The Stranger Beside Me

  Somewhere in the southeast, Karen Chandler, now a young wife and mother, was telling King about that night in January 1978. She seemed remarkably normal, and I thought that was nice. To know that even a handful of the girls who survived Ted could live happy, everyday, normal lives was a comfort. Karen didn’t mention that she still pays $300 a month for dental bills to try to repair what Ted did to her with an oak log.

  Karen’s sorority roommate Kathy Kleiner’s jaw hurts too, but there seems to be no surgical remedy guaranteed to help it.

  I had talked to another Florida State Chi Omega, Susan Denton, when she called earlier in the week, just as I had called or been called by most of the people whose lives had touched mine because of Ted Bundy. She said that a reporter named Amy Wilson had done an article about the girls of Chi Omega in Sunshine: The Magazine of Southern Florida. It had summed up everything, about their nightmares, and how they were trying to forget.

  But not one of us had forgotten, and we all knew we never would.

  In that hot little studio in San Francisco, I watched the cues of the cameraman and listened to Karen Chandler’s sweet voice, and to Jack Levin, a Boston professor, discuss serial murder.

  I felt a little faint.

  My mind kept circling back to the execution and the thought of how electricity must burn.

  And even so, I also thought: Ted had absolutely nothing to give to this world any longer, and the world certainly has nothing more to give to him. It’s time.

  It was cool and fresh in downtown San Francisco. The limo driver took me to the best hotel in town, where the 20/20 staff was waiting for me. There were also thirty-four phone messages waiting, all marked “Urgent.” I wondered how I could answer them all, and it made me crazy until I realized there was no way I could do that.

  For the next forty hours, I would be living with 20/20, with Tom Jarriel, Bernie Cohen, the producer, and Bob Read, the man who made everything mesh smoothly. We would talk about Ted.

  The otherworldliness feeling came back stronger than ever, and I felt a schism in my attention. I was aware of a clock ticking inside, the sure steady march toward the little room in the Florida State Prison—the room with the roughhewn oak chair with the leather straps and the electrodes, the room where the witnesses’ chairs were shiny black and white with backs shaped like tulips—chairs that seemed frivolous given their location. 20/20 took me downstairs to a gourmet dinner that cost more than any meal I’d ever partaken of. My mouth was too dry to enjoy it. Tom and Bernie and Bob were very nice, and funny. They were working on an interesting story. There was no personal involvement for them. I had done the same thing myself a thousand times.

  Tomorrow, Ted was going to die. January 24.

  I had finally come to the place where I had to acknowledge my reactions. I could not coast through the next twenty-four hours. I had a feeling much like the last time I ever saw my brother, Don. My new husband and I drove him to the Seattle airport, terribly worried by how depressed he was. Ironically, he and my father were headed for San Francisco, where I was now, so that Don could go back to Stanford. As soon as they were out of sight of the gate, I started to cry.

  I knew that I would never see Don again. There was nothing I could do about it. There was no way I could stop Don from dying. It was just one of those things that was going to happen, and nothing anyone could do to make it be different. At twenty, I felt that fatalism for the first time.

  Don was twenty-one years old when he committed suicide the next day. And Ted was a year older than that the first time I met him. My brother was goodness and kindness personified, and Ted Bundy was the opposite. And yet, I had probably always identified with Ted because I had lost Don.

  And now, thirty years later, Ted was going to die, and nothing anyone could do was going to stop it. And nothing should stop it.

  I tried hard to focus on the dinner conversation. I owed nothing to Ted, the monster. The rapist-killer-monster. He had lied to me, and he had destroyed more lives, horribly, than anyone I had ever written about. I was remembering a myth.

  Far away in Florida, Ted’s life was winding down rather quietly. He had canceled his press conference. He was visited by Jamie Boone, his stepson, now a grown man and a Methodist preacher. Jamie had always believed in him. Ted reportedly felt some remorse about having deceived Jamie.

  Carole Ann Boone did not visit.

  Louise Bundy had always doted on and trusted in her “precious darling boy” too. Her anguish at his revelations to detectives was incomprehensible. The media had found her and hounded her until she shut her doors on them.

  Louise had talked to the Tacoma News Tribune, her hometown paper. “It’s the most devastating news of our life,” she said on hearing that Ted had confessed eight— possibly eleven—murders to Bob Keppel. “If indeed, it was a confession [it’s] totally unexpected because we have staunchly believed—and I guess we still do until we hear what he really said—that he was not guilty of any of those crimes … I agonize for the parents of those girls. We have girls of our own who are very dear to us. Oh, it’s so terrible. I just can’t understand. …”

  Ted called his mother on the night of January 23. He told her over and over that she had done nothing wrong. “He kept saying how sorry he was, that there was ‘another part of me that people didn’t know.’” But Ted had rushed to assure his mother that “the Ted Bundy you knew also existed.”

  In a house filled with friends, Louise pressed the phone to her ear to block out extraneous noise, listening for the last time to her son’s voice.

  “You’ll always be my precious son,” she said softly. “We just want you to know how much we love you and always will.”

  In Raiford Prison, the long night passed too swiftly. Ted spent four of his last hours praying with Fred Lawrence, a Gainesville clergyman, and with the Tanners. Reportedly calmed by massive tranquilizers, Ted went through the final preparations. There was no last meal. He had no appetite. His wrists, right leg, and head were shaved to facilitate the electrodes that would carry a peak load of two thousand volts in three surges, until he was dead. He was given clean blue pants and a light blue dress shirt to wear.

  In San Francisco, we sat up all night. While the cameramen adjusted lights and camera angles, I talked for hours about Ted, and what he was like, or what he seemed to be like and, in truth, was not.

  The phone rang seventy-five more times. Even the hotel operator, who was married to a Bay Area probation officer, asked about Ted.

  When it was 7 A.M. in Starke, Florida, it would be only 4 A.M. in San Francisco.

  Not even sunrise.

  At about 2:30 A.M., I stretched across the top of the bedspread and slept for half an hour. At 3 A.M., the camera crew woke me up. They were ready to start filming.

  Tom Jarriel and I sat in silk covered chairs in front of a television set. The screen showed the Florida State Prison, and then it focused on the crowds who sang and drank beer and celebrated the coming execution. Three hundred people wore costumes and masks and held banners up that said “Burn Bundy!” and “It’s Fry-Day!” A man in a Reagan mask kept popping in front of the cameras. He held an effigy of a rabbit in one hand, his “Bundy Bunny,” he explained.

  They all seemed quite mad. They had no more humanity than Ted.

  Parents had brought their children to witness the happy event. There was a holiday feeling that appalled me.

  The 20/20 cameras were on us. Tom Jarriel asked me questions, and I watched the screen. I wanted again to be home. The green building that housed the death chamber was only dimly visible against the first rays of Florida’s sunrise.

  At seven, we all gazed at the screen. There could be no reprieve now. It was really going to happen. I thought that I was probably going to throw up. I had not felt that particular visceral turmoil for a decade. I felt exactly as I had in Miami when I realized that Ted was guilty.

  The cameras seemed focused up my nose, and I could hear Tom’s soft Southern voice asking me a
question. I shook my head. I couldn’t talk.

  We saw the lights outside the prison dim for what seemed a long time, and then they came back on bright. The expectant crowd murmured and hooted.

  At exactly 7 A.M., a door had swung open in the death chamber. Prison Superintendent Tom Barton stepped in. Escorted by two guards, Ted came next. His wrists were handcuffed. He was quickly strapped into the electric chair.

  Ted’s eyes were said to be empty, perhaps the result of no sleep or of large dosages of sedatives. Or perhaps because he no longer had any hope or expectation. He looked through the Plexiglas partition at the twelve witnesses who sat on the shiny black and white chairs. Did he recognize all of them? Probably not. Some he’d never known, and some he hadn’t seen for years. Tallahassee Detective Don Patchen was there, and Bob Dekle, and Jerry Blair. State Trooper Ken Robinson, who had found all that was left of Kimberly Leach, was there.

  Ted’s flat eyes locked onto Jim Coleman and Reverend Lawrence, and he nodded.

  “Jim … Fred,” he said. “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

  Barton would have one more call to make. He called Governor Martinez from the phone inside the death chamber. His expression unreadable, Barton nodded to the black hooded executioner.

  No one knew who the executioner was, but one witness saw thick, curled lashes fringing his/her eyes. “I think it was a woman.”

  I watched the television screen in San Francisco. The lights dimmed outside the prison once more. Once again.

  And then a blurry figure came out from somewhere in the green building and waved a white handkerchief in a wide, sweeping motion.

  It was the signal. Ted was dead.

  It was 7:16 A.M.

  A white hearse moved slowly from somewhere behind the prison. The crowds cheered and whistled joyfully as it picked up speed. Officials worried that the mob might stop it and turn it over. Bill Frakes, of the Miami Herald, shot a picture of it, the same Bill Frakes who had captured the only image of Ted Bundy out of control. That photograph was shot at the Leach trial nine years earlier. When Ted decided to leave the courtroom and deputies blocked his path, he had suddenly flown into a towering rage. That Ted was out of control, the Ted his victims saw. I use that slide to end my Bundy seminar and the audience never fails to gasp.

  But the Ted Bundy who walked under his own power to the electric chair was in control. He died the way I always thought he would: without letting the witnesses see his fear.

  I flew back to Seattle with the 20/20 group, and, without sleep, spent the next twelve hours doing radio and television interviews. Everywhere I went, I saw the instantly released videotape of Ted and Dr. James Dobson. In the tape, Ted, looking pale yellow, his face lined and exhausted, earnestly confided to Dobson that his crimes could be attributed to pornography and alcohol.

  Two agendas were met with that videotape. Dr. Dobson believed that smut and booze triggered serial killers, and he had the premiere serial killer to validate his theories. Ted wanted to leave behind a legacy of his wisdom and humanity’s guilt. He was guilty, yes, but we were guiltier because we had allowed pornography to be sold. We walked by newsstands and did not demand that filthy literature be confiscated and outlawed. Tired as he was, Ted was brilliant, persuasive, and self-deprecating. He lowered his head and looked sharply up at the cameras as he responded to Dobson’s question of what had happened to him. “That’s the question of the hour and one that … people much more intelligent than I will be working on for years. …”

  Ted was charmingly humble as he said he was no expert—this man who had told me, Keppel, Art Norman, Bill Hagmaier, and anyone who would listen that he was indeed the definitive expert on serial murder and psychopathology. He was simply offering his opinion, tentatively, modestly, on the Dobson tape.

  “This is the message I want to get across, that as a young boy, and I mean a boy of twelve or thirteen certainly, that I encountered—outside the home again, in the local grocery store, in a local drugstore, the soft-core pornography—that people called soft-core. As I think I explained to you last night, Dr. Dobson, in an anecdote, as young boys do, we explored the bad roads and sideways and byways of our neighborhood, and oftentimes people would dump the garbage. … And from time to time, we would come across pornographic books of a hard nature … of a more explicit nature. And this also included such things as detective magazines.”

  With Dobson seeming to lead him, Ted talked of his alleged addiction to pornography, of his warping by printed matter that involved violence and sexual violence.

  Ted was very convincing, a drained, repentant man about to die, yet still warning the world.

  I wish that I could believe his motives were altruistic. But all I can see in that Dobson tape is another Ted Bundy manipulation of our minds. The effect of the tape is to place, once again, the onus of his crimes, not on himself, but on us.

  I don’t think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. I think he became addicted to the power his crimes gave him. And I think he wanted to leave us talking about him, debating the wisdom of his words. In that, Ted succeeded magnificently.

  The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end. He talked to Dobson of stumbling across detective magazines, of reading them avidly and “fueling his fantasies.” Yesterday, I came across a letter Ted sent me almost exactly twelve years before he died. It is dated January 25, 1977.

  I had written to tell him I had done a “Ted” article for True Detective magazine.

  “I wasn’t surprised or disappointed to hear about the detective magazine story,” he wrote. “I rather anticipated such stories would surface or, in the case of the detective reading public, sub-surface. I hope I won’t offend you and I don’t intend to malign the detective magazine press, but who in the world reads these publications? I may have led a sheltered life, nevertheless I have never purchased such a magazine, and one of the two or three occasions I have ever picked one up was at the Crisis Clinic that night you brought some to show us some of your articles.

  “Come to think of it, I have never known anyone who subscribed or regularly read these magazines. Of course, I don’t qualify as your typical American either.

  “… If the article was being published in Time, Newsweek, the Denver Post, Seattle Times or even the National Inquirer [sic], I would be concerned. …”

  Which was it? Either Ted never, ever read fact detective magazines and shuddered at the thought, as he wrote me—or, as he told Dr. Dobson, he had been corrupted by them and other reading material to the point he had become a serial killer.

  Ted Bundy’s interview with James Dobson accomplished one thing that troubled me. During the weeks after Ted was executed, I heard from a number of young women. Sensitive, intelligent, kind young women wrote or called me to say that they were deeply depressed because Ted was dead. One college student had watched the Dobson tape on television and felt moved to send flowers to the funeral parlor where Ted’s body had been taken. “He wouldn’t have hurt me,” she said. “All he needed was some kindness. I know he wouldn’t have hurt me. …”

  A high school student said she cried all the time, and couldn’t sleep because a good man like Ted Bundy had been killed.

  There were so many calls, so many crying women. Many of them had corresponded with Ted and fallen in love with him, each devoutly believing that she was his only one. Several told me they suffered nervous breakdowns when he died. Even in death, Ted damages women. They have sent for the Dobson tape, paying the $29.95 fee, and watch it over and over. They see compassion and sadness in his eyes. And they feel guilty and bereft. To get well, they must realize that they were conned by the master conman. They are grieving for a shadow man that never existed.

  There were other calls—calls from women who were so afraid of Ted Bundy that they had not been able to call me while he still lived. They all believed that they had narrowly esc
aped from him during the killing time in the seventies. Some of them were clearly mistaken. Others were impossible to dismiss. There are so few actual Bundy survivors that it is illuminating to hear their stories.

  Brenda Ball disappeared from The Flame Tavern on Memorial Day Weekend, 1974. A week or so after Brenda vanished, a young mother named Vikky spent the evening at a tavern just down the street, Brubeck’s Topless Bar. Twenty-five, petite, with long brown hair parted in the middle, Vicky drove there in her convertible, and left before midnight.

  Her car wouldn’t start, so she accepted a ride home with friends. At 4 A.M., just as the sun was beginning to light the eastern horizon, Vikky went back to try to start her car. She didn’t want to leave it vulnerable and open in the tavern lot.

  “I was fiddling with the car, trying to get it started—and it wasn’t responding—when this good-looking man walked out from behind the tavern. I don’t know what he was doing there at that time of the morning, and it didn’t occur to me then that he might have deliberately disabled my car.

  “He tried to start it, and then he told me that I needed jumper cables. He didn’t have any, but he told me he had friends in Federal Way who did. We went to this store and he sent me in to get some. The guy inside thought I was nuts, and said he didn’t have any jumper cables. Well, the man who was ‘helping’ me said, ‘I know someone who has jumpers.’

  “Before I could say no, we hit the freeway in his car, heading someplace north—toward Issaquah. We were driving along, and I thought he knew where he was going, but I was worried because my five-year-old daughter was home alone. All of a sudden, the guy said, ‘Do me a favor,’ and I looked at him, and he pulled a switchblade from between his legs and held it to my neck.

  “I started to cry, and he said, ‘Take your top off,’ and I said, ‘It’s coming off,’ and he said, ‘now your pants’ and then he made me take off my underclothes.