The Phantom Prince

by Elizabeth Kendall

  I didn’t know what to believe. I thought it possible that the police would plant evidence, but on the other hand, dammit, why was Ted in Colorado when he wasn’t supposed to be? One of the main pieces of evidence the prosecutors had was the ski brochure Ted was carrying when he walked off the plane to visit me in January 1975. The police said there was a checkmark next to the name of a resort called the Wildwood Inn, the place from which Caryn Campbell was abducted. Ted had told me that the man sitting next to him on the plane had given the brochure to him. If Ted had killed Caryn Campbell three days before he came to see me, would he be carrying such a telltale piece of evidence?

  He wanted to know if I would come to Colorado for the trial. It wasn’t easy to tell him that I wouldn’t go through another trial. I asked him to understand. He sent me an anguished reply, a poem.

  Into a raging river

  you and I were tossed.

  Separately, we are swept along,

  trying desperately to save ourselves.

  I understand survival.

  I practice it myself

  Neither of us has the strength

  to pull the other to the shore.

  A few days later Ted was sentenced to fifteen days in isolation, “the hole,” for suspicion of attempting to escape. He told me what happened:

  On Tuesday afternoon, I was searched, and a friend’s social security card was found in my pocket. Later that afternoon, while I was resting in my cell on B block, several officers appeared and began searching my cell. With no further explanation, my things were packed and taken away and I was escorted to maximum security. . . . I would try to explain more of the story to you but I am not sure if these letters are read. It is sufficient to say that I never seriously planned or attempted to escape. . . . The situation is frightfully depressing and distressing, especially in light of the fact that I had recently thoroughly adjusted myself to making the best of prison life in hopes of being released in the shortest period of time.

  He described “the hole” as having a steel door, a small window, walls littered with graffiti, a urine and vomit stench, a concrete slab to sleep on, no commissary, no visits, and no companionship.

  I hated more than anything else to be treated as if I was stupid. I fired a letter back to him.

  It sounds like your current accommodations are a delight. You got more bad press when your plans and current situation hit the front page of both papers. . . . But I guess what really got me was your grandstanding to the omnipotent authorities through your letter to me. The facts, to me, show that you perhaps earned your way into the godforsaken Hole. It makes me sick to think of what you are going through but I can’t bleed for you. I get caught up in a way of thinking that I can somehow influence what you do or don’t do. Or that if I suffer along with you, somehow your suffering will be lessened. But it is too heavy a price to pay. I know your need for support at this time is acute but know that I only have a limited supply because I must look out for myself first.

  But in my next letter to him I was telling him that:

  it was an immense relief to me to know you’re o.k. That my “blast” as you call it didn’t blow you away. . . . Confusion reigns Supreme. Just know that I love you.

  Two steps forward and one step back.

  We filled a need in each other—still. The letters flowed back and forth, amusing, comforting, understanding. But most of all, Ted’s letters made me feel loved. I knew the words were only words, but they could still make me feel good. Right before Christmas he wrote me:

  No where in the hundreds of pages of letters I have written to you, I don’t believe I ever successfully expressed the totality of what you, Elizabeth, are to me. Lord knows I have strained every brain cell to put your magic on paper. Every molecule in you, all the tones in your voice move me. My whole mind and body are gripped by your invisible power. The life I loved living is you. Laughter is you. Women are you. Sometimes I believe I am you. Memories, music, wind, rain, sleep are you. I am so lonely without life and life is you.

  I had never spent Christmas anywhere but home in Utah, and this Christmas was to be no exception. Part of me didn’t want to go to the prison to see Ted in a cage, but my heart said go. After the first of the year, he would be taken to Colorado to stand trial, and it would be harder to see him there. Once again I had to battle the warden’s office; Kim Andrews was still the one woman on his visitors’ list, and they didn’t think exceptions should be made. But permission was finally granted and a time set up for my visit.

  There wasn’t much snow on the ground around the prison. It was a bright sunny day and I’d had my eyes dilated early that morning for my annual eye checkup. Even with my shades on, the sun was painful. As I pulled into the parking lot I thought about Gary Gilmore inside there somewhere. He had been sentenced to death, and he said that he looked forward to dying. I was appalled that Utah might be the first state to begin executing people again.

  Ted was in maximum security after his escape attempt, and that was in a different building. I was much calmer checking in than I had been the last time, though my pupils felt like fifty-cent pieces and I wanted to tell the guard that I wasn’t on drugs. But he, like everyone else I had dealt with at the prison, treated me as if I were some subnormal category of being, as if real people never went to prison and real people never came to visit them.

  We had the visiting room all to ourselves. Ted was wearing what looked like white pajamas and he had a mustache. He looked great. The first topic of conversation was my hair. After wearing it long and straight forever, I’d had it cut long but really curly. We hung all over each other. When our hour was up, the guard shouted that it was time to go. Ted groaned and asked if we could have more time. To my surprise, the guard gave us another fifteen minutes. “There are some nice ones,” Ted told me.

  After much more than fifteen minutes, the guard said, “That’s it.”

  “Five more minutes,” Ted said. “We’ve got some crying to do.” We had cried some as we talked—and laughed, too—and we cried when we said goodbye. It wasn’t the gut-wrenching feeling that had gripped us last summer, but it was still hard. We walked with our arms around each other over to the gate back into “max.” It still amazed me how well our bodies fit together. We embraced and kissed for so long I thought maybe the guard would come with orders to break it up. I turned and walked away. I didn’t look back.

  One morning in January, the first thing I heard when my clock radio came on was the news that Gary Gilmore had been executed by firing squad in Utah at the same prison where Ted was held. It was so real that I felt too sick to face the world another day. There had been a time when I didn’t pay any attention to news of murders and criminals. Now I seemed to be affected by every murder I read about in the paper. I felt the horror of the victims, the anguish of their families, the sickness of the murderers, the disbelief of the criminals’ families and friends. I despaired at what human beings do to other human beings.

  At the end of January, Ted was moved to Colorado. He complained of the jail conditions, especially after he was moved to Glenwood Springs because the Aspen jail had been found unfit for long-term prisoners. The one good thing about Glenwood Springs was that he had access to a phone. He called me collect at least once a week, sometimes two or three times. I liked talking to him, but I felt weighted down by the calls. I knew the satisfying way we connected robbed me of the motivation to get out in the world and make some real friendships with people who were part of my day-to-day life.

  March 1 was the anniversary of the date Ted was convicted. It seemed as if there had never been a time when he hadn’t been in trouble.

  In April, I celebrated my first year of sobriety with another day of profound depression. I burst into tears when called on to speak at my recovery group.

  In May, on Mother’s Day, my car was stolen from in front of my house. The next day the police found it on a school playground. That same afternoon I got a call from my high school sweetheart, Ben. Wh
en I went away to college I jilted him, not once but several times. I would call him up and ask him to come back and then drop him again. He was such a funny, kind, ambitious guy. The instant I heard his voice, I knew he had come to take me away from the chaos, back into the simple life of high school and 1962. He had married, he said, had kids, and was now divorced. He was in Seattle on business. We got together and had a fine time hashing over old times. We made tentative plans for me to visit him in San Francisco when Molly was visiting her dad in the summer. I was happy about the whole thing, pleased that when Ted called I was able to keep it from him. I talked to Ted so often and for so long that there wasn’t anything he didn’t know about my life. I didn’t want him to know about Ben because then he would barrage me with letters about being in the arms of another, et cetera, and I wanted to be free to do whatever I liked.

  Just about the time that Ben was due back in Seattle, Ted jumped out of a courtroom window in Aspen and escaped. He was recaptured after six days during which time I worried that he would contact me and ask for help. Knowing that I would have no choice but to turn him in, I prayed that he would never put me in that position.

  Back in prison, he called a few days later. He didn’t want to talk about the escape other than to joke about falling out of a window and wandering around senseless in the Rocky Mountains. I told him as gently as I could that I was involved with someone. I didn’t want him to hurt, but I wanted to go my own way. He wrote to me:

  While I cannot now or ever be able to fully comprehend or accept the reality of you loving, touching, laughing with and caring for another man, I know now that such an inevitability must be dealt with on the kind of understanding level which knows your happiness is my ultimate concern. So I understand.

  Shortly after that, Ben told me I had too many problems for him, and he dropped me.

  Ted continued to call, and as usual, it was Ted I turned to for understanding and support when I hurt. I told him that the “someone” was my high school boyfriend and he laughed. He told me more about what happened when he looked up his old flame, Susan Phillips.

  Old lovers are too often vehicles to the serene, uncomplicated long ago dream world of lost youth, and like old used cars, old lovers too often have too many miles on them to make the trip back.

  I bought a new house, got a promotion at work, and no longer hated myself every minute of every day.

  After I moved into my new house, Angie came for a visit. She had moved back to Utah. She had been going through some rough times herself, and as we talked we realized how much we meant to each other. We carefully avoided any mention of Ted, but we fell into a long conversation about life and what it was all about. I was able to share with her the things I had learned in recovery, but my pride wouldn’t let me tell her where these ideas came from or that I was going to meetings to stay sober.

  One of the steps to sobriety is making amends to those you have hurt. For a long time, I foolishly denied that I needed to make amends to anyone. The only person I had hurt with my drinking was myself. But being face to face with Angie and telling her I was sorry for the way things worked out was a tremendous relief. When she went back to Ogden, we ran up big phone bills getting to know each other again.

  Since Ted had been in prison, we had developed a share-the-book program, where we read the same book at the same time and shared our views and ideas. We were reading Shogun, a love story. In one letter Ted quoted a passage describing the hero after his lover had been killed.

  “Many times Blackthorne had looked over his shoulder expecting her to be there, but she was never there and never would be and this did not disturb him. She was with him forever, and he knew he would love her in the good times and the tragic times, even in the winter of his life. She was always on the edge of his dreams. And now those dreams were good, very good. . . .”

  And he added his own words:

  I feel you there, looking over my shoulder, a very powerful force in my life. Even though it is winter in my life, I still need you; I still love you.

  I felt the same way about him; he was always there, looking over my shoulder. I didn’t want to stop loving him or erase the power of his love from my life, but I needed real “in-the-flesh” relationships. So, it was back to therapy.

  The therapist gave me a questionnaire to fill out and another one to give to a person who knew me well. I sent it to Ted. After I turned them in to be scored, the therapist told me I had scored in the ninety-eighth percentile, meaning that if I was in a room with a hundred people, there would be only one person in the room who was more depressed than me.

  One day Ted called me at work and was talking about a friend who had been to see him. I asked him who the friend was, and he hemmed and hawed and then told me it was some guy he had met in Salt Lake City, but I knew he was lying. A woman named Carole Boone had been to see him. I didn’t know who she was, and I didn’t care.

  He wrote me a long mournful letter.

  I was shocked to be confronted with my old self today, my old petty, deceiving self. I was embarrassed, too. . . . It is a humiliating experience to be confronted with a weakness I thought I had corrected. It is a frightening thought to think that I am unable to correct it.

  He wrote about death:

  I am not sure I have the courage for that yet. My instinct to survive is strong, although that instinct seems so pathetic and pointless right now. What for? Who for? I bring pain to you; I bring pain to others who care for me and I bring pain to myself. It is time to rethink this awful experience because the stimulus of standing alone in the face of great odds is not satisfying anymore. It is time to re-evaluate the value of living without being alive. . . . The crazy flow of things seems to have stopped. I want to look around me now. I want to master life and death.

  Shortly before Christmas, Ted’s motion for a change of venue was granted. The trial would be held in Colorado Springs—the prosecutor’s hometown and probably the most conservative place in Colorado. Juries there routinely sentenced people to death. Ted was beside himself. Shortly after this, Colorado’s death penalty was found to be unconstitutional, so that burden was off his mind. He still couldn’t believe that he was to be tried in Colorado Springs. The prosecutor, Milton Blakely, had been loaned to Aspen to prosecute Ted, and now a judge had moved the trial back to Blakely’s hometown.

  Before I left to go to Utah for Christmas, I got a letter from Ted saying there could be no goodbyes, and that whatever happened he wanted to make sure that I knew he loved me and that my memory was with him always. It was the same kind of letter he had been sending me for the past year and a half, and I was resigned to the fact that our relationship would never end. While I was in Utah, he called me at my parents’ house. “It just makes more trouble for me,” I complained.

  He explained that he only wanted to hear my voice one more time.

  “How many times have we gone through this?” I laughed.

  He wasn’t laughing. He was dead serious.

  I was back in Seattle on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve when Detective Keppel called about one o’clock. “Ted’s gone,” he said. “He’s got an eight-hour jump. No one knows where he is.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ted had told me after his first escape in Colorado that he had no regrets about trying to gain his freedom, and that he would do it again if the opportunity arose. According to Keppel, Ted had crawled through a hole in the ceiling of his cell, sometime during the night, and no one had noticed he was gone until noon.

  “If you hear anything,” Keppel said, “call me immediately.”

  I had made plans to spend New Year’s Eve with some girlfriends, and we went out to dinner. Molly was spending the night with one of her friends. When I got home at one in the morning I halfway expected to find Ted in my house. I was a lot more jittery than the last time he’d escaped. I told myself that it was because I was afraid he might seek help from me, but as I lay awake that night, listening to every creak in my new house, I admitt
ed to myself that I might be afraid of Ted. I pushed the thought out of my mind. Ted loved me. He wasn’t capable of murder. I decided I was scared because I felt so vulnerable in this house. In my old place, there were always people around and all the windows were high up off the ground. The next day I nailed my basement windows shut.

  I knew I was overreacting, but my mind kept going back to a phone conversation Ted and I had several months earlier. He told me that some young female hitchhikers had been brought into the jail at Glenwood Springs, and that he could see them from the room where he’d been watching TV. He talked generally about how long it had been since he’d had sex, but his conversation was disoriented, and he seemed kind of weird. It had given me shivers at the time because he hadn’t sounded like the ever-in-control Ted I knew. A letter I received from him in November had bothered me immensely. He was responding to my complaint that I was afraid to establish relationships with people, and he wrote:

  You see yourself withdrawing from people, afraid to establish friendships, loveships (?). I have known people who, without saying a word, radiate vulnerability. Their facial expressions say “I am afraid of you.” These people invite abuse. I don’t know why but they do. Is it their self-concept? By expecting to be hurt do they subtly encourage it? And if some mental switch could be thrown and tomorrow they expected to be happy and excited with each person they met, could that happen, too?

  I didn’t want to fall into the bag that the press and the police were in. They assumed that Ted was a murderer, so everything he said had some weird double meaning to it. But I wished he hadn’t written that.

  On Sunday night there was a news report that Ted had been sighted in Tacoma. I doubted it very much, but as the evening wore on I decided that Ted had to be somewhere, and it could very well be Tacoma. I felt like a fool, but I called the King County Police dispatcher and asked him to call Keppel at home for me. After all I had been through with the King County Police, it wasn’t easy to swallow my pride and ask them for help. As it turned out, Keppel couldn’t be reached, but I talked to the dispatcher for a long time. We agreed that Ted would be crazy to come to the Northwest where his face was so well known. He arranged for the Seattle Police to cruise my neighborhood frequently, and he sent a plainclothes officer over to talk with me. He told me that if I was in trouble, I should open the blinds on the front window as a signal.