The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  He was going in circles now, and soon found himself again on the outskirts of Aspen. He headed back up Castle Creek for the cabin where he’d stayed days earlier. He was too late. Searchers had discovered that he’d been there. In fact, searchers were fanning out around the cabin as he watched from behind vegetation a couple hundred yards away.

  The posse members found scraps of dried food in the cabin and learned that the gun and ammunition were missing. They identified one fingerprint found in the cabin as being Ted’s. Then they learned that someone had broken into a Volkswagen camper in a resort area on Maroon Lake—apparently on Friday, June 10—and had taken food and a ski parka.

  Despite the stolen bits of food, Ted had lost a lot of weight, his injured ankle was swelling, and he was close to exhaustion. He headed back north, toward Aspen. On Saturday night, June 11, he slept in the wild, and Sunday found him skirting the edges of town. On Sunday night, he had been gone almost a full week. He was still free, but he was right back where he’d started and he needed a miracle to get out of town. Huddled, exhausted and shivering, in the tall bushes at the edge of the Aspen Golf Course, he saw an old Cadillac parked nearby. He checked and keys were in it. Ted seemingly had his miracle—wheels.

  Crouching low in the seat, he steered first toward Smuggler’s Mountain and the propitiously named Independence Pass route that headed east away from Aspen. Then he changed his mind. He would go west, instead, toward Glenwood Springs, back toward the jail where he’d been incarcerated, but farther than that, beyond that, west to complete freedom.

  It was now 2:00 A.M. on Monday, June 13.

  Pitkin County Deputies Gene Flatt and Maureen Higgins were patrolling the streets of Aspen, headed in an easterly direction that early morning when their attention was drawn to a Cadillac coming toward them. The driver appeared to be drunk. The car was wavering all over the road. They weren’t even thinking of Ted Bundy as they turned around and followed the Cadillac. They expected to find a drunk driver inside. Actually, Ted was cold sober, but his reflexes were dulled by exhaustion. He couldn’t control the Cadillac.

  The patrol car pulled up alongside the fishtailing Cadillac and signaled it to pull over. Gene Flatt walked over to the driver’s side of the car and looked in. The man inside wore glasses and had a Band-Aid plastered over his nose. But Flatt recognized him. It was Ted Bundy, who was about to be captured only blocks from where he had escaped.

  Ted shrugged and smiled thinly as Flatt said, “Hello, Ted.”

  The mountain maps were found in the stolen car, indicating that Ted’s leap from the courthouse had not been a spur of the moment impulse. He had planned the abortive escape attempt. Now, he was in more trouble than he’d been in before. He was lodged temporarily in the Pitkin County jail until June 16, when he was arraigned on charges of escape, burglary, and theft. Judge Lohr handed down an order that Ted would henceforth wear handcuffs and leg irons when he was being moved from place to place. But he would still be allowed to have most of the privileges he’d been granted before so that he could participate in his own defense: the law library access, the free long-distance calls, and all the other investigative tools.

  A week after Ted was recaptured, my phone rang a little before 8 A.M. Awakened from a sound sleep, I was startled to hear Ted’s voice.

  “Where are you?” I mumbled.

  “Can you come and pick me up?” he asked, and then laughed.

  He had not escaped again, but for a moment, I’d believed that he had somehow gotten out of jail once more.

  He told me he was fine, a little tired, and suffering from the loss of about twenty pounds, but fine.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked.

  “Would you believe I just looked out the window and saw all that lovely green grass and blue sky out there and I couldn’t resist?”

  No, I wouldn’t, but I didn’t have to say so. It was a rhetorical question.

  It was a short conversation, and when I wrote to him I couldn’t help starting with, “Tried to answer your last letter but you’d moved and left no forwarding address.”

  I had not yet expressed my answer to his question in the letter written just before his escape. He wanted to know my feelings about his guilt or innocence. What I told him was that I felt the same way I had felt on the Saturday afternoon in January 1976, our last meeting before he was returned to Utah for trial in the DaRonch kidnapping case. I had told him then that I could not fully believe in his innocence. I don’t know if he recalled what I’d said or not, but my reference to that afternoon in the tavern seemed to be enough. I also reminded him that I had never written one line about him for publication. Although he was big news, and getting bigger, I had managed to keep that promise. It seemed to satisfy him.

  His first letter after his capture was not as bitter or scathing as those just before had been. Perhaps his taste of freedom had softened him somewhat.

  Ted said he was recuperating from the effects of the failed escape, and that he thought very little of his few days of freedom. He was trying to forget being free, but he didn’t regret taking the chance. “I learned much about myself, my weaknesses, my capacity to survive, and the relationship of freedom to pain.”

  Everything about this letter was muted. He had tried and he had failed, and it was as if he’d turned down the energy in his emotions. After he was recaptured, he had learned from Meg that she was involved with another man. A year before, he would have been beating his breast in agony, now he viewed Meg’s final defection rationally and soberly. “Accepting the loss of her will never be easy. In fact, I doubt that I could ever truly say I accept her loving and living with another man. I will always love her so I could never say that I do not dream of our life together. But this new development, like my capture, must be taken calmly. My survival is at stake.”

  Perhaps that was the essential word: “survival.” If he allowed himself to grieve for Meg, he would not be up to the fight ahead. He wrote that he could only hope for a belief in a life to come. “I would dream of loving Meg again in another time.”

  In retrospect, there is evidence that Carole Ann Boone (who had dropped the “Anderson” from her name) was in constant touch with Ted during this period, that Ted was not without a woman to stand beside him. He did not mention it to me at that point.

  If survival was all, then Ted had to build up his body. He felt he had lost about thirty pounds during his days in the mountains, and he had been twenty pounds underweight to begin with. Jail food wouldn’t do it. Every day there was a new cook—a trusty, hired cook “who quits two days later,” a secretary from the front desk, a jailer, a jailer’s wife. Ted asked again for help from friends. He was healing much too slowly, and he needed healthy food. My assignment was to locate some powdered protein supplement. He told me I could probably find it in a health food store and that he preferred the two-pound can containing about 15 grams of protein per ounce. “Maybe some dried figs … maybe some canned nuts too, if you can afford it.”

  It seemed, from that letter, that Meg had gone out of Ted’s life. Yet I wondered at her telling him she was involved with someone else. I had talked to her on the phone only a few days before and she had said there was no one, but that for her own survival she had to pull away from Ted. Perhaps she had made up a fictitious man, knowing that that was the only way Ted would release her. It must have been that. Meg and I had commiserated with each other over the seeming impossibility of finding a single man who met our qualifications and would also even consider accepting a woman with a child, or—in my case—with four children. No, I didn’t think Meg had found anyone, not yet.

  I felt sorry for Ted, picturing him all alone at last, and yet he had been largely responsible for his own plight. He’d lied to Stephanie, Meg, Sharon, and even to his casual romantic partners. I needn’t have worried about him. Carole Ann visited him in jail whenever she could and worked as an “investigator” to refute the allegations against him. When she finally surfaced as his female defender, I
was startled. Who was this woman who was giving countless anonymous interviews in support of Ted? I could never have guessed that it was the same woman who had teased him years before about being the infamous “Ted.”

  In response to Ted’s requests, I sent him a large package containing ten pounds of protein supplement, vitamins, fruit, and nuts. When I carried it into my local post office, the clerk raised his eyebrows a bit as he looked at the addressee, but he said nothing. Postal clerks are like priests, doctors, and lawyers. They feel ethically bound to protect privileged information, and they respect their clients’ privacy.

  28

  I HAD NO DOUBT that Ted had planned his escape. He had alluded to escape to me so many times. Although he hadn’t wanted to discuss it in his first phone call to me or in his letters, he did tell Pitkin County Sheriff Sergeant Don Davis about his adventures during his week in the mountains. Yes, he had taken the rifle from the cabin, but he had thrown it away in the woods. A man with a rifle in June might have looked too suspicious. He had met few people out there in the wilderness, and when he did bump into some campers, he had pretended to be a man looking for his wife and children, just part of a happy family campout.

  Later, he would tell me how he’d felt when he returned to the cabin. “They were there, so close I could hear them talking about me. They didn’t even know I was watching them from behind some trees.” All in all, it had been an adventure for him, albeit a desperate adventure, and had only honed his will to be free. He was the prisoner in Papillon.

  I didn’t think that his escape necessarily marked him as a guilty man. An innocent man, seeing himself railroaded into a lifetime behind bars, would have been as likely to run. He had felt trapped by the inexorable grinding of the wheels of justice and, despite his protestations that he felt no pressure, he felt tremendous pressure—not only from Colorado but from Utah and Washington.

  Now he was in a hell of a mess. The murder trial in the Campbell case still loomed ahead. Now he was charged with escape, burglary, misdemeanor theft, and felony theft. Charges connected with his escape carried with them a possible ninety more years in sentences.

  Lawmen had a higher opinion of Chuck Leidner and Jim Dumas as attorneys than Ted did. “They’re damned good—almost awesome,” one detective commented. Dumas, who had just finished his arguments against the death penalty when Ted made his two-story leap for freedom, also had a sense of humor. When he learned that his client had escaped, he said wryly, “That’s the poorest show of faith in this argument that I’ve seen yet.”

  Ted hadn’t wanted the public defenders, however, and, with recent events, it was impossible for them to continue. Leidner was named as a potential witness for the prosecution on the escape charges.

  Ted’s longtime supporter and advisor, John Henry Browne from the Public Defender’s Office in Seattle, had flown to Aspen as soon as Ted was captured. Browne, who could not officially represent Ted since he had never been charged in Washington State, had always been offended by the way the “Ted” case was handled and felt Bundy was being convicted in the public’s eye through suspicion and innuendo. He spent his own funds to fly to confer with Ted in various states where he was being held.

  In mid-June 1977, it was Browne’s mission to serve as an arbitrator between Ted and Leidner and Dumas. Browne was delighted when a new attorney was appointed to defend Ted: Stephen “Buzzy” Ware.

  On June 16, Judge Lohr appointed Ware as the new counsel for the defense. Ware looked anything but a winning defense attorney as he stood beside Ted, dressed in jeans and a sports coat. Buzzy Ware’s hair was tousled, he wore glasses, and had a luxuriant mustache. Indeed, he looked more like a ski bum from the Aspen après-ski bars than he did a potential F. Lee Bailey. But Ware had made a name for himself. He had never lost a jury trial in Aspen. He flew his own plane and rode a motorcycle, and he was known as the man to have on your side in narcotics cases. After being appointed to Ted’s case, Ware flew off to Texas as defense counsel in a major federal racketeering case.

  Ware was a winner, and Ted sensed that. At last, he again had someone beside him whom he could respect. In a phone call to me Ted was ebullient as he talked about his attorney. Any residual effects of his failed escape were forgotten by August as he filed a motion for a retrial in Utah in the DaRonch case (based largely on what he felt were Detective Jerry Thompson’s suggestions to DaRonch that she pick Ted’s picture).

  The prosecution team in Colorado was attempting to beef up its case against Bundy by bringing in “similar transactions,” trying to introduce testimony about the kidnapping conviction, the murders and disappearances of Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, and Debby Kent in Utah, perhaps even the eight Washington cases. Taken in total, the crimes attributed to Ted Bundy bore a familiar pattern, a commonality. Taken separately, each case was lacking in clout.

  One can only speculate what might have happened if Ted had had the continued support from Buzzy Ware that fed new energy into the defense. On the night of August 11, Ware and his wife were involved in a motorcycle crash, an accident that killed Mrs. Ware instantly and left the brilliant young attorney with skull and facial fractures, internal injuries, and a broken leg. Ware was in a coma, and there was some question about whether he would be permanently paralyzed, but no question at all about whether he could continue assisting Ted.

  Ted was desolate. He had counted on Buzzy Ware to extricate him from his Colorado difficulties and now, once again, he was alone. He also felt that he was aging rapidly, that recent newspaper photos of him made him look years older than his true thirty years.

  I wrote to him in mid-August, commiserating with him about the loss of Ware, and assuring him that the photos in the paper were revealing only the residual effects of his ordeal in the mountains, and that they were also the result of harsh lighting.

  His answer was the last letter I would receive from Colorado.

  Fate does have a way of taking me by surprise, but the past two years have been so filled with surprises and shocking occurrences that my “down periods” have become progressively shorter. Am I becoming shock proof? Not exactly. There was a definite moistness in my eyes when news of Buzzy’s accident arrived. However, they were genuinely tears for him and not for me. He is such a beautiful person. As for my case, my confidence in it could not be diminished if every defense attorney in the country expired.

  He wrote that he felt it was almost a sacrilege to continue on with his case without pause, that he should stop for a time in respect for Ware, but that he had to continue. He seemed to see some light far ahead of him, and he was heading directly toward it.

  In many ways the dark, far corner has been turned I sense it now. The escape episode was at the end of a stretch, and the movement made now is toward a return. The media even seems to be humanizing me a little. More important, the DaRonch case has been broken. More later. My love,

  ted

  But, by September, Ted was screaming “injustice” and “political maneuvering” when El Paso County D.A. Bob Russell sought to include the Utah cases in the Campbell trial by introducing the hairs found in Ted’s old Volkswagen—hairs that matched the pubic hair of Melissa Smith in Midvale, and head hairs from Caryn Campbell and Carol DaRonch. Ted countered by saying that his understanding after reading the autopsy reports on Laura Aime and Melissa Smith was that the young murder victims might have been held captive for up to a week before they died. His argument was that this showed a clear lack of commonality since Caryn Campbell was known to have succumbed within hours of her abduction. Further, the Utah women had been struck with a blunt instrument, according to the postmortem reports, and Caryn Campbell with a sharp instrument. Ted argued that these differences made the diverse cases ineligible as “similar transactions.”

  Despite the vigorous fight going on in his legal arena, despite Carole Ann Boone, Ted did not forget Meg that September. He called me on September 20 and asked that I send a single red rose to Meg, to arrive on the twenty-sixth. “It’s the e
ighth anniversary of the night I met her. I want just one rose, and I want the card to read, ‘My heart valves need adjusting. Love, ted.’”

  I sent Meg that last red rose, after arguing with the florist who insisted that I could get four red roses for the $9 minimum. Ted had stipulated it be only one. He never offered to pay for the rose. I don’t know what Meg’s reaction was. I never talked to her again.

  Ted spent the fall of 1977 working feverishly on his defense for the trial ahead. He didn’t write any longer, but called me when he had something to talk about. Security was tighter now. He was not allowed to dial the phone numbers himself and had to wait for a deputy to do it. On his daily trips to the law library, he wore both handcuffs and leg irons. But again, he began to be so familiar to his captors, so affable, that the cuffs and irons were removed. He seemed to have nothing on his mind but winning in court. The escape several months behind him was dimming in everyone’s memory.

  On November 2, 1977, a suppression hearing was held behind closed doors in Judge Lohr’s courtroom. Ted was elated when Lohr refused to allow either the Debby Kent or the Laura Aime cases to be introduced at the Campbell trial.

  Two weeks later, a similar hearing was held where pathologists testified pro and con on the similarities of the head wounds suffered by Melissa Smith and Caryn Campbell. For the prosecution, Dr. Donald M. Clark said that such fractures were “unusual—not in the common area,” and that the fractures were “strikingly similar” both in the assumed weapon uses and in the fractures themselves.

  For the defense, Dr. John Wood, the Arapahoe County coroner, testified that the only similarity in the two skull fractures was that they had occurred in the same spot on the skull. Wood first said that Melissa Smith’s wound had been caused by a blunt instrument, while Caryn Campbell’s had been dealt with a sharp object. Under cross-examination, however, Dr. Wood admitted that if Ms. Campbell’s scalp had been bruised as well as cut (which it had been), then the same weapon could have caused the wounds on both victims’ heads. Looking at the pry bar taken from Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen, he agreed that it could have caused the injuries sustained by both women.