The Stranger Beside Me

  What Ted wanted from me was my editorial advice and for me to serve as his agent to help him sell the books he wanted to write about his case. He was anxious that we move rapidly in establishing our roles as collaborators and to agree on a percentage agreement on the distribution of the profits that would surely be forthcoming. He asked that I keep his proposal confidential until the time was right and that I correspond with him through his attorney’s office.

  I didn’t know just what it was that he intended to write, but I responded with a long letter detailing the various avenues of publishing, and explaining the correct manuscript form for submission. I also repeated again the information about the book contract I already had with W. W. Norton on the missing girls’ cases, and stressed my belief that his story would have to be a part of my book, just how much I couldn’t know. I offered to share my profits with him, gauged by the number of chapters he might write in his own words.

  And I urged him to wait a bit with his attempts to publish, for his own protection. His legal entanglements in Utah and Colorado were not over. Colorado was moving rapidly in their investigation, although the public, of which I was a part, knew few of the details. The discovery of the credit card purchases, however, had leaked out.

  And I had news. I was about to take a trip to Salt Lake City as part of the preparation for a travelogue book I was editing for an Oregon publishing house. I would try to get clearance to visit him in prison.

  That clearance would not be easy to come by. I was not a relative, and I was not on the approved list of visitors for Theodore Robert Bundy. When I called Warden Sam Smith’s office in the old prison in Draper, Utah, I was told that, if I called again when I arrived in Salt Lake City, they would make a decision. I was quite certain that the answer would be “no.”

  On April 1, 1976, I flew to Utah. I had never flown in a jet, hadn’t flown at all since 1954, and the speed of the flight, and the knowledge that I could leave Seattle’s rain and be in a comparatively balmy Salt Lake City within a few hours made the trip all the more surreal.

  The sun was shining, and a dusty wind blew puffs of tumbleweed over the brown landscape as I drove my rented car from the airport. I felt disoriented, much as I would three years later as I arrived in Miami, again because of Ted.

  I called the prison and learned that visitors were not usually allowed on days other than Sundays and Wednesdays. It was Thursday, and already 4 P.M. I talked to Warden Smith, who said, “I’ll have someone from the diagnostic staff call you back.”

  The call came. What was my purpose in wanting to visit Bundy?

  “I’m an old friend.”

  How long would I be in Utah?

  “Only today and tomorrow morning.”

  How old was I?

  “Forty.” That answer seemed right. I was too old to be a “Ted Groupie.”

  “O.K. We’re granting you a special visit. Be at the prison at 5:15. You’ll have one hour.”

  The Utah State Prison at Point-of-the-Mountain was about twenty-five miles south of my motel, and I had barely enough time to find the right freeway, going in the right direction, and reach Draper, the post office stop, population 700. I looked to my right and saw the twin towers with guards armed with shotguns. The old prison and the landscape around it seemed to be all the same gray-brown color. A feeling of hopelessness seized me. I could empathize with Ted’s despair at being locked up.

  I’d spent a summer working as a student intern at the Oregon State Training School for Girls when I was nineteen, and I’d carried a heavy ring of flat keys wherever I went, but that was a long time before. I’d forgotten the security needed to keep human beings behind walls and bars. The guard at the door told me I couldn’t take my purse inside.

  “What can I do with it?” I asked. “I can’t lock it in my car because my keys are in it. May I bring my keys in?”

  “Sorry. Nothing inside.”

  He finally relented and opened up a glassed-in office where I could leave my car keys after I’d locked my purse in the rental car. I carried my cigarettes in my hand.

  “Sorry. No cigarettes. No matches.”

  I put them on a counter, and waited for Ted to be brought down. I felt claustrophobia I always feel in jails, even though my work took me into almost every jail in Washington sooner or later. I felt my chest tighten and my breath catch.

  To get my mind off my cloistered feelings, I glanced around the waiting room. It was, of course, empty. It was not regular visiting hours. The dull walls and sagging chairs, seemed not to have changed in fifty years. There was a candy machine, a bulletin board, pictures of the staff, and a leftover religious Christmas card. To whom? From whom? Disciplinary notations on prisoners. For Sale notices. An application to sign up for self-defense classes. Who? The staff? The visitors? The inmates?

  I wondered where we would talk. Through a glass wall via phones? Through steel mesh? I did not want to see Ted in a cage. I knew he would be humiliated.

  Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons. They all smell the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.

  A smiling man walked toward me—Lieutenant Tanner of the prison staff—and asked me to sign in. But first, we moved through an electric gate that clanged heavily shut behind us. I signed my name, and Lieutenant Tanner saw me through a second electric gate. “You can talk here. You’ll have an hour. They’ll bring Mr. Bundy down in a few minutes.”

  It was a hallway! A tiny segment of space between two automatic gates on either side. There were two chairs shoved against a rack of hanging coats, and, for some reason, buckets of varnish beneath them. A guard sat in a glass enclosure four feet away. I wondered if he would be able to hear what we said. Beyond me was the prison proper, and I could hear footsteps approaching. I looked away, the way one averts his eyes from someone crippled or malformed. I could not stare at Ted in his cage.

  The third electric door slid open and he was there, accompanied by two guards. They searched him, patting him down. I was not searched. Had they checked me out? How did they know I had no contraband, no razor up my sleeve?

  “Your I.D., ma’am?”

  “It’s in the car,” I said. “I had to leave everything in the car.”

  The doors opened again, and I ran back to the car to retrieve my driver’s license to prove who I was. I handed it to a guard and he studied it, then handed it back. I had not looked directly at Ted. We both waited. And now he stood in front of me. For a crazy instant, I wondered why prisoners wore T-shirts proclaiming their religious preferences. His was orange and said “Agnostic” on the front.

  I looked again. No, it read “Diagnostic.”

  He was very thin, wore glasses, and his hair was cut shorter than I had ever seen it. He smelled of acrid sweat as he hugged me.

  They left us alone to talk in the funny coatroom-hall. The guard behind the glass across from us appeared to be disinterested. We were interrupted by a steady stream of people—guards, psychologists, and prisoners’ wives, headed for an Al-Anon meeting. One of the psychologists recognized Ted and spoke to him, shaking his hand.

  “That’s a doctor who did a psychological profile on me for John [O’Connell],” said Ted. He told John, off the record, that he couldn’t see how I could have done it.”

  Many of the people moving past us, wearing civilian clothes, nodded and spoke to Ted. It was all very civilized.

  “I’m in the ‘fishtank,’” he explained. “There are forty of us in the diagnostic center. The judge ordered that I be held in protective custody, but I turned it down. I don’t want to be isolated.”

  Still, he admitted to a good deal of trepidation on his arrival at Point-of-the-Mountain. He was aware that men convicted of crimes against women have a high mortality rate inside the walls. “They were lined up to see me when I arrived. I had to walk the gauntlet.”

  But he had found prison much better than jail. He was rapidly becoming a “jailhouse lawyer.”

/>   “I’ll survive inside—if I do—because of my brain, my knowledge of the law. They seek me out for legal advice, and they’re all in awe of John. I only had one really bad moment. This one guy—a killer who literally ripped out the throat of the man he killed—walked over to me and I thought I’d had it. He was only interested in knowing about John, in finding out how he could get John to represent him. I get along fine with all of them.”

  He glanced at the locked gate behind me. “They left it open when you went for your I.D. I saw the coats here, the door open, and the thought of escaping flashed through my mind, but only for a minute.”

  The trial just finished rankled Ted and he wanted to discuss it. He insisted that the Salt Lake County detectives had talked Carol DaRonch into identifying him. “Her original description of the man said he had dark brown eyes. Mine are blue. She couldn’t make up her mind about the mustache, and she said his hair was dark, greased back. She I.D.’d my car from a Polaroid, and the film was overexposed. It made the car look blue and it’s really tan. They showed her my picture so many times. Of course, she recognized it. But, in court, she couldn’t even identify the man who picked her up and drove her to the police station.

  “Jerry Thompson said he saw three pairs of patent leather shoes in my closet. Why didn’t he take a picture of them? Why didn’t he pick them up for evidence? I’ve never owned patent leather shoes. Somebody said I wore black patent leather boots to church. Would I wear a maniac’s costume to church?

  “She never saw the crowbar. All she said she felt was a many-sided steel or iron tool when she grasped it from behind. She said it was over her head.”

  Ted was as scornful of the psychologist, A1 Carlisle, who was administering the tests to him, as he was of the Utah detectives. Most of the tests were the standard ones that any psychology student is familiar with: the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index) consisting of hundreds of questions that can be answered “yes” or “no,” with some deliberate “lie” questions repeated at intervals. I spotted the lie questions when I was a freshman in college, particularly, “Do you ever think about things too bad to talk about?” The “correct” answer is “yes”—everybody does—but many people write “no.” For Ted Bundy, that test was kindergarten stuff.

  The TAT (Thematic Apperception Test): has the subject look at a picture and tell a story from it. And then there was the The Rorshach, or “ink blot,” test. Ted had administered these tests himself to patients. The Utah State Prison had its own psychological test, a series of adjectives where the subject underlines those that apply to his personality.

  “He wants to know about my childhood, my family, my sex life, and I tell him what I can. He’s happy and he says do I want to see him again? So I tell him ‘O.K.’ Why not?”

  We paused as another group moved through the hallway.

  “The next time I meet him, he’s smiling,” Ted continued. “He has a diagnosis. I am a passive-aggressive personality. The man is so pleased with himself, Ann, and he sits back waiting. He expects more from me. What does he want? A full confession?”

  I said little during our visit. He had so much to get off his chest, and, with the exception of visits from Sharon Auer and occasionally from O’Connell and his associate Bruce Lubeck, Ted felt he had had no one to talk to who could communicate on his level.

  “John thinks I should have gotten angry in court. He went to law school with Judge Hanson, and he knows the man. I was sitting there just trying to understand the motivations behind the prosecutors, and it was just too ridiculous to show emotion about. But John thinks I should have gotten mad!”

  We talked about Sharon and Meg. He had known Sharon for more than a year, and she visited him faithfully every Wednesday and Sunday. “Don’t mention Sharon to Meg. Sharon’s jealous of Meg, and Meg doesn’t really know about Sharon.”

  I promised that I would not involve myself in his complicated romantic life, and I marveled that he could keep two intense relationships going while he was locked up with a possible life sentence hanging over him.

  “My mother’s upset with Meg for telling the King County Police that I was illegitimate.” The legitimacy of Ted’s birth would eventually become the least of Louise Bundy’s worries.

  “This place … they’ve got everything they want in here: drugs, speed. I won’t do drugs. I’m not going to do the usual prison trip. I’m adjusting, and I want to work for prison reform. I’m innocent, but I can work from the inside.”

  Ted still wanted to write, and he felt that Sharon could serve as courier. She regularly carried in papers and legal briefs when she visited. He said that she could carry his writing out and send it to me.

  “I need $15,000 to hire private detectives. I think Carol DaRonch, or someone close to her, knew the man who attacked her. I need money to hire a team of independent psychologists to submit a report to the sentencing board. Everybody makes decisions about me, and I’m not even allowed to sit in on the meetings …”

  “I don’t think you should try to publish anything before the first of June,” I said. “And Colorado. There’s still Colorado.”

  “I talked to Colorado. They have no claim on me.”

  “What about those credit card slips in Colorado?”

  He smiled. “It’s not against the law to be in Colorado. Sure, I was there, but a lot of people go to Colorado.”

  I asked if when he wrote, he would include a description of the murder cases, and he told me that he believed those “sensational cases” would be essential to selling his book. “Sam Shepard was found innocent after years in prison,” he recalled, “and his book on an innocent man’s ordeal sold.”

  Sitting there in that airless cubicle, I was once again on his side. He seemed too frail and beleaguered by forces over which he had no control. And yet the charisma was still there. I believed his position. He was the man he’d always been, but he was in a situation that had no relevance to the real Ted inside.

  He remembered my world, and politely asked how my house sale was going and how my children were. He begged me to stand by Meg, and he told me how much he loved and missed her.

  And then the guards were back. They tapped him on the shoulder. They had given us an extra fifteen minutes. He rose, hugged me again and kissed me on the cheek. They patted him down again. I realized that that was why they hadn’t searched me. If I’d given him anything, they would find it before I left.

  The door slid open for me, and I paused for a minute, watching him as he was led back into the belly of the prison, dwarfed by the two guards.

  “Hey, lady … Goddammit! Watch out!”

  The door was automatically closing, and I leapt forward just in time to escape being caught in its metal jaws. The guard stared at me as if I were retarded. Lieutenant Tanner politely thanked me for coming and walked me to the prison’s front door.

  And then I was outside again, past the twin towers, in my car and on the road back toward Salt Lake City. The wind had kicked up a dust storm, and the prison behind me was almost obliterated from view.

  Suddenly, there were red lights whirling atop a van in back of me. I had become paranoid in that hour and a half at Point-of-the-Mountain, and I wondered why they were chasing me. What did I do? The van pulled up, closer and closer, and I prepared to pull over. But then it turned off on a side road, its wail fading in the wind. I realized I was talking to myself. No, no … he couldn’t have done it. He’s been railroaded in there by public opinion. That man I just talked to is the same man I’ve always known. He has to be innocent.

  I drove toward the city, past the turn-offs for Midvale and Murray, towns that had never been anything before but names on a map. Now they were the sites of two of the abductions. I past commuters, bored with their daily routine, and I was so thankful to be free. I could go to my motel, have dinner with a friend, get on a plane and go back to Seattle. Ted could not. He was locked up with the rest of the “fish.”

  How could this happen to a young man wi
th such a future ahead of him? I was so caught up in my reverie that I missed the turn to my motel and wandered, lost, in the wide, clean but confusing streets of Salt Lake City.

  It was that night, April 1, 1976, when I had the dream. It was very frightening, jarring me awake in a strange room in a strange city.

  I found myself in a large parking lot, with cars backing out and racing away. One of the cars ran over an infant, injuring it terribly, and I grabbed it up, knowing it was up to me to save it. I had to get to a hospital, but no one would help. I carried the baby, wrapped almost completely in a gray blanket, into a car rental agency. They had plenty of cars, but they looked at the baby in my arms and refused to rent me one. I tried to get an ambulance, but the attendants turned away. Finally, in desperation, I found a wagon—a child’s wagon—and I put the injured infant in it, pulling it behind me for miles until I found an emergency room.

  I carried the baby, running, up to the desk. The admitting nurse glanced at the bundle in my arms. “No, we will not treat it.”

  “But it’s still alive! It’s going to die if you don’t do something.”

  “It’s better. Let it die. It will do no one any good to treat it.”

  The nurse, the doctors, everyone, turned and moved away from me and the bleeding baby.

  And then I looked down at it. It was not an innocent baby. It was a demon. Even as I held it, it sunk its teeth into my hand and bit me.

  I did not have to be a Freudian scholar to understand my dream. It was all too clear. Had I been trying to save a monster, trying to protect something or someone who was too dangerous and evil to survive?

  23

  SOMETHING DEEP in my unconscious mind had surfaced and had told me forcefully that I perhaps believed that Ted Bundy was a killer. But I had made my commitment to keep in contact with him, no matter what the future would hold. I suspected that he did not feel things the way I did, but I could not believe that he was not laboring under a terrible weight. I felt that perhaps I might one day be the vehicle through which he could rid himself of that weight. If he would talk to me about what had happened, could reveal the facts still hidden, it would not only help him to receive the redemption he had alluded to in his poem, it could give some measure of relief, of finality, to the parents and relatives who still waited to learn what had happened to their daughters. Oddly, I could never picture Ted as a murderer, never visualize what had happened. It was probably best that I couldn’t. When I wrote to him, my letters had to be to the man I remembered, or I couldn’t do it.