The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  They were stalling—not me—but Ted. I’d been around police homicide units long enough to know that they wouldn’t be requesting records from that many suspects, and that something was definitely up. I didn’t argue. Kathy was clearly uncomfortable. “O.K., I’ll tell him that.”

  Subpoenas are not issued without probable cause. Obviously, something was happening, something big. I felt a chill. Not even a television script could make it believable that a crime writer could sign a contract to write a book about a killer, and then have the suspect turn out to be her close friend. It wouldn’t wash.

  I called Ted back that night and waited as the phone rang. After about eight rings, he answered, panting. “I had to run up the stairs. I was down on the front porch,” he told me.

  “I called them,” I began, “and they said to tell you that you’re only one of about 1,200 guys they’re checking out.”

  “Oh …O.K., great.”

  He didn’t seem worried, but I wondered how somebody as sharp as Ted could believe that.

  “If you have any more questions, they said you could just call them direct.”

  “Right.”

  “Ted … what’s happening down there?”

  “Nothing much. Oh, I got picked up on a Mickey Mouse thing in August by the state patrol. They’re claiming I had burglary tools in my car, but the charge won’t stand up.”

  Ted Bundy with burglary tools? Impossible.

  But he continued. “I think they have some kind of a wild idea that I’m connected with some cases up in Washington. Do you remember something about some missing girls up there?”

  Of course I remembered. I’d been living with it since January of 1974. He claimed to have almost no knowledge of the cases, and he’d almost thrown away his last statement. It was as if he’d said he was wanted for a traffic violation in Washington. I didn’t know what to say. I knew that whatever was coming down, it had to be based on more than my suggesting his name.

  “I’m going to be in a lineup tomorrow,” he said. “Everything’s going to turn out all right. But if it doesn’t, you’ll be reading about me in the papers.”

  I couldn’t understand how a lineup in Utah could have anything to do with the cases in Washington. He hadn’t mentioned Carol DaRonch or the kidnapping case at all. If he was a suspect in Washington, he would be in a lineup in Seattle. The only people who could conceivably identify the “Ted” from Washington were the witnesses from Lake Sammamish. But something kept me from asking him more.

  “Hey, thanks. I’ll keep in touch,” he said, and we said goodbye.

  On October 2, a brilliant gold and blue autumn day, I attended a junior high school football game. My son, Andy, was starting at right end. He broke his thumb on the first play, but his team won, and we were in a good mood as we stopped at McDonald’s for hamburgers on the way home.

  Back in the car, I switched on the radio. A bulletin interrupted the record playing. “Theodore Robert Bundy, a former Tacoma resident, was arrested today in Salt Lake City and charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault.”

  I must have gasped. My son looked at me. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s Ted,” I managed to stammer.

  “Isn’t that your friend from the Crisis Clinic?”

  “Yes. He told me I might be reading about him in the papers.”

  This time, there was to be no quick release on P.R. Ted’s bail was set at $100,000 and he was locked in the county jail.

  Detective Dick Reed called me that night. “You were right!” he said.

  I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to be right at all.

  I slept little that night. Even when I’d suggested Ted’s name to Reed, I hadn’t really visualized him as a man capable of violence. I hadn’t allowed my thinking to go that far. I kept seeing Ted as I remembered him, picturing him hunched over the Crisis Clinic phones, hearing his warm, sympathetic voice. I tried to picture him now behind bars, and I couldn’t.

  Early the next morning, I received a phone call from the Associated Press. “We have a message for Ann Rule, transmitted over our wires from Salt Lake City.”

  “This is Ann.”

  “Ted Bundy wants you to know that he is all right, that things will work out.”

  I thanked them, hung up the phone, and it rang almost at once. First, a reporter from the Seattle Times asked about my connection with Ted Bundy. Was I a secret girlfriend? What could I say about Ted? I explained who I was—a writer like the reporter calling. “Ive done several pieces for the Sunday Times Magazine. Don’t you know the name?”

  “Oh, yeah—Rule. So why did he send you that message over A.P.?”

  “He’s a friend. He wanted me to know he was all right.”

  I didn’t want to be quoted by name. I was still too confused by what had happened. “Just say that the man I know couldn’t be responsible for any of the things he’s accused of.”

  The next call followed immediately. It was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which had also picked up the A.P. message. I repeated what I’d told the Times reporter.

  It was as if someone had died suddenly. People who had known Ted from the Crisis Clinic—Bob Vaughn, Bruce Cummins, John Eshelman—were all calling to talk about it. And none of us believed Ted capable of what he’d been charged with. It was unthinkable. We kept recalling anecdotes about Ted, trying to convince each other that what we were reading in blaring headlines could not be happening.

  I didn’t know then that Carol DaRonch, Jean Graham, and Debby Kent’s girlfriend, Jolynne Beck, who had seen the man in the auditorium on November 8, had all picked Ted out of the Utah lineup on October 2. Ted had been one suspect, standing in a seven-man lineup, surrounded by detectives, all of them a little older, a little heavier than he was. The question would arise: was this a fair lineup?

  I wrote to Ted on October 4, telling him of support from Seattle, of the calls from his friends, of the favorable statements being published in the Seattle papers, promising him that I would continue to write. I ended that letter, “There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy—nothing— try to remember that.”

  Looking back, I wonder at my naïveté. Some things in this life are complete tragedies. Ted Bundy’s story may well be one of them.

  I was about to become a part of Ted’s life again. To this day, I do not know what tied us together. It was more than my zeal as a writer. It was more than his tendency to manipulate women who might be able to help him. There is a vast gray area somewhere in between that I have never been able to clearly define.

  His attorney, John O’Connell, called me during Ted’s first week in jail, seeking information on the investigation in Washington. I could tell him nothing. That would have meant a betrayal of my responsibility to detectives in Seattle. All I could do was keep writing to Ted. Whatever his crimes might have been, whatever hidden things might someday be revealed, he seemed to need someone.

  I was beginning to be torn apart.

  And Ted began to write to me, long, scrawled letters on yellow legal pad sheets. His first correspondence was full of his sense of displacement—letters from a young man who had never been in jail. He could not quite believe it. He was both astonished by his plight and outraged, but he was quickly learning the ropes of survival inside. Much of his prose was turgid and overly dramatic, but he was caught in a situation that seemed impossible for Ted Bundy, and he could certainly be forgiven his tendency toward pathos.

  “My world is a cage,” he wrote on October 8, 1975. “How many men before me have written these same words? How many have struggled vainly to describe the cruel metamorphosis that occurs in captivity? And how many have concluded that there are no satisfactory words to communicate their feelings except to cry, ‘My God! I want my freedom!’”

  His cellmate was a fiftyish old-timer whom Ted saw as a “star-crossed alcoholic.” The man quickly set about teaching the “kid” the ropes. Ted had learned to hide his cigarettes and, wh
en they were gone, to roll his own. He learned to tear matches in half because matches didn’t last long. He saved oranges, Styrofoam cups and toilet paper, realizing he was dependent on the whim of the trustees for all the small things that made jail life a little more bearable. He learned to say “please” and “sir” when he wanted to make a phone call or needed an extra blanket or soap.

  He wrote that he was growing personally and that he was discovering new things about himself. He was learning from his quiet observation of his fellow prisoners. He praised his friends’ loyalty and agonized over what the publicity surrounding him might be doing to those close to him. Still, he never lost sight of a happy ending.

  The nighttime hours are the hard hours. I make them easier by dwelling on the building which must be done when the storm is past. I will be free. And, someday, Ann, you and I will look upon this letter as a note from a nightmare.

  It was a note from a nightmare. The flowery, often trite, phrases could not take away from the fact that being locked up was a kind of hell for Ted.

  I continued to write to him, and to send whatever small checks I could manage for cigarette and canteen money. I didn’t know what I believed, and all my letters were couched in terms that were deliberately ambiguous. They contained information on what was appearing in the local press, details about what I was writing, and on calls from mutual friends. I tried to block the pictures that occasionally seized my mind and shook it. I tried to think back to the old days. It was the only way I could respond to Ted as I always had.

  The second letter from the Salt Lake County Jail came on October 23 and much of it was a poem, countless stanzas on life in jail. He was still only an observer—not a participant. The poem rambled over both sides of sixteen pages of the yellow legal paper.

  He called it “Nights of Days,” and it began:

  This is no way to be

  Man ought to be free

  That man should be me.

  The meter often faltered, but the words all rhymed as he again bemoaned his lack of privacy and the cuisine in the jail, the omnipresent game shows and soap operas on the television set in the dayroom, programs which he termed “visual brain cancer.”

  He wrote, as he often would, of his belief in God. We had never talked about religion, but now Ted was apparently spending a lot of his time reading the Bible.

  Sleep comes on slowly

  Read the words of the wholly [sic]

  The scriptures bring peace

  They talk of release

  They bring us to God

  In here that seems odd

  But His gift is so clear

  I find that He’s near

  Mercy and redemption

  Without an exception

  He puts me at ease

  Jailer, do what you please

  No harm can befall me

  When the Savior does call me.

  The endless poem talked of another release. Sleep. He could forget the nightmare he was living, the bars, and the screams of other prisoners, when he slept, so he napped whenever possible. He was trapped in a “caged human sea.”

  Moving easily from the Bible to the menu in jail, a bit of his old humor surfaced.

  It makes me feel blue

  Taking food from the animals in the zoo

  Pork chops tonight

  Jews are uptight

  I gave mine away

  It still has a tail

  And as for dessert

  The cook, that old flirt

  Surprised us with mellow

  Peach jello.

  For all his days in jail to come, he would decry Jell-O.

  As for the other residents of the jail, Ted found them childlike—“Overgrown kids.”

  Some really believe

  They were born to deceive

  To make a bank roll

  From money they stole

  They do not relate

  To going it straight

  Except when in court

  They sometimes resort

  To making a plea

  For a new life and leniency.

  His own inner ordeal emerged at the end of the poem. The fear of the “cage” was there.

  Days of days

  Self-control pays

  Don’t lose your mind

  Panic’s not kind …

  Days of days

  My integrity stays.

  Was this poem contrived? Something to play on my sympathies, which really needed no stimulus at all? Or was it the true outpouring of Ted’s anguish? In the fall of 1975, I was terribly confused, besieged on one side by detectives who felt sure that Ted was as guilty as hell, and, on the other, by the man himself, who insisted again and again that he was innocent and being persecuted. It was a dichotomy of emotions that would stay with me for a long, long time.

  At the time, I still felt that I might have caused Ted’s arrest. It would be years before I learned that my information had been checked out and cleared early in the game, and then buried in the thousands of slips of paper with names on them. It had not been my doubts, but Meg’s, which had pinned him to the wall.

  My mixed loyalties threatened to cost me a vital portion of my income. I heard via the grapevine that the King County Police wanted those two letters Ted was known to have sent me, and that, if I didn’t turn them over, I could forget about getting any more stories from that department. It would mean that a quarter of my work would be cut off, and I simply couldn’t afford it.

  I went directly to Nick Mackie. “I have heard rumors that if I don’t turn over Ted’s letters to the Task Force, your doors will be closed to me. I think I should tell you frankly how I feel, and what is happening in my life.”

  I told Nick that I had learned that my children’s father was dying, that it would be a matter of weeks or a few months at most. “I’ve just had to explain that to my sons, and they don’t want to believe it. They hate me because I had to put it into words to prepare them. He is so ill that I no longer have any financial support from him, and I’m trying to make it alone. If I can’t write up county cases, I don’t think I can hack it.”

  Mackie is an infinitely fair man. More than that, he could empathize with me. He was raising two sons alone. He had lost his wife a few years earlier. What I was telling him struck a nerve. And we had been friends for years.

  “No one has ever said you would be barred from this department. I wouldn’t allow it. You know you can believe me. You’ve always been fair to us and we respect you for it. Of course, we’d like to see those letters, but whether you turn them over or not, things will be like they always were here.”

  “Nick,” I said honestly. “I have read those letters over and over, and I can’t find anything in them that makes Ted sound guilty, even unconscious slips. If you’ll let me ask him if you can see them, and if he agrees, I’ll bring them to you immediately. That’s the only fair way I can do it.”

  Nick Mackie agreed. I called Ted, and explained my problem, and he responded that, of course, I must let the county detectives see his letters. He had nothing to fear from them, nothing to hide. I met with Mackie and with Dr. John Berberich, the psychologist for the Seattle Police Department, and they studied the first letter and the second long poem. There seemed to be nothing inherent there that would be a subconscious or overt admission of guilt.

  Berberich, who is built like a basketball player, talked with me and Mackie over lunch. Was there anything I could remember about Ted’s personality that made me suspicious? Anything at all? I searched back through the years and could find nothing. There was not the slightest incident that I could enlarge upon. “He seemed to me to be a particularly fine young man,” I responded. “I want to help. I want to help the investigation, and I want to help Ted, but there just isn’t anything weird about him—nothing that I ever saw. Ted is illegitimate, but he seems to have come to terms with that.”

  I had thought that Ted might stop contacting me after I’d shown his letters to the detectives. He knew tha
t I moved constantly in the circle of the very investigators who were trying to catch him in a slip. But his correspondence continued, and my ambivalence rose to a level where I was laboring under more stress than I could stand.

  In an attempt to sort out my feelings, to deal with that stress, I consulted a psychiatrist. I handed him the letters.

  “I don’t know what to do. I don’t even know what my motivations really are. Part of me wonders if Ted Bundy is guilty, not only of the cases in Utah, but of the cases here in Washington. If that is true, then I can write the book I’ve contracted for and write it from a position that any author would envy. I want that, selfishly for my own career, and because it would mean financial independence. I could send my children to college, and we could move to a house that isn’t falling down around our ears.”

  He looked at me. “And?”

  “And, on the other side of it, the man is my friend. But am I supporting him emotionally, writing to him, because I just want to solve all those murders, because I owe something to my detective friends too? Am I, in essence, trying to trap him? Am I being unfair? Do I have the right to correspond with Ted when I have a niggling feeling that he might be guilty? Am I playing straight with him?”

  “Let me ask you a question,” he countered. “If Ted Bundy proves to be a murderer, if he is sent to prison for the rest of his life, what would you do? Would you stop writing to him? Would you drop him?”

  That answer was easy. “No! No, I would always write to him. If what the detectives believe is true, if he is guilty, then he needs someone. If he had that on his conscience…No, I would keep writing, keep in touch.”

  “Then that’s your answer. You’re not being unfair.”

  “There’s another thing. I can’t understand why Ted is reaching out to me now. I haven’t seen or heard from him in almost two years. I didn’t even know he’d moved away from Seattle until he called me just before his arrest. Why me?”

  The psychiatrist tapped the letters. “From these, I get that he apparently looks upon you as a friend, perhaps as a kind of mother figure. He needs to communicate with someone he feels is on his intellectual level, and he admires you as a writer. There is the possibility of a more manipulative side. He knows you are close to the police and he may want to use you as a conduit to them, without his actually having to talk to them himself. If he has committed these crimes, he is probably an exhibitionist, and one day he’ll want his story told. He senses that you would do that in a manner that would portray the whole man.”