The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  “Let’s go back,” I said, swishing the bugs away.

  “No, come with me.” His voice sounded flat and hollow.

  “Maybe our dads knew something we don’t,” I said and turned and hurried back to the car. Would I ever be normal again?

  The day I was to fly back to Seattle, Ted and I sat on my parents’ back lawn and talked about “us.” I told him that I didn’t want to continue this long-distance relationship, that I wanted to get married soon. To my surprise, Ted said, “Let’s do it at Christmastime, then.”

  We got all excited talking about it and rushed in to tell my parents who were in the kitchen. Our great announcement was met with silence.

  Ted was devastated. We went for a walk in the foothills. “I thought your parents liked me. I thought they would be happy we were finally going to do it.”

  I was confused. My dad and I had talked once, briefly, about my early morning phone call to him. I had told him that both the King County and Salt Lake City police had checked Ted out and found nothing. Had Dad told Mom about that call? Was he still worried about Ted? I was so sure the problem was in my head, and now I had planted seeds of doubt in my father’s head too.

  I flew back to Seattle and the next day I gave notice at work that I would be quitting at Christmas. My boss—a man not given to offering unsolicited advice—told me he thought I was making a mistake by marrying Ted. He thought Ted was a nice guy, but too much of a “climber” to pay attention to my needs. I was annoyed.

  I called Angie and told her about my plans. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. Now I was irritated that nobody seemed to be happy for me.

  On August 16, I drove down to the Bundys’ cabin on the lake to meet Ted’s aunt who was visiting from back East. During the course of a conversation, Ted’s mother mentioned that Ted had given his little brother a bicycle the week before when he was visiting Ted in Salt Lake City. She talked about how hard it was to get it home on the plane. I only heard half of what she said. I had given Ted a choice between me and stealing. That bicycle had to be stolen.

  I left early and called Ted the minute I got home. No answer. I called all evening without getting him. The fact that he wasn’t home at one in the morning made me madder. I called him early the next morning and there was still no answer. I didn’t get hold of him until the next night. By this time, I was furious. I waded into him about the bicycle. “I won’t marry you unless you straighten yourself out,” I told him.

  I expected him to defend himself, to try to make things right again, but he seemed confused about why I was so mad. He had been sleeping when I called, and he seemed disoriented. As we talked, I became aware that he sounded relieved that I was mad enough to call off the wedding. Just before he hung up, he said, “I want you to know that I’ll always love you.”

  I lay down on the couch. I was so mad I was shaking, but at the same time I felt freer than I had in years. “You can just go to hell, Ted Bundy!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ted phoned me more than usual after our big breakup, but our conversations had a dreamlike quality about them. We both said that we loved each other and always would. We both acknowledged that we had had an important effect on each other’s lives, but we knew now that we would never get married and that our lives would grow in separate directions.

  The thought of never making love to him again, of never window-shopping with him on the Ave, of never having family tickle fights again left me undone. At the same time there was a certain deadness inside me that told me it really was the end, this time.

  One day in September, I ran into Ted’s former landlady, Freda, in a supermarket. She asked me if I’d heard from Ted lately, and I told her that we had broken up, but that he still called me.

  “The funniest thing happened,” she began in her German accent. “A woman detective was by the other day asking about Ted. Ja, they thought he might have something to do with those girls that were missing last year. Isn’t that silly? I told the woman what a good boy he was. He always helped me so.”

  “Are you sure she really was a detective?” I said.

  “Oh, ja, she showed me her identification before I invited her in.”

  “Was she from the King County Police?”

  “Ja, ja,” she said.

  The next morning, while everyone else in the office was on a break, I called the King County Police Department and asked to speak to Hergesheimer. The man who answered told me that Hergesheimer no longer worked in that division. As briefly as possible, I explained what had happened last fall and about the woman detective who had been asking questions about Ted.

  “Oh, we’re just cleaning out our files and going over some old information before throwing it out,” he told me. I knew he was lying.

  “Could I talk to the woman detective for a minute?”

  “I’ll see.” He sounded angry.

  The detective came on the phone and told me her name, Kathy McChesney. Once again, I went over the story of my calls to the police and the results. She told me she’d been planning to call me. She asked if I had talked with Ted lately. When I told her I had, she asked if he had told me that he had been arrested after trying to evade a police officer.

  “When?”

  “August 16. He was arrested and charged with possession of burglary tools.”

  I looked down at my desk calendar. August 16 was the day I had gone to the Bundys’ cabin. That was the night I had kept calling.

  “Would you be willing to talk to me further?” McChesney asked. “We could arrange to meet after you get off work.”

  “I’d rather do it right now,” I told her. I said I’d be at her office as soon as possible.

  I told my boss that something had come up and asked if I could leave for the day. He took a look at me and said, “I don’t think you should drive anywhere until you feel better. Is there somewhere I could drop you off?” I appreciated the offer, but I couldn’t ask him to drop me off at the police station.

  The office I was looking for had “Major Crime Unit” above the door. Inside was a narrow room with an appointment-desk-type window, not at all the way I expected a police station to look.

  I told the receptionist I wanted to see Kathy McChesney, and after a few minutes a petite woman who was younger than I came through the door.

  “Are you Liz? I’m Kathy. Come on in.”

  She led me through a large room with lots of empty desks into a private office. She carried a steno note pad. She started the interview by telling me about Ted’s arrest. She said he was charged with possession of burglary tools, but that the things found in his car might better be used to bind or assault somebody. She asked me what had prompted me to call the police.

  I went through the whole thing again. Every few sentences I would stop and say, “I know I’m wrong,” or “I’m probably crazy.” I was trying hard to lay out the things that bothered me in a straightforward way, but I was so twisted up with contradictory thoughts that I just couldn’t. Kathy seemed to understand what I was going through. We talked about my relationship with Ted before I had begun to worry. She was surprised that Ted and I had been together since the fall of 1969 and that nothing had ever seemed wrong until July 1974, when the two women disappeared from Lake Sammamish. We talked about Ted’s stealing things, and I told her we had called off our plans to get married because of it. She asked about our sex life. Even though she was a woman, I was no more comfortable talking about it with her than I had been with Hergesheimer.

  I asked her about the things found in Ted’s car when he was arrested. She pulled a photo out of her steno book and looked at it. She asked me if I had ever known Ted to wear a ski mask.

  I hadn’t, but I remembered the day I bought a ski mask. Kathy asked me if I still had it, and I didn’t know. She asked me to describe it and I tried. As she asked questions about it, she looked down again and again at the photo she held. Then she covered up most of the photo with her fingers and asked me to look at
the ski mask. This was awkward, and I couldn’t get a good look at it.

  Finally, she said, “Please don’t tell anyone I showed you this,” and she handed me the photo. Laid out on a flat surface were gloves, ropes, handcuffs, an icepick, Ted’s old brown gym bag, a crowbar, the ski mask (which wasn’t mine), and a pair of pantyhose with eye slits cut in them. How horrifying it would be to see a man coming at you with that pulled over his face! I kept saying “Oh, God,” over and over, not knowing whether I was praying or swearing.

  Kathy wrote down a list of dates and times of disappearances and asked me to go home and think about it. If I could place Ted anywhere at any of those times, I could rule him out as a suspect in that case.

  Over the next few weeks I spent a lot of time at the King County Police Department. I told Kathy about going through my cancelled checks to figure out where we might have been on the dates she gave me, but without any luck. I told her about the day I went through his gas receipts and about stealing a package of his cancelled checks. She asked me to bring them in. She also asked me what credit cards Ted had and if he had ever used mine. When I told her he had, she asked me to write to the companies and ask them to release my receipts to the King County Police.

  When I brought in the envelope with Ted’s cancelled checks, Kathy and I went through them one by one. She pulled out the same two checks I had wondered about last summer, the ones from the rental place and the surplus store. She asked me what I thought they were for. My guess was handcuffs from the surplus store and crutches from the rental place. But I had bought Ted’s yellow raft from the surplus store, and maybe he had bought something for the raft. I told her about calling the rental place to ask them about identifying the cancelled check, and she told me the police could find out what he had bought with it.

  Kathy seemed amused that I had taken the checks. She told me she had been suspicious or jealous of men in her life but had never gone so far as to steal their cancelled checks. She obviously didn’t realize how consumed by fear I had been. Not concerned, not suspicious, not jealous, but scared out of my mind.

  We talked endlessly about Ted. She asked me about any other women in Ted’s life and I told her what little I knew. Kathy wanted to know if Marcy, the woman he had worked with at Harborview, was a small woman with long blond hair. When I said yes, Kathy said, “I know her.” They had been bridesmaids together a couple of years ago. Small world.

  As soon as I learned that Ted had been arrested, I called my mom and dad. I hated telling them, but I wanted to make sure they didn’t get further involved. They had been inviting Ted for dinner often and visiting him in Salt Lake City. Mom was the one who remembered that they had been in Seattle at the time one of the young women had disappeared. Friday night, May 31, 1974, Ted had taken us all out for pizza, and when we got back to my house at 10:00 P.M., he was anxious to leave. He was supposed to meet us at my church the next day because Dad was baptizing Molly, but he didn’t show up until the ceremony was over, about 3:00 P.M., two hours late. Kathy McChesney thought this was interesting, because Brenda Ball disappeared from the Flame Tavern in Seattle about 1:00 A.M. on June 1.

  Ted continued to call me occasionally. Because things were so strained with us already, I didn’t feel as if I had to act “normal.” He asked me once if I could send him some money. I had loaned him money before, but I told him that I couldn’t spare any now. He wanted to talk about us and how we could have avoided some of the mistakes we made. I didn’t have much appetite for that kind of discussion, so he did most of the talking. Always after he called, I felt emotionally blitzed. This couldn’t be the same man I was talking about with the police.

  One day Kathy asked me again what I knew about Susan Phillips, Ted’s old girlfriend from San Francisco. When was the last time he had seen her? He had made a business trip to San Francisco in the summer of 1973 for the Republican State Committee. He had looked her up, but he told me it just proved that you can never go back. Kathy had a funny look on her face. “We’ve talked to Susan and to one of Susan’s girlfriends. Ted and Susan were engaged around Christmas 1973.” I didn’t understand. “She spent Christmas here in 1973,” Kathy said. “They were planning to get married. She also said that she visited Ted here for a while in the summer of 1973.”

  I was speechless. I was trying to remember Christmas 1973. That was the year I gave Ted a chess set and he gave me one, too. I had gone to Utah as usual. Ted told me he was going off skiing with some classmates. He had taken me to the airport, but he wasn’t going to be back in time to pick me up. He had my car, so when I got back to Seattle, I was homebound until he got back.

  I had been cleaning my oven New Year’s night, when he appeared. He was so happy to see me and so full of loving words, that I teased him about having a guilty conscience. We went out to the Sandpiper, the tavern where we’d met, and necked in a back booth. That son-of-a-bitch!

  Kathy told me that Susan had been in Seattle for a week in August that same year. I looked at the calendar on my checkbook: That was the week after Ted wrecked my car.

  “Are you sure?” I asked Kathy.

  “Susan sent me a picture that was taken by a friend. Do you want to see it?”

  He had his arm around her. He looked very handsome. She was attractive, but not the gorgeous knockout I had imagined. I stared at the picture. They looked so happy. “Well,” I said, “that proves he is a dishonest lover, but that still doesn’t make him a murderer.” I was both grateful and resentful that Kathy had showed me the picture, wishing I didn’t know, but at the same time wanting every detail.

  According to Kathy, Ted and Susan had a wonderful visit in the summer of 1973 and talked about marriage, but when Susan returned at Christmas, Ted was distracted to the point of being unpleasant. During a conversation about abortion, he had yelled at her and frightened her. When she returned to San Francisco, Ted didn’t call or write. When she called him, he was cold. At last she told him to forget about getting married, and he said that was fine with him.

  Kathy asked me if I knew why Ted would get so upset about abortion. For at least the tenth time since we had started, I extracted a promise from Kathy that the information I gave her would never go further than the file in her desk drawer. Then I tearfully told her about my abortion. Kathy looked as distressed as I felt. She was a professional, but she seemed to care about my misery. I asked her if I could have the picture of Ted and Susan together.

  At first, she said no, but then she relented. “Now you have to promise that you’ll never tell anyone.” She made a copy, and I went home with a picture of that son-of-a-bitch and Susan in my purse.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I was missing a lot of work. My boss told me that he didn’t know what was bothering me, but whatever it took to work it out was okay with him. One of the people at work pulled me aside and asked me if money would help with whatever was so heavy on my mind. He offered me a couple of hundred dollars, no strings attached. This kind of unconditional support meant a great deal to me. I was in constant touch with Angie and thanked God I had somebody to talk to. The police had questioned her a couple of times, but most of what she knew about Ted she got from me.

  Several weeks after my first talk with Kathy McChesney, she told me that detectives were coming to Seattle from Salt Lake City and would like to talk to me. I was becoming more and more agitated as the police investigation heated up.

  A few days later, her partner, Detective Bob Keppel, called me to tell me the men from Salt Lake City were here. I went downtown and was introduced to Ira Beal from the Bountiful Police Department and Jerry Thompson from the Salt Lake City Police. Beal went off with the King County detectives, and Thompson took me into a room with a polygraph in it. For a minute I thought they were going to ask me to take a lie detector test, but Thompson explained that this was the only room available.

  “So how are ya today?” he asked me.

  “Fine,” I answered mechanically, then I changed my mind. “Well, really nerv
ous, actually.”

  “How come?”

  “I’m so scared by what’s happening. Sometimes I think Ted is involved and then sometimes I just know I’m making a terrible mistake. I know that Ted’s not capable of murder, but I get these awful feelings that it’s true. . . .”

  Thompson was looking at me as if he couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t anybody explained to him how unsure I was? He started to set up his tape recorder. “You don’t mind if we record this, do ya?” Mind? Yes, I minded a whole bunch. He told me in an irritated way that to interview me without it made his job much more difficult. I didn’t care; I refused to have what I said recorded.

  He started the interview by telling me that Ted was a strong suspect in the November 8 attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch from a shopping mall in Murray, a suburb of Salt Lake City. This was the case I had read about in the papers so long ago, and Kathy and I had discussed it at great length. I told Thompson I was familiar with the case, but he continued to tick off the facts.

  When he was finished, I told him that the DaRonch case had caused me to ask my bishop to call the police in Seattle and ask them to call the Salt Lake City Police.

  We went over everything I had discussed with Kathy, from the length of my relationship with Ted to our sex life. It wasn’t getting any easier to talk about. Thompson asked me about the clothes Ted wore—in particular, whether or not Ted often wore patent leather shoes. I thought that was funny, picturing Ted in black patent leathers with taps on the bottom and told him no. A couple of times during the interview, Thompson came back to the shoes. “He was pretty big on patent leather shoes, eh?” he would say. I couldn’t have been clearer. “No, not ever.”

  After we had talked for more than an hour, Thompson pulled out what looked like enlargements of driver’s license photos. “Do you know who these women are?” he asked me. They were pictures of two young women, both of them blond, both of them attractive. He was holding the pictures at arm’s length from me.