The Stranger Beside Me

  I felt somewhat better after that visit. I would try not to look ahead, but I would keep up my contacts with Ted. He knew about my book contract. I hadn’t lied. If he chose to stay close to me, then I would let him call the shots.

  17

  IF I WAS FEELING GUILTY and somewhat disloyal to Ted during the fall of 1975, Meg Anders was going through sheer hell. The information she had given to the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office had been discounted until Ted’s first arrest on August 16. Now, detectives in Utah, Colorado, and Washington were anxious to know everything Meg remembered about Ted, all the bits and pieces of information that had made her suspect her lover. They were trying to find the man responsible for the most brutal series of killings in their memories, and it looked very much indeed as if Ted Bundy was that man. Ted’s privacy and Meg’s privacy did not matter any longer.

  Meg had adored Ted from the moment she met him in the Sandpiper Tavern. She never had been able to understand what it was that made him stay with her. She’d had an overwhelming sense of failure for most of her life. She’d always felt she was the one member of her immediate family who hadn’t lived up to their expectations. Everyone but Meg worked in a prestigious profession, and she considered herself “only a secretary.” The love of a brilliant man like Ted had helped to assuage her feelings of inferiority, and she was about to see that relationship exposed to merciless probing.

  Neither the Salt Lake County investigators nor the Seattle Task Force detectives liked what they had to subject Meg Anders to, the questioning that would delve into the most intimate details of her life and the slow tearing down of all that she had built up in the six years before. But one thing was apparent. Meg Anders knew more about the hidden Ted Bundy than anyone alive, with the possible exception of Ted himself.

  On September 16, Jerry Thompson and Dennis Couch from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office and Ira Beal from the Bountiful, Utah, Police Department had flown to Seattle to talk with Meg. They had first spoken with her father in Utah, who suggested that it might be of inestimable value to the investigation if they would speak directly with Meg.

  Thompson was aware that Meg’s doubts about Ted had predated the murders in Utah, had gone all the way back to the disappearance of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in July of 1974.

  The three Utah detectives met Meg in an interview room in the King County Police Major Crime Unit’s offices. They noted her nervousness from the terrible emotional strain she was under. But they also saw that she was determined to lay out all the information that had led her, finally, to the police.

  Meg lit a cigarette. She stated firmly that she did not want the proceedings recorded on tape.

  “Ted went out a lot in the middle of the night,” she began. “And I didn’t know where he went. Then he napped during the day. And I found things, things that I couldn’t understand.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “A lug wrench, taped halfway up, under the seat of my car. He said it was for my protection. Plaster of Paris in his room. Crutches. He had an Oriental knife in a kind of wooden case that he kept in the glove compartment of my car. Sometimes, it was there. Sometimes it was gone. He had a meat cleaver. I saw him pack it when he moved to Utah.”

  Meg related that Ted had never been with her on the nights the girls in Washington had vanished. “After I saw the composite pictures of ‘Ted’ in the paper in July of 1974, I checked back through the papers in the library to get the dates the girls disappeared, and I checked my calendar and my canceled checks, and he just … well, he just was never around then.”

  Meg said she had been more afraid after her friend, Lynn Banks, returned from Utah in November of 1974. “She pointed out that the cases down there were just like the ones up here, and she said, ‘Ted’s in Utah now.’ That’s when I called my father and asked him to get in touch with you down there.

  “Will you tell Ted that I’ve told you all this?” Meg asked Thompson, as she lit another cigarette.

  “No, we won’t,” the detective promised. “What about you? Will you tell him?”

  “I really don’t think I will. I keep praying about it, and I keep praying you’ll find out. And I guess I keep hoping that you’ll find out it’s not Ted, that it’s someone else … but deep down, I’m just not sure.”

  Asked to explain her doubts in detail, Meg talked about the plaster of Paris she’d seen in Ted’s room at Freda Rogers’s. “I confronted him about it, and he told me he’d stolen it from that medical supply place where he was working. He said he didn’t know why. ‘Just for the hell of it,’ he said. He said the crutches were for his landlord.”

  Meg said that she’d once found a paper sack full of women’s clothing in Ted’s room. “The top item was a bra, a large size bra. The rest was just clothing, girls’ clothes. I never asked him about it. I was afraid, and kind of embarrassed.”

  The detectives asked Meg if Ted had changed in any way in the last year or so, and she told them that his sexual drive had diminished to almost nothing during the summer of 1974. She told them of his explanations about work pressures. “He said there was no other woman.”

  The questions were excruciatingly embarrassing for Meg.

  “Had he changed in any other way, in his sexual interests?”

  She looked down. “He got this book, this Joy of Sex book, sometime in December 1973. He read about anal intercourse, and he insisted on trying it. I didn’t like it, but I went along with him. Then there was something in that book about bondage. He went right to the drawer where I kept my nylons. He seemed to know which drawer they were in.”

  Meg said she had allowed herself to be tied to the four bedposts with the nylon stockings before having sex. The whole thing had been distasteful to her. She had acquiesced three times, but, during the third occasion, Ted had started to choke her, and she’d panicked. “I wouldn’t do that anymore. He didn’t say much, but he was unhappy with me when I said, ‘No more.’”

  “Anything else?”

  Meg was mortified, but she continued. “Sometimes, after I was asleep at night, I’d wake up and find him under the covers. He was looking at … at my body … with a flashlight.”

  “Does Ted like your hair the way it is now?” Ira Beal asked. Meg’s hair was long and straight, parted in the center.

  “Yes. Whenever I talk about cutting it, he gets very upset. He really likes long hair. The only girl I’ve seen—for sure— that he dated besides me has hair just like mine.”

  The three detectives exchanged glances.

  “Does Ted always tell you the truth?” Thompson asked.

  Meg shook her head. “I’ve caught him in several lies. He told me that he was arrested down there for a traffic violation, and I told him I knew that wasn’t the truth, that there’d been items in the car that looked like burglary tools. He just said they didn’t mean too much, that it was an illegal search.”

  Meg told them that she knew Ted had stolen in the past. “I know he stole a television in Seattle and some other things. One time, just one time, he told me if I ever told anyone about it, that he’d … break my fucking neck.”

  Meg said that she was in constant touch with Ted, that she had spoken to him only the night before, and that he’d been his old, tender self again, telling her how much he loved her, planning their marriage. “He needs money: $700 for his attorney, $500 for tuition. He still owes Freda Rogers $500.”

  Meg knew too that Ted’s cousin had told him that he was illegitimate when Ted was eighteen or nineteen. “It really upset him. Nobody had ever told him before.”

  “Does Ted ever wear a mustache?” Beal asked her suddenly.

  “No, sometimes a full beard. Oh, he had a fake mustache. He used to keep it in his drawer. Sometimes he stuck it on and asked me how he looked in it.”

  The interview ended. Meg had smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. She had pleaded with the Utah investigators to tell her that Ted could not be involved, but they couldn’t.

  Th
e picture of Ted Bundy that was emerging was far different from that of the perfect son, the modem day prototype of a Horatio Alger hero.

  Meg Anders was living a dual existence, something that was intolerable for her, something that was standard for her lover. She talked often to Ted on the phone, and he played down the police interest in him, even though, as he talked, he was under constant surveillance by the Utah lawmen. And she continued to answer questions put to her by the detectives who were trying to place him during all those essential time periods, some of them now a year and a half before.

  July 14, 1974, was an infamous day in Washington—the day that Janice Ott and Denise Naslund had vanished from Lake Sammamish State Park.

  Meg remembered that Sunday. “We’d had an argument the night before. I was surprised to see him that morning. He came over, and I told him I was going to church and then planned to lie out in the sun. We quarreled again that morning. We just weren’t getting along. I was really surprised to see him later.”

  Ted had called Meg sometime after six that evening and asked her to go out to eat.

  “Was there anything unusual about him that night?”

  “He looked exhausted, really wiped out. He was getting a bad cold. I asked him what he’d done that day because he was so tired out, and he said he’d just lain around all day.”

  Ted had removed a ski rack from his car—a rack that belonged to Meg—and placed it back on her car that night. After they’d gone out to eat, he’d fallen asleep on her floor, and gone home at 9:15.

  Beal and Thompson wondered if it was possible. Could a man leave his girlfriend on a Sunday morning, abduct, rape, and kill two women, and then return casually to his girlfriend’s home and take her out to dinner? They questioned Meg again about Bundy’s sex drive. Was he—they tried to phrase it tactfully—was he the kind of man who normally had several orgasms in a period of lovemaking?

  “Oh, a long time ago, when we first started going together. But no, not lately. He was just normal.”

  Thompson made a decision. He pulled out a picture of all the items found in Ted’s car when he’d been arrested by Sergeant Bob Hayward on August 16. Meg studied them.

  “Have you ever seen any of these things?”

  “I haven’t seen that crowbar. I’ve seen the gloves, and the gym bag. Usually, it’s empty. He carries his athletic supplies in it.”

  “Did you ever confront him about the taped lug wrench that you found in your car?”

  “Yeah, he said you never know when you can get caught in the middle of a student riot.”

  “Where was it kept?” Thompson asked.

  “Usually in the trunk of my car. He borrowed my car a lot. It was a Volkswagen Bug too, a tan one. Once, I saw the wrench under the seat in front.”

  Meg recalled that Ted had often slept in his car in front of her house. “I don’t know why. He was just there. This was a long time ago, and there was a crowbar or a tire iron or something that he left in my house one night. I heard him come back in, and I opened the door to see what he wanted. He looked really sick, like he was hiding something, and I said, ‘What have you got in your pocket?’ He wouldn’t show me. I reached in and pulled out a pair of surgical gloves. Weird. He didn’t say anything. It seems incredible now that I didn’t just say, ‘Go away.’”

  It was weird. But, until the events of 1974 and 1975, Meg had never connected Ted’s nocturnal habits to anything definite. Like so many other women in love, she had simply put it all out of her mind.

  18

  TED WROTE ME in October 1975 that he felt as if he were “in the eye of a hurricane,” and, indeed, he had been in the center of some manner of storm ever since his arrest in August. I hadn’t known of this arrest until he phoned me at the end of September, and he had shrugged it off, just as he had with Meg and his other Washington friends.

  It would be a long time before I learned of the investigation that went on throughout the entire autumn. Once in a great while in the years ahead, a detective would let something slip, and then say hastily, “Forget I said that.” I didn’t forget, but I didn’t tell anyone what I’d heard, and I most assuredly didn’t write anything about it. Occasionally, odd bits and pieces would leak to the press, but the entire story would never be known to me until after the Miami trial, four years hence. As it was, having only fragments of the story, I tried to withhold judgment.

  Had Ted been a complete stranger to me—as all the other suspects I’d written about had been—resolution of my feelings might have come sooner. I don’t believe it was because I was dense. Better minds than mine continued to support him.

  As I wrote about other predators, I found myself wondering if any of those men could be responsible for the murders Ted was accused of. I checked to see where they were on the dates in question. But each man had solid alibis during the time of the “Ted” crimes.

  By the fall of 1975, there were more than a dozen detectives in Washington, Utah, and Colorado working full-time investigating Ted Bundy: Captain Pete Hayward and Detective Jerry Thompson from the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. Detective Mike Fisher from the Pitkin County District Attorney’s Office in Aspen, Colorado. Detective Sergeant Bill Baldridge from the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. Detective Milo Vig from the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office in Grand Junction, Colorado. Detective Lieutenant Ron Ballantyne and Detective Ira Beal from the Bountiful, Utah, Police Department. Captain Nick Mackie and Detectives Bob Keppel, Roger Dunn, and Kathy McChesney from the King County, Washington, Sheriff’s Office. Detective Sergeant Ivan Beeson and Detectives Ted Fonis and Wayne Dorman from the Seattle Police Homicide Unit.

  Ted stated to Jerry Thompson and John Bernardo that he had never been to Colorado, and he explained away the maps and brochures of the ski areas by saying, “Somebody must have left them in my apartment.”

  Mike Fisher, in checking Bundy’s credit card slips, found that that was not true. Moreover he was able to place Bundy’s car, the VW Bug, bearing two separate sets of plates, in Colorado on the very days that the victims in that state had vanished, and within a few miles of the sites of the disappearances.

  The Chevron Oil Company duplicate records noted that Ted had purchased gas as follows: on January 12, 1975 (the day Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn), in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. On March 15, 1975 (the day Julie Cunningham walked away from her apartment forever), in Golden, Dillon, and Silverthorne, Colorado. On April 4, 1975, in Golden, Colorado. On April 5 in Silverthorne. And on April 6 (the day Denise Oliverson vanished) in Grand Junction, Colorado.

  But only once had “Ted” been seen, and that was in Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974. The King County detectives began to chart as much of Ted Bundy’s life as they could ferret out. That was why his law school records had been subpoenaed. Because their probe into Ted had been carried out with a minimum of fanfare, Detective Kathy McChesney had been very startled when I had called her at Ted’s behest. The investigators had not known that Ted was even aware that he was under suspicion in Washington.

  At the same time that Ted’s Utah law school records were subpoenaed, his telephone records were requested from Mountain Bell in Salt Lake City, records going back to September 1974 when he’d first moved to Utah.

  Kathy McChesney asked if I would come in for an interview in early November 1975. She had been given the assignment of interviewing the women Ted had known in Seattle, however peripherally.

  Again, I repeated—this time for the record—the circumstances under which I’d met Ted, our work at the Crisis Clinic, our close, but sporadic, friendship over the intervening years.

  “Why do you think he called you just before his arrest in Salt Lake City?” she asked.

  “I think it was because he knew that I worked with you all the time, and I don’t think he wanted to talk to detectives directly.”

  Kathy thumbed through a stack of papers, pulled one out, and said suddenly, “What did Ted say to you when he called you on November
20, 1974?”

  I looked at her blankly. “When?”

  “Last year on November 20.”

  “Ted didn’t call me,” I answered. “I hadn’t talked to Ted since sometime in 1973.”

  “Yes, we have his telephone records. There’s a call to your number a little before midnight on Wednesday, November 20. What did he say?”

  I had known Kathy McChesney since we had both been in the King County Police Basic Homicide School in 1971 (she as a deputy sheriff and myself as an invited “auditor”). She had been promoted to detective, although she looked more like a high school girl, and she was sharp. I’d interviewed her countless times when she worked in the Sex Crimes Unit. I wasn’t trying to evade her question, but I was puzzled. It’s difficult to remember what you were doing on a particular date a whole year before.

  And then it dawned on me. “Kathy, I wasn’t home that night. I was in the hospital because I’d had an operation the day before. But my mother told me about a funny call. It was a call from a man who wouldn’t leave his name, and … yeah, it was on November 20.”

  That mystery was solved, but I have often wondered since if the events to follow might have somehow been different if I had been home to take that call. In the years ahead, I would receive dozens of phone calls from Ted—calls from Utah, Colorado and Florida—as well as scores of letters, and we would have several face-to-face meetings. I would be caught up in his life again, torn between complete belief in him and the doubts that grew stronger and stronger.

  Kathy McChesney believed me. I’d never lied to her and I never would. If I’d known it was Ted who had called me, I would have told her.

  Ted also made two other calls on the night of November 20, two calls between eleven and midnight. Although he had broken his “secret” engagement to Stephanie Brooks in January of that year and sent her away without any apologies or explanations, he had placed a call to her parents’ home in California at 11:03 P.M. Stephanie hadn’t been there. A woman friend of the family recalled that she talked to a friendly sounding man who asked for Stephanie. “I told him that Stephanie was engaged, and living in San Francisco … and he hung up.”