seen an old, beat-up Volkswagen—a light-colored Bug—racing from the parking lot just after 10:30 on the night of November 8.

  There was no more. Debby Kent’s parents were left to face a bleak, tragic Christmas season, just as Melissa Smith’s and Laura Aime’s family were. Carol DaRonch was afraid to go out alone, even in the daylight.

  14

  TED BUNDY was not doing as well in his first year at the University of Utah’s law school as he had done in his earlier college career. He was having difficulty maintaining a C average, and finished the quarter with two incompletes—Ted, who had breezed through tough courses at the University of Washington and graduated “with distinction,” who had assured the director of admissions at Utah that he was not “just a qualified student, but … an individual who is obstinate enough to want to become a critical and tireless student and practitioner of the law, and qualified enough to succeed.”

  Certainly, he had to work to pay his way through and that would cut into his studying time, but he was also drinking a great deal more than he had in the past. He called Meg frequently and was very disturbed when he did not find her at home. Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected—demanded—that she be totally loyal to him. According to Lynn Banks, Meg’s close friend, he would dial Lynn’s number if he failed to find Meg at home, insisting on being told where she was.

  On November 18, 1974, I entered Group Health Hospital in Seattle to be prepped for surgery the next morning. I had had four babies without anesthetic, but this surgery proved to be more painful than anything in my memory, and I was sedated heavily for two days. I reme
mber calling Joyce Johnson sometime in the late afternoon of November 19, telling her that I was alright, and I remember my mother, who had come up from Salem, Oregon, to stay with my children, sitting beside my bed.

  I also remember the deluge of flowers I received from various police departments. The Seattle homicide detectives sent me a dozen red roses, and Herb Swindler appeared carrying a pot of yellow mums, followed by Ted Forrester from the King County Major Crimes Unit with a huge planter. I don’t know what the nurses thought as they saw the steady parade of visiting detectives with ill-hidden gun belts at their waists. They must have thought I was a girlfriend of the Mafia under surveillance.

  Of course it was only a bunch of “tough” cops being kind. They knew I was alone and worried about getting back on my feet and able to work, and they were showing the sentimental side they usually keep hidden. Within a few days, I felt much better and rather enjoyed my notoriety.

  My mother visited me. She seemed worried as she remarked, “I’m glad I’m up here with the kids. You got a really strange phone call last night.”

  “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like it was long distance. Some man called you a little before midnight and he seemed terribly upset that you weren’t home. I asked if there was any message, but he wouldn’t leave any and he wouldn’t say who he was.”

  “Upset? How upset?”

  “It’s hard to describe. He might have been drunk, but he seemed disoriented, panicky, and he talked rapidly. It bothered me.”

  “It was probably a wrong number.”

  “No, he asked for ‘Ann.’ I told him you were in the hospital and that I could have you call him back in a day or so, but he hung up.”

  I had no idea who it might have been, and I would not remember the call at all until I was reminded of it almost a year later.

  The Intermountain Crime Conference was held at State-line, Nevada, on December 12, 1974, and law enforcement officers met to discuss those cases which seemed to have indicators that other states might be involved. Washington detectives presented their missing and murdered girls cases, and Utah lawmen discussed Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debby Kent, and Carol DaRonch. There were similarities, certainly, but there are, sadly, hundreds of young women killed each year in the United States. Many of them are strangled, bludgeoned, and raped. The method of murder was not distinctive enough to assume that any one man was responsible for a particular group of victims.

  Ted’s name was now listed—four times—in that endless computer readout in the Washington State Task Force Office. But he was still one among several thousand, a man with no adult criminal record at all, and certainly a man whose job record and educational background did not stamp him as a “criminal type.”

  He had been in Washington, and now he was in Utah. His name was Ted, and he drove a Volkswagen. His girlfriend, Meg, had been suspicious enough to turn him in, but Meg was a very jealous woman, a woman who had been lied to. There were a score or more jealous women who had turned their boyfriends’ names in as possible “Teds.”

  It was after that 1974 Intermountain Conference, and after more urging from Lynn Banks, that Meg Anders had gone a step further. She placed a call to the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, and repeated her suspicions about Ted Bundy. Her voice had had a near-hysterical edge to it, and Captain Hayward too suspected that this woman on the long-distance line from Seattle was exaggerating, and was allowing herself to see connections that were, at best, tenuous. He wrote down the name “Ted Bundy” and gave it to Jerry Thompson to add to the burgeoning list of Utah suspects.

  Without physical evidence or solid information, detectives cannot rush out and arrest a man. It goes against the grain of our whole philosophy of justice. It would be eight months before Ted Bundy would, through his own actions, place himself squarely in the eye of the law, and would almost challenge police to stop him.

  What do I remember of the Christmas season of 1974? Very little. There was no reason to. I remember that I was back at work two weeks after surgery, a recuperation compounded by a bout with the flu. I couldn’t drive yet, but a few of the detectives had taken their free time to tape the vital information on some of their cases which had already been to trial, and they drove out to bring me the tapes so that I could type stories at home.

  I remember that the following January brought one wailing wind storm, a storm that whipped across Puget Sound and hit our old beach house with such force that the living room window all across the southern wall was blown in, scattering plants, lamps, and glass shards twenty feet into the room. It looked like a tornado had danced through, and we froze until we could get someone out to put in a new window. That was the month the basement flooded, and the roof started to leak in several spots. I can remember being very discouraged, but I can’t remember once thinking about Ted Bundy.

  Ted came back to Seattle in January of 1975 and spent more than a week with Meg, from January 14 to 23, after he had finished his final exams in Utah. Meg didn’t tell him that she had turned his name into the police, and she carried a heavy burden of guilt, although no officer had yet approached him. He was so nice to her, was seriously talking marriage again, and her doubts of the fall just past now seemed to be only a nightmare. This was the old Ted, the man she had loved for so many years. She was able to put her fears somewhere far back in her mind. The only woman in Utah that he mentioned to her was Callie Fiore, whom he described as “flaky.” He said that there’d been a goodbye party for Callie sometime after Christmas of 1974, and that they’d seen her off on a plane.

  He didn’t mention that Callie hadn’t left for good, that she was coming back to Salt Lake City.

  When Ted left to go back to law school, Meg felt much better. There were plans for her to visit him in Salt Lake City that summer, and he promised to come back to Seattle as soon as he could.

  Caryn Campbell had vacationed in Aspen, Colorado, in January of 1975. Caryn, a registered nurse, was engaged to Dr. Raymond Gadowski of Farmington, Michigan, and the pair, along with Gadowski’s two children by a prior marriage, were combining a pleasure trip with a medical symposium on cardiology that Gadowski was scheduled to attend in Aspen.

  The group checked into the plush Wildwood Inn on January 11 and was given a room on the second floor. At twenty-three, Caryn was nine years younger than Gadowski, but she loved him and she got along well with his son, Gregory, eleven, and his daughter, Jenny, nine. She wanted to get married, and soon. When the couple argued that day, it was because Gadowski was not particularly anxious to rush into a second marriage.

  Caryn Campbell was suffering with a slight case of the flu when they arrived, but she was still able to take the youngsters skiing and sightseeing while Gadowski attended seminars. On January 12 they ate dinner with friends at the Stew Pot, and Caryn ordered beef stew. The others had cocktails but Caryn, still feeling queasy, drank only milk.

  And then Caryn, Gadowski, and the youngsters returned to the cozy lounge at the Wildwood Inn. Gadowski picked up the evening paper, and Caryn, remembering that she’d left a new magazine in their room, headed toward the elevator to get it. She carried with her the only key to Room 210. All things being equal, she should have returned to the lounge within ten minutes.

  Caryn got off the elevator on the second floor and spoke to several physicians waiting there, doctors she’d met at the convention. They watched her walk down the hall toward her room.

  Downstairs, Gadowski finished the paper, and glanced around. His children were playing contentedly, but Caryn hadn’t come back. He looked toward the elevators, expecting to see her emerge at any moment. The minutes dragged, and she didn’t appear.

  Warning the youngsters to stay in the lounge, the young cardiologist went up to their room, and then remembered that Caryn had the key. He knocked, and waited for her to cross the room and open the door. She didn’t.

  He knocked again, thinking that perhaps she was in the bathroom and hadn’t heard him, knocked louder. Sti
ll, she didn’t open the door. He felt a prickling of alarm. If she had ‘gotten sicker, perhaps fainted inside, she might have hit her head on something, might be unconscious. He sprinted down to the desk, obtained a duplicate key, and ran back to the second floor. The door swung open and the room before him looked exactly as it had when they’d left before dinner. There was no sign of Caryn’s purse, and the magazine that she’d meant to get was still on the stand beside the beds. Obviously, she hadn’t come up to the room at all.

  Puzzled and indecisive, he stood in the empty room, the key in his hand. Then he turned, and walked out into the hallway, locking the door behind him. There were a lot of parties going on that Sunday night, and he figured that his fiancée had probably run into some of their friends and been enticed to stop someplace “for just one drink.” She wasn’t usually inconsiderate, and she must have known he’d be worried, but then the atmosphere in the lodge was an easygoing one. He checked back in the lounge, and found the children still alone.

  Gadowski paced, hurrying faster and faster, from one bar in the sprawling building to another, listening for the sound of Caryn’s laughter, looking for the familiar way she tossed back her hair. The din and the ebullient spirits of the people around him seemed to mock him. Caryn was gone, simply gone, and he couldn’t understand it.

  He gathered up his youngsters and took them to the room. It was 10 P.M. now, and, outside the big warm lodge, it was freezing cold. All Caryn had been wearing when she’d strolled toward the elevator were blue jeans, her light brown wooly jacket, and boots. That was warm enough during the day, but it was inconceivable that she’d gone out into the January Colorado night like that.

  Gadowski called the Aspen Police Department shortly after ten. The patrolmen who arrived took a missing person report, but they assured the Michigan doctor that almost everybody who “disappeared” showed up after the bars and parties broke up.