The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  To Harmon’s credit, he could not have known that Ted Bundy had begun his twenties as the man I knew, the socially inept man, the man who felt he didn’t fit into a world of wealth and success. It was the latter-day infamous Ted who was smooth and charismatic. Infamy became Ted. Only as his crimes made black headlines did he become the Ted Bundy portrayed by Mark Harmon. That one-dimensional man was the “Hollywood TV Ted.” Harmon’s Ted was so charming and sexy that he sometimes seemed almost heroic.

  And that was the Ted that a whole new generation of teenage girls fell in love with. I was appalled at the letters and phone calls I got from young girls who wanted to rush to Florida to “save Ted Bundy.”

  Finally, I said—or wrote—firmly to each one: “You are not in love with Ted Bundy. You are in love with Mark Harmon.”

  I was gratified when several girls responded, “You know, you’re right. I got carried away seeing Mark Harmon.”

  Ted’s latest stay of execution had expired on May 6 but Polly Nelson announced that she would continue the fight to save his life on two fronts. She would protest the Supreme Court’s decision, arguing that they had not properly dismissed the appeal on its merits, and she would file a new appeal with the Supreme Court in the case of the murder of Kimberly Leach.

  While Polly Nelson scrambled for legal footing, Governor Graham set a new execution date: July 2, 1986. The word was that this would be it. Ted had slid by on his first warrant. But this was the second.

  Ted was scheduled to die at 7 A.M. on that first Wednesday in July, and all of Polly Nelson’s determined efforts to save him might not be able to stop his inexorable progression toward “Old Sparky,” the electric chair.

  While Nelson’s fight was slated toward appealing the conviction, she admitted that she was “willing to try any avenue” to spare Ted. Even an insanity defense. Would Ted cooperate in such a defense? He has always been so rational, so determined to be rational. I had always believed he would literally rather die than admit to any weakness of mind, any aberrance. Ted was so dedicated to being sane. To give up his sanity—even to live—might not be worth it.

  But Polly Nelson and James E. Coleman, Jr., began to make noises about the sanity issue. Coleman, a personable, brilliant young black attorney, tentatively tested the waters. He suggested that Ted’s competency was an area that had never been “fully explored.”

  Coleman said that Mike Minerva, the only attorney who had believed that Ted was incompetent, had been prevented from participating in Ted’s competency hearing way back in the spring of 1979. Ted, of course, had torn up the agreement that would have plea-bargained him into three consecutive twenty-five-year terms. In effect, Ted had chosen the very real threat of death by execution rather than admit that he was less than competent.

  Coleman believed that Ted was his own worst enemy. By insisting on running the show, Ted had set himself on this deadly path. Coleman argued that Ted, only a second-year law student, had frequently tried to direct his own defense, demanding that his attorneys be replaced and unknowingly undermining his right to effective representation. “Mr. Bundy was represented by a total of fourteen lawyers,” Coleman said. “He was also represented by himself. We think … he was denied effective counsel.”

  Could Coleman and Nelson now convince an appeals court that Ted Bundy was crazy? You cannot execute a crazy man, even if his descent into madness had occurred while he waited on Death Row. Vic Africano, Ted’s defense attorney in the Kimberly Leach case, believed that Ted was “a split personality.”

  “In all the time I was with Ted Bundy, I never saw anything that would indicate he could commit these crimes,” Africano reflected in June of 1986.

  But then, neither did I. Ted kept that side of himself hidden.

  Bob Dekle, the prosecutor in the Leach trial, had a blunter, less charitable opinion. He saw Ted differently. He had seen too many sociopaths in his career to believe the mask. “A sociopath is a person who, if you sit down and talk to that person, you would like him. And the longer you listen to him, and he tells you about how society—how everybody’s out to get him—you start to believe him. At times, Bundy had me believing him. But he’s just another sociopath— except he has a pretty face.”

  It looked as if it was really coming down. The death watch began in Starke, Florida. Nelson and Coleman filed appeals, requests for clemency hearings and stays of execution. Each was refused. Ted and Gerald Stano, 34, also linked to dozens of sex slayings of young women, were scheduled to die, in tandem as it were, two days before Independence Day.

  I believed that Ted was going to die this time. I was so sure of it that I somewhat naively attempted to phone him. Personal phone calls are not favored in Raiford Prison. Superintendent Dugger’s office did assure me, however, that they would pass on the word to Ted that I had called.

  Carole Ann Boone was there for Ted, as loyal and faithful as always. She and her son, Jamie Boone, spent the waiting hours with Ted whenever they were allowed. Carole Ann, an unwilling subject caught by the cameras, was much thinner than she had been at Ted’s 1979 trial, and she was blonde rather than brunette. She looked so different that she almost seemed to have taken on her husband’s chameleon-like aspect.

  Early on Tuesday, July 1st, Carole Ann, Jamie, and Rose, Ted and Carole Ann’s four-and-a-half-year-old daughter, visited in a sealed visitors’ room. Carole Ann left Raiford Prison shortly after noon, holding a green plastic trash bag over her head. Jamie guarded her protectively, shouting, “Shut up … shut up!” to the reporters who called out questions.

  Ted, moved to a holding cell, the last step before the walk to the death chamber, did not betray fear. “Except his eyes. There was something about his eyes,” one guard said, “that made you wonder if he was getting frightened.” Ted ate his breakfast of oatmeal and hotcakes. The guards watched over him carefully to be sure he would not commit suicide and cheat the electric chair.

  He had no reason to do that. Maybe Ted sensed that this wasn’t the time. Both he and Gerald Stano were given first a twenty-four-hour reprieve, and then an indefinite stay of execution. Ted had come within fifteen hours of dying, and he never spoke of fear. He never let them see so much as a quiver of his jaw muscle.

  His dignity intact, Ted moved from the holding cell back to his regular cell on Death Row. All the machinations of his attorneys and the courts had, once again, ended in a delay. While U.S. District Judge William Zloch of Fort Lauderdale rejected a petition from Ted’s attorneys, challenging Ted’s murder conviction in the Chi Omega cases, Nelson and Coleman appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. A three-judge panel would evaluate Zloch’s decision and the appeal. That could take months, and some said it might take years.

  It began to look as though it would be impossible to execute Ted Bundy. He was beating the system, and the taxpayers of Florida were paying for it.

  On August 4th, Ted wrote to me in response to the letter I’d sent him in March. His writing looked more out of control than I’d ever seen it, staggering over the pages up and down, words crossed out with overwrites. He was safe for a while, but his writing didn’t show he felt that.

  “I received the message you sent through Superintendent Dugger. Thank you very much. And thank you for the money and stamps you sent back in April. Now that things have calmed down some I can concentrate on doing some letter writing.”

  The niceties dispensed with, Ted started in once more on my general ineptitude in understanding serial murder. He found me “sincere,” but “trapped and limited.”

  “You simply don’t have a broad and complete enough data base to be making such judgments,” he chided. “The best I can do for you is refer you to the summary of the findings of a study done through the Behavioral Sciences [sic] Unit and reported in the August 1985 edition of the FBI Bulletin. General though the report is, it is by far the best and most accurate study in the area I have ever seen, and I have seen many. It is only a beginning, but a solid beginning.”


  The FBI, once “overrated bastards” to Ted, now almost had his stamp of approval. I had the FBI bulletin Ted referred to, and I knew two of the contributors well from the VI-CAP days. It was an excellent study—a study that has now become a book: Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives by Robert K. Ressler, Ann W. Burgess, and John E. Douglas.

  In this letter, Ted asked me not to put his words into print, and I decided that I would not, as long as he lived and fought his legal battles. He clearly didn’t trust me, and mentioned several times that he rarely trusted anyone.

  He ranted for pages about a man who had given public statements about things Ted allegedly had confessed to him. Ted denied this vociferously. Caught off guard by the deviousness of someone else, Ted was as outraged as I had ever known him to be.

  “He came on as such a decent, sincere, qualified, academic type,” Ted wrote, anguished. “And turned out to be not only a shallow fraud but a liar. I don’t use the word lightly. It shocked me. Really. I’ve met all kinds of people over the years. ‘X’ was not the kind I’d expect to lie as he did, and yet he fabricated things as no one else ever has. … It’s so sad, Ann. I never talked with that man about any case in which I was a suspect. Never. I’m no fool. I didn’t speculate or do anything along those lines. … We talked only in the most general terms. Nothing was tape recorded. … I have never had anyone lie to me like that before. Not even a cop.

  “It’s like open season on Ted Bundy. Anyone can say anything about Ted Bundy and people will believe it as long as it fits the popular myth. …”

  Ted was hoist on his own petard. But he was right in his assessment.

  Ted asked me to write, and to send money and stamps.

  There’s no way my family can help me now

  Be good.

  Peace

  ted

  I answered that letter, and a month later, he answered me. It was to be his last letter to me. It was friendlier than the first two of this trio of letters from him, letters written after a space of seven years. He talked about my having a word processor to write with, and said he wouldn’t mind having one himself even though it sounded so “primarily mechanical.”

  The bulk of his letter, the central part of it—perhaps the reason for the letter itself—was about the unsolved Green River Murder cases in the Seattle area. Seven years after Ted was arrested in Salt Lake City, the most prolific serial killings to date in America began in a terrible pattern. At least four dozen (and probably twice that many) young street girls,“Strawberries” in street lingo for baby prostitutes, had been murdered, and their bodies left in clusters in wooded areas near both Seattle and Portland.

  Three thousand miles away, Ted had theories.

  “It would seem that the case is about as cold as such a case can be. The folks on the Task Force must be spinning their investigative wheels. The way the person responsible dropped out of sight is truly fascinating. Of course, who knows, he may well be dead. There’s just no telling.

  “I’ve accumulated quite a lot of material on the case and developed many observations about it. A couple of times I’ve been tempted to express my views about the case. The public has been misled about the case. Public posturing by police officials is understandable but keeping the people ignorant about the essential nature of such crimes will in the end make a solution even less likely. And despite their best efforts, I can see that the investigators were limited by conventional concepts in an unconventional case.

  “Anyway I thought of making public my specific observations and ideas but decided people weren’t ready to accept my statements at face value. I didn’t need the publicity anyway. …”

  I had written to Ted about the scores of women who had contacted me about their “encounters” with him, although I didn’t give specific times or names or places. I commented that he would have had to have been superhuman to have been everywhere people “remembered” him. There had been a flurry in the press when campers found a tree in Sanpete County, Utah, with Ted Bundy’s name carved in it, and the date: “78.”

  “I too am familiar with the phenomena of Ted Bundy sightings,” he wrote. “Tells you a lot about the reliability of eye-witness identification, doesn’t it. Eye-witness id [sic] is the most inherently unreliable evidence used in court.

  “It also tells you a lot about fear.

  “The business about the tree in Utah with the name Ted Bundy carved in it is bizzare [sic]. The Utah authorities know very well that I wasn’t in Utah in 1978. There is probably nothing more certain than my whereabouts in 1978, and yet the Utah police act out their little farce. I believe it was done to assure people that the police are still actively investigating the case. I can’t say why, exactly. Is this an election year?”

  His humor was still caustic. I had asked Ted if he wanted something to read, and he explained that he could not receive books, even sent directly from the publisher. The exceptions were religious books or books that came in one of four package permits a year. Each package could contain four books, but Ted had used all of his permits for 1986.

  I had asked him too if he was busy working on his case, and he explained that he no longer concerned himself with legal pursuits. “I leave that all to my attorneys now. I don’t find legal work to be a positive, uplifting experience for me to say the least. Now that I have attorneys who have the ability and resources to handle the cases, I keep my involvement to a minimum. I have other things to do.”

  He did not say what those other things were.

  Write soon

  Be good.

  Peace

  ted

  I never heard from him again. I am sure that I wrote back to him. But then, the fall of 1986 was the beginning of a frenetic two years for me. I was finishing up my book on Diane Downs, Small Sacrifices, lecturing in California, and preparing for a month-long publicity tour. (That tour would somehow never slow down between the hardcover and the paperback editions of Small Sacrifices, and I seemed to be running faster and faster.)

  With Ted, there always seemed to be time. His life was like the Perils of Pauline. something always saved him in the final hour. I always thought I would write to him again, and see if he would answer. And I always wondered if maybe someday he would tell me the truth—or truths—he kept hidden so well.

  Ted had written that he no longer indulged in the semi-practice of criminal law, that he had other things to do. I suspect that a voluminous correspondence system took up much of Ted’s days. I was to learn that Ted wrote to many people, including women all over America. To those I have talked with, he wrote of his need for stamps, money orders, research. He answered an eloquent, poetic letter from a man who had grown up in Tacoma at the same time Ted did. The man was a gentle soul, a lover of animals, who lived on an island in Puget Sound. He was also a talented writer of nostalgia, and I cannot imagine that Ted could resist the letters that must have evoked bittersweet memories of his own youth. Ted wrote back, and gradually built a little web—or thought he had.

  His island correspondent told Ted about himself, and about his work. And bells must have rung. This man was in a position to provide Ted with information that he had sought for years: Meg’s address. Ted’s longtime lover had moved often enough so that she had finally freed herself of him, even of his letters. He did not know where she lived. And he wanted to know that.

  Ted’s correspondent worked in personnel. Although his letters sounded guileless, he was very shrewd. He could see Ted’s mind working in his letters. He knew his value to Ted was in the fact that he could tap a code into a computer and come up with information on Meg. He deduced that Ted wanted to be able to send a letter to Meg’s secret address, to say to her in effect, “See, you will never be able to hide from me. Even though I am three thousand miles away on Death Row, I have the power to find you.”

  Knowing it would be the end of his correspondence with Ted Bundy, the personnel man refused Ted the intelligence on Meg.

  Ted never wrote to him again.

 
To a registered nurse in the South, a woman who felt a little sorry for Ted because she had a friend in prison, he explained that his wife had too much to do to run errands for him. He needed information on serial killers, and he needed stamps and a little money. In 1984, unknown to me, Ted also asked the nurse to locate my address. He explained to her that he barely knew me, that I had exploited him— but, for whatever reason, he wanted to find me. I had never changed my mailing address. I still have not. He could have written to me easily, but perhaps he had lost the post office box number. Or, more chillingly, he may have wanted to prove that he could find me too. Ted knew that I never revealed my street address. It would have been a subtle psychological ploy if he was able to send a letter directly to my house.

  By the time I learned he was trying to reach me, I had already written to him. I have no idea what he had in mind in 1984. He never mentioned his search for me. I could imagine all kinds of things. In reality, I suspect he was looking for times and dates of other serial murders I had written about in the Northwest. He was trying to blame his crimes on other men, and I had all the specifics in my research files.

  As Ted explained to at least a dozen women correspondents who contacted me later, he needed help with errands. Carole Ann Boone had run errands for Ted for years without complaint. She was, of course, a very visible presence as he awaited execution in July of 1986.

  But, so gradually that no one in the media really picked up on it, Carole Ann was slipping out of Ted’s life. Unless she chooses to write about her life with Ted one day, or to give interviews, which she has not done for years, no one can do more than speculate on why Carole Ann was seldom there for her “Bunnie.”