by Ann Rule
“I sat there stark naked, and I tried to talk to him—to use psychology. I told him he was a nice-looking guy and he didn’t need to do something like this to have a woman. He said, ‘I don’t want that—I want a little variety.’
“I grabbed for the knife, and he was furious. He shouted, ‘Don’t do that.’
“Finally, I said, ‘My five-year-old’s home alone, and she’s going to wake up and she’ll be all alone.’
“He changed all of a sudden. Just like that. He drove onto a street with tall trees. He said, ‘This is it—this is where you get out.’ I shut my eyes, thinking he was going to stab me, and said, ‘Not without my clothes.’ He threw my clothes out of the car, but he kept my purse and shoes.
“I got to a house and they let me in, and called the police. They found that someone had pulled the distributor cap on my car. They never located the guy who pulled the knife on me.
“But a year or so later, I was watching the news on television and I saw the man on the screen. I yelled to my friend, ‘Look! That’s him. That’s the guy who almost killed me.’ When they said his name, it was Ted Bundy.”
Ted Bundy had passed into the criminal folklore of America. There will be stories and recollections and reports and anecdotes about him for years to come. There are truths to be winnowed out of his life and his crimes, and, hopefully, criminologists and psychiatrists will find some knowledge from so much horror, some intelligence that will help us prevent criminal aberrance like his from developing.
Ted wanted to be noticed, to be recognized. He accomplished that. He left this earth a man almost as hated as the Nazis who intrigued him. When Ted’s representatives announced that they planned to scatter Ted’s ashes over the Cascade Mountain range in Washington State, there was a swell of outraged protest. The question was dropped, and no one knows what has become of his earthly remains.
It no longer matters. It is over.
The Ted who might have been, and the Ted who was, both died on January 24, 1989.
I remember back to 1975 when Ted was first arrested in Utah. My New York editor at the time didn’t see that there would ever be a book about Ted Bundy. “Nobody’s ever heard of Ted Bundy,” he said. “I think it’s just a regional story. There’s no name recognition at all.”
Tragically, there is now.
At long last, peace, ted.
And peace and love to all the innocents you destroyed.
—ANN RULE April 27, 1989
UPDATE:
TWENTY YEARS LATER—
2000
IT HAS BEEN a quarter of a century since the day Ted Bundy called to ask for my help and to tell me that he was a suspect in the disappearances of more than a dozen young women. And the memory of that call still shocks me. Although I tend to picture Ted as a man in his early twenties, he would have turned fifty-four in 2000. Instead, he died in the electric chair at Raiford Prison in Starke, Florida, almost a dozen years ago. In my mind and in the public’s memory, he remains a handsome, youngish man. His physical attractiveness helped to make him a mythical character, an antihero who continues to intrigue readers, many of whom were not even born when he carried out his horrendous crimes. Ted Bundy has long since become the poster boy for serial murder. Indeed, John Hinckley, who shot President Ronald Reagan, was thrilled when Ted answered his letters. David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam Killer,” also corresponded with Ted.
Like the bleak handiwork of other killers embraced by popular culture, the horrific details of his obsessive stalking have become blurred with time, and the clever “rogue Ted” is the one people remember. That is unfortunate, because young women must be aware that Ted Bundy was not a singular man. His counterparts exist and they are dangerous.
Time and again, I have naïvely believed the fascination with Ted would diminish and that I would never have to think about him again. I have long since accepted that I will be answering questions about him until the end of my days. Not long ago, I lay in the operating room as an anesthesiologist prepared to put me to sleep before surgery. One of the OR nurses leaned toward me and spoke to me in a soft, concerned voice. “Ann?” she began.
“Yes?” I thought she was asking if I was comfortable.
“Tell me,” she continued. “What was Ted Bundy really like?”
I was unconscious before I could frame an answer, and that was just as well. I don’t know that I, or anyone else who ever knew Ted or studied him, has the key to who he really was. I doubt that even he knew that. I do know that my own view of him has evolved in a way exactly opposite of the public’s acceptance of Ted as a folk character. When I read my own evaluation of him in the ’70s, I realize I had a long way to go to achieve true accuracy. In the almost three decades since I first laid eyes on Ted, I have been forced to accept increasingly grisly truths. The human mind, my own included, creates elaborate unconscious pathways to let it deal with horror.
My memory of Ted Bundy is clear, but bifurcated. I remember two Teds. One is the young man who sat beside me two nights a week in Seattle’s Crisis Clinic. The other is the voyeur, the rapist, the killer, and the necrophile. Try as I might, I still can’t bring the images together. Looking at them under an imaginary microscope, I cannot superimpose the murderer over the promising student. And I am not alone. Most of the people who knew him struggle with the same dichotomy.
And so I deal, always, with separate Teds. As I sit in police seminars and watch slides of Ted’s dead victims—the ones who were found before they were skeletal—I see the evidence that he returned to the scenes of his crimes to line dead lips and eyes with garish makeup and to put blush on pale cheeks. I accept that this was done by the second Ted. I accept that he engaged not only in cruel murder but in necrophilia. I can deal with this intellectually, but I try never to let it slip into the emotional side of my mind. Yet even writing about it makes my throat close and the skin at the back of my neck prickle.
Ted Bundy is the one subject that I have never been able to regard in a detached manner. He is the only subject that I knew before, during, and after his crimes—and I hope there will never be another. Although I would not have stopped his execution if I had the power to do so, I try never to see the photographs of his body. The first time I saw such a photo was on the cover of a tabloid prominently displayed in a British Columbia store. Today, his dead image is ubiquitous on the Internet. Even so, when one pops up unexpectedly, I click my mouse instantly to move on.
With the advent of computer communication, I have heard from more women who encountered Ted Bundy— and lived to tell about it—than ever before. When I lecture, I recognize the haunted look in the eyes of women who approach me to tell of remembered terror. Just as in the past, I realize they cannot all have met Ted Bundy. But some of them have. The women are in their fifties now, their outward appearance so changed from that of the girls who bought into the emotional climate of the ’60s and ’70s when it was O.K. to trust strangers and hitchhike.
One told me of the good-looking man in the Volkswagen who gave her a ride west of Spokane, Washington, only to turn off the I-90 freeway onto a deserted road, where he produced a pair of handcuffs. “I managed to fight him off and run into the brush,” she remembered. “At first he drove away, but I heard his car stop just out of my sight and I knew he was waiting for me to come out. I crouched behind a clump of sagebrush for hours until I heard his car start up again. I wasn’t sure if he was really gone, but I was freezing and I had cramps in my arms and legs from being in one position so long. I ran to a ranch house and they let me in.”
When later she saw a picture of Ted Bundy, she recognized him. A quarter of a century after that encounter, she trembled as she remembered a night when she was sure she was going to die.
Another woman recalled a rainy evening when she got lost while driving near the University of Washington in Seattle. She became aware of a light-colored Volkswagen that was tailing her car as she circled through narrow streets. When she was forced to stop at a dead-end lane,
the driver pulled behind her car close enough to trap her. A wavy haired, handsome man emerged from the Volkswagen and headed toward her.
“And then some teenage boys came walking by,” she told me. “The guy hurried back to his car and backed up. It was Ted Bundy. I’m sure it was.”
There is little doubt that Ted stalked and trolled and watched constantly. He would have had to. For every hapless young woman that he managed to force or charm into his car, Ted probably approached ten times as many who got away. The aspect of their stories that strikes me the most is how frightened the lucky ones still are, a dozen years after Ted’s execution. They alternately berate themselves for having been so foolish to go with a stranger, and relive a sense of guilt that they survived while other girls didn’t.
I know I will continue to get these letters. As I wrote this page, two more came in today’s mail.
• • •
In the fall of 1999, I had occasion to visit another city where Ted had once walked. Although I’d read the police reports about Ted’s final capture in Florida in the early hours of February 15, 1978, I had never been to Pensacola. Last year, I was invited there to present a seminar for Dr. Phil Levine’s annual conference for medical examiners and detectives.
Hard by the Gulf Coast, often in the path of hurricanes, Pensacola is a city memorable both for its traditions and its technology. It has quaint old houses, lovingly restored, and posh homes with swimming pools where wealthy retirees live. Pensacola’s old railroad station is now part of a hotel, and the sumptuous barbecues for visiting conferees are served in a hall that is actually a museum of reconstructed stores. Trees and vegetation grow thick and heavy in the steamy heat. Overhead, the Blue Angels soar in practice sessions after taking off from their home airfield at the Pensacola Naval Air Station.
The ambiance of Pensacola didn’t matter to Ted Bundy twenty-two years ago. He was only passing through as he headed west. During breaks in Levine’s conference, several Pensacola detectives gave me a fascinating tour. They drove me to the area where Ted made his last run. It was a semi-residential area, a block off Interstate 10, the main east-west highway. Squat frame houses with screened porches looked out at the back of honky-tonks and hulks of dead cars. There were dirt yards with ragged trees and skinny cats slinking by.
Of all the places Ted’s obsession had taken him, this neighborhood had to have been the most cheerless. I could see why the residents had berated the Pensacola cop, David Lee, when they saw him struggling with a man on the ground. Police wouldn’t be popular in this neighborhood.
We drove next to the police precinct and my tour guides pointed out the back entrance where the prisoner who said he was “Kenneth Misner” had entered. Ted had called me from this building so long ago. Odd to see it. Strange to be in Pensacola, the last place he was ever free. Over in the convention center, there were pictures of Ted Bundy’s corpse on a software program designed for detectives. He has achieved the kind of infamy that makes him one of the subjects of almost any police investigative conference that is held, but he lost his struggle with a single cop in a quaint Florida town he’d meant to see only in his rearview mirror.
Many of the families of young women thought to have been victims of Ted Bundy never did find their daughters’ remains. From time to time, parts of skeletons turn up in rural areas, but to date there have been no positive identifications made. Indeed, a number of skeletons have been misplaced by medical examiners’ offices over the intervening years, although the value of skulls and bones as identifiers through mitochondrial DNA tests will probably ensure that it won’t happen again. The remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, the two women who disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974, were lost forever when the King County Medical Examiner’s office was relocated. Their families sued, and eventually King County settled with them for about $112,000 per family.
The passing years have worn away the survivors of Ted’s victims. Several parents have died, among them Eleanore Rose, Denise Naslund’s mother, who died in early 2000. Eleanore kept Denise’s room exactly as it was on the morning Denise left for a picnic at Lake Sammamish. Her stuffed animals were still on her bed, and her clothes still hung in her closet. Denise’s car remained parked in front of her mother’s house.
One of the biggest unanswered questions about Ted Bundy is still whether he had anything to do with the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr, who was eight years old on August 31, 1961, the last time she was seen. Ann Marie lived in Tacoma, Washington, and so did Ted, who was fourteen at the time and reportedly the Burrs’ morning paperboy.
Detectives who investigated Ann Marie’s disappearance have never agreed about Bundy as a viable suspect. He himself denied any culpability and he wrote to the Burrs in 1986, “I do not know what happened to your daughter, Ann Marie. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. You said she disappeared August 31, 1961. At the time I was a normal fourteen-year-old boy. I did not wander the streets late at night. I did not steal cars. I had absolutely no desire to harm anyone. I was an average kid. For your sake, you really must understand this.”
There are, of course, many indicators that Ted Bundy was anything but a normal, average teenager. His mother, Louise, seventy-five now, insists that he was not the one who took Ann Marie away. “We were such a close family,” she says. “He was living at home. All these other things happened when he was away.” Louise Bundy feels that Ted was too small in stature at the time to force Ann Marie Burr from her home.
“She had a strong little personality,” her father, Donald Burr, recalled. “You just felt happy to be around her. She was just a regular little girl.”
On August 30, Ann Marie ate dinner with a friend who lived nearby and was invited to stay over that night, but her mother, Beverly, said no. That night, the Burr children went to bed about 8:30. Ann was the oldest. Greg and Julie slept in the basement with their dog, the parents on the first floor, and Ann and Mary upstairs. It was about 11:00 when Ann brought Mary down to their parents because she was crying and complaining because the cast on her broken arm was making her frantic with itching.
The two girls went back up to bed. At 5:00 A.M., Beverly got up and saw that there was a wild summer rainstorm outside. The living room window was open.
Ann was gone.
And she still is, despite massive searches, rewards, despite detectives who hid in the Burrs’ basement for more than a month, expecting a ransom call. It was the cruelest tragedy for the Burrs—never knowing what had become of their little strawberry-blonde daughter. The very house they lived in reminded them that she was gone. After six years, they had to move but they always kept their old phone number, just in case she might call one day, or someone might call about her.
One day a woman did call, telling them she was their lost child. She remembered certain things—a pet canary, vague memories. But eventually a DNA test eliminated any chance that she was Ann Marie.
Donald Burr is sure he saw Ted Bundy in a ditch at a construction site at the University of Puget Sound campus on the morning Ann Marie vanished. Over the years, scores of people have asked me about the connection between Ted and Ann Marie. The most compelling, perhaps, is a woman who e-mailed me, hinting that Ted, a ninth grader, had taken her when she was a young teenager to see where he “had hidden a body.” Yet she balked at being more specific.
The Burrs adopted a daughter, Laura, and somehow continued on without Ann Marie. But they never had an
ending to their search. Finally, on September 18, 1999, they held a mass at St. Patrick’s Church in Tacoma, a memorial service for Ann Marie who would have been forty-seven years old if she were alive. Hundreds of people showed up to remember a little girl who seemed to have been swallowed up into thin air. The Burrs had a theme for the memorial mass: butterflies. Butterflies meant that Ann Marie was safe and free, flying above the earth where no one could trap or harm her.
It has been a long time. Bob Keppel and Roger Dunn, the two young detectives w
ho investigated the Bundy murders in the mid 1970s, have retired now. Dunn runs a very successful private investigation agency. Bob Keppel is renowned as an expert in serial murder. He writes books, serves as an expert witness in similar cases, and teaches an extremely popular class, called simply “Murder,” at the University of Washington. He has created the Homicide Information Tracking Unit (HITS), a computer system that connects information on murders, rapes, missing persons, sexual predators, and other crimes in Washington and Oregon.
The investigators who tracked Ted Bundy learned a great deal about the sadistic sociopathic killer over the years, and that knowledge may well save prospective victims of the serial killers who came after Bundy.
If that is true, it may be the one positive thing about so much tragedy and loss.
—ANN RULE April 22, 2000
Postscript by Leslie Rule, November 20th, 2012
Over the years, I’ve often assisted my mom as she researches cases, and I have been to many murder trials with her, taking notes of the proceedings, or taking photographs of detectives and killers. I “shot” my first killer at age seventeen. She was a beautiful “lady hit-man” who looked more like a movie star than a murderess.
During a courtroom break, I approached the defendant and asked permission to photograph her. She agreed but stressed she did not want to be photographed while smoking. But I was nervous, and I forgot. I snapped a picture at the wrong moment and captured her with cigarette raised and curls of smoke floating about her delicate face. I’ll never forget those cold, angry eyes as she growled, “I told you not to take a picture of me while I was smoking.”
It was not the first time I had been face to face with a killer. But it was my most chilling encounter. Looking back, my first meeting with a killer should have been the more disturbing one. If I had known what he was capable of, the experience would have been far different. But at the time my mom introduced me to him, we did not know his secret.