As the days passed, my fear subsided. Molly and I talked about all the possibilities and what she should do if any of them occurred. I had to keep reminding myself that Ted loved us and would not hurt us. The first time he escaped, I was secretly happy that he was free, but this time I was frightened. I continued to deny to myself that he was a dangerous person, but that didn’t match up with my gut feeling. At a recovery meeting I met Hank, a man who was handsome, big, and strong. Although we didn’t have a lot in common other than our recovery from alcoholism, he made me feel safe. He began to stay with me even at night.
One day at work I got a call from the prosecutor in Colorado. He wondered if I would be willing to talk with him about what Ted had told me of his upcoming trial. In other words, he wanted to know what I could tell him about Ted’s defense strategy. I thought this was a new low.
Soon the FBI men started coming around during work. I had recently moved into a new office after my department merged with another one. The people I had worked with over the years knew who these good-looking men in three-piece suits were and why they were there, but it puzzled the people I had just gotten to know. Feeling like a sideshow freak, I explained about me and Ted Bundy.
The FBI had entered the search for Ted on the theory that he had fled across state lines. The agent I dealt with must have spent years perfecting his mechanical I-am-the-law manner. He wanted to know about the last time I’d talked with Ted and the last time I’d seen him. Did I ever send him cash? (No.) Did I know he was planning to escape? (No.) Did I know where he was? (No.) He warned me that if I helped Ted or knew where he was and didn’t tell them, I would be guilty of aiding and abetting and would go to prison for it. He didn’t need to tell me that. I may have been screwed up but I wasn’t stupid.
I said something to the agent about not understanding why my life continued to be so chaotic.
“Maybe it’s the company you keep,” he said.
He wanted to know if he could talk with Molly. I thought that was an odd request. She didn’t know where Ted was, but if he thought it would do some good he was welcome to talk with her. He came to our house and asked me to leave the room. Later Molly said that he asked her how she felt about Ted and if he ever touched her body or talked dirty to her. What does that have to do with finding Ted? I wondered. He asked me if he could see the last letter Ted had sent me. Ted had, for the past few months, been sending me Cathy comic strips that he clipped from the newspaper. He said Cathy reminded him of me. She had this self-centered, egomaniac boyfriend named Irving that Ted said was his Siamese twin. This last letter from Ted had several Cathy strips enclosed, and Ted had signed it “Irving.”
The FBI agent pounced on the signature. “Does he go by Irving very often?”
I tried to explain that he never went by the name Irving, that it was a joke, but I saw “Irving” go down in the FBI report as an a/k/a (also known as).
One morning in mid-January I picked up the newspaper and saw a picture of a frightened woman peering out of a gap in the drawn drapes of her sorority house. The story said an intruder had raped and murdered two young women and beaten two others as they slept in their beds at Florida State University in Tallahassee. I previously told the FBI agent that I thought Ted would be found on a university campus somewhere. Now I had the ominous feeling that he was in Tallahassee, the same kind of feeling I’d had when I was handed the composite picture that started all my worries back in 1974.
The agent was scheduled to see me that day, but he didn’t put much stock in my fear that Ted was in Florida. Instead he wanted to know what kind of shoes Ted was fond of, what kind of cars he liked, what kind of music, and what kind of food. The FBI was about to put Ted on their “Ten Most Wanted” list. When I was growing up I got hooked on radio shows—Boston Blackie and others that closed with the line, “If you see anyone matching this description, contact your nearest law enforcement agency immediately.” Now it was happening in real life.
Later that day my mom called me from Utah to tell me that an FBI man had been to see her. She had told him to look for Ted in Florida because of a picture she had seen in the paper that morning. Much later, Keppel told me that he called Florida as soon as he saw the picture of the sorority girl, and told the police to look for Ted Bundy.
Keppel asked me if they could put a “trap” on my phone. A trap differs from a tap in that a trap only tells where calls are coming from, but you can’t listen to the conversation. I thought that Ted would call me sooner or later, so I agreed. In a way, that relieved some of the responsibility for turning him in. The phone company called to discuss the procedure, but the trap had not yet been installed when Ted called me on Thursday, February 16, 1978.
I had just got home from work about five o’clock and was putting my bike away, when a thoroughly shaken Molly told me that Ted was on the phone. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she told me, “so I accepted the charges.”
“You shouldn’t be calling me,” I told him. “There’s a trap on the phone,” I lied.
He was crying. “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m in custody. It’s all over.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Well, I made a deal with the police. They aren’t going to announce my arrest until tomorrow morning so that I can talk with you and my family. It’s going to be bad when it breaks.”
“I’m not going to call up Channel 7,” I told him. “Where are you?”
“Florida—Pensacola.”
“Oh, no! I was hoping you’d be picked up anywhere but Florida. I saw this picture in the paper last month—those sorority women were murdered. I told the FBI that I hoped you weren’t there.”
“It’s going to be bad,” he said, “really bad when it breaks tomorrow. I want you to be prepared. It could be really ugly.”
“Are you a suspect in those murders?” I asked.
“I wish we could sit down . . . alone . . . and talk about things . . . with nobody listening . . . about why I am the way I am.”
There was a long pause. I didn’t want to know but I asked anyway. “Are you telling me . . . that you’re sick?”
“Back off!” he barked. “I meant how come I’ve hurt you so many times.”
I was startled by the abruptness of his answer. I said nothing.
“I wanted to call you on Valentine’s Day,” he said, “but I didn’t quite make it.” Still I said nothing.
“How’s your love life?” he asked. “Anyone new in your life?” I told him that yes, I had fallen in love.
“He’s a lucky guy,” Ted told me. Soon we were talking as freely as we ever had. My friend Hank came into the bedroom where I was and demanded that I get off the phone. Molly had told him that I was talking to Ted. I shook my head, no. Hank stormed out and I soon heard his truck roar away. Ted and I kept talking.
I asked him about his escape from Colorado, but he wouldn’t talk about it. He did talk about his first days of freedom and about sitting in a bar in Michigan and watching the University of Washington Huskies play Michigan in the Rose Bowl. I tried to remember how afraid I had been when he escaped, but it seemed unreasonable now. Soon I heard Hank returning. Ted asked if he could talk with Hank for a minute. Hank looked so agitated that I thought he might throw up, but he was answering “I know” and “I will” to Ted’s exhortations to take good care of me and Molly.
“May God have mercy on your soul,” Hank said and gave the phone back to me.
Ted and I continued to talk. I told him I was surprised that he was back in custody, that I thought he would rather be dead than be a prisoner again.
“I thought so, too,” he told me. “I’m really disappointed in myself. I just didn’t have what it takes to die.”
I wanted to talk more about the circumstances of his arrest, particularly about the murders I’d read about. He told me not to bring it up again, that he didn’t want to talk about it.
“But why are the police waiting till tomorrow to make this public?” I asked. “What
was your end of the bargain?”
“They didn’t know who they had,” he told me. “I’ve been playing with them since Wednesday. I finally told them who I was in exchange for these phone calls.”
We talked for close to an hour and then he told me he had better call his mother. He asked me if he could call me back later, and I told him yes, he could. I would accept the charges.
I lay on my bed exhausted. Molly and Hank wanted to know what he’d said. When I came to the part about calling me back later, they both told me I shouldn’t talk to him again. I knew they were probably right, but I just felt so bad for him.
About an hour later the phone rang again, but this time Hank answered it. Although we had agreed on what he would say, I thought I would pass out when I heard him say, “No, operator, we won’t accept charges.”
I called the FBI and asked them to have Dale Kelly, the agent who had interviewed me, call me back. I wanted to know if Ted was a suspect in the murders I’d read about. Kelly had told me repeatedly to call him if Ted contacted me. I was sure, though, since Ted was in custody, that the FBI was aware of it. I was surprised that at seven o’clock Dale Kelly was still at work. I was even more surprised that Kelly didn’t believe me when I said I had talked to Ted and that he was in custody.
“Where?” he demanded. “How do you know it was Ted? Could it have been an impostor?”
Even after I told him that it was Ted, no doubt in my mind, one hundred percent sure, he continued to ask me, “Are you sure?” He never did answer my question about the Florida State murders.
At 2:00 A.M. the next Saturday, the phone rang. I was out of bed and into the living room before I was even awake. It was a collect call from Ted.
“I want to talk about . . . what we were talking about on Thursday,” he said, haltingly.
“About being sick?” I asked.
“Yes. . . . I’ve been talking with a priest.” He was crying. “I’m going to try to clear things up in a way . . . that I’ll be back in Washington. I have a . . . responsibility . . . to those who have suffered, and I want to reconcile things,” he went on in a weak voice.
“I love you,” I said. “I just don’t know what to say.” Hank had come into the living room and was motioning me to get off the phone. I shot him my fiercest go-to-hell look. I signaled to him to get me a pencil and paper. I knew that I wouldn’t remember what Ted was telling me if I didn’t write it down.
“I was afraid you would have nothing to do with me if I told you.” His voice was so weary that I started to cry. “Didn’t you . . . always think it was possible?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think it could be true. I had my doubts. but . . . I just couldn’t accept it. Sometimes . . . I wondered if it was me . . . that you hated me . . . and wanted to kill me.”
“No. There is something the matter with me. It wasn’t you. It was me. I just couldn’t contain it. I’ve fought it for a long, long time . . . it got too strong. We just happened to be going together when it got under way. I tried, believe me, I tried to suppress it. It was taking more and more of my time. That’s why I didn’t do well in school. My time was being used trying to make my life look normal. But it wasn’t normal. All the time I could feel that force building in me. . . .” His voice faded off for a moment. “You can ask me questions, if you want. I’ll try to answer the best I can.”
I felt a million years old. I wished I could hold him in my arms and rock him back and forth. “What about the Florida murders? . . . Are you going to be charged with those?”
“Oh, Liz. I can’t talk about Tallahassee, but anything else I’ll try to answer.”
“Did you ever . . .” How was I going to put this? “Did you ever want . . . to kill me?”
There was a long, heavy silence. “Well, there was one time when I was really trying hard to control it, so I’d been staying off the streets and trying to feel normal. But it just happened that I was sleeping with you at your house when I felt it coming on. I closed the damper so the smoke couldn’t go up the chimney, and then I left and put a towel in the crack under the door so the smoke would stay in the apartment.”
I remembered that night well. I’d been pretty drunk by the time we climbed into the hide-a-bed in front of the fireplace. I woke up briefly as Ted was leaving, and he told me he was going back to his house to get his fan because the fireplace was backed up. I had sleepily pulled the covers over my head because I couldn’t breathe. But soon I couldn’t breathe under the covers, either. My eyes were running, and I was coughing. I jumped out of bed and threw open the nearest window and stuck my head out. After I had recovered some, I opened all the windows and the doors and broke up the fire the best I could. I had gotten on Ted the next day for not coming back with the fan. As he told me now that he had wanted me to die that night, I almost didn’t believe him. It didn’t fit in with the murders. I thought that maybe he wasn’t willing to talk about any more serious attempts to kill me.
I told him that I sometimes wondered if he used me to touch base with reality, like the night Carol DaRonch was kidnapped and Debbie Kent vanished, and he called me at midnight. Or taking me out for hamburgers after what happened at Lake Sammamish.
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good guess,” he said. “It’s like it’s over. I don’t have a split personality. I don’t have blackouts. I remember everything I’ve done. Like Lake Sammamish. We went out to Farrell’s for ice cream after eating hamburgers. It wasn’t like I had forgotten or couldn’t remember, but it was just over . . . gone . . . the force wasn’t pushing me anymore. I don’t understand it. The force would just consume me. Like one night, I was walking by the campus and I followed this sorority girl. I didn’t want to follow her. I didn’t do anything but follow her and that’s how it was. I’d be out late at night and follow people like that. . . . I’d try not to, but I’d do it anyway.”
“What about Brenda Ball? I remember you took my family and me out for pizza that night and then hurried away only to be late for Molly’s baptism the next day. Is that where you were?”
He mumbled something that I couldn’t understand and then said, “It’s pretty scary, isn’t it?”
“But the police are saying that the murders started in 1969—that’s the year we met. What was it that made it start in ’69?”
“The police are years off,” he told me.
“I thought if you ever got free, you’d never so much as jaywalk to stay free . . . and now this in Florida,” I said.
“I know. Me, too. I loved my freedom. But I have a sickness . . . a disease like your alcoholism . . . you can’t take another drink and with my . . . sickness . . . there is something . . . that I just can’t be around . . . and I know it now.”
I asked him what that was, and he said, “Don’t make me say it.”
Throughout the conversation he kept telling me that I never needed to worry about Molly or myself. He talked of his responsibility to society and again, of arranging things so that he would be back in Washington State. I told him that I wouldn’t be able to visit him in prison except once or twice. He said he wished things were different. I told him I thought he was doing the right thing and that I would pray for him, and we hung up.
I sat on the living room floor huddled in the afghan that Mom made for me. I stared at the floor while scenes of the good times and of the bad times played in my mind like a desolate slide show. I had prayed for so long “to know,” and now the answer killed a part of me. I didn’t learn until later that Ted would be charged with murdering Kimberly Leach, a twelve-year-old girl, the same age as Molly. I thought of Ted’s assurances that I never needed to worry about me or Molly. I didn’t understand Ted Bundy and I never will.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. And one picture of the destruction it caused stays in my mind. Most of the trees had been blown over and burned clean by the blast; the few that remained standing had no branches. The ground was covered with gray ash and mud. The sky matched the
ground.
I looked at that bleak, desolate scene and thought, “That looks like I felt when I finally knew that Ted was a murderer.” How could anyone believe that these things could happen?
The fury of the eruption of this beautiful mountain had destroyed everything in its path. The fury of whatever plagued Ted has destroyed a beautiful man and taken many, many lives with it. I say “whatever” because I am uncomfortable discussing the evil power that I know exists. I don’t like to talk about it, partly because I don’t want to sound like a fanatic, but mostly because it has come too close to mangling my life. I don’t pretend to understand or accept Ted’s compulsion to kill beautiful, vital young women. But I do understand something of compulsion, and I do understand something of what it feels like to repeat compulsive actions over and over again, even though the intention is never to do it again. In my case it was getting drunk repeatedly when I didn’t want to. In Ted’s case it was so much worse.
At times I felt as if I was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with an evil spirit over my sanity, my sobriety, and my soul. Even after years without a drink I find myself thinking how great one glass of white wine would taste. I know where one glass of wine would lead, and I know where these thoughts come from. My spiritual growth is extremely important to me now. I try to live my life according to God’s will. There is comfort in knowing that if I stay sober, the worst is behind me. I have always prayed a lot and still do. I pray for Ted, but I am sickened by him.
I was distraught as the days and then weeks flew by after his last middle-of-the-night phone call. He said he was going to make things right, but nothing happened. Why did he tell me the truth and then not act on it? I felt as if he had laid a burden on me.
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