The Stranger Beside Me

  Ted had next dialed an Oakland residence where none of the occupants had ever heard of Ted Bundy or Stephanie Brooks. The couple who lived there had no contacts in Seattle or Utah, and the man who answered figured it had been a wrong number.

  By the time Ted reached my number in Seattle, he’d been very upset, according to my mother. When I had wondered about the identity of the caller, Ted had never entered my mind. Now, as Kathy asked me about it, I knew that the timing of the midnight call might be imperative. Ted had called me twelve days after Carol DaRonch had escaped her kidnapper, and Debby Kent had vanished. It had been twenty days after Laura Aime disappeared and a month after Melissa Smith was abducted.

  “I wish I’d been home that night,” I told Kathy.

  “So do I.”

  Kathy’s assignments took her to the elder Bundys’ residence in Tacoma. They believed none of the charges against their son. There would be no permission to search their home or the area around their cabin on Crescent Lake. What was unthinkable would not be helped along by the Bundys. And there was no probable cause to obtain search warrants.

  Freda Rogers, Ted Bundy’s landlady for five years, was also fiercely protective of him. From the day he had located his room at 4143 12th N.E., by knocking on doors, Freda had liked him. He had been a good tenant, more like a son than a roomer, often putting himself out to help them. His room in the southwest corner of the old house had rarely been locked, and it was cleaned every Friday by Freda herself. Surely, if he had something to hide, she reasoned, she would have sensed it. “His things are all gone. He moved everything out in September of 1974. Look around, if you like, but you won’t find anything.”

  Detectives Roger Dunn and Bob Keppel checked the Rogerses’ house from top to bottom, even climbing up into the attic. If anything had been hidden up there, the insulation would have been disturbed, and it had not been. They moved over the grounds with metal detectors, looking for spots where something might have been buried. Clothes? Jewelry? Parts of a bicycle? There was nothing.

  Kathy McChesney talked with Meg Anders. Meg produced checks that Ted had written in 1974. They were not incriminating in the least. Simply small checks written for groceries. Meg’s own checks helped her to isolate what she had done on particularly important days and to determine whether she had seen her fiancé on those days.

  Asked about the plaster of Paris she had seen in Ted’s room, Meg said she’d first seen it a long time ago, perhaps in 1970. “But I saw a hatchet under the front seat of his car, a hatchet with a pinkish leather cover, in the summer of 1974, and the crutches. I saw them in May or June of 1974. He said they belonged to Ernst Rogers.

  “We’d been to Green Lake one day. I asked him about the hatchet, because it bothered me. I can’t remember what his explanation was, but it made sense at the time. It was in August of 1974. I’d just come back from a trip to Utah. He was talking about getting a rifle that day. The cleaver, and the meat tenderizer … I saw those when he was packing. And the Oriental knife. He said someone gave him the knife as a present.”

  “Can you think of anything else that bothered you?” McChesney asked.

  “Well, it didn’t then, but he always kept two pair of mechanic’s overalls and a tool box in the trunk of his car.”

  “Did Ted have any friends at Evergreen College in Olympia?”

  “Just Rex Stark, the man he worked with on the Crime Commission. Rex was on the campus in 1973 and 1974, and Ted stayed some nights with him when he worked in Olympia. Rex had a place on a lake there.”

  “Did he have friends in Ellensburg?”

  “Jim Paulus. He knew him from high school. And his wife. We visited them once.”

  Meg knew of no one Ted might know at Oregon State University. No, there had never been any pornography in his room. No, he didn’t own a sailboat, but he had rented one once. Ted often liked to search out lonely country roads when they went on drives.

  “Did he ever go to taverns alone?”

  “Only O’Bannion’s and Dante’s.”

  Meg consulted her diary. There were so many dates to remember.

  “Ted called me from Salt Lake City, on October 18 last year, three times. He was going hunting with my father the next morning. He called me on November 8 after 11:00. (Salt Lake City’s time zone would make it after midnight there.) There was a lot of noise in the background when he called.”

  Melissa Smith vanished on October 18. On November 8, Carol DaRonch was abducted at 7:30, and Debby Kent vanished at 10:30.

  Recalling July 1974, Meg remembered that Ted had gone to Lake Sammamish State Park on July 7, the week before Denise and Janice disappeared. “He told me he was invited to a waterskiing party. When he came over later, he said he hadn’t had a very good time.”

  In fact, there had been no party, although the King County detectives learned later that two couples who knew Ted from Republican Party functions had been at Lake Sammamish waterskiing, and they’d seen Ted walking along the beach alone. “We were surprised to see him there because he was supposed to be at a political meeting in Tacoma that weekend.”

  Asked what he was doing, Ted had responded, “Just walking around.” They had invited him to join them skiing, but he’d demurred because he had no shorts with him. Ted had had a windbreaker slung around his shoulders. They had seen no cast.

  On the next Sunday, the fourteenth, Meg, of course, had seen Ted early in the morning and then again sometime after six when he came to her home to exchange the ski rack and to take her out for hamburgers.

  “My mother always keeps a diary,” Meg said. “My folks came up to visit me on May 23, 1974. On Memorial Day, the twenty-seventh, Ted went with us for a picnic on Dungeness Spit.”

  “What about May 31?” Kathy McChesney asked. That was the night Brenda Ball had vanished from the Flame Tavern.

  “That was the night before my daughter was to be baptized. My parents were still in Seattle and Ted took us all out for pizza, and then dropped us off before nine.” (Brenda had disappeared some time after 2 A.M., twelve miles south of Meg’s apartment five hours later.) Liane had been baptized at 5 P.M. the next day and Ted had arrived to attend the ceremony. Afterward, he stayed at Meg’s place until 11 P.M. “He was very tired, and he fell asleep on the rug that night too,” she told McChesney.

  Meg furnished the name of a woman that Ted had dated during the summer of 1972, a woman who had caused her to break up briefly with her lover. This woman, Claire Forest, was slender, brunette, with her long, straight hair parted in the middle. When she was contacted by detectives, Claire Forest remembered Ted well. Although she had never been seriously interested in him, she said, they had dated often in 1972.

  “He didn’t feel that he fit in with my … my ‘class.’ I guess that’s the only way to describe it. He wouldn’t come to my parents’ home because he said he just didn’t fit in.”

  Claire recalled that she had once taken a drive with Ted, a drive over country roads in the Lake Sammamish area. “He told me that someone, an older woman—I think he said his grandmother—lived around there, but he couldn’t find the house. I finally got fed up with it and asked him what the address was, but he didn’t know.”

  Ted, of course, had no grandmother near Lake Sammamish.

  Claire Forest said that she had had intercourse with Bundy on only one occasion, and although he had always been tender and affectionate with her before, that sex act itself had been harsh.

  “We went on a picnic in April on the Humptulips River, and I had quite a lot of wine. I was dizzy, and he kept dunking my head under. He was trying to untie the top of my bikini. He couldn’t manage it, and he suddenly pulled my bikini bottom off and had intercourse with me. He didn’t say anything, and he had his forearm pressed under my chin so hard that I couldn’t breathe. I kept telling him I couldn’t breathe but he didn’t let up the pressure until he was finished. There was no affection at all.

  “Afterward, it was like it had never happened. We drove home a
nd he talked about his family … everyone but his father.

  “I broke up with him because of his other girlfriend. She was almost hysterical when she found me with him once.”

  Claire Forest was not the only woman who would recall that Ted Bundy’s manner could change suddenly from one of warmth and affection to cold fury. On June 23, 1974, Ted had shown up at the home of a young woman, a woman who had known him on a platonic basis since 1973. She introduced him to a friend of hers, Lisa Temple. Ted didn’t seem particularly interested in Lisa, but, later, he invited the two women and another male friend to go on a raft trip with him on June 29. The two couples had dinner with friends in Bellevue on June 28, spent the night, and set out the next morning for Thorpe, Washington. The man who accompanied them was later to recall that, while searching for matches, he had found a pair of pantyhose in the glove box of Ted’s Volkswagen. He had grinned and thought nothing of it.

  The raft trip had started out with great hilarity, but, halfway down river, Ted’s attitude had changed suddenly and he seemed to delight in tormenting Lisa. He insisted that she ride through the white water on an inner-tube tied behind the raft. Lisa had been terrified, but Ted had only stared at her coldly. The other couple was ill at ease too. Ted had put the raft into the water at Diversion Dam, a dangerous stretch where rafts were rarely launched.

  They had made it, finally, through the rough water with both girls thoroughly frightened. Ted had had no money, so Lisa bought dinner in North Bend for the quartet. “He drove me home,” she remembers, “and he was nice again. He said he would be back about midnight. He did come back, and we made love. That’s the last time I ever saw him. I just couldn’t understand the way he kept changing. One minute, he was nice, and the next he acted like he hated me.”

  Kathy McChesney located Beatrice Sloane, the elderly woman who’d befriended Ted when he worked at a Seattle yacht club.

  “Oh, he was a schemer,” the old woman recalled. “He could talk me out of anything.”

  Mrs. Sloane’s recollections of Ted and Stephanie corresponded with what Kathy had already learned about that early romance. There was no question that the woman had known Ted, and known him quite well. Kathy drove her around the University District and she pointed out addresses where Ted had lived when she knew him. She recounted the things she’d loaned him: the china, silver, money. She recalled rides she’d given him when he had no car. He seemed to have been like a grandson to her, a highly manipulative grandson.

  “When was the last time you saw him?” McChesney asked.

  “Well, I saw him twice, actually, in 1974. I saw him in the Albertson’s store at Green Lake in July, and he had a broken arm then. Then I saw him on the ‘Ave’ about a month later and he told me he was leaving soon to go to law school in Salt Lake City.”

  The King County detectives contacted Stephanie Brooks, happily married now, and living in California. She recalled her two romances with Ted Bundy—their college days, and their “engagement” in 1973. She had never known about Meg Anders. She had simply come to the conclusion that Ted had courted her a second time solely to get revenge. She felt lucky to be free of him.

  There seemed to be two Ted Bundys emerging. One, the perfect son, the University of Washington student who had graduated “with distinction,” the fledgling lawyer and politician, and the other, a charming schemer, a man who could manipulate women with ease, whether it be sex or money he desired, and it made no difference if the women were eighteen or sixty-five. And there was, perhaps, a third Ted Bundy, a man who turned cold and hostile toward women with very little provocation.

  He had juggled his concurrent engagements with Meg and Stephanie so skillfully that neither of them knew of the other’s existence. Now, it seemed that he had lost them both. Stephanie was married, and Meg declared that she no longer wanted to marry Ted. She was deathly afraid of him. Yet, within a matter of weeks, she would take him back and blame herself for ever doubting him.

  As far as women went, Ted always had a backup. Even as he sat in the Salt Lake County Jail, unaware that Meg had talked volubly about him to detectives, he had the emotional support of Sharon Auer. Sharon seemed to have fallen in love with him. I would soon realize that it was not prudent to mention Sharon’s name to Meg, or to speak of Meg to Sharon.

  It is interesting to note that through all the trials, through all the years of black headlines that would label Ted a monster, and worse, he would always have at least one woman entranced with him, living for the few moments she could visit him in jail, running errands for him, and proclaiming his innocence. The women would change as time passed. Apparently, the emotions he provoked in them would not.

  19

  TED HAD HIS DETRACTORS as he languished in jail in Salt Lake City during the fall of 1975, but he had his staunch supporters, too. One of them was Alan Scott, the cousin he’d grown up with since he’d moved to Tacoma when he was four years old. Scott, himself a teacher of disturbed youngsters, insisted that he had never detected the slightest signs of deviant behavior in Ted. He, his sister Jane, and Ted had always been close, closer than Ted had ever been with his half-brothers and -sisters. His cousins were not Bundys, and Ted had never really felt part of the Bundy clan.

  It is ironic then that Jane and Alan Scott would prove to be further links in the chain of circumstantial evidence tying Ted to the missing Washington girls. They did not serve as links willingly. Indeed, they believed in his innocence completely. They worked to solicit funds for Ted’s defense, and many of his old friends contributed.

  Dr. Patricia Lunneborg of the psychology department at the University of Washington stated flatly that Ted Bundy could not possibly be a killer, and said that there was absolutely no reason to believe that he had ever known Lynda Ann Healy, despite the fact that they had both taken abnormal psychology (Psych. 499) in the winter and spring quarters of 1972. “There are hundreds of students, in many different sections of 499,” she said scornfully. “There’s no way to prove they were in the same sections.”

  Lunneborg said she intended to do everything she could to support Bundy against the ridiculous charges and innuendos about him.

  But there was another link between Bundy and Lynda Ann Healy, and that link was through his cousin Jane. When Lynda had lived in McMahon Hall, her roommate was the woman who would later be Jane Scott’s roommate. Detective Bob Keppel located Jane on a fishing boat in Alaska and interviewed her in a phone call to Dutch Harbor.

  Jane was not a willing witness. She too said her cousin had been normal, kind, and not the kind of boy or man who would kill. She had seen him, she said, three or four times during the first half of 1974. Jane had met Lynda Healy. She could not recall if Ted had. Yes, there had been some parties over the years, but she didn’t know for sure if Ted had ever attended the same parties that Lynda had.

  “Did you ever speak of Lynda’s disappearance to Ted?” Keppel asked.

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly. “But I can’t remember anything specific. We just talked about what a terrible thing it was.”

  Alan Scott was even less cooperative, an understandable position. Alan had lived at Freda Rogers’s home from September 1971 to February 1972. He and Ted had remained in close contact, and Alan had talked to Ted within days of the disappearances of Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, Georgeann Hawkins, Denise Naslund, and Janice Ott. “He was relaxed, happy, excited about going to law school in Utah, and looking forward to marrying Meg.”

  Scott didn’t add that a man who had abducted and killed young women couldn’t have acted so calm, but that was his implication. Scott had gone sailing with his cousin on Lake Washington, and they often hiked together.

  “Where?” Keppel asked.

  “In the Carbonado area. And off Highway 18 near North Bend.”

  Taylor Mountain, the resting place of four of the Washington victims’ skulls, was off Highway 18 near North Bend.

  Keppel said quietly, “When did you hike up there?”

  “July 197
2 through the summer of 1973.”

  Scott did not want to show the King County detectives just where they had hiked. He was reluctant to incriminate his cousin and, in the end, it would take a subpoena to make him lead them over the trails that had become familiar to Bundy.

  On November 26, 1975, a subpoena was served on Alan Scott and he accompanied Bob Keppel to the area where he had hiked with Ted. They drove toward Taylor Mountain, and Scott pointed out rough fields and woods along the Fall City-Duvall Road, and the Issaquah-Hobart Road. “Ted knew the roads around here, and we drove around in my car, looking at old farms and barns. There was one place with a great footbridge along the Fall City-Preston Road. That’s the only time we really got out and hiked.” He pointed out the road, three-quarters of a mile north of Preston. “We hiked about two hours up the hillside.”

  The area was only a few miles from Taylor Mountain.

  Apparently, the region between Issaquah and North Bend had been a favorite haunt of Ted’s. He had driven both Claire Forest and Meg there, mentioned it to his elderly woman friend, and he had taken his cousin there. He had gone to Lake Sammamish State Park, alone, only a week before July 14. Was it merely a coincidence or was it meaningful to the investigation?

  Contrary to published reports, there were some eyewitness identifications of Ted Bundy. One witness was “contaminated,” however, by the zeal of a newswoman. When Ted was arrested in the DaRonch kidnapping case, the television reporter rushed to the home of one of the women who had been approached by the stranger at Lake Sammamish on July 14. The anchorwoman held out a photo of Ted Bundy, and asked, “Is this the man who asked you to help him?”