Killer on the Road

by Ginger Strand

  But then something truly odd happened. Between the early eighties, when the nation experienced a widespread “panic” about its “epidemic” of serial murder, and the decade’s end, serial killers morphed in the public mind from figures of fear to figures of fascination. Murder has always interested the public, but this was a new kind of murder, and new kind of fascination. Serial killers came to be admired, not only as outlaws—we Americans have always loved our outlaws—but as icons of the nation’s newly unabashed materialism. This process began with the case of one man: Ted Bundy.

  The late seventies had seen a number of high-profile serial murder cases. There was David Berkowitz. In California there was someone known as the Zodiac Killer, as well as the “Hillside Strangler” in Los Angeles—actually two men, cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, arrested in 1978. In the Chicago area, the “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy, a respected citizen who dressed as a clown at children’s parties, was arrested in December of 1978. When nearly thirty bodies were found in the crawl space of his home, he became a media sensation. But the undisputed superstar was Ted Bundy. Handsome, personable, apparently middle class, and with a penchant for victims who made good copy—pretty coeds, ski instructors, sorority sisters—Bundy quickly became the nation’s paradigmatic serial murderer.

  Bundy first came to the public’s notice in 1977. He had been killing women in the Seattle region since the early seventies, but police there didn’t have enough evidence to indict him. In 1974, he moved to Salt Lake City to attend law school at the University of Utah, and in late 1974, one of his intended victims got away. She identified Bundy, and he was convicted of kidnapping in 1976. While embarking on Utah’s fifteen-year sentence, he was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for murder. While in law school, he had moved his killing activity out of state.

  In Colorado, Bundy became a media sensation after he escaped from custody—twice, once from Aspen, the second time from Glenwood Springs. Many people couldn’t help but admire his audacity. Aspen locals printed T-shirts saying “Ted Bundy is a one-night stand.” An area restaurant offered a “Bundyburger”—an empty bun, which you open to find “the meat has fled.” On the lam, Bundy made his way to Chicago, then Michigan, and ultimately, Florida. After a week in Florida, he broke into the Chi Omega sorority house on the Florida State University campus and went on a rampage, brutally bludgeoning and strangling two young women and severely injuring two more. Two weeks later, he abducted, raped, and killed a twelve-year-old girl in Lake City, Florida. He was arrested less than a week later and denied any connection to the Florida killings. But the game was over; he would eventually begin confessing to a shocking, multistate murder career.

  Bundy was catnip for the media. Not only was he good-looking and well dressed, he was a former law student, a converted Mormon, and an occasional political worker for Republican candidates and Washington state’s Republican Party. News stories depicted him as a bright lawyer-to-be with a promising future in politics. He had worked at a suicide crisis hotline and once saved a small child from drowning. He had run down a purse-snatcher. He wore turtlenecks and nice sports jackets. At his first trial, he conspicuously turned the pages of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago while the lawyers wrangled. Affable and apparently successful, he looked like the kind of man a woman would proudly bring home to meet Mom and Dad. “All-American Boy on Trial” was the title of the New York Times Magazine profile, which called him a “terrific looking man” with a “lean all-American face,” a “young man who represented the best of America, not its worst.” The Times author went so far as to dub him “Kennedyesque.”

  But Ted Bundy was no Jack Kennedy. On close inspection, his veneer of upper-middle-class sophistication evaporates. Born at a home for unwed mothers in Vermont, possibly the product of incestuous sexual abuse, he was told when very young that his grandparents were his parents. Then his mother took him to Tacoma, Washington, and remarried. He was adopted by his stepfather, a cook in an army hospital. The family, which soon grew to include four more kids, lived in an unimpressive home on Tacoma’s west side. Bundy hated being seen in his stepfather’s low-class Rambler. “I felt inferior,” Bundy later told interviewers, “in part because of the money thing. My family didn’t have money problems per se, but I was always envious of the kids who lived in all those brick houses where the executives and doctors lived. I felt kind of deprived, at a disadvantage to those people who had the money, the successful parents, all the goodies.” It’s hard not to hear an echo of Charles Starkweather’s resentment for “ ‘uppity’ kids from big houses whose old man was a doctor or a president of a bank.”

  Once at the University of Washington, Bundy worked hard to disguise his humble origins by pursuing a high-end brand-name lifestyle. He bought preppy clothes, drank fancy French wines, forged ski lift tickets. He affected an English-sounding accent. It seems he was most successful in hoodwinking those who were unsophisticated themselves. His first serious girlfriend, the daughter of a wealthy California family, dumped him for his lack of ambition. He later described her as “Saks” to his “Sears and Roebuck.” His next girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, a Mormon secretary from Ogden, Utah, was easier to impress: in her memoir of their relationship, she reports that when she first met Bundy she thought him “a cut above the rest of the crowd,” because “his slacks and turtleneck certainly weren’t from J. C. Penney.” The first time they made dinner together, he impressed her by taking her to a fancy, upscale Safeway to buy steaks. He didn’t tell her he had worked there as a night stocker. Kloepfer, who hadn’t gone to college, was even impressed by Bundy’s academic prowess, though he was a middling undergraduate and, after a round of rejections, did poorly in the one law school that accepted him the first time around, the University of Puget Sound.

  Writing after the 1979 trial, Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, authors of the most comprehensive account of Bundy’s crimes, declare themselves puzzled by the popular image of Bundy. “The press stories about Ted stressed his apparent normalcy, his intellect, his attractiveness, his Republicanism,” they write. “They didn’t report he was a compulsive nail-biter and nose picker, that he was no genius (I.Q.: 124), that he was at best a fair student in college and failure in law school, that he was poorly read, that he frequently mispronounced words and that he stuttered when nervous and had acquired only a surface sophistication.” The authors were swimming upstream. The media persisted in presenting Bundy as brilliant, charming, and promising, and when he announced his intention to defend himself at his Florida trial, 250 reporters from five continents applied for press passes to the courtroom. ABC television paid for a dedicated satellite hookup.

  The attention fed on itself. Bundy “fans” sprouted across the nation. He reportedly received hundreds of letters daily, the majority from adoring women. One of them managed to marry him while he was on death row, where she claimed to have conceived his child. And Bundy himself worked hard to maintain the upper-class image he had adopted. Asked by a prison interviewer to describe his crimes, he replied, “How do you describe the taste of bouillabaisse? Some remember clams, others mullet.”

  After his conviction, Bundy’s status as the paradigmatic serial murderer was augmented in print and on film: four books about him were published shortly after the trial. Their titles—The Stranger Beside Me, The Deliberate Stranger, The Killer Next Door, The Only Living Witness—highlight both his normalcy and his monstrosity. The most popular of them was by Ann Rule, a hardworking hack writer of parenting and detective-magazine stories who had actually worked with Bundy at the Seattle Crisis Center—a lucky break for a would be crime writer. Her account The Stranger Beside Me launched her career as a best-selling doyenne of true crime. In it, she describes Bundy in terms so glowing she sounds like she’s writing his law school recommendation: “a brilliant, handsome senior in psychology at the University of Washington”; “Ted Bundy is a man who learns from experience—his own and others’ ”; “If Ted is to die, I think he will mu
ster the strength to do it with style.” One year later, Elizabeth Kloepfer—writing as “Elizabeth Kendall”—took a similarly admiring tone in her memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy.

  Bundy fascination spawned a number of false myths about serial killers: that they are predominantly white, middle-class men who prey on beautiful young coeds; that they are intelligent, even brilliant, capable of eluding and tricking the police; and that they are fundamentally divided souls, with a socially acceptable “mask” disguising the dark demon writhing within. Even as academics and criminologists have consistently debunked each of these myths, they persist, not only in movies and novels about serial killers, but in purportedly nonfiction books about them. They serve to make serial killers more likable.

  Another myth the Bundy case helped create was the notion that serial killers are mobile predators, roaming the nation in search of victims. Bundy had indeed crossed the continent, inscribing a homicidal arrow across the map from Washington state to Utah to Florida, but before he left Washington the majority of his killings occurred in one very small area—the Seattle neighborhood around the University of Washington. Yet it was his travels that sparked the national imagination. He was said to be “the first coast-to-coast killer, the model of the traveling serial killer who took advantage of what Bundy called ‘the anonymity factor.’ ”

  One person who knew better, even in the early eighties, was Lieutenant Ray Biondi. The Sacramento area seemed to have more than its fair share of serial killers, and well before he became aware of Lou Ellen Burleigh’s disappearance, or heard the name Roger Reece Kibbe, Detective Biondi had helped capture a number of them. He had tracked down Richard Chase, the “Vampire Killer,” a psychotic murderer who drank his victims’ blood. He had helped build the case against Gerald Gallego, whose wife Charlene helped him abduct, rape, and murder teenage girls in the Sacramento area in the late seventies. In 1985, Biondi would help solve a series of murders of young boys committed by another young boy—Jon Scott Dunkle. None of these cases fit the stereotype: Chase was psychotic, Gallego worked in a team with his wife, and Dunkle was a diagnosed schizophrenic. And each of them stuck to a very specific “hunting ground.” Biondi knew that, although the media presented him as the very model of the modern multiple murderer, Ted Bundy was the exception, not the rule.

  • • • • •

  Sometime around 1980, Harriet and Roger Kibbe bought a home in Oakley, a small town about twelve miles east of Pittsburg. Roger started working as a truck driver, and Harriet began a bookkeeping business. A few years later, using borrowed money, they purchased a furniture warehouse in Modesto, a somewhat grimy agricultural center just outside Stockton, over an hour’s drive from their home. Roger was going to make furniture, and Harriet would manage the business’s books.

  The commute was made possible by the recent completion of I-5. The only interstate connecting Mexico, the United States, and Canada, I-5’s California leg was completed in 1979, with the opening of a five-mile stretch around Stockton, thirty miles northwest of Modesto. That October, more than three thousand people joined officials from all three nations in a celebratory ribbon-cutting attended by State Senator Randolph Collier, the “father of the California freeway,” and April Vandermoon, a fourteen-year-old girl introduced as “the first baby born on I-5.”

  The interstate was just one sign of how the region was changing. The Kibbes were part of a wave of development moving eastward from the San Francisco Bay Area. As housing prices soared in the 1980s, suburbs and subdivisions began to spread east from the Coast Ranges, sprawling from the Bay Area into the agricultural Central Valley. Dominating the center of California, the 450-mile-long Central Valley stretches from Redding in the north to Bakersfield in the south. Once home to little more than vast fields of grapes, almond trees, and vegetable farms, the Central Valley began to be devoured by subdivisions in the eighties. Before long, it became California’s fastest-growing region, which it remains today.

  It was an era of change. As the eighties dawned, the nation was experiencing a profound transition. The seventies—an era of questioning, of self-doubt, of rethinking old beliefs in the face of social breakdown—were about to give way to the eighties, an era of retrenchment, of turning away from what was wrong with society and refocusing on what was right. Some historians even put an exact date on this transition: July 15, 1979, the night President Jimmy Carter gave what came to be known as his “malaise speech.” Meant to reinvigorate a nation demoralized by unemployment, economic stagnation, inflation, and a second energy crisis—all following hard on the heels of Watergate and the ignominious conclusion to the war in Vietnam—Carter’s speech was a bold call to conscience. At its heart was a startling claim: the nation, he said, was facing a crisis of confidence, in part because it had lost its way. It was time to deal with the fact that America had chosen the wrong path: consumerism. “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” President Carter declared, “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” To take “the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values,” he proposed a slew of fundamental changes to the American way of life: oil-import quotas, bonds for alternative energy development, legislated reductions in oil use, and reinvestment in public transportation.

  At first, the nation was wowed. But then, what he said began to sink in. The president of the United States had declared that the nation shouldn’t endlessly consume—that in fact consumption might not equal happiness. Meaning might be found in making and buying less. Conservatives began calling it Carter’s “malaise” speech, though he hadn’t used that word. Arguments flared up about whether the nation really had lost its confidence, as if the president had been diagnosing a personality disorder and not a structural flaw in society. His self-questioning was dismissed as “navel-gazing.”

  Carter had done something truly shocking. He had expressed skepticism about what had been American economic dogma since the Second World War: the doctrine of growth. His basic premise—that there might be limits to expanding the economy, to resource use, to consumption—became, as he later wrote in his memoirs, “the subliminal theme” of his entire presidency. It wasn’t always subliminal. Dedicating the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Carter declared, “We can no longer rely on a rising economic tide to lift the boats of the poorest in our society. . . . We have a keener appreciation of limits now—the limits of government, limits on the use of military power abroad; the limits on manipulating, without harm to ourselves, a delicate and a balanced natural environment.”

  Carter was not alone in thinking about limits. In 1972, a group of intellectuals calling themselves the Club of Rome commissioned a group of MIT computer programmers to model a range of outcomes to ongoing growth. The geeks assembled a wonky collection of charts and graphs titled The Limits to Growth. In model after model, they demonstrated that the endless ramping up of population, industrialization, and resource consumption would lead inevitably to economic collapse and widespread societal meltdown. Although conservative economists immediately denounced the whole project as a doomsday fantasy, the book sold vigorously and was translated into thirty languages. Clearly the idea resounded with a lot of people. Even the money-minded Business Week, which rejected the book’s conclusions, admitted that “For all the criticism, practically everyone agrees that on a finite planet, growth must end sooner or later.”

  Growth must end? In fact, there was no such consensus. The nation, as sociologist Amitai Etzioni reported to the 1979 President’s Commission on an Agenda for the Eighties, was actually divided against itself, torn between its own commitment to endless growth and its desire to return to th
e antimaterialist values Carter had described in his speech. It was a state of ambivalence that couldn’t last, Etzioni predicted: the nation would have to undergo either “rededication to the industrial, mass-consumption society” or a “clearer commitment to a slow-growth, quality-of-life society.”

  The choice was made in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, articulating boundless faith in the American way, touched a chord in a nation weary of self-doubt and cognitive dissonance. In the campaign’s one televised debate, Reagan offered a few simple questions for people to ask themselves in deciding how to vote: “Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go buy things in stores than it was four years ago?” he began. In stark contrast to Carter’s critique of materialism, Reagan’s redefinition of the national mission was offered in the simplest terms possible: America is succeeding if its citizens can go buy things. His subsequent landslide victory suggested the message had found an enthusiastic audience: the rededication to mass consumption was on.