The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  He went on to tell me that I was the woman he loved and had “loved exclusively for years,” that I had given his life “the meaning which gives living beauty and dimension,” that I was the woman who made him know “what it is to be a man,” the lover who had taught him “the secret thrills of my sexuality,” a mother who showed him “the joy and fulfillment of raising a child.”

  I would not change places with any other man in the world. I consider you a miracle in my life and in spite of the disaster we have suffered, I would not for a moment ever wish for another woman. You are the most loving and lovely woman I have ever known. You are in my mind constantly. No words can express adequately the dimensions of my feelings. I shall love you forever and forever in my dreams. I shall love you with every long-haired beauty I see. I shall love you with every clear blue sky. I will love you til my last breath. There can never be any goodbyes for you and I. No parting because we are always with each other in spirit. No goodbyes, just I love you.

  My reaction to this letter was so intense that I scared myself. This was the end that I had been trying to ignore for the last three months. I knew Ted would be sentenced to life in prison. What a cruel joke, “life” in prison. He would die in there, and I would be responsible for his death. God, how I regretted making those phone calls.

  I had a list of phone numbers of people in recovery I could call if I was afraid of taking a drink. I had no desire to drink. I wanted to die, and I didn’t know if it would be okay to call them under those circumstances. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I pulled myself together enough to make arrangements for Molly to stay with friends, and when I was alone, I threw myself on the floor and against the walls, cursing myself for being alive. I was so hysterical when I picked up the phone and called one of the recovering alcoholic women I knew from group therapy that at first she couldn’t understand me, but she listened and offered to come to my house.

  I didn’t want that, and I think I frightened her. She gave me the name of another, older woman and made me promise to call her. A part of me was sure that no one wanted to help me because I was loathsome. How could I call on a total stranger for help? I turned angrily to God. Help me, help me, help me! I demanded. The answer I got was to call the woman. Her name was Pat.

  She was an oasis of serenity. She listened to me and talked to me about a loving God. She asked me how long I’d been sober, and when I told her it had been about seven weeks, she said that I couldn’t possibly hope to feel together and sane all the time this soon. After years of anesthetizing our bodies and our brains, she said, we didn’t have the ability to handle our emotions like normal people. I didn’t want to tell her that I was still wrestling with whether or not I was an alcoholic.

  We talked for a long while. She became my good friend in recovery, and I owe my life to her.

  Bundy Gets 1 to 15 Years the headline read.

  Convicted kidnapper Theodore R. Bundy of Tacoma was sentenced in Salt Lake City to one to 15 years in prison yesterday for the abduction of a young woman in a Murray, Utah, shopping mall in 1974.

  District Court Judge Stewart M. Hanson Jr. passed sentence after Bundy, a former University of Utah and University of Puget Sound law student, made a tearful plea that his incarceration would serve no purpose.

  “Yes, I will be a candidate for rehabilitation,” Bundy said in court, “but not for what I have done, but what the system has done to me.”

  Bundy’s attorney John D. O’Connell said he intends to file an appeal to the Utah State Supreme Court immediately.

  Bundy’s fate is now up to the Utah Board of Pardons which under ordinary circumstances might review a request for parole within six months of sentencing.

  Judge Hanson reduced the charge from a first-degree to a second-degree count. A first-degree charge would have called for a sentence of 5 years to life.

  Hanson said he reduced the charge because there were no other instances of criminal charges of a similar nature against Bundy.

  Bundy appeared in Hanson’s court as his own attorney for part of the proceedings and argued that his 90-day psychiatric evaluation at the Utah State Prison was inaccurate. Bundy objected to the psychiatric evaluation which described him as having an “antisocial personality,” harboring “passive aggressiveness,” being “a private person,” “insecure,” “hostile,” and being unable to handle stress.

  “He just underwent nine months of the worst stress I’ve seen, and he handled it better than Mr. Nixon handled Watergate, without breaking down,” O’Connell said. Bundy also objected to the report’s characterization of him as being “dependent on women.”

  “Who isn’t dependent on women?” he asked the judge.

  Bundy, who has spent the last 10 months in jail, told the judge before sentencing: “Someday, who knows when, 5 to 10 years in the future, when the time comes when I can leave, I suggest you ask yourself where we are, what’s been accomplished, was the sacrifice of my life worth it all?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  September 1, 1976, exactly six months from the day of Ted’s conviction, I was on my way to see him at the Utah State Prison. The day was hot and sunny, the kind of summer weather you can count on in Utah. The ninety-mile drive from Ogden to Draper gave me time to think.

  It had been a battle to get to see Ted. The prison rule was that a single male prisoner could have only one unmarried female on his list of people cleared to visit, and Ted already had listed Kim Andrews. The prison officials told Ted that I could not visit him unless he took Kim’s name off the list and put mine there in its place. As jealous as I was of Kim, I didn’t want her to abandon him.

  When I got to Utah, I called the warden’s office and told the official I talked to how dumb I thought the rule was, but he justified it by saying that prison had a “romanticizing” effect on relationships that was bad for the prisoners. He told me that with the prison system as the adversary, couples were drawn tightly together. I thought that was ridiculous. “Look,” I told him, “I’ve known Ted since 1969. I’m going to be in Utah for one week. If I lived here and wanted to see Ted every week, I could see your point. One week’s worth of visits is not going to pit Ted and me together against your system.” I was prepared to keep fighting until I got my way. After considerable discussion, he gave in.

  I was perplexed by the anger that seemed to be always there, just beneath the surface. I had always thought of myself as sweet and nice, but now that I had stopped drinking, I seemed to boil with anger. I kidded myself about being even-tempered—mad all the time. But it was a real problem. My letters to Ted were full of complaints about the way Molly and I were getting along. She was the bright spot in my life but staying sober and carving out a new life an inch at a time left me exhausted and short-tempered.

  The person who got most of my anger was Ted. I wrote him dreadful hot-and-cold letters that started out by telling him how much I missed him and loved him and then moved on to the same dead-end issue—his infidelity. I really did love him, but I wanted my revenge, too. In a way it was a relief to feel angry at somebody besides myself.

  The prison was a huge concrete box baking in the sun off to the right of the freeway. Ted had told me that the temperature inside routinely got up to 102 degrees—just like his old apartment. But now he couldn’t go out for a drink to cool off. After he was sentenced, Ted vowed that he would never accept and adapt to prison. His mood was grim, and he complained of insomnia and of feeling abandoned. He was angry at his mom who talked to him about faith, prayer, salvation, and destiny. He wrote me that he would not feel guilty for things he had not done.

  I looked up at the guard tower. This really is a prison, I thought.

  “You can’t take your purse in,” the guard in the lobby barked at me. Back to the car, lock the purse in the trunk. Back inside the prison lobby. “I need your driver’s license,” said the guard. Back to the car, get the license, back to the guard. “You can’t take those keys in,” he said. What was I supposed to do with the
car keys, lock them in the car? I asked the guard if he could keep them for me in his little cubicle. He grudgingly agreed. As he filled out the record with my name, I saw Kim Andrews’s name and birthdate, 1952. In 1952, I was teacher’s pet in Miss Wilson’s second-grade class. The guard told me I would be able to enter the visiting area in about ten minutes. I took my place against a wall with the other families and friends. I nervously rolled the tassels from my Mexican blouse around my fingers, not wanting to look around. I didn’t belong here.

  The ten-minute wait seemed to last forever. Finally, everybody moved forward into a little holding room. The door by which we had entered was closed electrically and the door to the visiting room opened. The visitors and prisoners rushed towards each other. I wanted to scream.

  At first, I couldn’t see Ted. Then he grabbed my arm and pulled me to him and hugged me tight. He led me to some chairs in a corner and we sat down, facing each other, holding hands, our knees mixed up together. He looked so handsome. He had on jeans and a blue work shirt, and he had a tan—from the hours working out at the Draper Racquetball Club, as he put it. He looked just like he used to look when we went off to go rafting.

  The room was noisy and there were little kids jumping around. This is not real, I kept telling myself. This is not real; this is not Ted’s life. I couldn’t speak. He stared at me.

  “How was your drive?” he finally said. It was such a silly question that we both laughed. Then between the I-love-yous and the gee-you-look-greats, we talked nonstop. I told him about Molly; he told me about the friends he had made in prison. We talked about getting sober. He had been going to recovery meetings in prison because he was so excited about what I was going through. We talked about the “new me” and how proud he was of me. He asked me if I’d been dating.

  “Oh, some,” I answered, trying to sound nonchalant. I had gone to bed with the first guy I had gone out with. It had been a cold and calculated act. It had felt like revenge when I planned it, but it left me feeling hollow and shaken. It wasn’t so easy for me to be irresponsible when I didn’t have wine and beer to help. I had learned a lot from the experience, but now Ted was prying it out of me, and it made me angry—as if I were accountable to him for my actions. That led us to a polite argument about Kim, and Ted changed the subject.

  We began talking about the poetry he had written for me. He was proud of it and I loved it, but I heard myself saying, “I really wanted to ask you not to write any more poetry to me. I find it just too upsetting. Sometimes I wonder if you send the same poems to other people.”

  The pain in his eyes made me wish I’d never said it. I didn’t mean it—I only wanted to hurt him the way he hurt me.

  “I write you those poems because I love you,” he said.

  I pulled my chair up to his so I could put my arms around him. I was sickened by my own anger and the pride that wouldn’t let me back down. “I love you,” I told him. “I’m sorry that I’m spoiling this time we have together.”

  We held each other for a little while, and with my anger out of the way, we could begin to talk more naturally. I asked him to give me a back-tickle.

  “Not here,” he said.

  “Then where?” I asked him.

  He felt foolish but he tickled my back for me. We kissed a lot, but it was very restrained. There was no point in getting turned on. We went back to conversation.

  In the middle of talking about his family, he suddenly said flatly, “I can’t live in here. Something’s going to happen. Soon.”

  I was horrified. I knew he was talking about escape. His letters had hinted at it. “No,” I told him. “It’ll only cause more problems.”

  “Every day I’m in here. I’m dying,” he said. “I can’t live like this.”

  “Don’t tell me about it,” I said quickly.

  We began talking about ordinary things again and soon it was time for me to leave. We both began crying hard. I promised to come back on Sunday before my plane left for Seattle. I wanted him to leave with me now.

  I was herded into the holding area, but I could see the guards pat him down. He turned around and waved to me. Then he was gone. I collected my keys and stumbled out into the hot sunlight, and I thought the agony of leaving him would kill me. As I drove out of the parking lot, I saw a bunch of colorful hang gliders coming off the mountain on the other side of the freeway, flying free in sight of the prison.

  If I ever needed a drink to take away reality, I needed one then, but I thought how disappointed Ted would be if I slipped.

  When I came to the turnoff for Murray, I left the freeway and pulled into a gas station to get directions to the Fashion Place Mall. When Ted was out on bail, he had let me read a copy of the police report on Carol DaRonch’s abduction. Now I wanted to retrace her steps.

  I parked behind Sears, as she had, and walked through the store into the mall. The report had said something about the Walden bookstore. I stood in front of it. I tried to picture Ted approaching, wearing green slacks and patent leather shoes. No, it didn’t compute. I leaned against the building and watched people walk by. There were several young, attractive women shopping by themselves. Would Ted see them as victims? Someone did. If a man came up to me right now and said he was a police officer, what would I do? Would I go with him? If he was as handsome and well-mannered as Ted, I might. The way the phony police officer had led Carol DaRonch all around the mall made me think that he enjoyed toying with his victim. I shouldn’t be doing this, I thought. My face was flushed. I had the kind of headache you get from eating ice cream too fast. I found a phone book and looked up the address of the Salt Lake Recovery Club. These are places where recovering alcoholics can go for coffee and company. I wanted to be around something positive.

  I pulled out of the north side of the mall’s parking lot and headed east. I tried to find the school where the man had stopped and slammed the handcuffs on DaRonch. I could almost see her fighting off her attacker, and I could feel her fear. But I could not see what he looked like. This was stupid to be doing this to myself. I headed for the Recovery Club.

  I talked to a woman at the club for a while, but it didn’t help much. I was afraid to go back to my parents’ house. I wasn’t afraid of the Scotch they kept—it was the hunting rifles in the basement. It hadn’t been hard for me to see that my drinking had been a slow form of suicide. Now when I flew into a self-destructive rage it wasn’t drinking I thought about, but putting a gun in my mouth and blowing my head off.

  I called Pat, my good friend in sobriety in Seattle. It was hard for me to ask for help. I told her that I’d been to the prison and that I was a little bit shaky. I was afraid that if I told her how crazy I really was, she wouldn’t be my friend anymore. Talking with her gave me the strength to go back to Ogden, but I knew I didn’t have the strength to go back to the prison to see Ted again.

  I knew I should see Ted again because I had told him I would and he would be counting on it, but I couldn’t. I called the prison and asked if they would give him a message. Absolutely not, I was told. I didn’t know what else to do, so I sent him a mailgram telling him that I would not be there. I felt guilty about putting myself first, but guilty or not, I still wasn’t going to go.

  When I got back to Seattle there was a letter from Ted waiting for me:

  Our two hours together was without doubt the most emotionally intense experience of my life. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world, though, unless I was offered my freedom to be with you.

  The next letter I had from him was an extremely painful one dated September 7, two days after the Sunday I didn’t show up.

  If I sound bitter it is because I am. This is not your problem any longer as you well recognize. Perhaps I am too much of a sentimentalist but as difficult as it would have been I would have liked to say goodbye to you in person, kiss you one last time. . . . Sunday, as I sat on the bench in the prison yard, basking in the sun, the fear grew with each hour. What a pathetic creature I must ha
ve appeared to be. Watching, waiting. Then three o’clock arrived and three fifteen and three thirty and three fifty and finally four. I waited until the bitter end. I imagined you driving to the airport and boarding the plane just a few miles away and I was struck with the panic of a caged animal. I felt the suicidal urge to run at the barbed wire fence and run and run to say goodbye to you before the plane flew you away from me forever. Crying, trembling as the last minutes ticked away I kept pleading softly to myself, “Please, Liz, please.” Please don’t leave me this way, I thought. Sunday was the most demoralizing day of my life. Sunday I think I finally recognized how powerless and weak I am.

  Our letters continued. He tried to explain to me the pressures and expectations that build in a prisoner. I was embarrassed by my disregard for what he was going through. I tried to be more sensitive to his needs. Our letters flowed back and forth, and we wrote about how much we loved each other, but with less intensity than before my trip to Utah.

  In October, a year after he had been arrested and charged with kidnapping, Ted was charged with first-degree murder in Colorado for the death of Caryn Campbell, who disappeared from a ski lodge near Aspen on January 12, 1975. In his letter to me Ted insisted on his innocence.

  This case they filed is based on information they have had since last February. . . . But it [the evidence] was manufactured. . . . The prosecution filed a witness list and on it are the names: Carol DaRonch, Jerry Thompson, David Yocum and Robert Keppel (King Co.). It is going to be like a rerun of a bad dream. DaRonch crying, Thompson lying (“Yes, I saw four pairs of patent leather shoes in his house”) and Keppel implying (“He’s pretty weird and a suspect in 4,900 disappearances.”). It’s an innuendo case. Dammit, I am not grandstanding, Liz. I am innocent and they are going to frame their little heads off. . . . Please try to believe in me.