Obsession (48 page)

He became active in state Republican politics. He made contacts. He once apprehended a purse-snatcher and another time saved a toddler from drowning in a lake. To all outward appearances, he was a model citizen. Ann Rule believes he actually helped people and saved lives working the hot line at the rape crisis center. After several missteps, he finally graduated from college in 1972 and then applied and got into the University of Utah Law School. But by the time he attended his first class there, he was already a murderer. On January 31, 1974, twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy, an attractive young woman with long, straight, blond hair, disappeared from her basement apartment near the University of Washington. The bedsheets were bloody and a bloodstained nightgown hung in the closet. A couple of weeks earlier and a couple of blocks away, eighteen-year-old Susan Clarke had been found assaulted, beaten, and sexually tortured, lying in her own blood. Though she would remain in a coma for months, Clarke did recover.

On March 12, 1974, a nineteen-year-old coed disappeared en route to a jazz concert in Olympia, Washington. On April 12, another young woman went missing, then another on May 6. On June 1, yet another disappeared after being seen leaving a tavern in Seattle with an unidentified man. And ten days later
a college girl in Seattle left her boyfriend’s apartment but never made it to the sorority house where she lived.

There were no bodies, but police were treating the disappearances as homicides. And there was a pattern. All of the apparent victims were college-age white females, all very attractive, with good figures and long, straight hair, parted in the middle.

Then, on July 14, two more young women—Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, both fitting the pretty, long-haired profile—disappeared from separate picnic gatherings on the shores of Lake Sammamish, a state park. But finally, police had a description to go on, from another pretty, long-haired young woman, Janice Graham. When questioned by police after the other women’s disappearance, Graham reported encountering a good-looking young man in his early to mid twenties who introduced himself as Ted. He was polite and charming and was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt. But the most memorable thing about him was the cast on his arm, suspended in a sling.

He said that he’d hurt his arm playing racquetball and needed help loading his sailboat onto his car. He was friendly and chatty, so Graham decided there’d be no harm in lending a hand. But when they walked to the parking lot and up to Ted’s Volkswagen Beetle, there was no sailboat to be loaded. Ted explained that it was up the hill at his parents’ house and asked her to get in and they would drive there to get it. At that point, she hesitated, and there is no question that this hesitation saved her life. She declared that she was running late and had to meet her husband and folks. Ted smiled and said it was okay. Several minutes later, she spotted Ted through the crowd, again heading toward the parking lot with another young woman by his side.

The cast was actually a successful and effective
modus operandi for him. The combination of his glib patter and the cast on his arm would convince most attractive young women that he was “harmless,” and he could get them to accompany him to the vicinity of his car, generally with the request for assistance in moving or carrying some heavy object that he could not manage himself in his temporarily handicapped condition. Most people want to help others, and Bundy took advantage of that instinct. When the woman was in reach and out of sight of others, the cast became a weapon. He would whack her with it, blitzing or disabling her. When she found herself in the passenger seat of his VW Bug, either willingly or unwillingly, she would also realize that the passenger-side door handle had been removed and she had no way out. Tom Harm employed this multipurpose cast as Buffalo Bill’s MO for gaining control over his targeted female victims.

The police hunt intensified for a “Ted” fitting Graham’s description. One of those who qualified was Ted Bundy. But this clean-cut Young Republican who had already been accepted in law school just didn’t seem as if he could be the one, and he was fairly quickly discounted among a flood of other reported suspects.

In September, near the lake, hunters found the decomposed remains of three women buried in shallow graves. Dental records identified two of them as Janice Ott and Denise Naslund. The third could not be identified. The following month, the remains of two more victims were found. One was a missing woman from Vancouver, Washington. The other was unknown.

That same month, sixteen-year-old high school cheerleader Nancy Wilcox disappeared in Salt Lake City, Utah. Then several more, all in the general area. One woman—tall, beautiful Carol DaRonch—managed to jump out of Bundy’s VW after he had abducted her from a shopping mall parking lot. He had
posed as a police undercover officer and had hand-cuffed her. While he had her in the car, he had threatened to “blow [her] brains out” if she didn’t stop screaming. That same evening, Debra Kent left a play at Salt Lake City’s Viewmont High School and was never seen again.

The following January, the killing scene shifted to Colorado. Caryn Campbell disappeared in Snowmass Village. Her beaten and violated body was found the next month. In March, Julie Cunningham disappeared in Vail, another ski resort. Then Melanie Cooley a month later in Nederland, and Shelly Robertson in July in Golden. Those bodies were both found, Nederland with her skull crushed and her jeans pulled down around her ankles, Robertson in an abandoned mine shaft.

The previous week, things had begun to come apart tor Ted Bundy. He had been arrested in Salt Lake City on suspicion of burglary, one of his old standbys and a prime source of income and supplies for him. He’d been picked up for reckless driving, and a search of his car revealed handcuffs and a pair of panty hose cut into a stocking mask. Maps and gasoline receipts indicated he’d been in both Snowmass and Vail. Good police work tied him to the Carol DaRonch case. She was called in to see if she could identify him, which she did. He was convicted of attempted kidnapping, then extradited to Colorado for the murder of Caryn Campbell. Rather than seeming afraid or despondent, Bundy seemed to glory in the battle of wits with the law enforcement establishment. He was held for a while in the quaint old jail in the Pitkin County Court-house in Aspen before being moved to the more modern Garfield County jail in nearby Glenwood Springs. While he was incarcerated, he was given access to the law library in the Pitkin Courthouse since he’d announced he wanted to prepare his own defense. On
June 7, 1977, during a trial recess, Bundy wandered back to the library on the second floor, climbed out the window, and escaped.

He was picked up eight days later on the road and returned to jail under tighter security. But the following December, as his murder trial loomed, he escaped again, carving a small square out of the ceiling of his cell with a hacksaw, sneaking through a guard’s apartment, stealing a car with the keys in the ignition, and headed away. When the car broke down, he got a bus to Denver and from there hopped a plane to Chicago. Then he went by train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in time to watch the Rose Bowl on television in a local tavern. Tiring of the cold, he stole a car, which he drove to Atlanta, then abandoned it and got on a bus for Florida. There, his daring escape had not hit the papers.

One report had it that when Bundy was incarcerated in Colorado, he casually asked a jailer one day which states were most likely to execute a convicted murderer. The guard told him that the best chances would probably be in Texas or Florida. Now, some people have interpreted his decision to go to Florida as a death wish, an urge to be caught. I disagree with this assessment. I have seen very few obsessional predators who truly wanted to be caught. The few who actually seem to—such as William Heirens in Chicago, who scrawled, “cAtch Me BeFore I Kill More,” on the wall of one scene with his victim’s lipstick, or Ed Kemper in Santa Cruz, who called police from a phone booth hi Colorado after he’d killed his mother and told them to come and get him—let you know hi no uncertain terms.

What I do believe this exchange indicated was Bundy’s tremendous arrogance, and his need not only to be able to manipulate, dominate, and control his victims, but the entire establishment as well. If he could
go to a major capital-punishment state and continue his murderous ways, then he was every bit the superman above the law he thought himself to be. Of course, we have to couple that with the deep-set inadequacy about normal human relationships that motivated Bundy to want to kill in the first place.

As Dr. Samenow says, “What often happens in the mental health field is that they’ll focus on what they call low self-esteem or sense of inadequacy. But that would be like saying, if you had a quarter, which is more important—heads or tails? They both make up the coin. What happens with the criminal is that he vacillates between an unrealistic view of himself as number one and an equally unrealistic view of himself as nothing.”

Ted got a room near Florida State University in Tallahassee. Once again, he would have easy access to a ready supply of his victim of preference: beautiful, willowy girls with long, straight hair. This, in itself, is significant in terms of the criminal behavior of the serial offender. Even thousands of miles from his home base, he was still setting himself up to operate within his zone of comfort—a university campus—as he had several times before.

Late on Saturday night of January 14, 1978, dressed in black with a dark blue knit cap and carrying a wooden club, he stole into the Chi Omega sorority house, which had a reputation for some of the loveliest girls on campus. When he left fifteen minutes later, two of the girls were dead in their beds, ritualistically covered with blankets, and a third was severely injured in hers, all beaten, molested, and mutilated with his club and his teeth.

But that wasn’t it for the night. A few blocks from the Chi Omega house, Bundy broke into an apartment and attacked another attractive young woman, leaving her lying diagonally across her bed in her own blood,
her skull fractured in five places. Miraculously, she lived, but with deafness in one ear and permanent impairment to her balance, which prevented her from pursuing her dream of becoming a professional dancer.

Days later, while discussing the gruesome Chi Omega murders with some neighbors, Bundy casually asserted that he could get away with any crime he wanted to, even murder.

But by that point, Bundy was finally displaying the kind of postoffense behavior we have come to associate with many, if not most, serial killers. He was getting ragged, sloppy; others noticed his speech was slurred, and he was no longer dressing in the smart and fashionable style that had become his trademark. He had no job and had not yet paid any rent, but he was charging a lot of incidentals on credit cards he had stolen.

Even the style of his crimes had changed. While the earlier murders and attempted murders had shown a propensity for the thrill of the hunt, the thrill of control, and a desire to keep the victim alive and inflict punishment for as long as was practical, these Tallahassee murders were strictly blitz-style from beginning to end. By this point, the obsession had “degenerated” into a simple need to kill young women. Whether he realized it consciously or not, Ted was now playing an endgame strategy.

And his choice of his final victim shows a complete psychological degeneration. I would add “moral degeneration” to that if it were possible to descend further from the moral depths Bundy had already reached.

On February 6, driving a stolen Dodge van, Ted set out for Jacksonville. Along the way, he charged his needs on his stolen credit cards and left a new motel each morning without paying the bill. On February 9,
beautiful little Kimberly Leach, a dark-haired twelve-year-old at Lake City Junior High, was seen in the school courtyard talking to a stranger, who motioned her toward a white van. Her body wasn’t found until the first week of April, the neck sliced through, in an abandoned hog shed near Suwannee River State Park. Even after eight weeks of exposure, it was clear to the medical examiner that there had been massive trauma to the child’s pelvic area. And the position of the body suggested that she had been slaughtered like a hog, meaning the killer’s choice of locations was not accidental.

Bundy returned to Tallahassee the same day he took Kimberly’s life. The next day, he was on the FBI’s Ten Most-Wanted List for murder and interstate flight. He was picked up by the police for questioning after a date at an expensive restaurant, but when the officer stepped back to his squad car to run the license plates, Bundy bolted and escaped. He had no further problems with the law, probably thinking he was invincible, until February 12, when he decided to leave town. He stole an orange Volkswagen Beetle, the type of car he felt most comfortable in, and headed west out of the city.

In the alley of a closed restaurant, police finally caught up with him again. Pensacola police officer David Lee thought it odd that a car would be emerging from behind a place that was closed and turned on his flashers to pull the car over. But then the VW took off. Lee radioed in the plates, which came back as stolen. He chased the car and overtook it about a mile down the road. With his gun drawn, he ordered the driver out and facedown on the pavement.

Bundy tried to resist and a scuffle ensued. Lee fired a warning shot, but Bundy scrambled to his feet and ran. Finally, Lee got the cuffs on him, not realizing the significance of his collar. It was not until the next
day that the FBI confirmed for the Pensacola Police that they had Theodore Bundy in custody.

That was when he began to negotiate. Without admitting guilt for anything, he attempted to continue his manipulation, domination, and control by implying that he could help clear up numerous open cases across the country in exchange for special treatment. The officers took this to mean not pursuing the death penalty and setting him up in some comfortable mental hospital. To prove his good intentions, one of the detectives suggested he tell them what he had done with Kimberly Leach’s body, so that her family might have some closure.