The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  The Colorado victims too had other things on their minds. Caryn Campbell had had an argument with her fiance over their prolonged engagement, and she was ill. Julie Cunningham was depressed over a failed romance. Denise Oliverson had had a fight with her husband. And Shelley K. Robertson had argued with her boyfriend the weekend before she vanished. The thoughts of Melanie Cooley are not known.

  The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, “Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.”

  Had the man who approached these young women divined somehow that he had come upon his victims at a time when they were particularly vulnerable, when they were not thinking as clearly as they usually did? It would almost seem so. The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.

  15

  IN MAY OF 1975, Ted Bundy had invited some old friends from the Washington State Department of Emergency Services to visit him at his apartment on First Avenue in Salt Lake City. Carole Ann Boone Anderson, Alice Thissen, and Joe McLean spent almost a week with him. Ted seemed to be in excellent spirits and enjoyed driving his friends around the Salt Lake City area. He took them swimming and horseback riding. He and Callie took them one night to a homosexual nightclub. Alice Thissen was somewhat surprised that, although Ted said he had been there before, he seemed ill at ease in the gay club.

  The trio from Washington found Ted’s apartment very pleasant. He’d cut pictures out of magazines and tried to duplicate the decor he favored. He still had the bicycle tire, hung from the meat hook in his kitchen, and he used that to store knives and other kitchen utensils in a mobile effect. He had a color television set, a good stereo, and he played Mozart for them to accompany the gourmet meals he prepared.

  During the first week in June 1975, Ted came back to Seattle to put a garden in for the Rogerses at his old rooming house, and he spent most of his time with Meg. She still made no mention of the fact that she’d talked with both the King County Police and the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office about him. The cases of the missing women in Washington were no longer being played up in local papers.

  Because neither King County nor the Seattle Police Department could spare the detectives detailed to the Task Force during the summer when so many of their investigators were on vacation, the Task Force was to be disbanded until September.

  Meg and Ted decided to marry the following Christmas, and although they had only five days together in June, they made plans for her to visit him in Utah in August. Meg was almost convinced she had been wrong, that she had allowed Lynn Banks to cloud her mind with suspicion that couldn’t have any basis in fact. But time was growing short, far shorter than either Meg or Ted realized.

  If anything was bothering Ted Bundy’s conscience during that summer of 1975, he didn’t show it. He was working as a security guard, still managing the building he lived in, and, though he sometimes drank too much, it wasn’t out of the norm for a college student. But his grades in law school had continued to drop. He wasn’t beginning to live up to the potential of a man with his I.Q., and boundless ambition.

  It was close to 2:30 A.M. on August 16 when Sergeant Bob Hayward, a stocky, balding twenty-two-year veteran of the Utah Highway Patrol, pulled up in front of his home in suburban Granger, Utah. Bob Hayward is the brother of Captain “Pete” Hayward, the homicide detective chief in the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, but his duties are quite different. Like Washington State’s, Utah’s Highway Patrol deals only with traffic control, but Hayward has the kind of sixth sense that most longtime cops have, the ability to note something that seems just a hair off center.

  In the balmy August predawn, Hayward noticed a light-colored Volkswagen Bug driving by his home. The neighborhood was strictly residential, and he knew almost everyone who lived along his street, and he knew the cars of the people that usually visited them. There was rarely any traffic at this time, and he wondered what the Volkswagen was doing there.

  Hayward threw on his Brights so that he could catch the license plate on the Bug. Suddenly the Volkswagen’s lights went out, and it took off at high speed. Hayward pulled out, giving chase. The pursuit continued through two stop signs and out onto the main thoroughfare, 3500 South.

  Hayward soon was just behind the slower car, and the Volkswagen pulled into an abandoned gas station parking lot and stopped. The driver got out, and walked to the rear of his car, smiling. “I guess I’m lost,” he said ruefully.

  Bob Hayward is a gruff man, not the sort of highway patrolman that a speeder or reckless driver would choose to meet. He looked closely at the man before him, a man who appeared to be about twenty-five, who wore blue jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, tennis shoes, and longish, wild hair.

  “You ran two stop signs. Can I see your license and registration?”

  “Sure.” The man produced his I.D.

  Hayward looked at the license. It had been issued to Theodore Robert Bundy, at an address on First Avenue in Salt Lake City.

  “What are you doing out here at this time of the morning?”

  Bundy answered that he had been to see The Towering Inferno at the Redwood drive-in and was on his way home when he’d become lost in the subdivision.

  It was the wrong answer. The drive-in Bundy mentioned was in Hayward’s patrol area, and he’d driven by earlier that night. The Towering Inferno was not the picture playing there.

  As the burly sergeant and Bundy talked, two troopers from the Highway Patrol pulled up in back of Hayward’s car, but remained inside, watching. Hayward seemed to be in no danger.

  Hayward glanced at the Volkswagen, and noticed that, for some reason, the passenger seat had been removed and placed on its side in the backseat.

  He turned back to Bundy. “Mind if I look in your car?”

  “Go ahead.” The highway patrol sergeant saw a small crowbar resting on the floor in back of the driver’s seat, and an open satchel sitting on the floor in front. He played his flashlight over the open satchel, and saw some of the items inside: a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, some rope, and wire.

  They looked like the tools of a burglar.

  Hayward placed Ted Bundy under arrest for evading an officer, frisked him, and handcuffed him. Then he called Salt Lake County for backup from a detective on duty.

  Deputy Darrell Ondrak had the third watch that night, and responded to 2725 W. 3500 South. He found troopers Hayward, Fife, and Twitchell waiting with Ted Bundy.

  Bundy maintained that he gave no permission to search his car. Ondrak and Hayward say that he did.

  “I never said, ‘Yes, you have my permission to search,’” Ted insisted, “but I was surrounded by a number of uniformed men: Sergeant Hayward, two highway patrolmen, two uniformed deputies. I wasn’t exactly quaking in my boots, but … but I felt I couldn’t stop them. They were intent and hostile and they’d do what they damn well pleased.”

  Ondrak looked in the canvas satchel. He saw the ice pick, a flashlight, gloves, tom strips of sheeting, the knit ski mask, and another mask—a grotesque object made from a pair of pantyhose. Eye holes had been cut in the panty portion and the legs were tied together on top. There was a pair of handcuffs, too.

  Ondrak checked the trunk and found some large, green plastic garbage bags.

  “Where’d you get all this stuff?” he asked Ted.

  “It’s just junk I picked up around my house.”

  “They look like burglar tools to me,” Ondrak said flatly. “I’m going to take these items, and I suspect the D.A. will be issuing a charge of possession of burglary tools.” According to Ondrak, Ted simply replied, “Fine.”

  Detective Jerry Thompson met Ted Bundy face to face on that early morning of August 16, 1975. Thompson, tall, good-looking, perhaps five years older than Bundy, was later to become an important adversary, but now they barely glanced at each other. Thompson had ot
her things to do, and Bundy was intent on bailing out and going home. He was released on P.R. (personal recognizance).

  It was the first time in his adult life that Ted Bundy had ever been arrested, and it had been such a chance thing. Had he not driven by the home of Sergeant Bob Hayward, had he not tried to run from the pursuing policeman, he would have been home safe.

  Why had he run?

  On August 18, Thompson glanced over the arrest reports for the weekend. The name “Bundy” caught his eye. He’d heard it someplace before, but he couldn’t quite place it. He hadn’t even known the name of the man brought in early Saturday morning. And then he remembered. Ted Bundy was the man that the girl from Seattle had reported in December of 1974.

  Thompson carefully read over the arrest report. Bundy’s car was a light-colored Volkswagen Bug. The list of items found in the car now struck him as much more unusual. He pulled out the DaRonch report, and the Debby Kent file.

  The handcuffs found in Bundy’s car were Jana brand. The handcuffs on Carol DaRonch’s wrist were Gerocal, but he wondered just how many men routinely carried handcuffs with them. There was the crowbar, similar to the iron bar that DaRonch had been threatened with.

  Ted Bundy was listed as being five feet, eleven inches tall, weighing 170 pounds. He was a law student at the University of Utah … yes, that’s what his girlfriend from Seattle had said too. He’d been arrested in Granger, which was only a few miles from Midvale, where Melissa Smith had last been seen alive.

  There were more similarities, more common threads in front of Thompson than he’d yet had in his ten months of trying to find the man with the Volkswagen—“Officer Roseland.” On August 21, Ted was arrested on the added charges: possession of burglary tools. He did not appear to be visibly upset by the arrest and had deft explanations for the items found in his car. The handcuffs? He’d found them in a garbage Dumpster. He’d used the pantyhose mask as protection under his ski mask against the icy winds of ski slopes. And didn’t everyone own crowbars, ice picks, and garbage bags? He seemed amused that the detectives would consider any of these things burglary tools.

  It was a posture that Ted Bundy would assume over and over again as the years passed. He was an innocent man, accused of things that were unthinkable for him.

  The arrest by Sergeant Hayward on August 16 was the catalyst to a flurry of intense activity in the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office during late August and September of 1975. Captain Pete Hayward and Detective Jerry Thompson felt they had their man in the DaRonch kidnapping, and suspected that Ted Bundy might well be the man who had taken Melissa, Laura, and Debby.

  Ted readily signed a permission-to-search form on his First Avenue apartment, and accompanied Thompson and Sergeant John Bernardo as they scrutinized the neat rooms. It was not a forced search. There was no search warrant listing specific items. In essence, this meant that the detectives had no authority to remove anything from Ted’s apartment, even if they should come across something they felt might be evidence. If they saw something suspicious, they would have to go to a judge and obtain a search warrant listing those items.

  Thompson glanced up at the bicycle wheel suspended from the meat hook and at the assortment of knives hanging from it. Then he glanced at a chopping block.

  Following Thompson’s glance, Ted said mildly, “I like to cook.”

  The detectives saw the rows of law textbooks. A few months later, a Washington detective would comment to me that the Utah investigators had found a “weird sex book” in Ted’s library. When I asked Ted about it later, he told me that he had Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, and I laughed. I had a copy too, as did thousands of other people. It was hardly Krafft-Ebing.

  There were other items in the apartment, seemingly innocuous, but meaningful in the probe going on. There was a map of ski regions in Colorado, with the Wildwood Inn in Aspen marked, and a brochure from the Bountiful Recreation Center. Questioned, Ted said he’d never been to Colorado, that a friend must have left the map. He thought he must have driven through Bountiful, Utah, but felt someone else had dropped the brochure in his apartment.

  Thompson insists today that he found patent leather shoes in Bundy’s closet on that first visit, but when he returned later with a search warrant, they were gone. A television set and a stereo he had seen were also absent.

  If the two detectives had expected to find something solid to tie Ted with the murdered Utah victims, they were to be disappointed. There were no women’s clothes, jewelry, or purses.

  When they had searched the whole place, Ted agreed to allow them to photograph his Volkswagen Bug, parked in the rear of the building. It had dents and rust spots, and a tear at the top of the rear seat.

  Bernardo and Thompson left. They felt they were closer to unraveling the truth, but were somewhat disconcerted by Ted Bundy’s casual attitude. He certainly didn’t appear concerned.

  One of Ted’s women friends in Salt Lake City was Sharon Auer. She put him in touch with attorney John O’Connell, a tall, bearded man who affected a cowboy hat and boots. A respected criminal defense attorney in the Mormon city, O’Connell immediately put a lid on Ted’s conversations with detectives. The lawyer called Thompson and said that Bundy would not come to their offices as scheduled, on August 22.

  Although Ted would not talk to detectives any longer, his mug shot, along with several others, was shown to Carol DaRonch and the drama teacher, Jean Graham, who had seen the stranger just before Debby Kent vanished forever.

  It had been ten months, but Mrs. Graham chose Bundy from the stack of photos almost immediately. His mug shot showed him clean shaven. She said that Ted Bundy was a ringer for the man she’d seen, and all that was missing was a mustache.

  Carol DaRonch was not as definite. The first time she thumbed through the packet of photos, she set Ted’s picture aside, but did not comment on it. When Thompson asked her why she had separated that photo from the others, she seemed reticent.

  “Why did you pull that one out?” Thompson asked.

  “I’m not sure. It looks something like him … but I really couldn’t say for sure.”

  The next day, Bountiful detective Ira Beal showed her a lay-down of drivers’ license photos. In this group, Ted was depicted as he had looked in December 1974 and appeared quite different than the man in the mug shot taken in August of 1975. Ted was a man with a chameleonlike quality, his appearance changing dramatically in almost every picture taken of him, apparently through no conscious effort on his part.

  Carol looked at the second set of pictures. This time, she chose Ted Bundy’s picture almost at once. She, too, remarked that he had had a mustache when she encountered him on November 8, 1974.

  The kidnap victim’s identification of Bundy’s Volkswagen was less clear. Several times she had seen photos of it, and by the time she was taken to view it, it had been sanded, the rust spots painted over, and the tear in the back of the seat mended. It had also been scrubbed and hosed down inside and out.

  Ted Bundy would never again be out of the constant attention of law enforcement agencies. He was not in jail, but he might as well have been. Surveillance units watched him continually during September of 1975, and wheels were turning behind the scenes. His gasoline credit card records had been requested, his school records were subpoenaed, and, probably the most disastrous move as far as his future freedom was concerned, Utah detectives had contacted his fiancee, Meg Anders.

  16

  I HAD NEITHER SEEN nor heard from Ted Bundy since the Crisis Clinic Christmas party in December 1973. And then, my phone rang on an afternoon in late September 1975. It was Ted, calling from Salt Lake City. I was surprised, but glad to hear his voice. I felt a sharp twinge of guilt when he began, “Ann, you’re one of the few people I can really trust in Seattle.”

  Great. I remembered turning his name in to Dick Reed in August of 1974, and I wondered just how trustworthy he would find me if he knew that. But that had been a long time ago, and I hadn’t heard a word about h
im since. I wanted to ask him what he was doing in Salt Lake City, but he had something on his mind.

  “Listen, you have contacts with the police. Could you find out why they’re subpoenaing my law school records down here?”

  A dozen thoughts raced through my mind. Why now? Why after thirteen months? Was Ted being investigated because of what I had done so long before? Had I implicated him in something that apparently had him very concerned? I had never heard of Carol DaRonch, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, or Debby Kent. I was completely unaware of the Utah investigation, and it didn’t seem possible that the Task Force would wait more than a year to follow up on a lead I had given.

  I answered slowly. “Ted, I probably could find out, but I wouldn’t do anything underhanded. I’d have to tell them who wanted to know.”

  “No problem. I’m just curious. Go ahead and tell them that Ted Bundy wants to know.” He gave me his number and asked me to call him collect if I learned anything.

  I stared at the phone in my hand. I truly couldn’t believe the conversation just finished. Ted had sounded exactly as he always had: cheerful and confident. I debated calling King County Police. I’d never interfered in their investigations, and I hesitated now. It was almost four o’clock, and the detectives would he going off shift within a few minutes.

  I called the county’s Major Crimes Unit, and Kathy McChesney answered. I explained that Ted Bundy was an old friend of mine, and that he had just called me requesting information about the subpoena. There was a long pause, and the receiver was covered while she conferred with someone in the office. Finally, she was back on the line.

  “Tell him … tell him, that he’s just one of 1,200 people being checked out, that it’s just a routine inquiry.”