The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  “How did you feel? Were you shocked, or upset?”

  “No. I think I felt better. It wasn’t a surprise at all. It was like I had to know the truth before I could do anything else. And when I saw it there on the birth certificate, then I’d done that. I wasn’t a kid. I was twenty-two when I found out for certain.”

  “They lied to you. Did it seem like they’d deceived you?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “People lie out of love too, you know,” I said. “Your mother could have let you go—but she didn’t. She did the best she could. It must have seemed the only thing she could do to keep you with her. She must have loved you very much.”

  He nodded, and said softly, “I know… I know.”

  “And look at you now. You turned out pretty good. In fact, you turned out great.”

  He looked up and smiled. “I hope so.”

  “I know so.”

  We never talked about it again. It was funny. In 1946, when Ted’s mother had found out she was pregnant in Philadelphia, I had been a high school student thirty miles away in Coatesville. I remember that when the girl who sat next to me in physics class became pregnant, it was the talk of the school. That’s the way things were in 1946. Could Ted understand that in 1971? Could he even fathom what his mother had gone through to keep him?

  He certainly seemed to have made the most of his considerable assets. He was brilliant and making almost straight A’s in psychology in his senior year, even though most of his studying had to be done between calls during his all-night shifts at the Crisis Clinic. I had never brought up any facet of psychology that Ted wasn’t fully conversant with. During that autumn quarter of 1971, Ted was taking ecological biology, adaptation of man, laboratory of human performance, and an honors seminar.

  He was handsome, although the years of adversity ahead would somehow see him become even handsomer, as if his features were being honed to a fine edge.

  And Ted was physically strong, much stronger than I had thought when I saw him for the first time. He had seemed slender, almost frail, and I had made it a habit to bring cookies and sandwiches to share with him each Tuesday night. I thought he might not be getting enough to eat. I was surprised one warm night when he’d bicycled to the clinic wearing cut-off blue jeans. His legs were as thickly muscled and powerful as a professional athlete’s. He was slender, but he was whipcord tough.

  As far as his appeal to women, I can remember thinking that if I were younger and single or if my daughters were older, this would be almost the perfect man.

  Ted talked quite a bit about Meg and Liane. I assumed that he was living with Meg, although he never actually said he was.

  “She’s really interested in your work,” he said one night. “Could you bring in some of your detective magazines so I can take them home to her?”

  I did bring in several, and he took them with him. He never commented on them, and I assumed that he hadn’t read them.

  We were talking one night about his plans to go to law school. It was almost spring then, and, for the first time, he told me about Stephanie.

  “I love Meg, and she really loves me,” he began. “She’s helped me with money for school. I owe her a lot. I don’t want to hurt her, but there’s somebody else I can’t stop thinking about.”

  Again, he had surprised me. He’d never mentioned anyone but Meg.

  “Her name is Stephanie, and I haven’t seen her for a long time. She’s living near San Francisco, and she’s completely beautiful. She’s tall, almost as tall as I am, and her parents are wealthy. She’s never known anything but being rich. I just couldn’t fit in with that world.”

  “Are you in touch with her at all?” I asked.

  “Once in a while. We talk on the phone. Every time I hear her voice, it all comes back. I can’t settle for anything else unless I try one more time. I’m going to apply for law school anyplace I can get in around San Francisco. I think the problem now is that we’re just too far apart. If we were both in California, I think we could get back together.”

  I asked him how long it had been since he’d gone with Stephanie, and he said they’d broken up in 1968 but that Stephanie was still single.

  “Do you think she might love me again if I sent her a dozen red roses?”

  It was such a naive question that I looked up to see if he was serious. He was. In the spring of 1972 when he talked about Stephanie, it was as if the intervening years hadn’t happened at all.

  “I don’t know, Ted,” I ventured. “If she feels the same way you do, the roses might help—but they wouldn’t make her love you if she’s changed.”

  “She’s the one woman, the only woman I ever really loved. It’s different from the way I feel about Meg. It’s hard to explain. I don’t know what to do.”

  Seeing the glow in his eyes when he talked about Stephanie, I could envision the heartbreak ahead for Meg. I urged him not to make promises to Meg he couldn’t keep.

  “At some point, you’re going to have to choose. Meg loves you. She’s stood by you when the going is rough, when you don’t have any money. You say that Stephanie’s family makes you feel poor, as if you don’t fit in. It might be that Meg’s real, and Stephanie’s a dream. I guess the real test is—how would you feel if you didn’t have Meg? What would you do if you knew she had someone else, if you found her with another man?”

  “I did once. It’s funny you should bring it up, because it just made me wild. We’d had a fight, and I saw some guy’s car parked outside her apartment. I raced around the alley and stood up on a garbage can to look in the window. The sweat was just pouring off me and I was like a crazy man. I couldn’t stand to think of Meg with another man. I couldn’t believe the effect it had on me. …”

  He shook his head, bemused by the violence of his jealousy.

  “Then maybe you care more about Meg than you realize.”

  “That’s the problem. One day I think I want to stay here, marry Meg, help bring Liane up, have more children— that’s what Meg wants. Sometimes it seems like that’s all I want. But I don’t have any money. I won’t have any money for a long time. And I can’t see myself being tied down to a life like that just when I’m getting started. And then I think about Stephanie, and the life I could have with her. I want that too. I’ve never been rich, and I want to be. But how can I say ‘thanks a lot and goodbye’ to Meg?”

  The phones rang then, and we left the problem in midair. Ted’s turmoil didn’t seem that bizarre or desperate for a man of twenty-four. In fact, it seemed quite normal. He had some maturing to do. When he did, I thought he would probably make the right decision.

  When I arrived for work a few Tuesdays later, Ted told me he had applied for admittance to law school at Stanford and at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Ted seemed to be a prime candidate for law school. He had the incisive mind for it and the tenacity, and he believed totally in the orderly progression of changes in the system of government through legislation. His stance made him something of a loner among the work-study students working at the Crisis Clinic. They were semi hippies, in both their garb and their political views, and he was a conservative Republican. I could see that they considered him a rather odd duck as they argued about the riots that were constantly erupting on the University campus.

  “You’re wrong, man,” a bearded student told him. “You aren’t going to change Vietnam by sucking up to the old fogies in Congress. All they care about is another big contract for Boeing. You think they give a shit about how many of us get killed?”

  “Anarchy isn’t going to solve anything. You just end up scattering your forces and getting your head broken,” Ted responded.

  They snorted in derision. He was anathema to them.

  The student riots and the marches blocking the I-5 freeway enraged Ted. On more than one occasion, he had tried to block the demonstrations, waving a club and telling the rioters to go home. He believed there was a better way to do it, but his own
anger was, strangely, as intense as those he tried to stop.

  I never saw that anger. I never saw any anger at all. I cannot remember everything that Ted and I talked about, try as I might, but I do know we never argued. Ted’s treatment of me was the kind of old-world gallantry that he invariably showed toward any woman I ever saw him with, and I found it appealing.

  He always insisted on seeing me safely to my car when my shift at the Crisis Clinic was over in the wee hours of the morning. He stood by until I was safely inside my car, doors locked and engine started, waving to me as I headed for home twenty miles away. He often told me, “Be careful. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Compared to my old friends, the Seattle homicide detectives who routinely saw me leave their offices after a night’s interviewing, at midnight in downtown Seattle, with a laughing “We’ll watch out the window and if anyone mugs you, we’ll call 911,” Ted was like a knight in shining armor!

  5

  I HAD TO DROP MY VOLUNTEER WORK at the Crisis Clinic in the spring of 1972. I was writing six days a week, and, beyond that, I was getting stale—a little jaded on the phones. After a year and a half, I had heard the same problems too many times. I had problems of my own. My husband had moved out, we had filed for divorce, and I had two teenagers and two preteens at home who provided their own crises for me to cope with. Ted graduated from the University in June. We had never seen each other outside the Crisis Clinic, and now we kept in touch with infrequent phone calls. I didn’t see him again until December.

  My divorce was final on December 14. On December 16 all current and former clinic personnel were invited to a Christmas party at Bruce Cummins’s home on Lake Washington. I had a car, but no escort, and I knew Ted didn’t have a car, so I called and asked him if he would like to attend the party with me. He seemed pleased, and I picked him up at the Rogerses’ rooming house on 12th N.E. Freda Rogers smiled at me and called up the stairs to Ted.

  On the long drive from the University District to the south end, we talked about what had happened in the intervening months since we’d seen each other. Ted had spent the summer working as an intern in psychiatric counseling at Harborview, the huge county hospital complex. As a policewoman in the 1950s, I had taken a number of mentally deranged subjects—220s in police lingo—to the fifth floor of Harborview and knew the facilities there well. But Ted talked little about his summer job. He was far more enthusiastic about his activities during the governor’s campaign in the fall of 1972.

  He had been hired by the Committee to Re-Elect Dan Evans, Washington’s Republican governor. Former governor Albert Rosellini had made a comeback try, and it had been Ted’s assignment to travel around the state and monitor Rosellini’s speeches, taping them for analysis by Evans’s team.

  “I just mingled with the crowds and nobody knew who I was,” he explained.

  He’d enjoyed the masquerade, sometimes wearing a false mustache, sometimes looking like the college student he’d been only a short time before, and he’d been amused at the way Rosellini modified his speeches easily for the wheat farmers of eastern Washington and the apple growers of Wenatchee. Rosellini was a consummate politician, the opposite of the upfront, All-American Evans.

  All this was heady stuff for Ted, to be on the inside of a statewide campaign, to report to Governor Evans himself and his top aides with the tapes of Rosellini’s speeches.

  On September 2, Ted, driving Governor Evans and other dignitaries in the lead limousine, had been the first man to traverse the North Cascades Highway that winds through spectacular scenery at the northern boundaries of Washington State.

  “They thought that President Nixon was going to show up,” Ted recalled. “And they had Secret Service men checking everybody out. His brother came instead, but I didn’t care. I got to lead fifteen thousand people in a sixty-four-mile parade across the mountains.”

  The Evans campaign for re-election had been successful, and now Ted was in good standing with the administration in power. At the time of the Christmas party, he was employed by the City of Seattle’s Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and was reviewing the state’s new hitchhiking law, a law which made thumbing a ride legal again.

  “Put me down as being absolutely against hitchhiking,” I said. “I’ve written too many stories about female homicide victims who met their killers while they were hitchhiking.”

  Although Ted still looked forward to law school, he had his sights on the position as director of the Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, and he was among the final candidates. He felt optimistic about getting the job.

  We went our separate ways at the party. I danced with Ted once or twice and noticed that he seemed to be having a good time, talking with several women. He seemed to be completely entranced with a young woman who belonged to Seattle’s Junior League, a Crisis Clinic volunteer whom neither of us had happened to meet before. Since some shifts never coincided, it wasn’t unusual that volunteers’ paths didn’t cross. The woman was married to a young lawyer with a “future,” a man who is now one of Seattle’s most successful attorneys.

  Ted didn’t talk to her. In fact, he seemed in awe of her, but he pointed her out to me and asked about her. She was a beautiful woman with long dark hair, straight and parted in the middle, and dressed in a way that spoke of money and taste. She wore a black, long-sleeved blouse, a straight white silk evening skirt, solid gold chains, and earrings.

  I doubt that she was even aware of Ted’s fascination with her, but I caught him staring at her several times during the evening. With the others at the party, he was expansive, relaxed, and usually the center of conversation.

  Since I was the driver, Ted drank a good deal during the evening, and he was quite intoxicated when we left at 2:00 A.M. He was a friendly, relaxed drunk, and he settled into the passenger seat and rambled on and on about the woman at the party who had impressed him so much.

  “She’s just what I’ve always wanted. She’s perfect. But she didn’t even notice me.”

  And then he fell sound asleep.

  When I delivered Ted back to the Rogerses’ that night, he was almost comatose, and it took me ten minutes of shaking him and shouting to wake him up. I walked him to the door and said good night, smiling as he bumbled in the door and disappeared.

  A week later, I received a Christmas card from Ted. The block print read, “O. Henry wrote the ‘Gift of the Magi,’ a story of two lovers who sacrificed for each other their greatest treasures. She cut her long hair to buy her lover a watch chain. He sold his watch to buy her combs for her hair. In acts that might seem foolish these two people found the spirit of the Magi.”

  It was my favorite Christmas story. How had he known?

  Inside, Ted printed his own wishes: “The New Year should be a good one for a talented, delightful, newly liberated woman. Thank you for the party. Love, ted.”

  I was touched by the gesture. It was typical of Ted Bundy. He knew I needed the emotional support of those sentiments.

  Seemingly, there wasn’t a thing in the world I could do for him. He wasn’t interested in me romantically. I was just about as poor as he was, hardly influential. He sent that card simply because we were friends. When I look at that card today and compare it with the signatures on the dozens of letters I would receive later, I am struck with the difference. Never again would he sign with the jaunty flourish he did then.

  Ted didn’t get the job as director of the Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, and he resigned in January 1973. I saw him again on a rainy day in March. An old friend whom I’d known since my days in the police department, Joyce Johnson, a detective for eleven years in the Sex Crimes Unit, and I emerged from the police-jail elevator in the Public Safety Building on our way to lunch, and there was Ted. Bearded now, he looked so different that I didn’t recognize him at first. He called my name and grabbed my hand. I introduced him to Joyce, and he told me enthusiastically that he was working for the King County Law and Justice Planning Office
.

  “I’m doing a study on rape victims,” he explained. “If you could get me some back copies of the stories you’ve done on rape cases, it would help my research.”

  I promised to go through my files and cull some of the accounts, many of them written about cases in which Joyce Johnson had been the principal detective, and get them to him. But, somehow, I never got around to it, and I eventually forgot that he’d wanted them.

  Ted had applied, for the second time, to the University of Utah’s Law School, largely at Meg’s urging. Her father was a wealthy physician, her siblings professionals in Utah, and she hoped that she and Ted would eventually end up in the Mormon state.

  He was quickly accepted, although he had been rejected in a previous application to the University of Utah in 1972, despite his degree from the University of Washington “With Distinction.” Ted’s grade point average from the University was 3.51, a GPA that any student might have aspired to, but his legal aptitude test scores had not been high enough to meet Utah’s standards for entry.

  In 1973, he bombarded the admissions department at Utah with letters of recommendation from professors and from Governor Dan Evans. Not content with the restrictions of a standard application form, he had resumes printed up listing his accomplishments since graduation from the University of Washington, and wrote a six-page personal statement on his philosophies on law.

  It made an impressive packet.

  Under postgraduate employment, Ted listed:

  Criminal Corrections Consultant: January, 1973. Currently retained by the King County Office of Law and Justice Planning to identify recidivism rates for offenders who have been found guilty of misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors in the twelve county District Courts. The purpose of the study is to determine the nature and number of offenses committed subsequent to a conviction in District Court.