Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy
Read Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Online
Authors: Rebecca Morris
Ted and Ann
“This is the ONLY book to read to learn the full story of the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr in August 1961. Fascinating!”
“While Ted Bundy might be the greatest evil enigma ever, author Rebecca Morris strips away the layers of the greatest mystery of his life—what was his connection to the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr? This is an astonishing achievement, the missing piece that readers of crime have long sought. Bravo for Morris!”
“As a journalist, I covered Ted Bundy’s murder trial in 1980. Thirty years later, Rebecca Morris brings to vivid life that particular trial and the whole Bundy mystique— when a young, intelligent, charming personality hid one of the vilest hearts that ever beat. This is a chapter in American criminal history that deserves Morris’ confident reporting and writing.”
FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads
“Few criminals have loomed as large in the national psyche as Ted Bundy, the ‘Cary Grant of serial killers,’ whose string of brutal murders manages to fascinate and repulse us still. Now, in a book as chilling as it is compelling and impossible to put down, journalist Rebecca Morris presents yet another possible Bundy victim—an innocent, eightyear-old girl who disappeared from her hometown of Tacoma, Washington, in 1961, and was never found. In telling the story of Ann Marie Burr, who went missing on a steamy August day, Morris also reveals startling, neverbeen-told details about Bundy’s childhood, including fresh information about his illegitimacy and brief abandonment by his mother. Morris’ deft writing and detailed research into Bundy’s actions that summer, when he was a gangly 14-year-old roaming the Burr’s neighborhood on his bike, will have you reading
Ted and Ann
well into the night.”
The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy
Rebecca Morris
Excerpts of
Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer
by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth used with permission of the authors. (Authorlink Press, 2000).
Photograph of Louise Bundy by Russ Carmack used with permission of
The News Tribune.
Photograph of Beverly Burr by Ellen Banner used with permission of
The Seattle Times.
Burr family photos, letters, and poems used with permission of Beverly Burr.
Holt family photos used with permission of Sandi Holt.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the author.
First published by Dog Ear Publishing 4010 W. 86th Street, Ste H
Indianapolis, IN 46268
www.dogearpublishing.net
This book is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America
Beverly Ann Leach Burr January 4, 1928—September 13, 2008
“Night comes and with it the fear, the listening, the horror again and again. Only prayer can lessen the pain as we whisper, ‘Dear God be with Ann. Please help us
and other parents like us to be strong.’”
Foreword ...........................................................ix
Prologue —The Day Before.............................xi
1. Teddy..................................................................1
2. August 31, 1961 .................................................9
3. August 31, Evening..........................................21
4. Ted....................................................................33
Photographs and Illustrations Part One .........48
5. The Weekend ..................................................59
6. 145 Days...........................................................72
7. The Birth of the Hunchback ...........................81
8. One Year Later.................................................87
9. The Cary Grant of Serial Killers.....................95
vii
10. Life Without Ann ..........................................108
Photographs and Illustrations Part Two .......125
Poems by Beverly Burr ..................................138
11. Life On Death Row .......................................142
12. Bev and Don and Louise and Johnnie...........180
13. The Blue House.............................................192
14. Explaining Ted ...............................................200
15. What Happened to Ann Marie Burr? ...........208
Ted Bundy’s Victims .........................................214
Notes on Sources ...............................................217
Selected Bibliography ........................................230
Acknowledgments .............................................235
About the Author ............................................238
Foreword
IT HAS BEEN 50 years since my brother and I were startled awake by men shining flashlights on us. It was late August, 1961, a few days before the start of school, and we were sleeping in our fort in the basement one last time. The men were police, and the scene of my parents panic and hysteria that morning is still vivid and haunting.
The tragedy described in Rebecca Morris’ book,
Te d and Ann
, deeply wounded and altered my life and that of my family and others close to us. As a parent, I cannot fathom having my child taken from my home in the night. The cruelest aspect of this heinous crime is that there have been no answers. Over the years there has been a somewhat regular eruption of rumors, theories, and “confessions.” None led to an answer, and all kept open a wound that never healed.
My parents’ imagination must have run wild with nightmarish visions of what had or was happening to their daughter, and our family struggled to hang on to normalcy. Morris has devoted years to uncovering the details of Ann’s disappearance, and the possible link to a wellknown psychopath, Ted Bundy. I have learned a great deal about the time period, the facts surrounding the case, and about Ted Bundy and the other suspects in my sister’s disappearance from Morris’ thorough research and this book. Our parents, trying to protect us and provide a happy childhood, shielded us from much of this even through our adult lives.
Morris spent countless hours talking with my mother, who has now passed on, as has my father. In their memory, I applaud Rebecca Morris’ diligent work and skill in telling our story and the story of Ted Bundy, and I hope that it leads to answers so that even now there can be some closure. My parents, Beverly and Donald Burr, showed tremendous strength and courage in carrying on after the abduction of their oldest child. They did it for their other children. They not only managed to hold our family together, but also to nurture friendships, create beauty in their gardens, travel the world, and provide compassion and support to others who were struggling.
I was robbed of my sister, my playmate, and best friend. Some may wonder what good could come from this book if it doesn’t result in answers. My hope is that it shows a family can survive an unthinkable tragedy, by finding good and beauty in life, and that the good outweighs the evil.
Prologue
The Day Before
SUMMER ENDED SUDDENLY on August 30, 1961. It was the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, and the unusually warm weather turned muggy and the sky threatened to storm. That night, rain drenched Tacoma, Washington. Not the polite, incessant drizzle that those who live in the Pacific Northwest learn to tolerate (or they leave, and many do), but a hard rain accompanied by high winds. Trees blew down, lights went out, and neighborhoods were plunged into blackness. The wind masked any sounds that might be heard inside a house.
But in the afternoon, before the rain, it was just plain hot. Beverly Burr’s steam iron made the day seem even hotter as she worked out the creases in her daughter Ann’s new dress. Bev usually made her children’s clothes and was so thrifty that the family teased her about it. But Ann was starting third grade, so Bev had splurged and bought the maroon-plaid jumper and butterscotch-colored blouse. Five-year-old Greg had begged for a Superman cape, so she was sewing one, although she was embarrassed for him. He’d find out the hard way on the first day of kindergarten, when none of the other children wore costumes to school.
She hadn’t told her husband that she had bought Ann new school clothes, and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. Bev did a lot of things she didn’t tell Don. At eight-and-a-half, Ann was the eldest of four children. Mother and daughter were a lot alike: smart, independent, and stubborn, with the talent and drive to achieve something creative and remarkable in their lives. Both would be robbed of that opportunity.
During the summer of 1961, Ann often wore a paper lei she had won at the state fair (or it might have been at a function at St. Patrick’s, their neighborhood parish). She liked to get up early in the morning and practice the piano. Ann hated to be called Annie, so people quickly learned not to call her that. And she wasn’t known as Ann Marie, which is how the missing poster sent around the world referred to her. Just Ann.
All the children in the immediate neighborhood congregated at the Burrs’. Bev, 33 years old and the mother of four children under the age of eight, didn’t work. Don, who was 35, wouldn’t allow it. Bev loved to have the children at her house. She scoured magazines for games they could play and wrote stories and poems for them. Life at Bev’s house could be described as wholesome.
The last children to see Ann were Susie, who lived right across the alley in back of the Burr house, and Christine, who lived a few blocks away. Ann also was good friends with a couple of teenagers, Robert Bruzas and his sister Frannie, who lived two houses east. Ann and Robert had an ongoing flirtation. She called him “lover boy,” and he called her “dear” and said she was “his girl.” Parents didn’t question until later why a 15-year-old boy would want to spend time with an eight-year-old girl.
The children had acquaintances whom Bev didn’t know, children from homes not as wholesome. Bev was naïve about the extent to which all children—hers included—got around by bicycle. Sandi Holt lived a couple
of miles west of the Burrs. She was three years older than Ann but knew her. Sandi spent most of her time trailing after her older brother, Doug, and his best friend, Ted Bundy. She looked on when the boys dug tunnels or pulled pranks on other kids, but kept her distance when Ted would douse an animal with gasoline and light it on fire, or when he tried to take small girls into the woods to urinate on them.
North Tacoma was a modest neighborhood, but the houses were nice. The Burrs’, on North 14
th
Street, just off Alder between Cedar and Junett, was a brick English bungalow built in 1934. Next door was Mrs. Gustafson’s orchard, a dense landscape of apple trees and thick rows of raspberry bushes; the children, who called her “Gusty,” knew all the paths between them, as well as every ditch, gulch, and abandoned home in the neighborhood. At the end of Ann’s street there were open ditches 30 feet deep, courtesy of a city sewer project. At the college two blocks west, seven new dorms and fraternities were under construction and cement was being poured. The college was hurrying to get as much of the project underway before students began arriving in a few days. Everywhere there were places to play, to hide, and to be a little bit scared.
Later, Bev regretted teaching her children that the world was safe. Like most Tacoma families, she didn’t know that the city’s police records were full of reports of (as the police called them) “sex perverts, exhibitionists, sex oddballs, psychos, crackpots, half-wits, queers, and women with lesbian tendencies.”
Ann’s father didn’t trust some neighbors, including the woman across the street who had spent time in the insane asylum after she had given birth to a “Negro baby.” Or there was the nudist who liked to sunbathe in his backyard. The neighborhood children visited him because he gave them candy. Because of the confluence of Tacoma’s port,
railroad, military bases, veteran’s hospital, and the insane asylum, Tacoma drew an odd and transient population.
In the summer even more strangers passed through. Just before the Labor Day weekend, neighbors noticed a man in the neighborhood selling cookware, which was strange because he didn’t have any pots and pans with him. The morning paper was filled with news of the Soviet Union and the United States testing nuclear weapons; one man was getting a jump on people’s fears, going door-todoor selling plans for basement bomb shelters.
That week the town was laughing about a more lighthearted story in the newspaper. A Tacoma couple was getting divorced, and the event that precipitated the split made the front page of the
Tacoma News Tribune.
One night at dinner the husband gave his wife an ultimatum: she had to choose between him and her seven cats, which ate at the table with them. She chose the cats.
