The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  The FBI came to the same conclusion. Ray Mathis, in charge of public information for the Seattle office of the FBI, and an old friend—a man I had once introduced Ted to at a Christmas party—called and asked for my address in Los Angeles. He wanted to know when I would be flying down to California.

  I had planned to leave on January 4, but my car had been struck from behind by a drunk driver. It had almost totaled the first new car I’d ever had and had left me with severe whiplash. I put off my flight until January 6.

  Ray gave me the names of two agents in charge of the Fugitive Unit in the Los Angeles FBI office. “Call them the minute you get off the plane. They’ll be in touch with you, watching you. We don’t know where he is, but he may try to contact you there.”

  All of it was unreal. Only a few years before, I had been, if there is such a creature, a typical housewife, and a Brownie leader. Now, I was off to Hollywood to write a movie, with the FBI waiting for me. I felt as if I belonged in an episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

  The two FBI agents met me as I arrived at my new apartment in West Hollywood. They checked the double locks on the door and found them sound, satisfying themselves that my third-floor apartment was not accessible from the ground. Any intruder would have to shinny up reed-thin bamboo trees.

  “Do you think he’ll call you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He has my address and my phone number.”

  “If he does, don’t let him come here. Arrange to meet him someplace public, a restaurant. Then call us. We’ll be in disguise at another table.”

  I had to smile. The ghost of J. Edgar Hoover still prevailed. I had always found that FBI agents looked exactly like FBI agents, and I commented on my impression. They were chagrined and assured me that they were “masters of disguise.” If I doubted their expertise at disguise, I did, however, appreciate their concern.

  I have often been grateful that Ted did not run in my direction. I was saved a scene I could only imagine. All writers have a sense of the dramatic, but I couldn’t quite see Ann Rule from the little town of Des Moines, Washington, in the midst of an arrest of one of the country’s Ten-Most-Wanted criminals—that “criminal” being an old friend.

  Joyce Johnson, who was to be a faithful, if sometimes needling, correspondent during my sojourn in Hollywood, wrote,

  Dear Ann,

  Just to let you know that I’m protecting your interests here in the police department. I told Captain Leitch that you are hiding Ted in your apartment, and is he mad! He says you’ll never get another story, but he really likes the new guy who’s writing crime stories, and lets him see all the files. If you and Ted go to Mexico, send me a postcard

  Love,

  Joyce

  The weeks ahead were uncomfortable, but not frightening. I had no fear of Ted Bundy. Even if he was what he was said to be, a mass murderer, I still felt he would never harm me, but neither could I help him in his escape. That was something I just couldn’t do.

  When I returned to my apartment complex each night, I parked my rental car in the dark underground garage, traversed its length, and emerged among the lush flowering shrubbery that threatened to overgrow the swimming pool. Shadows were everywhere, and the last stretch of sidewalk before I came to my building in the rear of the complex was pitch dark. The lights had burned out. I sprinted for the door, pushed the elevator button, made sure no one was inside the self-operated lift, and ran from there to the door of my apartment.

  Actually, I was more leery of some of the peculiar occupants of my building than I was of bumping into Ted. He was a known quality to me. They were not. My only fear as far as Ted was concerned was that I didn’t want to have to face turning him in.

  I needn’t have worried. On the night I arrived at the Los Angeles airport on January 6, Ted was pulling out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, my girlhood home, in a stolen car, headed for Tallahassee, Florida. By the time Marty Davidson and I began work on our script in earnest, Ted was comfortably ensconced in The Oak in Tallahassee, calling himself Chris Hagen. If he thought of me at all, it was only in passing. I was part of the other world, the world left behind forever.

  Living in his shabby room, Ted was as happy and contented as he’d been in years. Just to open his eyes in the morning and see the old wood door, paint peeling and scarred, instead of a solid steel door, was glorious. At first, simply freedom itself was enough. He was around people, part of a college group, a group he had always found healthy and exciting.

  He had meant to be completely and utterly law abiding, to get by without a car, without even a bicycle. He had meant to get a job—construction work preferably, or maybe even as a janitor. He wasn’t in as good physical shape as he’d been most of his life. The months in jail had caused his taut muscle tone to waste away, despite the pacing he’d done in his cell, despite the pushups and sit-ups he’d made himself do faithfully. And then, he was drastically underweight. He’d had to starve himself so he could get through the hole in the ceiling. It would take a while to build up again.

  He had gone through the records of graduates of Florida State University and decided that a graduate student named Kenneth Misner, a track star, would be the first man he’d become. He researched Misner’s family, his hometown. He had an I.D. card made up in Misner’s name, but he didn’t want to use it yet. He needed a driver’s license and other I.D. After he had all the verification that he needed to prove he was Kenneth Misner, then he would develop two or three more sets of I.D.—American first, and then Canadian. But he mustn’t hurry it. There was time now, all the time in the world.

  His days were simple. He arose at six and bought a small breakfast at the cafeteria on campus, skipped lunch, and had a hamburger for supper. In the evening, he walked to the store and bought a quart of beer, took it back to his room, and drank it slowly. God! Freedom was so sweet, there was such pleasure in the simplest things.

  He thought a lot about jail as he sipped the beer, smiling to himself as he went over the escape again and again. It had worked far better than he himself could have imagined. They had never understood what he was capable of. They’d been so grim and self-righteous about those damnable leg irons, irons they’d chained to the floor of their police cars. Hell, he’d had keys for those leg irons all along, made for him by a cellmate. He could have unlocked them at any time, but what good would it have done? Why should he jump out of a moving police car in the winter mountains when he could go through the ceiling anytime he chose and get a fourteen to sixteen hour head start on the bastards?

  He knew he should be working harder at finding a job, but he’d never been much of a job hunter. The days melted into each other, and it was all so good.

  He knew he was acquisitive—that “things” meant a lot to him. He’d had his apartment in Salt Lake City exactly as he’d wanted it, and the damned cops had taken it all away from him. Now he wanted some things to brighten up his world again. He’d passed the bicycle several times on his way to the store. It was a Raleigh. He’d always been partial to Raleighs. They had a good, strong frame, but whoever owned this one apparently didn’t give a damn about it. The tires were flat and the rims had rusted. He took it, fixed the tires, and polished the rims. Riding it felt great. He’d ride it to the store to buy milk, and nobody ever looked twice at him.

  There were other things he took, things he needed, things anybody needed if they were going to live like human beings: towels, cologne, a television set, racquetball racquets and balls. Now he could play on the courts at F.S.U.

  In the evenings, he mostly stayed in his room, watching television and finishing off the beer. He tried to be in bed by 10:00 P.M.

  Stealing those things he needed seemed O.K. It was like going to the supermarket and slipping a can of sardines into his pocket to have for supper. He had to steal if he wanted to have anything. The $60 left after he’d paid his deposit was vanishing quickly, no matter how spartan he tried to keep his meals.

  Friends were one thing he really
couldn’t afford. There was an unemployed rock band living down the hall, and he chatted with them occasionally, but he couldn’t get really close to anyone in The Oak. As far as a girlfriend, that was impossible. He had no past. He might get attached to someone and then have to disappear. How could he approach a woman when he—Chris Hagen—Ken Misner— who-knows-who-else—had been “born” only a week before?

  With each day that passed, he berated himself because he wasn’t actively looking for work. If he didn’t have a job, there’d be no paychecks, and how was he going to explain that to the landlord of The Oak on February 8 when the $320 came due?

  Still, he couldn’t seem to make himself move to find a the job. It was too great just to be able to play ball, ride his bike, go to the library, watch TV and feel part of the human race again.

  His room was becoming better furnished all the time. It was so easy to pick things up. And it was so easy to slip women shoppers’ wallets out of their purses left in shopping carts. Credit cards. Credit cards would buy anything. He just had to remember to keep changing them before they were reported as stolen.

  The world owed Ted Bundy. It had taken everything he had away from him, and now he was just making up for those stolen years, those years of humiliation and deprivation.

  He was trained to take shortcuts. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t bring himself to take buses when it was so easy to steal a car. He never kept them long. Later, he wouldn’t even be able to count how many cars he’d stolen during the six weeks he spent as a free man in Florida. There was one he’d picked up in the Mormon Church parking lot. He had driven it only a few blocks before he realized the thing didn’t have any brakes. He’d kill himself if he tried to drive that one. He dumped it in another churchyard.

  And thief that he was, he had ethics. There was one little Volkswagen that he picked up, and realized at once that it must belong to some young girl. It was old and had a couple hundred thousand miles on it, but she’d had it souped up and polished and reupholstered. It was clearly somebody’s pride and joy and he couldn’t steal it. He made it a point to never steal from someone who couldn’t afford it. If the car was new, and loaded with fancy extras, that told him that the owner could afford to lose it. But the little Volkswagen, he couldn’t steal. He parked it a few blocks from where he’d taken it.

  And so the days passed in Tallahassee. Warm, almost dreamy days, and chilly nights when he was safe in his room, watching television and planning for the future, a future he could not quite manage to get running smoothly.

  With the Florida metamorphosis, his appearance changed once again. Where he had been gaunt and skinny, the milk, beer, and junk food now began to add pounds. His face took on a rounded look. There was a hint of jowls around his chin. His body, trapped for so long in the confines of a cell, built up muscle from the bike riding and racquetball. He kept his hair short, and combed flat to discourage waves and curls. He’d always had the pronounced dark mole on the left side of his neck—one reason he’d worn turtlenecks almost exclusively—but none of the wanted posters mentioned it. Perhaps no one had noticed it. Now, he penciled in a fake mole on his left cheek and started a real mustache. Other than that, he made no effort to disguise himself. He knew that he had been blessed with features that seemed to change imperceptibly through no will of his own, always attractive, but somehow anonymous. He would capitalize on it.

  The one thing that ate at him was that he had no one to talk to, no one at all, beyond an occasional “How ya doin’?” exchanged with the band guys down the hall and a few meaningless words with a pretty girl who also lived at The Oak. Before, although he had never been in a position to and never really wanted to bare his soul, there had always been someone to talk to, even if it meant the rhetoric of the courtroom or jokes with his jailers. And there had been letters to write. Now, there was no one. He had to savor what he had accomplished inside his own head, and the loneliness took much of the joy out of it. Theodore Robert Bundy had achieved a measure of fame back in the West. In Florida, he was nobody. There were no reporters fighting for interviews, no news cameras trained on him. He had been “on stage,” admittedly in a negative way, but he had been someone to reckon with.

  Ted Bundy had arrived on the Florida State University campus on Sunday morning, January 8, 1978, and settled into his room at The Oak. Unheralded and unrecognized, he moved about the campus, sometimes even sitting in on classes, eating in the cafeteria and playing racquetball in the athletic complex south of the campus proper. He knew no one, and no one knew him. To the rest of the inhabitants of the college society, he was only a shadowy figure. A nobody.

  The Chi Omega sorority house, a sprawling L-shaped edifice of brick and frame, is located at 661 W Jefferson, only a few blocks away from The Oak, but it is a world apart. Expensively constructed, clean and decorated with impeccable taste, It was one of the top sororities on campus, and home for thirty-nine coeds and a housemother. I had pledged Chi Omega—another in the string of coincidences that have seemed to bind me to Ted—pledged it, indeed, way back in 1950 in its Nu Delta chapter on the Willamette University campus in Salem, Oregon. I remember the white carnations, the treasured pin with the owl and the skull, and, through the odd computer indexes of the brain, remember even the secret password. But that was in the days when sentiment reigned, when we gathered breathlessly on the house balcony to hear serenades from fraternity boys, much as the first Chi O’s did when the sorority was founded in the deep South. The girls who lived in the Chi O House in Tallahassee were young enough to be my daughters.

  The Chi Omega House on West Jefferson was the college home for the most beautiful, the brightest, the most popular, and, as always, the “legacies,” pledged because their mothers and grandmothers had been Chi O’s before them. Where we had been honor bound to be safely home by 8:00 P.M. on weeknights and 1:00 A.M. on weekends, there were no curfews in 1978. Each resident had memorized the combination lock to the backdoor, a door which opened into the rec room on the first floor. They could come and go at will, and, on Saturday night, January 14, 1978, most of the girls who lived in the sorority were out very late, into the early hours of the morning. There were several “keggers” on campus that night, functions that we had referred to as “beer busts,” and many of the Chi O’s were slightly intoxicated when they arrived home. Perhaps that may explain in part how the horror could happen only thin walls away from the girls who were spared, without their hearing so much as a footfall.

  The downstairs of the Chi Omega House contained the rec room, and, to the west of it, a formal living room, seldom used except to entertain visiting alumni and during rush week. Beyond that were the dining room and kitchen. There were two “back” staircases, one leading up to the sleeping rooms from the rec room— the route usually taken by girls returning home late—and one opening off the kitchen. The front staircase led up from the foyer just inside the double front doors. The foyer was papered in a bright metallic blue and was illuminated by a chandelier, illuminated quite brightly according to the witnesses who would testify later.

  For parents, sending their cherished daughters off to college, there would seem no safer place than a sorority house, full of other girls, watched over by a housemother, doors always locked. The only male usually allowed upstairs was Ronnie Eng, the houseboy who’d been dubbed the “sorority sweetheart.” All the Chi O’s were fond of Ronnie, a dark, slender, shy young man.

  On that Saturday, most of the girls who lived in the Chi Omega House had plans for the evening. Margaret Bowman, twenty-one, daughter of a wealthy and socially prominent family in St. Petersburg, Florida, was going out on a blind date at 9:30, a date arranged for her by her friend and sorority sister, Melanie Nelson. Lisa Levy, twenty, also from St. Petersburg, had worked all day at her part-time job, and she decided she’d like to go out for a little while. Lisa and Melanie went to a popular campus disco, Sherrod’s, which is located right next door to the Chi Omega House, at 10:00 P.M.

  Karen Chandler an
d Kathy Kleiner, who were roommates in number 8 in the sorority, went in opposite directions that evening. Karen went home to cook dinner for her parents, and returned before midnight to work on a sewing project in her room. Kathy Kleiner attended a wedding with her fiancé, and then went out to dinner with friends. Both of them were in their beds and sound asleep before midnight. Nita Neary and Nancy Dowdy had dates too that night. They would not return until late. “Mom” Crenshaw, the housekeeper, retired around 11:00. She was on call if her girls needed her.

  Lisa Levy was tired from her day’s work and stayed only about half an hour at Sherrod’s. Then she left, alone, and walked next door to the Chi O House and went to bed in number 4. Her roommate had gone home for the weekend.

  Sherrod’s many levels were crowded that night, as they always were on weekends. Melanie sat with another sorority sister, Leslie Waddell, and Leslie’s boyfriend, a Sigma Chi.

  Mary Ann Piccano was at Sherrod’s that night too, accompanied by her apartment mate, Connie Hastings. Mary Ann had a somewhat disturbing encounter with a man she had never seen before. The slender, brown-haired man had stared at her until she grew uncomfortable. There was something about the way his eyes bore into her that made her skin crawl. At length, he had come over to her table, bringing her a drink, and asked her to dance. He was handsome enough, and there was no rational reason for her to feel so wary, no reason to refuse really. Sherrod’s was a place where one often danced with strangers. But, as she rose to join him on the dance floor, she whispered to Connie, “I think I’m about to dance with an ex-con …”

  During the dance, he did or said nothing to substantiate her gut feeling about him, but she found herself trembling. She couldn’t look at him, and when the music finally ended, she had gratefully returned to her table. When she looked for him later, he was gone.

  Melanie, Leslie, and her friend left Sherrod’s a little after 2:00, when it closed, and walked next door. When they reached the backdoor, Melanie commented to Leslie that the combination lock wasn’t working. “This is strange,” she murmured. “The door isn’t locked.” Leslie only shrugged. They had been having trouble with the door’s closing and locking tightly for the past few days.