The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  We went into the courtroom and took our seats. They must have turned off the heat in the old courthouse over the weekend, because the room was freezing. I recognized a man sitting behind the prosecutor as Police Captain Hayward, the man I had called from Seattle over a year ago; the man who told me not to worry; the man who had denied that he had ever talked with me. Jerry Thompson, the detective I didn’t like, was sitting on the other side of the courtroom.

  I stared at Ted’s back for a long while. He was fiddling with his hair, one of his usual nervous habits. I liked the way his hands looked. Next to me, Mr. Bundy was holding Mrs. Bundy’s hand.

  We all stood up as Judge Hanson entered. After we were seated, the judge asked the defendant to please rise and step forward. I thought I might throw up. Ted and O’Connell stood before the judge. Hanson read the verdict fast: guilty. Mrs. Bundy let out a soft gasp and broke into tears. As if from outside myself, I saw that I was crying, too.

  Detective Thompson had stationed himself at the entrance to the judge’s chamber to take Ted away. There was another officer at the other side of the door. They were going to take him because of all the garbage I had told them. I had tried to tell them I was wrong, but they wouldn’t listen. They were so desperate to solve their cases that they had taken a man who might be a thief and had made him into a mass murderer.

  Ted asked if he could have a few minutes alone with his family. As he entered the judge’s chamber the two detectives grabbed him roughly, pulled his arms behind his back, and snapped handcuffs on his wrists.

  “You don’t need those,” Ted said through clenched teeth. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  As they frisked Ted, I leaned close to Thompson and said bitterly, “Revenge is sweet, isn’t it, Jerry?” I wanted to spit in his face, claw his eyes out, hammer him. But I knew—everyone in the room knew—who was really to blame for this insane finale. I put my arms around Ted and my head on his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you.” He didn’t respond. He was drenched with sweat. His spirit was gone. He was like a dead man standing up.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go! Take him down the stairs!” the detectives were shouting. I couldn’t look as they took him away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After Ted was taken away, Mr. and Mrs. Bundy and I went directly to the airport. We had three hours to wait until the next flight to Seattle. I ended up in the airport bar where I drank and wrote Ted a tearful letter on the only paper I had, a savings passbook. The waitress asked me if I was okay. I didn’t care what anybody thought. The people in the bar were talking about Ted’s conviction. When the waitress came by again I told her she was wrong—Ted wasn’t guilty—and she shouldn’t blow off her mouth when she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  On the plane I kept drinking. Mrs. Bundy came and sat with me for a little while. She told me a little about the man who had fathered Ted but hadn’t even stuck around until he was born. She told me about living in Philadelphia with her young child and the need to start a new life for herself and her son. She had moved to Tacoma and met Johnnie Bundy. They had had a small wedding. Ted was five years old, and he had stuck his hand in the wedding cake. “That’s why I never discussed it with him,” she said. “I thought he remembered.”

  A few days after I returned to Seattle, I got a phone call from Don Hull, the probation officer who was writing the presentence report on Ted. He wanted to know if I still thought Ted was guilty. Maybe it was just a matter of semantics, but I didn’t think I had ever told anyone I thought Ted was guilty—not flatly. Hull read from Jerry Thompson’s police report, that I had said that Ted frequently roamed around the neighborhood late at night and had a bad habit of jumping out of hiding places to scare me. I couldn’t believe the distortion of what I had said. I had told Thompson that Ted had hidden and scared me a few times in all the years I had known him, but I had never said he made a habit of it. When I wouldn’t confirm Thompson’s report, Hull said he had heard I’d had a change of heart. It was a terrible phone call, and if I’d had enough energy, I would have been furious, but the conversation only left me more depressed.

  When Ted called me a few days later, I told him about Hull’s phone call, and he asked me to call Hull back and try to make sure he knew I didn’t agree with Thompson’s report. Ted said that his own talks with Hull had convinced him that there was no hope of a fair presentencing report.

  I put off calling Don Hull back for a few days because I knew it would be bad, and it was. I dragged myself back to the same phone booth where many months ago I had called the police. As I sat there trying to figure out what I was going to say to Hull, I was overcome by anger. How many women died after I made those calls? If the police were so goddamn sure that Ted was guilty, shouldn’t they be held accountable for the deaths that occurred after I called them in October 1974? Weren’t they murderously irresponsible? I called Hull and told him I thought Thompson’s report was slanted and full of inaccuracies. Hull dismissed this again, attributing it to my “change of heart,” and I hung up. The inconsistencies in my thinking bothered me. I am, I thought, capable of holding a hundred different points of view on any one idea at any one time. There is no real me. That same day I had my first visit with a counselor.

  That night I went home, got drunk, and wrote Hull a letter. Ted called just after I finished it. When I read it to him, he said it was impressive and persuasive. Among other things I wrote, You call it a change of heart. I call it putting my head on straight. Hull had been to see Ted a couple of times. He told Ted that he had spoken with Carol DaRonch and that she was ninety percent sure that Ted was the one. Ted was dumbfounded.

  “A standard interpretation of ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ given by a judge to a jury is ‘if after a consideration of the evidence you are ninety-five percent sure that the defendant is guilty, you must acquit,’” he told me. “There is a ‘reasonable doubt.’ Not even Carol DaRonch could have found me guilty. I am not!”

  Hull had asked Ted some questions about his “old girlfriend” Angie. Furious that she would portray herself as having an intimate relationship with Ted, I called Angie and gave her hell. She was horrified that she had been identified as an ex-girlfriend. She told me she had never talked with Hull, so I could only guess that the label had come from Thompson’s report. Angie was so upset that she called me back the next morning and told me that if Hull did call her, she wouldn’t speak to him. I sure missed Angie’s friendship.

  My life had changed so much that I couldn’t believe it was still my life. I was spending most of my waking hours sifting through the past, reliving my mistakes. Sometimes I would bury my face in the yellow turtleneck sweater of Ted’s that I had retrieved from the back of the rental car in Salt Lake City. It smelled like a mixture of Tide and Right Guard, a distinctly good and Ted-like smell. I missed him more than I thought possible.

  The newspapers were full of stories about Patty Hearst. She and her SLA abductors had been captured in September 1975, and now in March 1976, she was on trial for helping the SLA rob a bank. There was much discussion in the press about whether or not she had been brainwashed. She had been kidnapped and physically, mentally, and sexually abused; but some people didn’t understand why that would cause her to join with her kidnappers. I thought of writing her a letter, because I understood perfectly well what the power of fear could do to a person.

  On March 22, Ted appeared before Judge Hanson to be sentenced, but the judge ordered him to the Utah State Prison for a ninety-day psychiatric evaluation. At first Ted thought there was hope. He knew he was a normal, healthy young man—not a murderer or a kidnapper—and he knew this would come through in any fair evaluation. The day he appeared in court I heard something on TV that made me fire off a furious letter to him:

  They always make me grit my teeth, but this one got me on my glass jaw. They went on and on about the court proceedings and then said the judge had ordered that Mrs. Bundy and Bundy’s girlfriend be allowed to visit with you in pri
vate. Since I’m up here and Judge Hanson was down there, I surmised there must be two girlfriends. Good old Kim. What would we do without her?

  This was the thousand-millionth time I had felt this way about Ted and another woman. Ted was Ted. He would never change. I don’t know what I expected him to do about anything, especially now, but I unloaded on him anyway.

  I discussed Ted and other women with my counselor at great length. “If it hurts,” he asked me, “why do you put up with it?” The answers were the same as they had always been: Because I love him and because I’m stupid. I discussed the guilt I felt about calling the police in the first place, and the fears and doubts about Ted that had prompted the calls. I felt unfaithful to Ted discussing this with a stranger but saying my thoughts out loud to another person took some of the sting out of them.

  I wrote Ted:

  I am a mature (reasonably) person and can accept things as they are—if I only know how things honestly are. Of course, what I am talking about is your relationship with Kim Andrews. I don’t like the way I throw up my defenses at the slightest possibility that someone is going to tell me something I thought I knew but didn’t. It’s like being emotionally shell-shocked. So, I have a deal to propose. Will you candidly tell me how it is? And whatever else there is to tell about things that might fall out of the sky to shock me. And for my part, I won’t bring it up ever again.

  His answer:

  Kim Andrews . . . is a loyal and close friend. She has volunteered to do things for me which no one else down here has volunteered to do. . . . If she had replaced you, I would tell you. If I loved her and no longer loved you, I would tell you. But she hasn’t and I don’t.

  I didn’t feel a whole lot better.

  My counselor was pushing me to open up in group therapy, and finally I took the plunge. I told the group I was dying of terminal loneliness, that my boyfriend who had been my whole life was in jail and now I had no one. We talked about the few steps I had taken to put my life back together. They asked about my daily routine. I told them that every day ended the same way: I drank, wrote letters to my boyfriend, and cried a lot.

  One of the women, who was a recovering alcoholic, suggested that I probably wouldn’t cry so much if I didn’t drink so much. It had been her experience that she couldn’t make any important changes in her life until she had cut out the alcohol, which she said distorted reality for her. I told her that was exactly what I needed—a reality distorter. But I admitted that I couldn’t seem to get drunk enough anymore, no matter how much I drank.

  It was getting harder and harder to take the edge off. Sometimes I’d drink till I threw up and still wouldn’t be drunk. At other times I would have one beer and it was as if I’d been hit between the eyes with a hammer. The hangovers were getting worse; usually it was the middle of the afternoon before I felt human. I told the counselor that I wasn’t ready to quit, but that I would try to slow down. He told me that he didn’t think any amount of counseling would help me if I didn’t stop drinking. I thought he was overreacting. If I quit drinking that would just give me more hours to kill in the evening.

  “You’re a bright woman,” he told me. “You’re at a turning point. It’s up to you to make the right decisions.”

  But I was worn out from making decisions. I wanted someone else to do it for me. When he suggested that I attend an alcohol recovery meeting, I was insulted. I took care of myself; I had a responsible job; I didn’t leave my child at home while I ran around to taverns. I wasn’t an alcoholic!

  Without alcohol, my hands shook, my back ached, and my disposition was rotten. When the counselor told me that these were symptoms of alcohol withdrawal, I was shocked. I was totally unprepared for what life without alcohol would be like. I wrote Ted:

  I have quit drinking and I have discovered that by drinking I have only postponed all the hurt, agony and sorrow. I am feeling these emotions intensely now. It is so painful that the temptation to soften it all with a drink is very strong.

  I was mad at the counselor for making me quit. I was mad at everyone. The counselor and the two recovering alcoholics in the therapy group were pushing recovery meetings at me. They said I’d find people there who were going through the same things I was. Fat chance. There was only one Ted Bundy and nobody else was dealing with what I was. Whenever I made arrangements to go to a meeting with one of the women, something always came up so that I had to cancel. But I wasn’t drinking, and as much as I carried on about how miserable I was without booze, every day that went by without a drink was a triumph to me.

  Eventually, the nagging I got from the group wore me down, and I made a contract with them to attend an alcohol recovery group. It was in a rundown second-story hall in a slightly shabby neighborhood, and as I walked slowly up the stairs, I said to myself, “So this is it, the bottom of the barrel.”

  This particular meeting was for women only, and to my surprise they were all fairly intelligent, clean, happy women about my age. I listened to their stories about their lives when they were drinking as compared to their lives now that they were sober, and I could identify with the feelings of guilt and remorse and self-hatred that they talked about. They told me that if I didn’t take the first drink, I wouldn’t get drunk. I had never thought of it that way, and it seemed like the most profound thing I’d ever heard. They also told me they lived their lives and stayed sober one day at a time. I wondered if that would work for me; I was tired of reliving the past every day.

  It embarrassed me to tell Ted about going to meetings to get sober, but I needed his praise and his opinions. He wrote:

  You have every right to be proud of your success in stopping drinking. We both know how much alcohol was a part of our lives. . . . Your success is genuine.

  He cheered me on like a football coach and I loved him for it. And I tried to support him as well as I could. In our letters we fantasized about a new life for the three of us, a new life away from fear and worry, perhaps on a small farm or a cabin in the mountains.

  His letters detailed the ninety-day evaluation.

  Then there was the educational achievement tests. First there was spelling. “Spell cat,” said our lemon faced school marm who didn’t seem to think any of us could.

  In another letter:

  I received a message today from the University Medical Center. It seems the EEG they did on me last week was inadequate because I was not relaxed. I can’t imagine why I wasn’t! After all, aren’t handcuffs, chains and leg irons conducive to relaxation? I tried my best though. As I lay there in the dark, my eyes closed, I repeated over and over “I love her, I love her” with your picture in my mind. You are with me everywhere I go.

  It was in every letter.

  The only reality I fight to preserve is you. You are my link to everything I hold dear. You keep alive emotions of caring and loving. I love you and Molly. . . . The psychologist gave me a test where pictures are shown, and a story was told by me about each picture. The last card was blank, and I was to imagine a picture. It was a picture of you in the kitchen and as I told it tears began flowing uncontrollably down my face. I miss everything about you.

  Then in May he wrote:

  Not to my surprise, the combined results of all psychological and medical tests show me to be completely normal, a psychiatrist told me. He kept saying “Very interesting.” He also said that he believes me when I say I didn’t do it, but being a loyal employee of the state, he asked me if it was possible I had forgotten it all. They never give up.

  And in another letter:

  They have reached the end of their proverbial rope and are now insinuating that I am very complex and hard to know which simply means that they have no basis to say that x caused y kidnapping. The psychiatrist has been the most honest with me. He has said on two occasions that he can see nothing to suggest that I was in any way capable of committing such a crime. . . . Both Don Morgan, my probation officer, and Al Carlisle, psychologist, are anxious to talk to you. I suggest you speak to the
m and be honest with them but be careful. Morgan, for instance, made reference to the “numerous contradictions in statements” you made to the King County authorities (something about composite picture similarities). I was not aware of such statements and I really do not think they are in any way relevant to the evaluation of me as a person. . . . I should clarify something at this point. Nothing you have said has hurt me. Your honest and forceful statement of your opinions about me now, however, can be helpful. I do have confidence in you.

  Later in May:

  This evaluation has reached the final impasse. Stalemate and I lose. He (the psychiatrist) is saying “I don’t have enough information to predict your future behavior” which is bullshit. (Or “please confess, it would make everything so simple.”) What he is saying is that he cannot predict violence, my tests are too good, but he is too much of a coward to forecast peaceful behavior. I think I can pry him off his rock, though.

  On June 14 he wrote:

  The tension builds each day as sentencing approaches. . . . I am in no way mentally prepared to accept anything the judge imposes, least of all commitment. . . . I am really not as brave as I would like to make myself believe. . . . When I think of years without you I see an eternity in hell. I need you and my freedom too dearly to accept commitment to prison with no more emotional response than I would have to spoiled milk. There is no denying the life and death significance of next Tuesday.

  The last letter he wrote me before he was to be sentenced was the worst.

  Time and circumstances have converged; all our lives have been focused on one day. For you and I, it has all come down to this final letter, the last letter you will receive before I am sentenced next Wednesday. At such a time, I am unable to choke back the urge to cry or hold back the tears. It is not that what I have to say is so sad; rather it is the realization that I may not be saying it again which makes me emotional. I would like this to be my finest, softest love letter. I wish each word could kiss you.