The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  “No, who?” I said.

  “Sorry, can’t tell ya,” he answered.

  I wanted to know, but he wouldn’t budge. Kathy had asked me if I knew who Becky was. I didn’t have any idea. It turned out she was a girl who had lived close to Ted in the U District of Seattle. They had gone out a couple of times and gone rafting once.

  “You’re kinda jealous, aren’t ya?” Thompson said.

  I couldn’t argue with him.

  The next day, Thompson and Beal came to see me. We sat in their car in the university parking garage and they asked me more questions. I had told Thompson that Ted had a fake mustache, that he had told me he wanted to see what he would look like with a mustache without going to the trouble of growing one. I described it as straight across and squared off at the ends. Thompson kept referring to it as “droopy.” I described it again as squared off and Beal handed me a composite sketch drawn after Carol DaRonch’s kidnapping. The man in the drawing had a droopy mustache. “No, it didn’t look anything like this,” I told them.

  Thompson asked me if I had ever known Ted to have a metal rod or crowbar in his car, maybe with the handle taped. I was shocked. I did recall something I had not remembered in all my hours of questioning by Kathy McChesney. One night several years ago, Ted left my place to go home and study, but a little while later I heard someone coming up the front stairs quietly, as if trying not to be heard. I stepped out into the hallway and it was Ted. He had an odd look on his face, and he was retrieving a crowbar that had been under the radiator in the hall. The pockets of his coat were bulging, and on an impulse, I reached into a pocket to see what was in there. He backed away quickly, but I had pulled out a surgical glove. I couldn’t remember now how he had explained it, but I remembered thinking how weird it was. I also told the detectives that Ted had taped the handle of my jack back in 1970, during the student riots. He told me to use it to protect myself if I needed it.

  Even though it was a sunny September day, it was freezing in the parking garage. I was calmer that day, but I was still nervous and cold. Thompson and Beal sat in the front seat and I was alone in the back. At one point, Thompson turned to me and asked how I felt about Ted now.

  Now? What had changed? I didn’t know any more than I had before I talked with the detectives. I told him that I loved Ted very much and prayed and prayed that he wasn’t involved in those murders, but that I just didn’t know. That statement turned up later in several books and articles about Ted as proof that I was a real flake.

  Thompson seemed exasperated with me. “I shouldn’t do this,” he said, “but because you’ve been so cooperative with me, I will let you in on something.” He whipped out the picture that Kathy had already shown me of the things taken from Ted’s car. I acted shocked.

  “Now what do you think?” Thompson said.

  “I just don’t know,” I told him. “But there is one thing I would like to know. Wasn’t Carol DaRonch shown Ted’s picture last year after she was kidnapped? In December after my bishop called? Or in January after I called?”

  “You ask hard questions, don’t ya?” Thompson answered. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “You mean that now, after almost a year, you’re going to ask her to identify Ted? I can’t believe she didn’t look at him months ago and say he wasn’t the guy.”

  “There was a communication breakdown somewhere,” Beal said softly.

  Beal made some scrapings from the untaped end of my jack handle, telling me it could be old blood. They took the jack handle with them, gave me their phone numbers in Utah, and told me to call them collect if anything came up or if I had any questions.

  That night when I got home from work, I found flowers from a florist. The card said, “I’ll love you forever. Ted.”

  Ted was calling me more and more often. He had been baptized into the Mormon Church, he told me. I could interpret this, like most things that had happened lately, in two ways: If everything was normal, it would mean he had found a Mormon woman to convert for. But, if he was really involved in the crimes, it was the kind of thing a “trapped” man would do.

  One Sunday in late September he called to tell me he was coming to Seattle. He said he was so broke that he was going to have to sell his Volkswagen, and he thought he could get much more for it in Seattle. When we had talked for about fifteen minutes, I told him I wasn’t feeling good, that I would call him back in a little while.

  I called King County Police and asked the operator to have Kathy call me. When the operator hesitated about calling Kathy at home, I told her it was an emergency.

  Kathy told me that she couldn’t advise me, but that if she were me, she would tell him not to come and that I knew he was being investigated.

  I called Ted back and told him I knew he had been arrested.

  “What? Just for speeding?” he told me, kind of laughing. “It was really nothing. I went through a stop sign and a highway patrolman picked me up.”

  “No, I know that you were charged with possession of burglary tools.”

  “They’re harassing me. I was just out driving. When he stopped me, he went through my car. I just had a bunch of stuff that I’d collected. . . . He called it suspicious, and now they’re out to get me.”

  “If it was just nothing, why did you run?”

  “I didn’t run anywhere.” His voice was trembling. “The policeman got upset, that’s all. I was just speeding, but he called it evading.”

  “Why did you have those things in the car?” I asked him.

  “Really, Liz, it was just an accumulation of junk. I had the rope from the raft in that brown bag, you know. And a crowbar that is really handy for prying cars apart or like that. The search will never hold up in court. It was clearly illegal. Who told you about it, anyway?”

  Ignoring his question, I asked him, “What about the pantyhose?”

  “Oh that. I wear that under my ski mask when I’m shoveling snow. It’s left over from last winter. I’m really going to get mad. Tomorrow, I’m going to talk with some people here and tell them to leave me and my friends alone. I’m really ticked off. Who told you?”

  “I ran into Freda at the store and she told me a woman detective had contacted her, so I called the police.”

  “I’m calling Freda,” he said and hung up.

  A short time later he called me back. “What did the police tell you?” he demanded.

  “Only that you’d been arrested and charged with possession of burglary tools.”

  “What did you tell them?” He was so agitated, I felt sorry for him.

  “Only what I know. . . .”

  I was glad he didn’t press me. He said he was going to call Ann Rule, a middle-aged woman he had worked with at the Crisis Clinic. She was motherly and he had liked her very much. To meet her, you would think she was your average next-door neighbor, but she made her living writing stories for crime and true detective magazines. She was also close to the police, and Ted apparently thought she would be able to tell him how much they knew.

  Again, he called me back, this time frantic. I wished for a moment that I could hold him in my arms and assure him that everything was going to be okay.

  The days went by at incredible speed. Ted’s arrest seemed inevitable. I called Thompson in Utah to see what was happening. He told me that he had taken Carol DaRonch to the law school to view Ted, but Ted hadn’t shown up that day.

  One Thursday Thompson called me at work at noon. “Are you ready?” he asked me. “Ted Bundy was arrested today, October 2, 1975, and charged with kidnapping and attempted homicide.”

  I hung up and ran into the hallway. Where am I going? I asked myself. I went back into my office and closed the door. I called my dad’s office in Ogden and got his answering service. I reached Mom at home and told her of Ted’s arrest.

  “I wish I was dead,” I told her.

  “Do you want us to fly up there?” she asked. “Do you want to come down here? Or send Molly here?”

  I didn
’t know how I was going to get home from work that day, let alone what to do beyond that. I called Thompson back for more details. He told me that DaRonch had picked Ted out of a lineup, and his bail was set at a hundred thousand dollars. I asked him if he thought it would be in the Seattle newspapers.

  “Not unless some eagle-eye reporter picks up on it,” he said.

  I called Angie at work, and she promised to meet me at my house. I told my boss about Ted’s arrest, and he drove me home. I was shaking and crying so hard that he suggested we stop for a drink to calm my nerves. After two Scotches on the rocks, I did start to feel less scared.

  The next few days passed in a blur. I told Molly that Ted had been arrested and was a suspect in the cases of the missing women. Even nine-year-old kids were very much aware of the disappearances. But even my responsibility for Molly couldn’t keep me sober. I stayed at least mildly drunk throughout the day, and when the pain slipped through, I drank until I passed out. Angie was with me taking care of Molly. Molly’s dad and his wife-to-be came up from Utah to help. I talked to Ted’s mom often. She seemed to be taking it better than I was, but she hadn’t betrayed him.

  The headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the morning after Ted’s arrest was not quite what Thompson had prepared me for. Ex-Evans Campaign Aide Held in Kidnap was in huge type next to a picture of Ted. In smaller type was the line Is Utah “Ted” the Seattle “Ted”? There were six related articles, which I skimmed to see if they mentioned “tips from a girlfriend” or my name. They didn’t.

  One of Ted’s friends had flown to Salt Lake City immediately after the arrest. When he returned, he brought me a letter from Ted. It said in part:

  What can I say except that I love you. What can I do except want to touch you and hold you. What can I hope for except to hope that someday we can be together forever. . . . I can never hope to compensate for the sorrow and anguish I have caused you. This is what hurts me most. Be strong. . . . And as I am sure you have done, protect Molly from all this if it is not already too late. . . . I love you more and more. Forever and forever. This I know is true. God love you and be with you.

  I couldn’t help wondering who was causing whom sorrow and anguish. If he only knew how untrue to him I’d been!

  More letters followed.

  If I regret anything in my life, then I regret not having shown you the deep love I have for you in a meaningful way to you. And should there be any desire that I want fulfilled it is a desire to prove to you beyond a doubt that my love for you is unshakeable and forever.

  I didn’t write to him. What could I say?

  Dear Ted. Hope you’re enjoying jail. I helped put you there. Love, Liz.

  On October 23, I received from Ted what he called his “marathon letter”—it was about ten pages long. He told of adjusting to jail and preparing his defense, and he added words that tore my heart apart:

  In this life we are fortunate to find one person to love and love completely. I am lucky because I love you in that way. Being in this jail has taught me this lesson. I think of no one else or miss no one else as I do you. . . . In this hour when my whole life is threatened, the only thing I regret losing is you and Molly. So I give you one more thing. It is the one part of me that cannot be taken away. I give you my love as deep and as powerful as any human being can have for another. I give it to you as the woman who has captured my very soul. Every last grain. There is no one to whom I could give my love for the rest of my life. My love for you is life itself. Without you there would be no life.

  Ted.

  He had added later:

  I read over the last part of my letter to you. I want it to be clear. I write these words to you not because I want you to feel the same in return or feel obligated in some way. I just want you to know.

  I was overcome with guilt. I had to tell Ted of my involvement with the police so he would quit sending me love letters and start hating me as I deserved. That night, after getting Molly to bed, I sat down to write him a letter.

  The phone rang. It was Ted. “I was just writing you a letter,” I told him.

  “It’s about time,” he said. “I don’t know how long they’ll let me talk.”

  I interrupted him. “I have to tell you something important—something you’re not going to want to hear.”

  I began shakily. “I’ve had some doubts . . . about you . . . for a long time. I got so worried that I went to the police myself a year ago.” I paused to give him a chance to say something, but he was silent. “I knew you couldn’t be involved, but there were all these things that bothered me, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Things like what?” he asked me. “What happened when you went to the police?”

  I told him of my conversations with the King County and Salt Lake City police.

  “It’s okay,” he told me. “You did what you had to do. If you told them the truth, then no harm has been done because the truth is good enough. The truth will prove me innocent.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Kathy McChesney called me at work and asked me to come down to the police station and pick up my jack handle and some other things of mine that she had. The scrapings from the jack handle had been tested in the lab and they were not blood. I had taken so much time off from work lately, I asked if she could bring them to me, but she was insistent that I come down to the police station. When I got there, she explained that her boss, Captain Mackie, had something he wanted to show me. We went into his office along with two other detectives. Mackie showed me what they had figured out from Ted’s oil company credit card slips.

  On a large pad of paper on an easel, Mackie had diagramed the locations from which young women had disappeared in Colorado. On the next sheet he had made a list of credit card slips from Colorado with Ted’s signature. On a third sheet he had put the two together and showed that Ted had been in each location when the women had disappeared. I was stunned. Mackie told me that the license numbers on the slips varied. I remembered the visit Ted had made when the license plate of his VW was loosely propped up inside the car and told Mackie about it. Mackie told me all this was highly confidential information, and the only reason they were telling me was that they trusted me and wanted to impress on me the gravity of the investigation.

  Next, they wanted to probe my sex life. I had discussed it with Hergesheimer, with Kathy, and with the two detectives from Utah, and now I was expected to go over it detail by detail again with these three men I hardly knew. My face was on fire. I stared at the floor, completely humiliated, as I answered their questions. How often? Where? When? What positions? Where are his hands? Where are your hands? Oral sex? Anal sex? Bondage? When it was time to go, I could barely move. I asked Kathy for my jack handle. “Sorry,” she said, “we still need it.”

  That night Kathy called me at home to tell me that the Seattle Times was going to publish a story the next day regarding Ted’s travels to Colorado and the murders there. She said a reporter had walked in right after I left and asked if his story was correct. What else could Mackie do but say yes? I found that hard to believe. I felt that I had been set up, and I was sick of being manipulated.

  I was sick of thinking about anal rapes, strangulation with nylon stockings, beautiful healthy daughters torn away from their families. The world was a sick, sick place and I was profoundly sorry that I had brought my beautiful, innocent child into it.

  When I looked in the mirror, I saw in my own reflection a similarity to the women who had died: the long brown hair, the pierced ears. Did they die because they looked like me?

  Ted wrote to me:

  My conscience is clear and my will to clear myself is strong. I cannot sense guilt which is not mine. . . . Liz, I know myself as no one else can, and I know I love people and life too much to destroy one living thing. This is the knowledge which gives me the strength to stand firm against all who challenge me. The world outside may have changed, but I have not.

  He seemed so together, and
I felt so screwed up. He loved life but was locked away in prison. I hated life, yet I was free.

  The newspapers were full of statements from Ted’s friends, outraged that this all-American boy was accused of these hideous crimes. I had double-crossed him and couldn’t live with my conscience. I needed help. Two friends of friends had recommended the same psychiatrist, so I reluctantly made an appointment to see him. He asked me what I wanted from counseling. This threw me for a loop. There was nothing I could hope to gain from therapy; everything was cast in stone.

  I dragged myself to the psychiatrist for several sessions because I didn’t know what else to do. He suggested that I no longer have anything to do with either the police or Ted. He felt it would be impossible for me to have any peace of mind as long as I was being pulled in two directions. I told him I would have to think about it. That same day Kathy called and asked if I would come down to the police station and look at a shoe that had been left at the site where two young female hitchhikers had been found with their throats slit a year ago. I told her that my shrink had told me not to talk to the police or Ted anymore, and I didn’t want her to call me again. She said she understood my need to protect myself, but she asked if they would be able to count on me later if they needed my help. I told her I didn’t know.

  On Thursday night, November 20, I got a phone call from Ted. “Hi! Guess where I am?” he said brightly. “I’m sitting in my attorney’s office. When I walked over here it was starting to snow. It was so cold and fresh. I’m free!”

  He’d been released on bond, but he didn’t want to talk about the details. He told me he was going to have pizza and beer and more pizza and beer until he’d had his fill. Hearing the happiness in his voice made me happier than I had been for a long time.

  Over the next few days, we talked and talked on the phone. My phone had developed an annoying click just about the time that Ted became a suspect. I wondered if it was tapped, but I told myself that I was being paranoid. Finally, it got so noticeable that I asked Kathy if the police had done anything to my phone.