The Phantom Prince

  “I understand. It makes my job harder but not impossible. What are the coincidences that you are worried about?”

  He understood. I told him about the experience I’d had when I called the Seattle Police. “My friend drives a Volkswagen, but it’s not metallic; sometimes he speaks in a formal way that could be mistaken for an accent; and his first name is Ted.”

  The detective’s reaction was milder than I had expected. He wanted to know why I had called the Seattle Police. I told him about seeing the crutches in my friend’s room. He wanted to know what was significant about that. I was amazed. Didn’t he know that a man on crutches had been connected with the Georgann Hawkins case?

  “Then you’ve been worried for a long time,” he said.

  “Oh yes! It’s been so awful! I know I’m wrong, but I can’t stop thinking about it.” He pressed me for more. Why was I calling him today? I told him what Angie had heard on the radio and that my friend had moved to Salt Lake City in September.

  “What is your relationship with your friend?” he asked.

  “Well, we’ve gone together for five years,” I said. I was getting worried about people coming back to the office. I told him I couldn’t talk much longer.

  “What’s the next step?” he wanted to know. “I think, in order to put your fears to rest, we need to pursue this further.”

  “Could you call Salt Lake City and find out what is going on there? Maybe it isn’t similar at all. Maybe they have made an arrest already.”

  “I’ll do that. What’s your phone number and I’ll call you back.”

  “No, I’ll call you back,” I said. I was getting panicky.

  “Well, what’s your name? I need to know who is calling me back. I want to tell you that you’re not the first girlfriend who has called about her boyfriend. They all felt about as bad as you do, but after we checked the guys out, the women were tremendously relieved.”

  I told him my name was Liz.

  “Okay, Liz, you are for sure going to call me back, right? It is important that you call back. Give me an hour. My name is Randy Hergesheimer. Promise me that you’ll call back in an hour.”

  Feeling like I was six years old, I solemnly promised to call him back in an hour. I just had time to call Angie before people drifted back to the office. She was leaving in a few days for Europe.

  I called Hergesheimer back in two hours.

  “I thought you had changed your mind,” he said.

  “I got real busy here,” I lied. I had watched every move of the minute hand on the clock for the last two hours.

  “Well, I called Salt Lake City,” he said, and told me only what Angie had heard on the radio, about the body being found. “Let’s talk about your friend some more,” he said. I said I would call him back at lunchtime.

  I went looking for the most out-of-the-way pay phone I could find. It was by itself on the mezzanine outside a large auditorium. I called Hergesheimer back.

  He told me that right after the Lake Sammamish disappearances the police had done a massive study of VW owners named Ted. “There are more of them than you might think,” he said. “What else made you worry about your friend?”

  I told him about Ted going to Lake Sammamish the weekend of July 7.

  “I go there a lot myself,” he said.

  “I’ve never been there,” I answered, “and I don’t think Ted had gone there before, either.”

  “But that wasn’t enough to make you worry, was it? Is your boyfriend violent? What really started you going on this thing?”

  I told him about the composite picture and my first anonymous call to the “Ted Hotline.” It was hard for me to put the bits and pieces together in any way that would sound sensible. I said that two of the earlier disappearances had happened in my own neighborhood, in the University District.

  “Where did your boyfriend live?” When I told him it was the U District, he quickly asked me if my friend’s name—Ted—was short for Edward.

  “No, it’s short for Theodore,” I said.

  “You don’t mean . . .” I could hear him shuffling papers, “Theodore R. Bundy?”

  I was stunned. “How did you know that?”

  “We checked him out last summer when his name was called in to the task force.”

  “By who?”

  “A university professor.”

  So, Ted had already been checked out. I was at once relieved that I’d been worrying for nothing and indignant that anyone else would suspect my Ted of these horrible crimes.

  “I still think we should get together,” Hergesheimer said. “Would you come down here to talk to me?”

  “No.” I was emphatic.

  “Would you meet me somewhere in the U District, say Herfy’s?” he went on, naming a popular hamburger place. I hesitated. “You sound like you have been pretty upset by your worries. Discussing them with me can put an end to them once and for all.”

  I agreed to meet him in the Herfy’s parking lot. After I hung up, I went into the ladies’ room. The mirror confirmed what I felt: the worst case of blotches I had ever had.

  We had gone through a long thing on the phone about how we would recognize each other, but I spotted him immediately that evening because he looked exactly like a detective sitting in a detective’s unmarked car, waiting for someone. He had a stack of papers on the seat with an enlargement of Ted’s driver’s license photo on top.

  We sat in Hergesheimer’s car, and I asked him about the police checking Ted out earlier. I felt somehow tricked. He picked up Ted’s picture and said, “This is proof. I couldn’t have got it since you called this morning. We got it last summer.”

  We went back over everything: height, weight, hair color; the accent, the VW, the expensive-looking tennis clothes; whether Ted had a sailboat. I told him I had been with Ted the morning and the evening of July 14. He told me that when they checked Ted out, they found he had never been in trouble with the law and seemed to be clean in every way.

  I hesitated, and then I began. “That’s just it. There is a side to Ted that only I know. You see, he steals!” Hergesheimer kept looking at me as if I hadn’t finished my sentence. “I mean he gets all dressed up in his fine clothes and then he shoplifts. He’s taken everything from textbooks to a TV.” I felt stupid. Hergesheimer was trying to catch a murderer, not a thief.

  I went on. “Sometimes I think that Ted enjoys the ‘con’ of stealing things more than the stuff he stole. One of the few times I’ve ever seen him lose his temper was when I dropped over to his room and he had a new TV and a new stereo and a bunch of stuff I knew he couldn’t afford. I was shocked and I told him he was nothing but a thief. He told me that if I ever told anyone, he would break my fucking neck.”

  “Does he have a violent temper? Did he put his hands on you when he threatened you? Did he ever hit you?”

  I was embarrassed, but I told Hergesheimer about the only time Ted had hit me. It was early in our relationship and I was drunk. I couldn’t remember what we were arguing about, but I kept telling Ted to “Go ahead and hit me. Go ahead!” Finally, he had slapped me. Ironically, it had happened in this very same Herfy’s parking lot.

  Hergesheimer asked me if there was anything in Ted’s background that would affect the way he felt about women. I told him that Ted was illegitimate, and that he had been upset because his mom had never discussed it with him, but that he was still close to his mom and his brothers and sisters.

  Then, looking straight into my eyes, Hergesheimer said, “What about your sex life?”

  “Oh, we’ve had our ups and downs, so to speak.” I was trying to cover my nervousness by being funny, but my face was beginning to flush. “We’ve had a pretty good sex life up until last summer, I guess. Then Ted just lost all interest in sex . . . he was under a lot of pressure with his job . . . and moving and all . . . maybe he had another girlfriend . . . I don’t know.”

  “I know this is hard for you, but it is important,” he said. How often? What positio
ns? When? Where?

  I didn’t even talk about these things with Angie, but I told myself that this guy was a police officer. He’d heard it all before.

  I told him that in the fall of 1973, Ted had brought a copy of a book called The Joy of Sex to my house. We had lain in bed and read through it. Ted sheepishly asked me if we could try bondage. I said sure, never dreaming that a year later I’d be sitting in a car telling a stranger about it. We’d had sex that way maybe three times, but I didn’t like it, so we stopped. I tried to convince Hergesheimer that there was nothing unnatural about the way we made love.

  Had Ted ever had any homosexual experiences that I knew about?

  None. But during the past year he had talked about anal sex enough to make me wonder. Had we had anal sex? No, never. I couldn’t think of anything less appealing.

  Hergesheimer pulled out a piece of paper and asked me to look at it. It was a psychological profile, a list of characteristics that a psychiatrist thought the killer would possess. I read down the list: Ted didn’t come even remotely close to fitting it. When I came to the line that said the killer probably hated animals and had a history of cruelty to them, I thought about all the strays Ted had brought to my house, the hamsters and guinea pigs and kittens he had given Molly.

  Hergesheimer told me flatly that Ted didn’t look like a suspect. He told me about a man he had investigated recently. Everything about him fit what the police were looking for and they spent a lot of time checking the guy out. When they picked him up it turned out he had an airtight alibi: He was on a fishing boat off Alaska on the day of the disappearances from Lake Sammamish. Hergesheimer’s frustration was apparent in his voice. He talked about how much pressure there had been to solve the case, pressure from the public and pressure from his superiors. I really wished I could somehow help him.

  He asked me if I would give him some recent pictures of Ted so, as a final check, he could show them to the witnesses from Lake Sammamish. I hesitated. Pictures would be concrete proof that I had called the police. I thought of my waking dream the night before, about Ted’s campaign for governor. I tried to explain how I felt about giving him the pictures. He seemed to be getting annoyed with my ambivalence. It was getting late; he probably wanted to get home. I told him yes, he could have the pictures.

  As he started his car, he turned to me and said, “Now you’ve told me absolutely everything that’s been bothering you, right?” I bit my lip. I didn’t know if I should bring up one last thing. He persuaded me that giving him “almost” all the information I had would clear up “almost” all my questions. If I wanted to be totally done with this, I would have to be a hundred percent honest with him. So I told him about the plaster of Paris I had found in Ted’s desk drawer several years ago, and Ted’s comment that you can never tell when you’ll break your leg.

  We drove the six blocks from Herfy’s to my place in silence. It was past Molly’s bedtime, but she was still up with the babysitter. I introduced the detective as my “friend” and tucked Molly in, then walked the babysitter home, to the end of the block. Neither of us liked walking down the dark street, but tonight, knowing there was a policeman in my living room, I felt safe.

  When I got back, we started flipping through photo albums. He told me he thought Molly was a real cute kid and asked me how she got along with Ted. I told him how lucky I felt that she and Ted cared so much for each other. The albums were proof: a three-year-old riding on his shoulders; a five-year-old held up on her new bike; an eight-year-old held upside down by him. I wanted to tell Hergesheimer about all the trips, the dinners, everything we had shared, but I knew he didn’t care. He picked up three snapshots and then pulled out a report form. His manner was businesslike.

  “Spell your name. Give me your address. How old are you?”

  I was tired. It seemed to take him forever to write down the things we’d talked about at Herfy’s. At last he was ready to go. “I’ll let you know what the witnesses say as soon as I show them the pictures,” he said on his way out the door.

  I called Angie and we talked into the night. I felt guilty and I felt relieved. She was leaving the next day for Europe and was upset about leaving me with so many worries, but she gave me an address in Paris—as if she could do anything from halfway around the world.

  A week later my parents came for a visit. I tried to dazzle them with how well I was doing. I chattered about becoming involved with the University District Community Council and getting chosen for the board right away. I had accepted a church job that was keeping me busy. I rambled on about the night class I was taking. What I didn’t tell them was that I had lost control of my mind and couldn’t sleep at night unless I was drunk.

  Ted called several times that week. It was easy for me not to think about having gone to the police when I was talking with him. He was just Ted, nothing else. It was after I hung up that I was consumed by guilt and hoped to God he never found out!

  I had expected to hear from Hergesheimer right away. When almost a week had gone by with no word, I called him again from the same pay phone on the mezzanine.

  “Hi, this is Liz. Have you shown those pictures to the Lake Sammamish witnesses yet?”

  “What pictures?” he asked.

  “Those pictures of Ted Bundy.”

  “Who is this again?” he asked, sounding irritated.

  “This is Liz Kendall. I talked to you last week in the Herfy’s parking lot.” I had told this man the most intimate details of my life and he couldn’t remember who I was. “I gave you three snapshots and you were going to show them to the witnesses from Lake Sammamish and call me back.”

  “Oh, yeah. I haven’t had a chance to show them to the most reliable witness. I haven’t been able to get ahold of her. Like I told you, I’ll call you when I do.”

  More days went by without a word from Hergesheimer. I decided to call him again. In my imagination I could hear him say things like, “Don’t call here any more.” Or, “You’re the one who ought to be locked up, lady. You’re the one with the problem.”

  As it turned out, Hergesheimer was on vacation.

  One day I called a woman I barely knew and asked her if she would join me at the afternoon break. I was so lonely. As we got our coffee, she suggested we join her boyfriend and his friends from the Prosthetics and Orthotics lab in the hospital. On the way back to our offices she said to me, “You noticed that good-looking guy named Jim? The reason I didn’t use his last name when I introduced you is that he’s Jim Ott. His wife, Jan, was murdered out by Lake Sammamish.”

  A terrible chill swept over me. I knew who had murdered his wife. Oh my God, was I responsible? I had done the only thing I knew to do. I had gone to the police. It was out of my hands now.

  Weeks later I remembered that my ski rack was on Ted’s car on July 14. Was that what happened to Janice Ott’s bicycle?

  Finally, Hergesheimer called me. He had shown the pictures to his best witness. He explained to me that a stack of photos is given to the witness and that she goes through them one by one. When she came to one of Ted, she pulled it out of the stack and balanced it on her knee. When she was finished, she took Ted’s picture and put it back in the stack. The man was too old, she explained.

  “That’s hardly a positive I.D.” Hergesheimer said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means to you,” he said, “but to me it means I’m going to put Ted Bundy in my done-it-twice file and file him away.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Around Thanksgiving, a young housewife named Vonnie Stuth vanished from her home in the south end of Seattle. My first reaction was relief—Ted was in Salt Lake City—but almost immediately, the police announced that they had a suspect and that the Stuth case was not related to the “Ted” murders.

  I was trying to get on with my life as best I could, but it was hard. For my night class I was supposed to write a term paper based on research done in newspapers. As I headed for the newspaper readi
ng room in the downtown public library, I knew that I would read the Salt Lake Tribune while I was there. Maybe the crime in Salt Lake had been solved.

  As I browsed through the Tribune, I found myself reading about the Utah political scene and how the college football teams were doing. Then I came to the first article about the discovery of the body of Melissa Smith, the killing Angie had told me about. The article said that Smith, the daughter of Midvale’s police chief, had been missing since the evening of October 18. That was the day before my dad’s birthday, and my dad had spent his birthday deer hunting with Ted, Ted had called me several times on the eighteenth; he had never been hunting before, and he was excited about it.

  I started going through papers more rapidly, looking for more details. I was stunned by what I found next. On November 8, a young woman had been abducted from a shopping mall by a man posing as a police officer. The woman had escaped from the man’s Volkswagen as he tried to handcuff her. The man had struggled with the woman, had managed to get the handcuffs on one wrist, and had tried to hit her with a crowbar, but she managed to get away. Later that night, a young woman named Debbie Kent disappeared from a high school parking lot in Bountiful, Utah, thirty miles north of the attack on the first young woman. The police had found a key in the high school lot that fit the handcuffs attached to the first woman’s wrist.

  Get up, I told myself. Get up and go see your bishop.

  By the time I got to the church, I was detached from the horror I had felt at the library, but when I entered the bishop’s office and shook his hand, I came unglued. I had been trying for so long to maintain a calm and poised façade, to at least look normal from the outside. Now I sat in front of my bishop sobbing and wringing my hands. He listened patiently, trying to make sense out of my story as I jumped back and forth. I kept telling him that I thought I was persecuting Ted and I didn’t know why.

  In a calming voice, my bishop began talking to me about decisions. He told me that he sometimes agonized over simple ones, and had learned that the only way to get peace of mind was to make a decision, take it to the Lord, and if it was a right decision, I would feel a confirmation in my heart. I explained to him how intensely I had prayed to know what was right and what I should do.