We went to the university library to read all the newspaper stories and learn everything we could about the disappearances. We paged through all the papers for the last week. One story described “Ted” as five-foot-six or five-foot-seven—several inches shorter than my Ted. The VW was described as metallic gold—Ted’s was dull brown—and there was no mention of a ski rack on the back. There was a different composite drawing, too. It gave the suspect curly hair, but the resemblances to my Ted weren’t there.
The discrepancies were reassuring. “It sounded like Ted,” I said, “all that stuff about the expensive tennis clothes, the white Adidas, and the way he talks, and the business about asking for help with his sailboat. Ted is always talking about when he’ll own a sailboat. But this doesn’t look like him at all.”
I drove Angie home, wondering what had gotten into me. Then I drove to Ted’s place. I wanted to see him, to see that he was the same Ted I knew. I was relieved to find him home, and he seemed glad to see me and the cold beer I brought on this hot summer night.
I lay on the floor in his room. We drank beer and talked aimlessly about ordinary things. I found my eyes traveling over every detail of his room, as if I was seeing everything for the first time. I noticed a pair of crutches in the corner by the door. Ted said they belonged to his landlord, and that he had offered to return them to the rental agency. There was a big knife—like a meat cleaver—on his desk. Ted showed me how the knife was specially designed to rock back and forth on its blade for dicing and mincing vegetables.
I went home and Ted joined me later. He seldom spent the whole night anymore, but that night we fell asleep next to each other after making love.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I don’t remember how many times I went over every detail I could think of about Sunday, July 14, the day the two young women disappeared from Lake Sammamish. There were stories in the papers almost every day. The police were searching the area around the lake with infrared cameras that were supposed to be able to detect newly disturbed earth, but they didn’t find anything. There was some confusion about what time Janice Ott, the first of the young women, disappeared. The stories about Denise Naslund’s disappearance agreed on four o’clock. It had been five or five-thirty when Ted called to ask me to have dinner with him that Sunday. I couldn’t understand why Ted had gone to Lake Sammamish on July 7. We had never been there together and as far as I knew, Ted had never been there before.
I conspired with Angie to take Ted to her houseboat so she could see if he still looked normal to her. We arrived after dinner, and Ted talked and joked while he ate her leftover eggplant Parmesan. Angie and I agreed the next day: Nobody looked more normal than my Ted in her kitchen, talking and eating.
I talked to Ted on the phone every day. He was feeling pressured about the budget he was working on and about his move to Utah. I was leaving in a few days to spend a week with my family and bring Molly back; Ted asked me to find him an apartment in Salt Lake City.
I did as he asked, but it seemed to me that I was doing the work of getting him set for law school without anything in it for me. I spent hours in Salt Lake City poring over the rental ads and traipsing up and down stairs of places with pink flamingos on the wallpaper. Finally I found an apartment I knew Ted would like in an old house in a neighborhood called The Avenues, near the University of Utah. The house was being remodeled, but it would be ready by fall. I called Ted to tell him about it, and he was pleased. He would meet Molly and me at the airport.
We caught an early flight and landed in Seattle about nine on a Sunday morning. When we walked off the plane, Ted was nowhere in sight.
We headed for the subway train that takes people to the main terminal and baggage area. A train pulled up, the doors opened, and there he stood. I felt as if I’d been hit in the stomach. All his curly hair was gone. It was the shortest haircut I’d ever seen on him, and it changed his appearance drastically. I went through the motions of greeting and kissing him as though in a dream.
Molly thought the new haircut looked funny and she told him so. “Why did you do it?” she asked.
“Because I just decided to,” he said.
Molly chattered all the way home from the airport. She wanted to get home and go out and play, to go swimming right away. We decided to go to Green Lake for the afternoon.
We loaded Ted’s car with the raft, two inner tubes, and all our picnic stuff. We stopped on the way to the lake to get some beer. It was illegal to drink in the park, but we’d be careful. It was the kind of hot, sunny day that makes cold beer taste great. Our picnic ended badly. I watched from the shore as Ted rowed the raft with Molly swimming along behind. He stayed so far ahead of her that she got tired and frightened. When they got to shore she was in tears and I was furious.
“Why do you have to push her so hard? Nobody thinks it’s funny but you!”
“Oh, Liz, not again. Will you stop! Just because you baby her doesn’t mean everyone else should, too.”
We gathered up our things and headed for his car. As we were loading it, I reached under the front seat to retrieve Molly’s stray sock and my fingers touched a hatchet. My blood stopped flowing. I pulled myself together enough to ask, casually, “What’s this for, Ted?”
“I chopped down a tree at my parents’ cabin last week.”
I was so rattled, I left the oars on the ground next to the car and we didn’t notice that they were missing until we got home. Ted was really annoyed with me. He was sure there was no point in going back for them, that they would be stolen. We argued, but we went back, and they were there where I’d left them.
When we got home again, I was so drunk I started to cry and couldn’t stop. Ted wanted to know what I was crying about and I told him it was because he was moving away.
“You’re crying because you drank too much,” he said. “Everything will work out for us. You could have come with me if you’d wanted to.”
I didn’t argue with him. It had been a horrible day. I had felt safe in Utah with my family, but as soon as I got off the plane in Seattle I was hit with it again. I was now scared—not that Ted would hurt me or Molly, because that was inconceivable—but that he would find out what I was thinking.
I thought back over the years with Ted, trying to find what I might have overlooked before. He was not a violent person. When we argued he was always calm and reasonable; I was the one who lost control and yelled. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times that Ted had lost his temper since I’d known him. One of the times was the afternoon Molly and I had stopped by his room and found he had redecorated with a new television, a new stereo, a new typewriter, and several other things I knew he didn’t have the money to buy. “You’re nothing but a thief!” I had blurted out.
He grabbed my arm. “If you ever tell anyone about this, I’ll break your fucking neck.”
Later that night he came to my place crying, saying he didn’t understand himself or why he took those things. He had given me a beautiful cutting board the previous Christmas. Had he stolen that? Had he stolen the presents he had given Molly? He confessed he had. I tried to explain to him that I would rather have no present than a stolen present. It wasn’t so much the morality of it: I was afraid that he’d be arrested for shoplifting. He had sworn up and down that he wouldn’t steal any more, but what stood out in my mind now, looking back, was his threat to break my fucking neck.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I would even be thinking these terrible thoughts. Was I going crazy? Was it jealousy? Why did I try to keep building the case against Ted? I tried praying, but it didn’t help. The only thing that did help was being with Ted. He was so normal, so absorbed in what he was doing and planning. He was looking for an old truck to move his things, and he was making lists of things for the move. He was collecting pots and pans for his new kitchen and was excited about having a whole apartment to himself, not just a room. And I was still wondering what would become of the two of us.
O
ne night we finally talked about our future and assured each other that we’d stay together. But even then, I suspected that we were saying these things to each other because neither of us was willing to face the truth: that Ted was bored with me; that I was socially inadequate for the political circles he traveled in; that he would soon be looking for someone new. Still, I didn’t give up hope altogether. Maybe this was only a bad time. Maybe we would pull through it somehow. There was no way of knowing. But just when I began to believe that there was nothing wrong anywhere except inside my head, something would happen to trigger my fears again.
The newspapers, radio, and TV news were filled with speculation and stories, pictures and rumors about the “Ted” case. There was no way to escape it.
For my morning coffee break on August 8, I took my cup of coffee and the morning paper out into the sun. What I read chilled me. The story was headlined UW Coed’s Encounter with a Man Like “Ted.” A young, female student had been walking in front of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house about 12:30 A.M. on June 11, the night Georgann Hawkins had disappeared from the University District, when she encountered a man on crutches carrying a briefcase. He was having a lot of trouble and was dropping the briefcase every few steps. The student helped him carry the case as far as her boyfriend’s fraternity house and told him she would be out in a few minutes and could help him to his car if he needed it. She stayed over an hour, and when she came out, he was gone. Georgann Hawkins had last been seen about 1:00 A.M.
I had seen crutches in Ted’s room. I dragged myself back to my office, terrified. I had to call Angie, but I could barely talk. I told her about the crutches and about the story in the paper.
“There’s only one thing you can do,” she said. “You’d better call the police.” I knew she was right.
I went out to a pay phone and looked up the number of the Seattle Police Department’s homicide unit. I was trying not to cry. I asked to speak with someone who was familiar with the “Ted” case, and when the officer who answered said that he was, I poured out one long scary sentence about being worried about my boyfriend, that he might be involved, that he sort of matched the descriptions, and that I had seen crutches in his room.
“What’s your boyfriend’s name?” the officer asked.
“I can’t tell you,” I answered. “I’m not sure he’s involved, I’m just worried. Some things fit and some things don’t.”
“I can’t talk to you over the phone,” the officer said. “You need to come in and fill out a report. We’re too busy to talk to girlfriends over the phone. How do you think we can . . .”
I hung up on him. I sat in the phone booth and prayed. “I don’t know what you want me to do, God. Please help me.”
I went back to watching and waiting, spending my days thinking, trying to find some end to the thoughts in my head, spending my nights drinking to shut down my mind.
One night in August, Ted called from his parents’ house in Tacoma. He was crying, and his words came out slowly. He told me that he’d been driving near a shopping center in Tacoma and had seen the police chase a man down the street. “He was like an animal,” Ted said. “He ran and ran with the police chasing him in their car, and when they caught him, he urinated all over himself.” I wondered what he was trying to tell me, but when I tried to get him to tell me more about it, he changed the subject and started talking about the budget he was working on. I had to take what he told me at face value: Nothing else made sense. I was almost sure that I’d lost control of my thinking, that there was something seriously wrong with my mind, or that it was all part of the pain of Ted’s leaving me. Finally, I began to look forward to his departure, hoping that once he was gone, all these weird thoughts would depart, too.
I still spent time with Ted. We were doing all our favorite things one last time. We went to our favorite tavern, the Deluxe, which was famous for its bargain steak dinners. We went to visit his parents together, and I wondered if it was the last time I would see them.
One day Ted took my car to Olympia because his was out of gas. He gave me his Chevron credit card and asked me to fill his car up when I got the time. While the service station attendant was filling the tank, I noticed a thick bunch of gas receipts over the visor. Feeling like a burglar, I pulled them down and went through them one by one. They were all from the area, and with shaking hands I put them back where I had found them. I decided to search his room.
The next afternoon I called Ted at his office in Olympia to make sure he was there and went straight to his room. Sometimes he left his room unlocked; sometimes he locked it and left the key on the doorframe. This time it was locked, and I couldn’t find the key. I had to ask his landlord to let me in. I told him I was there to help Ted pack, but I beamed a silent message to him: “Don’t tell Ted I was here.”
There were cardboard boxes, already packed, on the floor. I started digging into them. I found more gas receipts and went through them: nothing out of the ordinary. I found a film cannister that was heavily taped with electrician’s tape. I was tempted to take it but didn’t dare. He might notice that it was gone. I found an eyeglass case full of every kind of key I could imagine. Did he break into houses with them? That was different from shoplifting. I found his cancelled checks. I pawed through a couple of months, not knowing what I was looking for, getting as frightened as if Ted might burst in on me at any moment. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I grabbed an envelope full of cancelled checks for the month of May 1974 and fled. Later that night, at home, I went through them. There were two that got my attention: one to a rental outfit, the other to a surplus store. The next day I called the rental company and told them I was balancing my checkbook and had a check that I couldn’t identify. Could they tell me what it was for? The man said they didn’t keep records for that kind of thing.
Angie was worried about where this obsession was taking me, so I tried not to talk to her about it as much.
Ted was working right down to the wire on his budget. The Sunday before he was to leave, Molly and I went down to Olympia with him for the day. We took my TV set and parked Molly in front of it in a back room, and then I sat at a typewriter while Ted paced up and down behind me, dictating. It was a long day; Ted was way behind in the work and his deadline was Monday.
This was the Ted only I knew, I thought. Everyone else thought he was so well organized, but I had spent years helping him out of last-minute jams like this. He had always waited until the last possible moment to write papers and then showed up at my office and asked me to drop everything and type them. He took incompletes in many of his classes and had to make the work up later. Today was typical. It was midnight when we finished, and Ted left his budget on his boss’s desk, tied with a big red ribbon.
Angie cooked a going-away breakfast for Ted on her houseboat. It was Labor Day weekend, still sunny and hot, and Ted took a last look at the lake and the matching blue sky above it. He would miss Seattle, he said, but he was glad to be starting fresh in Utah and convinced that he would finally be able to concentrate on getting his law degree. He tickled Molly one last time, gave Angie a hug, and then turned to me. We held each other for a long time, then kissed goodbye. Ted waved and honked as he drove off, his Boston fern beside him in the front seat.
CHAPTER NINE
Ted called me from Nampa, Idaho, to tell me he loved me. We had picnicked there on one of our trips to Utah. He called me again from outside of Salt Lake City to tell me where he was, and he called me from his apartment to tell me how much he loved the place I had found for him. We talked several hours a week, running up huge phone bills.
In mid-September 1974, the bodies of the two young women who had disappeared from Lake Sammamish were found in woods not far from the lake. According to the newspaper accounts, there were no clues and the police were still baffled. I told Ted about it, listening for some sort of reaction, but hearing none. The next time we talked he asked me if any more bodies had been found. His bringing it up like that scar
ed the hell out of me.
In late October, I picked Angie up at the airport as she was returning from a trip to Utah. She seemed upset, but she waited until we were alone in the car to tell me what was wrong.
“I don’t want to scare you,” she said, “but it’s happening in Utah right now.”
I stared at her. I knew exactly what she meant.
“When my mom was driving me to the airport,” she said, “I heard it on the radio. Deer hunters found the body of the daughter of the Midvale police chief. She’d been missing—just like the girls up here.”
Tomorrow morning, I would have to call the police. I had fixed a nice dinner for Angie, but neither of us could eat. I drank the bottle of wine I’d bought and was awake most of the night. I visualized Ted and me married: He would be campaigning to be governor when it was revealed that his devoted wife had gone to the police in 1974, claiming that he was a murderer.
The next morning, I waited until everyone else in my department had gone on a break, and then I called the King County Police.
“Major crimes, Hergesheimer.”
“I’d like to talk to someone who knows about the missing women cases.” I was shaking and my voice was high and strained.
“I can help you,” he said.
Even though I had rehearsed this a hundred times during the night, I didn’t know how to begin. “I’m scared that a friend of mine is involved. I know I’m wrong, but there are some coincidences. My friend moved away and the crimes stopped, and now where he lives the same kind of thing is happening. Most of the time I think I’m crazy, but then I get scared that I’m right.” I wanted to be businesslike and concise, but here I was rattled, talking about being crazy.
“Let’s start at the beginning. What’s your friend’s name?”
I paused. I’d been at this point before. “I really don’t want to say. I know you can’t do much without his name, but it’s just that I’m probably wrong. . . .”
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