The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  Although Ted opposed it, he was transferred on April 13, 1977, from the Pitkin County Jail to the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs forty-five miles away, in accordance with the order sent down from the state Health Department.

  The Garfield County Jail was only ten years old, and considerably more pleasant than his old basement cell in Aspen. We talked often on the phone, and he commented that he liked Garfield County Sheriff Ed Hogue and his wife, but that the food was still lousy. Despite the modern facilities, it was another “mom and pop” jail.

  It wasn’t long before Ted began to inundate Judge Lohr with requests for special treatment. Since he was serving as his own attorney, he needed a typewriter, a desk, access to the law library in Aspen, the free and uncensored use of a phone, help from forensic laboratories, and investigators. He wanted three meals a day, and said neither he nor the other prisoners could survive without lunch. He pointed out his own weight loss. He wanted an order rescinded forbidding other prisoners to talk to him. (Hogue had issued this order soon after Ted arrived, after jailers intercepted a diagram of the jail, a chart outlining exits and the ventilation system.)

  “Ed’s a good guy,” he told me on the phone. “I don’t want to get him into trouble but we have to have more to eat.”

  His requests were granted. Somehow, Ted Bundy had managed to elevate the status of a county jail prisoner to that of visiting royalty. He not only had all the paraphernalia he wanted, but he was allowed several trips weekly, accompanied by deputies, to the law library in the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen.

  He grew friendly with the deputies, learned about their families, and they liked him. He told me, “They’re O.K. They even let me take a stroll along the river because it was such a nice day. Of course, they went with me.”

  I did not hear from Ted during the first four weeks of May, and I wondered what had happened. Although he seemed to be growing constantly more bitter, more sarcastic—as if he’d developed an impervious outer shell—he had written or called me regularly up until May. I finally got a letter written May 27.

  Dear Ann,

  Just returned from Brazil and found your letters piled up in my post office box here in Glenwood. Jesus, you must have thought I got lost in the jungles down there. I actually went down there to find out where the sons of bitches are hiding the 11 billion tons of coffee they say the bad weather destroyed. Didn’t find any coffee but brought back 400 pounds of cocaine.

  Ted was still in contact with Meg, at least by phone, and she had passed on my concern about not hearing from him. No, he was not angry with me, he assured me. Someone had told him, however, that I had “developed an opinion relative to my innocence, which opinion was not in any way consistent with my innocence.”

  Now, he wanted me to write to him and make a “frank statement” about how I felt regarding his guilt or innocence. He said he understood that I was very close to the police and that he knew they had convinced many people of his guilt, but he wanted a letter from me spelling out my feelings.

  And he had yet another message for Nick Mackie: “Tell Mackie, if he doesn’t stop thinking about me that he will end up at Western State [Washington’s state mental hospital]. Deals indeed. I have got them up against the wall down here, and there [sic] are eternal optimists talking about deals.”

  The trial date had been put ahead to November 14, 1977, and Ted was proceeding without counsel. He was most enthusiastic about his new role, and felt he had the instincts of an investigator. “But most important, I will persist, and persist, and work and act until I succeed. No one can outwork me, because I have more at stake than anyone else.”

  He was also elated because he was costing the county a great deal of money. A local reporter had complained in print about the escalating costs of investigators, expert witnesses, extra personnel needed to guard Ted during his library trips, dental costs, supplies, and the phone calls. Ted found this criticism “Goddam outrageous. No one asks the prosecutor or the police how much of the people’s money they piss away. Dismiss the case, send me home and save all that money is my response.”

  He had used the $20 I’d sent him to pay for a haircut, his first since December 1976, and Judge Lohr had ordered that he be taken to a doctor to see if his loss of weight—which he blamed on the paucity of food in the Garfield County Jail—was as profound as Ted said. The day after the order, the jail had begun to serve lunch for the first time in its history, and Ted claimed a moral victory for that.

  Ted suspected that the sheriff was trying to fatten him up before he went to the doctor, but he still termed Hogue a “good man.” The sheriff had also consented to having Ted’s friends and family send food in from outside. Packages of raisins, nuts, and beef jerky would be appreciated.

  Although Ted had begun the letter with a touch of suspicious hostility, a request for a declaration of loyalty from me, his mood mellowed as he wrote.

  Thank you very much for the money and the stamps. I know your recent successes have by no means put you on easy street, so donations to me no doubt represent sacrifices. I will not take so long to write again. Promise.

  Love,

  ted

  But he did. He took a long, long time to write, because Ted Bundy had gone away. Very suddenly.

  27

  THAT LETTER TROUBLED ME. Ted was, in essence, asking me to tell him that I believed wholeheartedly in his innocence, something that I could not do. It was something he had never asked of me before, and I wondered what had happened to make him wary of me. I had not betrayed his confidence. I had continued to keep the letters and calls rolling into Colorado and I had not shown Ted’s replies to anyone. If I could not tell Ted that I believed he was innocent of all the charges and suspicions against him, I was maintaining my emotional support as always.

  It had been the first week in June when I received Ted’s questioning letter, and I was wrestling with how I could reply as Ted prepared for a hearing on whether the death penalty would be considered in his trial. It was a decision that was being made individually in each homicide case in Colorado. The hearing was set for June 7.

  As usual, Ted was chauffeured to Aspen from Glenwood Springs on the morning of June 7, leaving a little before eight. He was wearing the same outfit he had worn when we had lunch at the Brasserie Pittsbourg in Seattle in December 1975: the tan corduroy slacks, a long-sleeved turtleneck shirt, and the heavy, variegated brown coat-sweater. Instead of his usually preferred loafers, however, he wore his heavy prison-issue boots. His hair was short and neat, thanks, somewhat ironically, to the twenty-dollar check I had sent him.

  Pitkin County Deputies Rick Kralicek and Peter Murphy, his regular guards, picked him up that morning for the forty-five-mile ride back to Aspen. Ted talked easily with the two deputies he’d come to know well, asking again about their families.

  Kralicek drove with Bundy sitting beside him, and Peter Murphy sat in the backseat. Later Murphy would recall that as they left the outskirts of Glenwood Springs Ted had suddenly turned around and stared at him, making several quick movements with his cuffed hands. “I unsnapped the leather strap holding my .38, and it made a loud unmistakable ‘snap’! Ted turned around and stared straight ahead at the road all the way into Aspen.”

  When they reached the courthouse, Ted was handed into the custody of Deputy David Westerlund, a lawman who had been his guard for only one day and was not familiar with him.

  Court convened at 9:00 A.M., and Jim Dumas—one of the public defenders fired by Ted earlier but still serving him—argued against the death penalty for an hour or so. At 10:30 Judge Lohr ordered a break, saying that the prosecution could give its arguments when they reconvened. Ted moved, as he often did, to the law library, its tall stacks hiding him from Deputy Westerlund’s view.

  The deputy stayed at his post at the courtroom door. They were on the second floor, twenty-five feet above the street. Everything was normal, or seemed so. Ted was apparently doing some research back in the stacks, while waiti
ng for court to begin again.

  On the street outside, a woman passing by was startled to see a figure dressed in tans and browns suddenly leap from a window above her. She watched as the man fell, got to his feet and ran, limping, off down the street. Puzzled, she stared after him for a few moments before entering the courthouse and heading for the sheriff’s office. Her first question galvanized the officers on duty into action. “Is it normal for people to jump out of windows around here?”

  Kralicek heard her, swore, and headed for the stairs.

  Ted Bundy had escaped.

  He wore no handcuffs, and the leg irons he usually wore when he was outside the courtroom had been removed. He was free, and he’d had ample time to observe the area around the Pitkin County Courthouse when the deputies had kindly allowed him to walk near the river during exercise periods.

  Chagrined, Sheriff Dick Keinast would admit later, “We screwed up. I feel shitty about it.”

  Roadblocks were set up, tracking dogs were called in, and posses on horseback fanned out around Aspen looking for the man who had telegraphed in so many ways that he was going to run for it. Whitney Wulff, Sheriff Keinast’s secretary, recalled that Ted had often walked over to the windows during hearings, glanced down, and then looked at the sheriff’s men to see if they were watching.

  “I thought he was always testing us,” she said. “Once he walked up close behind a girl court aide, and looked at us. I got worried about the possibility of a hostage and alerted the officer escort to stay closer to the prisoner.” But Westerlund had been a new man on the job, unaware of others’ suspicions that Bundy was perhaps planning a break.

  Ted had “double-dressed”—in the lingo of the con— wearing extra clothing beneath his standard courtroom outfit. His plan was so audacious that it went off like clockwork at the beginning. He had hit the ground on the front courthouse lawn, hit it so hard in fact that he’d left a four-inch-deep gouge in the turf with his right foot. Officials suspected that he might have injured that ankle, but evidently not enough to slow him down much.

  Then Ted had headed immediately for the banks of the Roaring Fork River, the spot four blocks from the courthouse where he’d walked often before. There, hidden in the brush, he quickly removed his outer layer of clothing. He now wore a dress shirt. He looked like any other Aspen resident as he strolled with controlled casualness back through town. It was the safest place he could have been. All his pursuers had scattered to set up roadblocks.

  The word of Ted’s escape was a newsflash on every radio station between Denver and Seattle, and down into Utah. In Aspen, residents were told to lock their doors, hide their children, and garage their cars.

  Frank Tucker, the District Attorney who was the chief object of Ted’s derision that summer, commented in I-told-you-so terms, “I am not surprised. I kept telling them.”

  Apparently everyone had been expecting Ted to run, but no one had done anything about it, and now they ran in circles trying to get him back. The roadblocks on the two roads leading out of town took forty-five minutes to set up. The dogs were delayed for almost four hours on their flight from Denver because carriers could not be located and the airlines refused to fly them without carriers. If there is a patron saint of escapees, he was looking down favorably on Ted Bundy.

  Back in Seattle, I began to receive phone calls from friends and law officers, warning me that Ted was loose. It was their feeling that he might head toward me, thinking that I would hide him or give him money to get across the Canadian border. It was a confrontation that I didn’t relish. I doubted that he would head back toward Washington. There were just too many people who would recognize him.

  If he got out of the mountains around Aspen, he would do better to head for Denver, or some other big city. Nevertheless, Nick Mackie gave me his home phone number, and my sons were instructed that they must get to their phone and call for help if Ted appeared at our front door.

  My phone rang three times on the evening of June 7. Each time I answered, there was no one there … or no one who spoke. I could hear sounds in the background as if the calls were coming from a phone booth on a highway with cars racing by.

  I finally said, “Ted … Ted, is that you?” and the connection was broken.

  When Ted made his desperate jump for freedom, it had been a beautiful sunny, warm day in Aspen. But nightfall brought the temperature drops common to mountain towns even in summer. Wherever Ted was, he was undoubtedly cold. I slept restlessly, dreaming that I had gone camping and discovered that I’d forgotten to bring blankets or a sleeping bag.

  Where was he? The tracking dogs had stopped, confused, as they’d reached the Roaring Fork River. He must have planned that. They couldn’t pick up his trail beyond his first four-block run to the river shores.

  It began to rain in Aspen late in the afternoon of that Monday in June, and anyone unlucky enough to be without shelter would have quickly been soaked to the skin. Ted wore only a light shirt and slacks. He was possibly suffering from a badly sprained or broken ankle … but he was still free.

  He must have felt like the protagonist of Papillon, the book he’d almost committed to memory during his long months in jail. Beyond the cleverness of escape, Papillon had dealt with mind control, man’s ability to think himself past despair, to control his environment by sheer force of will. Was Ted doing that now?

  The men who tracked Ted Bundy looked like something out of a Charles Russell or Frederick Remington painting, garbed in Stetsons, deerskin vests, jeans, cowboy boots, and carrying sidearms. They could have been possemen of a century earlier, looking for Billy the Kid or the James boys. I wondered if they would shoot first and ask questions later when, and if, they found Ted.

  Aspenites vacillated between utter fear and black humor. While deputies and volunteers made a house-by-house search in the resort city, entrepreneurs hastened to capitalize on this new folk hero who was capturing the imagination of a town where ennui can set in quickly. Ted Bundy had thumbed his nose at the system, had beaten the “dumb cops,” and hardly anyone stopped to think about the broken body of Caryn Campbell that had been found in the snowbank way back in 1975. Bundy was news, and good for laughs.

  T-shirts began to appear on well-endowed young women, reading: “Ted Bundy Is a One Night Stand,” “Bundy’s Free—You can bet your Aspen on it!” “Bundy Lives on a Rocky Mountain High!” and, “Bundy’s in Booth D.” (This last slogan referred to a national magazine article which stated that, if one sat in Booth D in a local restaurant, one could purchase cocaine.)

  One restaurant put “Bundy Burgers” on its menu … open the bun and the meat has fled. A “Bundy Cocktail” served locally was made of tequila, rum, and two Mexican jumping beans.

  Hitchhikers, wanting to be assured of a ride out of Aspen, wore signs reading, “I am not Bundy.”

  Paranoia reigned along with the high jinks. One young male reporter, after interviewing three young women in a cafe about their reactions to Bundy’s escape, was promptly turned in as a suspect. His identification and press card had meant little.

  Everywhere, fingers of blame were being pointed. Sheriff Keinast blamed Judge Lohr for allowing Ted to represent himself, and for letting him appear in court without his leg irons and handcuffs. Tucker blamed everyone, and Keinast wearily admitted to one reporter that he wished he’d never heard of Ted Bundy.

  By Friday, June 10, Ted had been missing three days and the FBI joined the manhunt. Louise Bundy appeared on television and begged Ted to come back. She was worried about Ted being out in the mountains. “But most of all I’m worried about the people who are looking for him not using good common sense and pulling the trigger first and asking questions later. People will think, ‘Oh, he must be guilty. That’s why he’s running.’ But I think just all the frustrations piled up and he saw an open window and decided to go. I’m sure by now he’s probably sorry he did.”

  The number of searchers had dropped from 150 to 70 by Friday. The feeling was that Ted ha
d made his way out of the search area, and possibly had had an accomplice. Sid Morley, thirty, serving a year for possession of stolen property, had become friendly with Ted in the Pitkin County Jail and transferred with him to the Garfield County Jail. Morley had failed to return from a work release job on the Friday before Ted’s jump from the courthouse and the searchers felt he might have been waiting to help Ted.

  Morley, however, was taken into custody on June 10 near a tunnel on Interstate 70, fifty miles west of Denver. Questioned, he insisted that he’d known nothing about Ted’s escape plans and he did not, indeed, seem to be involved. Morley’s own opinion was that Ted was still in Pitkin County, but outside of Aspen.

  Nationwide, it was a big week for escapes. Even as Ted Bundy was being tracked in Colorado, James Earl Ray, along with three other inmates, escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee on June 11. For one day, the story of that escape would take western headline precedence over Bundy’s.

  Ted Bundy was still in Pitkin County. He had made his way through town on June 7 to the foot of Aspen Mountain, and then hiked easily up the grassy slope. It had been a bad year for snow, but the warm winter was lucky for Ted. By the time the sun set that first night, he was up and over Aspen Mountain and walking along Castle Creek, headed south. Ted had maps with him of the mountain area around Aspen, maps which were being used by the prosecution to show the location of Caryn Campbell’s body. As his own defense attorney, he had rights of discovery and had been allowed access to those maps.

  If he could have kept going south until he came to the hamlet of Crested Butte, he might have been able to catch a ride to freedom. But the winds and rain had driven him back to a cabin he’d passed along the way, a well-stocked and temporarily unoccupied mountain cabin.

  Ted rested there after breaking in. There was a little food in the cabin, some warm clothing, and a rifle. On Thursday morning, June 9, better equipped and carrying the rifle, he headed south again. He might have made it to Crested Butte, but he didn’t keep going straight south. Instead, he cut west over another ridge that wasn’t so choked with lingering snow, and found himself along the East Maroon Creek.