Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy

by Rebecca Morris

  “It was not so much that there were significant events (in my boyhood), but the lack of things that took place was significant,” Ted continued. “The omission of important developments. I felt that I had developed intellectually but not socially. In junior high, everything was fine. Even went to some parties. Nothing that I can recall happened that summer before my sophomore year to stunt me or otherwise hinder my progress. Emotionally and socially, something stunted my progress in high school. Not that I ever got into trouble. Or wanted to do anything wrong.”

  His friends complained that he would make plans with them, then not show up. Or he would come up behind them suddenly to scare them (he liked to strangle his victims from the rear, too). And Ted began prowling.

  Ted would say of his teenage years, “I loved the darkness, the darkness would excite me, it was really sort of my ally, because I could creep around in the darkness.” And, according to Sandi Holt, Ted was drinking heavily in high school; for the rest of his life alcohol would be a depressant that would prompt his spiraling moods and loosen his inhibitions so he could kill.

  Eventually, Ted began thinking and speaking of his behavior in a detached way. He hinted that he began murdering young. Maybe that's what he meant when he said that “something happened” when he was a teenager. He could mention his crimes, but only in the third person. “The first victim of this other person could have been an 8 or 9-year-old girl,” he told an expert on serial killers. It was a round-about way of confessing without confessing, one more way to titillate and manipulate the police, yet remain in charge.

  The Bundy's must have read or heard about the little girl missing in their former neighborhood. The news coverage of the search for Ann Burr was on the front page of the Tacoma newspaper every day, and was covered by the two Seattle newspapers, as well as local radio and television. Sandi Holt heard the news on the radio and burst into tears, telling her mother that she knew the little girl who had vanished.

  Even if Louise was house-bound by her fifth pregnancy, she had to have known that just two blocks from where she and Teddy had lived with her uncle, a child had likely been abducted. She had children about the same age. Bev had put up missing posters at grocery stores all over town. The compelling posters, with big lettering and the haunting photo of Ann, were everywhere. Ted was a paperboy for one of the Seattle papers. Did Louise empathize with the mother of the missing girl? Ted's friend, Jerry Bullat, remembers his own mother being distraught about Ann's disappearance. So were the parents of the other children who played with Ann and parents with children attending Grant Elementary. Sandi Holt's mother immediately kept a closer rein on Sandy, and Doug was ordered to walk her to Geiger Elementary when the new school year began.

  Over the years, Bev Burr and Louise Bundy would meet by accident. They didn’t speak, but they had a lot in common. They were petite, they kept their hair style simple and wore no makeup, and they were intelligent. They were married to working-class men, and both had five children. Each would lose her oldest child, the one with the most promise, in a horrific way. And at the most stressful times in their lives, they coped in the same way: they offered guests apple pie.

  In 1961, Ted was getting ready to begin ninth grade at Hunt Junior High. As Tacoma police questioned hundreds of teenagers and men (two of their prime suspects being just 13 and 15 years old) about the disappearance of Ann Burr, there were thousands more they didn’t know. The name Ted Bundy didn’t come to their attention because he didn’t live in the north end of the city, and Ted's family was Methodist; the Burrs and most of their friends and neighbors—all potential suspects—attended St. Patrick's. Although he roamed and peeped, Ted wouldn’t be known to Tacoma police until a few years later, when he reportedly was picked up on suspicion of auto theft and burglary. Those records were reportedly expunged while he was still a juvenile.

  In the summer of 1961, Ted was 14 years old; he would turn 15 in November. He told Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis that when he was ... “twelve, fourteen, fifteen... in the summer... something happened, something, I’m not sure what it was... I would fantasize about coming up to some girl sunbathing in the woods, or something innocuous like that... I was beginning to get involved in what they would call, developed a preference for what they call, autoerotic sexual activity,” he told her. “A portion of my personality was not fully... it began to emerge... by the time I realized how powerful it was, I was in big trouble... ”

  Ted's favorite subject was Ted. He loved to talk. A state Republican party leader who got to know Ted said he had “the gift of gab” and “oozed sincerity.” One advantage to being on death row for years is that many sought him out, and he could expound on his theories, including that of killers who begin young. “Perhaps the only firm trend I ever ran across in the study of abnormal behavior,” Ted told a journalist, “was that the younger that a person... that he or she was when they manifested abnormal behavior or thought pattern... the more likely it was that there was going to be a condition that would be lasting. And, uh, permanent. A chronic disorder.”

  Later, when the police, the media, and the Burrs wondered if Ted could have begun his killing with one small girl, a girl who didn’t fit the image of the college coeds he killed (although the last girl he killed was just 12, and there were a couple of 14 year olds, too), a young girl who wasn’t in college and didn’t have long hair parted in the middle, Louise Bundy went on the defensive. She told the Tacoma News Tribune, “I resent the fact that everybody in Tacoma thinks just because he lived in Tacoma he did that one too, way back when he was 14. I’m sure he didn’t. We were such a close family... he didn’t have anything against little girls.”

  The missing poster created August 31, 1961.

  Beverly Burr’s father, Roy Leach,on the porch of his Tacoma grocery store.

  Bev’s sixth grade class at Central Elementary School in 1939. Bev is third from left in the front row. Her friend Haruye Kawano is second from right in the front row.

  Bev, at left, as yearbook editor,

  Stadium High School, 1945-46.

  The article announcing Bev’s engagement to Don Burr, 1951.

  Bev, pregnant with Ann, on an Oregon beach in 1952.

  The four Burr children at Christmas, probably 1959.

  Beverly Burr, with Mary, Julie, Greg, and Ann on Fox Island. Summer, 1960, one year before Ann disappeared.

  The four Burr children, in outfits Bev had sewn, possibly Easter, 1961.

  Newspaper photo of search party. Don Burr is second from the left. Sept. 2, 1961.

  Police photographs of the Burr house and Ann’s bedroom.

  Bev’s mother, Marie Leach, offers a reward.

  Ted Strand, Bev Burr, Don Burr, and Tony Zatkovich mark 145 days of searching for Ann. January 23, 1962.

  The cover of Master Detective, April, 1966.

  The article in Master Detective, April, 1966, written by Robert Cour, of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

  Newspaper coverage of the adoption. Bev, Greg, and Mary feeding the new baby, Laura, July 18, 1963.

  Bev’s mother, Marie, with George Voigt on their wedding day. They are holding Laura.

  Bev and Don on Fox Island, with Barney, Ann’s cocker spaniel, 1962.

  Greg, Mary, and Julie, one year after Ann disappeared, 1962.

  The 1967 sketch of the Oregon field where Richard Raymond McLish says he buried Ann's body.

  The house on North 28th Street, in the mid-1970s.

  5

  The Weekend

  THE YOUNG POLICE OFFICER, APPARENTLY CHOSEN because he was agile, had one leg in and one leg out of Beverly Burr's living room window. She couldn’t bear to watch. If he could maneuver into the house without breaking her collection of English pottery Toby jugs, without getting tangled in the TV antenna or leaving a fingerprint or a clue, then it made the possibility that an intruder had taken her daughter both more plausible and more baffling.

  Instead of watching the officer, Bev kept her eye on the pottery displayed o
n the table immediately under the window, each one a caricature of a short, fat fellow seated with a jug on his knee. Their cheery grins taunted Bev.

  The police were back to take another look inside the Burr house. They were still monitoring phone calls in the basement, there was still a patrol car each night on the street in front of the house, and they were busy chasing down tips and known sex offenders. But were they certain there was no evidence of an intruder? Just to be sure, the forensics team returned, hoping to add to their pitifully small cache, which consisted of the lone red thread and the toe print on the outdoor bench.

  They took more photos of the outside of the house, and tried to get fingerprints off a downspout that Don had told them about. It had been pulled loose from a gutter on the northwest corner and might have been used as a handhold. It was beneath Greg's bedroom window (who was asleep in the basement that night). There were no fingerprints on the southwest window, which they thought was the way the kidnapper had entered the house. Then they searched the living room again; it was the living room, and the window, the Toby jugs, the doors, and the furniture that should hold clues.

  Late that night, the young, agile officer and his partner wrote in their report that the latest search was in vain. It was too late to find clues that might have been overlooked. There would be no latent fingerprint. A well-meaning relative of the Burrs had dusted the living room, top to bottom.

  Bob Drost was the only member of the police force who believed Ann was alive. He thought she had been taken by someone she knew (that's why the family didn’t hear any screams), someone who was desperate to have a little girl, someone who didn’t live in Tacoma and could raise Ann without the family knowing or others becoming suspicious. Someone who—he went so far as to say— “cherished” the little girl, yet was busy brainwashing Ann. He didn’t think it would take long for an eight-year-old to forget her family and cleave to a new one. Whoever abducted Ann, Drost said, didn’t leave “five cents worth of clues.” He described the result of the investigation as “a handful of nothing—it was like grabbing clouds.”

  Drost was Captain of Detectives and had been away with his family on their annual fishing and camping trip to Lake Chelan, three hours east in the central part of the state. He returned to the biggest missing persons case since the Weyerhaeuser and Mattson kidnappings. But this case was more puzzling. The Weyerhaeuser boy was kidnapped off a city street, and a ransom demand came quickly. And Charles Mattson's siblings saw him taken from their house; his body was found two weeks later. But with the Ann Marie Burr case there was no evidence, no witnesses, no body, and no credible ransom demand.

  The newspapers reported that police could find no proof that anyone had entered the house. They were told there was no sign of a struggle in Ann's bedroom. Ann's disappearance was still not officially considered an abduction.

  Drost was friends with Detectives Zatkovich and Strand, but especially Tony Zatkovich. Tony's brother Al had married a close friend of Drost's wife, Betty, and they considered themselves family—the kind of extended family that got together for Thanksgiving and birthdays. Drost had been a member of the same vigilante group of police as Detectives Strand and Zatkovich. When he got back from fishing, Drost officially put into place the major roles in the investigation: Strand and Zatkovich would be the lead detectives; Det. Richard Roberts would be in charge of the underground search, including the city sewer system; Police Inspector Emil Smith was overall search director.

  Part of the detective's job was to get to know as much about Ann as they could. They found that opinions of Ann varied greatly. Her grandmother, Marie Leach, had told police she thought Ann was “a little irrational.” Ann spent time with Becky B__ who lived a block away. Both of Becky's parents worked, so the children would often spend time with Mrs. B__ 's mother during the day. Becky had seen Ann on Wednesday. “I last saw Ann in the neighborhood between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. the evening before she disappeared. I think Ann has quite a temper and she throws tantrums,” Becky told police. Becky's mother, a schoolteacher, said she considered herself “very good friends” with the Burr family. “It is my impression that she (Ann) is the favorite in the family. She most always gets what she wants and is very high in intelligence for a girl of her age. I feel the family is a little lax in the child's activities, as to staying with other friends overnight or staying for dinner at their home,” Mrs. B__ told the police.

  Her uncle Raleigh considered Ann “brilliant.” Ann gave off a confidence that could be misconstrued in a child. It could be mistaken as flirtatiousness. Her cousin, Eddie Cavallo, was 14 years old when she disappeared. “She was a little sweetheart,” he says. “She was like a teddy bear; you wanted to give her a little squeeze. She attracted males; she elicited a response from boys. She was a very sexual little kid. It was the way she was wired.”

  Both the family and police knew the clock was ticking. “Hopes for the safe return of the missing youngster, believed to be barefoot and clad in only an ankle-length nightgown, continued to wane,” the Tacoma News Tribune reported. Over the Labor Day weekend, more than 600 men from the Army's 2nd Battle Group, 39th Infantry, stationed at Ft. Lewis, and National Guardsmen from Camp Murray staged a massive ground search. It was too windy to take a helicopter up, but they covered 700-acre Point Defiance Park on foot, a mostly undeveloped wilderness in the middle of urban sprawl. Point Defiance was where the last, or one of the last, photographs of Ann was taken. Bev had taken Ann to the park's zoo so she could feed the goats.

  A number of Tacoma residents had dusted off their Ouija boards—a popular Christmas item the year before, by now relegated to the hall closet. They called police to say Ann was safe; Ann was far away from Tacoma by now; Ann was somewhere at Point Defiance Park. When the winds did let up, an Army pilot and a Tacoma police officer used a helicopter to cover the park from the air. They flew over its beaches, cliffs, wooded areas, boat house, and sewer outfall. They went as low as they could over Commencement Bay and “The Narrows,” what folks called the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which connects the city and the Kitsap Peninsula.

  A dream took Alfred S__ from his home in Seattle to Tacoma, via a Greyhound bus. From the bus station he took a taxi to the Burr house. The 79-year-old man told Bev and Don that he had had a vision or a religious revelation that Ann was being kept in the back bedroom of a white house with green trim. He stated that the Lord had provided the vision, and the Lord had even provided an address, 4548 Pearl Street. Detectives Johnson and Six took Mr. S__ to the police station where he told his story again. Then they put him on a bus back to Seattle. Bev asked the police to check out 4548 Pearl Street. There was no house at 4548 Pearl Street; there was a Piggly Wiggly grocery store under construction. There were several white houses with green trim nearby, but they decided it wasn’t worth knocking on the doors.

  Over the holiday weekend, the police returned to homes in North Tacoma that hadn’t been searched earlier. Detectives, in old clothes and with flashlights, meticulously crawled under houses and into attics.

  The town's Public Works Department began combing the main sewer lines near the Burr house. A three man crew went underground “using portable lights to probe the pitch black flumes of the city's sewer network through the North End,” the Tacoma News Tribune told its readers who were following the search for Ann. At low tide, volunteer scuba divers went to the end of the line—the main outfall pipe on Commencement Bay, not far from Tacoma's favorite night spot, The Top of the Ocean—where the rushing flow of storm drainage and sewage was rapid enough to push a body out the pipe and into the bay. But it hadn’t. Man holes and catch basins were searched and two muddy ponds in Buckley Gulch, which ran just a block from the Burr house, were drained. Citizen volunteers searched the nearby city of Fircrest, focusing on the construction site of a stadium for the town's minor league baseball team, the Tacoma Giants.

  When no trace of the girl was found, Det. Richard Roberts was asked what came next. “I just don’t know where we go from here,�
� he said. Tacoma Police Inspector Smith called it one of the most baffling cases in Tacoma crime files.

  On September 3, the fourth day after Ann vanished, the city did what Don suggested just hours after Ann went missing; it sent men to search the ditches being dug at the University of Puget Sound. Don had worried that it was a feasible place to leave a child's body. The digging in question was in an area on the western edge of the campus, running along Union Avenue for several blocks between Adams Street and Washington Street. The five fraternities (to be known as the Union Avenue Housing), would be connected by an underground tunnel and would share a common kitchen, also underground.

  There's no record of whether the police shared the bad news with Bev and Don. By the time they went to search the excavation sites, they couldn’t find any ditches with water. “At this time, all ditches are covered and the roads are open,” the police report noted. Traffic was driving over the spot where Don thought the body of his daughter might have been cruelly discarded.