Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (16 page)

The sense of frustration and disappointment the police faced was evident in the rare emotional comment included in the police report. “It appears that this is just another dead end in the numerous leads we have been receiving on the Ann Burr case,” one officer wrote.

Then, suddenly, there were two very real suspects in Ann Marie Burr’s disappearance. The story was familiar. On a summer day in Tacoma, a young girl with golden hair went missing. The newspaper caption on her photo read: Another Ann Marie?

For a week in the summer of 1964 Tacoma held its breath again. Ten-year-old Gay Lynn Stewart was “strangely missing” from her home on South Melrose Street. Her relatives and “school chums” did not know where she was. She had last been seen wearing a light blue blouse and cut-off jeans and blue tennis shoes. The story of the missing girl never did get the coverage Ann Marie did, maybe because Gay Lynn seemed a little too worldly for her age. While the police were fearful about parallels to the Burr case, Gay Lynn’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Stewart, told police that their daughter is a “very intelligent girl and usually entirely capable of taking care of herself.” They admitted she had once run away and had been found at the home of a relative. The oldest of six children, Gay Lynn had left home this time “after a minor tiff for which she feared a reprimand,” according to The
Tacoma News Tribune.

Just like Ann, Gay Lynn was fond of the Point Defiance Park area. In fact, she was standing in the Funland amusement area when she struck up a conversation with a man who said his name was Bob Brown. The two took in a movie at the Fife Drive-In Theater, and then Bob Brown asked her if she would like to take a ride to Spokane.

If the Burr case was, and still is, the coldest case in the Tacoma Police Department files, the Stewart case is one of the oddest. For three days, Gay Lynn Stewart rode around the Pacific Northwest in a brand new Buick Electra convertible with the man who called himself Bob Brown. He kept a small caliber handgun tucked away in the glove compartment. They ate their meals in restaurants, Gay Lynn got a haircut, and when Bob Brown dropped her off in Tacoma three days later, she also had a new dress, a new pair of shoes and socks, and $15 in her pocket.

After a clerk at Carl’s Market & Freezers at 1433 South 56th recognized her and called police, the girl denied her identity and “tartly” told officers, “No—my name is Mickey Anderson.” The child was taken to police headquarters where she was questioned before being allowed a brief private meeting with her parents, summoned from their home. They were seen crying as they left police headquarters. Gay Lynn was taken to Remann Detention Hall, where children in custody were housed. She was, in fact, reluctant to return home, according to police. They described her as “dazed” by her trip. Two weeks later, she was still at the detention hall, “for her own protection,” police explained. They presumably meant because Bob Brown had not yet been found.

While Gay Lynn told police she and the man had slept in his car, the still unidentified and still on-the-run man was charged with carnal knowledge, as well as kidnapping and flight to avoid prosecution. Gay Lynn helped the police with a composite sketch that was distributed to law enforcement agencies. He must have been known to Spokane police, because they had a mug shot of him they shared with their Tacoma colleagues. Now, they had a name: he was 48-year-old Ralph Everett Larkee, an automotive parts salesman based in Spokane. Since Larkee and his new Buick convertible had taken Gay Lynn into multiple states, the FBI joined the search.

Two months after his trip with Gay Lynn Stewart, Larkee was found living in a Portland apartment house under the name Paul Lindley. On September 9, 1964, FBI agents knocked on the door and identified themselves. They heard a gunshot and found Larkee had put the small caliber pistol in his mouth and fired. Larkee was in critical condition for six months and never awoke from a coma. He died March 31, 1965, before Tacoma police had a chance to ask him if he had taken another young girl, Ann Marie Burr, for a ride in a convertible.

Richard Raymond McLish loved cars, too. Plymouths, Fords, Dodge Darts. They would be his downfall in his long, but minor, criminal career. He was good at stealing cars, and good at escaping from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, but he wasn’t good at staying out of prison. Nicknamed “Mountain Red” because he was tall and handsome, with blue eyes and curly red hair and freckles, McLish was a member of Oklahoma’s Chickasaw Nation. Left motherless at age two, by age 13 McLish had quit school and lied his way into the U.S. Army. He received a dishonorable discharge at age 17—for stealing a car. The state of Oklahoma never knew what to do with McLish; it tested his IQ twice and came up with wildly different numbers, 76 and 107. He was likeable and easygoing and almost no trouble as an inmate. Only twice did his behavior inside lengthen his stay: once when he was found with homemade beer, and the second time when he stole a prison truck and escaped. He never learned a trade. When he wasn’t in prison he worked as a hospital attendant, a cook, a meat packer, or in a salvage yard.

In the summer of 1961, McLish, his wife Juanita, and their three young children were picking beans and living in a shack on a farm in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. He was friendly with another family on the farm, David and Enola Mae Withnell and their five children. (There would soon be seven; Enola Mae was pregnant with twins.) Over Labor Day weekend, 1961, Richard McLish and David Withnell (himself the proud owner of a white, 1957 Chevy), drove north to Washington state to look for work. Sometime that weekend Enola would realize that a quilt had disappeared, the one she and a daughter were making for another girl on the farm who was leaving to get married. For some reason, the men had taken it with them.

In 1965, Richard Raymond McLish, once again an inmate in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, must have read an update on the search for Ann Marie Burr. Bev had written The
Tacoma News Tribune,
which printed her letter reminding people of the fourth anniversary of Ann’s disappearance and that the five thousand dollar reward was still being offered. The Associated Press picked up the story, and among the hundreds of newspapers that printed it was one in Oklahoma. Within days, McLish wrote Don Burr, who shared the letter with the Tacoma police. In the letter, McLish said that he knew Ann’s whereabouts. All he asked in exchange for the information was that the reward money be given to his wife and children. He claimed to have been in a car with a man and woman who had abducted Ann. McLish said that the girl was living with the couple in Oklahoma, and he had seen her over the years. He also said that the couple told him they had “gotten the wrong child.”

Detective Tony Zatkovich immediately contacted the penitentiary. Buried deep in the Tacoma police report, by now 600 pages long, was a report of a car with two men and a crying girl speeding away from the Burr neighborhood the morning Ann had disappeared. The car had either an Oregon or a California license plate.

As prison officials tried to sort out McLish’s story, the head of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation wrote to Charles Zittel, then chief of Tacoma’s police department: “It is our feeling that if there is any substance to McLish’s statements, the child is in no immediate danger. Moreover, if his association with her abductors is as alleged, precipitant activity at this time would be ill advised. I trust you will agree that a methodical, systematic evaluation of McLish’s information and motives is the most appropriate course of action at this time. You will be kept informed of any new developments as they occur. Please be assured of our complete cooperation in this and any other matters of mutual interest.” The letter, dated November 22, 1965, was signed by Earl E. Goerke, Director, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

After two more years of correspondence, both the Tacoma police and Oklahoma corrections officials thought enough of McLish’s story to fly him—with guards, in a state-owned airplane—out to Oregon. By then, McLish’s story had changed; he and David Withnell had taken Ann Marie Burr. McLish claimed to be so troubled by Withnell’s abuse of the little girl they had abducted that he wouldn’t give details about what happened. But he did say they had driven from Tacoma back to the bean farm and that Withnell paid McLish to wrap her body in the quilt and bury her three feet deep. They chose a spot close to a tree so that the land wouldn’t be plowed and the body found.

On October 11, 1967, an unusually mild, rainy day with temperatures in the sixties, Lt. Maurice Buchholz and Det. Sgt. Fred Mulholland Jr. of the Tacoma Police Department; two Oregon state police officers; members of the Marion County Sheriff’s Office, in Salem, Oregon; Marion County District Attorney Gary Gortmaker; and a representative of the Oregon State Crime Lab, met up at Vern Chamberlin’s bean farm in Stayton, Oregon.

McLish had sketched a map of the farm. The Chamberlin farm house was on the northern edge of the land; the main road cut west to east across the bean fields. There were footbridges, three shacks, and a pond to the south. McLish had changed his story again; now he said that they had put Ann, wrapped in the blanket, in the pond, not buried by a tree.

Complicating the effort to find her body—if it was on the farm—was the fact that a flood in 1964 had changed the landscape of the land. Vern Chamberlin pointed out that if a small body had been in the pond, it likely would have been washed away in the torrent of water. Chamberlin showed the police how the flood had even moved the path of the road and other identifying landmarks on the farm.

As state police skin divers search the pond in vain, the two Tacoma officers, Lt. Buchholz and Det. Sgt. Mulholland, ducked into one of the shacks to get out of the rain. McLish pointed out that it was the same shack his family had lived in during the summer of 1961.

What little credibility McLish had disappeared when he was caught in a lie. McLish had seemed visibly disturbed by the news they shared with him, that his good friend David Withnell had killed himself December 27, 1963, by carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in his ’57 Chevy. Problem was, McLish already knew. Police concluded that the tears McLish showed on hearing of his friend’s death was “a put up deal.”

The Tacoma police officers went to see Dave Withnell’s widow. Enola Mae had remarried and was living in another small town nearby. She told them the story of the quilt disappearing and the Labor Day weekend the two men had spent in Washington state. She said that she and her seven children had left David Withnell when she learned he had molested one of their daughters. She said her former husband was indeed capable of killing a child; she didn’t think Richard McLish was.

While McLish stalled his inevitable return to the Oklahoma prison, police showed his photo to both Donald Burrs, the father of Ann Marie, and the architect. Neither recognized him. That seemed to puzzle McLish who implied he knew Don Burr (Ann Marie’s father) and asked repeatedly, “Are you sure Don Burr says he don’t know me?”

While he was still in Oregon, McLish agreed to a Sodium Pentothal (or “truth serum”) exam, after first consenting to a polygraph, then changing his mind. There is no evidence that he underwent either test.

The guards took McLish back to Oklahoma where he continued his periodic stays in the McAlester prison, finally receiving a long sentence after being convicted of a third felony, another stolen car. His crimes and his stays in prison began to wind down in the 1980s.

Lt. Buchholtz summed up their two-year investigation of McLish and his connection to the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr: “We can’t prove he did it, and we can’t eliminate him,” he told a newspaper.

About the time the Tacoma Police Department was finished with Ralph Everett Larkee and Richard Raymond McLish, its two most memorable crime fighters left, for good this time. Ted Strand retired in March, 1966, and Tony Zatkovich didn’t last much longer without him. Zatkovich tried a few other jobs; he served on the Tacoma City Council until he was ousted in a recall effort led by the man who had presided over the wedding of his son, Dick. He ran for Pierce County Sheriff in 1970 but lost. When The
Tacoma News Tribune
published a story in 1979 looking back at their careers and asking their opinion on how police work had changed, Zatkovich grumbled again that it still was no place for women.

Hadn’t Bev and Don had enough heartache? Not long after Ann disappeared, Raleigh Burr witnessed an outburst by Mary. “Bev told Mary to do something and Mary—very shrill—screamed,” he explained. “Her response was way too strong.” It was one of the first indications that something was very wrong with Mary. Did it date back to the night her sister disappeared?

As Mary plummeted into mental illness, Bev jeopardized her own life and the happiness of her other children to try and save Mary. “I’ve already lost one daughter,” Bev would explain. “I’m not going to lose another.”

A map of Tacoma showing the proximity of the Burr and Bundy homes, nearby construction projects, and Taylor Mountain, where the skeletons of several victims were found. Map by Brad Arnesen.
Ted Bundy, right, and Doug Holt, center.