The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  Ted also called Beatrice Sloan, his old friend from the Seattle yacht club. She found him the same as he’d always been, full of plans and adventures. He told her he’d been to Philadelphia, where he’d seen his rich uncle, and that he was on his way to Aspen, Colorado, to become a ski instructor.

  “Then I’ll knit you a ski hat,” she replied promptly.

  “No need. I already have a ski mask. But I do need a ride to the airport.”

  Mrs. Sloan did drive him to the airport and saw him off on his trip to Colorado. She wondered a little at the expensive ski gear he carried. She knew he’d never had any money, and the equipment was clearly the best.

  Why he went to Colorado at that point is unclear. He did not have a job or even the promise of a job as a ski instructor. Perhaps he wanted to see the skiing hamlet that Stephanie had raved about. He was back by the time the fall quarter started at the University of Washington.

  In a psychology curriculum, Ted seemed to have found his niche. He pulled down mostly A’s with a sprinkling of B’s, in courses like physiological psychology, social psychology, animal learning, statistical methods, developmental psychology, deviant personality, and deviant development. The boy who had seemed to be without direction or plans now became an honor student.

  His professors liked him, particularly Patricia Lunneborg, Scott Fraser, and Ronald E. Smith. Smith three years later would write Ted a glowing letter of recommendation to the University of Utah Law School, which read in part:

  Mr. Bundy is undoubtedly one of the top undergraduate students in our department. Indeed, I would place him in the top 1% of undergraduate students with whom I have interacted both here at the University of Washington and at Purdue University. He is exceedingly bright, personable, highly motivated, and conscientious. He conducts himself more like a young professional than like a student. He has the capacity for hard work and because of his intellectual curiosity is a pleasure to interact with… As a result of his undergraduate psychology major, Mr. Bundy has become intensely interested in studying psychological variables which influence jury decisions. He and I are currently engaged in a research project in which we are attempting to study experimentally some of the variables which influence jury decisions.

  I must admit that I regret Mr. Bundy’s decision to pursue a career in law rather than to continue his professional training in psychology. Our loss is your gain. I have no doubt that Mr. Bundy will distinguish himself as a law student and as a professional and I recommend him to you without qualification.

  Ted needed nothing more than his scholastic excellence to stand him in good stead with his professors. It was somewhat odd then that he should tell Professor Scott Fraser that he had been a foster child, raised in one foster care home after another during his childhood. Fraser accepted this information as fact and was surprised later to find that it was not true.

  Ted often frequented University District taverns, drinking beer and occasionally scotch. It was in the Sandpiper Tavern on September 26, 1969, that he met the woman who would be a central force in his life for the next seven years.

  Her name was Meg Anders.* Like Stephanie, Meg was a few years older than Ted. She was a young divorcee with a three-year-old daughter, Liane.* Meg was a diminutive woman with long brown hair—not pretty, but with a winsomeness that made her seem years younger than she was. The daughter of a prominent Utah doctor, she was on the rebound from a disastrous marriage which had foundered when she learned that her husband was a convicted felon. Meg had divorced him and taken her daughter to Seattle to make a new life. Working as a secretary at a Seattle college, she knew no one in Seattle except for Lynn Banks, a childhood friend from Utah, and the people she worked with.

  A little hesitant at first, she had finally allowed Ted to buy her a beer and had been fascinated with the good-looking young man who talked about psychology and his plans for the future. When she gave him her phone number, she really hadn’t expected that he would call her. When he did, she was thrilled.

  They began a friendship, and then an affair. Although Ted continued to live at the Rogers home and Meg kept her apartment, they spent many nights together. She fell in love with him. Given her situation, it would have been almost impossible not to. She believed totally in his ability to succeed, something Stephanie had never done, and Meg often loaned Ted money to help with his schooling. Almost from the start, she wanted to marry him but understood when he told her that would have to be a long time in the future. He had much to accomplish first.

  Ted continued to work at part-time jobs, selling shoes for a department store and working again for the surgical supply house. When he couldn’t make ends meet, Meg helped out.

  Sometimes she worried that it was her family’s money and position that attracted Ted to her. She’d seen his appraising glance around their home in Utah when she took him home for Christmas in 1969. But it had to be more than that. He was good to her, and he was as devoted as a father to Liane. Liane always got flowers from him on her birthday, and Ted always sent Meg a single red rose on September 26 to commemorate their first meeting.

  She sensed that he sometimes saw other women, knew that he and a friend would occasionally drop into the Pipeline Tavern or Dante’s or O’Bannion’s and pick up girls. She tried not to think about it. Time would take care of that.

  What she did not know was that Stephanie existed, that Stephanie lived in Ted’s mind as strongly as she always had. Although Stephanie had felt relieved when she said goodbye to Ted in the spring of 1969, she had not dropped him completely. The California woman who had wrought such a cataclysmic change in Ted Bundy’s life had relatives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and she had taken to calling Ted to say “hi” when her travels brought her through Seattle from time to time.

  As 1969 and 1970 passed, Ted’s path was straight upward, excelling in everything he put his hand to. He was becoming more urbane, superbly educated, and socially adept. He was an ideal citizen. He even drew a commendation from the Seattle Police Department when he ran down a purse snatcher and returned the stolen bag to its owner. In the summer of 1970, it was Ted Bundy who saved a three-and-a-half-year-old toddler from drowning in Green Lake in Seattle’s north end. No one had seen the child wander away from her parents—no one but Ted—and he had dashed into the water to save the youngster.

  Ted kept up his contacts with the Republican Party. He was a precinct committeeman and would become more involved in the party work as the years progressed.

  To those closest to him, Meg was definitely Ted’s girl. He took her to meet Louise and Johnnie Bundy in their rambling blue and white house in Tacoma, and they liked her. Louise was relieved to see that he’d apparently gotten over his disappointment over the end of his romance with Stephanie.

  From 1969 onward, Meg was a welcome visitor both at the Bundys’ Tacoma home and at the A-frame cabin they’d built at Crescent Lake near Gig Harbor, Washington. Meg, Ted, and Liane often went camping, rafting, and sailing and took more trips to Utah and to Ellensburg, Washington, to visit Ted’s high school friend Jim Paulus.

  Everyone they visited found Meg gentle and bright and devoted to Ted, and it seemed only a matter of time until they married.

  4

  THE SEATTLE CRISIS CLINIC’S OFFICES were housed in 1971 in a huge old Victorian mansion on Capitol Hill. Once the area where Seattle’s richest pioneering fathers settled, Capitol Hill today has the second highest crime rate in the city. Many of these old houses remain, scattered willy-nilly among apartment houses and Seattle’s main hospital district. When I signed on as a volunteer at the Crisis Clinic, I felt some trepidation about working a night shift, but with four children at home that was the only time I had free.

  Ted Bundy became a paid work-study student at about the time I became a volunteer. While I worked a four-hour shift one night a week from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M., Ted worked from 9 P.M. to 9 A.M. several nights a week There were fifty-one volunteers and a dozen work-study students manning the crisis lines arou
nd the clock. Most of us never met because of the staggered schedules, and the circumstances that made Ted and me partners were purely coincidental. I have pondered on that coincidence in the years since, wondered why I should have been the one out of fifty-one to spend so much time with Ted Bundy.

  None of those on the phone were professional psychiatric social workers, but we were people who were empathetic and who sincerely tried to help the clients who called in crisis. All of the volunteers and work-study students had to pass muster first during interviews with Bob Vaughn, the Protestant minister who directed the Crisis Clinic, and Bruce Cummins, who had a master’s in psychiatric social work. Through the three-hour intake interviews, we had “proved” that we were essentially normal, concerned, and capable people who were not likely to panic in emergencies. It was a favorite joke among the crew that we must have our heads on straight or we wouldn’t be there dealing with other people’s problems.

  After going through a forty-hour course, which featured psychodramas with would-be volunteers answering staged calls that represented the more common problems we might expect, we were trained by experienced volunteers in the phone rooms themselves—allowed to listen in on calls through auxiliary receivers. Ted and I were trained by Dr. John Eshelman, a brilliant and kind man who is now head of the economics department at Seattle University.

  I remember the first night I met Ted. John gestured toward a young man sitting at a desk in the phone room which adjoined ours with only an arch separating us, saying, “This is Ted Bundy. He’ll be working with you.”

  He looked up and grinned. He was twenty-four then, but he seemed younger. Unlike most of the other male college students of that era, who wore long hair and often had beards, Ted was clean-shaven and his wavy brown hair was cut above the ears, exactly the style that the male students had worn when I had attended the University fifteen years before. He wore a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and his desk was piled with textbooks.

  I liked him immediately. It would have been hard not to. He brought me a cup of coffee and waved his arm over the awesome banks of phone lines, “You think we can handle all this? John’s going to turn us loose alone after tonight.”

  “I hope so,” I answered. And I did devoutly hope so. Suicides-in-progress seemed to make up only about ten percent of the calls coming in, but the range of crises was formidable. Would I say the right thing? Do the right thing?

  As it turned out, we made a good team. Working side by side in the cluttered two rooms on the top floor of the building, we seemed to be able to communicate in emergencies without even having to speak. If one of us got a caller on the line who was actually threatening suicide, we would signal the other to call the phone company and put a trace on the line.

  The wait always seemed endless. In 1971 it took almost an hour to get a trace and an address if we had no hint about the area of town from which the call was coming. The one of us who was on the line with the would-be suicide would attempt to maintain a calm, caring tone while the other raced around the offices making calls to get help to the caller.

  We had callers who became unconscious from overdoses many times, but we always managed to keep the lines open. Then there would be the welcome sound of the Medic I crew breaking in, sounds of their voices in the room with the caller, and finally, the phone would be picked up and we would hear: “It’s O.K. We’ve got him. We’re on the way to Harborview.”

  If, as many people believe today, Ted Bundy took lives, he also saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it.

  I can picture him today as clearly as if it were only yesterday, see him hunched over the phone, talking steadily, reassuringly—see him look up at me, shrug, and grin. I can hear him agreeing with an elderly woman that it must have been beautiful indeed when Seattle was lit only by gas lights, hear the infinite patience and caring in his voice, and see him sigh and roll his eyes while he listened to a penitent alcoholic. He was never brusque, never hurried.

  Ted’s voice was a strange mixture of a slightly western drawl and the precise clipped phraseology of an English accent. I might describe it as courtly.

  Shut off from the night outside, with doors locked to protect us from the occasional irrational caller who tried to break in, there was an insular feel to those two offices where we worked. The two of us were all alone in the building, connected to the outside world by only the phone lines.

  Beyond the walls, we could hear sirens screaming as police units and Medic I rigs raced up Pine Street a block away toward the county hospital. With the blackness outside our windows broken only by the lights in the harbor far below us, and the sound of rain and sleet against the panes, those sirens seemed to be the only thing reminding us that there was a world of people out there. We were locked in a boiler room of other people’s crises.

  I don’t know why we became such close friends so rapidly. Perhaps it was because we dealt with so many life-and-death situations together, making our Tuesday nights intense situations that bound us together the way soldiers in battle often are. Perhaps it was the isolation, and the fact that we were constantly talking to other people about their most intimate problems.

  And so, when the quiet nights came, the nights when the moon was no longer full, when the welfare money had run out with no money left to buy liquor, and when the street people and the callers seemed to be enjoying a spate of serenity, Ted and I talked for hours to each other.

  On the surface, at least, it seemed that I had more problems than Ted did. He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.

  Most of the Crisis Clinic volunteers gave our time because we had endured crises ourselves, tragedies that made us more able to understand those who called in. I was not an exception. I had lost my only brother to suicide when he was twenty-one, a Stanford senior about to enter Harvard Medical School. I had tried vainly to convince him that life was worthwhile and precious, and I had failed because I’d been too close to him and had felt his pain too acutely. If I could save someone else, I think I felt that it might help me to expiate some of the guilt I still carried.

  Ted listened quietly as I told him about my brother, of the long night’s wait while sheriff’s deputies looked for Don, finally finding him too late in a deserted park north of Palo Alto, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  In 1971 my life was not without problems. My marriage was in deep trouble, and I was again trying to cope with guilt. Bill and I had agreed to a divorce only weeks before he’d been diagnosed with malignant melanoma, the deadliest of skin cancers.

  “What can I do?” I asked Ted. “How can I leave a man who may be dying?”

  “Are you sure he’s dying?” Ted responded.

  “No. The first surgery seems to have caught all the malignancy, and the skin grafts have finally held. He wants to end the marriage. He says he wants to, but I feel as if I’m really running away from a sick man who needs me.”

  “But it’s his choice, isn’t it? If he seems well, and if your being together is an unhappy situation for both of you, then you have no guilt. He’s made the decision. It’s his life, and, especially when he might not have that many years ahead, it’s his right to decide how he wants to spend them.”

  “Are you talking to me as if I were a crisis caller?” I smiled.

  “Maybe. Probably. But my feelings would be the same. You both deserve to get on with your lives.”

  Ted’s advice proved to be the right advice. Within a year, I would be divorced, and Bill would remarry and have four good years doing what he wanted.

  What was happening in my life in 1971 is unimportant to the story of Ted Bundy, save for the fact that Ted’s incisive viewpoint on my problems and his unfailing support and belief in my capabilities as a writer who could earn a living on her own, demonstrate the kind of man I knew. It was that man I would continue to believe in for many years.

&nbs
p; Because I had opened up my life to him, Ted seemed to feel at ease in talking about the vulnerable areas in his world, although it was not until many weeks after I met him that he did so.

  One night, he moved his chair through the alcove that separated our desks and sat beside me. Behind him, one of the posters amidst those plastered over most of the walls in our offices, was in my direct line of vision. It was a picture of a howling kitten clinging to a thick rope, and it read, “When you get to the end of your rope … tie a knot and hang on.”

  Ted sat there silently for a moment or two as we sipped coffee companionably. Then he looked down at his hands and said, “You know, I only found out who I really am a year or so ago. I mean, I always knew, but I had to prove it to myself.”

  I looked at him, a little surprised, and waited for the rest of the story.

  “I’m illegitimate. When I was born, my mother couldn’t say that I was her baby. I was born in a home for unwed mothers and, when she took me home, she and my grandparents decided to tell everyone that I was her brother, and that they were my parents. So I grew up believing that she was my sister, that I was a ‘late baby’ born to my grandparents.”

  He paused, and looked at the sheets of rain that washed over the windows in front of us. I didn’t say anything. I could tell he had more to say.

  “I knew. Don’t ask me how I knew. Maybe I heard conversations. Maybe I just figured out that there couldn’t be twenty years’ difference in age between a brother and a sister, and Louise always took care of me. I just grew up knowing that she was really my mother.”

  “Did you ever say anything?”

  He shook his head. “No. It would have hurt them. It just wasn’t something you talked about. When I was little, we moved away—Louise and I—and left my grandparents behind. If they were my mother and father, we wouldn’t have done that. I went back east in 1969. I needed to prove it to myself, to know for sure. I traced my birth to Vermont, and I went to the city hall, and I looked at the records. It wasn’t difficult. I just asked for my birth certificate under my mother’s name—and there it was.”