The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  “Again, think of me, our Crisis Clinic days and more recently our conversations during our meetings in Seattle. It is entirely possible that I do structure my relationships with other people, maybe not consciously, but there must be some order in my life.”

  One of the conclusions that galled Ted the most was that Dr. Carlisle had found Ted to have a strong dependency on women, and deduced that that dependency was suspect.

  “That I am dependent on you women has got to mean something. What though? I am undeniably dependent on women. Given birth by a woman, taught in school by women, and deeply, deeply in love with one woman. I ask any woman with whom I have been involved, socially, professionally, or intimately, to look at our relationship. Was I some twisted mass of nerves … subjugating myself to superior womanhood?”

  Carlisle had found that Ted had a fear of being humiliated in his relationships with women, and Ted sardonically confessed a “personal distaste for being put down and humiliated … Draw whatever inferences you must, but, like Brer Rabbit, throw me in that briar patch [female companionship] any time you want. We are still a long way from running about scooping up teenage girls.”

  For every conclusion that Dr. Carlisle asserted, Ted had a comeback. He denied that he “ran from his problems,” or that he was unstable, pointing out his amazing strength under the rigors of the DaRonch trial, and his ability to function under stress. No one could fault him there.

  Ted continued in his incisive critique. Citing Carlisle’s report, he could not agree that the profile emerging was, as the psychologist noted, “consistent with the nature of the crime for which he was convicted.”

  “If this is true [Ted wrote], there are a lot of potential kidnappers running around loose out there … the conclusion is preposterous and indicative of the strenuous attempt to satisfy the presumptions underlying the verdict. The report was a despicable fraud.”

  Ted’s pain and hopelessness came through in the last paragraphs of that long, long letter.

  “I am exhausted. The bitter reality has dawned, but the full impact of my fate has not been fully understood. Since the sentence was handed down, the first flashes of intense anger and despair have grown out of the knowledge that Meg and I shall never have a life together. The most beautiful force in my life has been separated from me.”

  He asked me to share the letter with Meg, explaining that it was the first he had written since being sentenced, and asked me to comfort her. “There can never be any goodbyes for Meg and I, but I weep bitterly to think that there can be no more hellos.”

  I was mightily impressed by Ted’s ability to think like a lawyer, in the polished order of his evaluation. His I.Q. had been tested at the Utah State Prison and found to be 124—not on the genius level, about what a student in a four-year college needs to graduate—but he was clearly superior to the test results. My loyalties wavered once again. It would always be so.

  And yet, even as I read Ted’s declaration of his great love for Meg, I was aware that he seemed to be able to dismiss his concurrent relationships with other women. If he could not be faithful to Meg, how could I fully believe in his steadfast love for her? It was so hard for me to know. Despite my dream, despite the bombardment of opinions from lawmen, there were still so many facets of his story that were hidden from me, and still that chance that Ted was being railroaded.

  If he was manipulating me, he was doing an excellent job of it.

  24

  WHILE TED HAD BEEN SENTENCED in the DaRonch kidnapping, it had been the most minor of the crimes he was suspected of, and although Colorado authorities seemed to be putting a case together in the Campbell slaying, Washington State detectives were supremely frustrated.

  In the fall of 1975, Captain Herb Swindler had been transferred out of the Seattle Police Crimes Against Persons Unit and became commander of the Georgetown Precinct in the South End of Seattle. There were rumors that Herb’s preoccupation with psychics and astrologers, in all the occult possibilities in the mass killings, had begun to annoy the brass. With the reassignment to Georgetown, Herb would be out of the missing girls’ cases for all intents and purposes. His duties would involve supervising the uniformed contingent of patrolmen in his precinct now. It was still a position calling for a high-ranking officer and one with uncommon good sense, but Herb’s contact with detectives would be minimal. And the hierarchy upstairs in the Public Safety Building would no longer hear tales of Swindler’s bizarre investigative techniques.

  It was not a slap in the face. It was more the gentle rapping of knuckles. Swindler had been the only detective who had believed that Kathy Parks of Oregon was part of the Seattle pattern—and he’d been right. It was September 1975 when he’d been transferred out of the probe, ironically only a few weeks before Ted’s arrest.

  Swindler’s replacement, Captain John Leitch, is a tall, blond veteran cop—a man my age, and a man of some brilliance. Herb had liked to talk over everything that was happening. Leitch was as close-mouthed as a sphinx, and leery of me. In time, he would come to regard me with a certain grudging trust and took delight in teasing me about my “boyfriend, Ted.” But, in 1976, John Leitch and I circled each other somewhat warily. I found him a solid administrator who left the detectives in his unit alone to do their work, a cerebral kind of policeman. I don’t know what he thought of me, although he tended to view me as part of the media rather than an ex-cop myself. I liked him, but he intimidated me.

  He, on the other hand, was very concerned that I might be regarded as a “police agent” in the Ted Bundy transactions. He needn’t have worried. It was a role I most assuredly did not want to play. I was still walking the tightrope between Ted and the detectives, a rope that seemed to wend over higher and higher precipices. It was imperative that I continue to write fact-detective stories, and any breach of faith with a police agency would mean the end of that. Neither did I want to be disloyal to Ted, although it was becoming more and more difficult not to believe that Ted was the man the police sought.

  Nick Mackie, over in the county offices, had known me for so long that I wasn’t much of a threat. During most of the spring and summer of 1976, we met sporadically to talk about Ted. Ted knew it, because I continued to forward messages from Mackie. At times, he grew churlish about my suggestion that he talk to the King County commander, but he never seemed truly angry about it.

  Although Mackie never revealed to me exactly what the detectives had on Ted, he tried continually to convince me that they were right. I don’t know how many times he asked me with some exasperation, “Come on. Admit it. You really think he’s guilty, don’t you?”

  And I would always answer, “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes I’m sure he’s guilty, and then, again, sometimes I wonder.”

  On two or three occasions my discussions with Mackie continued through lunch and far into the afternoon. Both of us were searching for answers that seemed always just beyond reach.

  I was quite sure of one thing. After writing up at least a dozen cases in the Northwest dealing with “mass” killers of young women in the eight years preceding, I felt that the “Ted” had “souvenirs” hidden someplace, that he had kept a trophy from each killing.

  “Nick, I think that somewhere, he’s hidden earrings, clothing, possibly even Polaroids, something from each girl. I’ve never found a case similar where the suspect didn’t keep momentoes.”

  “I agree—but where? We’ve been through the Rogerses’ rooming house—the attic, the garage—and we’ve dug up the garden. We didn’t find anything.”

  Of course, the elder Bundys had absolutely refused to allow their Tacoma home to be searched, nor would they permit a search of the grounds of their A-frame cabin vacation home on Crescent Lake. Senior Deputy Prosecutor Phil Killier had advised Mackie that there was not sufficient probable cause to obtain a search warrant for those properties. His inability to search for physical evidence to tie Ted in with the Washington cases, particularly at the Crescent Lake location, tor
mented Mackie. I didn’t blame him, but without a search warrant anything detectives found would be considered “fruit of the poisoned tree,” meaning it is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law because it would have been obtained illegally. If Keppel, Dunn or McChesney were to go to the A-frame cottage and find something like Georgeann Hawkins’s purse, Janice Ott’s bike, or Lynda Healy’s turquoise rings, it would be absolutely useless. Tainted evidence. I had had that concept hammered into my head when I’d taken a course titled “Arrest, Search, and Seizure.”

  Mackie mused. “We can’t go but I wish someone could, that someone could just bring us in one piece of physical evidence.”

  And, indeed, that was the only way it would be admissible. If I were to search any private property Ted was known to frequent after this conversation with Nick, anything I found would be “fruit of the poisoned tree.” I would be an extension of the arm of the police department, because I had never considered searching on my own.

  The detectives’ hands were tied. The rules of the justice system in criminal investigations are so intricate, and most of them seem to be weighted heavily on the side of the suspect.

  It was unlikely that Ted Bundy would ever be charged or tried in the Washington homicide cases. There was nothing more than the dozens of circumstances that seemed to defy probability.

  Months later, when Captain John Leitch felt free to talk to me with cautious candor, he concurred that he felt the same way. It was his opinion that the only way Ted might be tried for the Washington cases would be if the eight cases were combined. “If all the known facts came out, on all the girls up here, I think there would be a conviction. But that seems to be the only way.”

  And no defense attorney would allow the Northwest cases to be lumped together. John Henry Browne would fight like a tiger if such a suggestion arose.

  25

  CAUGHT IN THE UTAH STATE PRISON, Ted’s ego seemingly remained intact. Our letters continued, in that odd intimacy that is sometimes maintained through the written word, an intimacy, and, occasionally, an honesty that is more difficult to keep alive in a face-to-face situation. If I could manage to suspend disbelief, I could continue to support him—if not wholeheartedly, then through my letters. The truth was caught somewhere, suspended, in an intricate cobweb of suspicion, denial, and continuing investigation.

  I kept in touch with Meg too, and found her to be gathering new resolve. She signed up for some evening classes and started looking for a home to buy. And she was becoming increasingly suspicious of Ted’s ties to Sharon Auer. When Louise Bundy returned from Ted’s sentencing, she had made the tactical error of repeating over and over to Meg her feelings that Sharon was a “lovely person.”

  Meg had finally deduced that Sharon was much more to Ted than an errand girl. When I spoke to her in August 1976, Meg was vacillating between saying goodbye to Ted forever (but not because of the charges against him, but because he had lied to her about Sharon) and continuing to support him with her love. She mailed him one letter to pave the way for a break, and then was instantly sorry. “I’ve been rethinking it … maybe I was too hasty.”

  Ted spent that summer in prison, becoming more acclimated to confinement. I didn’t hear from him again until August 25. I had suggested to him that I pass his letter on his feelings about the psychiatric report on to Nick Mackie, a suggestion that was not met with glee. Yet, this letter, arriving eight weeks after the outraged “evaluation” letter, seemed to reflect the emotions of a man who was getting it together again.

  He was pleased to note that he had a new typewriter, earned, he said, when he wrote his first writ after being moved into the general population of the prison.

  “General Population is the faceless mass of real prisoners we fish are always afraid were trying to rape us, and worse, steal our commissary. They were greatly overrated. They never steal commissary,” Ted wrote.

  Indeed, he was doing well among the general population. He had been afraid to move among these cons—cons any man convicted of crimes against women or children is anathema, the lowest rung in prison hierarchy. Such men are often beaten, raped, or killed. But no one had threatened Ted, and he said he could move about the entire prison without fear because he had something of value to give the inmates of Point-of-the-Mountain: legal advice. He was often stopped and asked to help other prisoners prepare their appeals for new trials. Just as he had told me during my visit when he was still a “fish,” he would survive because of his brain.

  Further, he was something of a celebrity, and his outspoken defense in his own legal encounters had impressed prison leaders. The old-timers made a point of being seen with Ted, of putting their stamp of approval on him.

  “I think they also enjoy seeing a once-Republican, once-law student, one-time white-middle-class member attack the system as vigorously as they think it deserves,” he commented. “I keep in close touch with the blacks and the Chicanos and my work for men in these groups has helped my image. One thing I have successfully avoided is the ‘Wholly [sic]-than-thou. I’m so smart—I shouldn’t be here with you criminals’ image.”

  His days were spent working in the prison print shop, listening to other prisoners’ grievances, and “wishing I were not here.” He seemed happy to report that Meg was becoming more independent, even though it meant she didn’t write to him as often as before, but he was looking forward to a visit from her on August 28.

  Ted had not become completely mellow, however, and he launched into a harangue directed at Nick Mackie and other members of the law enforcement field. He did not want Mackie to read his letter on the psychiatric evaluation, although he forgave me for suggesting it.

  I think you should know where I stand on the subject of policemen in general and Mackie in particular. Policemen have a job, a difficult job, to do, but I am sorry because I don’t care one bit for the “job” they did on me no matter how genuine the devotion to duty. I have a standing policy from this point forward never to talk to a law enforcement officer about anything except the time of day and the location of the toilet. Mackie has earned my particular disrespect. True, he may be a good cop, feeds his dog Alpo, and doesn’t eat his young alive, but my empathy for him ends there.

  Someday, Ted said, he would be interested to hear the “monstrous theory” held by the King County Police Department, but he was not presently interested in “storybook fiction.” He asked me to continue to stay in touch with Meg, and to “Tell Mackie only that he has earned a special place in my heart, as I have probably earned one in his.”

  Ted’s letters that summer and fall of 1976 ranged from the anger and humor of this one, to requests for information, to the blackest lines of depression. The mood swings, given his circumstances, were to be expected. His bid to remain free pending his appeal had been denied, and the Colorado murder charge hovered just ahead.

  There were several letters where he asked me to check out the credentials of Northwest reporters who were attempting to interview him. I tracked most of them to their sources and reported that they seemed to be essentially innocuous writers from small publications.

  Something happened to Ted’s stability during the first week of September, something that seemed to make him despair completely. Reconstructing the time sequence later, I deduced that Meg had said something to him during their August 28 visit that made him think he had lost her forever.

  The letter Ted sent me on September 5 was typed on the cover from a pad of typewriter paper, and its contents seemed steeped in the bleakest loss of hope. It could not be interpreted as anything other than a suicide note, and it frightened me.

  Ted explained that the letter was like a call to the Crisis Clinic, but that there could be no reply. “I am not asking for help, I am saying goodbye.”

  He wrote that he could no longer struggle for justice, that he was not having just a bad day, but that he had reached “the end of all hope, the darkening of all dreams.”

  The letter as a whole—each sentence in it—cou
ld mean only one thing. Ted planned to kill himself. “What I am experiencing now is an entirely new dimension of loneliness mixed with resignation and calm. Unlike times of low morale I have survived in the past, I know I will not wake up in the morning refreshed and revived. I will wake up knowing only what has to be done—if I have the courage.”

  As my eyes raced down the page, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It might already be too late. He’d written this three days before.

  The last sentences were a plea to the world who believed him guilty of any number of terrible crimes against women: “Lastly, and most important, I want you to know, I want the whole world to know that I am innocent. I have never hurt another human being in my life. God, please believe me.”

  Although he had said the letter could have no answer, I remembered that Ted and I had both been taught at the Crisis Clinic that any contact made by someone in emotional distress—any reaching out—must be regarded as a cry for help. Ted had written to me, and I had to assume that meant he wanted me to stop him from destroying himself. I called Bruce Cummins, our long-ago mentor at the Clinic, and read him the letter. He agreed that I had to take some action.

  I called John O’Connell’s office in Salt Lake City. It was either that or notify Warden Sam Smith’s office in the prison, and Ted had better friends in his lawyer’s office. I reached Bruce Lubeck and told him that I feared Ted was about to kill himself. He promised to go out to Point-of-the-Mountain and see Ted.

  I don’t know if he went or not. I wrote a special delivery letter, a letter full of “Hang in there’s” and sent it, holding my breath for days, expecting to hear a news bulletin.

  It never came.