The Fear Collector

by Gregg Olsen

  The circumstances of the girls’ abductions were more than familiar. They mirrored what Ted Bundy had done when he took a Washington girl and a girl from Colorado.

  Grace put it out of her mind.

  Or rather she tried to.

  Grace felt that saying much more about it would only serve to bolster her reputation for being obsessed with Ted Bundy. One time when she was in the bathroom, she’d heard a couple of other women, a records clerk and a lab assistant, talking about her.

  “I think she’s kind of weird,” the records clerk said.

  “I don’t know,” the lab assistant said. “I guess she seems nice enough.”

  “I read her file. You want to know what’s in it?”

  “You aren’t supposed to disclose that stuff.”

  “We work here. It’s all right for us to share. We’re not supposed to tell anyone outside. It’s okay to talk about stuff here because we’re all, you know, working together.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “Really kind of interesting.”

  “Okay. I guess you can tell me,” the lab assistant said, lowering her voice.

  “Now you’re making me feel bad.”

  A long, seemingly, exasperated pause followed before the lab assistant gave up. “Just tell me.”

  “Fine,” said the records clerk. “Says that she had to be evaluated by the shrink twice because of her sister’s disappearance. They’ve cleared her. No reprimands. But they told her to stay out of the Ted Bundy files. I read her files. Interesting and disgusting stuff. Anyway, there is a lot of crap in there about how her mom, Sissy O’Hare, kept pestering our guys here back then. She was sure that her daughter was a Ted victim. Never proved it. Maybe she was. Grace was digging around trying to see if they missed any clues.”

  “I guess I could understand why she’d do that. You know, why she’d want to know.”

  “Don’t you think it’s creepy?” the records clerk said.

  “Probably. But really, you shouldn’t look in her personnel files.”

  “I have clearance. I’m very responsible. I’ve never told anyone what I’ve seen. I would never, ever breach my duty to be confidential.”

  Grace waited for the women to leave. She didn’t report them. To do so, she’d felt, would only make matters worse. She believed her background was an asset, one that made her a more effective investigator and victim interviewer. She could connect with anyone who’d felt his brand of incompressible and evil influence in the trajectory of their lives.

  After reading the Lancaster and Caldwell files, she needed a moment.

  “Paul,” she said standing behind him as he finished a phone call in his cubicle adjacent to hers.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m heading out early. Hold down the fort, will you?”

  Paul nodded. He’d seen that look before.

  “Anything new on the bones?” he asked.

  Grace pulled her coat from the hook next to her chair and shook her head.

  “Not yet,” she said, heading out the door. “Might take a while. If anything, I’m patient.”

  PART TWO

  PEACE, TED

  “We serial killers are your sons, we are

  your husbands, we are everywhere.

  And there will be more of your

  children dead tomorrow.”

  —TED BUNDY

  CHAPTER 14

  Grace Alexander had read every book written on Ted Bundy. In fact, true-crime author Ann Rule’s famous account of her friendship with Ted, The Stranger Beside Me, had been required reading when she was growing up in the family’s white and gray Craftsman home in North Tacoma. It sat on the shelf alongside first editions of Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The novels were genuine and undisputed classics, of course. Grace’s mother, Sissy, insisted that Rule’s book was on par with those famous tomes.

  “A story like Bundy’s deserved the ring of truth,” she’d said one night when Grace was eleven and reading the book for the first time. “Stranger is a choir bell.”

  Later, Grace wondered about a mother who would have her not only read such a book, but discuss it as if they were having a chardonnay and Brie book club meeting.

  What do you think motivated Ted to lie about things that weren’t even important?

  Do you think Ted has any feelings whatsoever?

  What kind of a mother was Louise Bundy?

  Grace had immersed herself in Ted’s life. Given the circumstances of her birth, had there ever been another path to follow? It had all been ordained by heartbroken parents, who had lost their oldest daughter, their firstborn, to a phantom.

  Grace knew how Ted had been born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, in November of 1946. His mother’s Christian name was Eleanor Louise Cowell—though later she was known only as Louise. Grace imagined what it might have been like for a young woman finding herself pregnant. Louise more than likely lied on the birth certificate that Theodore Robert was the son of an airman named Lloyd Marshall. While no one from her family ever gave voice to the rumors, some suspected that the pregnancy was darker than a mere casual relationship between a young woman and a serviceman.

  Grace’s feelings regarding Louise were like wipers, moving back and forth over an oily windshield. Louise hadn’t set out to give birth to a monster. No mother does. Sometimes Grace felt sorry for her; other times, mostly because of her mother’s stories, she hated Louise. She had a vivid recollection of the time her mother actually confronted Louise when they were out shopping. Grace was eleven at the time. Louise, dressed in a plain cotton shirtdress and shoes that were so sensible they could easily have been worn to work on a factory floor, was shopping in the linens department of the Bon Marché at the Tacoma Mall. Sissy, looking for a wedding gift and dragging Grace along, spotted Ted’s mother from a table of marked-down china.

  “Stay close,” she said. She set down the oh-so-slightly chipped platter, and walked over.

  Louise’s eyes fluttered a little, but she offered no indication that she knew Sissy.

  “I know who you are,” Sissy said.

  “Excuse me?” Louise answered without really even looking up. Ted’s mother ran her fingertips over a piece of the fabric exposed through a small slit in its plastic wrapping.

  Grace’s mother reached over and touched Louise’s hand.

  She was trembling a little.

  When their eyes finally met, Sissy saw something that she hadn’t expected to see.

  Fear and recognition.

  “I know who you are, too,” Louise said, finally and softly. “I know what you believe and I know in my heart that nothing I can say would make a bit of difference to you.”

  Sissy O’Hare’s heart rate had accelerated by then. She had seen the picture of Louise on the night of Ted’s execution, the phone pressed to her ear, around her the simple furnishings of a hardworking couple’s life.

  “Do you know anything about my daughter?” she said.

  Louise tightened her grip on her purse and stepped back a little. She kept her eyes fastened on Sissy.

  “I know what it’s like to lose a child,” Louise said, her voice a slight croak. “If I could ease any mother’s pain, I would.”

  Sissy, who had imagined all sorts of scenarios had she ever had a moment alone with Ted’s mother, hadn’t expected that she would feel pity. She told Grace that’s just what happened. While it spun through her mind to shoot back a cold remark about how Louise couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have her child missing or murdered by a monster, Louise had experienced a profound loss, too.

  “I imagine that you and your family have suffered a great deal, too,” Sissy said, finally, and not without compassion in her heart.

  A salesclerk interrupted the conversation.

  “Can I help you two find anything?” she asked.

  Both women shook their heads. Louise loosened her grip on the s
heet set and put it back on the shelf. There was an irony to the younger woman’s question, of course. Both women had needed help in finding answers—Sissy, for the identity of the killer; Louise, for the reason her beautiful boy had turned into the worst kind of evil.

  And yet, as her mother replayed that encounter with Grace when she was a little older, it was clear that she didn’t hold Louise responsible. Grace was in the middle of a social studies course at school that introduced the nature versus nurture debate.

  “We don’t know everything about what makes a person evil,” Sissy said.

  “That’s only partially true, Mom,” she said.

  “If you’re thinking that Ted’s mother is a factor in what he ended up doing later in life, I think you’re overstating things.”

  “She abandoned him when he was a baby, Mom.”

  Sissy nodded. “Yes, but she went back for him. She didn’t leave him at the home. She loved him enough to bring him home.”

  Grace pressed her mother. “She led him to believe that he was her brother.”

  “Those were the times, Grace.”

  “He never knew who his father was. His family had wrapped up his entire young life in lie after lie.”

  Sissy knew where her daughter was going, and she knew that she was probably right. And yet, she debated her right then. Grace was smart, tenacious, and well equipped to do what Sissy wanted her to do above everything else. She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t. She didn’t want Grace to think that her own environment, her own upbringing in the shadow of Tricia’s murder, was artificial. The love between them was genuine.

  Louise Bundy may have given birth to a monster, and she’d certainly played a role in the miserable trajectory of his life, but not all of it was her doing. Grace and her mother parted company on that. Sissy felt that there was such a thing as “a bad seed” and that Ted had been evil from the outset.

  One time when Grace was a teen, a story about a young woman who grew into adulthood not knowing that her grandfather was in fact her father appeared on a TV talk show. The young woman had lived a life of crime, unable to resolve just why it was that everything she touched turned ugly.

  “She was born evil,” Sissy said as mother and daughter pulled weeds from a garden bed under a beloved pear tree.

  “Maybe she was bad because her mother hated her?”

  Sissy stopped what she was doing.

  “You mean, her mother’s hidden feelings were not so hidden? Is that what you are saying?”

  Grace dropped a dandelion into an old galvanized bucket. “Think about it, Mom. If she was treated like she was garbage, like she was vile, maybe she would grow up to be that way.”

  “A self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe?”

  “I guess it might be. Maybe we can never understand what makes people do the ugly things they do. We try, though. Don’t we?”

  It wasn’t the greatest mystery in the annals of crime, but it was one that Grace pondered over and over as she tried to understand the man who would have such an influence on her life. Ted was an obsession, one that had been passed on through her own personal history and the desires of her own mother. They kept coming back to this: Who was Theodore Robert Cowell, Ted Bundy? Really? Was he the son of an Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall? A sailor named Jack Worthington? Both were names that Ted’s mother had ascribed to the man who’d made her pregnant. Over the years, the Cowells suggested that Ted was the result of incest between Louise and her father, Sam.

  “He hated his mother for doing that to him,” Grace had said once, revisiting a familiar conversation with Shane when they took a drive to the peninsula to visit friends. It was summer, hot, dry. It was the kind of day that would bring out young women in bathing suits and predators on the hunt for them. Somewhere. Anywhere. There was always someone on the hunt. Those days often evoked Ted.

  “I never talked to Ted,” Shane said, his eye on the road. “So I wouldn’t know for sure.”

  “You’ve profiled him. You know.”

  “When he found out that he was a bastard—his words, not mine—I expect it was an epic betrayal. He probably knew he wasn’t one of Johnnie Bundy’s kids—he didn’t look like them. He probably entered the room more than once when things fell silent. He knew that there was a secret about him.”

  “If he hated his mother so much,” Grace said, “maybe it was her that he was killing. Maybe everyone had it all wrong. Maybe it was his way to get Louise to pay for her lies.”

  “We’ll need to stop for gas,” Shane said, flipping on the turn indicator.

  “I’d like a pop, too,” she said.

  Shane took the next exit. “Back to what you were saying, babe. I get it. I can see his rage directed toward Louise, but I think it was toward all women. All the women in his life. He was selecting a kind of every-woman, to stand in for Louise, maybe his grandmother, his girlfriends. Remember, as much as we know about him we really can’t say for sure any of it is absolute.”

  “He was all contradictions,” she said. She was thinking about how Ted had professed a deep love for his grandfather—a man who some family members were all but certain was his actual father. In some ways, that kind of misplaced devotion fit the profile. But there was more to it. If there had been a genetic component to Ted’s aberrant behavior, it came from his grandfather. Family members talked about how Sam Cowell abused his wife, children, and even family pets.

  “Brain studies indicate a fundamental difference between sociopaths and normal brains,” Shane said.

  “I’ve done the same reading,” Grace said, her tone a little defensive. She regretted it the second the words passed her lips.

  Shane didn’t take the bait.

  “Sociopaths like Ted sometimes learn the behavior from a family member,” he said.

  “Sam literally pushed one of his daughters down a flight of stairs because she dared to oversleep,” Grace said. “Another said he swung a cat by its tail like a lariat.”

  Being a young woman in Tacoma had gotten decidedly more terrifying. Lisa Lancaster had been found butchered along the river. An unknown female’s remains had been uncovered along the beach. Emma Rose was missing. Farther south of the county, Olympia teenager Kelsey Caldwell’s name had been aligned with the missing girls cases, but that was more by the press than the genuine belief of law enforcement. She wasn’t a part of the Tacoma cases.

  That all changed one morning.

  “How did we miss this?” Grace said, studying the highlighted section of the autopsy report that Paul Bateman had planted in her hand the minute she’d sat at her desk.

  “A mistake,” he said, almost more of a question than an answer.

  “That Lisa had two left hands?”

  Paul didn’t say anything more. It was all there. The medical examiner’s report noted that there had been body parts from more than one victim recovered from the dump site along the Puyallup River. An assistant taking autopsy photos had been the first to discover what should have been patently obvious—that the hands that had been severed and recovered from the site were both lefties.

  “This is a colossal screwup,” Paul said, facial muscles tightening.

  Tissue samples had been analyzed and hand number one was a match for Lisa. The other, hand number two, was not a tissue or DNA match at all.

  “The hand’s size, overall condition, and traces of pale pink nail polish, indicate a female in her teens or early twenties. . . .”

  Grace’s blood was boiling too. “We’re going back,” she said.

  Paul nodded.

  “To the river,” she said.

  A half hour later, the two parked on the same dusty shoulder alongside River Road. The crime scene tape had been removed and rainfall had washed away the evidence of hundreds of footprints of the crime scene techs, coroner’s staff, and police detectives who’d been there when Lisa’s remains had been tagged and bagged.

  Grace walked over to the river’s edge. Paul finished up a call and followed.<
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  The river had swollen and sloshed over the thin shelf that served as its bank. A fisherman, unaware of the fact that they were police detectives or the grisly reason that had brought them there, paused and waved from the other side.

  “Thurston County is sending a sample of Dennis Caldwell’s DNA right now,” Paul said, getting off the phone. “No one is telling him, though. The detective there, Jonathan Stevens, knows how to keep his mouth shut. We don’t want this out.”

  “If it’s a match,” she said, “it’ll get out anyway. Probably sometime today.”

  She studied the bank and looked over humps of grass and Himalayan blackberry vines that rambled around the perimeter of the river.

  “The rest of Kelsey’s got to be around here,” she said, her eyes tracing the scene, inch by inch.

  “Maybe just that one part was ditched here,” Paul offered.

  Grace didn’t think so. She shook her head and started walking. “Ridgway and Bundy both dumped bodies in clusters. They went to places they knew would be undetected, places where they could go back.”

  “And defile the bodies,” he said.

  Grace nodded. “That, too. But I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking about how they liked to relive the conquests, from the hunt to the kill. At the after-party.”

  “They really got off on it,” Paul said.

  It made her sick to her stomach, thinking of Ridgway and Bundy’s victims, their final moments. How even in death they’d been made to suffer the worst indignities that anyone could imagine. In fact, no normal person could even conjure up the activities that Ted had enjoyed with the dead girls.

  “Sick pieces of crap, those two,” she finally said, stopping and bending at her knees to get a closer look at a piece of paper that had attached itself to the damp earth. It was narrow and white, probably a receipt.