“That would be illegal,” she said. I knew that—but she hadn’t answered my question.
In the back of my mind was the psychiatrist’s advice to stop all contact with Ted, but Ted was so full of loving words. He told me that being in jail had taught him that the most important thing in his life was his love for me. I ate it up like a ham sandwich.
November 24 was Ted’s birthday, and I called him at the house in Salt Lake City where he was staying with friends from the Mormon Church. Since he wasn’t home, I left a message for him to call me, and when he didn’t, jealousy took over again. He had mentioned a friend named Kim that his parents stayed with when they were in Salt Lake City. She had been a great support to him and had done errands for him while he was in jail. They had been “just friends” for about a year, he told me. As an afterthought, he told me that she was his lawyer’s secretary. I tried to be mature when he talked about her. But when I couldn’t reach him on his birthday, maturity went out the window. When he finally called, I was upset.
“For Godsakes, Liz, this is no time for jealousy,” he said. “I need all the support I can get right now.” He told me he had been invited to four different Thanksgiving dinners. I had sent Molly to Utah for ten days, and I was lonely. When he asked me what I would be doing at Thanksgiving, I tried to sound perky as I told him I was going out with friends, hoping to make him jealous.
On Thanksgiving Eve, I ran into Captain Mackie at the liquor store. I waved at him from across the room and left before he could ask me why I wouldn’t cooperate with the police any more.
On Thanksgiving Day, my skiing buddy Len came to my place and we watched football and drank wine until it was time to meet Angie and her friend at Horatio’s, a restaurant on Seattle’s Lake Union. I went into the bathroom to wash up, and when I came out Ted was standing in my kitchen. Len, who had let him in, was standing in the dining room, glaring. Ted looked pale and upset. I threw my arms around Ted. Gradually he relaxed and we rocked back and forth.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“I was afraid you’d tell me not to,” he said. He looked so vulnerable that I was sorry he was probably right. He told me that he had flown in late the night before and was staying with his friends Aaron and Debra in the Magnolia District. He asked me not to go to dinner at Horatio’s but to stay with him. “It’s important,” he said. “I need to talk with you.”
I didn’t want to stay with him. I was a little bit scared. I told him to call me later.
“No, it’s now or never.” His voice was shaking. He walked towards the front door.
“Look, take the extra key to my car and go back to Aaron and Debra’s. I’ll call you when I get home.” I didn’t want him to go, but I didn’t want him to stay. He told me he had his friend’s car, but I insisted he take the keys to mine, to guarantee he’d be back.
At Horatio’s, I drank most of my dinner and barely touched the food. Angie was the first to spot him—Ted pacing back and forth in the lobby, staring at us. I didn’t know what to do. I went out and asked him to leave. Then I went into the ladies’ room and from a pay phone, called my psychiatrist. He was away, and his answering service put me in touch with another doctor who advised me to call the police. But the last thing in the world I would do was call the police on Ted, again.
When I came out of the ladies’ room he was gone. We finished dinner and Len took me home. He came in and checked the apartment to make sure Ted wasn’t there. He offered to stay with me, but I sent him away.
Ted called from a phone booth and asked if he could come over. I suggested we meet somewhere for a drink. We agreed on Horatio’s again. I called Angie and told her what I was doing. I was surprised at how strongly she objected. “I must see him one more time,” I told her. I was lying, even to myself, to think this would be the last time. She made me promise to call her in a while.
As we were shown to a table in the bar, I glanced around to see if anyone was staring at us, but no one seemed to be. Ted’s picture had been splashed across the front pages of the newspapers since his arrest, and I was afraid he would be recognized.
The conversation was strained at first. We stared at each other. He said that he had been afraid that he would never see me again. He asked if it would be okay if he held my hand.
We had always been so physical with each other, but now it was awkward. We tried to find things to talk about. Everything was different except for how much I cared about him. We sat sipping our drinks, when suddenly a man in a kilt appeared in the bar playing a bagpipe, music much too loud for the tiny room. He stopped right in front of our table and all eyes turned to him—and us. Ted and I looked at each other and began to laugh, our attempt to be inconspicuous blown to smithereens.
We decided to go on to the Edgewater Inn on the waterfront for another drink. As we walked out into the cool night air, Ted gathered me in his arms, and we kissed for a long, long time. He was a part of me and I was a part of him. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen to us together.
We drove in my car to the waterfront, and I remember parking the car, but the next thing I remember is sitting in the bar of the Edgewater Inn, both of us crying. I knew I was drunk and apparently, we had been in the bar for over an hour, but I couldn’t remember any of it. A year later, Ted wrote me about what we’d said that night.
He pleaded with me.
A million times I rehearsed this. . . . I pictured me on my knees begging forgiveness. I was going to tell you what a fool I was for my infidelities and I am. . . . For now, would it be wrong just to enjoy the love we have and forget everything else? Sounds like I’m asking you to play house, doesn’t it? Maybe I am. I’m asking to pretend tomorrow doesn’t exist. We’ll sit here, drink our drinks, look out across the water, hold hands just like a pair of carefree lovers, just like we really were so long ago. It’s just you and me. No courts, no detectives, no jail cells. . . .
For just a moment I thought of all the people who would be disappointed in me, but I didn’t care. “I love you, Ted Bundy,” I said. “I want to be with you forever.”
After we got back to my house, I called Angie and told her everything was “fine,” that Ted was going to stay with me, and that I loved him with all my heart and soul.
“Have you lost your mind, Liz?” she asked me. “I don’t believe this. That man may be a murderer—and you’re going to let him stay there? Use your head.”
“I have to do what I have to do,” I said. I was offended that she couldn’t understand what seemed crystal clear to me at that moment—that if there was the slightest chance that he was innocent, I couldn’t and wouldn’t let go. We made drunken love that night, and the next morning we stayed in bed till noon, making love, talking, laughing, reading aloud the letters he had written to me from jail.
We talked about getting married but discarded the idea. I was afraid that I was going to be subpoenaed to testify against him, and I was thinking that if I was his wife, they couldn’t make me.
At last we rolled out of bed and began a round of doing our favorite things one more time. We strolled down the Ave, doing our version of the bump with our hips. Ted said he was going to call the news hotline at a local radio station and report that Ted Bundy was seen in the University District. Perhaps he would collect the prize for the best news tip of the week.
That night, as usual, I called Angie to talk. I was stunned when she told me that she was sorry, but as long as I was going to have anything to do with Ted, she didn’t want to have anything to do with me. She said she could not support me while I made what she considered a very dangerous mistake.
“Well, fine,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, but feeling abandoned.
Saturday night we headed for the laundromat, and when we got there, Ted told me he was going to drop me off while he did some things.
“What things?”
“I think someone is following me. I want to make sure.”
As I turned around to look
, Ted barked, “Don’t look, for Godsakes!”
I took the clothes out, and he took off up the street in my VW. No one took off after him. After a while he came back, still claiming that someone was following him but unable to prove it.
We went to the grocery store while the clothes washed.
“Damn it, there is somebody following us!” he said. “You shop. I’ll be back.” Again, he took off.
He was back a few minutes later, still with no proof. We loaded the groceries in the car and headed back to the laundromat. “Hang on,” he suddenly said. We made a sharp right turn down a side street and then a sharp left. Then a sudden U-turn that took us back towards the first street we’d turned on. A black man in a black car, talking into a radio mike, came speeding by us. We fell in behind him, and he pulled into a Safeway parking lot. Ted pulled the car into the Burgermaster lot next door, jumped out, and approached the black man in the Safeway lot. I got out too, wondering what a bullet would feel like in my back. I half-expected to see Ted shot, then thought that if they shot Ted while I was watching, they would have to shoot me, too.
The man looked surprised. He was writing something on a clipboard. “Who are you? Why are you following me?” Ted demanded. The man didn’t say anything. “Are you with the police? Or are you a private investigator?” Still the man said nothing, but he looked embarrassed. “Leave me alone,” Ted said. “Just let me be.” We went back to the VW and sat there until the man drove away.
“You should have stayed in the car,” Ted told me. “This could be ugly. He could have been hired by the family of one of the murdered women. They want to see me dead. They may not wait for the courts.” He said he had received obscene and vehement hate mail in jail.
When we got home, he pulled all the curtains, lit candles, and turned out the lights. He called his attorney and asked him to find out who was following us. Then we had a candlelight dinner. Later we played cards and drank wine by candlelight. Ted had never been a card player until he went to jail; now we spent hours playing the games he had learned there.
Ted’s attorney learned that the police were, in fact, following us, and a semi apology was extended through the attorney. The policeman should have shown Ted his I.D. when we approached him. The game had rules.
Over the next few months, it developed into a war of nerves. The police staked out my house and followed us. They even brought in the police helicopter a few times. When Ted and I stepped out on the porch to go somewhere, so many unmarked police cars started up that it sounded like the beginning of the Indy 500. We would drive down the street singing “I love a parade” at the top of our voices as three or four cars followed along behind us. The only things lacking were crepe paper and a tuba.
Some days, when I was at work, Ted would go jogging in Discovery Park for the mere joy of watching the policemen pant along behind him. One day he came to my office, laughing heartily. Detectives Keppel and Dunn had been waiting for him when he left the house that morning. They had fallen in step with him and tried to talk with him, and when he wouldn’t speak to them, they followed him down to my office. He had taken a detour into a building on campus that had a restroom with both a front and a back door. He said he hoped that Keppel and Dunn wouldn’t wait more than an hour for him to come out.
Ted took me everywhere with him now, and that was what I had always wanted. I knew he needed me as a sort of cover, to counteract the image of “freak” he had been given by the press, but I was willing to play whatever game it was if I could stay by his side. He kept telling me how much he loved me and how important I was to him.
But nothing had really changed. One night we were at Aaron and Debra’s, drinking beer and eating chicken enchiladas, when Ted got a long-distance call. I knew it was Kim Andrews, his Salt Lake City friend. He went into the bedroom to take the call, and I marched in right behind him. He paid no attention to me, so I went back into the living room and picked up the phone there. It was obvious from the conversation how deeply they cared for each other. “When are you coming back?” she wanted to know. “Soon,” Ted answered.
I stormed out of the house and tried to unlock my car, but I couldn’t get the key in the lock. Ted came out and asked me where I was going.
“Don’t talk to me, you asshole!” I shouted. Ted looked around nervously to see if there were plainclothes police listening in.
“Come into the house,” he said. “We’ll talk.”
He tried to take me back to the house, but I began hitting and pounding on him. I really wanted to break his goddamn jaw. “Leave me alone,” I screamed. “I hate you.” Finally, I got the door open, jumped into the car, pulled out, and left him standing in the dust. I thought he would probably follow me, and I wanted to get to my house and bolt the door before he got there.
To get from the Magnolia District to my house requires going through a tricky interchange of streets, and in my drunken state I took a wrong turn and found myself heading for downtown Seattle. I pulled over to figure out how I was going to go in the opposite direction and that’s the last thing I remembered until I found myself in my garage.
I ran into the house. I could tell Ted had been there. I pushed the bolt in place so that he couldn’t get back in, even though he had a key. I sat in the dining room with all the lights out. I knew he would be back, and I didn’t know what I would do. Soon I heard his key in the lock. He called my name softly and jiggled the key furiously in the lock. I didn’t answer and he kept it up. Finally, I said through the door, “Go away. Leave me alone. I don’t want to see you anymore.”
More loudly now, he started begging me to open the door, all the while jiggling the key. Then I heard the key break off in the lock, and at the same time, one of the guys who lived upstairs came to the head of the stairs.
“Leave her alone, man,” he said.
“Fuck off,” Ted told him.
“Hey, she told you to get out of here. If you don’t, I’m calling the cops.”
“Liz?” Ted called through the door. “If I call you from a phone booth, will you talk to me?”
I wanted him gone before there was more trouble, so I said yes. Five minutes later the phone rang. I let it ring for a long time. I almost had the strength to not answer it. Ted was crying. “The last thing in the whole world I want to do is hurt you,” he was sobbing, “but over and over I wound you.”
“Call me in the morning. I don’t have anything to say to you now.”
“Please, Liz. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you so much.” On and on he went. Eventually I decided that this man needed me so desperately that I told him to come back and I would let him in.
The next day, Ted sheepishly took the lock apart and removed the broken key. I kept it on my keyring for a long time as a reminder of what had happened that night.
It was Christmastime again and we led a parade of unmarked police cars to the Christmas tree lot. Sometimes the police were discreet, but sometimes they followed us so closely as to harass us. They pulled their cars in so close behind us at the lot I was tempted to ask them to help us tie the tree on the VW. Later we went shopping on the Ave and I bought Ted some corduroy slacks and a brown sweater as a combination birthday and Christmas present.
Ted had court dates in Salt Lake City, so he began a round of flying back and forth. For traveling, he assumed an alias, Christopher Robbins, from Molly’s Winnie the Pooh books. He said that being Ted Bundy in public was just too hard. If he was relaxed and normal, people said he was putting up a good façade to hide his weirdness; if he got upset and irritated with the press or the police, people said he was evil; if he was jovial, people said he thought the idea of murder was funny.
I hated it when he was in Salt Lake City. Not only was Kim Andrews there, but I couldn’t handle being alone very well. I had terrible dreams in vivid detail. Once I dreamed I found Molly battered and sexually mutilated. I held her on my lap and cried for help, but the police told me they were sorry: If I didn’t help them, they couldn
’t help me. Another night, I dreamed that the killer was at my door, but when I looked out it was Kathy McChesney, so I opened the door. She began to strangle me, and in a flash, I realized that the killer had been a woman and that was why the dead women had trusted her. Then Ted jumped out of the closet where he had been hiding, saved me, and captured the real killer.
Ted called me often from Salt Lake. I found it easier to talk with him about certain things on the phone. Why had he gone to Colorado? How come he had never told me about going to Colorado? At first, he said he couldn’t talk about it over the phone. I told him not to come back to Seattle unless he was willing to give me some answers. When he did return, he talked about Colorado with great reluctance. He told me that he wasn’t doing well in school and that long drives gave him a chance to think about what was going wrong. He hadn’t told me because he thought I would be angry that he was spending the time away from classes, and because it was costing him money, money that he sometimes borrowed from me.
On New Year’s Eve, we were home before midnight. Ted was already asleep but I was still up when, shortly after midnight, there was a loud boom and the lights flickered and went out. The George Jackson Brigade, a radical group, had blown up a power substation near my house. The whole world had gone berserk.
When I was a little girl, I had been very upset to learn in Sunday School that someday Christ was going to come back to earth and it was going to be the end of the world. As I sat in my dark house those first few minutes of 1976, I figured now was as good a time as any.
Some of our worst chases with the police occurred when Ted was trying to leave town. He really disliked the idea of having his comings and goings monitored. He liked to take the 7:00 A.M. nonstop flight, so the night before he left, he would try to throw the cops off his trail. One night when we got caught up in a particularly desperate chase, Ted wanted me out of the car, so he screeched into my alley, pushed me out, and roared away. It was pitch black in the alley. The car that had been following us hadn’t come into the alley, and I started to imagine that the men had left the car and were in the alley or in my garage watching me. As I crept up the side of the garage towards the house, my eyes straining to make out the shadows, I suddenly realized that the police would like to see me dead.
The Phantom Prince Page 12