The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  At 6:30 A.M. on February 15, the interrogation was stopped when “Misner” requested a physician. He was taken to a hospital for treatment of his injuries, injuries that were limited to the cuts and bruises. Then he slept through the morning back in jail.

  In Tallahassee, two hundred miles away, the real Ken Misner was astounded to learn of his “arrest.” The F.S.U. track star had had no idea, of course, that someone had appropriated his name, and his life.

  Tallahassee Detective Don Patchen and Leon County Detective Steve Bodiford drove to Pensacola on the afternoon of the fifteenth. They knew the prisoner was not Misner, but they didn’t know who he really was, only that he had some connections in their jurisdiction. They talked briefly with the suspect, saw that he was in good condition, but exhausted. “We know you’re not Ken Misner,” they told him. “We’d like to know who you are.

  He refused to tell them, but said he would talk to them the next morning. At 7:15 A.M. on February 16, the still unidentified prisoner listened to his rights, and again signed the waivers, “Kenneth Misner.” He was quite willing to discuss the thefts. He admitted stealing the credit cards: Master Charge, Exxon, Sunoco, Gulf, Bankamericard, Shell, Phillips 66, many copies of each with different names. He couldn’t remember exactly where he’d gotten them, but most of them had come from purses and billfolds in shopping malls and taverns in Tallahassee. Some of the names were familiar. Some were not. There had been so many.

  The interview ended as Bodiford said, “State your name.”

  The suspect laughed. “Who, me? Kenneth R. Misner. John R. Doe.”

  The still unknown prisoner asked to make some phone calls. He wanted to call an attorney in Atlanta, explaining that he wanted advice on just when he should reveal his true identity and what plea he should make.

  The attorney was Millard O. Farmer, a well-known criminal defense lawyer whose particular area of expertise is the defense of those indicted in homicide cases where the death penalty is involved. Farmer allegedly told Ted that an associate would fly down to Pensacola the next day and that he could give his name then, but not to admit to anything.

  Until that unveiling, Ted requested that he be allowed to call friends and that no news of his arrest or his identity be released until the next morning, the seventeenth.

  Ted placed a call sometime after 4:30 P.M. on February sixteenth—a call to John Henry Browne, his old lawyer-friend in Seattle. Browne learned that Ted was in Pensacola, that he’d been arrested, but that no one knew who he was yet. Browne found Ted’s condition distraught and had difficulty in eliciting the facts. It took Ted three or four minutes to explain why he was in custody, and Ted didn’t much want to talk about that. He wanted instead to talk about the old days in Seattle, to learn what was happening in his hometown.

  Browne told him a dozen times not to talk to anyone without the advice of an attorney. Given Ted’s rambling state of mind, he felt that Ted would jeopardize himself if he talked to detectives. Ted had always listened to Browne’s advice before. That all changed on February 16. Ted didn’t seem to be listening any longer.

  Pensacola Public Defender Terry Turrell went to Ted’s cell at 5:00 P.M. and stayed with him until 9:45 P.M. He could see the man was caving in. His head was bowed, he was crying and smoking cigarettes one after another.

  During the time Turrell spent with Ted, Ted made several long-distance phone calls—to whom Ted wouldn’t say.

  And, strangely for a former Protestant, a somewhat-failed Mormon, Ted requested to see a Catholic priest. Father Michael Moody was closeted with him for a while, and then left, carrying with him whatever privileged information Ted may or may not have given him.

  Pensacola detectives say that they shared hamburgers and french fries with him that evening, that he ate. I don’t know.

  I know only that the carefully constructed facade was cracking apart, falling away in shards of despair. I know, because I talked to Ted Bundy several hours later. For the first time, he wanted to loosen a terrible burden from his soul.

  35

  ON THAT THURSDAY NIGHT, February 16, 1978, I was in my apartment in Los Angeles. Somehow, the news of Ted’s arrest had filtered out to the Northwest news sources, even before Pensacola and Tallahassee detectives knew for sure who they had. Ted was being interrogated in Pensacola when my father called me from Salem, Oregon, about 11:00 P.M. (Pacific Coast Time) and told me, “They’ve caught Ted Bundy in Pensacola, Florida. It’s on the news up here.”

  I was shocked, relieved, incredulous—and then, I remembered the single clipping I’d seen about the Chi Omega murders in Florida. I looked at my mother, who had just flown down that day to attend a premiere with me the next night, and said, “They’ve caught Ted … and he was in Florida.”

  That was all the information I had. The details—all the details of the Florida cases—would become known to me over the next eighteen months, but I had a terrible feeling that Ted Bundy was inextricably bound up with those murders on the campus of Florida State University. Until that point, I had always nourished a small hope that the police, the media and the public might be wrong in their assumption that Ted was a killer. Now, knowing he was in Florida, that hope crumbled. I fell asleep, and dreamed—not dreams, but haunting nightmares.

  I was awakened by the shrill ring of the phone just beside the couch where I slept in the one room apartment. I fumbled for the phone in the dark.

  A deep, distinctly Southern voice asked if I was Ann Rule. I said I was, and he told me he was Detective Norman Chapman of the Pensacola Police Department.

  “Will you speak to Theodore Bundy?”

  “Of course …” I looked at the clock. It was 3:15 A.M.

  Ted’s voice came on the line. He sounded weary, disturbed and confused.

  “Ann … I don’t know what to do. They’ve been talking to me. We’ve been talking a lot. I’m trying to decide what I should do.”

  “Are you all right? Are they treating you all right?”

  “Oh yeah … we’ve got coffee, cigarettes … they’re O.K. I just don’t know what I should do.”

  Perhaps because I had been roused from a sound sleep, because I had no time to think, I responded with the honesty that can come with surprise. I decided the time had come to face whatever facts had to be faced.

  “Ted,” I began. “It’s been a long time, and I think maybe now it’s time to get it all out. I think maybe you should tell someone about it … all of it … someone who understands you, someone who’s been your friend. Do you want to do that?”

  “Yes … yes … can you come? I need help …”

  In a sense, it was a call I had expected for years, ever since I’d learned that Ted had called me that midnight in November of 1974, when he had been obviously disturbed about something. That had been after the last victim, Debby Kent, had vanished in Utah. I had always felt since that Ted knew that I knew he could tell me the terrible things bottled up in his mind, and that I could take it. Was this the call?

  I told him that I thought I could come, but that I didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket, didn’t even know when planes left Los Angeles for Florida. “I can find the money—someplace—and I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “I think they’ll pay for your plane ticket from here,” he said. “I think they want you to come too.”

  “O.K. Let me have a cup of coffee and get my head together. I’ll check with the airlines, and I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Give me the number where you are.”

  He gave me the number, the number in the captain’s office in the Pensacola Police Department, and then we hung up. I immediately called the airlines, found I could get a plane out early in the morning, and would get to Pensacola, via Atlanta, the next afternoon. I felt Detective Chapman wanted me to be there. Why else would he have called me? I later learned he had contacted my babysitter in Seattle on my home phone, and had had to put his captain on the line before my sitter would release my number. They had gone to a lot of t
rouble to find me.

  Yet, when I tried to call back to the interrogation room only minutes later, I was told by the desk sergeant that no calls were being allowed in! I explained that I had just talked to Norm Chapman and Ted Bundy and that they were expecting my call, but the answer was still no.

  I was completely mystified until I received a phone call thirty hours later from Ron Johnson, an assistant Florida state attorney. “I want you to come. I think you should come, but the detectives here want three days to get a confession from Ted Bundy. Then, if they don’t get one, they will send for you.”

  They never did. I would never see any of those involved until I walked into Ted’s Miami trial in July of 1979. And only then would I learn what had occurred during that long, long night of February 16—17, 1978, and in the days that followed. Some of the interrogation was on tape, an hour long tape played aloud in the Miami pretrial hearing. Some of it came out in preliminary hearings, testified to by the detectives themselves, these men who spent so many hours closeted with Ted: Norm Chapman, Steve Bodiford, Don Patchen, and Captain Jack Poitinger.

  If I had been allowed to talk to Ted during those first days after his arrest in Pensacola, would things have been any different? Would there now be more answers? Or would I have flown to Florida only to be met with the same evasive, meandering statements that Ted gave to the detectives?

  I will never know.

  36

  DETECTIVE NORM CHAPMAN of the Pensacola Police Department is a most likable man. There is much evidence that Ted liked him. It would be hard not to. I think the man is sincere, that his earthy, “good-ole-boy” quality is genuine, and I think he wanted desperately to find out what had happened to Kimberly Leach, for her parents’ sake. And he wanted to clear up the murders and beatings in Tallahassee. I think he also had self-aggrandizing motivations, just as we all do. For a cop with six years’ experience in a department stuck way up in the panhandle of Florida to elicit a confession from one of the most infamous fugitives in America would be something to remember. The detectives’ decision to block my phone call and my presence in Florida may have been the right one. It may have been tragically wrong.

  In July 1979, Norm Chapman sat on the witness stand in Judge Edward Cowart’s Dade County courtroom, his shoulders and belly straining at his sports jacket, his white socks visible beneath his slacks. He was not a braggart. He was what he seemed to he, a smiling, garrulous man, a man who carried a tape that would electrify the courtroom.

  Late on the evening of February 16, Ted had sent word to Norm Chapman that he wanted to talk, and talk without counsel. The tape of that long conversation with Chapman, Bodiford, and Patchen began at 1:29 A.M. on February 17.

  Ted’s voice is strong and confident. “O.K. Let’s see. It’s been a long day, but I had a good night’s sleep last night and I’m coherent. I’ve seen a doctor, called a lawyer.”

  If Ted had expected a grand hurrah when he revealed that he was Theodore Robert Bundy, he was to be disappointed. The three detectives had never heard of him. It was anticlimactic. What good did it do a man to be one of the most hunted fugitives in America if there was such a blank response when he finally announced who he was? It wasn’t until Officer Lee walked in with a copy of the FBI Ten-Most-Wanted flyer (to have Ted autograph it) that they really believed him.

  Chapman offered, “We’ll listen—whatever you want to talk about …”

  Ted laughed. “It is a bit formal.”

  “Anytime you get tired of our worn out faces, just say so,” Chapman said.

  “I’m in charge of entertainment …” Ted began.

  “You got plenty of cigarettes?”

  “Yeah. … It was a big deal not to tell my name.”

  “I think we all understand since you told us. We can see why you were reluctant. I must admit you kept your cool, standing before the judge and not telling your name. It’s more than I could do.”

  “You know my background?”

  “Only what you told me. I deal on a one-to-one basis. We’ll listen.”

  “The name business is a good way to start. I just knew the kind of publicity—if I got arrested in Omaha, Nebraska … I knew it was inevitable you’d discover my I.D. picture. I’d gone through such an effort, so much to get free the first time, it seemed like such a waste to give up so easily.”

  Chapman said he was interested to hear about Ted’s escapes. And Ted was anxious to tell about them. So clever, so well thought out, and then he’d been unable to tell anyone.

  It was ironic that it was to policemen, the “stupid cops,” he had put down for so long that he finally talked.

  There was frequent laughter on the tape as he started at the beginning with the leap for freedom from the Pitkin County Courthouse and continued through until he reached Tallahassee. His voice dropped and he took deep breaths as he berated himself for not finding a job. He mentioned how much he enjoyed playing racquetball and offered to sign permission for his stolen car to be searched. And then his voice broke.

  “You start crying in certain areas, like when you’re talking about racquetball,” Chapman commented.

  “It was just so good to be around people, to be a part of people. I have a habit that makes me want to acquire things—little things. I had a nice apartment in law school, and it was all taken away from me. I told myself I could live without cars and bicycles and stuff—just being free was enough. But I wanted things.”

  Ted described his escalating thefts, and again, castigated himself for being so stupid. “I never got a job. It was really stupid. I do like to work but I’m just reluctant to get a job. It was a terrible time not to get a job.”

  Chapman asked Ted if he had ever been to Sherrod’s in Tallahassee.

  “I never went there until a week and a half ago. The sound’s unbearable in there. It’s a disco.”

  “You ever crash fraternity or sorority parties for free beer or food?”

  “No, I had a bad experience that way a long time ago. I walked in with a friend and there was a belligerent drunk. I was able to run fast enough.”

  “You remember Rush Week—the beer busts out on the lawns in January?”

  “Yeah, I heard noise from some frats close to where I live.”

  “What did you do at night? Walk around?”

  “I’d go to the library. I made a point of going to bed early. Once I had the TV, I’d stay in my room ’cause I had something to do.”

  Asked to describe his Saturday nights, Ted veered away. He did not remember stealing a license tag around January 12 or 13, but he remembered one tag stolen six days after he got to Tallahassee, a tag from an orange and white van.

  Asked if he’d ever wiped his prints off the cars he’d stolen, he replied with surprise, “Well … I wore gloves, just leather gloves.” Tears brimmed in his eyes and blurred his words.

  “Anything else in Tallahassee you can clear up for us?”

  His voice was choked as he described stealing the neglected Raleigh bicycle. It seemed to be an almost animate companion.

  “I asked you about a white van, taken off campus …”

  “I really can’t talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because I can’t talk about it.” Ted was crying.

  “Because you didn’t take it, or …”

  Ted’s voice was muffled by sobs. “I just can’t … it’s a situation—”

  Chapman quickly shifted gears, changing the subject to Ted’s arrest in Utah. Ted explained he got one to fifteen on a kidnapping charge.

  “Man or woman?”

  “Oh well … it’s all so complicated. I thought you’d have all that background by now. I was in prison from March to late October 1976 in Utah when the murder charge came down from Colorado.”

  The detectives snapped a picture, and someone asked, “What’s your best profile? Hell, you made the top ten last week …”

  “They’ll take credit for my arrest.”

  “You don’t like th
e FBI?”

  “They’re overrated bastards.”

  Chapman asked Ted about what happened in Colorado.

  “Standard Oil slips … I don’t really understand how that came down. Oh yeah. … I had bought gas in Glenwood Springs the same day Caryn Campbell disappeared from Aspen about fifty miles away. If the bells rang before, they were clanging, especially since the Washington situation. I had a lot of connections in Washington—governor’s office, etc. The pressure was really on.”

  “What kind of homicide was it?”

  “Well, I know because it was communicated to me. They were young women. The captain of King County Homicide was under pressure but they never questioned me. They had no evidence.”

  “What kind of murders were they?”

  “No one knows because the parts are scattered.”

  “How about Colorado?”

  “I saw the autopsy pictures. Blunt trauma and strangulation …”

  “In what way?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chapman switched gears again and asked Ted if he ever went in sorority houses to take wallets.

  “No … too much risk. Too much security. I’d assume they’d have locks, lock devices, sound systems …”

  At that point, Ted requested that the tape recorder be turned off. He asked that no notes be taken.

  According to Detective Chapman’s courtroom testimony, a “bug” had been activated in the interrogation room, a bug that failed to record.

  In Washington State, such surreptitious recording of an interview would have made the whole interrogation tainted but it was allowed Florida.