The Stranger Beside Me

  Once before, Ted had called me when he was in the grip of some emotional anxiety. Although he had denied making that call to me on November 20, 1974, I had seen the phone records. He had called that night, and I sensed that there would come a day when he would need me again. Something seemed to have gone so terribly wrong with Ted’s mind, and I now suspected the “sick” part of him was capable of murder. If that was true, then he would need someone who could listen, who would not judge, but who might help to make his confessions easier. I felt that Ted might be able to expiate his guilt through his writing, and I continued to encourage him to write.

  He had asked me to call Meg. In our prison visit, he had told me, “I love Meg spiritually,” and I wondered if that meant that she was caught up with a man who, even if he were not in prison, would never marry her. For her sake, I wrote to him: “My gut reaction to discussions we have had about Meg recently—and years ago—is that you do not ultimately see your future with her as much as you love her and as much history as you share with her. There is something missing, something essential to a forever-after relationship. This, of course, is not something I would discuss with her, but I will encourage any effort she puts forth to become a complete person in her own right, so that she does not need any man quite as much as she needs you now.”

  He seemed to agree, but there would be letters where he was terrified that he would lose her. Even so, there was Sharon, and I kept my promise not to discuss either woman with the other.

  I did call Meg, and she remembered me from that long-ago Christmas party. She seemed anxious to meet me again and we set up an appointment to have dinner together.

  On April 7 (although he misdated the letter again as March 7, 1976), I had a letter from Ted, the first since I’d returned from Utah.

  The small white envelopes furnished by the prison all had a preprinted return address, giving a post office box in Draper, Utah, and above that, Ted wrote “T.R. Bundy.”

  Ted had pulled himself together now, an effort that would never fail to make me pause and consider the ability he had to do that. He could somehow manage to recoup and recover under such tremendous stress and adjust to each new situation.

  His letter was an apology, in part, because he had usurped much of the conversation in our visit in prison. “I have developed a typical prisoner’s syndrome: the obsession with my legal case … the trial and the verdict live in me like some cerebral ulcer.”

  He was writing many letters and observations in his cell, and commented that his left hand (he is left-handed) had become so strong that he broke his shoelaces without even trying.

  Ted commented on the link between us, a link that seemed to be growing stronger: “You’ve called it Karma. It may be. Yet, whatever supernatural force guides our destinies, it has brought us together in some mind-expanding situations. I must believe this invisible hand will pour more chilled Chablis for us in less treacherous, more tranquil times to come.”

  Again, he urged me to take care of Meg for him, and he asked that I suggest to Meg that she read me some of the love poems he had sent to her. He enclosed one of those poems, a poem he had printed on blue paper in the prison’s printing facility. It ended,

  I send you this kiss

  Deliver this body to hold.

  I sleep with you tonight

  With words of love untold.

  I would love you, if I might

  With words that unfold

  These arms to press you tight.

  When I met Meg for dinner on April 30, 1976, she carried with her a dozen or more poems, love poems from Ted. She had typed them carefully, with copies for herself and for Ted. They were romantic sonnets, something any woman in love would have clung to. And Meg was certainly a woman in love. Yet, even as I read them, I was struck with the incongruity of the situation. This was the woman who had placed Ted in his present jeopardy, and I knew that Sharon Auer was also in love with him—Sharon, who thought Ted loved her.

  Meg wept as she read over the poems, pointing out particularly tender phrases to me. “I can’t understand how he can forgive me after what I did to him, how he can write me poems like this.”

  Meg slipped the poems back into the large manila envelope and glanced around the room. No one had noticed her tears. The heavyweight championship fight was on the television set above the bar and everyone was staring at it.

  “You know,” she said softly. “I don’t make friends easily. I had one boyfriend and one woman friend. And now, I’ve really lost them both. I don’t see Lynn anymore. I can’t forgive her for making me doubt Ted, and I don’t know when I’ll ever see him again.”

  “What was there, Meg?” I asked. “What was there that made you go to the police? Was there anything besides Lynn’s suspicions?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t tell you. I know you’re writing a book. I hope you understand, but I just can’t talk about it.”

  I didn’t press her. I wasn’t with her to try to squeeze information out of her. I was with her because Ted had asked me to stand by her. Pushing her would be too much like poking a creature with a stick, a creature already hurt.

  And yet, Meg wanted information from me. She was jealous of Ted, even when he was locked up in the Utah State Prison. She wanted to know about Sharon. I told her, truthfully, that I really didn’t know much about Sharon Auer. I didn’t mention that I had talked to Sharon on the phone when I was in Salt Lake City, and that I’d heard Sharon’s voice turn icy when I mentioned Meg. That was my first realization that Sharon was seemingly as unsure of Ted, as possessive, as Meg was.

  Meg struck me as terribly vulnerable, and I wondered why Ted could not let her go. She was thirty-one, and she wanted—needed—a marriage, a chance to have the children she longed for before there was too great a gap between them and Liane, before Meg was too old. Ted must have known that he would not be free for years, and yet he bound her to him through his poems, letters and calls. If anything, she loved him more than she ever had, and she was trying to cope with more guilt than she could bear.

  It was odd. Even as I mused about how Meg would survive with her complete dependence on Ted, I received a letter from him, on May 17, wherein he seemed terrified of losing her! He was sweating out his last two weeks before the June sentencing date, and that may have contributed to his anxiety. He seemed to feel that Meg was pulling away from him, and he asked me to go to her and plead his case.

  He had no real reason to doubt Meg’s loyalty, but he “sensed vibrations.”

  “You are the only person whom I trust,” he wrote, “who is both sensitive and in a position to approach Meg for me. I think it would be easier for Meg to express herself to you than to me.”

  The letter ended with his opinions on the psychiatrists and psychologists who had spent three months examining him:

  … After conducting numerous tests and extensive examinations, (they) have found me normal and are deeply perplexed. Both of us know that none of us is “normal.” Perhaps what I should say is that they find no explanation to substantiate the verdict or other allegations. No seizures, no psychosis, no dissociative reaction, no unusual habits, opinions, emotions or fears. Controlled, intelligent, but, in no way, crazy. The working theory is now that I have completely forgotten everything, a theory which is disproved by their own results. “Very interesting,” they keep mumbling. I may have convinced one or two of them that I am innocent.

  I did call Meg on Ted’s behalf and found that she was completely unchanged in her devotion to him. She had managed to tell him that in a two-minute phone call to the prison, and urged me to assure him that she wasn’t dating anyone else. He did not want to let her go, and Meg apparently did not want to leave him. On June 5, Meg came to my home to spend the evening. She had just seen her parents off after a weeklong visit and was tense because they were not sympathetic about her continued allegiance to Ted. She was also apprehensive about Sharon, more aware of Sharon’s relationship with Ted than he realized. I was in the middle
of a situation that made me uneasy. I didn’t want to cover for Ted if he was deluding Meg, but I didn’t want to tell her about Sharon’s twice weekly visits to the Utah State Prison either. I suspected that I was being subtly manipulated in keeping Meg bound to Ted.

  I wrote to him about Meg on June 6: “I think that she is aware of Sharon’s relationship to you, but I stressed that I really know nothing about it and I don’t want to know. When the time comes to think of everyday conflicts, you will have to get your act together.”

  Ted’s future was still in limbo. The sentencing on the DaRonch kidnapping conviction, set for June 1 had been postponed for thirty more days. It was conceivable—but not likely—that he would receive probation. Or he could receive life in prison. Psychologists were still wrestling with his personality. I had received a phone call from Al Carlisle, the psychologist in charge of the report on Ted, one Sunday evening. He began abruptly, “Do you know Ted Bundy?”

  “Who wants to know?” I’d responded. Knowing Ted Bundy was becoming something that one did not brag about.

  He had then identified himself, sounding like a shy, diffident man. I told him only what I had seen—there was no point in putting my dreams and fears into what was allegedly a rational psychological study. I explained that, in all my contacts with Ted, I had found him normal, empathetic, friendly, and gentle. And that was true.

  “Well,” he said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people about him and I’ve been surprised at the widely divergent opinions about him.”

  I wanted to ask what they were, but it didn’t seem the proper response. I waited.

  “I like him myself. I’ve spent about twelve hours with him, and I like him.” Carlisle wanted copies of the two “Ted letters” which had garnered such undeserved fame, and I said I would send them, but only with Ted’s permission. Ted gave that, and I mailed them to the prison psychologist.

  Ted wrote again on June 9. With sentencing just around the corner, he had geared up for a fight. “The prospects are exciting!”

  Ted found the psychological examinations “malicious, slanted, and infernal.” Harking back to his own psychology training, he felt prepared to deal with the questions that the doctors asked him and his friends—questions which suggested that he might be strange, homosexual, or deviant in his demands during sexual intercourse. He was angry because his examiners had told him that some of his friends had had negative things to say about him, but would not reveal the content of interviews or the names of friends.

  “I was aghast! Is this America? Am I to be attacked anonymously? I listed the names of several close friends, people who know me well. None had been contacted. Who are my detractors? No response …”

  He had received some answers. The testing team had reported to him that the nameless interviewees had indicated that he was changeable.

  “Well, sometimes you would appear happy, pleasant. Other times you would seem like a different person and unresponsive,” they had told him. “They are trying so desperately to create a split personality,” he wrote angrily. “I’ll tear them apart.”

  He was, indeed, looking forward to the hearing on his mental capabilities, positive that he could tear down all that the diagnostic team had constructed in the three months just past.

  Ted had begun to enter into the legal fight for his own freedom, and his participation would escalate over the years ahead. He was “up,” confident that his mind, his intelligence, could surpass whatever the psychiatric examination purported to reveal. I think he truly believed that, through his own rhetoric, he would be free.

  Ted made his statements to Judge Hanson. As he made his plea, he was the cocky, witty Ted, the man so removed from the facts that the whole situation was ridiculous. It was a posture that would irritate several judges and juries in his future court wranglings, but it was seemingly an attitude necessary for the survival of his ego. I have always felt that Ted would, literally, rather die than be humiliated—would face life in prison or the electric chair before humbling himself in anyway.

  At the hearing, Ted was scornful as he attacked the arrests in August and October of 1975. He admitted to a certain “strangeness” of behavior when he’d been confronted by Sergeant Bob Hayward, but could see no connection with his actions, with the contents of his car, and the DaRonch kidnapping. He had had no alibi for the night of November 8, 1974, and he argued, “If I cannot remember precisely what occurred on a date which is now eighteen and one-half months prior to my arrest for kidnapping, it is because my memory does not improve with time. It is safe to say what I was not doing, however. I was not having heart surgery, nor was I taking ballet lessons, nor was I in Mexico, nor was I abducting a complete stranger at gunpoint. There are just some things a person does not forget and just some things a person is not inclined to do under any circumstances.”

  Then Ted was sentenced on June 30, despite his tearful plea that his being in prison would serve no purpose. “Someday, who knows when, five or ten or more years in the future, when the time comes when I can leave, I suggest you ask yourself where we are, what’s been accomplished, was the sacrifice of my life worth it all? Yes, I will be a candidate for rehabilitation. But not for what I have done, but for what the system has done to me.”

  He drew a comparatively light sentence. One to fifteen years. Because no other charges of such magnitude had been brought against him, he was sentenced under provisions for a lesser second-degree felony. All things being equal, he could hope to be paroled as quickly as eighteen months hence.

  But, of course, all things were not equal. The investigation into the murder of Caryn Campbell in Aspen, Colorado, was accelerating. Investigator Mike Fisher had the credit card slips, and he had received word from the FBI lab’s criminalist, Bob Neill, that, among the hairs found when Ted’s Volkswagen was processed and vacuumed, were hairs that were microscopically alike in class and characteristic to not one—but three—of Bundy’s suspected victims: Caryn Campbell, Melissa Smith, and Carol DaRonch.

  Hairs are not as individual as fingerprints, yet Bob Neill, an FBI crime lab expert for two decades, stated he had never found three victims’ purported hairs in one spot before. “The chances of three different hair samples being so microscopically alike and not belonging to the victims are one in 20,000. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  One Washington detective mentioned to me that the crowbar found in Ted’s car matched the depression in Caryn Campbell’s skull. There was said to be an eyewitness, the woman who had seen the strange young man in a second-floor corridor of the Wildwood Inn minutes before Caryn vanished. The word among law enforcement networks was that the Colorado case was much stronger than the Utah kidnapping case had been.

  If Ted was aware of the burgeoning Colorado case, and I suspect he was, he was still more caught up in the emotions that lingered after the sentencing in Utah when he wrote to me on July 2, 1976. That letter was classic in that it was the evaluation by the subject himself—an honors psychology graduate—of the psychiatric evaluation done on him.

  The letter was typed on an ancient machine with letters clotted with ink, but Ted’s pride in his hour-and-a-half dissection of the psychiatric evaluation transcended the blurred pages.

  I was whistling in the wind, yet in a curious sort of way, I felt a deep sense of fulfillment. I felt relaxed but emphatic. Controlled, but sincere and filled with emotion. It didn’t matter who was listening, although I desired each word to strike the Judge as forcefully as possible. Briefly, all too briefly, I was myself again, amongst free people, using all the skill I could muster, fighting the only way I know how: with words and logic. And all too briefly, I was testing the dream of being an attorney.

  He knew he had lost, but he blamed that loss on the police, the prosecutors and the judge, on what he termed “the weaknesses of men who were too timid, too blind, too frightened, to accept the cruel deception of the state’s case.”

  The psychiatric diagnoses had concluded that Ted Bundy was not psychotic, n
eurotic, the victim of organic brain disease, alcoholic, addicted to drugs, suffering from a character disorder or amnesia, and was not a sexual deviant.

  Ted quoted Dr. Austin, the psychiatrist, the one member of the team whom he had thought most forthright: “I feel that Mr. Bundy is either a man who has no problems or is smart enough and clever enough to appear close to the edge of ‘normal.’ … Since it has been determined by the Court that he is not telling the truth regarding the present crime, I seriously question if he can be expected to tell the truth regarding participation in any program or probation agreement.”

  Ted’s conclusion was that Judge Hanson had swayed the entire evaluation by his original verdict, and that the diagnostic team had merely groomed their report to match the verdict.

  Carlisle had evidently concluded that Ted was a “private person,” one not known intimately by others. “When one tries to know him, he becomes evasive.”

  “Ann, think of me as you know me,” Ted wrote. “Yes, I am a private person, but so what … and the part about being someone incapable of being intimate … is absurd.”

  Ted had been given the California Life Goals Evaluation Schedules test. His answers had shown that he had six goals:

  To have freedom from want.

  To control the actions of others.

  To guide others with their consent.

  To avoid boredom.

  To be self-fulfilled.

  To live one’s life one’s own way.

  None of these goals could be considered abnormal, and Ted was quick to point that out to me in his letter. He admitted readily that he was insecure, as Dr. Carlisle had suggested, and that perhaps he tried to structure his relationships with other people.