The Phantom Prince

  “A woman I work with. Remember, I asked you first. . . .”

  “Tell me you’re kidding,” I pleaded. “Please don’t do this to me.” I slammed down the phone and waited for him to call back. But he didn’t. I told my boss I had to leave. I rode my bike home, crying all the way and talking out loud to myself, telling myself it wasn’t true. I took my bike into my apartment and threw it on the floor. I let out a scream. “You asshole!” I shouted. “You fucker! You made me kill my baby for you and your goddamn career. You’re a miserable son-of-a-bitch, Ted Bundy. I hate you!”

  Then I started in on myself, “God, you’re stupid Liz. You’re a goddamn stupid idiot. A goddamn ugly pig. What did you think he would do? Love you and cherish you? He’s just used you and now he’s through with you.”

  I poured myself a glass of Scotch and drank it straight. It burned and tasted awful, but I deserved to be burned. I prayed the phone would ring. Or that he would knock on the door, put his arms around me, take my pain away. I poured another drink. I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror at my ugly, puffed face. “You’re going to be held accountable,” I told the face. I took the bottle of Scotch, sat in the back closet, and drank till I passed out. When I came to, it was after midnight. My apartment was pitch black and I didn’t want any lights. As long as it was dark I might be dreaming. There was a little Scotch left in the bottle and I drank it down. Still with the lights out, I changed into my jeans and put on a black sweater and a black parka, put a small butcher knife in my pocket, and set out for Ted’s place. I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there. I kept my hand on the knife in my pocket, very much afraid that I would be attacked. I looked up at Ted’s windows. No lights, so I sat down on the porch to wait for him.

  I got cold fast. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe if I went back to my place, Ted would be there. I crept back home. No one was there and no one had been there. I drank the beer in the refrigerator and passed out again.

  First thing the next morning, I threw on some clothes and drove over to Ted’s. His landlord let me in and when I knocked on Ted’s door there was no answer. I felt around the ledge where Ted always hid his key, found it, and let myself in. The bed was made—maybe he hadn’t come home at all. I poked around the room looking for evidence and I found it. In his garbage can was a note from a girl named Marcy. “Saw you out riding your bicycle in the sun. Came by to visit but you weren’t here. You missed out!” By the time Ted burst into the room I was lying on his bed, hysterical.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, coming towards me. I sat up and started scooting backwards, away from him. I didn’t want him to touch me.

  “Are you all right?” I rolled off the bed and shot past him. He reached out and grabbed me and wrapped his arms around me. I was shaking with rage. I had so much to say that I was speechless. “Stay here until I get back,” he told me. I nodded, but as soon as I heard him go out the front door I ran after him. He was just getting into a sporty red car. That must be her car. Maybe I should follow him. “Go back to my room and wait for me,” he shouted as he drove off. I sat on his porch steps and put my head on my knees and rocked back and forth and moaned and moaned.

  “Gut Gott im Himmel. Was ist los?” said his landlady.

  “Just about everything,” I told her and walked away.

  I drove home and put the car in the garage. I was too tired to get out of the car. I heard footsteps running along the side of the garage. I thought I had cried myself out, but when I saw Ted’s face the tears began again. I sprang out of the car so fast I think I scared him. I grabbed his shirt and began pushing and pulling at him. “I wish I was bigger than you. I’d beat the shit out of you!” I screamed.

  He steered me into the house, out of earshot of the neighbors. I kept screaming at him. “When did you stop loving me? Did you ever really love me? Why didn’t you tell me?” I went on and on, out of control. I ran to the bathroom and locked myself in.

  Ted stood outside the bathroom door. “Please come out here and talk to me,” he was saying.

  “Get out of here and leave me alone. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.” The berserk sound of my own voice scared me. I was starting to feel detached from myself. I wondered what the people upstairs must be thinking.

  “I’m going to get Angie,” Ted shouted over my shouting. “Will that make you feel better?”

  “Oh yes,” I said sarcastically, “that will make everything fine. You get Angie and then things will be swell again.”

  Within a few minutes, Ted was back with Angie, who had a towel wrapped around her wet hair. He had crashed in on her while she was in the shower and scared the hell out of her.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” she said.

  What good would that do? I wondered. Would that make Ted love me? What was the point? Angie and I talked. Ted said little. I wanted to know more about this other woman, Marcy. He told me she was just somebody he worked with at Harborview. How long had they been dating? Well, they had spent the Fourth of July together, he said.

  “All day? You must really like her. Where did you go?” I felt like a kamikaze pilot.

  “I don’t think that is important. Telling you the details will only cause you more hurt.” I knew why he didn’t want to go on.

  “You went rafting, didn’t you? You went rafting with Marcy in the raft I gave you as a present.” I only wished the raft was here so I could slice it into a million yellow ribbons.

  At last I sent Ted away. I was tired. I spent the next few days with Angie: talking, drinking, crying, ranting, raving, crying some more. Ted looked in from time to time.

  I finally realized that life was going to go on. I went on a shopping spree and bought myself a bunch of new clothes. One evening I was trying on a new nightgown in a nice store. I looked good in it and I wanted it, but then I thought, “What for?” I knew Ted would be back for sex. Over the years our sex life had been a strong bond between us, our desire rising and falling in cycles, but always tender and gratifying for me, and I knew why. I loved him with all my heart. He probably liked our sex because it was available, nothing more.

  I bought the nightgown, admitting sadly to myself that if this was the only way I could be a part of Ted’s life, I would settle for it.

  About two weeks later Ted called for a date. Over steaks and beer, we made small talk. My job was fine. His job was fine. I had talked to Molly in Utah and she was fine. My parents were fine. Angie and I had been spending a lot of time together and, yes, Angie was fine, too.

  Suddenly Ted grabbed my hand. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done,” he blurted out. “I love you so much. Being with someone else was the loneliest experience of my life. I don’t know why I jeopardized everything. Maybe, if you are willing—if you think you can forgive me, maybe we could start over. . . .”

  I looked into those beautiful blue eyes, and I couldn’t decide whether to slug him or flip out of my chair backwards and do handsprings across the room. Things were going to be okay. Things were going to get back to normal. But things were never really the same again.

  Ted’s job at Harborview ended and he threw himself into Governor Dan Evans’s re-election campaign. He was working as a volunteer, but he had hopes of a paying position. Even if he didn’t get paid, the experience and the contacts would be worth a million dollars. He was enthusiastic and busy. I decided to make some changes in my life and got a parttime job with an environmental agency. I did a little telephone work for McGovern’s presidential campaign, and Ted thought that was awful, working for a Democrat. I was a poll watcher for McGovern on Election Day, and after the polls closed, Ted and I went to Evans’s victory party. I didn’t know a soul, so I stuck by Ted’s side, feeling stupid, boring, and ugly. Eventually I slipped away to a tavern and drank until it was time to go. Ted couldn’t understand why I got so tongue-tied around people.

  Ted and I planned to go to the Governor’s Inauguration Ball in January of 1973, so we went to Northgate Ma
ll to buy a new dress. Molly and I liked a red number that Ted thought was too flashy. He picked out a black knit that was pretty in a conservative way, and I bought it. On the way back to the car, Ted suddenly shoved the dress box at me and took off running on the icy pavement. I didn’t know what was happening until a woman with two little kids started screaming and pointing at a man almost a block away that Ted was chasing. When Ted came back with a security guard and the purse-snatcher, I was awed at how fast he had responded and at his bravery. He told me he had cornered the man in a dead-end alley, and at the last moment had realized that the man might be armed. Fortunately, he wasn’t.

  Ted was making good money at a job in the King County Budget Office, a job he got after working briefly for the Seattle Crime Commission on a study of white-collar crime. He decided to buy a car. I helped him by going through the ads, and soon he had a brown Volkswagen of his own.

  In the spring of 1973, Ted was appointed Assistant Chairman of the Washington State Republican Central Committee. He loved the work and the people he worked with, particularly his boss, the State Chairman. It upset me very much that with such a great job, Ted still continued to steal. One day in a hardware store, he began gathering up tools and putting them in a tool chest. At first, I paid little attention, but he seemed so intent on what he was doing that I said, “You’re not going to steal those, are you?”

  “Of course not,” he said. But several days later I saw the tool chest in his car. I had had enough confrontations, so I said nothing.

  In the early summer I went sailing with a girlfriend and stumbled on a pocket of eligible men. One of them, Greg, needed someone to crew for him on his Hobie Cat, a sixteen-foot catamaran. There wasn’t much to crewing, just shifting from one side of the boat to the other and sometimes going out in the trapeze, a sling affair that suspended a person over the water and kept the boat from turning over. It was great fun, and I made plans to crew for Greg again.

  I liked the idea of making Ted jealous. Every time I tried to talk to him about our relationship it ended up the same way: I was insecure; I was too clingy. As far as he was concerned, our relationship was fine the way it was. When I asked him point blank whether he was dating anyone, he would look me straight in the eye and say no. When I told him about sailing with Greg, he told me I was taking a big chance, that I was probably going to ruin everything.

  At the next regatta, I was helping Greg get the boat ready when I looked up and saw Ted on a bridge, watching me. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer, so I walked away, feeling his eyes drilling holes in my back. I wasn’t going to let him spoil my good time.

  Greg and I planned a bicycle and ferry trip to Victoria, British Columbia. I told Ted about it one morning as we were driving to work. He blew up and started driving like a madman. At the first chance, I got out of the car. I had walked about four blocks when Ted darted out of an alley in front of me. When he saw me, he jumped back. Then he was behind me, following me. Just as I got to work, he fell in step alongside me.

  “You’re making a big mistake, Elizabeth. I love you very much, and you’re taking my love and destroying it.”

  “I’m destroying it!” I couldn’t believe my ears. “You tell me you love me, but you don’t act like it.”

  The evening Greg was to pick me up, Ted came over early and refused to leave. He had been drinking and his tears flowed freely. He wished I wouldn’t go. I was steamed. I told him that I’d had enough, that I was sick of his words, words, words. If he wanted to stay and make a fool of himself, go ahead. He left. I went on my trip with Greg and we had a platonic good time.

  When I returned I found a letter:

  It’s Friday evening. You’re gone and I’ve never been so alone in my life. The memory of your face haunts me. The memory of our times together is so fine that the fact that I’ve lost you seems unreal. I’m perfectly stunned. Cigarette upon cigarette does nothing. You’ve left and I can think of nothing but that I love you. I love you now. I loved you in the past. I’ll love you as long as I draw breath. . . . With tears in my eyes, I punish myself. Shaking my head, I can’t believe I have driven you to find someone else. Your smile, your hand in mine, your loving daughter, the three of us together, these memories are the fondest memories I can ever hold. My insensitivity has destroyed everything. . . . I am looking inward as you told me to.

  I love you. I want you. Forever.

  Love,

  Ted

  There would be more such letters. And as often as I had told Ted that actions spoke louder than words, all he had to do was say the right ones. I told Greg that I couldn’t see him anymore. Ted was attentive and loving for about a month; then we slipped into the familiar pit-stop routine.

  In August my car was stolen and when I got it back, the only thing I could tell was missing was an Oriental knife that Ted had put in the glove compartment a couple of weeks earlier, saying that some friends had given it to him.

  Three days later, Ted borrowed my car and, two blocks from my house, nearly totaled it. I had it fixed and drove it another fifty thousand miles.

  In the fall, Ted started night law school at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. Now that he was a student again, I saw more of him. Occasionally he took me to class with him and I enjoyed that. I was trying to change so he would love me as he used to. My dependency bugged him, so I tried to get involved in things of my own.

  I went skiing every Friday night. I liked to ski, but I loved the drinking that went along with it: hot buttered rums and coffee nudges. A couple of times, I never even put my skis on. Strange as it seemed, I started going to church again. I was feeling a lot of guilt about the kind of life I was living, and I prayed that I would learn something at church that would get my life back on track again.

  Ted came skiing with me sometimes, but our favorite pastime was playing chess with Molly’s toy chess set and drinking hot spiced wine. For Christmas I gave Ted a really nice hand-carved chess set. He had picked out a special present for me—a really nice hand-carved chess set.

  As usual, Molly and I went home for Christmas. When my parents asked me about Ted, I didn’t know what to tell them. I still thought we would get married when the time was right, but I had no idea when that time would be.

  When we returned, Ted was wearing an expensive-looking red parka, a Christmas present from his mom, he said. He had on a Head brand ski sweater, another present from his mom. In his room there was a nice antique clock on the wall—from his mom. His mom was on a tight budget. I asked him if he had stolen anything lately. His indignation was so intense, I almost believed him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Early in January 1974, a young woman was attacked as she slept in her house near the University District. She was raped and beaten unconscious. Her roommates were home, but they heard nothing, and she wasn’t discovered until the next day.

  I felt safe enough in the old house I lived in. There were four men renting the upstairs bedrooms and sharing a kitchen and bathroom. There were two more men living below me in the basement apartment. I felt confident that if anyone broke in, help was right at hand. I couldn’t imagine a silent intruder, silently assaulting a woman, silently slipping away.

  On January 31, Lynda Ann Healy, a University of Washington student, disappeared from her bedroom in the basement of a house a few blocks west of mine. She had stayed up late watching TV with her roommates, and had gone to bed as usual, but the next morning, when one of her roommates went into her room to look for her, she was gone. Her bed was neatly made, and her electric alarm clock sat buzzing on the bedside table. When the police inspected her room, they pulled the covers back and found blood on her pillow. They also found blood on her nightgown, which had been hung in the closet.

  In February, a little girl who lived just south of the University District disappeared while she was playing in her front yard.

  In June, a young woman named Georgann Hawkins disappeared without a trace as she walked from her boyfriend’s frat
ernity house to her sorority house, three blocks south of my place.

  Like most women living in the University District, I was deeply disturbed by these disappearances. Walking at night from my garage to my front door scared me. One day I was looking for something in the back seat of my car in the garage when a seedy-looking man stuck his head in the car and asked if he could borrow a screwdriver. I must have jumped a foot. I couldn’t help thinking of those young women and how they had vanished without any clues.

  Ted and I weren’t getting along very well. In March, I had come home from a skiing weekend to find him in my apartment, upset and in tears. He said he had asked the landlord to let him in because he had to see me. He was doing badly in law school and had decided to drop out. I was surprised; I had no idea his schoolwork wasn’t going well. He looked haggard, and when we sat on the couch, he put his head in my lap and cried. I stroked his hair and tried to get him to talk, but the words came haltingly. He couldn’t concentrate, he said, but he didn’t understand why. He felt that he was spinning his wheels. Being a lawyer meant everything to him, but he was terribly afraid that he wasn’t going to make it.

  I searched for things to say. I knew he would be a great lawyer if he could make it through law school. Maybe UPS was the wrong place. It was true, he said, that night school didn’t feel like a “real” law school. Maybe a change of scene would help. The University of Utah had accepted him before; maybe he would reapply there.

  Within weeks he had reapplied and was accepted for the coming fall. He would be moving to Salt Lake City. He talked about it a lot but said nothing about my going with him. I waited and waited for him to bring it up until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Am I going or am I staying?” I asked him.

  “It’s up to you,” he said. “You can come if you want.”

  I accused him of taking me for granted. He accused me of being insecure. The question of my moving to Utah was left dangling.