The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  Gadowski shook his head impatiently. “No, she isn’t like that. She was ill. She may have gotten sicker.”

  A description of the nurse and her clothing was broadcast to patrolmen on duty in Aspen. Many times during the night, patrol units would pull up to a young woman wearing jeans and a wooly jacket, only to find that it was someone else. It was never Caryn Campbell.

  By morning, Gadowski was distraught after a sleepless night and the children were crying and upset. Aspen police detectives moved through the Wildwood Inn, searching room by room, storerooms, closets, even the kitchens, and up through crawl spaces, peering down into the elevator shafts. The pretty nurse wasn’t anywhere in the lodge.

  They questioned every guest, but no one had seen Caryn Campbell after she’d said “hi” to the group at the elevator on the second floor and walked down the hall toward her room.

  Finally, Dr. Gadowski packed up their bags and flew home with his children, hoping each time the phone rang that it would, somehow, be Caryn, with a logical explanation of why she had walked away from him.

  The call never came.

  On February 18, a recreational employee working along the Owl Creek road a few miles from the Wildwood Inn noticed a flight of squawking birds that were circling something in a snowbank twenty-five feet off the road. He walked through the melting drifts and turned away, sickened.

  What remained of Caryn Campbell’s nude body lay there in the snow, snow stained crimson with her blood. Pathologist Dr. Donald Clark performed a postmortem examination on the body that dental records verified was Caryn’s. She had died of repeated blunt instrument blows to her skull and had, in addition, suffered deep cuts from a sharp weapon. A knife? An axe? There was not enough tissue left in the neck area to say whether she had been strangled, but her hyoid bone had been cracked.

  It was much too late to tell if she had been subjected to a sexual attack, but the nude condition of her body pointed to rape as a strong motive.

  Undigested bits of stew and milk were easily identifiable in her stomach. Caryn Campbell had been killed within hours after she had eaten on January 12, which would make the time of death shortly after she had left the lounge of the Wildwood Inn to go up to her room.

  She had never made it to her room, or, if she had, someone had waited inside for her. That seemed unlikely. The room had shown no signs of struggle at all. Somewhere along that well-lighted corridor on the second floor of the Wildwood Inn, somewhere between the elevators and Room 210, Caryn had met her killer, and had, seemingly, gone with him without a fight.

  It was a disappearance reminiscent of the Georgeann Hawkins case in June of 1974. Less than fifty feet to walk to safety, and then, she was gone.

  One California woman tourist had been in that corridor of the Wildwood Inn on the night of January 12 and she had seen a handsome young man who had smiled at her, but she’d thought nothing of it. She had left for home before Caryn Campbell’s disappearance became known to other hotel guests.

  The winter waned, and back in Washington State the snows had begun to melt and slough off in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. On Saturday, March 1, 1975, two Green River Community College students were working on a forestry survey project on Taylor Mountain, a thickly wooded “mini” mountain east of Highway 18, a two-lane highway that cuts through forests between Auburn and North Bend, Washington. The site is about ten miles from the hillside where the remains of Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and an unidentified third person (perhaps fourth) were located in September of 1974. It was slow going through the moss-shrouded alders, the ground carpeted with sword ferns and fallen leaves.

  One of the forestry students looked down. A human skull rested at his feet.

  Brenda Ball had been found at last, although it would take dental records to verify that. As they had six months before, King County police detectives immediately ordered the lonely area cordoned off, and, again, Detective Bob Keppel led over two hundred searchers into the area. Men and dogs moved with painstaking slowness through the dank forest, turning over piles of leaves and rotten stumps.

  Denise and Janice had been found only a few miles from the park where they vanished. Brenda’s skull was discovered thirty miles away from the Flame Tavern. This could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that she’d intended to hitchhike to Sun Lakes State Park east of the mountains. Highway 18 would have been a likely alternate route to Snoqualmie Pass. Had she gotten into a car with the stranger with a sling on his arm, grateful that she had a ride all the way to Sun Lakes? And had he then pulled over, stopped in this desolate region, and stared at her with the pitiless eyes of a killer?

  The discovery of the skull on Taylor Mountain made some kind of macabre sense, but that was all there was to be found of the dark-eyed girl. Even if animals had scattered the remainder of her skeleton, there should have been something more, and there was nothing. No more bones, not so much as a tattered rag of her clothing.

  Cause of death was impossible to determine, but the skull was fractured on the left side, smashed by a blunt instrument. The grim search went on for two more days.

  Early on March 3, Bob Keppel slipped and fell as he made his way down a slimy incline. He had stumbled— literally—over another skull one hundred feet away from that of Brenda Ball.

  Dental records would confirm that Keppel had found all that was left of Susan Rancourt, the shy blonde coed who had vanished from Ellensburg, eighty-seven miles away! There was no reason at all for Susan to be here in this lonely grove. It appeared that the killer had established his own graveyard, bringing only his victims’ severed heads with him, month after month. It was an ugly supposition to contemplate, but one that could not be ignored.

  Susan’s skull, too, had been brutally fractured.

  As the search went on, the other families waited, dreading that their daughters might be up on Taylor Mountain, that they would hear a knock on their door at any time.

  Fifty feet more of the tedious sifting of wet leaves, brushing aside dripping sword ferns. And there was yet another skull. Dental records confirmed this victim was a girl that detectives hadn’t expected to find so far away from home. It was that of Roberta Kathleen Parks, missing since the previous May from Corvallis, Oregon, 262 miles away. As with the others, it bore the crushing damage of a blunt instrument.

  The first to vanish was the last to be found. Lynda Ann Healy, the teacher of retarded youngsters, gone fourteen months from her basement room in the University District, could be identified only by her lower mandible. The fillings in the jaw bone matched Lynda’s dental charts. Lynda’s skull, too, had been carried to Taylor Mountain.

  Although the search continued from dawn until sunset for another week, no more skulls, clothes or jewelry were found.

  There had been a few dozen small bones, neck bones, but not nearly enough to indicate that the victims’ complete bodies had been carried into the forest, and the realization that only the girls’ heads had been brought there one at a time over a six-month period brought forth more rumors of cults, witchcraft, and Satanism.

  Seattle Police had a file on occult happenings, File 1004. Reports came in to the beleaguered Task Force—reports from people who thought they’d seen “Ted” at cult gatherings. In any case with such widespread publicity, a number of “kooks” will surface, advancing theories that make an ordinary person’s hair stand up on the back of his neck. There were totally unsubstantiated rumors that the missing and murdered girls had been sacrificed and their headless bodies dumped, weighted, into the almost bottomless waters of Lake Washington.

  A psychic from eastern Washington contacted Captain Herb Swindler and prevailed upon him to meet with her at dawn on the Taylor Mountain site, where the woman pierced the ground with a stick and attempted to deduce information from the way it cast shadows. It was an eerie scene, and it produced no new theories.

  Swindler was soon besieged by messages from those who claimed direct contact with “that other world,” and almost as many reques
ts from other departments with crimes they felt might have resulted from devil worship. The man was a no nonsense cop, and he was hassled by his detectives, who thought the psychic angle was ridiculous.

  But Swindler kept remembering the astrological prediction that had come true on July 14. Asked if he felt the occult was involved, he shook his head. “I don’t know, I’ve never known.”

  Psychiatrists were more inclined to believe that the killer was a man obsessed by a terrible compulsion, a compulsion that forced him to hunt down and kill the same type of woman, over, and over, and over again, that he could never be able to murder her enough times to find surcease.

  Over at County Police headquarters, Captain Nick Mackie admitted that the crimes might never be solved. The probers knew now that Lynda, Susan, Kathy, Brenda, Denise, and Janice were dead. They were in the dark when it came to the fate of Donna and Georgeann. There were still the extra femur bones found with Denise and Janice. They probably belonged to the missing women. It was all they were ever to know. Donna Manson and Georgeann Hawkins may never be found. In Utah, it is the same with Debby Kent. Gone.

  “The name of the game is tenacity,” Mackie remarked. “We have looked at 2,247 ‘Ted’ look-alikes, 916 vehicles …”

  Mackie said that there were 200 suspects left after the winnowing out, but 200 is still an impossibly large number of men to learn everything about. “We have no crime scene evidence, no positive means of death,” Mackie said. “It’s the worst case I’ve ever been on. There’s just nothing.”

  Mackie added that a psychological profile of the killer indicated that he would probably have criminal behavior in his background and was probably a sexual psychopath. “You go up to a certain point in your investigation,” the weary detective chief commented. “Then you stop, and start all over again.” Ted Bundy’s name remained on the roster of 200 suspects. But Ted Bundy had no criminal background. He was squarely on the other side of the law from all the information the Task Force had uncovered on him. His juvenile records were shredded, and they didn’t know of his long-ago arrests for car theft and burglary. Meg hadn’t told them that she knew Ted had stolen television sets, even while he was an honor student at the University. There was a great deal she hadn’t yet told them.

  Just as the crimes had stopped in Washington, they stopped in Utah. The murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen was another state away, and appeared to be an isolated instance. Detective Mike Fisher in Aspen was busy checking out local suspects, eliminating every man who had known the pretty nurse. He could see no link with the Utah cases, and Washington State was a long, long way away.

  Crime news was about to escalate in Colorado.

  Vail, Colorado, is one hundred miles away from Aspen, a booming ski resort town, but without the flash, the money, the drugs, and the “laissez-faire” attitude of Aspen. Jerry Ford keeps a vacation condo in Vail, and Cary Grant occasionally flew in quietly with his daughter, Jennifer, to ski.

  Jim Stovall, Chief of Detectives of the Salem, Oregon, Police Department, takes his winter vacation there, working as a ski instructor. His daughter, also a ski instructor, lives there.

  Stovall drew a deep breath as he recalled to me that twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham was a good friend of his daughter, and Stovall, who has solved so many Oregon homicides, was at a loss to know what had happened to Julie on the night of March 15.

  At twenty-six, Julie Cunningham should have had the world by the tail. She was very attractive and she had silky dark hair, parted in the middle. She shared a pleasant apartment in Vail with a girlfriend, and worked as a clerk in a sporting goods store and as a part-time ski instructor. But Julie wasn’t happy. She was searching for the one man she could really love and trust, someone to settle down with. She’d done the ski bum bit, but she was growing out of that. She wanted marriage and children.

  Julie was not the best judge of men. She believed their lines, and she was becoming disillusioned. She’d heard, “It’s been great. I’ll give you a call someday” much too often. Maybe Vail was the wrong place for her to be. Maybe the aura of a ski town didn’t lend itself to permanent relationships.

  In early March of 1975, Julie was to suffer her last heartbreak. She thought she had met the man she wanted, and she was thrilled when he invited her to go to Sun Valley with him for a vacation. But she’d been “dumped on” again when they reached the resort made famous by Sonja Henie movies in the thirties. The man had never had any intention of a committed relationship, and she returned to Vail, crying and depressed.

  March 15 was a Saturday, and Julie didn’t have a date that night. She called her mother, feeling a little better when she hung up just before nine. She decided to get out of her apartment, and, wearing blue jeans, a brown suede jacket, boots, and a ski cap, headed for a tavern a few blocks away. Her roommate was there. She could have a beer or two. There was always tomorrow.

  But there wasn’t.

  There were no more tomorrows for Julie Cunningham. She never arrived at the tavern, and, when her roommate came home in the early morning hours, Julie was gone.

  Julie Cunningham’s disappearance was soon eclipsed in the news by an event in Aspen. Claudine Longet, the divorced wife of singer Andy Williams, was arrested for the March 19 slaying of her lover, “Spider” Sabich, a former world champion skier. The lovers’ quarrel and the notoriety of the principals, made much bigger headlines than the disappearance of an unknown ski instructor.

  But the pattern was repeating, just as it had in Washington a year earlier. A victim in January. No victim in February. A victim in March.

  Would there be a victim in April in Colorado?

  Denise Oliverson was twenty-five years old that spring, married, and living in Grand Junction, Colorado, a town just east of the Utah-Colorado border on Highway 70. Denise argued with her husband on Sunday afternoon, April 6, and left their home, riding her yellow bike, headed for her parents’ home. She may have grown less angry with each mile that passed. It was a wonderful spring day, and perhaps she realized that their fight had been silly. Maybe she planned to go home and make up that night.

  It was a warm day, and Denise wore jeans and a green, printed long-sleeved blouse. If anyone saw the pretty, dark-haired woman pedaling her ten-speed that afternoon, they have never come forward to report it.

  Denise didn’t arrive at her folks’ place, but they hadn’t been expecting her. She didn’t come home that night either, and her husband figured she was still angry with him. He would give her time to cool off, and then call.

  On Monday, he called her parents and was startled to learn she had never arrived at their home. A search of the route she had probably taken was instituted, and police discovered her bike, and her sandals, beneath a viaduct near a railroad bridge close by the Colorado River on U.S. 50. The bike was in good working order. There would have been no reason to leave it there.

  Like Julie Cunningham, Denise Oliverson had disappeared.

  There would be other girls who would vanish in Colorado during that bright spring of 1975.

  Eighteen-year-old Melanie Cooley, who looked enough like Bountiful, Utah’s Debby Kent to have been a twin, walked away from her high school in Nederland, a tiny mountain hamlet fifty miles west of Denver, on April 15. Eight days later, county road workers found her battered body on the Coal Creek Canyon road twenty miles away. She had been bludgeoned on the back of the head, probably with a rock, and her hands were tied. A filthy pillowcase, perhaps used as a garotte, perhaps as a blindfold, was still twisted around her neck.

  On July 1, Shelley K. Robertson, twenty-four, failed to show up for work in Golden, Colorado. Her family checked around and discovered she had been seen on Monday, June 30, by friends. A police officer had seen her in a service station in Golden on July 1, in the company of a wild haired man driving an old pickup truck. No one saw her after that.

  Shelley had been a hitchhiker, and her family tried to believe that she had decided to take off on a whim for a visit to another st
ate. But as the summer passed with no word from her at all, that seemed unlikely.

  On August 21, Two mining students discovered Shelley’s nude body, 500 feet inside a mine at the foot of Berthoud Pass. Decomposition was far advanced, making cause of death impossible to determine. Almost 100 miles from Denver, the mine is quite close to Vail. Investigators thought it possible that Julie Cunningham’s body could be hidden there, and the mine was searched, but there was no sign of her.

  And then it was over. There were no more victims, or, if there were, they were young women whose disappearances were not reported to police. In each jurisdiction, the detectives had checked out relatives, friends, and known sex criminals, and eliminated them all, through polygraph examinations or alibis.

  Of all the Western victims, there was not one who had short hair, not one who could be described as anything but beautiful. And none were inclined to go away willingly with complete strangers. Even the girls who had been known to hitchhike had been cautious. Yet there is a common denominator in almost every instance. Something in the victims’ lives had gone awry on the days they vanished, something that would tend to make them distracted, and therefore easy prey for a clever killer.

  Brenda Baker and Kathy Devine were both running away from home. Lynda Ann Healy had been ill. Donna Manson was suffering from depression. Susan Rancourt was alone on campus at night for the very first time, ever. Roberta Kathleen Parks was depressed and upset over her father’s illness. Georgeann Hawkins was extremely worried about passing her Spanish final. Janice Ott was lonely for her husband and depressed on that Sunday in July. Denise Naslund had had a fight with her boyfriend. Of the Washington women, only Brenda Ball had been her usual good-natured self the last time her friends saw her, yet patrons at the Flame Tavern recall that she was worried because she’d been unable to find a ride home that night.

  In Utah, Carol DaRonch was a naive, too-trusting girl. Laura Aime was a little drunk, disappointed at the fizzle of her party plans for Halloween. Debby Kent was worried about her father’s recent heart attack and anxious to protect him from worry. Melissa Smith was concerned about her friend’s “broken heart” and probably was thinking about their conversation as she left the pizza parlor.