The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  If anyone should still have that bike, its serial number is PT290.

  Although Ted has always been linked to Donna Manson, who vanished from Olympia, only now could detectives be sure. Ted said that Donna’s was the fifth body left on Taylor Mountain. When the snows go away, searchers will move once more into the area.

  Who were the three victims Ted steadfastly refused to name?

  Ted denied killing Ann Marie Burr, the little girl from Tacoma. But his excuses were so weak. He said that he couldn’t have killed Ann Marie because, “I was too young at the time,” and “I lived too far away from her house.”

  Ted was fifteen when Ann Marie vanished. Old enough. And he lived only blocks away. Ann Marie took piano lessons next door to the house where Ted’s Uncle John lived. Ted could very well have seen her there.

  The early morning Ann Marie disappeared is locked into her family’s memory. It was August 31, 1961. There had been a tremendous storm during the night, and they had to get up twice to tend to Ann’s little sister, Julie. Julie had broken her arm and the cast woke her up with itches that she couldn’t scratch.

  Ann Marie was there the first time. The second time, her bed across the hall was empty.

  Ann Marie’s aunt recalls that the little girl liked to get up early and go downstairs in her nightgown to practice the piano in the living room. “The window there didn’t quite shut. There was a TV antenna lead coming in through that window and the latch couldn’t quite catch.”

  When Beverly and Donald Burr came down in the morning, the window was open, and so was the front door. And Ann Marie never came home.

  During the late hour confessions, Ted shied away from talking about child victims. Or he made faint excuses.

  I think he killed Ann Marie. I think that, quite probably, she was his first victim.

  I also think he killed Katherine Merry Devine, although he would not admit to that. Ted did tell Bob Keppel that he had picked up a hitchhiker in 1973 near Olympia. He said he murdered her and left her body in the trees somewhere between Olympia and Aberdeen on the Washington coast. But he could not pinpoint the spot from a map Keppel showed him. Kathy Devine was found near Olympia. It is possible that the ride she hitched in the University District let her out sixty miles south of the freeway. And that Ted was the one who picked her up near Tumwater?

  And that Ted was the man who killed her in December 1973?

  I think the third victim was Lonnie Trumbull, the stewardess attacked in her bed in 1966.

  Ted would not say.

  The list of the victims Ted Bundy did acknowledge is long and tragic. He confirmed to Bob Keppel that he had killed Lynda Ann Healy, Donna Gail Manson, Susan Elaine Rancourt, Brenda Carol Ball, Roberta Kathleen Paris, Janice Anne Ott, and Denise Marie Naslund.

  And finally, as the fifteenth anniversary of Georgeann Hawkins’s disappearance looms, Ted filled in the missing scenario of the bleak drama played out in the alleyway behind Greek Row at the University of Washington in June 1974. Georgeann’s disappearance without a scream, in the space of a minute or so, has baffled detectives—and me.

  In my head, as I lectured and showed the slides of that alley, I had pictured a hundred times what might have happened. As it turned out, it happened very much the way I had imagined.

  Georgeann had laughingly called “Adios” to her friend in the window of the Beta House at the north end of the alley. She’d walked down toward the shiny yellow Buick convertible parked on the west side of the alley.

  And met Ted Bundy.

  The tape of his confession was hard to hear. There was a steady thunk-thunk-thunk, where the recorder malfunctioned slightly. And Ted’s voice itself was so tired, raspy with stress. I knew the voice. I had never heard that voice say such ugly things before.

  “… I was ahhh—at about midnight that date [June 10, 1974] in an alleyway behind, like—I may have my streets wrong here—the sorority and fraternity houses, it would have been 45th—46th … 47th? … In the back of the houses, across the alley and across the other side of the block, there was a Congregational Church there, I believe … I was moving up the alley, ahhh, handling a briefcase and some crutches. This young woman walked down—all around the north end of the block into the alley. She stopped for a moment and she kept on walking down the alley toward me. About halfway down the block, I encountered her. And asked her to help me carry the briefcase. Which she did— and we walked back up the alley, across the street, turned right on the sidewalk—in front of I think the fraternity house on the corner there. [This would be the Beta House where Georgeann’s boyfriend lived.]

  “Around the corer to the left—going north on 47th, partway in the block, there used to be one of those parking lots they used to make out of burned down houses in that area. The University would turn them into instant parking lots. There was a parking lot there at ahhh … no lights, and my car was parked there.”

  “About that day—” Keppel prompted.

  Ted sighed deeply “Ahhh, awwwww … Basically—when we reached the car, what happened was I knocked her unconscious with the crowbar—”

  “Where’d you have that?”

  “By the car.”

  “Right outside?”

  “Outside—in back of—the car.”

  “Could she see it?”

  “No. And then there were some handcuffs there, along with the crowbar. And I handcuffed her and put her in the driver’s—er, I mean the passenger side of the car and drove away.”

  “Was she alive or dead then?”

  “No. She was quite—she was unconscious, but she was very much alive.”

  Ted’s sighs on the tape were those of a man in the grip of deeply painful emotion. He groaned, gasped, and drew in breaths. And the flaw in the tape went on as steady as a clock ticking, Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

  Ted told of driving down the alley to 50th N.E. “The street going east and west. I turned left—I went to the … freeway. Went south on the freeway, turned off on the old floating bridge—90—[the I-90 Freeway]. She regained consciousness at this time—basically—ahh, well, there’s a lot of incidental things that I’m not getting into. I’m not telling you about them ’cause they’re just—anyway, I went across the bridge to Mercer Island, past Issaquah. Up a hill. Down a road to a grassy area. …”

  At that point, Keppel tested Ted, and mentioned a barricade in the road that would keep Ted from crossing both lanes. Ted insisted there was no barricade in 1974. And he was right.

  “At that time, you could make a left-hand turn. Illegal as it may have been because of the double yellow line. And that was crazy of me—talk about craziness—if there’d been a state patrolman there, he probably would have arrested me. [Ted laughs.] But, you know, nevertheless, at that time, there was no divider going down the middle of the road at that point … All you had to do was make an illegal left-hand turn all the way across—well, the two west-bound lanes of 90 and right into that side road that ran parallel to 90.

  “… I took the handcuffs off her, and … took her out of the van and took the handcuffs off her. Took her out of the car.

  Keppel interjected. “Van?”

  “No, it was a Volkswagen.”

  “You said van.”

  “Well, I’m sorry if I—it was a Volkswagen. Ahhh … anyway, this is probably the hardest part—I don’t know … We were talking abstractly before, but we’re getting into—we’re getting right down to it. I will talk about it but, it’s just—I hope you understand—it’s not something that I find easy to talk about, and, after all this time, ohhh, awwwww.”

  Ted sighed so deeply that his breath whistled into the tape recorder. He seemed to try to pull away from himself, and groaned as he did so.

  “One of the things that makes it difficult is that, at this point, she was quite lucid, talking about things … Funny— it isn’t funny, but it’s odd—the things that people say under those circumstances. And she thought—she said that she thought that—she had a Spanish test the next
day—and she thought that I had taken her to help get ready for her Spanish test. Odd. Things they say. Anyway … the long and short of it was that I again knocked her unconscious. And strangled her, and dragged her about ten yards into the small grove of trees that was there.”

  “What’d you strangle her with?” Bob Keppel’s voice was soft, drained of emotion. He asked questions, suspending his own feelings. At least five hours were unaccounted for.

  “A cord—er, an old piece of rope that was there.”

  “… Then what happened?”

  There was another spate of sighs and groans. “… Started the car up. By this time, it was just about dawn. The sun was coming up. And I went through my usual routine. I went through this routine—I would go through this—where I was just absolutely—on this particular morning, I was just absolutely, again just shocked—again just shocked, scared-to-death—horrified. I went down the road, throwing everything I had—the briefcase, the crutch, the rope, the clothes. Just tossing them out the window. I was—I was in this sheer state of panic, just absolute horror. At that point in time, is … ahhhhh … consciousness of what has really happened. It’s like you break out of a fever or something … I would. I drove northeast on 90 throwing articles of clothing out the window—shoes—as I went—”

  Keppel cut in, asking Ted if Georgeann had disrobed,

  “What?” Ted’s voice was flat and irritated.

  Keppel asked again.

  Ted tossed it aside. “Well, after we got out of the car— well, I skipped over some stuff there—and we’ll have to get back to it sometime, but I don’t feel—it’s just too hard for me to talk about right now”

  And some of those things that Ted “skipped over” he did get back to. But they will remain with Bob Keppel. Keppel wondered why no one had found the things Ted had tossed out in his alleged frenzy of panic. The answer came. Ted had gone back and picked up everything, once he calmed down.

  The confessions came in bursts, spaced with long silences. They were horrific. Ted Bundy proved to be, as he had said years before in Pensacola and Tallahassee, a “voyeur, a vampire,” a man whose fantasies had taken over his life. His aberrations and perversions were as ugly and sick and as deeply entrenched as those of any killer I have ever written about.

  They must have been there all the time I was spending Sunday and Tuesday nights alone with the clear-eyed young man of twenty-four named Ted. That thought makes me shiver, as if a rabbit has run over my grave.

  Beyond the Washington crimes, Ted confessed to more and more murders.

  He admitted that he had killed Julie Cunningham in Vail, Colorado, in March of 1975. She would have been crying, walking alone toward the comfort of her friend. Ted met Julie on that snowy street, and he asked her to help him carry his ski boots. At his car, he hit her with a crowbar, and lifted the unconscious woman inside. Like Georgeann had, Julie came to, and he hit her again. He left her body behind, but he came back later to bury it.

  Yes, he had varied his pattern. He had buried some of them, left some in woods, tossed some of his victims away in rivers.

  There were so many. There were probably more victims than we will ever know. Bob Keppel thinks Ted has killed at least a hundred women, and I agree with him.

  Ted Bundy, who was voted the “shyest” boy in his class at Hunt Junior High School in Tacoma, began to kill, I think, in 1961 with the disappearance of little Ann Marie Burr. He was free, moving through his intricately compartmentalized life, until October 1975. After his escape in December 1977, he was free again for a deadly six and a half weeks. We know that he attacked seven women during that time, killing three of them. How many more are there that we do not know about?

  When the confessing was over, the dreadful toll of dead girls filled a page of a newspaper, top to bottom.

  Ted Bundy confessed to killing:

  IN COLORADO

  Caryn Campbell, 24.

  Julie Cunningham, 26.

  Denise Oliverson, 24.

  Melanie Cooley, 18.

  Shelly K. Robertson, 24.

  IN UTAH

  Melissa Smith, 17.

  Laura Aime, 17.

  Nancy Baird, 23. (A young mother who vanished on July 4, 1975, from a Layton service station where she worked)

  Nancy Wilcox, 16. (A cheerleader last seen on October 3, 1974, in a light-colored Volkswagen Bug.)

  Debby Kent, 17.

  OTHER SUSPECTED VICTIMS IN UTAH

  Sue Curtis, 15. (Disappeared June 28, 1975, while attending a youth conference.)

  Debbie Smith, 17. (Disappeared February 1976. Her body was found at the Salt Lake International Airport on April 1, 1976.)

  IN OREGON

  Roberta Kathleen Parks, 20.

  Although Oregon detectives were not given time to question Ted in Florida, they believe he is responsible for the disappearance of at least two more women in their state:

  Rita Lorraine Jolly, 17. (Vanished from West Linn in June 1973.)

  Vicki Lynn Hollar, 24. (Disappeared from Eugene in August 1973.)

  IN FLORIDA

  Margaret Bowman, 21.

  Lisa Levy, 20.

  Kimberly Leach, 12.

  The State of Idaho had had no reason to send detectives to Raiford Prison. Bob Keppel, however, phoned Russ Reneau, chief investigator from the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, and suggested that it might be a good idea for that state to send investigators to Florida.

  Attorney General Jim Jones dispatched three detectives to Starke. Russ Reneau had not the foggiest notion of what he would learn, but after meeting with Ted, he found the Idaho connection.

  According to reports, Ted admitted that he had stopped off near Boise during his Labor Day weekend move to Salt Lake City. He had seen a girl hitchhiking near Boise on September 2, 1974, and picked her up. He bludgeoned her, and threw her body into a river, the Snake River, he thought. Idaho authorities were unable to find a missing person report to match the description Ted gave.

  The next confession, however, sounded too much like a known unsolved disappearance to be coincidental. And the story that emerged was a study in calculated cruelty. Ted reportedly told Reneau that he made a trip up into Idaho with no other purpose beyond finding someone to murder.

  He made sure that he would not have to buy gas that might mark his trail. He chose Pocatello as his turnaround point. The trip to Pocatello and back to Salt Lake City was 232 miles. A Volkswagen could manage that handily without refueling.

  The area was high traffic, a spot where people came for outdoor recreational activities. Strangers passing through.

  Ted drove his Volkswagen Bug up Highway 15, looking for his quarry, for some unknown female to kill.

  It was May 6, 1975.

  He spotted a girl in a junior high school playfield during the noon hour. He picked her up, murdered her, and disposed of her body in a river. Again, he thought it was probably the Snake River.

  Lynette Culver, 13, of Pocatello had been missing since May 6, 1975. Missing thirteen and a half years, longer than she had been alive. Lynette’s body was never found.

  His mission fulfilled, Ted had headed back to Salt Lake City. The entire trip took only four hours driving time.

  Without the bodies of the missing girls, Idaho could never prove that what Ted Bundy had told them was true. But, in Lynette’s case, it seemed as though the questions were answered. The other girl, who surely must have existed, was never reported missing. Somewhere, someone may remember a young girl who disappeared over Labor Day of 1974 in Idaho.

  How many more? Because Ted murdered so many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too. It is too easy, and expedient, to present them as a list of names. It is impossible to tell each victim’s story within the confines of one book. All those bright, pretty, beloved young women became, of necessity, “Bundy victims.”

  And only Ted stayed in the spotlight.

  The time between my first call from Gene Miller
in December, 1988, and the eve of Ted’s electrocution went so swiftly. I spent Monday, January 23, racing from one talk show to another. Each new interviewer seemed so convinced that the execution was going to happen. There was an otherworldly sense to that time period in my life. We had a new president in the White House, the weather had finally begun to warm up in Seattle after an unseasonal winter of bitter cold, and Ted was going to die.

  This time, he really was.

  Given a choice, I would have preferred to stay home, where things were familiar, and where my family and friends were. I needed a comfort zone.

  For good and bad, Ted Bundy had been some part of my life for eighteen years. Indeed, he had changed my life radically. Now, I wrote books instead of magazine articles. This book—which turned out to be about him—started it all. Now, I had enough income to live comfortably, without worrying about bills.

  I had worked to stop people like Ted Bundy, and I had worked with the victims and the survivors of people like Ted Bundy. Ninety-five percent of my brainpower detested Ted, and what he represented. But one part of me still thought, “Oh my God, he is going to walk down a hall and get into an electric chair, and he is going to have electricity surging through him, leaving burn marks on his temples and his arms and his legs.” It was a thought that ran through my head over and over as I sat very still on a plane carrying me to San Francisco. I gazed out at the clouds and down below to the Golden Gate Bridge. Since my first flight to Miami to cover Ted’s trial—a flight where I was so bedazzled at the thought of actually flying all night—I have flown a thousand or more times. I’ve been to San Francisco eight or nine times a year. Now I fly to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago the way I used to drive to Portland, Oregon.

  But, on this night, how I wished I could have been home.

  First, I was going to do Larry King Live, and San Francisco was the closest CNN affiliate where they could hook up a satellite. A limousine met me at the airport and delivered me to a skyscraper.

  I sat under hot television lights and tried to talk at a camera lens as if I really saw Larry King there. Anybody who had ever known or encountered Ted Bundy was being interviewed somewhere in America on this night. We were newsworthy, although we wouldn’t be particularly sought after within a day or so.