The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  “Yes!” she replied with a giggle and a broad smile.

  “Then I do hereby marry you.” Ted grinned expansively. It was done before the prosecutors realized it. Carole Ann and her Bunnie were now man and wife.

  Most of the eyes in the courtroom were decidedly dry, and there would be no honeymoon. The second anniversary of Kimberly Leach’s death was now Ted Bundy’s wedding day. Carole Ann had prevailed. She had remained loyal and omnipresent. Stephanie, Meg, and Sharon were now relegated to Ted’s dim past. One got the impression that Carole Ann’s tenacity was such that she might indeed wrest Ted from the very arms of the electric chair if it came to that.

  And it seemed that it would come to that. After listening to Jerry Blair’s characterization of the wedding as “a little Valentine’s Day charade,” and to Ted’s own forty-minute rambling plea for his life, the jury retired for forty-five minutes to deliberate on the question of the death penalty.

  It was 3:20 P.M. on February 9 when they announced their decision that Ted must die. He rose in his chair and shouted, “Tell the jury they were wrong.”

  On February 12, Judge Jopling sentenced Ted to die— for the third time—in the electric chair in Raiford Prison. As Ted stood to receive that sentence, he carried a red envelope in his hand: a valentine for his bride.

  Within an hour, Ted was in a helicopter lifting off the courthouse roof, headed back to Raiford Prison. In the language of Florida state law, he had been convicted once again of a crime “extremely wicked, shockingly evil, and vile.”

  There would be appeals ahead, predicted to take years, but for all intents and purposes, the Ted Bundy story was over. Locked away from the rays of the limelight, the rays that for Ted seem necessary to sustain life, I know that he will continue to sink deeper and deeper into the compulsive madness that grips him. He will never again be the Golden Boy beloved by the media.

  Ted Bundy is a killer. A three-times convicted killer, a throwaway man now.

  I cannot forget his phone call in October 1975, the call where he said calmly, “I’m in a little trouble—but it’s all going to work out. If anything goes wrong, you’ll read about it in the newspapers.”

  AFTERWORD—

  1986

  AS I WRITE THIS, it has been six years since Ted Bundy was sentenced, for the third time, to die in Florida’s electric chair. In my naïveté in 1980, I ended The Stranger Beside Me by suggesting that the Ted Bundy story was at last over. It was not. I vastly underestimated Ted’s ability to regenerate in both spirit and body, to pit his will and mind continually against the justice system. Nor was I able to extricate Ted from my mind simply by putting him and my feelings about him on paper. The relief that I felt when I wrote the last line was immense. This book was a healing catharsis after a half-dozen years of horror.

  But the next half-dozen years have forced me to accept that some significant part of my consciousness will be inhabited by Ted Bundy and his crimes, for as long as I live. I have written five books since The Stranger Beside Me, and yet when my phone rings or a letter comes from somewhere far away—several times a week still—the questions are invariably about “the Ted book.”

  My correspondents fall generally into four categories. Laymen have contacted me from as far away as Greece, South Africa and the Virgin Islands, consumed with curiosity about Ted Bundy’s eventual fate. Most of them ask, “When was he executed?”

  Police investigators call wondering where Ted Bundy might have been on a particular date. (Ted’s comments to Pensacola detectives that February night he was captured in 1978 are well-remembered by homicide detectives all over America. Although officially a murder suspect in only five states, Ted told Detectives Norm Chapman and Don Patchen that he had killed “in six states” and that they should “add one digit” to the FBI’s victim estimate of thirty-six.)

  The calls that surprised me most were from Ted’s burgeoning “fan club,” unofficial but passionately vocal. So many young women who had “fallen in love” with Ted Bundy and who wanted to know how they could contact him to let him know how much they loved him. When I explained that he had married Carole Ann Boone, my words fell on deaf ears. I finally asked them to read my book once more, asking, “Are you sure that you can tell the difference between a teddy bear and a fox?”

  Almost as fervent were the religious readers who hoped to get word to Ted so that they might prevail upon him to repent before it was too late.

  Finally, there were the callers that Seattle policemen refer to as “220’s,” people deranged to greater and lesser degrees, who imagined that they had some bizarre connection to Ted.

  The latter were the most difficult to deal with. An elderly woman came to my door near midnight, regal and impeccably dressed, and yet distressed because “Ted Bundy has been stealing my nylons and my pantyhose. He’s been coming into my house since 1948 and he takes my personal files. He’s very clever, he puts everything back so that you can scarcely tell it’s been moved …”

  It did no good to point out that her “thefts” had begun when Ted was still a toddler.

  Her visit did, however, make me realize that I could no longer have my home address printed in the phone book.

  In ways that I could never have imagined, Ted Bundy changed my life. I have flown two hundred thousand miles, lectured a thousand times to groups ranging from ladies’ book study clubs to defense attorneys organizations to police training seminars to the FBI Academy—always about Ted. Some questions are easy enough for me to answer. Some may never be answered and some provoke more and more questions in an endless continuum.

  If, indeed, Ted claimed to have murdered in six states—then which state was the sixth? Had there really been a sixth state—a hundred and thirty-six victims or, God help us, three hundred and sixty victims? Or had it been, for Ted, a game to play with his interrogators in Pensacola? His cunning jousts with police were always akin to Dungeons & Dragons, and he so delighted in outwitting them, watching them scurry around to do what he considered his bidding.

  There may well have been myriad other victims, and yet it is an almost impossible task to deduce precisely where Ted Bundy was on a particular date in the late sixties and early seventies. I have tried to isolate periods of that time almost twenty years ago now, and so has Bob Keppel, the onetime King County detective who knows as much about Ted as any cop in America. But Ted was always a traveler, and an impulsive wanderer at that. He would say he was going one place, and head somewhere else. He hated to be made accountable for his whereabouts—by anyone—and he reveled in popping up to surprise those who knew him.

  The year 1969 found Ted visiting relatives in Arkansas, and attending classes at Temple University in Philadelphia, his childhood home. In 1969, a beautiful dark-haired young woman was stabbed to death far back in the “stacks” of the library, at Temple. That case, more than a decade unsolved, came back to a Pennsylvania homicide detective when he traced Ted’s journeys in my book. In the end, he could only conjecture. No one could place Ted in that library on that evening.

  Even more haunting is the unsolved murder of Rita Curran in Burlington, Vermont, on July 19, 1971. Each born in Burlington, Rita Curran and Ted Bundy were twenty-four years old that summer. Ted had, of course, been raised on the opposite coast while Rita grew up in the tiny community of Milton, Vermont, daughter of the town’s zoning administrator.

  Rita was a very lovely but shy young woman. Her dark hair fell midway down her back. Sometimes, she parted it on the left side, sometimes in the middle. A graduate of Burlington’s Trinity College, she taught second grade at the Milton Elementary School during the school year. Like Lynda Ann Healy, Rita spent much of her time and energy working with deprived and handicapped children. Although she was well into her twenties, she hadn’t really lived away from home until the summer of 1971. She had worked as a chambermaid at the Colonial Motor Inn in Burlington for three previous summers, but this year was the first she’d taken an apartment there rather than commuting from her
parents’ Milton home ten miles north.

  She was attending classes in teaching remedial reading and language at the University of Vermont’s graduate school, and shared the apartment on Brookes Avenue with a female roommate. Rita Curran had no steady boyfriend— and that was probably one of her reasons for spending the summer in Burlington. She was hoping to meet a man who would be right for her. She wanted to be married—to have children of her own—and she’d laughed to friends, “I’ve gone to three weddings this year—all the bachelors in Milton are taken!”

  • • •

  On Monday, July 19, 1971, Rita changed bedding and vacuumed rooms at the Colonial Motor Inn from 8:15 A.M. to 2:40 P.M. That evening, she rehearsed with her barbershop quartet until ten. Rita Curran’s roommate and a friend left her in the apartment on Brookes at 11:20 to go to a restaurant. Both the front and back doors were unlocked when they left. Burlington, Vermont, was hardly a high-crime area.

  People didn’t lock doors.

  When Rita’s friends returned, the apartment was quiet and they assumed she had gone to sleep. They talked for an hour and then Rita’s roommate walked into the bedroom. Rita Curran lay nude. Murdered. She had been strangled manually, beaten savagely on the left side of the head, and raped. Her torn underpants were beneath her body. Her purse, contents intact, was nearby.

  Burlington detectives traced the escape route of the killer and found a small patch of blood near the backdoor leading off the kitchen. He had, perhaps, dashed through the kitchen and out through the shed as Rita’s roommate came in the front door. A canvass of neighbors was fruitless. No one had heard a scream or a struggle.

  In 1971, there were approximately 10,000 homicides in America. What intrigued retired FBI special agent John Bassett, a native of Burlington, when he read about Ted Bundy was the remarkable resemblance between Rita Curran and Stephanie Brooks, the fact that Rita had died of strangulation and bludgeoning to the head and the proximity of the Colonial Motor Inn where Rita worked to an institution that had wrought so much emotional trauma in Ted Bundy’s life: the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers.

  The Lund home was right next door to the motel.

  I had always assumed that Ted’s trip to Burlington had occurred in the summer of 1969 when he journeyed east, but John Bassett’s call made me wonder. It was in the fall of 1971 when Ted spoke to me of “finding out who I really was.”

  If Ted was in Burlington in July of 1971, if he walked past the building where he was born, if he, perhaps, checked into the Colonial Motor Inn, there are no records whatsoever to confirm or deny it.

  There is only a blurred notation in the Burlington “dog-catcher’s” records that note a person named “Bundy” had been bitten by a dog that week.

  In talking with Bassett, with Rita Curran’s parents, and with a detective from the Burlington Police Department, I, too, was fascinated by so many similarities, but there was little I could do to confirm their suspicions about Ted Bundy. Meg Anders wrote in her book The Phantom Prince that she saw Ted sometimes that summer and sometimes he didn’t show up for dates. She had begun to notice a moodiness in him.

  But was Ted gone long enough to make a trip to Vermont? And is it simply too easy to imagine Ted Bundy’s shadow wherever a beautiful dark-haired woman died by strangulation and blows to the left side of the head?

  There are many commonalities between Rita Curran’s murder and those that came later and were attributed to Ted.

  How many victims were there for Ted Bundy? Will we ever know?

  A dozen or more young women have called me since 1980, absolutely convinced that they had escaped from Ted Bundy. In San Francisco. In Georgia. In Idaho. In Aspen. In Ann Arbor. In Utah…

  He could not have been everywhere, but, for these women, there are terrified memories of a handsome man in a tan Volkswagen, a man who gave them rides and who wanted more. They are sure that it was Ted who reached for them, and declare that they never hitchhiked again. For other women, there is a man with a brilliant smile who came to their door, ingratiating, and then angry when they would not let him in. “It was him. I’ve seen his picture, and I recognized him.”

  Mass hysteria? I think yes, for most. For some, I wonder.

  There have been other calls that left no doubt in my mind. Lisa Wick, nearing forty now, called me. Lisa was the stewardess who survived a bludgeoning with a two-by-four as she slept in a basement apartment on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle in the summer of 1966. Her roommate, Lonnie Trumbull, died. Like so many of the later victims who were struck repeatedly on the head as they slept, Lisa Wick lost weeks of memory forever.

  Lisa did not call to tell me that she had read my book. She called to say that she could not read my book. “I try to pick it up and read it, but it is impossible. When my hand touches the cover, when I look at his eyes, I get sick to my stomach.”

  Somewhere, buried in her deepest forbidden memory, Lisa Wick knows that she has seen those eyes before. But long after her physical injuries have healed, her mind remains bruised, and protects itself. “I know that it was Ted Bundy who did that to us but I can’t tell you how I know.”

  There have been no calls from Ann Marie Burr, who would be thirty-one if she were alive. From the night she disappeared from her own home in Tacoma in August of 1962, there has been no sign of her. And yet I have had more calls, with information, and with question, about Ann Marie than any of the other victims.

  A young woman, whose brother was Ted Bundy’s best boyhood friend said, “We lived right across the street from the Bundys and when that little girl disappeared, the police were all over our street. They searched the woods up at the end of the street many times. They questioned everybody because we lived so close to the Burrs’ house.”

  An older woman, now living in a retirement home, who lived near the Burrs in 1962 remembered, “He was the paperboy. Ted was the morning paperboy. That little girl, Ann Marie, used to follow him around like a puppy. She really thought he was something. They knew each other all right. She would have gone with him if he asked her to crawl out the window.”

  It is so long ago. Twenty-four years.

  A young woman called from Florida one day, an assistant in the State Attorney General’s Office. “I’m a Chi Omega,” she began, “and I read your book.”

  I said, “I was a Chi Omega too—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “I mean I was a Chi O at Florida State. I was there in Tallahassee that night, in the house when he got in.”

  We talked about how it could have happened, with all those girls, thirty-nine of them and a housemother. How could anyone have done so much damage, so quietly in such a short time?

  “He had already scouted it out that afternoon I think,” she mused. “For some reason, we were all gone Saturday afternoon, even the housemother. The house was empty for a couple of hours. When we came home, the housemother’s cat was acting spooked, and its hair was standing on end. It ran through our legs and out the door and it didn’t come back for two weeks.”

  She said that some of the girls had felt the presence of a kind of evil that night. The Chi O’s had wondered only a little while about the cat’s behavior, but, later that night, at least two of the girls who were upstairs in the sleeping area had experienced stark terror, a free-floating dread with nothing to pin it to.

  “Kim had a sore throat, and she went to bed early. She got up sometime during the night to go down to the bathroom to get a drink of water because she was coughing. She saw that the lights were out in the hallway. They were almost always on, and it was pitch-dark but she just had a little way to walk to touch the switch. But she said she suddenly felt such unreasoning terror, as if something awful was waiting for her. She had a terrible cough and she really needed a drink of water, but she backed into her room and locked the door. She didn’t come out until the police banged on the door later.

  “And, it must have been a little bit after that, Tina started down the backstairs to the kitchen to get a snack. It was
the same kind of thing. She couldn’t seem to make her feet go down those stairs. She started to shake, and she ran back to her room too. She’d felt something—or someone—waiting down below. …”

  I had always believed that Margaret Bowman had been Ted’s designated victim that January night in 1978. Margaret looked very much like Stephanie Brooks. She was a beautiful girl with the same long, silken dark hair. It would have been easy enough for Ted to have spotted her on the Florida State campus, or walking near The Oak and the Chi O House or even at Sherrod’s. But how could Ted have known which room Margaret Bowman slept in?

  I asked my Chi Omega caller that. “How did he know just where to go?”

  “We had a room plan posted—”

  “A room plan?”

  “Like a blueprint of the house. Each room had a number, and the names of the girls who had that room were written in.”

  “Where was it?”

  “In the foyer. Near the front door, on the wall there. We took it down after.”

  Posted on the foyer wall, right there in the one area of the sorority house where dates and delivery men and strangers could read it and pinpoint exactly which room each girl occupied. It would have been propitious for a man stalking a particular girl.

  The Chi Omegas, beseiged by the press, ousted from their rooms by investigators dusting for prints, gathering evidence, and testing for blood, were evacuated from the huge house on West Jefferson and farmed out around Tallahassee with alumnae. They came back two weeks later, just about the same time the housemother’s cat deemed the house safe again.

  I have not been back to the Chi O House in Tallahassee, but I have returned many times to the Theta House on the University of Washington campus in Seattle, with screenwriters or magazine photographers, who want to see where Georgeann Hawkins vanished.

  The alley behind Greek Row looks the same, with students constantly moving back and forth. Night or day, fraternity boys are still shooting basketballs at hoops nailed to telephone poles. The cars parked along there are newer models than those in the police photos but otherwise, nothing has changed, not even the sorority itself that was Georgeann’s destination.