The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  But when one considers an extrasensory awareness of danger or evil, I know I felt it in the narrow space between the Theta House and the fraternity just to the south of it. On the hottest, sunniest days, the air is icy, the pine trees there are crippled and blunted, and I want very much to be away from it, from the cement steps where Georgeann was to have perched while she threw pebbles at her roommate’s window.

  Fear made some of Georgeann’s sorority sisters drop out of school for a time. A dozen years later, Georgeann Hawkins is still missing. The sorority girls inside the Theta House seem oblivious to what happened to her. They were only five or six in 1974. For them, Georgeann Hawkins might well have vanished in the 1950s.

  Ted Bundy’s rooming house on 12th N.E. looks exactly the same as it did the day he moved out and headed for Salt Lake City. The old rooming house the next block over, where the woman was raped by a man in a dark watch cap, has been razed to make room for the University of Washington’s new law school buildings.

  Farther north on 12th N.E., the green house where Lynda Ann Healy disappeared in 1974 has been painted a dull brown. The main floor is a preschool now, and, in the front window, someone has pasted a decal of, eerily, a huge smiling teddy bear.

  Donna Manson has never been found. The campus at Evergreen State College is even more heavily thicketed with fir trees today. In Utah and Colorado, the missing are still gone: Debby Kent and Julie Cunningham and Denise Oliverson.

  No more evidence has been found. Not an earring. Not a bicycle. Not even a faded piece of clothing. All things that were secret a dozen years ago remain hidden.

  When Ted was delivered by helicopter back to the bleak walls of the Florida State Prison northwest of Starke, he joined over two hundred inmates on Death Row, the building housing more condemned men than any other state prison. Compared to Utah’s Point-of-the-Mountain and the jails where he’d been incarcerated in Colorado, Raiford was a long step down in the amenities of prison life.

  Starke, Florida, is the closest town of any size, with a population of about a thousand people. Approaching from the east, it appears to be a shantytown, economically depressed. The houses move from shack to middle-class closer to the hub of Starke where the main intersection is marked by a Western Auto Store.

  About three miles west of town, the prison looms on the left, and there is a neat sign reading “Florida State Prison.” Just past the sign, visitors turn into the main driveway and proceed one hundred yards to the parking lot and the brick administration building.

  The prison is fifty yards beyond. It is not a modern concrete fortress. It is an old prison, stucco and faintly greenish white, not unlike the pallor of the inmates it holds.

  The grounds are perfectly manicured, with bright flower beds. The driveway and the parking lot are paved with carefully troweled cement.

  Richard Dugger is the superintendent of the Florida State Prison. He is, in a sense, a “lifer” too. Dugger was born on the prison grounds when his father was the warden. He was raised here. He is Ted Bundy’s contemporary, a tremendously fit, tautly muscled athlete—the antithesis of the standard movie portrayal of the potbellied, semi-comedic Southern warden. Dugger has been described as a rigid man who goes by the book. He is certainly a no nonsense prison superintendent.

  Dugger runs his prison meticulously. Trustees keep the flat grounds of Florida State Prison a tentative oasis in the midst of inhospitable sandy soil. There is a farm, as most prisons have with cows, pigs, and whatever will grow to add to the prison menu.

  For Ted, born on Lake Champlain, nurtured on the Delaware River and raised on Puget Sound—Ted, who craved water and trees and the smell of salt air coming off some sound or bay or ocean, this last stop on his downward spiral had to be hell.

  Raiford sits smack dab in the middle of a triangle of roads surrounding nothing. There are no waterways at all. The air outside dries the membranes of the nose and throat, or smothers with mugginess. Beyond the grounds, the vista is endless and barren. There is a factory down the road, the vegetation is scrabbly palms, and whatever will grow without water and with too much sun.

  The Okefenokee Swamp is approximately fifty miles north of Raiford. Gainesville (the city Ted once dismissed when his pin stuck there on a map because it had no large waterways) is thirty-five miles south. The Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean are east and west, each an easy hour and a half’s drive for a free man.

  It probably didn’t matter at all what it was like around Raiford. Ted Bundy would not spend time outside the walls. With his history and expertise at escape, every precaution would be taken so that he would not demonstrate his talents at Raiford. This was something of a disappointment to a number of burly guards who muttered that they’d sure as hell like to see the bastard make a run for it—as they’d “enjoy splattering Bundy all over a wall.”

  Ted was not destined to be a popular prisoner. Not so much because of the crimes for which he’d been sentenced, but because of his attitude. Ted Bundy was a star and that rankled both guards and fellow convicts.

  When he wrote to me from the Utah State Prison, Ted had confided that he was welcome in the “general population”—a sought-after “prison lawyer.” He had not done very well for himself when he played lawyer in Miami. His counsel was tainted now. Besides, in this Southern prison, he was isolated among all those men struggling not to die. He was alone in a cell most of the time, a cell once occupied by John Spenkelink, the convict who had been executed six days before Ted chose to tear up his “admission of guilt” on May 31, 1979, throwing away what proved to be his last good chance to elude the death penalty. He would have been locked up forever, but he would have lived.

  If it was a gamble. Ted had lost.

  Less than a year later, Ted sat in the dead Spenkelink’s cell, a short walk from “Old Sparky,” the electric chair that would soon hold the record for electrocuting more convicted killers than any other since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976.

  But Ted was not alone in this ugly life he’d come to. When Carole Ann Boone spoke her surreptitious vows of marriage in Kimberly Leach’s murder trial on February 9, she had meant them. She would stick by her “Bunnie.”

  Carole Ann did not, however, take Ted’s name. She remained “Boone.” After the two widely publicized Florida trials, the name Boone was notorious enough. She and her son, Jamie, who was in his early teens, a dark, good-looking young man, who impressed news people at the Miami trial as being an exceptionally nice kid, chose to live not in Starke but in Gainesville.

  Carole Boone is an intelligent woman, with advanced degrees and an impressive job resume. She had spent her financial as well as her emotional reserves, however, in her fight to save her new husband. Ted at least was housed, fed, and clothed. Carole Ann and Jamie were on their own.

  No one has ever questioned that Carole Ann believed in Ted’s innocence. I have often wondered if she truly expected that Ted would be freed, that they would one day be able to settle down like a normal family. Her obsession with him had landed her in Gainesville, Florida, on public assistance, at least temporarily. She became only one of hundreds of prisoners’ wives clogging the employment market.

  But it did not seem to matter. Nothing mattered but the fact that she was still close to Ted. She was Mrs. Theodore Robert Bundy, and each week she could journey up through Starke, turn at the Western Auto Store, and go three miles out the dusty two-lane road to see her husband. From time to time, she would write to Louise Bundy to tell her how Ted was doing. But in essence, Carole Ann had become everything to Ted, as he had been for her for so many years now.

  Whatever he asked for, she would try to give him.

  The Stranger Beside Me was published in August of 1980. I had not written to Ted, and he had not contacted me since his ebullient phone call just before his Miami trial. As I wrote this book, I had been startled to find a great deal of anger surfacing from someplace inside me where I had unknowingly repressed it for years.
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br />   I thought that I had juggled my ambivalence about Ted very well. But listing the murders, detailing the crimes, and being closeted for months in my office where the walls were papered with the photographs of young women who had died grotesquely changed me. I thought that sometime I would write to Ted, but I wasn’t ready when I finished the book. And I wasn’t ready when I went out on a media tour for Stranger in August of 1980.

  In seven weeks, I flew to thirty-five cities, and, in each, talked to interviewers from radio, television, and newspapers about Ted Bundy. Some of them had never heard of him. Some, in surprisingly distant cities, had watched his trials on television.

  The night shows were different. Many listening to their radios out there in the darkness were unable to sleep, for one reason or another. The callers’ voices were more emotional than daytime listeners,’ and opinions were expressed more freely. Many of them were angry but their rage was polarized.

  In Denver, on a midnight-to-3:00 A.M. talk show, the host left me on the phone, and on the air, for fifteen minutes with a man who bragged that he had murdered nine women “because they deserved it”—disconnecting him only when the man threatened to “blow me away” with his .45 because I was being “unfair” to Bundy.

  The host walked me downstairs, pointing out the bulletproof glass in the lobby, and helped me into a cab with a perfect stranger who, fortunately, turned out to be most protective as he raced me to my hotel. (Four years later, the host of that late-night talk show was shot and killed in front of his own townhouse.)

  In Los Angeles, I had a similar threat because I was “too kind” to Ted Bundy.

  But, for the most part, readers understood what it was I was trying to convey, and I was grateful for that.

  My itinerary took me to Florida in September. The closest I came to the Florida State Prison was the day I was in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Just as I went off the air in a radio station in Tampa, an urgent call came in from a man. The host said that I could not talk, but gave the caller the number of the next station where I would be interviewed.

  But when I arrived in St. Petersburg, there was only a message. A man who would not give his name had said it was urgent that he speak with me, that I would know why, but that he could not stay on the phone.

  The next day, I was in Dallas. I never found out who the caller was. Ted? Or possibly just a “220”?

  The St. Petersburg Times interviewer had told me that he’d come up with a novel approach for reviewing my book. He had sent it to Raiford and asked Ted to criticize it, on its literary merits only, promising him the usual thirty-five-dollar payment that book critics received.

  Ted would have loved that, I thought, if Vic Africano let him do it. Ted had not responded, but the book had not been returned.

  In late September, after weeks on the road, I came home to Seattle for a few days to rest up for the second half of the tour. There was a letter waiting for me, a letter postmarked “Starke, Florida,” and dated the day after I had been in Tampa. The handwriting was as familiar to me as my own.

  It was, of course, from Ted.

  Dear Ann,

  Since you have seen fit to take advantage of our relationship, I think it only fair that you share your great good fortune with my wife, Carole Ann Boone. Please send her $2500—or more—to: [he gave her address] as soon as possible.

  Best regards,

  ted

  Curiously, my immediate reaction was one of guilt. Emotion without rationale: What have I done to this poor man? And then I remembered that I had never once lied to Ted. I had my book contract months before he was a suspect, I told him about it when he became a suspect, and I reiterated the details of my contract to him many times in letters. He knew I was writing a book about the elusive “Ted,” and still he had chosen to keep in touch with me, to write me long letters and to call often.

  I believe that Ted felt that I could be manipulated into writing the definitive “Ted Bundy is innocent” book. And I would have done that, if I could have. But the Miami trial had exposed his guilt with such merciless clarity. I had written what I had to write. Now, he was furious with me, and demanding money for Carole Ann.

  That he had lied to me—probably from the first moment I met him—had not occurred to him.

  When I reconsidered, I had to smile. If Ted thought that I was basking in riches, he was woefully mistaken. My advance payment for the book that one day became The Stranger Beside Me had been $10,000, spread over five years, with a third of it going to pay my expenses in Miami.

  I glanced in my checkbook. I had twenty dollars in the bank. There would be more coming, of course. My book was selling very well, but I was learning as all authors do that royalty payments come only twice a year. In 1975, I had offered Ted a portion of book royalties, if he should choose to write a chapter or two from his viewpoint, and he had declined.

  I reduced his request to a simple equation. I had four children to support. Carole Ann Boone had only one. Even if I had had the money Ted requested, it did not seem fair, somehow, that I should help support Carole Ann.

  I started to write to Ted to explain my feelings, and then, for the very first time, I truly realized that he could not, would not, understand or empathize or even care what my situation was. I had been meant to serve a purpose in his life. I had been the designated Bundy PR person, and I had failed to produce.

  For six years, I didn’t write to Ted again. Nor he to me.

  Ted Bundy, who had been all over the news for five years, virtually disappeared for months. The word was that he was in his cell, poring over law books, preparing for appeals. There were three books published about Ted in 1980, including mine, and the man who once yearned to be governor of Washington became instead a nationally known criminal, his chilling eyes staring back from newsstands and bookshelves all over America.

  There was yet another book in 1981. The woman I called “Meg Anders,” the woman who had been with Ted longer than any other, published her story, titled The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy.

  Meg’s real first name is Liz. She used that and the fictitious surname “Kendall” as her pen name. She did not realize, perhaps, that becoming an author had made her a public figure. Seattle papers immediately printed her true name, and her hope for anonymity for herself and her daughter, fifteen in 1981, was destroyed.

  Liz/Meg had received a call from Ted at Pensacola Police headquarters on the same Thursday night in February 1978 when I did. In her book, she intimated that Ted had confessed to her the kidnappings of Carol DaRonch and Debby Kent and the murders of Brenda Ball, Janice Ott, and Denise Naslund. She quoted Ted as saying that the police were “years off” when they speculated about when he had begun to kill.

  Liz wrote that she asked Ted if he ever wanted to kill her, and said he admitted he had tried to kill her once. He had allegedly left her asleep in her hide-a-bed after closing the damper on the fireplace and putting towels against the door crack. She had awakened, she wrote, with streaming eyes, choking in a smoke-filled room.

  Liz Kendall’s book, published by a Seattle firm, may well have caused her more grief than comfort. Families of the victims bombarded radio stations where she was interviewed, demanding to know why, if Ted had confessed to her, she had not told the police. Many callers reduced Liz to tears, as she tried to explain that everything was being taken out of context. No, Ted had never actually confessed to her.

  At the end of June 1980, Liz got a last letter from Ted, mailed not from the Florida State Prison, but forwarded by Carole Ann Boone. Oddly, Ted berated Liz for going to the police and telling them “fairly uncomplimentary” things about him. Why would he have been so angry at that late date? I can remember so well having lunch with Ted in January 1976 when he told me that he knew it had been Liz who turned him in to the Salt Lake County Sheriff, adding, “But I love her more than ever.”

  Whatever Ted’s reason for castigating Liz, he called her weeks later and apologized. That, she wrote, in the ending o
f her book, was the last time she heard from him.

  Of all the lives that Ted Bundy damaged irrevocably, beyond those of the women he murdered, Liz’s may head the list. She was—is—a very nice woman, fighting a hostile world. She loved Ted for a long time. She may still.

  • • •

  There are no authorized conjugal visits in the Florida State Penitentiary, no cozy trailers or rooms where inmates may share intimacy with their spouses. The visitors’ room in Death Row is well-lighted, utilitarian, with tables and stools bolted to the floor, redolent of wax, cigarettes, disinfectant, and sweat.

  But there are ways around the rules. One of my periodic callers is a woman who visits a relative on the Florida State Penitentiary’s Death Row. Like most visitors, she was fascinated to catch a glimpse of the infamous Ted Bundy. And she has learned a great deal about how certain activities are accomplished in the Death Row visitors’ area.

  “They bribe the guards,” she explains. “Each prisoner who wants sex with his wife or girlfriend puts up five dollars. After they get a kitty of about fifty or sixty dollars, they draw lots. The winner gets to take his lady into the restroom or behind the water cooler and the guards look the other way.”

  “Have you seen Ted?” I asked her. “What does he look like now?”

  “You bet I have. He’s real thin. Some of them say he’s just gone crazy in there … just purely crazy … that they have to keep him doped up with Thorazine all the time. …”

  My caller was afraid of Ted Bundy. “His eyes. He just kept staring at me and staring at me and he never blinks.”

  But Ted had not gone crazy. He was planning and studying and working things out in his head, just as he always had. There was the mythic “Ted” who terrified female visitors, and there was the real Ted, who, if he’d had a white shirt, a tie, and a suit, could still have sat easily at the governor’s right hand.