The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  If a suspect was ever found.

  There was the Clairol hair mist bottle, stained with type O blood—Lisa’s type.

  There were the two hairs found in the pantyhose mask beside Cheryl Thomas’s bed.

  There were cards upon cards of latent prints lifted, all of which would prove of no value. The killer apparently knew about fingerprints.

  There was a wad of chewed gum found in Lisa’s hair, gum that would inadvertently be destroyed in the lab and made useless for testing for secretion, or for teeth impressions.

  There were all the sheets, pillows, blankets, nightgowns, and panties.

  There were the fragments of oak bark. But how could one piece of bark be traced to a certain source, even if the death weapon was ever found?

  There were the pantyhose. The Hanes garrote from Margaret’s neck, stained deeply with her blood, the Sears-brand mask from Cheryl’s apartment. That mask would be found to resemble almost exactly the mask taken from Ted Bundy’s car when he’d been arrested in Utah in August of 1975.

  There were tests on all the victims’ sheets and bedding for the presence of semen. When acid phosphatase is applied to material, the presence of semen produces a purplish-red stain. There was no semen found on Lisa’s, Margaret’s, Karen’s, or Kathy’s sheets.

  There was, however, a semen stain approximately three inches in diameter on Cheryl Thomas’s bottom sheet. Richard Stephens, an expert in serology at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s crime lab, did intensive testing on that semen stain.

  Approximately eighty-five percent of all human beings are “secretors.” Enzymes are secreted in bodily fluids—saliva, mucous, semen, perspiration, urine, feces—and these enzymes will tell a serologist what blood type that person has. If a sample of cloth bearing a bodily fluid stain is dropped into a control sample with the same blood type, the sample will not agglutinate (the cells will not clump together). If it is dropped into a control sample of another blood type, there will be agglutination.

  Stephens’s agglutination tests for known blood types all showed cell clumping when the Thomas sheet samples were inserted. The test was inconclusive.

  Next, he used a process known as electrophoresis. A sample of the semen-stained sheet was placed in starch gel and heated until it took on a “Jell-O-like” consistency. It was then put on a glass slide and stimulated electrically, causing the proteins to move, and a small metabolite was added to show the rates of movement. There was no detectable PGM enzyme activity.

  It would appear then that the man who’d ejaculated that semen was a nonsecretor. Yet, to Stephens, the results were inconclusive. There were too many variables that could affect the tests: age of stain, condition, the material it was on, environmental factors such as humidity and heat. Also, the rate of secretion varies in individuals depending on the condition of their systems at any given time.

  Ted Bundy had type O positive blood, and he was a secretor.

  It was a puzzle. In his trial, the defense would claim that the enzyme tests, the agglutination tests, had proved that Ted could not have left the semen in Cheryl’s bed. Perhaps. The prosecution would stress only that Cheryl Thomas could not remember if she had changed her sheets that Saturday, January 14. Neither side would go a step further, would ask Cheryl if she had had sexual relations with another man in that bed earlier in the week, and the question was left suspended. If Cheryl had not changed her sheets, the inference left unspoken by the prosecution was that the semen stain, the stain where the blood type could not be determined, had been left there by someone else before the man who bludgeoned her entered her apartment. This stain of ejaculate was one piece of physical evidence that Ted’s supporters would refer to again and again as proof positive that he was innocent.

  For a lay jury, it seemed to be a moot point anyway. The scientific testimony would appear to pass over their heads like so much gobbledy-gook.

  What the case would come down to was Nita Neary’s eyewitness identification of the man in the “Toboggan” cap, the man she saw leaving the Chi Omega House with a bloodstained club, the bite marks in Lisa Levy’s flesh, and the hairs in the pantyhose mask. The rest was circumstantial.

  But on January 15 that was academic. The lawmen didn’t even have a suspect, and none of them had ever heard of Theodore Robert Bundy, missing now for sixteen days from his jail cell in Colorado.

  31

  TED STILL LIVED at The Oak, and he had stepped up his thefts. With the stolen credit cards, he could eat and drink luxuriously at expensive restaurants in Tallahassee, he could buy items that he needed, but he couldn’t figure out a way to get the $320 for his upcoming rent.

  I was in Los Angeles, still half-expecting to see him step out of the shadows in the apartment complex in West Hollywood, still expecting to see his friendly grin.

  Someone tried to steal my car, pried the whole ignition out of the battered Pinto my producers had rented for me from Rent-a-Wreck. When the deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s substation a block away came to take my report, he glanced around my apartment and asked me if I had chosen it myself, or if someone had rented it for me. I told him my producers had picked it out.

  He grinned. “Do you know you have the only apartment on this floor that isn’t a hooker’s pad?”

  No I didn’t. But it explained why there were so many knocks on my door in the wee hours of the morning.

  Like the FBI men before him, he double-checked my locks and warned me to be careful. I could be forgiven for a slight tinge of paranoia.

  I got another car from Rent-a-Wreck and life went on. Florida was a long, long way away. I’d never been there, and had no plans to ever go there.

  I received a letter from my mother in Oregon. In it, she enclosed a two-inch clipping giving the sparsest of details of the Chi Omega murders. And she wrote, “It sounds a lot like the ‘Ted’ murders. I wonder …”

  No, I didn’t think so. If Ted had been guilty of the crimes he was accused of in Washington, Utah, and Colorado, and I’d always had great difficulty really believing that, he had made a clean escape. He was free. Why would he jeopardize that freedom, which meant so much to him? The Chi Omega attacks had been different, the work of an almost clumsy, rampaging killer.

  32

  A YOUNG MAN named Randy Ragan lived in a house just behind the Dunwoody Street duplex. If he stood in the back doorway, he could look directly at Cheryl Thomas’s backdoor. On January 13, he’d found the license tag missing from his 1972 Volkswagen Camper. It couldn’t have just dropped off. It had been firmly attached with nuts and bolts.

  The license number was 13-D-11300.

  Ragan reported the tag as lost, and then received a new tag.

  Ragan lived so close to Cheryl’s apartment, so close to the Chi Omega House, in fact, and so close to The Oak.

  On February 5, Freddie McGee, who worked for the Florida State Audio-Visual Department, reported that a white Dodge van owned by the department had been stolen, driven off by someone after he’d left it parked on campus. It had borne Florida plates which were bright yellow and read 7378. In addition, it had a Florida State University number, 343, painted on the back.

  “Thirteen” is a state designation meaning that a vehicle has been licensed in Leon County. The “D” is for a small vehicle, and Ragan’s camper would have fit in that category. If someone attempted to put Ragan’s plate on a larger vehicle, he would ultimately be spotted by a trooper and pulled over. But no one spotted the Dodge van stolen from the Audio-Visual Department—no one in Tallahassee or its environs at any rate.

  Tallahassee is in the northwestern portion of Florida. Jacksonville is 200 miles away in the northeast, along the St. Johns River, which leads out into the Atlantic Ocean.

  On Wednesday, February 8, 1978, fourteen-year-old Leslie Ann Parmenter left Jeb Stuart Junior High School on Wesconnett Boulevard in Jacksonville a little before 2:00 P.M. Leslie’s father is James Lester Parmenter, chief of detectives for the Jacksonville Polic
e Department, an eighteen-year veteran on the force. She expected to be picked up by her twenty-one-year-old brother, Danny, and she crossed the street in front of the junior high school and entered the K-Mart parking lot, keeping an eye out for Danny.

  Policemen’s children tend to be a bit more careful than the average kid and are warned of dangers a bit more often. It had not saved Melissa Smith in Midvale, Utah, almost four years earlier. It would save Leslie.

  It was raining that day in Jacksonville, and Leslie Parmenter bent her head against the sprinkles that were gaining momentum. She was startled when a white van moved toward her and stopped suddenly.

  A man, a man needing a shave, with dark-framed glasses, wavy dark hair, plaid slacks, and a dark navy-type jacket jumped out of the van and walked over to her, blocking her path.

  The teenager saw that he had a plastic badge pinned to his jacket. It read “Richard Burton,” and “Fire Department.”

  “I’m from the fire department and my name is Richard Burton,” he began. “Do you go to that school over there? Someone told me you did. Are you going to the K-Mart?”

  She stared at him, perplexed, and more than a little frightened. Why should it matter to him who she was? The man was nervous, seemed to be choosing his next words. Leslie didn’t answer him. She looked around for the sight of her brother’s truck, the truck that bore the name of the construction firm her father owned and Danny worked for.

  The man didn’t look like a fireman. He was too disheveled, and he had a strange look in his eye, a stare that made her shiver. She tried to sidestep him, but he continued to block her path.

  At that moment, Danny Parmenter drove into the lot. He’d stopped work early because of the rain, another factor that probably saved Leslie. He saw the white Dodge van, saw the door was open, and that the driver was standing beside it talking to his sister. He didn’t like the look of it.

  Danny Parmenter pulled up beside the stranger and asked him what he wanted.

  “Nothing,” the man mumbled. He seemed agitated by the arrival of the girl’s brother.

  “Get in the truck,” Danny said quietly to Leslie, and then he got out and walked toward the man in the plaid pants. The man backed away, and hurriedly climbed into the van. Again, Parmenter asked him what he wanted.

  “Nothing … nothing … I just thought she was someone else. I was just asking her who she was.”

  And then the van’s window was hastily rolled up, and the man drove out of the lot. Parmenter had noticed that he’d been so nervous that he was actually trembling, his voice quavering.

  Danny Parmenter followed the van, then lost it in traffic, but not before he wrote down the license number: 13-D-11300.

  Had Leslie not been a detective’s daughter, the incident might have been forgotten, but Parmenter had a feeling in his bones when Danny and Leslie told him about what had happened that evening. The whole thing smelled bad, and he was grateful that his daughter was safe. But he didn’t stop there. His whole orientation was to protect every man’s daughter.

  He knew that the “13” meant Leon County way across the state. He would check it out with detectives in Tallahassee. His own duties kept him busy for most of February 9. He would not have time to call the capital city until late afternoon.

  Lake City, Florida, lies about halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahassee. Pretty, dark-haired, twelve-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach lived in Lake City. She was a tiny girl, five feet tall, 100 pounds. On February 9 she was very happy. She’d just been elected first runner-up to the Valentine Queen at Lake City Junior High School.

  Thursday, February 9, was a gusty, rainy day in Lake City, but Kim was at school on time. She was there when her homeroom teacher took roll. Perhaps because she was so excited about being on the court for the Valentine’s Dance, Kim forgot her purse when she left her homeroom and went to her first period P.E. class. When she did discover that she’d left it behind, her teacher gave her permission to go back and get it. It meant running through the rain to another building, but Kim and her friend, Priscilla Blakney, didn’t mind. They ran from the backdoor, which opens onto West St. Johns Street. They reached their homeroom without incident, and Priscilla started to follow Kim back out into the rainswept courtyard, then remembered something she had to get. When she ran after Kim, she was startled. She saw a stranger beckoning Kim toward a white car. Later, her recollections would be somewhat garbled—perhaps by her shock at Kim’s fate. Had she seen Kim in the vehicle? Or had she only imagined it? But she had seen the man.

  And Kim was gone.

  Clinch Edenfield, an elderly school crossing guard, working that morning in the thirty-five-degree chill, buffeted by winds that reached twenty-five miles per hour, had noticed a man in a white van. The van had been blocking traffic, and Edenfield saw that the driver was staring at the schoolyard. He forgot that van quickly. It was irritating— nothing more.

  Clarence Lee “Andy” Anderson, a lieutenant and paramedic in the Lake City Fire Department, drove past the junior high school a few minutes later. Anderson had been working double shifts, and he had problems on his mind which distracted him. He too was annoyed that the white van was blocking traffic, and he braked behind it.

  On his left, Anderson noticed a teenaged girl with long dark hair. The youngster seemed to be on the verge of tears. The girl was being led toward the van by a man who appeared to be in his early thirties, a man with a full head of wavy brown hair. The man was scowling, and Anderson had the impression that he was an angry father, retrieving a daughter who’d been sent home from school. He mused that somebody was going to get a spanking as the man pushed the girl into the passenger seat of the van, and then hurried to the driver’s side, gunned the motor, and roared away.

  Anderson said nothing to anyone. The incident hadn’t seemed that unusual. A man called away from the job because his kid had gotten into trouble at school could be expected to be angry. The firefighter drove on to work, to the fire department, which is housed in the same building as the Lake City Police Department.

  Jackie Moore, the wife of a Lake City surgeon, was driving east on Highway 90 that morning, after picking up her maid. She saw a dirty white van approaching, and gasped as the van suddenly swerved into her lane, swung back, and then swerved toward her car again, almost forcing her off the road. She caught a glimpse of the driver. It was a brown-haired man, a man who seemed angry, enraged. He was not looking at the road at all. He was looking down toward the passenger seat, and his mouth was open, as if he were shouting.

  And then the van disappeared westbound, leaving Mrs. Moore and her maid trembling at how close they had come to a head-on collision.

  Kim’s parents, Thomas Leach, a landscaper, and Freda Leach, a hairdresser, went through their workday, unaware that their little girl was missing. It was late in the afternoon when the school’s attendance office called Freda routinely to ask if Kim was ill. She wasn’t in school.

  “But Kim is in school,” her mother answered. “I drove her there myself this morning.”

  “No,” was the answer. “She left during first period.”

  The Leaches felt stark dread, something that only parents can know. They tried to hope that Kim had varied her usual dependable pattern, that she would come home after school with a good explanation. When she didn’t, they hurried to Lake City Junior High School and searched the grounds. School authorities felt that Kim had run away, but her parents wouldn’t believe that. She had been too excited about the Valentine’s Day dance for one thing. But the most important element was that Kim simply wouldn’t run away.

  Kim didn’t arrive home for supper, as the streets outside grew dark, and the wind whipped sheets of rain against their windows. Where was she?

  Her parents called her best friend and all her other friends. None of them had seen Kim. Only Priscilla had seen her walk away toward the stranger.

  The Leaches called the Lake City Police. Chief Paul Philpot tried to reassure them. The most dependable of you
ngsters sometimes runs away.

  Even as he tried to believe what he told her frantic parents, he sent a call out to all patrolmen to watch for her. Kim was a straight A student, again, like all the others, superior in every way. She would not have run away.

  The BOLO on Kimberly Leach listed the clothing she had been wearing when she was last seen: blue jeans, a football jersey with 83 on the back and chest, a long brown coat with a fake-fur collar. Brown hair, brown eyes and pretty. She looked a few years older than her age, but she was really only a child.

  Kimberly Leach was the same age that Meg Anders’s daughter had been when Ted Bundy was first arrested in Utah, Meg’s daughter, who looked upon him as a father substitute. The same age that the little girl had been whose mother would not allow her to go out for hamburgers with Ted, the ruling that had so insulted him. “What did she think?” he’d asked me indignantly, “That I’d attack her daughter?”

  That afternoon, Detective James “Lester” Parmenter in Jacksonville didn’t know that Kim Leach was missing in Lake City, but he was still very concerned about the man in the white van who had approached his daughter. He called Detective Steve Bodiford at the Leon County Sheriff’s Office.

  “I need a little help. I’m trying to check out the ownership on a white Dodge van—license number 13-D-11300. The computer’s got it listed to a Randall Ragan in Tallahassee. I’d like to have him checked out. Somebody with his license number frightened my daughter yesterday. I think he was trying to pick her up. She’s only fourteen.”

  Parmenter told Bodiford of the incident in the K-Mart lot, and Bodiford agreed that it was worth following up.

  He had no idea how valuable the tip was, with its far-reaching ramifications.

  On Friday, February 10, Bodiford tracked down Randy Ragan in the frame house behind Dunwoody Street. Sure, Ragan said, he’d lost his license plate, on about January 12. “I didn’t report it stolen. I just got a new tag.”