The Stranger Beside Me

  As I drove the twenty-five miles, I realized that no one knew I was meeting Ted. I also knew somehow that he had lost his ever-present surveillance team. When he walked up to meet me a little after noon at the tavern that was a popular watering hole for soldiers from nearby Fort Lawton, I looked up and down the street for the sneaker cars that I had long since learned to recognize. There were none.

  He grinned. “I lost ’em. They aren’t as clever as they think they are.”

  We found a table on the other side of the tavern from the shouting soldiers. I had a package under my arm, a dozen copies of magazines with my stories in them that I’d picked up from the post office. It wasn’t until Ted had glanced at it several times that I realized he suspected I might have a tape recorder. I ripped open the package and handed him a magazine.

  He seemed to relax.

  We talked for five hours. My memory of that long conversation is just that. It is indicative of my belief at that time in his innocence that I didn’t bother to jot down notes when I got home. In many ways, it was a much more relaxed meeting than the earlier lunch. Again, we drank white wine, so much white wine for Ted at least, that by the end of the afternoon, he was unsteady on his feet.

  Because of the wine, or perhaps because we’d gotten past our first meeting since his arrest, Ted seemed less edgy than he had been before. Considering the turns that our conversation took, this was remarkable, and yet I felt able to bring things up that might well have angered him.

  The din on the other side of the tavern seemed far away. No one could overhear us. A fake gas log blazed merrily in the fireplace next to our table. And, as always, rain droned steadily down outside.

  I asked Ted at one point, “Ted, do you like women?”

  He considered the question and said slowly, “Yes … I think I do.”

  “You seem to care for your mother. I guess it all goes back to that. Remember, when you told me how you found out for sure that you were illegitimate, and I reminded you that your mother had always kept you with her, no matter how difficult it might have been for her?”

  He nodded. “Yes, she did. I remember when we talked about that.”

  He volunteered information. He told me that it had been Meg who had turned him in to the police. I felt the old tug of guilt because he didn’t know that I had given them his name too. He evidently thought I was privy to more information than I really was. “Those crutches in my room—the crutches she told them about. Those were for my landlord. I used to work for a medical supply house, and I got them and the plaster of Paris there.”

  I didn’t show it, but I was surprised. I hadn’t heard about the crutches or the plaster of Paris, and I certainly didn’t know that Meg had gone to the police.

  Ted seemed to have no rancor at all toward Meg, who had plunged him into about as much trouble as a man can be in. His mild, forgiving stance seemed inappropriate. I wondered what Meg had told detectives about him. I wondered how he could forgive her so easily. Here he was telling me that he loved her more than he ever had, and yet, if it were not for Meg, he would not be on his way back to Utah in a few days to stand trial for kidnapping. The most he would have had to worry about were the charges of evading an officer and possession of burglary tools.

  I would have thought most men would have despised a woman who had done that to them, but Ted talked of the wonderful times they had had together while he was home during Christmas, and of their closeness, even though they were constantly followed by police.

  It was too mystifying for me to even question him about. It was something I would have to ponder on. I nodded agreement when he asked me to look after Meg, to see that she had someone to talk to.

  “She’s shy. You call her, will you? Talk to her.”

  Ted was still confident. It seemed as though the trial in Salt Lake City was more of a challenge than a threat. He was like an athlete about to enter the Olympics. He would show them.

  At one point during that long afternoon, I got up to go to the ladies’ room, walked by tables full of half-drunk soldiers, and past a couple of dozen people who hadn’t seemed to recognize Ted as the infamous Ted Bundy. As I walked back to our table, suddenly someone was behind me, his hands lightly gripping my waist. I jumped, and then I heard a laugh. Ted had come up behind me, so quietly that I hadn’t even realized he’d left the table. Later, I learned that Ted enjoyed sneaking up on women (according to Meg and Lynn Banks), that he delighted in leaping out at them from behind bushes and hearing them scream. And I remembered how he had startled me that day in the tavern.

  As the afternoon lengthened and it grew dark outside, with the impenetrable murkiness of a January night in Seattle, I decided to tell Ted where I stood. I chose my words as carefully as possible. I was probably more honest with him about my feelings than I would ever be again. I told him about my visit to the psychiatrist and about my dilemma in being fair to him, while I knew I had a book contract on the story of the missing girls.

  He seemed to understand completely. His manner with me was the same as it had been five years before when I’d talked about my problems in the Crisis Clinic offices. He assured me he could relate to my ambivalence.

  “And, you know … I have to tell you this,” I continued. “I cannot be completely convinced of your innocence.”

  He smiled. The same flat response I was to grow used to.

  “That’s O.K. I can understand that. There are … things I’d like to tell you, but I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I just can’t.”

  I asked him why he didn’t just take a polygraph examination and get it over with.

  “My lawyer, John Henry Browne, feels that it’s best.”

  It was a paradox in itself that Browne should be advising Ted. Ted hadn’t been charged with anything in Washington, although he certainly was under continued surveillance, and he’d been accused by the press and most of the public. But Browne worked for the Public Defender’s Office, an agency funded to defend suspects actually charged with crimes.

  It seemed to be a game with no rules. It wasn’t usual either for a man to be convicted by the media. Ted had been asked not to use the University of Washington’s Law School library anymore. It frightened women students to see him there.

  “Ted,” I said suddenly. “What did you want when you called me from Salt Lake City that night in November in 1974?”

  “What night?” He seemed puzzled.

  “It was November 20 when I was in the hospital. You talked to my mother.”

  “I never called you then.”

  “I saw the phone records from your apartment phone in Salt Lake City. You called just before midnight.”

  He didn’t seem upset, just stubbornly resistant.

  “The King County Police are lying to you.”

  “But I saw the records.”

  “I never called you.”

  I let it go. Maybe he didn’t remember.

  Ted bragged more about how clever he’d become at losing the men tailing him, of how he taunted them.

  “I know. Billy Baughman says you walked back to his car and asked him if he was with the Mafia or the police, that you just wanted to be sure.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s a Seattle homicide detective. He’s a nice guy.”

  “I’m sure they’re all princes.”

  Ted had talked in any depth to only one of the detectives who dogged his tracks. John Henry Browne had told him not to talk with police, that he was under no obligation to do so, but Roger Dunn had come face to face with him, as Ted parked his car near a friend’s apartment on December 3.

  The two men, hunter and hunted, had stared at each other, and Ted had asked Dunn if he had a warrant.

  “No. I just want to talk to you.”

  “Come on in. I’ll see what I can do.”

  If Dunn had expected any voluntary give and take, he was disappointed. Ted had immediately gone to the phone and called Browne’s office, informing an a
ide that Dunn was with him.

  Before Dunn had finished reading Ted the Miranda warning, Browne called, asked to speak to him, and told him to leave the apartment as soon as possible. He didn’t want Ted talking to any Washington state officers.

  Ted had been more sympathetic. “I’d really like to help you out. I know the pressure on you from the press is heavy. I personally feel no pressure, but I won’t talk to you now. Maybe later, John and I might get in touch with you.”

  “We’d like to eliminate you as a suspect if we could. So far, we haven’t been able to.”

  “I know there are things I know that you don’t know, but I’m not at liberty to discuss them.”

  Roger Dunn had heard much the same sentiment that Ted would repeat to me often, had also noted that Ted would not meet his eyes. And then the interview had quickly ended. Ted had held out his hand and they shook.

  They had taken each other’s measure. They were never to meet again.

  Sitting in the smoky tavern, I felt that there was more Ted wanted to say to me. It was nearing six, and I had promised my son I’d take him to a movie that night for his birthday. Ted didn’t want the visit to end. He asked me if I would go with him someplace to smoke marijuana. I demurred. I didn’t use marijuana, and I had promised my son I’d be home early. And too, although I was not frightened, I may have been a little ill at ease.

  Ted was quite intoxicated as he hugged me outside the tavern, and then disappeared into the misty rain. I would see him again, twice, after we said goodbye, but I would never see him again as a free man.

  21

  IT IS MY BELIEF that Ted’s trial in Salt Lake City on the aggravated kidnapping charge involving Carol DaRonch was the only legal proceeding where he had everything going for him. He had chosen to leave his fate up to a judge alone and to dispense with a jury. On Monday, February 23, 1976, the trial opened in Judge Stewart Hanson’s courtroom.

  Ted was enthusiastic about Hanson’s reputation as a fair-minded jurist. He truly believed that he would walk away a free man. He had John O’Connell on his side, a veteran of twenty-nine murder trials, and considered to be one of the top attorneys in Utah. He had friends in the courtroom: Louise and Johnnie Bundy, Meg, others who had flown in from Seattle, those who still believed in him from Utah: Sharon Auer and the friends who had convinced him to join the Mormon Church shortly before his first arrest.

  But Midvale Chief of Police Louis Smith, Melissa’s father, was also there, as were the parents and friends of Debby Kent and Laura Aime. There could be no charges involving their daughters, but they wanted to see what they felt to be only token justice done.

  In the end, the verdict would depend on the reliability of the eyewitness, Carol DaRonch, and on Ted Bundy’s own testimony. O’Connell had attempted to have Sergeant Bob Hayward’s testimony about Bundy’s arrest on August 16 suppressed, but Hanson refused to do so.

  There was, of course, no mention during that first trial of the other crimes in which Ted Bundy was a prime suspect, and no mention of the fact that the Volkswagen he’d sold to a teenage boy (coincidentally an ex-classmate of Melissa Smith’s) on September 17, 1975, had been seized by the police and systematically ripped apart as criminalists looked for physical evidence that would tie in to other cases in which Ted was suspected.

  Carol DaRonch was not a confident witness. She appeared to be upset by the way Ted stared steadily at her. She sobbed during her testimony, recalling her terror of sixteen months before. But she pointed to Ted as he sat impassively at the defense table, identifying him positively as the man who had told her he was “Officer Roseland.”

  Ted, sitting there clean shaven, wearing a light gray suit, white shirt, and tie, looked anything but a kidnapper. The accusing witness was plainly hysterical, buckling again and again under O’Connell’s questions, questions intimating that Carol DaRonch had been led to her identification of Ted by the subtle and not-so-subtle persuasion of the detectives under Captain Pete Hayward’s command. For two hours, the defense lawyer cross-examined the weeping girl.

  “You identified pretty much what law enforcement officers wanted you to, didn’t you?”

  “No … no,” she replied softly.

  Ted continued to stare at her implacably.

  When Ted himself took the stand, he admitted that he had lied to Sergeant Bob Hayward at the time of his arrest for evading an officer, that he had lied to O’Connell. He explained that he had “rabbited” when Hayward chased him in the patrol car on August 16—but only because he’d been smoking marijuana. He’d wanted time to get the “joint” out of the car, to let the smoke clear. He admitted that he had not been to a drive-in movie, but had told Hayward that. He had not admitted the real story to John O’Connell at first.

  Bundy had no firm alibi for the night of November 8, but he denied that he had ever seen Carol DaRonch before he saw her in court.

  The handcuffs? Only something he’d picked up at a dump and kept for a curio. He had no key for them.

  Assistant County Attorney David Yocum questioned Bundy under cross-examination.

  “Have you ever worn a false mustache? Didn’t you wear one when you were a spy in the Dan Evans campaign?”

  “I wasn’t ‘spying’ for anyone, and I never wore a fake mustache during that period,” Ted answered.

  “Didn’t you brag to a woman acquaintance that you like virgins, and you can have them any time?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t you tell that same woman that you saw no difference between right and wrong?”

  “I don’t remember that statement, if I made it, it was taken out of context and does not represent my views.”

  “Did you ever use an old license plate on your car, after you’d received new plates from the state of Utah?”

  “No sir.”

  Yocum then produced two gasoline credit slips.

  “You notified the state that you had lost plates bearing the numbers LJE-379 on April 11, 1975. These slips show that you were still using those ‘lost’ plates in the summer of 1975. Why was that?”

  “I cannot remember the incidents. The attendant probably asked for my plate numbers and I may have inadvertently given him the old numbers from memory.”

  Ted had lied, not big lies, but lies, and it tainted all the rest of his testimony. He admitted that he had lied to O’Connell about the marijuana until two weeks before trial. A jury might have believed him. Judge Hanson did not. Hanson retired to ponder his decision after final arguments on Friday, February 27. On Monday, March 1, the principals were summoned into the courtroom at 1:35 P.M.

  The thirty-seven-year-old judge by his own statement had spent an “agonizing” weekend. And he had found Ted Bundy guilty of aggravated kidnapping beyond a reasonable doubt. Ted, who had been free on bail, was remanded to the custody of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office to await sentencing.

  Ted was stunned. Louise Bundy’s sobs were the only sound in the courtroom on that snowy afternoon. Convicted, Ted said nothing until he was handcuffed by Captain Hayward and Jerry Thompson, and then he said scornfully, “You don’t need these handcuffs. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Meg Anders watched as Ted was led out of the courtroom, seeing it all happen. It had been what she thought she wanted when she called police with her suspicions. Now she was sorry. She wanted Ted back.

  Sentencing was set for March 22. There would, of course, be an appeal.

  Ted was behind bars again, in a world that he hated. I wrote to him, vapid letters full of what was happening in my life, trivia. I sent him small checks through John O’Connell’s office to buy things such as stationery and stamps in the jail commissary. And, still, I suspended judgment.

  Until I had proof that Ted was guilty of this, and perhaps of other crimes, I would wait.

  The frequency of his letters to me increased. They were more telling of his state of mind than what someone else could paraphrase. Some of them are misdated, as if time itself had no meaning for h
im any longer.

  22

  HIS FIRST POSTCONVICTION LETTER was mailed on March 14, 1976, although he had mistakenly dated it February 14.

  Dear Ann,

  Thanks for the letters and the commissary contribution. I’ve been slow in returning letters since this most recent setback. Probably a function of my need to mentally rearrange my life. To prepare for the living hell of prison. To comprehend what the future holds for me.

  He said he was writing to me as a “pump priming venture,” to help him begin to assess what lay ahead. He was confounded by the guilty verdict and scornful of Judge Hanson, intimating that the jurist had been influenced by public opinion rather than by the evidence presented. He expected to receive a five-to-life sentence, and felt that the Department of Adult Probation and Parole was doing its presentence report with bias.

  “The report seems to be focusing on the Jekel [sic] and Hyde theory, a thing disputed by all the psychologists who have examined me.”

  Ted said he had heard that the probation investigator seemed to believe that Ted had made some damaging admission to me in letters. Of course, he had not. I had had only those two letters from him before the trial, and, with his permission, had turned them over to King County Police detectives.

  On March 22, Judge Hanson announced that he would delay sentencing for ninety days, pending a psychological evaluation. Ted wrote to me that night as he crouched on the floor with his back against the steel wall of his cell, trying to glean enough light from the hall fixture so that he could see to write. He did not seem to be particularly upset about the diagnostic evaluation which would take place at the Utah State Prison at Point-of-the-Mountain.

  “If jail life is any indication, prison should be rich in the material that human suffering breeds, full of the startling tales which prisoners tell. For several reasons, I must take advantage of this opportunity and begin to draw upon this valuable reservoir of ideas. I will start writing.”