by Ann Rule
Instead, on September 26, Ted wrote me a letter that was a partial explanation. He referred obliquely to hanging himself, but assured me that he was “hanging in there with nothing but my soul, I will add to your relief.”
Apparently, it was not my letter that had turned him around, but a session of handball, which he’d found to be an effective method of catharsis.
“It [handball] has a curious way of draining the bitterness away. Or perhaps it’s the body’s way of asserting itself over the destructive impulses of the mind, temporarily mindless of the body’s uncompromising, unquestioning, eternal desire to survive. The body may only appear as host to the brain, but the intellect, fragile and selfish, is no match for the imperative of life itself. Hanging around, intangibly, is better than being tangibly nothing at all.”
Ted apologized for alarming me. I wonder if he realized how very upset I had been to receive that suicide note, if he remembered how guilty I’d felt because I hadn’t been able to save my own brother’s life when he’d reached the point of suicidal thoughts.
Ted had decided to live, and, with this decision, his anger and bravado burst forth in his ensuing letters.
Again and again, he castigated the police. “Police detectives are a curious breed, but one learns quickly that when they have something they act first and talk later … I never underestimate the inventiveness and dangerousness of such men. Like wild animals, when cornered they can become very unstable.”
Ted had reason to fear the “dangerousness” of police detectives. On October 22, almost exactly a year since he had been charged in the DaRonch kidnapping case in Utah, he was formally charged with the murder of Caryn Campbell in Pitkin County, Colorado. I suspect that he was as eager to confront his accusers as he told me he was. His strength in the face of attack seemed to be real, as it would always be. The overt challenges he could face. He was best on his feet, scornfully denying charges against him.
It is possible, however, that Ted had not planned to be around when those charges finally came down. On October 19, Ted had not returned to his cell from the yard. Warden Sam Smith announced that Ted had been discovered behind a bush, and that he’d had an “escape kit” on his person: a social security card, a sketch of a driver’s license, road maps, and notes on airplane schedules.
Ted had written that his “pristine” behavior had allowed him more freedom around the prison, and now there was speculation that, with his job in the printshop, he might have intended to print up phony identification papers. He was immediately placed in solitary confinement. In retrospect, viewing Ted’s propensity for escape that was to surface in the months ahead, it is likely that he had planned an escape from Point-of-the-Mountain, an escape that was aborted.
On October 26 I received a letter from Sharon Auer, who enclosed a brief note that Ted had sent her to send to me. Sharon was still very much a part of his life, even though his letters to me extolled no one but Meg. Sharon was horrified at the maximum security cell where Ted was being held, although her impressions of the “hole” were based on Ted’s description of it, as he was allowed no visitors.
Ted had written to her that he envisioned his cell as something resembling a Mexican prison. “Eight feet high, ten feet long, six feet wide. Two feet in from the front are steel bars running from floor to ceiling. A solid steel door— with only a peephole for the guard to look in—closes off the front of the cell. The walls have graffiti, vomit, and urine coating them.”
Ted’s bed was a concrete slab with a thin mattress, and the only item of hope in the cell was a crucifix hanging over the washbasin. He could have nothing to read, but was allowed to receive letters. He would be there fifteen days, and Sharon was angry that he had received this harshest punishment possible for such a minor infraction as having a social security card on his person. She wrote that she was trying to write him three or four letters a day. “The bastards may not let me visit, but they’re sure going to tire of carrying mail to him…”
Reading her letter, I was again bemused and somewhat dismayed at what the denouement might one day be when those two women who loved Ted realized they had been deluded into believing that each was the only one. And me? I made up the third corner of the three-woman network giving Ted emotional support. I had managed to remain relatively unscathed. Torn by conflicting feelings and doubts still—but I was not in love with Ted. Sharon and Meg were.
Ted wrote to me from solitary confinement on Halloween. He said he had had only a woman’s social security card, and not the kind used for identification, and blamed Warden Smith for blowing the circumstances out of proportion. I never found out what woman’s name was on that card. Ted was angry, but he was not chastened.
“Adversity of this kind only serves to make me stronger, especially when it is clear to me that it is designed to create the pressure some believe will shatter my ‘normal facade.’ How absurd. Said one prisoner, when he heard of the decision to place me in isolation, “They’re trying to break ya, Bundy. Yeah, they’re just tryin’ to break ya.” I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but since there is nothing to “break,” I’ll have to suffer instead. The fact that some persons continue to misjudge me has become almost humorous.”
Ted commented on the Colorado case only to the extent that he insisted he was innocent of any involvement. He hinted that he had documents that would destroy Colorado’s case. “The Colorado trial will mark the beginning of the end of a myth.”
He said he had sent me a note via Meg—which was a slip because it had not been Meg who forwarded it, but Sharon. And he chided me gently for living in luxury in my new house, for writing to him on my new personalized stationery. “Personalized stationery is one of the small but truly necessary luxuries of life.”
Ted was attempting to push my guilt buttons. I was free, and living in splendor, and he was in the “hole.” I refused to take the bait, and wrote back,
You said you’d given the message for me to Meg—but it was Sharon who sent me one. You probably just misspoke yourself. Don’t go getting the two of them confused or you’ll be in hot water! While you’re envying my security, remember you have two members of the opposite sex in love with you, and I haven’t got any. Fortunately, I’ve been so busy lately with work, housing, and the kids’ problems, there hasn’t been much time to ponder this glaring lack I am still sleeping with my typewriter and it’s still cold, lumpy and unresponsive.
Ted’s reply came after his extradition arraignment on the Colorado murder charge, an arraignment that took place on his thirtieth birthday. I had sent him two humorous birthday cards (explaining that Hallmark didn’t put out a card specifically for his predicament: “Hi there … Happy Thirtieth Birthday and Happy Arraignment.”). He had chosen to view his situation with wry, angry humor and I geared my responses to that.
Ted wrote after the extradition hearing that he had drawn the largest crowd of reporters he’d seen in one place since his ordeal began, and he denigrated the press’s sense of fair play and justice “—since it has none.” He assured me that the “eyewitness” in Aspen was of no consequence since she had picked out his picture a full year after the Campbell disappearance.
Although Ted’s extradition arraignment on November 24, 1976, had drawn a flock of reporters, he was not the most famous prisoner in the Utah State Prison that week It was a fellow convict, Gary Gilmore, a convicted murderer with a death wish, who made the cover of Newsweek on November 29. Compared to Gary Gilmore, Ted was decidedly second-string news. It would not always be so.
Gilmore was a habitual criminal who had shot two young men during robberies, and he had a kind of bitter mystique about him. He too was involved in a doomed romance with a woman who seemed as bedazzled and driven as Ted’s Meg was. The tragic child-woman, Nicole Barrett, who had entered into an abortive suicide pact with Gary Gilmore, reminded me of Meg in her obsession with her lover, but Ted apparently saw no correlation at all between his romance and Gilmore’s and detested the other man for his manipulation of Nicol
e. He had studied Gary and Nicole when they met in the visitors’ area.
“The Gilmore situation grows curiouser and curiouser. Have seen him on occasion in the visiting room with Nicole. I’ll never forget the deep love and anguish in her eyes. Gilmore, however, is misguided, unstable, and selfish … The media preys on this Romeo and Juliet saga. Tragic. Irreconcilable.”
Nor did Ted have anything good to say about Gilmore’s legal advisors.
Ted had little time to ruminate on the “saga” of Gary and Nicole. He was busy reviewing and indexing 700 pages of testimony from the DaRonch trial, and, at the same time, studying Colorado criminal law. After reviewing the Utah trial, he could not see how the judge could have found him guilty, and he was sure that there would be no guilty verdict in Colorado.
“I feel like a general conducting a battle, not General Custer either,” he wrote enthusiastically. “Legally, I am on very solid ground!”
Ted never failed to comment on what was happening back in my world, even if it meant only a sentence or two at the end of his letters. This time, he wrote:
I am anxious that Cosmopolitan et al return payment so you’ll be able to rent a helicopter and get me out of here. The prison maintains, falsely, that I had airline schedules. Can you imagine! If I were foolish enough to go to an airport, I certainly wouldn’t give a damn which flight I jumped on as long as I was assured the plane could take off and land. Doing well, battling like hell. You know what it takes for the tough to get going.
love,
ted
The talk of escape, however flippant, had begun to flash a warning light on and off like a subliminal message on a television screen, hidden among Ted’s discussions of legal battles. But then, all prisoners dream of escape, and all of them talk about it—the possibilities, the odds. A minuscule number actually try.
Ted had mentioned that he would be “having a change of scenery” and that meant that one day he would stop fighting extradition to Colorado, but he would do it in his own good time. He had much research to do first. There was no more money for lawyers, nothing more to be counted on from family and friends in Washington, and that meant he would be in the hands of public defenders. More and more, he was seizing his own legal destiny. like the Little Red Hen, he would do it himself.
Almost from the moment I moved into my new home, leaving the sea and the wind to take over the little beach house we’d vacated, my writing fortunes took an upward turn. I had assignments from Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies Home Journa.l After years with the pulps, I’d finally broken into the “slicks.” Interestingly enough, all my assignments had to do with victims of violent crimes. The American public, in 1976, had finally begun to show concern for the fate of crime victims. Too many people had become victims or knew victims. Because I’d been busy moving and meeting publishing deadlines, I had not written to Ted for three or four weeks, and I got a rather plaintively hostile letter from him in mid-December.
Dear Ann,
I surrender. Did I say something offensive? Worse yet, is my breath offensive? Have my letters been stolen by the C.I.A. and you think I don’t write you anymore so you don’t write to me? Am I too hopeless a case? (Don’t answer that.) I can take it. Yessiree, never let it be said that I lost my cool just because my friends have forgotten me.
It was not a happy season for Ted. For the first time, he was behind bars at Christmastime. Only a year before, we had sat together at the Brasserie Pittsbourg. It seemed that twenty years had passed.
Ted’s letter was his Christmas message, poems scrawled on the lined paper.
This note must do as my Christmas card to you. a way of thanking you for the merriment you have brought into my life, not to mention the life-sustaining support. Now all I need is one of those quaint verses that all the store-bought cards have:
May Santa’s reindeer be so kind
Not to leave their droppings
On your roof
…
It’s here!
Don’t pretend you couldn’t tell.
If you’re not into Christmas
Catch the first train to hell.
So just tack up those house lights
And mummify the tree
Don’t forget, without Christmas cards
You’d never hear from me.
The final poem was a departure from the bitterness of the first two—a religious poem. Ted often referred to God in his letters, although he had never mentioned Him in any of our conversations outside prison walls.
I wrote immediately, and then called Meg to learn that she was on her way to Utah for Christmas and yet another reunion with Ted. I hoped that this visit would not be the catalyst for a renewed spate of dark depression for Ted as her last trip to Utah had been. His days at Point-of-the-Mountain were growing short. He would have to make the decision about going to Colorado soon. His name was still not well known in Aspen, except to policemen. Claudine Longet’s murder trial was set in Aspen in January, and she was reaping the big headlines.
Evidently Meg’s Christmas visit was more successful than their meeting in August had been. Ted wrote me two days before Christmas, describing their visit. “She came to me yesterday. In a visit so short and sweet, I am reunited with the missing element in my life. Seeing her is a glimpse of heaven. Touching her gave me a belief in miracles. So often I had dreamed of her that seeing her for real was a dazzling experience. She is gone again, and, again, I feel her absence in each unconscious moment.”
He recalled the fight that he and Meg had had after I’d driven him to the Crisis Clinic Christmas party in 1972. After I had dumped him in his inebriated state at the Rogerses’ rooming house, he had gone to his room and fallen fast asleep.
“Meg and I had had an argument and she was scheduled to fly out early the next morning. She decided to stop by before the flight, kiss and make up … she threw rocks at my window and called me … Believing that I would have awoken if I was there, she rushed away heartbroken because she thought I was ‘sleeping’ with someone else. She has never fully believed my fervent assurances that I was in a deep, intoxicated sleep. I have never told her that I went with you to a party.”
But, of course, I had told Meg on the night we met in December 1973. Perhaps Ted hadn’t heard me explain, or perhaps he had forgotten.
Ted wrote that he was trying to bring the Christmas spirit into his cell, putting all his Christmas cards on his desk. He had even bought and wrapped presents for his “neighbors.” The presents were tins of smoked oysters and Snickers bars. “Now I am attempting the impossible: suggesting all us hardened cons sing carols on Christmas Eve. Thus far, I have been designated a sicko degenerate for such a perverse idea.”
As far as I can determine, this Christmas of 1976 would be the last such holiday that Ted and Meg would share, even separated by mesh screens in a visitors’ room. And yet, she seemed to be more than a love to him. She seemed to be a life force itself.
“What I feel for Meg is the ultimate omnipresent emotion. I feel her living inside me. I feel her giving me life when there is no other reason for it than appreciating the gift of life itself.”
Ted enclosed a witness list for the Campbell trial in Colorado, pointing out that many names were misspelled. And he ended his Christmas letter:
As for the New Year, it is going to start out so bad that it will have to get better. Perhaps if you put some Chablis in Hawaiian Punch cans and send me a case for the New Year, I can forget the ominous beginnings. But what the hell—
Happy New Year.
love,
ted
Ted would be leaving Utah for the last time on January 28, headed for Colorado. He sent me a brief note on the twenty-fifth, telling me not to write again until he contacted me from his “new address.”
The year ahead, 1977, would bring tremendous upheavals in Ted’s life, and in mine. I doubt that either of us could have possibly envisioned what lay ahead.
26
ON JANUARY 28
, 1977, Ted was removed from the Utah State Prison, spirited by car to Aspen, Colorado, and placed in a cell in the antique Pitkin County Jail. He had a new judicial adversary: District Judge George H. Lohr, but Lohr didn’t appear all that tough. After all, he had just sentenced Claudine Longet to a modest thirty days in jail for shooting “Spider” Sabich. Claudine would begin her sentence in April in the same jail, although her cell would be freshly painted for her and friends would cater in noninstitutional food.
Sheriff Dick Keinast was leery of Bundy and argued that he was an escape risk, because of the escape kit that had been allegedly discovered on him in the Utah prison. He wanted Ted to be handcuffed during his court appearances, but Lohr overruled him and declared that Ted could wear civilian clothing and appear unfettered.
The ancient courthouse which housed the jail had been built in 1887 and offered spartan accommodations, but Ted liked the change from the looming walls of the Utah prison. When I phoned him in February, I was pleased and surprised to find that the Pitkin County Jail was operated much like the jail under my grandfather’s jurisdiction so many years before in Michigan. It was a “mom and Pop” jail, where I called, heard a deputy yell down the hall, and then Ted’s voice on the line. He sounded happy, relaxed, and confident.
Throughout his eleven-month stay in Colorado, I would speak with Ted frequently by phone. When he would assume more and more of his own defense, he would be allowed free phone privileges to help in preparing his case. Many of these calls, however, would be to me and other friends, and there was seemingly no limit put on the time he spent on long-distance calls.
I can remember Bob Keppel and Roger Dunn shaking their heads at Ted’s nerve combined with his easy access to a phone. “You aren’t gonna believe this,” Keppel told me one day when I was in the King County Major Crimes offices. “Guess who called us up?”
Of course, it had been Ted, brazenly phoning two of his most dedicated trackers to get information that he wanted for his Colorado defense.