The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  Bodiford noted the proximity to the Dunwoody crime scene, noted that a white Dodge van had been stolen on campus on February 5, and put the two together. And then he read the bulletin out of Lake City, and he felt cold. If there was a connection between the cases in Tallahassee and twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach’s disappearance, he didn’t want to think about the child’s fate. She was alone, and the girls in Tallahassee hadn’t had a chance, even surrounded by other people.

  Parmenter, hearing how all the coincidences linked up, felt a chill too. His daughter had come so close. If it hadn’t been for Danny’s arriving just when he did. …

  Parmenter knew that his children might hold the key to the missing stranger in the white van. He arranged for them both to be hypnotized by a fellow officer, Lieutenant Bryant Mickler. Perhaps there was something in their subconscious minds that they were blocking.

  It proved to be an ordeal for Leslie Parmenter. She was a good subject for hypnosis. Leslie not only recalled the man who’d approached her, she actually relived the experience, and she became hysterical. There was something about the man’s face—this “Richard Burton, Fire Department”—that terrified her, as if she had sensed the evil and the danger.

  Parmenter explained, “When he got her to the point where she saw his face, she went hysterical. He had to stop right then and bring her out of it. She was fighting it, because she didn’t want to see his face. And what happened to make her so fearful, I don’t know.”

  A half hour after the session, still trembling and afraid, Leslie nevertheless cooperated, along with her brother, with police artist Donald Bryan. They worked up a composite sketch of the man with Danny and Leslie separated. First one, and then the other. Each of the young Parmenters came up with almost identical likenesses.

  Later, a few days after Ted Bundy’s arrest in Pensacola, Florida, on February 15, Parmenter would look at Ted’s mug shots. “I thought, well, shucks … you put glasses on that, and you’ve got a duplicate almost.”

  And, also a few days after Bundy’s arrest, Tallahassee Investigator W. D. “Dee” Phillips showed the Parmenter children a stack of mug shots, including one of Ted Bundy, and Danny Parmenter picked two photos. He chose Bundy’s second. …

  Leslie Parmenter didn’t hesitate at all. She picked Bundy’s mug shot instantly.

  “Are you sure?” Phillips asked.

  “I’m positive,” she answered.

  But Kimberly Leach was gone. No one would find any trace of the child for eight weeks, despite a massive search that would cover four counties and nearly 2,000 square miles. Gone, like the others before her, young women that she had never even heard about, young women almost a continent away.

  33

  IT WAS FEBRUARY 10, 1978, and things were closing in on Ted Bundy. Still, no one knew he was Ted Bundy, but the “dumb cops” whom he detested and reviled were beginning to pick up on him. He’d stalled his landlord, told him that he would have the money for the two months’ rent in a day or so, and that was smoothed over for the moment, but he was planning to leave Tallahassee. He wouldn’t have the money and couldn’t see any way to get it.

  Stakeouts by the Tallahassee Police Department and the Leon County Sheriff’s Office were still beefing up the surveillance on the Florida State campus. Some of the cars were marked. Some were not.

  Roy Dickey, a six-and-a-half-year veteran of the Tallahassee force, sat in his patrol car near the intersection of Dunwoody Street and St. Augustine at 10:45 P.M. on the night of the tenth. He’d been there for two or three hours, and he was getting bored. Stakeouts are tiresome, muscle cramping, and often nonproductive. Occasionally, he talked by walkie-talkie with Officer Don Ford, who watched and waited on the corner of Pensacola and Woodward.

  And then Dickey saw a man walking toward the intersection, a man who had come from the Florida State stadium and driving range area. The man was in no hurry. He walked east on St. Augustine, and then cut north on Dunwoody, before disappearing between Cheryl Thomas’s duplex and the house next to it.

  The man wore blue jeans, a red quilted vest, a blue cap, and jogging shoes. As he passed under the street light on the corner, he looked over at the patrol car—briefly—and Dickey saw his face clearly.

  Later, when he saw a picture of Ted Bundy, Dickey would recognize him as the man who’d passed him so casually.

  Leon County Deputy Keith Daws was working surveillance on the next shift, midnight to 4:00 A.M., in an unmarked Chevy Chevelle. It was now the early morning of February 11—1:47 to be exact.

  Daws turned onto West Jefferson near the Chi Omega House and saw a “white male fiddling with a car door” up ahead of him. Daws eased his car up to where the man was bending over the door of a Toyota. When he saw the deputy’s car in the middle of the street, the man stood up and looked around. Daws identified himself and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “I came down to get my book.”

  Daws saw that the man had a key in his hand … but no book.

  “Maybe I’m stupid or something,” the deputy drawled. “But you say you’ve come to get your book, and you don’t have no book.”

  “It’s on the dash on the other side of the car,” the man answered easily.

  Daws studied him. He looked to be in his late twenties, wore blue jeans that looked brand new, and an orange-red quilted “lining” vest. When he bent over with the key, the deputy could see there was no wallet in the back pocket of the jeans. The brown-haired man also looked “wasted … completely exhausted.”

  There was a book on the passenger side dashboard, but the man said he had no I.D. He’d just come down from his room. He hadn’t parked on West College Avenue where he lived because all the spots were filled.

  That made sense. Parking on campus was tight. First come, first served.

  Daws shined his flashlight into the green Toyota’s interior, and saw that the seat and floorboards were covered with papers. He saw the tiny tip of a license tag under the papers on the floor.

  “Whose tag is that?”

  “What tag?” The man was fumbling with the papers and his hand hit the tag.

  “That tag you’ve got your hand on.”

  The man in the vest handed the tag to Daws, explaining that he’d found it somewhere, and never thought that someone might miss it.

  The tag read, 13-D-11300. Daws didn’t recognize the number, but he routinely walked over to his car radio to check it with “Wants and Warrants” for stolen. He left the man standing by the Toyota. Daws had one hand on his microphone and the tag in the other.

  And then the man suddenly sprinted, running across the street, between two apartment houses, and leaping over a retaining wall.

  Daws was caught by surprise. The man had seemed to be cooperative. He would later ruefully describe the scene to a Miami jury. “The last time I saw him, I could have hit him with a baseball. You’re talking about the width of this courtroom.”

  The runner had leapt over the retaining wall, directly into the backyard of The Oak … and disappeared.

  The tag, of course, was registered to Randy Ragan, but when Daws went to Ragan’s house, he was obviously not the same individual who had run from the deputy. The man who had “rabbited” was later picked out of a photo lineup by Daws. It was Ted Bundy.

  Daws, whose frustration at the near-miss was still evident when he testified in court, was even more disgusted when he read the next morning of the search for a Dodge van. There had been a white Dodge van with a flat tire, parked illegally, just behind the Toyota that the suspect was unlocking. When the detectives returned to look for it, it was gone.

  34

  THE MAN LATER IDENTIFIED as Ted Bundy had leapt over the retaining wall backing on The Oak and disappeared in those early morning hours of February 11. His landlord, who knew him, of course, as Chris Hagen, saw him on the eleventh and noticed that he seemed “tired—like he’d really been through it …”

  Ted’s stay at The Oak, and in Tallahassee, was about to e
nd, but first, on the evening of February 11, he treated himself to one last meal at the Chez Pierre in the Adams Street Mall, a meal where the tab for the French cuisine and wine came to $18.50. He paid for it with one of the stolen credit cards, also charging a $2.00 tip.

  The waitresses at the Chez Pierre remember him because he had such “a cold air about him. He kept to himself. You couldn’t make conversation with him. He ordered good wine. One night, he drank a full bottle and on another occasion he ordered a bottle of sparkling white wine and drank half of it.”

  Ted had always liked good wine.

  On February 12 he gathered up the possessions he’d accumulated. He had considerably more paraphernalia to carry with him than he’d had when he arrived in Tallahassee on January 8—the television set, the bicycle, his racquetball equipment. He gave a box of cookies to a girl down the hall, and he left.

  He had wiped the room down completely. Later, detectives would find no fingerprints at all, no sign that anyone had spent a month in room number 12 at The Oak.

  The white Dodge van, stolen from the Audio-Visual Department, was no longer useful. He abandoned it in front of 806 West Georgia Street in Tallahassee. On February 13 it would be spotted and recognized by Chris Cochranne, an Audio-Visual employee, and would be taken in by police for meticulous processing. The van was covered with a thick layer of dust and dirt—except for the area around the door handles and on the passenger door. There, the technicians processing the vehicle found “wipe marks” as if someone had deliberately tried to remove fingerprints.

  Doug Barrow, fingerprint expert for the Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement, also found wipe marks on some of the windows, and on the armrests and in other spots inside the filthy van. In other parts of the van he was able to lift fifty-seven latent prints—prints which all proved to have been left by Audio-Visual employees.

  There was so much dirt, so many leaves and particles of vegetable debris in the back part of the van that it looked as if it had been placed there to obliterate whatever might be on the carpet beneath. And through this pile of soil and leaves, there remained the imprint of something heavy, something that had been dragged from the van.

  Serologist Stephens found two large dried bloodstains smeared on the synthetic carpeting, an unusual carpeting made up of green, blue, turquoise, and black man-made fibers. The stains proved to be from a person with type B blood. Mary Lynn Hinson, a crime lab expert in cloth fibers, was able to isolate a great many fiber strands which were caught and twisted in the van’s carpet. She also photographed some distinct footprints in the pile of dirt, footprints left by a pair of loafers and by a pair of running shoes.

  The criminalists had weeks of work ahead of them, and most of that work would have to wait until they had some shoes, some blood, or some fibers for comparison purposes. Police didn’t know the man they sought, and they didn’t have Kim Leach’s body, or the clothes she had worn when she disappeared. Nor could they know the significance of two small bright orange price tags found caught under the front seat of the van. One read $24, and the other, stuck on top of it, read $26. The store name was Green Acre Sporting Goods, a sports equipment company with seventy-five outlets in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. Detective J. D. Sewell was assigned to find which store used that reddish-orange type of price sticker, that marking pencil, and what item might have sold for $24 or $26.

  Ted had always favored Volkswagen Bugs. On that last day in Tallahassee, he spotted a little orange VW, a car belonging to a young man named Ricky Garzaniti, a construction worker for Sun Trail Construction. Garzaniti would report to police that someone had stolen his car on February 12 from 529 East Georgia Street.

  The keys had been in it. It was a sitting duck for Ted. He had a stolen tag, a tag he’d taken off another Volkswagen in Tallahassee: 13-D-0743. He stowed his Raleigh bike and the television set in the back, and left Florida’s capital city for what he fully expected would be the last time.

  This time, he headed not east, but west. At nine the next morning, a desk clerk, Betty Jean Barnhill, in the Holiday Inn in Crestview, 150 miles west of Tallahassee, had an argument with a man who’d arrived in an orange Volkswagen. When he’d finished his breakfast, he’d attempted to pay for it with a Gulf credit card, a card bearing a woman’s name. When he started to sign the woman’s name to the charge slip, she told him that he couldn’t do that. He became so angered that he threw the card in her face and left hurriedly. Later, when she perused articles about the arrest of Ted Bundy, she recognized him as the man who’d been so furious.

  There were no sightings reported of Ted Bundy and the orange car between 9:00 A.M. on February 13 and 1:30 A.M. on the morning of February 15.

  David Lee, a patrolman in the city of Pensacola, a city so far west that it is almost in Alabama, was working “third watch” on February 14-15—8 P.M. to 4 A.M.—in West Pensacola. He knew his area well and knew the closing hours of most of the businesses in his sector.

  Lee’s attention was drawn to an orange Volkswagen Bug emerging from an alley near the Oscar Warner’s Restaurant. On that Tuesday evening, Lee knew that Warner’s had closed at 10:00 P.M. He also knew what the vehicles of all the employees looked like. There was a driveway all around the building, with the alley leading up to the restaurant’s rear door. When the officer first saw the Bug, he thought it might have been the cook’s—but then saw it was not.

  Lee did a U-turn and came back. The Volkswagen cruised slowly as the squad car pulled in behind it. There had been no violations. At this point, Lee was simply curious to see who was driving, since the alley up to the restaurant was not a shortcut.

  He picked up his microphone and requested a “Wants and Warrants” check on the license plate. Then he flicked on his blue lights, signaling the Volkswagen to pull over. The tag came back: stolen.

  As the lazy blue beam revolved atop Lee’s cruiser, the orange car ahead accelerated. The chase continued for a mile, over the line into Escambia County, with speeds up to sixty miles per hour. Just past the intersection of Cross and West Douglas Streets, the Volkswagen pulled over.

  Lee drew his service revolver and walked up to the driver’s side. He suspected there was someone else in the front seat. He was wary, and his backups were far behind him.

  Ted Bundy’s life has a way of running in circles. Once before, while driving a Volkswagen, he had raced away from a policeman. Once before, he had finally pulled over. That had been way back in August of 1975, way back in Utah. This was Pensacola, Florida, and the officer ordering him out of the car had a deep Southern drawl. Otherwise, it was almost a repeat. Only this time Ted was at the end of his rope. This time he would fight.

  David Lee was a year younger, and about twenty pounds huskier than Ted, but his attention was divided between the man who sat in the driver’s seat and the possibility that someone else was hidden in the car. He knew that was the way most cops got killed.

  He ordered Ted out and told him to lie facedown on the pavement. Ted refused, and Lee couldn’t see his hands. Finally, Ted obeyed, but as Lee handcuffed his prone suspect’s left wrist, Ted suddenly rolled over and kicked Lee’s feet out from under him, and then hit the officer. Now, Ted was on top of the scramble of arms and legs.

  Lee still had his revolver out. He fired one round— straight up—to get the suspect off him.

  And then Ted was running south on West Douglas Street. Lee was right behind him, shouting, “Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!”

  Ted made the intersection and turned left on Cross Street. His only response to Lee’s shouts was to turn to the left slightly. Lee saw something in his left hand. He’d forgotten about the handcuff in the excitement of the moment and thought the man he was chasing had a gun. He fired another round, this time directly at the suspect.

  Ted hit the ground, and Lee thought he’d hit him. The officer ran up to see how badly the runner was injured, and his quarry came up fighting again. He hadn’t been hit at all, and he was struggling to grab Lee’s gu
n. The fight lasted for a long time, at least it seemed a long time to Lee.

  Someone was yelling “Help!” over and over. Lee was startled to realize it was the suspect.

  As he recalled the incident later in court, he would comment, “I was hoping there was help coming for me. Some guy came out of his house and asked me what I was doing to the man on the ground. I was in uniform, too.”

  Finally, Lee’s strength prevailed and he managed to subdue the suspect and cuff his hands behind his back.

  He had not the slightest idea in the world that he had just arrested one of the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted criminals.

  Lee took the man to his patrol car, read him his rights under Miranda, and headed for the station. The suspect, all the fight gone out of him, seemed strangely depressed. He kept repeating, “I wish you had killed me.”

  As they neared the jail, he turned to Lee and asked, “If I run from you at the jail, then will you kill me?”

  Lee was puzzled. The man wasn’t drunk, and he’d been arrested only for possession of a stolen vehicle. He couldn’t understand the black, suicidal mood that had suddenly gripped his prisoner.

  Detective Norman M. Chapman, Jr., was on call that night. Chapman is a man with a voice like warm maple syrup. If he weighed fifty pounds more, the dark-haired, mustachioed detective would look like Oliver Hardy’s twin. If he weighed fifty pounds less, he could double for Burt Reynolds. When he walked into Pensacola headquarters at 3:00 A.M. on February 15, he saw the suspect lying on the floor asleep. He woke the prisoner and took him upstairs to an interview room, where he read him his rights again from a Miranda warning card.

  The suspect nodded and gave his name: Kenneth Raymond Misner.

  “Misner” had three complete sets of identification, all in the names of coeds, twenty-one stolen credit cards, a stolen television set, a stolen car, stolen tags and the bicycle. He gave his address as 509 West College Avenue, Tallahassee. “Ken Misner” agreed to a recorded statement. He appeared somewhat the worse for wear. He had scratches and bruises on his lips and cheeks, blood on the back of his shirt. He signed his rights’ waivers, and admitted that he had lifted the credit cards from women’s pocketbooks, and also stolen the car and license tags. He’d stolen the I.D.’s from taverns. Why had he attacked Officer Lee? That was simple enough: he’d wanted to get away.