The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  I had written to Ted immediately after I learned that I would not be allowed to talk to him on the phone or to come to Florida, but I heard nothing from him until March 9. The letter, mailed to Los Angeles, bears the date February 9, 1978. Again, he had lost track of time. It was not surprising. That letter was one of the most depressed communiques I ever received from him, and, I believe, it includes key words explaining what had happened.

  Ted began by saying it seemed as if his call to me in February had occurred many months before, although he could still remember it very clearly. He admitted to having been “in bad shape” at that time, but said he had been able to pull himself together within a day or two. He thanked me for my thoughtfulness and willingness to come to Florida to talk to him at that time, but said that unfortunate changes in circumstances had made such a journey “both impossible and unnecessary.”

  He wrote that each new phase of his existence seemed to be more unbearable than the last, and that he was finding it more and more difficult to express his emotions and observations in writing. Indeed, a great deal had happened to him since his December escape from the Garfield County Jail, but he said he was so bitterly disappointed that that opportunity had ended in failure that he was both unable and unwilling to discuss the events of the prior two months. “Two months, it feels like so much more time has gone by …”

  His handwriting wavered on the page, and it was difficult to read. His writing had always varied with the intensity of his emotions at any given time.

  I try not to look forward. I try not to think back to the precious few days I had as a free person. I try to live in the present as I have on past occasions when I have been locked up. This approach worked in the past but is not working well now. I am tired and disappointed in myself. Two years I dreamt of freedom. I had it and lost it through a combination of compulsion and stupidity. It is a failure I find impossible to dismiss easily.

  Love,

  ted

  PS. Thanks for the $10.

  How many times had he added that same P.S.? How many $10 checks had I sent over the years? Thirty … forty, maybe. And now, he was back inside again, far removed from the French restaurants, the sparkling wines, even the bottles of beer and milk he drank in his room at The Oak, with $10 to buy cigarettes.

  Ted blamed his failure and capture on “compulsion,” and he speaks of a “precious few days of freedom.” Could forty-four and a half days be called a “few,” or was he speaking of the days between his escape and the first murders? Had he tried mightily to overcome his compulsion, only to find that he could not control it?

  From that night of terror in the Chi Omega House— January 14-15—was Ted, in essence, not free at all, caught instead in a kind of mind-prison he himself could not escape? His failure to find honest work might be construed as stupidity, but I feel compulsion is the operative word in his letter.

  After that one letter, I wouldn’t hear from him again for four months, although I wrote to him several times. He was very busy, repeating and repeating patterns of behavior as if he were a squirrel on a treadmill.

  On April 1, Ted asked for a judicial order that would permit him to defend himself on the credit card and auto theft charges. Just as he had done in Colorado, he wanted to be released from his cell three days a week to visit a law library, he wanted better lighting in his cell, a typewriter, paper, supplies, and he wanted jail personnel ordered to desist from interfering with or censoring legal correspondence going in or coming out. He wanted reduced bail too. A hearing was set for April 13.

  On April 7, searchers finally found what was left of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. When the Dodge van was processed, criminalists had taken samples of soil, leaves, and bark found inside and caught in its undercarriage. Botanists and soil experts had identified the dirt as coming from somewhere close to a north Florida river. It had not been much of a clue to pinpoint exactly where Kim’s body might be found, but it was a start.

  Columbia County is bordered by the Suwannee River on the northwest and the Santa Fe on the south. Adjacent Suwannee County is bounded by the Suwannee on three of its four borders. The Withlacoochee joins the Suwannee opposite Suwannee River State Park. The banks of these rivers seemed the most likely area in which to concentrate the search, although they had been searched before.

  Late in February, searchers had found a huge tennis shoe, other debris, and strands of human hair along the Suwannee near Branford, twenty-five miles from Lake City. They had gathered the possible evidence and retained it for testing, testing that did not reveal much.

  There had been an “extraordinary find” rumored near the entrance to Suwannee State Park in March, but no specifics had leaked out to the public and nothing official had come of it. The find had been a pile of dumped cigarette butts—the same brand as the contents of the ashtray in the VW Bug Ted was driving when he was arrested: Winston. Suwannee River State Park had the kind of soil, the kind of vegetation found inside the rear doors of the stolen van, and, on April 7, Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Kenneth Robinson worked with a forty-man search team near the park, just off Interstate 10.

  It was a baking hot day for April, with the temperature heading toward the 90s, and the searchers fought off clouds of mosquitos as they broke through thickets, and probed into sinkholes with poles and into the deeper ones with scuba gear.

  The morning’s work produced nothing, and the crew stopped for a quick lunch in the shade. If their mission had not been so grotesque, they might have enjoyed the dogwood and the redbud blooming. But there was always the image in their minds, an image of the hidden body of the little girl gone now so long.

  After lunch, Robinson’s party organized search lines radiating out from the sinkhole. Searchers on horseback had been through the region before, but it had not yet been searched on foot. Robinson, alone, walked through the underbrush for perhaps fifteen minutes. Ahead of him he saw a small shed made of sheet metal, an abandoned farrowing shed for a sow and her litter. A wire fence encircled the shed.

  Robinson, a lanky man, hunkered down and peered into a hole on the open side of the shed. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness inside, he saw, first, the tennis shoe … and then what looked like a pull-over jersey, a jersey with the number 83 on it.

  There was no leg or foot in the sneaker—only a bare bone. He felt sick. Sure, they had known what they might find, but the ignominy of the site, the thought that Kim Leach had been tossed away in a pigpen in this desolate area made him want to vomit.

  Robinson stood up and backed away. He called for the men in his party, and they immediately roped off the pigpen that had become a tomb. It was 12:37 P.M.

  Jacksonville Medical Examiner Dr. Peter Lipkovic arrived and the caved-in roof of the shed was carefully lifted off. There was little question that it was Kim. She was nude except for the tennis shoes and a white turtleneck shirt, but her long coat with the fake fur collar, her jeans, her jersey, her underclothing, and her purse were all there, piled in an incongruously neat pile beside the body.

  Soon, dental records would verify absolutely that Kim Leach had been found.

  Dr. Lipkovic performed an autopsy on the body, and found “about what you’d expect after eight weeks.” Because the months of February, March, and April had been unseasonably hot and dry, most of the body had virtually mummified, rather than decomposing. Internal organs were there, but desiccated. There were no bodily fluids. Blood typing had to be done from tissue samples.

  Cause of death was questionable, as it always is when bodies have lain undiscovered for so long. Lipkovic would say officially only, “She succumbed to homicidal violence to the neck region. There was a considerable amount of force applied to the neck that tore the skin, but I have no idea whether it was done with a blunt or a sharp instrument.”

  He did not know if she had been strangled, but he would not exclude the possibility. There were no broken bones, but something had definitely penetrated the neck. A penetrating injury is usually inflicted wit
h a knife or a gun. There were absolutely no signs of bullet fragments or gunbarrel debris.

  Unlike the girls in Tallahassee, Kim had suffered no skull fractures, apparently no bludgeon blows at all. There was evidence of sexual battery, but that too was impossible to confirm either at postmortem or with tests. Dr. Lipkovic said, somewhat inscrutably, that the injured areas of a body decompose more rapidly than those untraumatized. He meant that there was not enough vaginal tissue left to examine for signs of sexual assault.

  Back at the state park, the searchers had continued to look for evidence: They found a man’s khaki military-type jacket, bloodstained, about a hundred feet from the pigpen.

  Kim had, in all likelihood, been dead when her body was driven to Suwannee State Park. There was very little blood at that site, and the deep indentation—the drag marks— through the soil in the Dodge van were consistent with a body’s having been laboriously pulled out of the van.

  Kim’s parents accepted the news that she had, at last, been found, with grief but little shock. They had known she would never run away. They now had only one child, a younger son. “It’s not much better now,” Freda Leach said bitterly. “It’s never going to be good.”

  When Ted was told that Kim had been found, he showed no emotion at all.

  39

  THE DODGE VAN had already given up physical evidence. The soil and leaf samples had led searchers to the banks of the Suwannee. Its odometer showed that it had been driven 789 miles between the time it was stolen on February 5 and the time it was abandoned on February 12. Now, Mary Lynn Hinson and Richard Stephens had some samples for comparison with the evidence they’d been holding. Heretofore, it had been useless, only half of an intricate puzzle.

  Kimberly Leach’s blood type was B, the same type, as the congealed blood pooled in the back of the van. The desiccated state of her body, however, made it impossible to break the blood factors down to enzyme characteristics. Possible, but not probable or absolute, physical evidence. Semen stains on the child’s underpants found next to the body had been made by a man with type O blood, a secretor. Ted Bundy’s blood type. Again, a possible but not an absolute.

  Ms. Hinson had a pair of loafers and a pair of running shoes, which Ted had in his possession when he was stopped by Officer Lee. She compared the soles of both pairs of shoes and found them identical to the footprints left in the soil inside the Dodge van. More than possible, more than probable, but not absolute physical evidence.

  The complex makeup of the van’s carpeting with its four colors—green, blue, turquoise, and black—would become very important in Hinson’s testing of the hundreds of cloth fibers found in the van. Many of the fibers had been found intertwined. Shreds of one blue fiber, an unusual polyester weave with thirty-one strands to the yard, had come from Kimberly’s football jersey.

  Identical fibers had been found clinging still to the navy blue blazer that Ted wore when arrested. Fibers from the blue jacket were identified microscopically with those caught in Kimberly’s white socks. Again and again, Hinson found mute testimony that Kim’s clothing had come into close contact with the carpet of the van (or with a carpet microscopically identical) and to the clothing worn by Ted (or clothing microscopically identical). The microanalyst’s conclusion was that it was very probable, “in fact extremely probable,” that Kim’s clothing had been in contact with the van’s carpet and with Ted Bundy’s blue blazer jacket.

  Extremely probable. Not absolute.

  Hinson did not attempt to match any fibers vacuumed from the van except those that appeared to correspond to the carpeting, or to clothing worn by Ted or Kim. Patricia Lasko, a microanalyst from the Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement’s crime lab, found no hair matches to either Kim’s or Ted’s hair among the one hundred samples found.

  There were no Ted fingerprints. It was impossible to tell if Kim’s prints had been there. Twelve-year-old children rarely have their fingerprints on file, and Kim’s body had been too decomposed to lift complete prints from her fingertips.

  Given the intermingling of the fibers from each subject’s clothing, and the position in which Kim’s body had been found, Medical Examiner Lipkovic surmised that the child had been killed during an act of sexual attack. Her body had apparently been left in that position as the process of rigor mortis began, and transported to the hogshed where it was found.

  The price tags from the Green Acres Sporting Goods Store, found in the van, were traced to Jacksonville. The store owner, John Farhat, recalled that he’d sold a large hunting knife sometime in early February. “I’d just marked it up from $24 to $26.” It had been a cash sale. A brown-haired man in his thirties had purchased it. But Farhat had first picked a mug shot of another man—not Ted’s. When he later saw a picture of Ted in a paper, he had called a state investigator and said he was now positive that the man who’d bought the ten-inch knife was Ted Bundy.

  In the orange Bug which Ted drove at his arrest in Pensacola, there was a pair of dark-framed eyeglasses—glasses with clear, nonprescription lenses. And there was a pair of plaid slacks. Were these the clothes and glasses of “Richard Burton, Fire Department?”

  As always, Ted’s credit card purchases would be worrisome for him, especially those where he purchased gas. Among the twenty-one cards found on him when he was arrested by Officer Lee were cards that had been stolen from Kathleen Laura Evans (Gulf), Thomas N. Evans III (Master Charge), and William R. Evans (Master Charge), cards that had all been in Ms. Evans’ purse in Tallahassee before they vanished.

  Over the years, detectives had found that Ted seemed to have a phobia about running out of gas, often purchasing gas in small amounts many times in one day. On February 7 and 8, the Gulf and Master Charge cards had been used to buy gas in Jacksonville. One charge was for $9.67, and another was for $4.56. The license plate? 13-D-11300.

  The desk clerk of the Holiday Inn in Lake City, Randy Jones, recalled registering a man he described as “kind of ratty looking, with three days’ growth of beard,” on the evening of February 8. Jones had noted that the man’s eyes seemed “glassy,” and another clerk had surmised that the man was under the influence of either alcohol or drugs. He had signed in under the name of “Evans,” using one of the cards stolen in Tallahassee. He had charged a meal and several drinks in the lounge.

  The next morning, “Evans” had checked out, but not officially. It would have cost him nothing to pay for his motel room, since he’d stolen the credit card in the first place, but he left directly from his room at 8:00 A.M.

  Less than an hour later, Kimberly Leach was seen being led into a white Dodge van by an “angry parent.” Firefighter Andy Anderson continued home to change clothing and said nothing about the incident. He was, he would later say, “half afraid of starting a turmoil … of seeing law enforcement sent on a wild goose chase”. He didn’t really feel that the girl he’d seen with her “father” had any connection to the missing teenager. When Anderson did go to the police six months later, he willingly allowed himself to be hypnotized to bring back the scene in detail that he’d witnessed on the morning of February 9 and he was able to describe Kimberly’s clothing and the man who had taken her away.

  “The man was clean shaven … 29-30-31, good looking, 160-65 pounds.”

  Jackie Moore, the surgeon’s wife, had gone to the police, but she would not be able to identify Ted absolutely until she saw him erupt in anger in an Orlando courtroom two years later as she watched the television newscast of the trial. Only then, when she glimpsed the enraged profile of the defendant, could she superimpose it on the face that lingered in her memory.

  Clinch Edenfield, the school crossing guard, another eyewitness, would prove to be an ineffective witness. Two years later, he would recall that February 9, 1978, had been a “warm, summery day.” In fact, it had been blustery, near freezing, and drenched with torrents of icy rain.

  40

  THERE WOULD BE FEW PERIODS in the next eighteen months when Florida papers
did not carry at least some story about Ted Bundy, but he would not be permitted the jail “press conferences” he wanted to hold. Once his anonymity had vanished, Ted wanted to tell the press his feelings about the spreading news coverage which pegged him as the number one suspect in both the Tallahassee and Lake City cases. He did manage to sneak out a few letters to newspapermen in Colorado and Washington, denouncing the sweeping indictment of him by the Florida press.

  The state of Florida was more interested in getting samples of his hair and blood, which were finally supplied. Ted refused to supply handwriting samples. Judge Charles Miner said that if Ted continued to refuse, he would be denied his right to be provided with information on the forgery cases.

  On April 10, 1978, he was charged with two more forgery cases. One count alleged he had used a stolen Gulf Oil card in Lake City to buy gas on February 9. The second was for the use of a stolen Master Charge in the same city. Lake City now had a legal hold on him. But Lake City would have a long wait. There were still sixty-two charges extant in Leon County. And, of course, he was still wanted in Colorado for murder and escape.

  His legal troubles continued to pile up. On April 27, a warrant was issued to Ted in his Leon County jail cell, a warrant decreeing that he would be taken from that cell to a dentist’s office, where impressions of his teeth would be made. These impressions would be compared with the bite marks found on Lisa Levy’s body.

  Sheriff Katsaris was quoted as saying, “It’s not an impossibility that someone will be charged in the Chi Omega killings in the near future …” At the same time, Judge Minor called off Ted’s May 9 trial for auto theft and burglary, and said it would not be rescheduled until the suspect agreed to provide samples of his handwriting. The sudden trip to the dentist’s office appeared to have been deliberately planned as a surprise for Ted. The word was that authorities did not want to give him a chance to “grind down his teeth” before the odontology impressions could be obtained.