It seemed that Ted would never give up his secrets.
It didn’t take long for Michaud and Aynesworth to realize that Ted came from what Michaud called “a really, really buttoned-down family.” A close family friend, interviewed for a documentary about Ted, described the family as “secretive.” (For example, both Ted and his oldest half-sister, Linda Bussey, said they never discussed with each other or with other members of the family who Ted's birth father was.)
Just before Christmas, 1980, Michaud and Aynesworth traveled to Tacoma to talk with Louise and Johnnie Bundy. The four sat in the Bundy living room. Louise was still adamant that Ted was innocent and his convictions were all a mistake. He had done nothing to prepare his mother for the truth.
The two journalists played one of the taped interviews between Stephen Michaud and Ted, where Ted speculated in the third-person about raping and killing a girl.
TB: “... they were at a place where there was an orchard, or a number of trees or something. As he came up behind her she heard him. She turned around and he brandished a knife and grabbed her by the arm and told her to do what he wanted her to do. You know, to follow him. He pushed her off the sidewalk into this darkened wooded area, and uh, told her to submit and do what he wanted her to do.
But he found himself with this girl who was struggling and screaming. Uh, not screaming, but let's say just basically arguing with him. There were houses in the vicinity and he was concerned that somebody might hear. And so, in an attempt to stop her from talking or arguing, he placed his hand over her mouth. So, not thinking clearly but still intending not to harm her, let's say, he placed his hands around her throat.”
SM: “Uh huh.”
TB: “Just to throttle her into unconsciousness so that she wouldn’t scream anymore. She stopped struggling, and it appeared that she was unconscious. but not, in his opinion, to a point where he had killed her.
Then let's say he removed her clothes and raped her and put his own clothes back on. At about that point, he began to notice that the girl wasn’t moving.
It appeared, although he wasn’t certain, that he’d done what he had promised himself he wouldn’t do. And he had done it, really, almost inadvertently.
Uh, so he took the girl by one of her arms and pulled her to a darkened corner of this little orchard and then, in a fit of panic, fled the scene.”
“We’re playing the tape for her,” Michaud explained about Louise's reaction. “She starts to make little noises, like a mouse. I actually thought an animal might be in the room. Then, she suddenly says, ‘How about some coffee and apple pie?’ ”
Bev and Don Burr read the Michaud/Aynesworth book, The Only Living Witness, when it was published in 1983. They wondered if one of Ted's stories, the same one Louise Bundy heard him relate on audio tape, was about their little girl, about their orchard. Bev wrote Hugh Aynesworth, explaining her daughter's disappearance.
“My husband and I read your book slowly, word for word, practically memorizing your book,” Bev wrote. And she listed the similarities between Ted and their missing daughter. The orchard. The noises in the yard she heard late at night. How close they lived to the campus where Ted's great-uncle was a music professor. How Ann took piano lessons across the street from the college's music building. The possibility Ted was a paperboy in their neighborhood. The bench police thought a teenager might have used to look through the living room window. The print of a tennis shoe found on the bench and near the basement. The name of Ted's last victim, Leach. Bev also hypothesized that if Ann was Ted's first victim, maybe the publicity regarding her was so great and lasted such a long time that it had prevented him from committing another murder until he reached his twenties.
Bev and Don offered to travel to Texas to see Aynesworth. They thought maybe he and Michaud knew more about Ted's early crimes. Aynesworth remembered Bev's letter to him, but he received hundreds of letters after the book was published, many from families still looking for answers. In fact, the girl Ted described in the orchard wasn’t Ann. Aynesworth traveled to Utah while investigating Ted's crimes. The unnamed girl in the orchard was 17-year-old Melissa Smith, the daughter of Midvale, Utah's police chief and one of Ted's victims.
The Burrs never went to Texas to see Hugh Aynesworth. They did travel to Colorado in 1985 to talk to people at the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, where Ted had jumped from a second story window in June, 1977. Bev and Don had heard a rumor that Ted had said something about Ann to the police there, but their trip was fruitless.
So Bev decided to write to Ted. Their correspondence began with a letter from her doctor. On October 9, 1984, Dr. William R. Conte, Mary's psychiatrist, who had become a friend and confidant of Bev's (as well as very concerned with Bev's emotional state), wrote Ted. He identified himself as a Tacoma psychiatrist treating Mrs. Donald (Beverly) Burr:
“Her daughter, Anne [sic] Marie Burr, disappeared from her home on the evening of August 31, 1961. The child was never seen or heard of again. The effect of this loss to the Burrs is beyond comprehension. You will note that Mrs. Burr is still in treatment dealing with depression, profound anxiety and a series of very difficult acting out behaviors. It would be very helpful if the Burrs knew the truth about their daughter, what happened to her... In the event that you would want to talk to me in private and maintain absolute confidentiality, I would arrange to come to Florida to see you or we could possibly talk by phone.”
Ted answered Conte within the week:
“Your concern for her (Bev's) well-being and peace-of mind would seem to go beyond the call of duty and this extraordinary demonstration of your compassion moves me in a way that says I can trust you to understand what I have to say.
I have absolutely no knowledge of what happened to Anne [sic] Marie Burr 23 years ago. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. Nothing. At the time I was for all practical purposes a normal, healthy 15-year-old. Even the thought of harming another human being would have been as ghastly and slim as the thought of jumping off the Narrows Bridge...
I have from time–to-time heard the Burr disappearance mentioned in connection with me. With all due respect, I didn’t imagine how anyone could have taken such a report seriously. However, I do realize that no stone must be left unturned, but I thought that stone had been turned and discarded long ago.”
Bev may never have told her friends or family that she was being treated by Dr. Conte (at one time, letters to Bev from Dr. Conte were sent to Julie in Seattle so that Don wouldn’t know about it). Her family knew she was difficult to be around, that she seemed to be in a constant state of anxiety; they knew she seemed to have lots of accidents. As one family member said, “If life wasn’t in crisis mode, she would create it.”
Bev finally wrote Ted herself in 1986, when it looked as if Ted's execution was imminent. In her first letter to Ted, dated May 30, 1986, Bev wrote.
“With all appeals likely to be refused and soon, there is nothing left for you in this world; there can STILL be everything good for you in the next.
Your life started going wrong somewhere when you were very young. There had to be a lot of bad things happen to make you have your strong feelings of hatred.
I came close to ruining my life because of my cruel actions and feeling no sorrow about them. A lot of strange circumstances brought help to me I would not have found myself, even though I knew I needed help and my actions were getting out of control. You should have received that same help when you needed it.
God can still give the help to you—if you can gather together any strength you have left and try to feel a real sorry inside for the horrors you have brought to so many. You will face these horrors alone if there is no chance to be with God after you die.
You have NOTHING MORE TO LOSE IN THIS WORLD... Will you write to me regarding Ann Marie?”
Again, Ted, a prompt correspondent, answered right away. In his response, dated June 8, 1986, he wrote:
“Dear Beverly, Thank you for your letter of May 3
0. I can certainly understand you doing everything you can to find your daughter. Unfortunately, you have been misled by what can only be called rumors about me. The best thing I can do for you is to correct these rumors, these falsehoods.
First and foremost, 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 14-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 just an average kid. For your sake you really must understand this.”
Ted pointed out that he had lived at the time on Skyline Drive in the west end of Tacoma near the Narrows Bridge. And he claimed, in his letter to Bev, to not have heard of Ann's disappearance in 1961. That is hard to believe; at 14, Ted was already roaming the town on his bicycle. He was also a window peeper, a purveyor of pornography, a thief, a boy who liked to drag girls into the woods, and addicted to crime and detective stories. Ann's disappearance was front page news daily in those newspapers he delivered and she lived in a neighborhood he had once lived in, his great-uncle's neighborhood. His letter to Bev continued.
“There is also a rumor that I was your paper boy back in 1961. Again, I’m almost certain that I wasn’t because, as I said earlier, I would remember news of the abduction, which I do not. My paper route covered an area just north and east of the Narrows Bridge.
Again and finally, I did not abduct your daughter. I had nothing to do with her disappearance. If there is still something you wish to ask me about this please don’t hesitate to write again. God bless you and be with you, peace, ted.”
In a flourish that many found ironic, he signed most of his letters, peace, ted.
At about the same time that Ted began corresponding with Bev Burr and Dr. Conte, he wrote Bob Keppel, the King County police detective who had been chief investigator of the “Ted” murders in the 1970s. It was Keppel's idea to use a computer (back when computers were the size of a refrigerator) to narrow a list of thousands of “Ted” suspects to 25 names, among them Ted Bundy. He was number seven. Before they could focus on him, he was arrested in Utah.
By 1984, Keppel was the chief criminal investigator for the Washington State Attorney General's office and a member of a task force working on what was known as “The Green River Killings.” Someone was killing dozens of women, many of them prostitutes, and leaving their bodies near the Green River, southeast of Seattle, and at other sites. Ted, who had slipped away from Washington state authorities because of a lack of physical evidence, wrote to Bob Keppel to offer himself as a consultant on the Green River murders. The task force thought the Green River killings had stopped in 1984, but Ted wrote Keppel that serial killers don’t quit.
Ted's first letter to the task force arrived in October, 1984. Ted explained that he could offer “valuable insights” into the Green River Killer (Ted called him “Riverman”). Keppel wrote back and Ted's next letter was 22 pages long. For the next several years, Ted ruminated on Riverman's frame of mind, motives, victim pool, geographic preferences, and dump sites. “Technically, he wasn’t any help in actually naming the Green River Killer and catching him,” Keppel said. “But in understanding the Green River Killer, he was a big help.” It wasn’t until 2001 that “Riverman” was caught. Gary Leon Ridgway eventually pled guilty to murdering 49 women; as part of a plea bargain, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole in exchange for disclosing the whereabouts of missing women. He is serving his sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary, where Ted fantasized he might serve out his prison term.
Keppel also saw his communication with Ted as an opening to talk about other cases—including unsolved cases attributed to Ted. Although Keppel had spent 15 years investigating Ted Bundy, they hadn’t met before Keppel went to Florida in 1984, to meet the man he called his “personal nemesis.” They met again before Ted was executed in 1989. Keppel wanted Ted to give him an alibi for eight murders in the Northwest. Ted couldn’t. Keppel also asked him about the murder of Lonnie Trumbull and the attack on Lisa Wick, the two stewardesses bludgeoned in their Queen Anne Hill apartment in Seattle in 1966. “Ted was shaking and confused,” about the questions, Keppel wrote in The Riverman-Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. Ted had “worked himself into a box, knowing all along that I didn’t believe him,” and he “desperately tried to recover, stammering and doing verbal backflips,” according to Keppel.
“No. No. I have no hesitation about talking about things I have done, no hesitation about telling you about what I haven’t done, okay? So if I tell you something—I may not tell you something—I might not tell you something right now or every single detail right now, but if I tell you something, you can rely on it. And when I say, yes I did it, or no, I didn’t do something, that's the way it is.”
Keppel didn’t believe much that Ted had to say. His last question to Ted was about Ann Marie Burr. Ted gave a long-winded answer about how ludicrous the idea was, how he was “a kid” at the time, how his paper route was in a different part of Tacoma, how they went to different schools. But Keppel remembered what Ted had told him the year before: there “were some murders killers never talked about, because they were committed too close to home, too close to family, and of victims who were very young.” Ted had told Hugh Aynesworth that committing a murder at age 15 would be “...a much more mystical, exciting, intense, overwhelming experience... ” than when older. Keppel wrote that Ted “steadfastly did not want to talk about [the Burr case], and every denial he made was unconvincing.”
Ted's execution was set for March 4, 1986. Just a few weeks before, in February, a fledgling attorney was handed a pro bono case that changed her life. A recent University of Minnesota law school graduate working at a Washington, D.C. law firm, Polly Nelson was paying her dues, like other new lawyers; that week she was assigned to research the rules and regulations for frozen dairy products. She was asked if she would like to take on a pro bono project for her firm. There was a death penalty case in Florida. Did she know who Ted Bundy was? She wasn’t sure, but soon she was representing the man who had been called “the nation's most despised killer.”
Ted was under two separate death sentences in Florida, one for the Chi Omega killings and the other for the murder of Kimberly Diane Leach. He was awaiting execution for the Chi Omega murders when Nelson was brought in.
She felt the best chance of getting a stay of execution was to show how Ted had sabotaged his defense. Ted had displayed “irrational conduct” in court, including his “obnoxious posturing for the press, his disrespectful and destructive bantering with Judge Cowart, his utter lack of concern for what the jury saw or heard,” according to Nelson. In one of his most damaging displays of ego, Ted insisted on participating in the questioning of witnesses. His public defenders had worked hard to keep the grisly details of the Chi Omega killings out of the courtroom. But Ted introduced all the gruesome minutia for the jury to see and hear. The result was “chaos,” according to one of his attorneys, and the move alienated both judge and jury. Ted also prevented his lawyers from addressing his mental competence during the penalty phase and turned down a plea bargain.
Nelson described Ted's conduct in court this way: “Egocentricity, even at the cost of his own best interests.” Nelson believed there was another error committed, too. The jury in the Chi Omega murders had been hung at six to six for life or death; the judge erroneously instructed them that they were required to break the tie. Without that instruction, Ted would have been given a life sentence.
Reluctantly, because he didn’t believe he was incompetent, Ted agreed to Nelson's petition. Work could proceed on the appeals. Just days before he was to be executed, the Florida Supreme Court denied a stay of execution but the U.S. Supreme Court granted one. He was so close to being executed that Ted had been measured for a casket. For the next three years Ted would be just a hair's breadth away from execution.
> Nelson was never swayed by the charm that others saw. Ted wanted her to see him as he saw himself, smart, charming, sophisticated. She didn’t. “What he always reminded me of was a stereo salesman,” she said. “Glib, seemingly competent, until he was off script.” Where others had seen intellect, even brilliance, she saw a man “about as intelligent as a fair-to-middling college undergraduate... he could talk and write, but he couldn’t comprehend or respond... he was incapable of independent thought or elaboration.” Nelson also described him as “...like a precocious ten-year-old... very literal.”
At that time, Ted was still claiming he was innocent of all the murders attributed to him. Ted told Nelson, “Believe me, Polly, I am not the kind of person who would hurt a fly... ” She didn’t believe that, but she had entered the case with what she calls “naïve optimism,” hoping for the “miniscule possibility that Ted had been convicted falsely.” Nelson and Ted hadn’t talked in detail about his crimes; he was afraid she would be revolted. So was she. Her assignment was to dispute his trials, not be involved in the details of the crimes. But with the Chi Omega execution on hold he now faced execution for the murder of Kimberly Leach. Nelson needed to know if there was a chance he had not, in fact, killed her. Nelson really did not want him to be guilty of killing the child.
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 14