The Stranger Beside Me

  The interrogation went on throughout the night, and Bodiford, Patchen, and Chapman insist that Ted made statements that were far more damaging than those captured on any tape. Judge Cowart would eventually rule that none of the statements Ted Bundy made on the night of February 16—17, 1978, would be admitted into the Miami trial, but the conversation that is alleged to have taken place after the recorder was turned off is the most chilling.

  The three detectives say that Ted told them he was a night person,“a vampire,” and that he’d been a “voyeur, a peeping Tom.” He said he had never “done anything” but that his voyeurism had to do with his fantasies.

  He had apparently described one girl to them, a girl who had walked down a street in Seattle years before, when he was in law school in Tacoma. “I felt I had to have her at any cost. I didn’t act on it though.”

  He had allegedly discussed a “problem,” a problem that surfaced after he’d been drinking and driving around, a problem having to do with his fantasies.

  “Listen,” he said, after the tape was off. “I want to talk to you, but I’ve built up such a block so that I could never tell. You talk to me.”

  “Do you want to talk about the Chi Omega murders?”

  “The evidence is there. Don’t quit digging for it.”

  “Did you kill those girls?”

  “I don’t want to lie to you, but, if you force an answer, it would be a no.”

  “Did you ever act out your fantasies?”

  “They were taking over my life …”

  Bodiford asked again, “Did you ever carry out your fantasies?”

  “The act itself was a downer …”

  “Did you ever go to the Chi Omega House? Did you kill the girls?”

  “I don’t want to have to lie to you …”

  There were more statements alleged to have been made by Ted that night and the next. One must decide whether to believe police detectives or Ted Bundy as to their authenticity.

  According to the FBI information and several reporters who were deluging the Pensacola detectives with calls, they had caught a man suspected of thirty-six murders, a figure they found hard to believe.

  When Chapman asked him about that during the post taping conversation, Ted had reportedly replied, “Add one digit to that and you’ll have it.”

  What had he meant? Was he being sarcastic? Did he mean thirty-seven murders? Or, no, it couldn’t be … did he mean a hundred or more murders?

  The FBI figure had included several unsolved cases pulled in from left field, including some in northern California, cases that the detectives who’d dogged his trail didn’t believe had strong links to Ted. But, off the record, Ted reputedly hinted to the Florida detectives that there were six states that would be very interested in him. Six? They say he talked of making a deal, of wanting to give information in return for his life, that he felt he had things in his mind that would be invaluable to psychiatric research. None of these statements is on tape, and, just as Ted seemed to approach specifics, the investigators say he backed off, teasing them, offering the “carrot,” only to retreat.

  When the statement “Add one digit to that and you’ll have it,” filtered down to Washington detectives, they immediately thought of two long-unsolved cases in their state.

  In August of 1961, when Ted was fifteen, nine-year-old Ann Marie Burr vanished forever from her home in Tacoma, a home that was only ten blocks from the Bundy residence. Ann Marie had awakened during the night and told her parents that her little sister was ill. Then the freckled blonde child had presumably gone back to bed. But, in the morning, Ann Marie was gone, and a window fronting the street was found wide open. She had been wearing only a nightgown when she disappeared.

  Despite a tremendous investigation, headed by Tacoma Police Detective Tony Zatkovitch, no trace of Ann Marie was ever found. The former Tacoma detective remembers that the street in front of her home was torn up for repaving on the night she disappeared, and wonders if her small body was buried hastily in the deep ditches, to be covered over with tons of earth and asphalt in the days that followed. Now retired, Zatkovitch says that the name of Ted Bundy was never listed in the endless roster of suspects.

  On June 23, 1966, Seattle homicide detectives had a case which matches the M.O. of the cases Ted is suspected of very, very closely. Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull, both twenty, lived in a basement apartment on Queen Anne Hill with another girl. They were all United Airlines flight attendants, and all extremely attractive. The third girl was not at home on Wednesday, the twenty-third, because she spent the night with another stewardess. Lonnie Trumbull was dating a King County deputy sheriff, and he saw her late in the afternoon and called her at ten that night. The pretty brunette, daughter of a Portland, Oregon, Fire Department lieutenant, told her friend that everything was fine and that she and Lisa were about to retire.

  When Lonnie’s and Lisa’s roommate returned the next morning at 9:30, she found the door unlocked—a very unusual circumstance—and a light on. When she walked into her friends’ bedroom, she found them still lying in their twin beds, but they didn’t respond to her greeting. Puzzled, she turned on the light.

  “I looked at Lonnie and I didn’t believe my eyes. Then I started to wake Lisa … and she was in the same state,” the girl told Detectives John Leitch, Dick Reed, and Wayne Dorman.

  Lonnie Trumbull was dead, her head and face covered with blood. Her skull had been fractured with a blunt instrument. Lisa Wick was comatose. She too had been battered on the head, but physicians at Harborview Hospital speculated she had survived because the curlers she wore had absorbed some of the force of the blows. Neither girl had been sexually assaulted, and neither had struggled. They had been attacked as they slept. There were no signs of forced entry and nothing had been stolen.

  Joyce Johnson sat beside Lisa Wick’s hospital bed for days, listening for something the critically injured girl might say if and when she came out of her coma. Lisa did recover, but she had no memory of what had happened. She had gone to bed and awakened days later in the hospital.

  The Seattle detectives found the death weapon in a vacant lot just south of the apartment building. It was a piece of wood eighteen inches long and three inches square and it was covered with blood and hair. The case remains today in the unsolved file of the Seattle Police Department.

  Ted Bundy was twenty years old that summer, and, sometime in the summer of 1966, he had moved to Seattle to begin attending classes at the University of Washington. A year later, he worked in the Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill.

  There are no other matches—nothing beyond proximity and M.O.—but both the Burr and the Wick-Trumbull cases came to investigators’ minds when they heard of that throwaway remark Ted Bundy made on February 17, 1978.

  Leon County Chief of Detectives Jack Poitinger would give a deposition to the defense team in which he recalled that Ted had told him a day later he had a desire to cause great bodily harm to females. Poitinger had asked him why he had such a proclivity for stealing Volkswagens, and he’d said it was because they got good gas mileage.

  “Well, come on, Ted. What else is there about it?”

  “Well, you can take out the front seat.”

  There was a hesitation on Ted’s part, and Poitinger said, “It might be easy to carry someone in the car that way.”

  “I don’t like to use that terminology.”

  The detectives and the suspect fished around for a word that would suit, and came up with “cargo.”

  “It’s easier to carry cargo in them.”

  “Why is it easy to carry cargo?”

  “You can control it better. …”

  According to Poitinger’s deposition, Ted had indicated that he preferred to end up in some sort of an institution in Washington State. An institution where he might be “studied.”

  “Studied for what?”

  Poitinger, responding later to questioning by a Bundy defense attorney, Mike Minerva, said, “I think the
gist of the conversation was that his problem was that he had a desire to cause great bodily harm to females.”

  Chapman, whom Ted seemed to favor, asked, “Ted, if you will tell me where the body [of Kimberly Leach] is, I will go and get it and let the parents know that the child is dead.”

  “I cannot do that because the site [sight?] Is too horrible to look at.”

  When Ted was subsequently transferred to the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee in a tightly guarded caravan of cars, Detective Don Parchen asked him again, “Is the little girl dead?”

  “Well, you gentlemen knew that you were getting involved with a pretty strange creature, and you have known that for a few days.”

  “We need your help in finding Kim’s body so that her parents can at least bury her and go on with their lives.”

  According to Patchen, Ted raised up in his chair, crumpled a pack of cigarettes and threw it on the floor, saying, “But I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”

  If all the off-the-record and off-the-tape remarks made by Ted Bundy are to be given weight, there is, indeed, a side to the man never revealed to anyone but his alleged victims—and they cannot talk.

  Norm Chapman swears that Ted did make those remarks, and that, at one point when Chapman accompanied him to the bathroom on February 17, Ted had indicated he didn’t want to talk to his public defenders, Terry Turrell and Elizabeth Nicholas.

  “He said, ‘Norman, you gotta get me away from those S.O.B.’s because they’re trying to tell me not to tell you things I want to tell you.’ He said he was wanting to tell us about him and his personality, his ‘problem,’ because the fantasies were taking over his life. He worked with people with emotional problems and he couldn’t discuss his with anyone. He said to keep his fantasies going, he had to do acts against society. We presumed his ‘problem’ had to do with death. He said when he got into his ‘lawyer’ personality, he would talk to the public defenders and we should realize what a big concession it was for him to talk this way. He kept saying he didn’t want to lie to us, but, if we forced him, he’d have to. He said this many times. I told him that I couldn’t tell his P.D.’s to go away. He’d have to do that himself.”

  It was 6:15 A.M. (Florida time) when Ted called me on the morning of February 17, telling me he wanted to get it all out, to talk. His public defenders waited outside the interrogation room and say that they were not allowed to see him until 10:00 A.M. At that time, they say they found him weeping, distraught, and rambling in his speech.

  That evening Elizabeth Nicholas went to the Escambia County Jail and demanded again to see Ted, telling the jailer she had an order for sleeping pills for Ted. The jailer blocked her way, and she called the judge. The jailer was furious and said he had the right to search her.

  “I hope you have a woman to do it,” she said.

  “Listen, lady, there are naked men up there,” the jailer hedged.

  “Then I just won’t look,” she retorted.

  She was allowed up into the jail area and saw that Ted was sleeping soundly. In pretrial, eighteen months later, Ted Bundy testified that he had only fuzzy recall of that morning, and that he most certainly would have seen his attorneys if he’d known they were outside the interrogation room.

  There had been a tug-of-war over the prisoner between detectives and public defenders. Just which group Ted really wanted to talk to, if either, is another area that remains clouded.

  37

  I HAD TRIED for most of that Friday, February 17, 1978, to get through to Ted, and, of course, I had met a brick wall in Pensacola, Florida. That Friday night should have been exciting for me. My first Hollywood premiere. I was guest of the director of the film, who was also my collaborator on a new movie script, and there were so many movie stars. It would have been grist for letters to send back to Seattle to my deluded friends who visualized my life in Los Angeles as something more exotic than it really was. Instead, it was all ashes. I kept hearing Ted’s terrified voice, a call for help from 3,000 miles away.

  I knew what he wanted, although he had not said it outright. He wanted to come home. He was ready, at that point, to confess it all, if he could just come back to Washington to be confined in a mental hospital. He had called me because he had no place else to go, because the running was over. There were no more corners in his mind where he could go to forget, and he was frightened.

  I tried, literally, to save his life. I began to phone Washington state agencies to try to arrange something that would allow Ted to confess to me, and, through plea bargaining, to be returned to Washington for confinement in a mental hospital. All of Saturday, I was on the phone. First, I called Nick Mackie at home and asked if he could intervene, if he could call Chapman or Poitinger and explain that it was likely that Ted would talk to me, and that that was what the Washington contingent of investigators wanted. Mackie said he would contact Senior Trial Deputy Phil Killien, and get word back to me.

  As far as funds available to pay for my plane fare to Florida and my housing there, he didn’t know.

  I called the Seattle Police Homicide Unit and talked to Lieutenant Ernie Bisset, assistant commander of the unit. Ernie felt that I should go to Pensacola if there was any way it could be managed. The Seattle Police had some money available for investigation, he said, and he would try to arrange for a plane ticket for me.

  Bisset called back within half an hour. He had gotten an O.K. to pay for a trip to Florida for me, but it was up to me to see if authorities there would allow me to talk to Ted. The Seattle Police had no impact on what the Florida detectives wanted to do.

  A short time later, Phil Killien called. I explained to him that Ted had seemed anxious to talk to me, but that I had been unable to get through to him by phone since Thursday night.

  “Phil,” I asked, “who has jurisdiction over Ted? Would it be Washington because the first of the crimes occurred in Seattle? Or would it be Florida?”

  “Whoever has the body,” he answered.

  For a moment, I was confused. Which body? Washington had a half-dozen bodies, and Utah and Colorado had their share, but Florida had two too, with Kim Leach still missing. And so I asked Phil Killien, “Which body?”

  “His body. Ted Bundy’s body. They have him, and that gives them primary jurisdiction. They can do what they want.”

  And so they could. If Florida didn’t want me to talk to Ted, then I couldn’t talk to Ted. It was clear that the detectives in that state did not want me, and what Ted wanted didn’t matter in the least to them.

  38

  ALTHOUGH TED WAS the prime suspect in the Chi Omega murders, the Dunwoody Street attack and the abduction of Kimberly Leach, he was, for the moment, charged only with multiple counts of auto theft, auto burglary, credit card thefts, forgery, and “uttering” (a somewhat archaic term meaning to declare or assert that a note, money, or a document is good or valid when it is actually counterfeit). Conviction on those charges alone could—like the charges after his first escape in Colorado—bring him more than a lifetime in prison: seventy-five years. But the State of Florida was looking for more, and they were taking no chances that the “Houdini of jails” would bolt again.

  Whenever he was outside a cell, Ted wore handcuffs, chains, and a bulky orthopedic brace from his left foot to thigh, a brace that made him walk with a pronounced limp. When a reporter asked him at one hearing why he wore the brace, he grinned and said, “I have a problem with my leg—I run too fast.” For the press, at least, he could summon up his old bravado.

  While the processing of the orange Bug and the white Dodge went on, so did the search for Kimberly. No one believed that they were looking for anything but a decomposing body. Detectives were also running down charge slips on the stolen credit cards in Ted’s possession when he was arrested.

  On February 18, even as I had tried, naively, to work out plea bargaining for him, Ted had been taken from his cell in Pensacola and driven back to Tallahassee, the city he had never planned
to visit again. Throughout his legal problems, there had always been certain lawmen and prosecutors who galled Ted: Nick Mackie, Bob Keppel, Pete Hayward, Jerry Thompson, and Frank Tucker. He was about to run into another nemesis—Sheriff Ken Katsaris of the Leon County Sheriff’s Office.

  Katsaris was a darkly handsome man of thirty-five, a man who would jokingly tell a political meeting that “Ted Bundy is my favorite prisoner.” Ted would come to despise Katsaris, and more and more would come to depend on Millard Farmer, the Atlanta attorney who is a founder of Team Defense, legal help for indigents who face the death penalty. Ted had talked by phone with Farmer even when he was incarcerated in Colorado, and now he wanted Farmer at his side. It would not please Florida judicial authorities who thought Farmer a disruptive force in a courtroom, given to grandstanding ploys.

  Farmer gave an interview to the Tallahassee Democrat after Ted’s arrest, an interview in which he characterized Ted as being “a person very disturbed mentally. He is emotionally disturbed. Attention being drawn [to him] is of interest to him. He enjoys playing the game. He appears to enjoy watching law enforcement people muddle in their ignorance.”

  But Farmer said that his defense team would volunteer to defend Bundy if he was charged with the Florida murders.

  During the first week of March 1978, Ted appeared in Judge John Rudd’s courtroom twice: to hear the charges against him to date, and to fight a prosecution request that he be ordered to give samples of his hair, blood, and saliva. And he was, seemingly, back to his normal, joking self-confidence, despite the bulky brace on his leg and despite the fact he still wore a dirty ski sweater and rumpled slacks.

  In view of his background, the thirty-four forgery counts and the uttering charges brought against him, because he’d charged $290.82 worth of purchases on a credit card stolen from the wife of an F.S.U. criminology student, were chickenfeed. He appeared more rankled by Ken Katsaris’s enjoyment of the limelight than he did by the innuendoes surrounding him.