Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (19 page)

Bev Burr couldn’t believe the coincidence, that the name of his last victim was Leach, Bev’s surname.
He was tried first for the Chi Omega killings. Florida jurors never heard of the women he was suspected of killing in five western states. In fact, Ted was never prosecuted for those crimes; Florida was not going to let go of him, and Ted was good at not leaving physical evidence at the scene of his crimes. Ted, who had completed only a couple of semesters of law school (in fact, he had repeated the first year of law school), rejected a plea deal and acted as his own lead attorney. He was found guilty of the Chi Omega killings on July 25, 1979. Louise and Johnnie Bundy, and Ted’s friend Carole Boone, were in the courtroom. A reporter wrote that Louise sobbed after hearing the verdict. Another one reported that Ted waved and smiled and that he told a friend he was “perplexed” by the verdict.
Six days later, Ted’s mother took the stand during the penalty phase hearing to speak on her son’s behalf. Louise told the courtroom, “We tried to be very conscientious parents, ones who did things with our children, gave them the best we could on a middle-class income. But, mostly we wanted to give them lots of love.” She told the court that she considered the death penalty “...the most primitive, barbaric thing that one human can impose on another. My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another’s life under any circumstances is wrong. I don’t believe the State of Florida is above the laws of God.”
Those in the courtroom said it was the only time during the long trial that Ted Bundy cried. The same jury that had found him guilty of first degree murder in the Chi Omega killings debated his punishment for one hour and forty minutes. On July 31, 1979, Louise and Johnnie Bundy heard their son sentenced to death. Louise gasped and closed her eyes in agony. Johnnie held her hand.
The next year Ted was convicted of the murder of Kimberly Diane Leach and again received the death penalty. Neil Chethik covered the trial for the
Tallahassee Democrat
. Ted was more low-key than he had been during the Chi Omega trial. Still, there was a lot of posturing on his part. He enjoyed being watched and whispering to his attorneys. “He was the star of the show,” according to Chethik. Louise and Johnnie Bundy did not regularly attend the trial, but once again Louise spoke during the penalty phase. “She said something like, ‘My son became very troubled, something happened to him, you shouldn’t kill him,’” Chethik remembered.
The dozens of journalists took turns being a designated pool reporter for sessions in the judge’s chambers. One day, Chethik was the only reporter in the room with Ted, the judge, and two attorneys. Ted locked eyes with the reporter. Chethik was on the receiving end of the famous Ted stare—the strange stare women mentioned who were lucky enough to walk away from him, the stare that terrified his relatives and even some police. Ted wouldn’t look away, so Chethik did, finally.
Like a few other reporters over the years, Chethik had questions about the trials and the evidence against Ted, which was mostly clothing fibers connecting Ted to the Leach murder. “My overall feeling as an observer is that he was guilty,” Chethik said. “The [crime] was bloody, messy, disgusting. But as a juror, I don’t believe there was enough to actually convict him beyond a reasonable doubt.” But the Leach trial was important to the State of Florida. If Ted ever won an appeal in the Chi Omega killings, the state needed the Leach guilty verdict and death penalty to keep Ted. “The attitude was, ‘We need to lock this guy down and kill him,’” Chethik remembered. “The second trial was the knock-out punch.” The state wanted to make sure he died in Florida.
The only time Ted spoke during the second trial was at his sentencing. He invoked an old Florida law still on the books allowing him to make a declaration in court and marry his former co-worker, Carole Ann Boone. The two had worked together at Seattle’s Department of Emergency Services, a job that enabled him to continue the study of his favorite subject, crime and police procedures; he even reportedly wrote a pamphlet for the agency on rape prevention. Boone was in touch with Ted after he was arrested in Utah, and she and a group of Ted’s friends raised some money for his defense.
Soon, she and her teenage son moved to Florida to be closer to Ted. She and Ted reportedly consummated their marriage in a corner of a visitor’s room, having bribed a guard to look the other way. Boone became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. They may have considered themselves married, but the State of Florida never did.
Because of so-called Son of Sam laws prohibiting criminals from profiting from their crimes, Ted couldn’t sell his story. But he was looking for a way to find money for Boone and her children. By 1980, there were already four books published about him (including his friend Dick Larsen’s
The Deliberate Stranger
, his other friend Ann Rule’s
The Stranger Beside Me,
and former girlfriend Liz Kendall’s
The Phantom Prince
).
He decided to give unusual access to two journalists; it would be the first time Ted sat for extensive interviews. Reporter Stephen Michaud received a phone call from his agent saying Ted Bundy wanted to cooperate on a book. At that time, Ted was suspected in as many as 150 murders. Michaud teamed up with Hugh Aynesworth, who he knew from when they both worked at
Newsweek.
Ted Bundy may have thought he was the biggest story in America, but Aynesworth had seen much bigger. As a reporter for the
Dallas Morning News
, Aynesworth had witnessed three of the most important events in American history: he saw President John F. Kennedy shot as his motorcade wound through the city; he was present when police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald in a movie theater later the same day; and he saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald. He was also the first reporter to interview Oswald’s widow, Marina Oswald.
Ted said he wanted an impartial, re-investigation of the crimes he had been convicted of and others he was a suspect in. Michaud would interview Ted on death row, while Aynesworth would review all of the evidence against Ted, traveling to the western states where authorities believed Ted had committed dozens of murders. The agreement— made with Carole Boone’s input—quickly became complicated. (According to Aynesworth, Boone was paid some money, either by the publisher of Michaud and Aynesworth’s book,
The Only Living Witness
, or a foundation created to help family members of death row inmates.)
It is widely believed that Ted was expecting Michaud and Aynesworth to find information that would clear him as a suspect in the murders. Other authors who wrote about Ted think Michaud and Aynesworth deceived Ted, that they strung him along, never intending to try and prove his innocence. But when Ted wrote to Michaud and Aynesworth about plans for the book, he advised them “not to search for evidence that he was guiltless as he claimed,” because the facts were not there. He also stated that he didn’t care what they wrote, just so they got it right and “just so it sells.” “We thought, ‘If we can prove him innocent, great,’” Aynesworth remembered.
Almost immediately, Michaud and Aynesworth decided Ted was guilty. To get at the truth, they needed to find a way to get Ted to open up. He agreed to talk about the crimes in the third-person; he would speculate about the murders without confessing. (Twenty-six years later, O.J. Simpson would try a similar approach with
If I Did It,
his book about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.) Michaud said Ted “jumped” at the suggestion. “It wasn’t long before we were deep into his macabre world, exploring regions of the criminal psyche I hadn’t guessed existed,” Michaud wrote.
Michaud had the best rapport with Ted, maybe because he was a Tacoma boy, too. They had an astonishing number of experiences in common. Two years younger than Ted, Stephen Michaud had grown up about five miles from Ted in Tacoma. They knew people in common, and they were both born in Burlington, Vermont, and had moved to Tacoma when young. Michaud never knew his birth father, either, although his parents had been married.
Michaud was sickened by Ted’s revelations, but he was more patient than Aynesworth. Aynesworth was more than 15 years older than Michaud and Ted and the father of two teenage girls. “He hated me,” Aynesworth said of Ted. Ted talked about how he sometimes returned to the decaying bodies days or weeks later. At least once he shampooed a victim’s hair and put makeup on her. “If you’ve got time, they can be anyone you want them to be,” he said.
“I’d ask him how he could return to the mountain, visit the corpses and have sex with them,” Aynesworth remembered. “He said, ‘You had to be there, Hugh.’ I said, ‘I’d never be there.’”
Some saw Ted’s speaking in the third person as a way of confessing, without actually confessing. Without a doubt it was manipulative. Michaud and Aynesworth got some insights into the mind of a serial killer, but it was also a way for Ted to keep the police—and the families of dozens of missing and murdered women—guessing.
Michaud and Aynesworth met with Ted for more than 100 hours, from January, 1980, through March, 1981, wearing out five tape recorders in the process. Michaud would attend the Kimberly Diane Leach trial by day, then interview Ted at night (sometimes by telephone). From the beginning, Ted told them that he “was a victim of incompetent defense attorneys, poisonous pretrial publicity, and manipulated evidence.” Michaud and Aynesworth admit that they, like many others in Ted’s life, could not tell when he was being genuine. Their time with him was complicated by the fact that Ted was often stoned, according to Michaud.
They heard the familiar stories: of how ashamed Ted was of the Nash Rambler his parents drove; of how he grew up thinking Louise was really his sister; of how much he resented kids with money; of his bitterness towards Louise. The two authors witnessed some of the physical transformation in Ted that others had seen. When Michaud was at the prison, and Ted was talking about murder, he “would grab the recorder and cradle it…a white mark appeared on his left cheek, like a scratch, then it would fade away…,” Michaud wrote.
They concluded that Ted had a “strong streak of narcissism, entitlement,” and that it was “entirely possible” that Ted’s grandfather was his father (he made them promise they wouldn’t contact Samuel Cowell). Aynesworth now says that he “never bought” the theory that Ted’s grandfather was his father.
They also came to believe that the key to Ted’s crimes was possession. “Murder isn’t just a crime of lust or violence,” Ted told FBI agent Bill Hagmaier when Ted was on death row. “It becomes possession. They are part of you…You feel the last bit of breath leaving their bodies…You’re looking into their eyes…A person in that situation is God!”
During the taped sessions with the two journalists, Ted described—in the third-person—how he evolved from stalking a woman to murder:

“And we can say that the, the…on one particular evening, when he had been drinking a great deal…and he was passing a bar, he saw a woman leaving the bar and walk up a fairly dark side street. And for no, uh, we’d say that, something seemed to seize him! I was going to say that something crystallized, but that’s another way of looking at it. But the urge to do something to that person seized him—in a way he’s never been affected before. And it seized him strongly. And to the point where, uh, without giving a great deal of thought, he searched around for some instrumentality to uh, uh, attack this woman with. He found a piece of two-by-four in a lot somewhere and proceeded to follow and track this girl.”

“On succeeding evenings he began to, uh, scurry around this same neighborhood, obsessed with the image he’d seen on the evening before. And on one occasion, on one particular occasion, he saw a woman park her car and walk up to her door and fumble for her keys. He walked up behind her and struck her with a …a piece of wood he was carrying. And she fell down and began screaming, and he panicked and ran.”

Then Ted talked about how, after vowing never to do “something like that again,” he had trouble controlling his urges:

“And he did everything he should have done. He stayed away from…he didn’t go out at night. And when he was drinking, he stayed around friends. For a period of months, the enormity of what he did stuck with him, and he watched his behavior and reinforced the desire to overcome what he had begun to perceive were some problems that were probably more severe than he would have liked to believe they were.”

On April 4, 1980, Ted described for Stephen Michaud the last hours of Lynda Ann Healy, the 22-year-old University of Washington psychology major Ted had classes with. During the recording Ted singled out the attack as “one of the first instances that he’d (the unnamed serial killer he is hypothesizing about) abducted a woman in this fashion.”

There were things Ted wouldn’t discuss, in the thirdperson or otherwise. Top of the list were any children he was suspected of killing, or had been convicted of killing, including 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach.

Eventually, Aynesworth grew impatient with the thirdperson “confessing” and encouraged Ted to “get it all out and get it done,” and truly admit his crimes. He urged him to make a list of names and dates. Maybe it would lessen his guilt. But as Ted told Michaud and Aynesworth, “…I don’t feel guilty for anything. I feel less guilty now than I’ve ever felt in any time of my life. …I guess I’m in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt. There’s no reason for it.”

It seemed that Ted would never give up his secrets. It didn’t take long for Michaud and Aynesworth to realize that Ted came from what Michaud called “a really, really buttoned-down family.” A close family friend, interviewed for a documentary about Ted, described the family as “secretive.” (For example, both Ted and his oldest half-sister, Linda Bussey, said they never discussed with each other or with other members of the family who Ted’s birth father was.)

Just before Christmas, 1980, Michaud and Aynesworth traveled to Tacoma to talk with Louise and Johnnie Bundy. The four sat in the Bundy living room. Louise was still adamant that Ted was innocent and his convictions were all a mistake. He had done nothing to prepare his mother for the truth.