The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  I think those of us who followed the case were almost surfeited on that sort of news. It was growing hard to follow—from circuit court to federal appeals court to the U.S. Supreme Court. I remember saying to a young Florida assistant A.G., “It almost seems as though Ted can take one issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and it gets turned down, and then he can find another issue and start all over again.”

  “You got it,” he said succinctly.

  GENE MILLER of the Miami Herald called me during the first week of December 1988. We had talked sporadically over the decade since we met at the first Florida trial in Miami.

  “Ted’s going to go,” he said.

  “… what?”

  “The word is that he will be executed by early spring 1989.”

  “I’ve heard the word before,” I said.

  “This time, they sound positive.”

  I thanked him. He said that he had a young reporter, Dave Von Drehle, who was only twenty-seven, but a natural. “Dave’s doing a long piece on Bundy. Can he call you?”

  “Sure.”

  Not believing that it was really going to happen in the foreseeable future, I talked with Von Drehle. He seemed to feel too that the time was at hand. Von Drehle’s excellent article appeared in the Herald’s Sunday edition on December 11.

  “This is Bundy’s last stand,” he began.

  I mused that the reporter who now knew every facet of Ted Bundy’s history had been only twelve years old when Lynda Ann Healey died. He was not even born when Ann Marie Burr vanished from her Tacoma home in 1961.

  Ted’s attorneys had taken what might well be their final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Should the Court deny that appeal—already denied by judges in Orlando, Tallahassee, and Atlanta—Governor Bob Martinez would be free to sign another death warrant. This would be Ted Bundy’s fourth death warrant.

  On January 17, 1989, the Supreme Court denied, and Martinez immediately signed that death warrant.

  The warrant had a seven-day life span, beginning at 7 A.M. EST on Monday, January 23. Plans were under way to carry out the execution on Tuesday, January 24.

  There was a different chill in the wind. My phone rang off the hook with calls from television and radio shows. Fort Lauderdale, Albany, Calgary, Denver. How could everybody know that this was the time?

  It was the fourth death warrant. Maybe that was it.

  The wheels of justice had been given a squirt of lubricating oil, and they raced, faster and faster and faster.

  Bob Keppel, who had already journeyed twice to see Ted Bundy in the Florida State Prison, waited for a call from Florida. So did the Salt Lake County detectives, and those in Pitkin County, Colorado.

  And so did the parents who had never had truthful answers to haunting questions. Those whose daughters were still gone vacillated between wanting it over at last, and knowing that once Ted was gone, they would probably never find their daughters’ remains.

  Ted had played his luck out, running it perilously down to the end of the line. I remembered how scornful he had been of Gary Gilmore, but also how he had been almost envious of the news blitz at the end when Gilmore faced the Utah firing squad. Ted could not, would not, go quietly. He could not turn his back on the fanfare.

  I knew that. There would be fireworks and revelations.

  A day after the fourth death warrant was signed, word surfaced in Florida that Ted Bundy might be willing to tell what he knew about unsolved murders. It was beginning to look as if he had little, if anything, to lose, and much to gain by confessing. He could hope, possibly, for a delay. As long as he kept confessing, it seemed unlikely that he would be executed. Too many people had been waiting too long to hear the secrets only he knew.

  Beyond that, Ted could move back into the sunshine of the strobe lights once again—if he talked. He had been telling me, and I’m sure a number of other people, how much more he knew about serial murder than anyone else did. This might be his last chance to prove himself the all-time expert.

  Governor Martinez was not impressed. His office said that Ted could confess if he wanted to, but it wasn’t going to buy him any time. “He’s got six days to do it,” John Peck, Martinez’s press secretary, said.

  Polly Nelson said she planned to file another appeal in state court in Lake City. Jim Coleman said he was aware that there was the possibility of a deal to delay—confessions for time—but that he was not involved in it, and would not comment.

  Ted Bundy was suddenly headline news again, but he was in danger of being pushed off the front pages of American papers. Riots in Miami burned through the nights in Overtown and Liberty City and threatened the Super Bowl. A drifter fired into an elementary schoolyard in Stockton, California, and killed five children. Seattle’s mayor, Charles Royer, announced that he would not run for re-election. And the Republicans, Ted’s old party, were about to stage a presidential inauguration.

  But the word was right. Ted Bundy was headed for the electric chair, and now, after fourteen years of denial, Ted Bundy was prepared to talk to detectives.

  Perhaps as surprising as his sudden accessibility to the men who had stalked him for so long was the announcement that Ted had agreed to meet with Dr. James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, a Pomona, California, minister and member of President Reagan’s commission on pornography. Beyond a general press conference, Ted had the right to pick one solo interviewer and he had chosen Dobson. Ted reportedly had been corresponding with the conservative preacher for years. Their meeting was to be videotaped, but that tape would not be released until such time as Ted was no longer alive. There would be no press conference.

  On January 18, Ted changed his mind about giving a press conference. He would hold a press conference on Monday, the day before he was to be executed, for a pool of reporters who would draw lots to win one of the much sought after spots.

  Jim Coleman and Polly Nelson, Ted’s criminal attorneys, remained—at least on the surface—optimistic as they filed legal motions. Ted was also being advised by Diana Weiner, his “civil attorney.” Weiner is an attractive woman with long, almost black hair, some years younger than Ted. The Sarasota, Florida, attorney and Jack Tanner, his “spiritual advisor,” a lawyer and Christian prison minister, were the team who had approached Governor Martinez to plead for time for Ted in exchange for confessions.

  Diana Weiner, obviously deeply committed to Ted emotionally, called Bob Keppel at home at 3 A.M. on Thursday morning, January 19. “Why are you calling me now?” he asked.

  Weiner was feeling panicky, desperate to somehow slow the plummet toward Ted’s execution. She wanted Keppel to call the governor and plead Ted’s case, to ask for a delay. For Keppel, now back as chief investigator for the criminal division of the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, Weiner’s request seemed at once premature and too late. Fighting off sleep, Keppel told Diana Weiner that he would be leaving in a few hours to fly to Florida. He was in no position to make any plea to the governor, if he should be so inclined, until he heard what Ted Bundy had to say.

  An interview with Bob Keppel was high on the list of coups for reporters. He had been deluged with calls and he looked forward to some time in the air with peace and quiet. Reporters from Seattle, holed up in motels around the prison in Starke, tried to guess where Keppel might be staying once he got to Florida. They asked me what I thought the likely hotels might be.

  I had no idea.

  Nobody knew where Bob Keppel stayed in Florida, not even his wife. If she didn’t know, reporters couldn’t catch her off guard. In actuality, Keppel flew into Jacksonville and stayed the first night at Motel 6, the first spot he could find near the airport. Later on, he hooked up with Bill Hagmaier of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and they stayed at the Sea Turtle on Jacksonville Beach. “I never got to see that beach, however,” Keppel recalled. “We left early in the morning in the dark, and came back after dark”

  Bill Hagmaier had come to know Ted Bundy too. As Ted had written t
o me, he approved—at least partially—of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit’s approach to serial murder. Those special agents would be men he would seek out. Hagmaier was coordinating the last-minute confessions. He had a calming influence on Ted, and he would serve well as an advisor to the detectives arriving, men so anxious to have their questions answered before time ran out.

  Keppel was scheduled to talk to Ted at 11 A.M. Friday morning until 2:30 that afternoon. But he had lost half an hour going in. Diana Weiner and Jack Tanner wanted to brief him before he talked to Ted. That took until 11:30. Then there was another visitor, and Keppel had to wait ten more long minutes. It was almost noon when he finally faced Ted.

  Diana Weiner was present at the interview with Ted, and that prevented Keppel from having a “contact” visit. The “no-contact” visit meant there would be a glass panel between Bundy and Keppel. A tape recorder was on Ted’s side of the partition. Weiner listened carefully to what was said, hovering nervously. The prison interview rooms were either lime-green or mustard-colored, and neither enhanced Ted’s facial pallor. He had not been out in the sunshine for years. But he smiled at Keppel, greeting him confidently. He trusted Keppel as much as he trusted anyone. Keppel had never lied to him.

  “The first day I talked to him he was pretty well prepared to talk,” Keppel recalls. “It didn’t dawn on me the first day I went in there—Friday—that he wasn’t going to confess that day. He wanted to lay the groundwork for the next three days. He had notes, preparations to cover those days. He started on that with me, got about halfway through it, and got off-track. He realized he’d better start confessing, otherwise I wasn’t going to appreciate all this. Because I didn’t have any time set with him after that.”

  Keppel had expected that his previous visits to Ted would allow them to “cut all the B.S. and get down to it.” But the Washington detective saw that there was a game being played. “It was all orchestrated. They were going to do some things, but not all.”

  Keppel realized he was going to have to figure out a way, “real quick-like to get Ted to talk about one murder—but to admit to all the others.” It was not the ideal interrogation situation. Far from it. To take a good, solid statement on one murder, any detective would like to have at least four hours. Keppel needed information on eight or more murders, all in the space of ninety minutes.

  And time was draining away while Ted continued to attempt to manipulate the thrust of their meeting. There was no time left to play to Ted’s ego…

  “The easiest way to do it,” Keppel recalled, “was to ask him about the sites. And it turned out to be five bodies left on Taylor Mountain—not four as we thought.”

  Ted told Keppel that the fifth body was that of Donna Manson, the girl missing from Evergreen State College in Olympia since March 12, 1974.

  “He said there were three—not two—at the Ott and Naslund site.”

  Detectives had found an extra femur bone and extra vertebrae beside that rutted road two miles from Lake Sammamish State Park. But they had not known whose they were.

  Ted finally admitted they had found all that was left: of Georgeann Hawkins.

  Keppel’s last hour technique worked well. He mentioned the body sites, and if Ted didn’t refuse to talk about it, the interview moved ahead smoothly. Ted gave Keppel real, verifiable information. Keppel watched the tape twist and curve and saw it coming to the end. They were in the midst of a vital confession but he had to slow Ted down, and ask him to turn the tape cassette over. He saw pure gold as the tape rolled on, recording what he had sought for so many years. What Keppel heard was ugly, and Ted choked up, paused, gulped, and sighed heavily. But the truth was coming out.

  At last.

  The interview took a fortuitous turn when the question of numbers was broached.

  The numbers didn’t come out even. Finally, Keppel said, “Who are these other ones? Is there somebody out there that I don’t know about?”

  Ted answered quickly. “Oh, yes. Three more.”

  But the time was up. Keppel didn’t know if he’d ever get to talk to Ted again. He knew that detectives from both Utah and Colorado had questions. His allotted time was over.

  As it happened, he had one more shot. Keppel was offered a slot on Sunday evening, after the Dobson interview, which took place between 5:30 and 7:30 P.M., after Detective Dennis Couch from Salt Lake City, and before Mike Fisher of Colorado.

  Ted was exhausted. He hadn’t slept for several nights. His face was washed of color and stained with tears. He was thin, even frail looking, and he wore two shirts as if he were already trying to shut out the chill of death. He no longer looked like the charismatic young politician. Ted looked old and worn out.

  Ted had spent hours with Bill Hagmaier on the first night of the marathon interrogations, with Hagmaier helping Ted to isolate the information that the detectives were going to need. He had talked to Dobson and to his attorneys, and he was starting again on the detectives.

  Asked if he thought Ted was going without sleep to savor the last days of his life, Keppel shakes his head. “No, I think he really thought he had some kind of a chance to live longer if he played out his scenario right. He wanted to save his own life. He didn’t want to die. He had the expectation that his efforts would be realized.”

  This was undoubtedly true. Ted’s team had asked for three more years. If Martinez would give Ted just three years more to live, then Ted would tell it all.

  All through Keppel’s meetings with Ted, he could see that the prisoner had an ear cocked for the phone. Messages were coming in from Polly Nelson and Jim Coleman all through Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. There was still a chance as long as the U.S. Supreme Court was considering an emergency request aimed at keeping Ted alive until another formal appeal could be filed. Nelson and Coleman now were prepared to argue that the jurors in the Leach case were misled about the importance of their role in determining whether Ted would receive the death penalty or life in prison for his crime.

  “The phones were ringing,” Keppel recalls. “And they woke Ted up. Whatever he was doing, he heard the phone ringing. That’s what he was really concentrating on.”

  Ted knew he was getting no reaction from Governor Martinez. No matter what Ted and Tanner and Weiner offered, Martinez said no.

  Diana Weiner had asked Bob Keppel to intercede with Martinez, but Keppel would not. The next avenue of intercession was to ask the victims’ families to fax letters to the Florida governor, asking for mercy for Ted!

  Keppel had arranged for Linda Barker, a victims’ advocate, to call the victims’ relatives and ask how they felt about delaying Ted’s execution so they could know the truth about their daughters’ last moments on earth, and, in some cases, so they could know where their daughters’ remains lay.

  To a person, the families refused to intercede for Ted Bundy.

  “The timing was all wrong,” Keppel said. “Ted was giving us spots where victims were buried, but we couldn’t check it out. Not then. There were seven feet of snow in those areas in Utah and Colorado. Even in Washington, we had a foot of snow.”

  Bob Keppel had forty-five minutes with Ted Bundy on Sunday night, January 22, 1989. He got a few more details. But when Keppel attempted to joust a bit with Ted, he saw that the man before him had no fight left. Ted stared at him, his eyes drooping with the effort. He was almost asleep. He roused himself and said, “I know what you’re trying to do—but it won’t work. I’m just too tired.”

  The phone rang and Ted was awake and alert. The news was bad. The Supreme Court had turned him down.

  “He didn’t have any energy after that,” Keppel remembers.

  There were no more answers for Keppel’s questions.

  Bob Keppel talked to reporters and the strain of the past few days was evident on his face. Not a man easily shocked, Keppel had been shocked. He had been poleaxed to look, finally, into the dark mind of a man “born to kill.”

  “He described the Issaquah crime scene [wh
ere Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Georgeann Hawkins had been left] and it was almost like he was just there. Like he was seeing everything. He was infatuated with the idea because he spent so much time there. He is just totally consumed with murder all the time. …”

  Bob Keppel was also shocked to see Ted Bundy beg for his life, to see at last the tears that flowed for himself as he scrabbled and scurried to live. Ted had maintained such exquisite control for so long.

  Keppel answered some of the reporters’ questions, and promised to answer more later. He said there were some things he had learned that he would never discuss.

  The news services carried the story in the next editions. Bundy had confessed. Bundy would confess more in all likelihood. The headlines flashed in all languages.

  Bundy Admits ‘Ted’ Slayings!

  Aplaza Bundy Varias Entrevistas Para Confesar Otros Asesinatos!

  Bob Keppel drove the sixty miles to Jacksonville and boarded a plane for Atlanta, where he would change planes and fly back to Seattle.

  He had done all he could, and he was probably as satisfied with the results as he could possibly be. By Monday night, he would be sleeping in his own bed.

  He had no plans to be awake at 4 A.M. PST, the hour that Ted Bundy was scheduled to die.

  Dr. Dorothy Lewis arrived from Connecticut to talk with Ted again. If she found him incompetent, the governor would have to appoint three psychiatrists to examine him. They would have to be in the same room at the same time, a mass psychiatric examination. If two of the three should agree that he was incompetent, there would be a delay.

  There was none.

  At this eleventh hour, there was the knowledge that Ted knew he was probably not going to get a stay of execution, that he’d probably sensed it over the past several days. And yet he had confessed and confessed and confessed. He had finally given details that would link him irrevocably to so many murders.

  Ted told Bob Keppel he had left Janice Ott’s yellow ten-speed “Tiger” bike in the Arboretum in Seattle shortly after he killed Janice in July 1974. No one had ever reported finding it. Keppel assumed that “some kid picked up the bicycle and rode off on it.”